Agile London – worth attending if you work in software development
This evening I went to the latest Agile London event, hosted at Thomas Cook, at a supremely convenient location about quarter of a mile away from the Endava office.
Our host for the evening was Jesus Fernandez, the Development Manager at Thomas Cook. In a concise introduction he described how Thomas Cook has been consolidation pretty much everything – from its management team to the brands it was selling, to its technology platforms.
Today was the Sitecore EMEA Partner Summit 2015 at the Riverbank Park Plaza hotel in London. We, Endava, are a Platinum Sitecore partner and I’ve often considered Sitecore’s partner programme one of the best developed technology partnership programmes out there – and certainly one that other companies could learn a lot from.
These notes were taken at the conference using OneNote and a stylus (or perhaps it should be called a Microsoft Pen ha ha!!) – which I then quickly converted to text. I’ve had a quick read through, but if anything looks out of context, it probably is – please comment at the bottom of the post and I’ll correct it.
One of my favourite annual Internet reports is out. It’s the KPCB report, from the Venture Capital company based in the US.
It’s 196 pages of fact-packed charts, and here are my favourites.
The US makes up ‘only’ 10% of the 2.8bn online users. 73% of the World has a phone, of which 40% are smartphones. So there are 2 billion smartphones.
The top 15 Internet companies (by capitalisation) consist only of American and Chinese companies.
The only company featuring in the top 15 companies in 1995 and 2015 is Apple, which has increased its capitalisation by over 190 times! The combined capitalisation of the top 15 has increased by 141 times.
During the last couple of weeks I’ve been working with clients across different industries – a key advantage for these clients, and something I love about my job.
It’s also been London Technology Week – a series of events showcasing you guessed it, Technology in London’s firms, including a great event at Goldman Sachs.
As well as these links I’m midway through reading Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo which is easy to read and proven quite useful so far, although it would score high on the American cheesiness scale.
Sobering PewDiePie vs Corrie viewing stats. Source: Deloitte 2015
I went to the Deloitte Media Consumer 2015 survey presentation presented by Matt Guest, their Head of Digital Strategy EMEA. The survey focusses on media consumption habits in the UK, and was an informal, highly interactive presentation. So interactive, that I apologise to the rest of the audience for asking so many questions.
The invite pulled out some key stats:
A third of us watch the same TV shows every day
61% watch on average one short form video a day
The younger generation prefers sharing social media content with a limited amount of followers
36% of adults feel they don’t need to go and see big releases in the cinema as they are available on demand so quickly
For up-to-date news content, 70% of users turn to Twitter
The Goldman Sachs Agenda at London Technology Week 2015
You may have seen some publicity recently how a megazillion people in the UK, especially London, all work in the FinTech sector. This publicity stems from some research commissioned by London Technology Week, a series of events taking place in London around FinTech.
The events range the full spectrum of FinTech technologies, and as a result we have clients travelling from the US over to London for LTW (London Technology Week). Most of the events are free, and even the charging ones were under £20.
I’ll be attending a few events with some colleagues going to events which clashed. I’m also speaking at Tuesday’s CSFI round table on crypto-currencies, which I think is just a coincidence that it happens to fall during LTW.
The first event of LTW15, or the headline event as it was known, was at Goldman Sachs called “Goldman Sachs Engineers – Solutions to Complex Problems at Scale”. Here are some brief notes. My apologies for speed over brevity – there will be a lot to cover this week.
This is a neat idea from the Guardian with some clever language – instead of pushing more traditional subscription models, they are offering “Guardian supporter membership” for £5/ month.
Question: Is this David Cameron’s rating or Apple share price?
Since the week before Easter I’ve been extremely busy – there was the holiday period, followed by a big family celebration, and then last Friday I managed to fall off my bicycle and break some fingers. In short… it’s been quite hectic.
During the family celebration I heard a brilliant quote from a friend, Yehuda, an IT Solution Architect, who had travelled from Israel to join us for a week. We were discussing how IT projects have become either prescriptive (detailed requirements) or business focussed (with high level requirements and leaving the solution to the supplier partner). He tells this to all his customers:
Tell me either what you want to do, or how to do it, but if you tell me both – go and do it yourself.
Today I was at Payments International 2015, which is one of the main annual industry events. Endava are the principal sponsors (that’s my disclaimer) – a colleague spoke at the event yesterday, and I’m speaking tomorrow. I was busy elsewhere yesterday, so today was my first day at the conference.
“Apple bites man”
The first keynote talk was from Ben Hammersley, the Editor-in-chief at Wired magazine, but he also does the speaking circuit and he made an interesting documentary about cybercrime earlier this year.
Don’t expect any creative thinking time from this environment. (Credit: John Seb Barber)
When we present our innovation process or new ideas for clients, one of the most common first questions is “How do you think like that?”
This applies to all companies, from small start-ups to very large financial services organisations.
When the question is asked, the rest of the audience often pick up their pens as though we’re going to answer with a poignant, silver bullet answer. But as soon as we do answer, you can see the disappointment in everyone’s eyes.
I’m sorry, but the answer is much simpler than they expected.
