#technwes

[govindhtech]

Google Pixel 9 Series Launch Confirmed for August 13th

As Google gets ready to reveal the Google Pixel 9 series on August 13, 2024, the tech community is a flurry of activity. The debut this year looks to be historic, with a focus on cutting-edge AI, design enhancements, and lightning-fast performance that might completely change the smartphone market. Let’s examine the features of the Pixel 9 series in more detail and discuss why you should put this event on your calendars.

An Intimidating First Date: Taking Centre Stage When announcing the launch date of August 13th, Google appears to be acting strategically. In order to potentially capture consumers’ attention before they make a decision, it deftly places the announcement of the Google Pixel 9 series reveal between the upcoming Samsung Galaxy foldables and the anticipated introduction of the iPhone 16 lineup. Google’s deliberate timing shows that it is confident in the Pixel 9’s potential and intends to compete strongly in the flagship smartphone market.

The Pixel Revolution is Powered by Tensor G4 Presumably, the Tensor G4, the next generation Tensor chip, will be the brains behind the Google Pixel 9 series. The artificial intelligence capabilities of Google’s proprietary Tensor processors have continuously amazed, and the Tensor G4 is expected to push the envelope even farther. In domains such as total processing power, picture and speech recognition, and on-device machine learning, we should expect major advances. This might result in improved computational photographic skills, a speedier and more seamless user experience, and even yet-to-be-unveiled, potentially revolutionary AI functions.

Improvements for the Camera: Getting the Perfect Shot Famous for having outstanding cameras, Google Pixel phones are anticipated to improve even further with the Google Pixel 9 series. More megapixels, better low-light performance, and even faster autofocus are all suggested by leaks and rumours about the next sensors. The Tensor G4 is expected to enable Google to further hone their computational photography magic, producing amazingly realistic and detailed images and movies. Another possibility is the introduction of AI-powered camera functions like sophisticated video editing software or real-time object and scene recognition.

Redesign: An Optimal Pixel Appearance Google may have introduced a new design language with the Google Pixel 9 series, despite their previous design decisions being quite conservative. Rumours suggest a more sophisticated, contemporary style with possibly smaller bezels and better construction. To give the Pixel 9 a more upscale appearance and feel, more opulent materials like metal and glass might have been used. When it comes to colour selection, there may be some surprises as well. Google may provide fresh and intriguing hues to suit a range of tastes.

Foldable Future Unfolded: Pixel Folding Google Pixel 9 rumours go beyond the ordinary Pixel phones. Many expect Google to release a new Pixel Fold. Google may have improved the Pixel Fold’s appearance, hinge mechanism, and user experience after first receiving mixed reviews. Google’s software skills and a cutting-edge foldable display might make the Pixel Fold 2 a strong rival in the foldable phone industry.

Using AI: A Pixel Enabled by Cognition The Google Pixel 9 series is probably going to demonstrate a more thorough integration of AI throughout the user experience. Google’s strength is its artificial intelligence capabilities. Personalised voice assistant interactions, more intelligent call filtering, and context-aware suggestions that streamline daily activities are some of the improvements we may expect to see. When it comes to anticipating your wants and offering proactive support, Google Assistant may grow even more intelligent and beneficial.

Android’s advantage over other software.

With the most recent version of Android pre-installed, the Google Pixel 9 series will definitely have special features and optimisations not found on other Android smartphones. A primary selling feature of Pixel phones is Google’s simple, bloatware-free software, and the Google Pixel 9 series is probably going to carry on this legacy. For years to come, your Pixel 9 will remain secure and current thanks to timely updates and security fixes.

The Pixel Ecosystem: Looking Past the Hardware Going beyond the phone itself is the Pixel experience. With Google Photos and Google Drive, for example, you can enjoy a smooth integration between your Pixel device and a variety of Pixel-exclusive services from Google. To create a unified and user-friendly ecosystem for Pixel users, these services are probably going to get additional improvements and functionality concurrently with the release of the Pixel 9.

Looking Ahead: The Pixel 9 and Up Google is expected to undergo significant change with the August 13 debut of the Pixel 9 series. Google has a chance to produce a flagship smartphone experience that rivals the finest on the market with the upcoming release of Android 13, a formidable Tensor G4 chip, and outstanding camera advancements.

It will be interesting to see if the Google Pixel 9 series lives up to the expectations, but one thing is for sure: international smartphone lovers and tech enthusiasts will be watching attentively for this August 13 event.

Read more on Govindhtech.com

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

8 Oct 2019: The AI will interview you now. Uber work. Amazon rumours. Facebook leak.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Bladerunner fandom]

The AI will interview you now

Face recognition technology and AI is being used in job interviews in the UK “to identify the best candidates”, says the Telegraph. Unilever and other use HireVue’s AI to 

“analyse the language, tone and facial expressions of candidates when they are asked a set of identical job questions which they film on their mobile phone or laptop. The algorithms select the best applicants by assessing their performances in the videos against about 25,000 pieces of facial and linguistic information compiled from previous interviews of those who have gone on to prove to be good at the job.”

It’s not doing face recognition, it’s doing behaviour recognition. Something like: “These facial and speech behaviours are correlated with the interviewee being a good employee - thumbs up, +4 career points”.

It’s natural that this feels a bit wrong because humans are unique and special, right? In truth though, they are bound by fairly predictable behaviours, and really it’s not that hard to have a computer watch the face of a human and make judgements. It’s science you can trust, and in fact it weeds out bias because the machine doesn’t care, unlike a human interviewer who’ll bring loads of messy biases. So it’s a good thing, it’s progress.

Oh sorry wait, it’s a science you can trust as long as the data the machine learning model was trained on was large and unbiased. And as long as none of the interviewees look different to the ones in the training data. And as long as the machine learning doesn’t inadvertently amplify any systemic biases in the hiring organisation’s practices (or Hirevue itself’s). And as long as interviewees can meaningfully give consent to be catalogued by a machine. And as long as no discrimination law is being broken by having the computer say no. And as long as some job applicants aren’t freaked out by being video-interviewed by a Voight-Kampff machine.

Here the newsletterbot is guilty of bias: it believes humans to be sufficiently complex that it will be hard to effectively “machine learn” the problem that is organisations, their people, their culture, their politics, the webs of motivations and incentives, their jobs and the humans that might potentially fit well.

Still, HireVue says they’re serious about ethical and accurate machine learning, so fingers crossed 😬. An interesting read on video interviews. YouTube is full of videos about how to do well in a HireVue video interview, here’s one. Watching them, you’re struck by the asymmetry: the machine and later an employer watching your interview video, but you seeing nothing except the questions and the webcam’s black eye. So interviewing would be perhaps be a bit fairer if the employer also had 30 seconds to consider and 3 minutes to answer on camera the interviewee’s questions.

Unrelated, but relevant because it’s about bias and how it and power are inadvertently expressed in technology: “Google contractors allegedly offered darker-skinned homeless people $5 dollar gift cards to scan their faces for facial recognition software”.

Uber work

Uber’s temp agency platform, Uber Work has launched in Chicago. The company says: “We believe that finding work shouldn’t have to be a job in itself. For positions as diverse as being a prep cook, warehouse worker, a commercial cleaner or event staff, Uber Works aims to make it easier to find and claim a shift.”

Here’s a fictional look at temp workers in 2023, and hopefully Uber Works doesn’t nudge work in that direction. Something that empowers shift workers is a better model: “crowdsourcing information about what it’s really like to work somewhere, turning it into recommendations about employers that could be better for you” (from plucky UK startup Poplar).

Elsewhere, a successful taxi co-op: “A worker owned taxi coop in Southend has grown from 6 to 70 drivers. They repaid all their investors and returned £3000 to their members last year. The same year Uber left the area after failing to compete with them.”

Amazon rumours

Amazon to sell its Go technology to airports, cinemas, sports venues? Interesting if true - eventually there would be a tension between the platform and the grocery businesses (see also: Ocado in 2017ish).

Amazon is said to be hiring property experts in UK.

Similar rumour: but in Los Angeles. A dozen leases have been signed in Los Angeles, reports the Wall St journal. 7 burning questions about Amazon's new grocery chain.

Facebook leak: trust deficit internally?

A Facebooker leaked audio of an all-team Zuckermeet. The media reported it as FB boss Zuckerberg saying he’d fight (too) hard against politicians etc, but the transcript suggests that his comments were actually fairly standard stuff. This story is more notable for the fact that an employee recorded and leaked the meeting - growing cultural/trust deficit internally, perhaps?

Cryptocurrency news

Paypal has pulled out of the Facebook-led Libra cryptocurrency consortium, saying that it’s not you Libra it’s me. Rumours: Mastercard and Visa aren’t so sure either.

Police auctioned off £240,000 of cryptocurrency confiscated from a hacker - if it had been a confiscated 3 Series with a spoiler kit and spinner rims you’d have expected to be able to snag a good deal, but money’s money so maybe there wasn’t a discount in this case.

“The pain in my jaw from holding just one cryptocurrency had reduced me to an all-liquid diet. I was not cut out to be a trader.” - a good piece on the subsistence lives of small-scale cryptocurrency traders (also a decent backgrounder on cryptocurrencies).

Other news

How grocery pickup is evolving - supermarkets trying to make click-n-collect faster.

Supreme Court hands victory to blind man who sued Domino's over website accessibility - see previous story on this.

Climate Action Tech: “empower technology professionals to play our part - to meet, discuss, learn and take climate action” - needed because the tech industry uses a lot of energy.

No good urban ebike deed goes unpunished. “Horrible. One good deed rewarded with a scary blend of the so-called sharing economy, the commercialisation of communal spaces, and authoritarian surveillance capitalism, all sugared with the unbearable style of wackaging. May every dockless bike and scooter scheme go bust as soon as possible.”

Workshop tactics for agile teams - looks good.

Job ad for Ocado developers is neatly placed in the website’s code.

Previous newsletters:

Most opened newsletter in the last month: competing with Amazon Go. Most clicked story: Why don’t we just call agile what it is: feminist.

News 1 year ago: curated convenience and paying with your data.

News 2 years ago: eGovernment (single digital market) and first mile logistics (Amazon keeping inventory in retailer warehousing).

Co-op Digital news and events

What the data and feedback show about 3 digital services in our Food stores.

Public events:

Manchester WordPress User Group - Wed 16 Oct 6.30pm at Federation House.

Tech for Good Live vs the climate crisis - Thu 17 Oct 6.30pm at Federation House.

Business Growth Hub - Moving your business forward - Mon 21 Oct 12pm at Federation House.

Meet the expert - marketing approach - Tue 22 Oct 12pm at Federation House.

Meet the expert - hints and tricks on social media - Wed 23 Oct 1pm at Federation House.

Human values in software production - Tue 5 Nov 6pm at Federation House.

Practitioners Forum: vital lessons for key co-operators - Thu 7 Nov at the Studio, Manchester.

Pods Up North , an event for podcasters - Sat 23 Nov 9am at Federation House.

Mind the Product - MTP Engage - Fri 7 Feb 2020 - you can get early bird tickets now.

Internal events:

Digital all hands - Wed 9 Oct 1pm at Fed House Defiant.

Co-operate show & tell - Wed 9 Oct 3pm at Fed House 6th floor kitchen.

Food ecommerce show & tell - Mon 14 Oct 10.15am at Fed House 5th floor.

Delivery community of practice - Mon 14 Oct 1.30pm.

What has the web team been up to? - Tue 15 Oct 1.30pm at Fed House 5th floor.

Health show & tell - Tue 15 Oct 2.30pm at Fed House 5th floor.

Engineering community of practice - Wed 16 Oct 1pm at fed House Defiant.

Targeted marketing (CRM) show & tell - Wed 16 Oct 3pm at Angel Square 13th floor breakout area.

Membership show & tell - Fri 18 Oct 3pm at Fed House 6th floor kitchen.

More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at  federation.events@coopdigital.co.uk. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West. 

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s word gardener @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[softwareengineeringleader]

"Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff delivered the keynote address this morning at the TechNW event in Seattle, discussing the process by which the online real estate company went public and dishing on the recently approved JOBS Act". Reblog with caption 🙃

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

1 Oct 2019: Data is not the new oil. “We track what customers do.” Amazon writes face recognition legislation.

[Last week’s newsletter, which, again, Tumblr didn’t post. Grrr.]

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Littmann/Architectural Digest]

Data is not the new oil

Data is the new oil, says the New York Times. That convenient marketing metaphor probably dates back to Tesco Clubcard creator Clive Humby in 2006, but is it that helpful? Not really, because there are several ways that data is nothing like oil. Oil is a physical resource, data isn’t. Oil is expensive to store and transport, data isn’t. Oil is relatively easy to price. But data isn’t because its value depends on context. Oil is fungible (-ish: don’t worry about the difference between Esso diesel and Shell’s, but don’t put aviation fuel in your Vauxhall Corsa), data isn’t. Oil depletes, runs out, data multiplies in every direction. The products of oil are typically used once. Data is used, remade, reused many times … and so on. 

Are there any ways that data *is* like oil? Data and oil usually need a load of processing before they’re useful. Both data and oil are at risk of a sudden collapse in value: data if it is managed negligently, or lost or stolen; oil assets if (when) the carbon economy collapses thanks to climate change. (Related: if used casually, data is a bit like oil in that its side effects can be unexpected.)

Data is enormously valuable to data factory companies like Google and FB. But for companies that aren't Google, where it was once seen as an asset, now data looks increasingly like a liability, thanks to new regulation like GDPR. (And weirdly it remains fairly valueless to individuals - it's not easy to sell your data and get cash money for it.) 

What does this mean for organisations? Don’t think of data as if it were a scarce physical resource used to refine single-use commodities! Consider whether the data you are collecting is as much a liability as an asset. Can your service run with less data? Should you (responsibly) delete data?

Related: “Data is the New Oil” - a ludicrous proposition.

Mckinsey: “We’re aiming to track what customers do”

Consultancy McKinsey opens a retail store/learning lab In Mall Of America. It’s a 12-month experiment to collect data and understand offline shopper behaviour in 2019.

“Everybody’s seeing the pressure and trying to figure out ‘How do I drive more people into my brick-and-mortar store?’ and ‘How do I make sure when they’re there that I deliver a new customer experience that makes them want to stay there, spend time and engage with the product so that they ultimately buy more?’ The traffic equation and then the in-store experience to get you to buy more stuff is what everyone’s trying to figure out on the revenue side of things. That’s why with these experiences, we’re aiming to track what customers do throughout their journey and which of those things are analytically proven to show that people buy more.”

Amazon health care, and better social care

Amazon has launched a health care service to employees in the Seattle area. It does “urgent care for things like colds and infections, preventative wellness consultations and lab tests, testing for sexually transmitted infections, and answers to general health questions”.

Elsewhere: “Although the care system collects vast amounts of data, current metrics focus on costs and processes and not outcomes for the individual, family or community.” That’s from Doteveryone’s new report on better social care. And their video about the risks and the small daily agonies of automated care tech is great.

Amazon: “here’s your legislation”

What else is Amazon up to? Drafting legislation for face recognition that it hopes lawmakers will take a look at and then go “Well ok, guess we’ll just go with that.” Bezos:

“It’s a perfect example of something that has really positive uses, so you don’t want to put the brakes on it. But, at the same time, there’s also potential for abuses of that kind of technology, so you do want regulations. It’s a classic dual-use kind of technology.”

Related: Facebook is creating its own “supreme court” for content disputes. The tech industry crossing over into law-making, or just borrowing its language is interesting. (Imagine if a House of Commons committee called Amazon in to hear its suggestions about what the Christmas promotion for Prime should be, or the best book to bundle with the next Jack Reacher.)

Uber: “the operating system for your everyday life”

Uber wants to be “the operating system for your everyday life”, which (for now?) means a focus in three areas: card rides, bikes/scooter rides and food delivery. More details about many new services and features it is launching. (If you designed an operating system for your own life, would it centre on travel and meal delivery?)

Other news

On digital crypts and memorials.

Amazon will run 100,000 electric vehicles for deliveries - bold move. 

Boris Johnson’s speech at UN about technology - interestingly freewheeling.

It’s scarily easy to track someone around a city via their Instagram Stories.

More than 50% of Google searches end without a click to other content - study.

Previous newsletters: 

Most opened newsletter in the last month: personal carbon offsetting. Most clicked story: Introducing Co-op groceries on demand.

News 1 year ago: unbundling the high street (ghost restaurants, retail without shopfronts...)

News 2 years ago: all the way to your fridge.

Co-op Digital news and events

Co-op: “We’re the first UK retailer to pledge to meet the United Nations’ climate target by 2050 - but we’ll need political will and real co-operation to get there”.

Public events:

Human Values in Software Production - Tue 5 Nov 6pm at Federation House.

Pods Up North , an event for podcasters - Sat 23 Nov 9am at Federation House.

Mind the Product - MTP Engage - Fri 7 Feb 2020 - you can get early bird tickets now.

Internal events:

What has the web team been up to? - Tue 1 Oct 1.30pm at Fed House 5th floor.

Health show & tell - Tue 1 Oct 2.30pm at Fed House 5th floor.

Targeted marketing (CRM) show & tell - Wed 2 Oct 3pm at Angel Square 13th floor breakout area.

Delivery community of practice - Mon 7 Oct 1.30pm.

Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 8 Oct 1pm at Angel Square 12th floor breakout.

Digital all hands - Wed 9 Oct 1pm at Fed House Defiant.

Co-operate show & tell - Wed 9 Oct 3pm at Fed House 6th floor kitchen.

Data management - Thu 10 Oct 2.30pm at Angel Square 13th floor breakout area.

More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at  federation.events@coopdigital.co.uk. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West. 

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s word gardener @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

19 Aug 2019: Google’s green dot and Facebook’s privacy cafe.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Peter Fonda in The Hired Hand, 1971]

Google’s green dot: making Nest cameras more private

Google sent an email to customers of its Nest camera explaining that a software update would prevent them from turning off the status light on their camera. “You would always see a clear visual indicator when your Nest cameras are on and sending video and audio to Google” they said. 

It’s a bit uncomfortable not knowing if the house you’re in contains videos, microphones and other sensors that are watching you. So a change that will clearly improve privacy should be a Good Thing, but it has been controversial. Some customers say the light prevents a specific user need (homeowners who fear criminals will take cctv systems unless they’re hidden, parents who want to use them as baby monitors, etc, and there’s now a petition). One obvious reading of this is that the customer’s interests aren’t necessarily the same as those of people who might be in the camera’s field of vision.

The other thing that might be alarming customers is the idea that you buy a product which works a certain way, but the manufacturer later changes how it works with a software update. Once software eats physical products, they’re permanently a bit malleable. People are used to websites and software changing over time, but they aren’t yet used to thinking about physical objects as changeable software services that they’re merely renting access to.

Google’s note says that some cameras will indicate that they’re watching with a green light, others a blue light, and others will use a blinky light. Maybe a new language would help. If sensors and devices that collected data and sent it to some other place were required to indicate that in a consistent way. You still wouldn’t know whether you could fully trust the “purple light” (for example), nor what happened to the video when it got sent to wherever.

Questions of privacy and data are never about one camera, or one company or even one individual. They’re usually about multiple devices, services, companies and people with differing roles and interests. Not easy questions.

Facebook privacy cafe

Facebook is opening a pop-up coffee shop in London to give people “privacy check ups”. You would guess that this will be about being careful which third parties you share your data with when you’re on Facebook. But it might not cover how to perma-delete your FB account or send them a GDPR subject access request.

(Previously: students pay for coffee with personal data.)

2030

Yotta walks down the street through an invisible bath of data, network pings and sensor attention that her device describes as an audible crackling in the background like a radiation counter. Her earring buzzes when she turns to face the shop - there’s a brief pause as DuckDuckSocial provides a disposable proxy identity. She won’t get the loyalty points but she has principles. She steps over the threshold of the Whatstagram coffee shop and into quote a safe social space. The crackling thins out - inside the shop Whatstagram blocks some traffic to other platforms.

At the table with friends, their devices all flash purple LEDs • to indicate personal data being gathered by the network. She know her devices will try resist the sensors, offering deepfaked data. But you never know if it works. 

“If this shop worked like Whatstagram actually does, they’d give you this free coffee and a cookie, and then very closely watch how you behaved, who you spoke to, taking lots of notes, follow you to the bathroom, and continue when you walked off down the street.”

“Yeah yeah Yotta, but the coffee is good.”

“I know.”

Livestreamed funerals

Livestreamed funerals: “nearly 20 percent of US funeral homes now offer the service—a big number in an industry resistant to change—in response to demand from clients. Tech-savvy entrepreneurs offer livestreaming as a service to hesitant funeral directors” 

Internet fridges

At last, you think, a genuine use for an internet fridge! Infuriated by her daughter’s obsession with social media, a mother confiscates her internet devices, resulting in the teen tweeting from gaming boxes and eventually from a smart fridge. Funny story. Though maybe it was a Twitter joke, or just a guerrilla marketing campaign (the fridge manufacturer claims not). Whether it is true or not, you can expect to see people emergency-tweeting from their fridges in a movie plot in 2021. 

Two more marketing stories for a world in which true and fake are smooshing into each other: a depressing article on how to piggyback your marketing onto news stories. A vision for “synthetic media” - computer-generated content.

(Elsewhere in marketing, Facebook will be rebranding Instagram and WhatsApp as “by Facebook”, though these days you wonder if rebranding FB “Newsfeed by Whatstagram” could have been worked.)

Tracking the tracking

The last newsletter was looking for a user-friendly tool that you could give a web address to and get back a list of third party tracking things running on that site. A beloved reader writes: “PrivacyBadger will almost do what you want with trackers: it’s a browser extension built by the EFF that will show (and block) trackers when you visit a page”.

Co-op Digital news

Service mapping to make friends and influence stakeholders.

Most opened newsletter in the last month: small baskets at Amazon Go stores. Most clicked story: what’s on the Alan Turing banknote?

Events

Public events:

Ladies that UX - Tue 20 Aug 6.30pm at Federation House.

Manchester WordPress user group - Wed 21 Aug 6.30pm at Federation House.

What is responsible tech? - Thu 22 Aug 6pm at Federation House.

'Disability Confident' Celebrating diversity at work - Fri 13 Sep 8am at 151 Deansgate.

ODI’s Strategic data skills - Mon 16 Sep 8.30am online course (needs 3-5 hours/week)

Mind the Product - MTP Engage - Fri 7 Feb 2020 - you can get early bird tickets now. 

Internal events:

Delivery community of practice - Mon 19 Aug 1.30pm at Fed House.

What has the web team been up to? Playback - Tue 20 Aug 1pm at Fed House 5th floor.

Health team show & tell - Tue 20 Aug 2.30pm at Fed house 5th floor.

UX future vision wrap up show & tell - Wed 21 Aug 11am at Fed house 5th floor.

Engineering community of practice - Wed 21 Aug 1.30pm at Fed House Defiant.

CRM and data ecosystem show & tell - Wed 21 Aug 3pm at Angel Square 13th floor breakout area.

Membership show & tell - Fri 23 Aug 3pm at Fed House 6th floor kitchen.

More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at  federation.events@coopdigital.co.uk. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West. 

Thank you for reading

Thank you, clever and considerate readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s typing squirrel @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

5 Nov 2018: Walk out

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading and please do send ideas, questions, corrections etc to @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading please consider telling a friend about it!

[Image: Sainsbury’s, modified]

Unintended consequences in checkoutless stores

In Amazon Go, no one thinks I'm stealing - “No one cared what I was doing. Is this what it feels like to shop when you're not black?”. The cameras don’t care what colour you are, removing the employees gets rid of the human biases. As with all automated systems, it’s possible though that new algorithmic biases are introduced, ones that are less visible to a shopper, or harder for them to get a handle on and influence. An economic look on this story and discrimination in shopping.

But! Maybe the humans will game your system if you’re doing checkoutless but haven’t built the full Amazon Go. Perhaps shoplifters will wander in, theatrically wave a mobile at some goods, and confidently strut out. It’s harder for staff to tell who is using the mobile app and who’s nicking stuff. (Some ways to fix that problem. Accounting: do what self-checkout stores do and accept more shrinkage because you now have reduced cost of checkout staff. Tickets please: have every shopper show receipt to a machine or a security on the way out (see Sam’s Club below). Expensive IT: tag all the produce and tie it to the purchasing system. Costco: club members get access and cheaper prices. Panopticon: tag and track the shoppers by having them check in through a barrier and using cameras, which is what Amazon Go does.)

Related: Sam’s Club (Walmart) is close to launching its own checkoutless store format - though it won’t be “just walk out”: when shoppers are ready to check out, they find a store associate and scan a barcode on their phone.

Luxury convenience stores

Hipster convenience stores in New York. And hipster office landlord WeWork plans to open 500 in-house WeMRKTs in the next few years, to maximise the productivity of the young workers in its office spaces.

Traceability and provenance

M&S has a good map of its factories and suppliers for own-label food, clothing and household products. “As a condition of trade, we require all direct suppliers and contracted factories to join the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange (Sedex), a web-based database where suppliers disclose information (labour standards, health and safety, environmental) including self-assessments and site audit reports. Factory information and data is based on self-declared information disclosed on our internal order management systems and Sedex which is then reviewed by our specialist Regional Office teams located in the UK, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, China, Cambodia and Vietnam.”

Google Walkout

Thousands of Google employees walked out of their jobs to register their discomfort with Google’s handling of harassment cases against a few of its former top brass. And here is a great list of articles about women working in tech, and being prevented from working.

Big Tech employees becoming politically activated is a good thing, and you wonder if this will lead to similar reactions to the effects Big Tech’s work has on wider society.

UK Budget: digital tax

The Treasury plans to introduce a 2% “digital services tax” on search engine, social media platforms and online marketplace revenue of global companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Language

Weaponised design: “electronic systems whose designs either do not account for abusive application or whose user experiences directly empower attackers” and which is “facilitated by designers who are oblivious to the politics of digital infrastructure or consider their design practice output to be apolitical”. Interesting piece, though “weaponised design” seems a problematic term. You immediately think about intent, about who is turning the thing into a weapon. In one of the first examples in that piece, is it Snap, the journalist, the mobile phone, or even Google Maps who does the weaponising? When Russian botfarms spam political ads and fake news onto FB, is that “weaponising” a platform, or actually using a platform pretty much as it was designed? Maybe it is better if the language is simply “unintended consequences”.

Cryptocurrencies

The newsletter hasn’t talked about cryptocurrencies for a while. Bitcoin‘s whitepaper was published 10 years ago. This is quite young by the standards of other technology or money infrastructure: the internet hadn’t really got going when it was 10, and to be honest this newsletter isn’t sure how double-entry book-keeping or credit ledgers were doing a decade after 1494.

“Stablecoins” are becoming quite popular. The idea is that they have the advantages of digital assets (quick and easy to sub-divide infinitely and send somewhere, hard to double-spend) and the advantages of a fiat currency (predictable price, indirectly backed by a government). “A programmable dollar”, as this VC puts it. Weirdly though, plain old bitcoin has been less volatile than the stock markets of late, so maybe it too is maturing into a stable coin, pegged against the dollar.

But: “If bitcoin becomes more widely adopted, the huge amounts of electricity used to trade the cryptocurrency could push global temperatures above 2 degrees Celsius by 2033.”

UK gov is considering regulating crypto assets and banning crypto-based derivative products. “The FCA has made clear that in its view cryptoassets have no intrinsic value and investors should therefore be prepared to lose all the value they have put in”. An economist put that view in stronger terms when testifying to the senate: “Crypto is the mother of all scams and (now busted) bubbles while blockchain is the most over-hyped technology ever, no better than a spreadsheet/database”.

Finally, there is a new Wu-Tang Clan affiliated cryptocurrency, ODB coin. (Had ODB still been with us, he’d have told his son to give it a better name, Ol’ Dirty Blockcoin or something like that.)

Psychoanalytic tool

Musk tweeted that he’s deleted his titles. Obviously that doesn’t mean that he’s *actually* resigned as CEO etc, just that he had someone delete <p>CEO</p> from the website (or maybe he does the front-end code himself!). He sometimes gets himself into trouble with the SEC for using Special Terms like “funding secured”, but generally it’s safer to see everything he does on Twitter as an unfiltered internal monologue made public, prompting the thought that maybe Twitter could be used as a psychoanalytic tool. Related: Musk is the id of Silicon Valley.

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Events

Is a co-op right for you? - several sessions in several towns 11 Sep - 27 Nov.

Delivery community of practice meetup - Mon 5 Nov 1pm at Federation House.

Engineering community of practice meetup - Wed 5 Nov 1pm at Federation House 5th floor.

TICTeC Local - by mySociety Where Civic Technology meets Local gov -  Tue 6 Nov  9.30am at Federation House.

Local.co.uk show & tell - Tue 6 Nov 1pm at Federation House 6th floor.

Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 6 Nov 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor breakout.

Web team show & tell - Wed 7 Nov 2.30pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Line management drop-in clinic - Thu 8 Nov 1pm at Federation House.

Heads of practice community of practice meetup - Thu 8 Nov 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Digital Risk discovery show & tell - Thu 8 Nov 3.30pm at Angel Square 5th floor breakout.

More events at Federation House. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

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Thanks for reading. If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

29 Jun 2018: Self-driving shops, Amazon buys online pharmacy, Co-op economy, Alexa for hotels, Tesco Go

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading and please do send ideas, questions, corrections etc to @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading please consider telling a friend about it!

[Image: Minh Uong/The New York Times]

Co-op economy report

The Co-op economy report shows that co-operative economic activity is growing. The standout line: “co-operative start-ups are almost twice as likely to survive their first five years when compared to companies”, probably because it’s easier to align interests when the employees are the owners.

Related: Co-op Group will buy four convenience stores from John Lewis, which is refreshing the JL and Waitrose brands to add “& partners” in order to emphasise employee ownership. Hopefully they’ll reinstate their brilliant JL&p logo from the 1970s.

Self-driving shops

If cars didn’t have drivers or passengers, they wouldn’t need to drive at busy-human speeds, which might make it easier to deploy certain kinds of self-driving car - like Robomart’s “autonomous shops on wheels”. The basic promise: instead of you having to pop to the shops, the shop pops to you. Robomart says that customers will prefer to inspect perishable goods in person, and that looking at shelves that bring themselves to your driveway is easier than tapping away on a grocery app.

But it might be decades before full self-driving autonomy is ubiquitous. Before then you could imagine a temporary stage in which if you want to pick up a loaf of bread and some milk you wait until Freshco’s automated shop comes to you - it might slowly cruise around the neighbourhood, being flagged to a stop by pedestrians. But if you want to order an uncommon product or you want it in a hurry, maybe it’s delivered to you by a human driver, and more expensively. And you might even still be able to pop to the local store!

After that, perhaps transport and shopping merge. You wave away that Gregg’s Steakbake-n-ride Bus because you want something different today, and the queue for the FalaFellers Gondola is always insane. So instead you “step into a Starbucks Van, or a Burger King Coupe, to dine and commute at the same time”.

Amazon buys online pharmacy PillPack

Amazon is buying US online pharmacy startup, PillPack. You can see how PillPack fits with Amazon’s “efficiently sending things” strand, just as the wider Improving Healthcare Services joint venture with Morgan Stanley and Berkshire Hathaway fits their “efficiently running info-rich services” capability.

Employee power and indifferent technology

Big tech employees are criticising their employers for taking contracts with government agencies. Amazon employees demanded it cut ties with ICE, the US immigration and customs enforcement agency, saying “we should not be in the business of supporting those who monitor and oppress marginalized populations”. Salesforce, Google and Microsoft employees are also pushing back on their employers’ gov contracts.

The problem is that the same technology that underpins the friendly, free-and-pay-with-your-behaviour services that users love can often be put to use elsewhere, and in ways that more obviously seem objectionable. Technology isn’t neutral, but it is indifferent to how it’s used.

Alexa for hotels

Amazon announced Alexa for hospitality. Contexts and jobs that have constrained use cases are easier to build a voice assistant for because you can build for a predictable set of requests, and the users already know what kinds of thing they can ask. “What time is breakfast/checkout/breakfast served from?”, “Turn up the heating please”, “Can you send up a cheese sandwich/ironing board?” and so on, but not “Hotel! Can you improve this sales presentation for tomorrow’s important meeting because aaaaaah?” (You can imagine that a shop or an insurance company might have some similarly narrow requests.) Interesting: they plan that hotel guests will be able to sign into their own Amazon accounts, to be able to “call home” etc. And maybe even watch their own Prime Video content?

Related: a robot that delivers in hotels.

Tesco Go

Tesco is looking at cashierless/checkoutless shopping - shops in which you can put things in your bag and just walk out. Tescoboss: “In our stores in central London, Manchester and Birmingham, lunchtime queues are a problem. Anything we can do to speed that up will be a benefit for customers.” But Tesco is “still figuring out how it could be introduced at some of its 1,800 UK express stores without increasing theft”.

Amazon’s Go shop in Seattle is a bit further along: “Amazon Go, for the most part, is designed to make the process of "oh, I changed my mind" very visually clean. Shelves are stocked with shape and color variety in mind, and they have rigid item-placement spots. Those factors combine to make it very difficult to put stuff where Amazon doesn't want you to.”

Other news

Ticketmaster was hacked - the fraudulent activity was spotted by the bank Monzo, which acted quickly and has explained itself well. By comparison Ticketmaster and their chat vendor look a bit preoccupied with pointing the finger at each other.

Better Internetter from Doteveryone - “some handy hints to make your tech work better for you when you shop, search and share online.”

Building the GOV.UK of the future - including a mundane but profound use of machine learning: categorising and structuring content.

Lots of stories in the last fortnight about companies moving jobs, activity, headquarters etc outside of the UK if the Brexit disast destination is no customs union. Insurance giant AIG is moving to the UK though - it was previously serving its UK customers from Luxembourg.

Slack had a rare service outage - team communications tool/office gossip supercharger was down for three hours, during which co-workers had to fall back to email or nervously clear their throats and use speech. They posted an update every 30 minutes - a good practice.

Elon Musk drawn into farting unicorn dispute with potter. Reasons why this story is being linked: 1. Elon Musk/Tesla. 2. The way that tech firms are sometimes a bit casual about other people’s intellectual property. 3. pottery. 4. the headline.

Magic: here is a Colombian football fan helping his deaf and blind friend experience their team's World Cup.

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Co-op Digital news

Introducing our software development standards.

Now’s the time to enter new markets.

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Events

Code your future summit - Sat 30 Jun 9.30am at Federation House.

Healthcare ventures show & tell - Tue 3 Jul 10am at Federation House 5th floor.

Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 3 Jul 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor.

Update from Heads of Practice - Wed 4 Jul 11.45am at Federation House 5th floor.

Shifts show & tell - Thu 5 Jul 11am at Angel Square 4th floor.

Cremation without ceremony show & tell - Thu 5 Jul 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor.

Marketplace ventures show & tell - Tue 10 Jul 10am at Federation House 5th floor.

Update from Heads of Practice - Wed 11 Jul 11.45am at Federation House 5th floor.

Turning GDPR into an opportunity - Wed 11 Jul 4pm at Federation House.

How to improve and innovate customer experiences using service design with Co-op Digital’s Jack Fletcher - Thu 12 Jul 8.30am at LABS in London.

Cremation without ceremony show & tell - Thu 12 Jul 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor.

Manchester Masterclass in Decentralised Organising - Fri 13 Jul 9.30am at Federation House.

More events coming up at Federation House. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

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Thanks for reading. If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

4 May 2018: If you’re not paying, you’re the data

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter. It looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading and please do send ideas, questions, corrections etc to @rod on Twitter. You should recommend it to a friend!

[Business Insider/Reuters/Techcrunch]

If you’re not paying, you’re the data

The famous “if you’re not paying you’re the product” line is a useful way of thinking about ad-funded services. These days it gets a bit of criticism for not being precisely accurate - Facebook doesn’t sell your personally identifying data, no. But it does sell an advertising product that can be more finely targeted if it knows a lot about your behaviour and what you might like to purchase. The users are committing (paying) with their time, attention, behaviour and data for some internet entertainment, and that data is then packaged, sliced, insighted, segmented and sold to advertisers who pay to place exciting purchasing opportunities in front of the right users. Whether you say that the business model is an incidental side effect of the honest product vision and execution, or that the business model cruelly drives the product, there are still misalignments of interest.

This week Cambridge Analytica announced that it is to be switched off in disgrace. Last week, Facebook’s quarterly financials were strong (though perhaps Facebook’s recent privacy wobbles will show up in the financials in a couple of quarters’ time). And maybe this made everyone at FBHQ relax, because this week they announced a dating product. Facebook says that

“people will be able to create a dating profile that is separate from their Facebook profile — and potential matches will be recommended based on dating preferences, things in common, and mutual friends. They’ll have the option to discover others with similar interests through their Groups or Events. However, what people do within the dating feature will not be shown to their friends.”

You could imagine an “ad data date targeting” feature that had been in the dating product plan but had to be yanked in a hurry last month:

“You eat beef 11% more often than other video streamers of Midsomer Murders in the M30 postcode, and are flagged for Weber barbecue ad retargeting on sunny weekend days. Would you like to meet this male advert receptacle who buys a lot of Sauvignon Anything, and like you secretly thinks Mutual Friend is a weakening bore?”

Organise

Organise “helps you to start, run, and win campaigns to change your workplace”. The startup provides a online platform to help workers take concerns from the office, shop floor or workshop all the way to the boardroom. It has 20,000 users on its online platform and has managed to make big companies like River Island clarify their policies for staff.

Current campaigns include reducing warehouse targets at Amazon and better contracts at McDonald’s.

TSB bank: wrong kind of transparency

TSB has had problems upgrading its online banking platform, with furious customers unable to access their money or seeing other people’s accounts, which is exactly the wrong kind of transparency. The Treasury Select Committee is not impressed.

The contemporary banking customer expects everything to work and seamlessly, on all devices - banking should be rock-solid and modern, reliable and cutting-edge. The technology and process layers are usually invisible because they usually “just work”. But behind the scenes large high-street banks grapple with legacy IT systems (“legacy” typically meaning “weepingly complicated” and sometimes “do NOT turn this off in case!”).

Is there a service that rates online banking on reliability? Would you switch account to a bank that said “OK we’ve no mobile app, but look at our data - we haven’t made a mistake with an overdraft charge since 2002.” Or imagine a bank offering an “added resilience” service in which you had a second account explicitly running on the old platform, just in case something bad happens.

Elsewhere in complex systems: a high-decibel whistle from a fire prevention system knocked out Nasdaq’s servers for several hours at a Swedish data center, shutting down trading in the stock markets for six countries.

McDonald’s the tech firm

McDonald’s is doing lots with tech: “McDonald’s now has an app that lets customers order and pay on their phones. It’s experimenting with self-ordering kiosks in restaurants. And it has a delivery partnership with Uber Eats.”

“McDonald’s “experience of the future” platform [includes] digital menu boards, self-ordering kiosks, improved hospitality from staff, and a more modern look. Additionally, the company is seeing customers engaging with the brand via its mobile app much more frequently. In the United States alone, McDonald’s has more than 20 million registered users of its mobile app. […] 20,000 restaurants around the world offering mobile order on pay. While still very early with customer usage we’re encouraged by digital orders as we’re seeing higher average check size and greater customer satisfaction among the customers. In particular many customers are appreciating the added convenience of curb side pickup.”

Self-deluding cars

Tesla driver is banned for M1 autopilot seat-switch - the problem seems to be that human biology (or maybe idiocy) isn’t really cut out for Level 2-4 vehicle autonomy. And/or the human trainers of self-driving systems aren’t sufficiently trained anyway - again the same problem of doing nothing for long periods of time while staying alert and ready to take over if the car struggles. And some say the levels are themselves a problem.

Perhaps a better way would be to offer a reassuring safety theatre that turned everything around: have the car hide the fact that it was self-driving, duping the humans into believing they needed to be in control and thus staying alert. Does that make sense?

Twitter passwords

Twitter discovered that it was dropping unencrypted passwords into its internal logging software. Good practice that it disclosed the problem, and its password recommendations are decent.

GDPR countdown 21 days!

Under a month til GDPR day, which comes into force on 25 May 2018. The Information Commissioner’s Office guide.

Other news

Ocado has a third partnership deal for its grocerplatform, a Swedish grocer.

UK Parliament select committee threatenvites Zuckerberg to come chat. (pdf)

Campus North in Newscastle is closing - looks like job done, not failure.

People, Power and Technology: Doteveryone’s 2018 Digital Understanding Report - see also their digital attitudes report.

Projects by If is offering data ethics toolkits.

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Co-op Digital news

Introducing our user research principles.

Karen Lindop: Shifts is live plus learning to be mental health first aiders.

Co-op is trialling robot grocery delivery in Milton Keynes, with a robotics co we discussed in Jan 2017. 1,000 deliveries have been made so far.

Events

Ventures show and tell - Tue 8 May 10am at Federation House 5th floor.

Funeral care show and tell - Tue 8 May 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor.

Data Science team minihack - Tue 8 May 2.30pm at Angel Square 8th floor.

Member Voice show and tell - Wed 9 May 11.30am at Federation House 6th floor.

Update from Heads of Practice and Portfolio - Wed 9 May 11.45am at Federation House 5th floor.

Techie video club - Wed 9 May 12pm at Federation House 6th floor.

Service design Wednesdays - Wed 9 May 12.30pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Designing to delight at scale - Wed 9 May 6pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Shifts show and tell - Thu 10 May 11am at Angel Square 4th floor.

Direct to Cremation show and tell - Thu 11 May 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor.

Engineering community lunch - Fri 11 May 12pm.

All-team - Wed 16 May 10.30am at Angel Square.

More events coming up at Federation House.

TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

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Thanks for reading. If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

21 May 2018: Ocado brings robowarehouse to Kroger, Alibaba and 6m corner shops, hello GDPR

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter. It looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading and please do send ideas, questions, corrections etc to @rod on Twitter. You should recommend it to a friend!

[Image: Gizmodo]

Ocado brings robowarehouse to Kroger

Some crunchy grocery news this week. First, Ocado announced a warehouse-and-ecommerce partnership with Kroger in the US. Ocado has two distinct businesses: one, the branded online grocery business in the UK. The other, a horizontal warehouse-logistics-ecommerce platform business that’s gradually picking up deals globally.

Kroger already has a partnership with Instacart, which somewhat overlaps with Ocado in that both get groceries delivered to your home. Instacart’s service is more human-powered, and perhaps lighter and easier to hook into existing retail grocery businesses. Ocado’s platform is a higher investment reinvention play with robot-driven warehouses and so on, and you’d guess is more efficient longer-term. Ocado tends to do territory-exclusive deals for its platform, so it may not mean head-to-head competition between Ocado and Instacart - both companies have done well recently, thanks in part to the wake-up call the Amazon/Whole Foods deal gave to the grocery sector. Ocado’s exclusive deals have also dampened potential conflicts between their vertical online grocery and horizontal platform businesses. But the other interesting question is whether Ocado becomes enough of a horizontal platform business that the retail grocery business in the UK looks optional.

Alibaba and 6m corner shops in China

Next, here’s a sense of Alibaba’s offline ambition - Alibaba to transform China’s mom-and-pop shops In massive offline expansion:

“The retail giant has now unveiled an even more ambitious plan to transform 10,000 mom-and-pop convenience stores across China into a vast network of Tmall.com brick-and-mortar outlets, where consumers can shop, pick up packages, make orders online or even apply for and receive small loans. It’s the first step in Alibaba’s broader plan to turn as many as six million convenience stores into smart service centers equipped with Alibaba’s e-commerce infrastructure and capabilities in financial technology, logistics and travel services. [...] "These Tmall shops will be a supermarket, a post office, a travel agency, or even a community bank," said Lin Xiaohai, vice president of Alibaba.”

Elsewhere in grocery, high streets, retail and payments: Mothercare will close 50 shops. Shoppers desert the high street (link might need registration). Paypal is buying point-of-sales payment solution iZettle.

Cars, cops, bailiffs and data

In the US, car repossessions are up as loan deliquency rises. Car repossession companies use cameras and software to automatically perform number plate checks on nearby cars. The camera systems are provided by companies like Digital Recognition Network which keep and aggregate all of the data (its website boasts 6.5bn vehicle sightings), also reselling it to law enforcement agencies. The creation of surveillance systems that span the private and law enforcement realms sounds a bit uncomfortable from a privacy perspective. In the UK, automatic number plate recognition is only done by police services. And the Highways Agency, Capita, car parks. And maybe Google Maps and… hmm.

In the future, if you don’t pay your car loan, your self-driving car will repossess itself. (Well, you’re more likely to be paying per ride for a car owned by A Tech Company, but let’s imagine it anyway.) It will self-police, taking itself off to Kwikfit to get its tyres replaced after dropping you off at the office. And when it fails the new sensor-driven “continuous MOT test” it will report itself to the nearest DVLA drone and hopefully let you out before it locks down and goes dark.

UnFound platform co-op accelerator

Accelerator programme UnFound announced a shortlist of eight platform co-ops. One of them, Open Food Network, provides “online tools for buying, selling & distributing local food”.

Hello GDPR

GDPR day is this week, 25 May 2018. The Information Commissioner’s Office guide.

One of the disadvantages of leaving the “re-consenting” until the last minute is that users, exhausted by all of the emails about new terms, instead use it as an excuse to unsubscribe/cancel, resulting in very clean but perhaps much smaller consent lists. Three entertaining GDPR efforts: A football club’s pitch-side messaging. A financial consultancy’s ballad of GDPR. A musician planning for the future.

Previously we’ve talked about what happens if personal data in the blockchain’s immutable record meets the GDPR’s right to erasure. The preliminary answer seems to be that regulation wins.

Unsocial media

Facebook has deleted 1.2 billion fake accounts in the last six months, automatically recognising over 80% of spam, nudity and violence but under 40% of hate speech. Twitter is hiding unhealthy and trolling content behind a “show more replies” link. Social media is increasingly about removing noise.

Other news

Amazon has a dozen or so “experience homes” in which you can try out their smart door lock/video doorbell/entertainment/thermostat/etc services - and helpfully suggests that you can say “Alexa, start party time.” Immediately followed by “Alexa, show me the front door.”

Mobile virtual network operator GiffGaff says “We revolutionised the mobile industry and now we want to do the same with personal finance”, and is starting with credit checks.

Unexpected side effects: “Do you think the people who founded GoFundMe understood they were starting a healthcare company?”

Doteveryone’s Society in the Loop newsletter looks great.

Microsoft’s Adaptive Xbox Controller will make gaming more accessible for people with limited mobility.

Two years ago: “How might food/high street retail and cornershops change in future? Perhaps we’ll see more floorspace devoted to local “warehousing” of goods you’ve already bought, and the Co-op would be strongly positioned to explore this further. Shopping that’s little and often, relevant to me, collecting my goods on the way home, closer to me.”

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Co-op Digital news

It was the Co-op Annual General Meeting on Saturday - Royal Wedding and FA Cup fans who missed it can catch up on the video.

Events

Healthcare show & tell - Tue 22 May 10am at Federation House 5th floor

Connecting communities show & tell - Tue 22 May 1.15pm at Federation House 6th floor

Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 22 May 10am at Angel Square 12th floor

Update from Heads of Practice - Wed 23 May 11.45am at Federation House 5th floor

ProductTank Manchester - evening Product Management meetup - Wed 23 May 6.30pm at Federation House

Tech for Good live - Wed 23 May 6.30pm at Federation House

Shifts show & tell - Thu 24 May 11am at Angel Square 4th floor

Direct to Cremation show & tell - Thu 24 May 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor

Open - challenging how we think about accessibility - Thu 24 May 6pm at Federation House

More events coming up at Federation House. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

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Thanks for reading. If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

4 Mar 2020: Coronavirus. Insurance: Ford’s black box. Amazon goes big.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: New Scientist/Alfred Pasieka/Science Photo Library]

Coronavirus: making supply networks visible

UK Government published its COVID-19 plan, which says that up to a fifth of UK workers could be off sick at any one time in the “reasonable worst case”. If that happens there will obviously be strain on systems: you’ll see 

“population distancing strategies (such as school closures, encouraging greater home working, reducing the number of large-scale gatherings) to slow the spread of the disease throughout the population, while ensuring the country’s ability to continue to run as normally as possible.”

That might also mean key parts of the public sector need to prioritise the most essential services, so NHS, social care, emergency services etc may see some streamlining. 

What are big tech firms doing? Amazon is banning non-essential travel. Twitter is encouraging staff to work from home and Google is trying out a work-from-home day in Ireland to test its preparedness. (Amazon is also trying to stop people selling face masks at hugely inflated prices on its platform.)

Very practically: it might seem suspiciously simple, but handwashing with soap is still the best thing to do, because soap is good at ripping apart the fatty envelope around the virus. Some measured “preparing” is probably sensible and helpful because it introduces a little slack into the health and food systems. The wider community benefits because the case load on the healthcare system is spread out over time the. (For the avoidance of doubt, this newsletter is *not* advising anyone to immediately put their camouflage bandana on and barricade themselves into their homes. And nor are public health experts, who are the people to actually listen to.) 

It looks like the virus will make visible some of the things that modern life works hard to keep invisible. Critical national infrastructure - chief medical officers, scientists - explain the situation and the plan. And supply chains also become more visible: if consumer electronics become more expensive, you might get a sense of that supply chain reaching back to China. But it isn’t a single chain, a linear path of supply along which money is swapped for things. It’s really supply *networks* - all the supply chains are entwined. If schools are shut, then there will be knock-on effects: a significant percentage of the workforce would be at home looking after children. This also means that if you wanted to avoid other people by staying at home and getting everything safely delivered to your house, well that still relies on Amazon's delivery people! The virus may eventually force everyone to think at the level of the community, rather than the individual.

Elsewhere: 

“GOV.​UK Notify just helped an NHS team set up a 2-way text messaging service for extreme-risk people to monitor and report Coronavirus symptoms. Took them a few hours, start to finish. Would've been impossible, even a couple of years ago. This is why platforms matter.”

Azeem Azhar wonders if coronavirus will force some political, economic and cultural adaptation upon society.

Insurance: Ford’s black box

Ford will offer drivers better insurance rates in partnership with Nationwide (a US insurer, not the UK mortgage provider). Insurance premia depend on how much you use the car, but also how you use it - drivers will be able to get up to 40% off if they drive safely. It’s one of the first driving telemetry solutions that doesn’t need a “black box” to be installed - the car is the black box. The catch for drivers: you need to be happy sharing your driving data with Ford and your insurer, and no doubt you need to be a safe driver.

Also in car insurance:

Young drivers “let down over insurance app faults” - Carrot uses phone data to measure braking and acceleration, but some say it often fails to work.

How we analyzed Allstate’s car insurance algorithm - data + code = new approaches to journalism.

Amazon goes big

Amazon has opened its first full size cashierless grocery store in Seattle - Go technology at 5,000 product lines in 10,000 sq ft size. (And here’s someone’s inevitable “can we fool the sensors and steal a banana” piece.) You shouldn’t necessarily see this story as Amazon going bigger now that it has *perfected* Go. There will probably be many more experiments with technology, format, size, inventory, location and everything else. Amazon is the experiment machine.

Elsewhere in supermarkets:

Walmart's click-and-collect offering is doing well - 37% growth in US ecommerce (which covers both click-and-collect and delivered).

M&S Food will expand its fill-your-own-container scheme to Manchester after a successful trial in which half of the lines offered outsold their packaged equivalents.

Tesco puts 1,800 jobs at risk as it scales down in-store bakeries - on the other hand Waitrose is selling more bread!

Ridesharing: more pollution, more accidents

Two research reports find unexpected problems with ridesharing: 

ridesharing companies seem to generate 70% more pollution than the trips they displace.

ridehailing is associated with an increase of approximately 3% in the number of fatalities and fatal accidents, for both vehicle occupants and pedestrians. 

When your company started up in car culture’s home country, then naturally the solutions mostly look like… cars. Though this might be part of the problem.

Other news

Lloyds of London will insure crypto wallets - given the last decade of stories about cryptocurrencies and their wallets being hacked, you’d guess the premia will be quite big.

Kickstarter workers vote to form first union in US tech industry. 

Amazon primed to change the fashion industry in new TV series - Amazon’s first big fashion TV-meets-shopping cross-selling project.

Here is your heart-warming retail story: Italian IKEA store opens its doors to local stray dogs.

Co-op Digital news and events

How the Web team used the ‘top tasks’ approach to prioritise.

Sign up for The Federation newsletter!

Public events, most of them at Federation House:

Global Legal Hackathon Manchester - Fri 6 - Sun 8 Mar 4pm.

Digital City Festival - Mon 9 - Fri 13 Mar at venues across Manchester, several of them at Federation house.

Open Data Manchester: Black software (explores racial injustice & the professionals & hobbyists of color who helped build the internet) - Wed 18 Mar 6.30pm.

Returners/Re-trainers (about successful initiatives to create better routes for women returners/re-trainers) - Thu 26 Mar 11.30am

Internal events:

Targeted Marketing (CRM) and Data Ecosystem show & tell - Wed 4 Mar 3pm at Angel Sq 13th floor breakout.

Membership show & tell - Fri 6 Mar 3pm at Fed 6 kitchen.

Delivery community of practice - Mon 9 Mar 1.30pm.

Co-operate show & tell - Wed 11 Mar 2pm at Angel Sq 8th floor red core breakout.

Data management show & tell - Thu 12 Mar 2.30pm at Angel Sq 13th floor breakout.

Membership show & tell - Fri 13 Mar 3pm at Fed 6 kitchen.

More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at  federation.events@coopdigital.co.uk. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s typing entity @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

19 Feb 2020: Food on the go and 15 minute grocery delivery. Workers first. Electronic voting. Conditions for success and failure.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Sainsbury’s]

Food on the go and 15 minute grocery delivery

Sainsbury’s launches its first “food on the go” store - it will open 10 stores with in-store “perch” seating. Can a convenience store successfully do slower “consume in store” food alongside faster “grab and go” food? Starbucks and fast food suggest it is possible, if the format’s right.

Sainsbury’s, Frasers and Shoe Zone plead for business rates reform.

Russian search giant Yandex is planning 15-minute grocery delivery in Moscow: a network of bike couriers will deliver items from a 2,000 item inventory at a network of 200 small warehouses to Muscovites with urgent grocery needs.

Overview of the market - The Retail Bible - this is a sales pitch but @dresserman is always worth a read. He should do the same forensic documentation of apps, websites and delivery trucks as he does for in-store.

Workers first: Breakroom

Breakroom wants to “help 100M people find the right job, and raise the standard of all hourly work”. It’s fascinating looking at the performance of retailers in various sectors - you can find out if you’d like that front-line retail job. For instance: employee reviews of convenience stores. The feedback also has plenty of lessons for employers. (And Breakroom are hiring right now.)

Elsewhere in hiring, The Body Shop is trying “open hiring” and will hire the first person who applies for any retail job. And the UK Gov plans much tighter immigration controls for “low skilled” workers, which will affect agriculture and other industries.

Conditions for success and failure in digital teams

Two good reads from Public Digital. Jamie Arnold on Conditions for success: 

“Don’t build an app, build a team Empower a team to meet the needs of the user.  Make sure they can do this free from the imposition of political constraints to avoid building a product or service that suboptimally reflects the shape or behaviours of the current organisation. Trust the team to own their process and choose the tools they wish to work with.”

And a great thread on conditions for failure: “top 10 systemic blockers to Internet-era ways of working in your org”. (See also: PD’s newsletter, currently written by Co-op Digital’s Amy McNichol.)

Electronic voting

MIT researchers released a paper criticising Voatz (pdf), a remote-voting app used in several districts and territories in the US. Voatz’s response felt a bit prickly - it would have been better to refute the criticisms with clearer evidence. The US Gov also looked at Voatz and raised its eyebrow a couple of times. If correctness and auditability will be critical features of your service, then perhaps the name alone is a red flag: “voatz” might imply a certain… casualness to some readers?

Walking: given enough eyeballs, the map is the territory

Legislation says that all walking paths in England and Wales must be recorded (mapped) by local authorities by 2026, if they’re to retain their rights of way in future. Problem: the new maps are missing a lot of paths. So a community of walkers are comparing the big new map to old maps to see which old paths need to be reinstated. It’s an admirable crowd-working effort. 

(Is this the kind of thing that machine learning should be able to help with? It’s a constrained image recognition problem: look for things like this on the old map and then if they’re not also described on the new map add them, or tell someone about it.)

Stuffed crust

A snapshot of venture-capital-fuelled techno-exuberance in a piece on struggling “pizzatech” startup Zume Pizza:

“Just, what a closed loop it is. You run a pizza delivery business. You craft a pitch calculated to convince Masayoshi Son [of massive venture fund SoftBank] that your pizza delivery business will change the world. You meet with Masayoshi Son. He convinces you that you will change the world. Now you are all believers, all in it together. He hands you piles of money. You go home and weep to your friends, “I am going to change the world.” The friends are like “wait what with the pizzas?” But it is too late for skepticism, you have the money, the robots are in the trucks, they are fanning out across town, the cheese is everywhere, they cannot turn back.”

Other news

Consequence scanning - “a way for organisations to consider the potential consequences of their product or service on people, communities and the planet [...] an opportunity to mitigate or address potential harms or disasters before they happen”.

Amazon says it "regrets" that suspect child car seats were on sale on its UK store, and says it has removed them - not the first time this has happened.

I stumbled across a huge Airbnb scam that’s taking over London - how some people are gaming the Airbnb platform to run short stays with fake reviews, and hotels without having to meet those pesky regulations. (Airbnb is spending $150m on “safety initiatives”.)

Robots guarding the perimeters of building sites. Yes.

Co-op Digital news and events

Public events, most of them at Federation House:

Conscious Entrepreneurs - Wed 19 Feb 12pm.

People, Progress & Responsible Tech: Where's the humanity in tech's future? - Wed 19 Feb 6pm.

Mini-SPA Conference 2020 Leeds - Fri 21 Feb 9:30am-4:40pm at St George's Conference Centre, 60 Great George Street LS1 3DL

Open Data Manchester: Black software (explores racial injustice & the professionals & hobbyists of color who helped build the internet) - Wed 18 Mar 6.30pm.

Returners/Re-trainers (about successful initiatives to create better routes for women returners/re-trainers) - Thu 26 Mar 11.30am

Internal events:

Targeted Marketing (CRM) and Data Ecosystem show & tell - Wed 19 Feb 3pm at Angel Sq 13th floor breakout.

Membership show & tell - Fri 21 Feb 3pm at Fed 6 kitchen.

Delivery community of practice - Mon 24 Feb 1.30pm.

Service design community of practice - Tue 25 Feb 12pm at Fed 5-04.

Co-operate show & tell - Wed 26 Feb 2pm at Angel Sq 8th floor red core breakout.

Data management show & tell - Thu 27 Feb 2.30pm at Angel Sq 13th floor breakout.

Membership show & tell - Fri 28 Feb 3pm at Fed 6 kitchen.

More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at  federation.events@coopdigital.co.uk. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s typing entity @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

11 Feb 2020: Why political software sucks. Writing for death. Remote working.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

OK, this one’s a bit of a linkorama.

Sustainability, data and AI in retail

Pandora, Zalando, IKEA, Amazon ramp up sustainability focus - how long until retail businesses must have a clear, strong sustainability position if they’re to avoid losing customers and revenue? - not long, believes this newsletter.

UK consumers warming to AI, with 54% happy to resolve queries with bots.

IKEA are promising new data controls for customers - that link might be behind a paywall so it’s explained here.

“In the future, all but the most convenience-based retailers will begin to use their stores as media to acquire customers and their media platforms as stores to transact sales. Put another way, media is now a cost of sales and rent is now a cost of customer acquisition.” - a retail opinion.

“Amazon Choice” labels look like an editorially curated quality filter but are just a popularity algorithm.

The impact of coronavirus on China-centered supply chains - now that China is responsible for around 15% of global manufacturing, the concerns for supply chains are real.

Why political software sucks

In the US, the Democratic party’s Iowa caucus votes were delayed by flaky software (and here’s how caucuses work). Some interesting commentaries on the underlying causes of unreliable software:

“The space is dominated by decision makers who are stuck on a very short term decision making cycle. Structurally there is no space for long term investment, despite everybody stating that this would be good [...] In normal tech circles we’d have a bunch of free software libraries and tools we build on together, but the campaign tech space doesn’t have this because decision makers fear our tools will be taken and used by the other side.”

“no one should have been solving the problem of making the caucuses more innovative. transparency & speed was what it sounds like the actual needs were, & those are often best served by rock-solid last-gen technology, optimized & tested to heck.”

“well-intentioned but underfunded and lacked comprehensive organizational buy-in [...] the product testing cycle and margins are nonexistent [...] a hard market where everyone hates you and no one has money to pay you”

Software is always harder than it first looks, even to fellow developers commenting online! The comments above recall Conway’s law (“organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations”). But here you might extend that slightly: the software you get reflects the organisations’ communications structures, but also the values and the incentives that commissioned it.

Writing for death, care promises

Designing content for people dealing with a death: “There’s no room for doubt or misunderstanding. That means the words we use must get straight to the point. By trying to be kind, we often use more words when we should be helping people to understand what they need to do as quickly and simply as possible.”

Scotland’s independent care review has published its comprehensive report on the care system, encompassing “legislation, practices, culture and ethos” - it’s ambitious and essential reading for those working in digital gov, but also those who care about humans.

Remote working

18F’s best practices for making distributed teams work (18F is a digital services agency within the US government). Perhaps there are some lessons here for organisations with many locations: tear down any head office vs shopfront barriers by going “remote first”.

There are now startups explicitly working on making remote staff work easier.

Help agriculture

Digitalfolk, could you help next-gen agriculture get more sustainable and more human-centred? Add your name here: Agriculture is a game-changer! Community of Practice.

Digital in organisations

Six digital strategy plays to drive value in established corporations - some of these plays are common sense (like cutting cost/time/process/error), but this is an interesting read, and it’s good to see some failures discussed as well.

How to scale agile product development and delivery - spoiler: not by imposing some framework.

Co-op Digital news and events

“‘We don’t want to just give people a refund when there’s a problem; we want to give them a genuine response and a personalised experience that they will remember.’ [says Claire Carroll, Head of Sales and Service at the Co-op.] The Co-op’s trailblazing approach has been a great success: customers actually buy more in its stores after making a complaint. ‘The basket spend is 6% higher’”

That’s from a shiny Salesforce customer success story - Co-op customer service advisors run 3m requests yearly through it. If customers are sending more after a complaint, that means Co-op is handling complaints - fixing the problem - in such a way that’s builds increased loyalty and confidence in the business. The industry term for this is “service recovery” (and that link is an interesting thread of how to win at ecommerce), but you might equally call it putting customers first. As exciting as the Salesforce bit is, this story is really about a Rescue Lasagne.

Public events, most of them at Federation House:

Carbon Co-op’s Beginner’s Guide To Retrofit (a monthly event about retrofitting your house for energy efficiency) - Wed 12 Feb 6pm at URBED, 10 Little Lever Street, Manchester, M1 1HR.

Manchester Law Tech Meetup - Thu 13 Feb 6.00pm.

Open Data Night - February 2020 - Tue 18 Feb 6.30pm.

Conscious Entrepreneurs - Wed 19 Feb 12pm.

Open Data Manchester: Black software (explores racial injustice & the professionals & hobbyists of color who helped build the internet) - Wed 18 Mar 6.30pm.

Returners/Re-trainers (about successful initiatives to create better routes for women returners/re-trainers) - Thu 26 Mar 11.30am

Internal events:

Digital all-hands - Wed 12 Feb 1pm at Fed Defiant.

Co-operate show & tell - Wed 12 Feb 3pm at Fed 6 co-operate space.

Data management show & tell - Thu 13 Feb 2.30pm at Angel Sq 13th floor breakout.

Membership show & tell - Fri 14 Feb 3pm at Fed 6 kitchen.

Food ecommerce show & tell - Mon 17 Feb 10.15am at Fed 5.

Delivery community of practice - Mon 17 Feb 1.30pm.

Health team show & tell - Tue 18 Feb 2.30pm at Fed 5 kitchen.

More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at  federation.events@coopdigital.co.uk. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s typing entity @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

24 Jan 2020: The evil list, privacy and face recognition. Microsoft and carbon: green cloud, black rain.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: not a Co-op!]

Supermarkets and online retail

Green: Asda trials refill points and bottle recycling in sustainability store.

Supermarkets cutting management jobs: Sainsbury’s will cut hundreds of jobs - “cost synergies” after the Argos acquisition. Morrisons will cut 3,000 managers, but says it will create 7,000 hourly-paid roles as part of a major restructuring.

Logistics: Fabric’s microfulfilment offer for online groceries is interesting because its pricing model is pay as you go, allowing supermarkets to try it out easily, and it can be “multi-tenant”, meaning that multiple retailers can be served from the same location. Logistics simulating cloud services - interesting! (Previously: Microfulfilment: compact distribution centres.)

Online: Shopify merchants made more than $900 million in sales to 9.3m shoppers on Black Friday. 69% of them were on mobile.

The evil list, privacy and face recognition

The Evil List: Which tech companies are doing the most harm? - a list of companies that do bad things. Most of the evil is about companies arming themselves or law enforcement with overly-powerful tools. Or companies performing surveillance, data collection and other harms to privacy. Or companies being pretty casual with their effects on wider society. So, as you’d expect, the very big Big Tech platforms are on there. But there isn’t much anti-competitive evil or climate change evil on that list, and perhaps it’s a surprise to see the US electric grid on it.

Anyway, they missed this one: the secretive company that might end privacy as we know it. This is about ClearView, a company that hoovered images of people off the internet and used them to make a big face recognition database, now used by various US law enforcement agencies.

Despite their claims it’s unlikely that the machine learning model is the unique thing here. There are many good models freely available already. The interesting thing is the data. It sounds as if they’ve ignored social networks’ acceptable use policies to grab images and related personal data. So that might be their unique thing.

Related: the Met Police is ready to use real-time facerec on London streets. And the EU is considering temporary ban on facerec in public.

Green cloud and black rain: Microsoft carbon negative by 2030

Microsoft says:

“By 2030 Microsoft will be carbon negative, and by 2050 Microsoft will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975.”

“We recognize that progress requires not just a bold goal but a detailed plan. As described below, we are launching today an aggressive program to cut our carbon emissions by more than half by 2030, both for our direct emissions and for our entire supply and value chain. We will fund this in part by expanding our internal carbon fee, in place since 2012 and increased last year, to start charging not only our direct emissions, but those from our supply and value chains.”

This is good news! It’s an ambitious target. They’re targeting scope 3 emissions, which are indirect emissions that come from a business’s other activities and (eg) the electricity customers may consume when using the product. Computing needs to become vastly lower carbon, so good, let’s get that done. It will also be a strong, positive signal to other cloud and computing services, good.

You knew there’d be a “but”. But Microsoft is lobbying and funding politicians who are climate change deniers, which seems counter-productive.

The more important but is that Microsoft are still courting business from oil companies. Loads of green machine learning running on a green cloud working energetically to help oilcos get more oil out of the ground… will increase emissions. Not so good. (The other big cloud cos Amazon and Google are also doing this - see previously: Every cloud needs a green lining.)

“Charging not only our direct emissions, but those from our supply and value chains” could start to address that problem if it is directed to MS’s customers as well as to its suppliers. (You might call that scope 4 emissions - how would it work? Maybe, refusing to supply the customer because their carbon footprint is large. Or charging them more to fund your own carbon capturing activities. Or charging customers with small carbon footprints less.) 

Yet it would still be better if we found ways to not have those emissions in the first place, by keeping the oil in the ground.

Elsewhere: Sweden flights are down 4% and 9% domestically - suggesting that flight-shaming has an effect and that purpose-driven change can be driven by people as well as by legislation and suppliers.

Other news

Amazon picks Manchester over London for new UK corporate office.

Where are our affordable houses and how do councils keep track of them?

Tik-Tok “feels like a richer description of humanity than Twitter or Instagram. It’s bored people at work or school or at home – I don’t know if the social media policies of all the large companies hasn’t caught up yet, or if they don’t care. Tesco and McDonalds seem to do pretty well out of it in the UK.”

“knowing what I know now, if I were starting my company today, I would bet less on Slack for our main mechanism of internal communication and more on email.” and “If you're a confident voice, it can feel like the public square is open to everyone equally. But having equal access to the text box does not mean that people feel equal access to use it. Slack can amplify the loudest voices + make it even harder for quieter ones to show up.”

“A young Fife resident received weekly health and social payments of £59,395 instead of £59.95 after an extra digit was accidentally added to a Fife Council spreadsheet” - spreadsheets are very “accessible” but they aren’t great systems of record. However this story could have been “...after the operational checks and balances weren’t correctly performed”.

Neat envelope thing that hobbles your mobile so you don’t use it too much - you could also pop your mobile in an envelope and post it to yourself as you leave the office on Friday night.

Co-op Digital news and events

What happens to surplus food from your local Co-op?

Colleague weeknote: Nate Langley, Principal Designer in the Digital group.

Public events, most of them at Federation House:

Northern Azure Group - Tue 28 Jan 6pm.

Doing Tech for Good: How can we build an active movement in Manchester? - Wed 29 Jan 6.30pm.

Open:Data:Surgery - Fri 31 Jan 2pm.

Free Code Camp - Mon 3 Feb 6pm.

An Introduction to Data Ethics and the Data Ethics Canvas - Fri 7 Feb 9.00am.

Mind the Product - MTP Engage - Fri 7 Feb.

Internal events:

Delivery community of practice - Mon 27 Jan 1.30pm at Fed house.

Co-operate show & tell - Wed 29 Jan 3pm at Fed 6 co-operate space.

Data management show & tell - Thu 30 Jan 2.30pm at Angel Sq 13th floor breakout.

Membership show & tell - Fri 31 Jan 3pm at Fed 6 kitchen.

More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at  federation.events@coopdigital.co.uk. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s typing entity @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

14 Jan 2020: Hello 2020. Takeaway buys Just Eat. Hiring misfits and weirdos.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

Hello 2020

Tesco's sales fall in challenging market. John Lewis could ditch its annual bonus for first time in 67 years. Next is doing well thanks to strong online and click-and-collect sales (or cold weather in November). Boots profit drop. Greggs sharing profit with staff. More Christmas retail winners and losers.

Retail is changing a lot as online shopping takes more market share, shopping habits change, and as high streets gradually reconfigure. There’s a sense that the middle ground (average products and services, average locations) is disappearing: products and services that rely on shoppers having poor information about price or product complexity are struggling because the internet is really good at ironing out information asymmetries like that. Product and services have to become clearer, more distinct.

Takeaway.com buys Just Eat

Dutch meal delivery co Takeaway.com is buying Just Eat for about £6 billion. It says the combined company will handle more orders than rivals Uber Eats, GrubHub and Delivery Hero, and will be second only to China’s Meituan. (Why does delivered prepared-food matter? 66% of shoppers buy prepared food items from a retail location at least three times a month.)

Elsewhere: supermarket Carrefour is buying Dejbox, whose thing is delivering lunches to office workers.

Cummings: “I don’t really know what I’m looking for”

A blog post written by the Prime Minister’s senior advisor says there are “some profound problems at the core of how the British state makes decisions” and calls for weirdos and misfits to apply for jobs. The civil service does need modernising. The landscape (digital, Brexit, ageing population, climate change etc) will need us to reset and re-make many things. So, leaving aside your political affiliations, problems at the core is reasonably correct. 

However the post also feels a bit... technophilic, thrashy, a bit internet copy-paste-y, a bit performatively clever. It’s clear that Cummings and team are smart, that they admire parts of tech startup culture (it would have been interesting if Downing Street were saying things like this when GDS started.) But it’s not so clear that they understand how institutions and culture are (re)formed, and how people are central to it all. It looks like the general approach might be to tear everything down and rebuild. Possibly including the people they hire: “I’ll bin you within weeks if you don’t fit — don’t complain later because I made it clear now.” So the 2022 confessionals of ex-employees should be interesting.

Some interesting commentary about DC’s post, all of these smart and worth a read: 

Dominic Cummings, government transformation and digital twins, by Jeni Tennison.

Inside the Clubcard Panopticon: Why Dominic Cummings’ Seeing Room might not see all that much, by Rachel Coldicutt.

The coming storm, by Paul Clarke.

Could the Cummings nerd army fix broken Britain?, by Tom Chivers.

Scale: saving time with faster logins

GOV.UK: £40 million investment to reduce NHS staff login times: 

“The investment will support projects similar to that seen at Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool, which implemented single sign-on technology and reduced time spent logging into multiple computer systems from 1 minute 45 seconds to just 10 seconds. With almost 5,000 logins a day, it saved over 130 hours of staff time and freed up their time to focus on patient care”

That’s 130 staff hours saved every day, in one hospital. Small improvements at scale can have big outcomes (when the Co-op introduced SmartGap to help shelf re-stocking in stores, it saved 15 minutes per store daily, which adds up to 27 years and 5,000 trees saved every year).

What if mobile phone hackers sold you good customer service?

“SIM swaps” are when a hacker calls your mobile phone company, persuades them that they’re you with some of your personal information, and then has the mobile phone co point your mobile number at a new SIM card. The hacker now receives your calls and text messages and all of the one-time passwords used in two factor authentication and “forgot password” features etc. (The usual way to protect yourself from this is to put a PIN on your mobile phone account.) But:

SIM swappers are escalating. Hackers now reaching directly into AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint systems to perform SIM swaps themselves. Seen screenshots of this in action with T-Mobile and AT&T; Sprint confirmed issue.

That raises the interesting prospect of hackers adding parallel business lines. If a hacker has access to a mobile phone company’s account and customer support systems, would you pay them a reasonable fee to get faster and higher quality customer support on your mobile phone account? (And if they were offering that, would you also buy their “we promise no hacking” insurance policy?)

Predictions: “A library of mouth feels”

It’s the season of predictions for the year and the decade. Food in 2050: bacon grown on blades of grass and bioreactor chicken nuggets. Mmm, if “we can make a library of mouth feels and texture at a nanoscale”... why don’t we just grow the food inside the mouth, or in the gut? (newsletter handwaves wildly)

Also: “I am getting worried that I was perhaps too optimistic” - self-driving cars and AI predictions (a scorecard after 2 years). And a good read from Exponential View: Preparing for 2030.

Other news

Travelex was hit by ransomware at the end of 2019, locking up some systems and data. Two weeks later, they’re still using pen and paper. 

Global 5G wireless deal threatens weather forecasts. Great timing: not a great decade to be guessing what the weather’s going to be.

"Karie wants to get rid of the analytics people because she refuses to listen to polling - which she says is all slanted and biased - even though it's just been proven to be horrifically accurate" - is the Labour Party planning to bin its data analytics team? 

Here’s some hiring very un-best practice. Newsletter advice: pay interns rather than ask them to pay you! And don’t use interviews to get code for free!

Oh dear, it is 20 years since Y2K (!) and it turns out that some of the “fixes” back then merely delayed the problem.

Co-op and news and events

Progress: Own brand to be fully recyclable by the Summer – Colleague stories.

Public events, most of them at Federation House:

Profit, purpose and responsible tech - Tue 14 Jan 6pm.

Manchester WordPress user group - Wed 15 Jan 6.30pm.

Map Club Manchester - Thu 23 Jan 2020 5.30pm.

Doing Tech for Good: How can we build an active movement in Manchester? - Wed 29 Jan 6.30pm.

An Introduction to Data Ethics and the Data Ethics Canvas - Fri 7 Feb 9.00am.

Mind the Product - MTP Engage - Fri 7 Feb.

Internal events:

Engineering community of practice - Wed 15 Jan 1pm at Fed Defiant.

Co-operate show & tell - Wed 15 Jan 3pm at Fed 6 co-operate space.

Data management show & tell - Thu 16 Jan 2.30pm at Angel Sq 13th floor breakout.

Membership show & tell - Fri 17 Jan 3pm at Fed 6 kitchen.

Food ecommerce show & tell - Mon 20 Jan 10.15am at Fed 5.

Delivery community of practice - Mon 20 Jan 1.30pm at Fed house.

Health team show & tell - Tue 21 Jan 2.30pm at Fed 5 kitchen.

Targeted Marketing (CRM) and Data Ecosystem show & tell  - Wed 22 Jan 3pm at Angel Sq 13th floor breakout.

Membership show & tell - Fri 24 Jan 3pm at Fed 6 kitchen.

More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at  federation.events@coopdigital.co.uk. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s typing entity @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

13 Dec 2019: Delivery failure. Health surveillance. Every cloud needs a green lining.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Amazon having a dig at all of those old mainframes cluttering up back offices like unwanted furniture. From this talk.]

Election

There was a general election in the UK. The “indecent, dishonest and untruthful” social media campaigns continued the work of fracturing truth in the political domain, and perhaps fracturing nations will follow. Steady yourselves. Onwards.

Delivery failure 

Failed deliveries cost the UK delivery industry £1.6bn in 2018. You could add on a chunk again for costs to others: additional/slower traffic, wasted time, emissions, etc. In the US, 15% of “first attempt” deliveries fail in some cities. This suggests lots of problems for cities as package delivery grows and with it the number of repeated delivery attempts [1]. The underlying cause: it’s hard to co-ordinate the delivery arriving at a location while the recipient is there. People are out at work, or have popped to the shops.

The obvious way to fix this is to get much better at predicting and planning shorter delivery windows, and loads of delivery companies are working on this problem. Another way might be to deliver to where the recipient is definitely going to be: to be able to change where a package is delivered while it is in transit. This approach seems neat because it would make packages behave more like internet packets, but it seems complex. 

Perhaps the easiest thing would be to make it easier for delivery to be “asynchronous” with lockers, home lockers, delivery to local points. There are Amazon lockers in shops and petrol stations these days, and some delivery handling companies have their own outlets. But where is the home locker? - a letterbox for the Amazon age, a secure delivery point that only you and the delivery staff have access to.

[1] If New York had the same failure rate and it has 1.5m deliveries a day, then 225,000 journeys might be unnecessary. UK package deliveries are actually down year on year in November, but intuitively the longer-term trend seems safely up thanks to internet shopping.

Health surveillance

All children to receive whole genome sequencing at birth - an announcement by Health Secretary shortly before the election. It is easy to see the benefits: accumulating data that would help future treatments. Perhaps it is harder to see the drawbacks: the privacy concerns, security, insurability, the wider effects on society, implementation risks, and so on (what happens when a government department has so much visibility into, well, you?). On balance you’d say it is not such a good idea.

Related: “Apparently it needs to be said: Compelling children to exercise by holding the lives of other kids over their heads is magnificently problematic”.

Every cloud needs a green lining

Who has the greenest cloud? (TLDR: Google is probably greener than Microsoft which is probably greener than Amazon AWS.) They all buy Renewable Energy Certificates which are certificates than entitle you to claim the “benefit” of renewably generated electricity in the same way that carbon offsetting lets you claim the benefit of some sequestered carbon.

However! All three of these cloud services sell to the oil and gas industry, so their carbon-zero platforms help others create more carbon and other emissions: Oil is the new data. Needed: a more expensive but provably ethical, sustainable and (if it isn’t oxymoronic) transparent cloud? Or cloud companies shouldn’t just offset the carbon creation that cloud platforms take to run - they should also offset the carbon that their platforms enable.

More microfulfilment

One trend in logistics is moving distribution centres closer to the customer, which means smaller centres (and often with clever automation) because customers live in densely populated towns and cities. 

Ocado’s new mini fulfilment centres in Bristol is 14,000 m2, can handle 30,000 orders a week, and took 13 months to build out. (For comparison, last week: TakeOff’s microfulfilment centres are smaller at 930 m2, handle unknown number of orders weekly, and can be built out in 3 months.)

More on planning technology

“Leadership that relies on a predetermined plan, or fixed outputs, simply will not deliver. We need leaders who will openly embark on a journey without knowing where it will end". This is true, and why approaches that embrace discovery are doing well.

(Related: TSB bank’s IT failures and corporate fiction.)

Other news

HSBC is launching “no fixed address” bank accounts to help the homeless get back on their feet. 

The Competition and Markets Authority has asked Amazon to address competition concerns if its investment in Deliveroo proceeds.

As a result of increasing earth wind speeds, the average wind turbine generated roughly 17% more electricity in 2017 than it did in 2010.

Amazon releases logistics AI benchmarks - interesting.

Co-op Digital news and events

Testing and accessibility: Co-op Insurance: Usability testing with people who are visually impaired and What we considered before researching with people who are visually impaired.

Public events, most of them at Federation House:

Global AI Bootcamp - Manchester - Sat 14 Dec 8am.

Free code camp - Mon 16 Dec 6pm.

Map club Manchester - Wed 18 Dec 6pm.

Manchester Wordpress user group - Wed 18 Dec 6.30pm.

Mind the Product - MTP Engage - Fri 7 Feb 2020 - you can get early bird tickets now.

Internal events:

Delivery community of practice - Mon 16 Dec 1.30pm at Fed house.

Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 17 Dec 1pm at Angel Sq 12th floor

Engineering community of practice - Wed 18 Dec 1pm at Fed Defiant.

Co-operate show & tell - Wed 18 Dec 3pm at Fed 6 co-operate space.

Data management show & tell - Thu 19 Dec 2.30pm at Angel Sq 13th floor breakout.

Membership show & tell - Fri 20 Dec 3pm at Fed 6 kitchen.

More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at  federation.events@coopdigital.co.uk. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West. 

Thank you for reading

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