Jiva Technology

Hubris in the Valley

kevin — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:38:20 +0000

Is the tech industry getting too big for it’s boots? I’ve always been proud of the fact that I was part of an industry that was, on the whole, a force for good in society and whose members were pretty good corporate citizens. Most of the techies I know are pretty down to earth and the dominant worldview seems to be a neat blend of anti-estblishment, pro-education with a vaguely hippy twist.

It is possible, however, that my views are out of date. You can’t avoid the fact that there’s been a stream of news from the Google, Apple, Amazon mega-plexes, that border on the arrogant and anti civil society. Since when did we feel the need to hire an army of lobbyists to avoid paying sales tax? Since when did we feel the need to hire an army of lawyers and accountants to set up complex structures to avoid paying corporation tax? And since when did we feel it our place to lecture elected Government officials on what taxes we were prepared to pay or what immigration policy should look like?

In February 2000, I gave a speech at the Reform Club outlining how I though the industry had lost it’s way because stock option plans had become more important than great engineering. A month latter, we got our come-uppance. I can’t help but feel that 13 years later, we have again forgotten what the industry is all about: great ideas, skilful engineering and a commitment to product excellence.

Good luck to Bristol Academy in the FA Cup Final

kevin — Sat, 25 May 2013 10:00:08 +0000

Good luck to the ladies of Bristol Academy in the FA Cup final tomorrow. Here’s hoping they can put one over Arsenal ladies. I’m sure the Barmy Smurf Army will be in good voice no matter what…

Hanzo Archives are hiring

kevin — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:04:58 +0000

Our friends over at Hanzo Archives are looking for crawl engineers. If you’ve got Python & Javascript experience and solid unix/linux skills, take a look here.

We need more people like Janet Downs

kevin — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:00:15 +0000

Education Secretary Michael Gove could probably do without Janet Downs, a retired teacher. When Gove recently claimed that one in five teenagers thought Winston Churchill was fictional, she used a freedom of information request to find out where Gove got his facts from. The result? He got his ‘facts’ from a survey by UKTV Gold. Not the most reliable of sources for an Education Minister to cite. We’ll see you after school Mr Gove …

A history of the world in one statistical graph

kevin — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:19:44 +0000

When people say Maths is boring or it has little or no application if you aren’t an engineer or a ‘geek’, then I like to point to applications like this from Gapminder:

In a single, beautiful chart, it shows how the countries of the world have developed in both health and wealth over the last 200 plus years. It shows how different countries have advanced at different rates, over what time periods and for me, what happens as wars break out and peace is achieved; how communism affected the life of ordinary Russians and how life expectancy in China has radically improved in the last 50 years. It’s a whole history course in one chart. It shows why everyone who leaves school should understand statistics to beyond a basic level of probability and why maths is the language of the natural world.

How happy are our children?

kevin — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:04:44 +0000

UNICEF are about to launch a follow up to their 2007 report that rated children in the UK as the unhappiest in the world’s rich economies. Their follow up report for 2013 has been completed and the good news is that the UK is now comfortably mid-table. The Netherlands and Nordic countries continue to top the table. The report covers a fairly broad spectrum of issues related to the well-being of children, including issues related to obesity, education and to alcohol / substance abuse, but the key reason why the UK continues to struggle (mid-table can never be considered acceptable) relates to education. The UNICEF Report rates the UK poorly for the quality of general education provision, particularly the number moving on into further education.

It’s yet more evidence to suggest that we need to innovate and think differently about how we provide education.

WebRTC comes to Tutorhub

kevin — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:06:59 +0000

From day one, Jiva Technology has been both a real time and an open standards house. There are times when that felt like we were swimming in front of a wave, not on the crest of it, but just the same, it always felt like the right thing to do. Sometimes, “doing it right” is more important than “doing it quick”. For Tutorhub users on the Chrome browser, we’ve just switched to webRTC to support the audio component of our online classroom and it’s a great example both of the power of open standards (it’s a big improvement for our customers, out of the box) and how the big guys can help the rest of the industry by investing in open standards to the benefit of all. Google put a lot of muscle and support behind webRTC, so thanks Google, keep up the good work. It also shows why everyone in the industry should be supporting initiatives like this …. Apple.

Lazy maths from the Head Teacher

kevin — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:05:47 +0000

I see that in a recent speech on immigration, the Prime Minister got himself into trouble with what can only be described as a rather lazy approach to Maths. It could also be described as a self-serving attempt to manipulate the numbers to support a blatantly incorrect view and it’s the reason why we should all be proficient in understanding and manipulating numbers aka Maths. In the speech, it was noted by the PM that in a four year period from 2007, social lettings (government funded housing) provided to immigrants had gone up by 40%. Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Well, it does until you realised that it was an increase from 6.5% to 9% of such lettings. Suddenly, it doesn’t look so bad. Add in the fact that 2m people have arrived on these shores in the last ten years or so and the sums look even less extreme.

It only goes to show that equipping everyone with the basic ability to understand the manipulation of numbers should be a basic building block of democracy. Because if not, those in the know have enormous power over those who don’t ….

The UK is actually a great place for startups

kevin — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:43:40 +0000

Amongst all the doom and gloom surrounding the economy at the moment, it’s easy to forget that the UK is a pretty great place for tech startups. We have a big skills base in all sorts of technologies, we have first class academic institutions and we have a tax system that encourages crucial angel investment, via the EIS and SEIS (even better). The tax system acknowledges the superhuman efforts required by entrepreneurs to make a business work by offering specific tax relief on gains once a business is sold (entrepreneurs relief). The latest budget has even made small steps to reduce the burden of NIC’s for small business. I’d like this to go further, perhaps by introducing a NIC holiday for a limited period of time, but I suppose with current Government finances, we can’t have everything.

All we need now are a few more ‘poster child’ success stories to encourage entrepreneurs to push harder and faster. I suspect that with a nearly 50% increase in EIS scheme applications in the last year, we may soon get one.

Why do we tell our children about the jobs we do and not the jobs they will do?

kevin — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:01:00 +0000

Last night I was at a jobs fair with my daughter at her school. When I looked around the room, it was full of the usual suspects: police, armed forces, teaching, retail management, medicine, architects etc. There was only one engineering company and they specialised in naval architecture. Now I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with any of these as careers, but where was the stand talking about careers that might be? It was hardly a coincidence that most people looked fairly bored – there was very little to set the imagination on fire. That’s a shame, because the generation currently at school are most likely to see some monumental changes to both work and society. It’s the generation that will face the full consequences of environmental change (good time to become a dyke engineer), who will see a decline in the number of lawyers (increased automation), the expansion of robotics (low paid care jobs automated), gene based medicine (good reason to be a medical device engineer) and the advent of driverless cars and planes (drones). Many of these things could happen sooner than you think*. Driverless cars would decrease accidents, reduce fuel requirements (good for the environment) and reduce the need to build more roads. That’s a pretty long list of benefits, but if you drive a taxi or a delivery lorry, it’s not such good news.

* the State of Nevada already permits driverless cars and issued the first license in May 2012.