Blog by Paul Golding

I thought that I'd just give a summary post of what I've been up to and thinking of late in my many wireless wanders.

As many of my associates know, I spend a lot of time consulting at O2. I'm now responsible for platform strategy. I was already playing a "tech push" role, evangelizing various Web and start-up methods into the enterprise as a catalyst for new types of thinking and innovation. This is how I founded the O2 Incubator. I can report that the winning teams and ideas, which I hope to share with Debi Jones on the new Telefonica Developer blog, are showing exceptional promise. The "incubator experiment" appears to be working. One idea is in the area of business events aggregation and the other is in sentiment analysis of UGC sources. The teams are fantastic and I really get a buzz out of watching them develop their ideas.

(p.s. for those of you interested in working in the O2 Platform team - tech visionaries with the ability to still think in code when necessary - I'm looking for a couple of "platform ninjas" to join the team.)

As for platform strategy, my focus is mostly on trying to put the right ingredients in place to enable open innovation. This isn't just about NaaS and APIs. There are many ways to think about platforms. The issue is trying to get the telco mindset to adopt a different method of working where the final result of a project isn't known in advance, unlike most projects in a mature operating environment. In this sense, much of the education and evangelizing internally is about trying to encourage "start-up" thinking.

We successfully used start-up-think with the #Blue project, a new take on the existing (poor) Bluebook service. It was an experiment in pursuing various "Lean start-up" and Web-venture methods, that I won't elaborate here, but which proved to be very useful. The project will continue into a live service beyond the current prototype. There are some very exciting developments in the pipeline, many of them radically different to the telco "business as usual" approach.

I am on the fifth chapter of my new book (working title "Connected Services.") I'm currently writing a chapter about the "Big Data" developments on the Web. It's a wide set of technologies dealing with data sets big enough to require distributed storage and processing. This rapidly leads to the exciting area of schema-less storage solutions, like Hadoop, MongoDB and Cassandra. These are all interesting, but I'm much more interested in the "meaning of data" - analysis, statistics, regression, prediction etc.

I like what Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, said in the Jan 2009 McKinsey Quarterly:

“The *sexy job* in the next ten years will be statisticians… The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill.”

I got excited because my wife has a statistics degree and I spent most of my early career working with signal processing, pattern analysis, even neural networks. Perhaps a new career as a "Big Data Guru" is in order. At least I know many of the tools for "thinking" about data. (That said, when I read my 1997 paper about Fuzzy Clustering recently, fuzzy is what it was - I couldn't think how I'd ever written it!)

Ultimately, the analysis of data is where the action is ultimately going to be. Big Data is really about getting value from the processing of unthinkably huge amounts of data. For some interesting provocations, I suggest reading the book Super Crunchers.

By the way, I recommend the Kumon maths system for those of you with kids. It's not about stats, but about really getting to grip with mathematics and numbers, based on encouraging independent learning.

And talking of kids learning, some of you will know that I have had various attempts at teaching my own kids computing and programming. I still like the approach of tools like Alice and Scratch. However, the bridge between these and a "grown up" system is very large. Also, I really want something that works on mobiles.

UPDATE [14-July-2010] - Google has the App Inventor, which actually uses the same graphic UI framework as Scratch.

What I'm really excited about is producing my own programming environment. It's merely a thought-experiment at the moment, called Spawn. The essence of the idea is to create a new programming model that is inherently distributed from the start and can run on desk, embedded or mobile platforms. The model is heavily influenced by the idea of modelling processes as organisms. The default UI paradigm being considered is also "virtual/augmented reality." I've written many times before about how inappropriate I find current UI paradigms are for teaching kids about computers - they don't really know of the history of disks, folders, icons, threads and all that stuff. In this regard, this is the genius of the iPad - it's lke a computer without being a computer.

Spawn might sound a bit grand, but the kernel of the idea - and the objective - is very simple: to allow kids to program immediately and to learn through doing, progressing in the same way a child does with reading. I recently met with a programming guru from the Telefonica R&D lab in Barcelona, who had similar ideas. I suggested we just go build it! I'd be interested to hear other views on the topic of making programming accessible to kids.