Blog | Archive for July, 2008
WorkTech North
By Charles Armstrong | Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
The Lowry, Salford Quays, Greater Manchester
WorkTech08 North brings together some of the biggest and brightest names in workplace and technology to debate, discuss and divulge the latest thinking on the future of workplace and technology. This year’s theme is Creative Places, New Media, Future of Work. Leading global speakers will come together to offer a unique insight into case studies of innovation and visions of the future. Philip Ross, CEO of Cordless Group, and Charles Armstrong, CEO of Trampoline Systems, will discuss The Connected Enterprise. The session looks at technology trends that empower employees to connect, collaborate and innovate; and examines ways of strengthening informal employee networks across departments and geographies.
Learn more here.
Posted in Events | No Comments »
From Ego to Ergo: Using Influence in Design
By mike | Friday, July 11th, 2008
My presentation at SkillSwap seemed to go down well and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I’ve posted the slides to SlideShare but a few of the screenshots have been mangled and the embedded version here only shows about half of what it’s supposed to. The good folk at SlideShare are investigating, apparently. There will be audio at some point too, I’m told.
A few people asked for the links I listed at the end so here they are in full:
- Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
- The Hardest Working Presidential Candidate Logo
- The Werther Effect
- Copycat suicide
- Social Proof: Herd it Through the Grapevine
- Fundamental human needs
- Shafted: 41 hours in an elevator
- The Tao of Twitter
- Ego psychology
- The Usability of Urinals
- Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics
- You’re Kidding Yourself If You Think Those Things Don’t Matter
- The Wheres and Whens of Users’ Expectations
- Eyetracking Study, June 2005 (PDF)
- Cues, The Golden Retriever
- Evolution of a Header
- What Dictionaries and Optical Illusions Say About Our Brains
- The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
- Dunbar’s number
- The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes
Tags: brighton, history, presentation, psychology, skillswap, ui, user experience, ux
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Skillswap Brighton
By mike | Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
I have the pleasure of speaking at Skillswap in Brighton tomorrow evening. It’s a long-running, grass-roots, community event that has hosted a large collection of my favourite speakers so I’m very excited! My talk is called “From Ego to Ergo: Using Influence in Design” and will be a loose ramble through a whole bunch of my favourite mind-related trivia, facts and effects.I was turned on to “influence” by some online marketing friends; few in design circles seem to be aware of it even though they use aspects of it daily. I hope people enjoy it…Posted in Events | No Comments »
Celebrate the differences
By Charles Armstrong | Friday, July 4th, 2008
Charles Armstrong, CEO of Trampoline Systems, discusses entrepreneurship in the UK and Silicon Valley.
Posted in Media | No Comments »
It’s not just who you know…
By peter | Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
We’ve been discussing the issue highlighted by this posting internally. I think that the question boils down to this:Do people currently feel so proprietary about their professional connections that they feel their connections must remain confidential to remain professionally competitive?
In the fairly recent past some have certainly felt this way, but the interent is radically changing that. Search, social networks and the massive increase of data available online to anyone makes it much easier to find people and things. This is causing our understanding and appreciation of relationships to change back to the way things were much longer ago…
It’s 1500, somewhere in Europe. Everyone in town knows the blacksmith; so what? The interesting questions were much more complex and contextual – eg who would the blacksmith let slide on payments? Who does the blacksmith socialize with? Is the farrier in town profesionally cooperative with the blacksmith, or is she a competitor?
Preserving knowledge of the existence of nodes in a social network as if they are proprietary IP and must remain obfuscated is an “old school” modern business behavior. It implies that the node on the other end would be happy to deal in the same manner with anyone, and as such it devalues the relationship to such a great extent that you have to wonder if there’s a relationship there at all.
Economies based on this kind of artificial scarcity are excessively vulnerable in a modern age of search and the internet.
Back when I ran a paintball field, and long before the interwebz had search, I found a source for the smoke grenades that most of us sold at our fields in WA state. It was hard to find this guy; he was in the Midwest somewhere and it took about 3 or 4 people hops and lots of phone chatting to get to him.
Once I did find him I was able to buy the grenades in fairly small numbers – say a case at a time – and sell them at a significant mark-up while still under-cutting my local competition. In essence I became a regional distributor. It was a good deal for me and for the other guy.
However he owed me nothing and he just wanted to move product, and so ANYONE who found him could get the same deal I got. Eventually someone did, which cut my regional advantage down to nothing. I still got a good price, but ultimately what happened was the regional price re-set so that we all got close to the same markup of a buck or so a grenade.
These days, that kind of advantage is tremendously fleeting. What matters is relationships themselves, and how they are nurtured over time. If just know who I talk to makes you directly competitive with me, then I am not doing my job.
I understand that sales relationships can be different animals than other kinds of relationships, and that sales people can feel very proprietary about their network. Inside Trampoline we’ve been very fortunate in that Adrian and the rest of the sales team treat our sales relationships as long-term investments which aren’t prone to being under-mined by other people simply knowing about them.
This happens to align nicely with our overall view of relationships – it’s not only who you know but also how you know them that matters.
Posted in Organisations & Technology | 3 Comments »
removing global fixtures for ruby tests
By mccraig | Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
global fixtures are evil, but we’ve got a bunch of unit tests depending on them, so we still need them aroundhere’s a neat [and generally fast, though a degenerate O(#tables^2) case is possible] way of deleting all fixtures without invoking db dependent ways of ignoring foreign-key constraints, and without loading all the objects into memory :
classes = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.tables.map {|t|
t.singularize.camelize.constantize rescue nil
}.compact.reject{|cls| !cls.ancestors.include?(ActiveRecord::Base)}
while classes.size > 0
classes = classes.select{|c|
begin
c.delete_all
false
rescue
true
end
}.reverse!
end
Posted in Coding | 1 Comment »