Day 5 Thursday 27th September – Boards, Secret Clubs and a Single Malt Ecosystem Service
by Guy Poppy
In order to maintain the energy of the group, today involved a diverse range of activities, including meeting with our Malawian Advisory Board. Prior to this, Felix and Miro presented work on Tipping points and how we could incorporate this important topic into the ASSETS project. This very serious topic cannot help but bring humour as the team felt the tipping point of productivity was being reached through our long and daily meetings â time for a different afternoon strategy. In serious terms, the project has a real opportunity to link the social and ecological concepts around tipping points, which should have a significant impact on the whole conceptual basis of this area. Hopefully this can be achieved in a similar way that Kate Rayworth from Oxfam has linked social foundation needs into Rockstrom et al ideas on planetary boundaries.
The meeting with the board, well the two which we were able to attend on this occasion, was very useful and I feel important in ensuring wider impact of our work. The board members were very well placed to help us develop our Theory of Change and should be able to help with the communication and dissemination in Malawi.  It was the first time I had been called a Village Headman, as Sosten introduced me as the project leader to his VC – the Chief! The CEO of the energy company outlined how the lack of reliable electricity coupled with reluctance to change in behavior, resulted in people continuing to use firewood to cook, even though itâs more expensive and far more damaging to the environment. This practice in turn affects the reliability of electricity from the dams, due to changes in water flow caused by deforestation. Thus, the vicious circle and wicked problem continues⊠It will be important to see how our research may help, in any way, address this issue, but it highlights the importance of attitude and human behavior. Towards the end of the meeting, he was called to say Zomba and lost half its power and thus the reliability issue came to the fore once again!
During the afternoon, the social scientists worked as a group to generate timelines for their work â the project was finally in full flow, and the natural scientists identified data sources and a road ahead for the modeling work. This included discovering about the secret club who own certain forests where they obtain spiritual and cultural services. Some have tried infiltrating these clubs to find more about them, but getting the data might be tricky â we volunteered Simon to join, but perhaps he would be better employed in Southampton. The key now was to steer these groups forward whilst keeping the cross-talk successfully developed so far in the ASSETS project. After a highly productive few hours, we retreated to the market for some relaxation time.
The market was not as full-on as I was expecting, but that was nice considering this was a relaxation part of the week. The eclectic mix of ware on show was stimulating to all of your senses and I bought some gifts for my family. The evening was completed by a lovely team meal at Dominoes restaurant, which is owned by Clement â head of Forestry. We shared the ecosystem services prize of Single Malt whisky which I won last year from ESPA in producing the best explanation of why ecosystem services are important for a London taxi driver. I cannot recall exactly what I said now but it was something about the food, water, energy and health you currently have are due to ecosystem services â if we continue to use them like we are, we will need to colonize a new planet. Thus, we have the choice of either discovering how to get to another livable planet or be more sustainable and manage our ecosystem services better.
Day 4 Wednesday 26th September- Three steps forward and two back and TV coverage
by Guy Poppy
Today was always going to be a tough day in many ways. Some important decisions crucial for the successful delivery of the 4 year project needed to be made and some of us were going to be interviewed for a 25 minute Environmental TV documentary covering our project on Malawian TV. If I did not think the day was going to be long and challenging, I was reminded of that by the reappearance of the giant spider in my shower â even I found this one too big to remove and thus decided to shower whenever they were not on the wall by the shampoo bottle.
The morning was spent wrestling with the study site selection and the usual discussions relating to the best design for the ecosystem services, the PRA and household surveys and finally, and not to be ignored, the ability of working at the sites chosen. The team is so full of talented people, all of whom are respectful of one anotherâs opinions, and because of this the morning became a stimulating and creative task rather than a challenge. We decided to run a transect form west Zomba (Chingale), through a transition /frontier zone on the forested plateau and then continuing on towards Lake Chilwar. This method captures different distances from the large forested plateau, important providers of ecosystem services and the Lake Chilwa area which is so affected by actions taken on the plateau, yet provides other key services form the lake.
This lake has dried up in the recent past, and is likely to dry out again if further land use change, including further deforestation, and climate change occur. As the population of Malawi has increased significantly in the past decade, the consequence of the lake drying out would be severe and affect many people. I hope that the knowledge from our project will help to improve the management of the Zomba plateau and surrounding valleys to stop this from happening or to better manage the recovery from such an environmental shock beyond a tipping point.
The day concluded with some of the team being interviewed for a Malawian Environmental Programme shown three times a week and at a 9pm prime time slot. It was a pleasant surprise, and yet another challenge, to have so much time to discuss our project on television and not offer our 25 minutes of interview for a 30 second sound-bite. Sosten, Nyovani, Carolina and myself worked hard to explain why our project was important and what we will do with our findings. I hope we managed to rise to this challenge and you can be the judge when we hopefully post the progrmmae on youtube and on our ASSETS website http://espa-assets.org/. Seeing my colleagues in action in front of the TV crew reassured me for the second time today that the ASSETS team is really special and I am honored to be leading the team to address such a globally important and worthwhile issue.
Creative Digifest #SXSC2 Speaker Profile: Andrew Keen
October 3, 2012
by Lisa Harris
Andrew Keen is an Internet entrepreneur who founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a popular first generation Internet company. He is currently the host of âKeen Onâ show, the popular Techcrunch chat show, a columnist for CNN and a regular commentator for many other newspapers, radio and television networks around the world. He is also an acclaimed speaker, regularly addressing the impact of digital technologies on 21st century business, education and society. He is the author of the international hit âCULT OF THE AMATEUR: How The Internet Is Killing Our Cultureâ which has been published in 17 different languages and âDIGITAL VERTIGO: How Todayâs Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing and Disorienting Usâ, his controversial critique of contemporary social media.
How are digital technologies transforming our lives?
Digital technologies are turning us into networking addicts, incapable of spending time alone, uncomfortable with self-reflection, dependent on how others see us. Digital technologies are creating a shadow over our lives. They are creating a society dominated by voyeurism and surveillance. It’s a world that Alfred Hitchcock could have created. I call it Digital Vertigo.
What can the latest technologies do for you?
The latest technologies can isolate you, undermine your human relationships, feed your narcissism and turn you into a corpse. A better question to ask is what we do for the latest technologies. And the answer to that is to humanise them by creating a network in which data degenerates, a network that has learnt how to forget.
If youâre not online, are you out of the game?
Out of the game? Life isn’t a game, even if digital gamers want to turn it into one. Unfortunately, however, only the very rich and very poor can afford to be offline. For the rest of us, then, existing on the digital network is the dominate reality  of the 21st century. As the fictional Sean Parker said in the movie The Social Network: “first we lived in villages, then in cities and now on the Internet.”
Day 3 Tuesday 25th – working with the community
by Guy Poppy
After almost three days of talking in a conference centre, it was time for me to join the team engaged with Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRA). We headed into the valley East of Zomba, where the ASSETS team had been training field workers in PRA and for me to see the village first hand that I had seen on the maps and tables presented yesterday. This was my first visit to the areas where we would be working over the next four years and I was excited as we pulled up into the community. Several groups were already discussing ecosystem services and ranking how important the services were to the community. This was a powerful approach which captured so much information of qualitative richness, so often neglected as everyone strives to quantify and statistical probe data. As a natural scientist now working and leading multidisciplinary teams, it is great to see the power of qualitative approaches, especially when integrated with the more quantitative household surveys and food diets, which in turn will help inform the rest of the team and especially models involved in assets.
I had the privilege of undertaking a transect walk through the village from the dam under construction outside the village boundary right down to the centre of the village, the hub of so much activity with our team these past few days. Joseph from WorldFish acted as a translator for us as we walked with two villages who shared the knowledge of the key features and ecosystem services in the village, which related to their attempts to stay food secure. It was eye-opening to see the reliance of improvements in plant breeding in providing hybrid maize, which also led to increased reliance on fertilizers, supposedly provided from the Government. At the same time, this fertilizer frequently leached from the soils and affected the fish ponds and water supply. A two-edged sword as fertilizer could really increase yield and help towards food security, whilst at the same time create a circle which can result in poor soils, low yields and polluted waters. In contrast, trees were being used to generate insecticides (like neem) and applied by reed-brushes to the crops which needed attention, and provide the pest regulation not on offer through insecticides to this community.
I found the experience humbling and motivational. The lady with Joseph in the picture was from one of the poorer parts of the village, yet she had easy access to water and was clearly a good farmer. She was also very pleased in having her photo taken with Joseph and reminded me powerfully of the need to ensure the knowledge form our research project has impact beyond academic journals.
Monday 24th September â Day 2- Itâs hard to not want to make a difference
by Guy Poppy
Today was always scheduled to think and plan in the morning and to expose those of us who arrived only yesterday to the crucial first phase of the project â participatory rural appraisal. This proved to be a stimulating, challenging and humbling day which captured much of what the whole ESPA programme is about. As I sit writing this blog, reflecting on the day I feel a sense of energy and passion amongst the whole team, something exciting for me to see as it gives me real confidence in the caliber of the team and my own desire to ensure we really do deliver a project which really can undertake âworld-class research on ecosystem services (ES) for poverty alleviation at the forest-agricultural interface and deliver evidence from a range of sources and in various formats to inform policy and behaviorâ.
During the morning it became increasingly apparent that some important decisions needed to be made. Everyone was contributing in the numerous brain-storms required to enable us to seek clarity and understanding of the major questions and themes of our project which will help us achieve our goal: âto explicitly quantify the linkages between the natural ecosystem services that affect â and are affected by â food security and nutritional health for the rural poor at the forest-agricultural interfaceâ. Importantly, the conversations and sharing of expertise approaches amongst the disciplines will allow this multidisciplinary project to set off on the right trajectory â something so important for successful multidisciplinary projects addressing complex and grand challenges such as ensuring food and ecological security.
The afternoon involved a group of our Malawian collaborators, who had worked with the ASSETS team members from other countries, led by Kate Schreckenberg, presenting their results from the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) they had conducted in a village the previous week. I was amazed by the detail of the qualitative information obtained and the impact this approach will have in shaping the whole project. It confirmed the importance of community/village led input into projects like ours, the valuable insight from those living in the ecosystems we study and the error in assuming we know the key drivers and issues. Personally, I found the experience an emotional journey and humbling as the storyline emerged towards the coping strategies used by those suffering from extreme poverty in trying to ensure food security. I finished the day feeling honored and privileged to lead the marvelous ASSETS team and thinking to myself, I really want our world class research to make a difference and thus a Theory of Change takes on new meaning.
Sunday 23 September â Day One â A high point of the trip
by Guy Poppy
There is no better way to get a feel for an area than to climb to a high point and look over the landscape. Members of the ASSETS team ascended the Zomba plateau this morning from Ku Chawe Inn towards the Malumbe peak at 2075 metres. Whilst hiking the long and steep terrain and along a dramatic ridge towards the peak with radio and mobile masts, it was hard not to reflect on the beauty of the landscape, but also the fragility of the ecosystem which was vital to so many people- the reason we were here in Malawi. Our guide, Robert, clearly found the hike much easier than the rest of us, although I thought I was a well-fed fit cyclist. The dominance of African distance runners living at altitude is a really interesting current topic which I saw in a recent documentary broadcast after the Olympics.
When we reached Malumbe peak, I welcomed the rest and enjoyed eating some of the wild harvested fruits (Himalayan raspberry) which we had seen many people selling alongside the road as we drove from Zomba village into the forest reserve that morning. It is very clear that the forested Zomba Mountains are vital in providing services to many people living on and around the plateau. We could see right across Zomba west towards the Shire River which leads away from Lake Malawi (Lake Nyasa) and makes its way towards the Zambezi River. The villagers in this area west of the Zomba Plateau will be very important to our study and I look forward to working with them over the next few years. The range of ecosystem services crucial to these communities food security and how that in turn affects the ecosystem services is something we will be able to map and value (in terms of monetary and non-monetary) during the project. Even more importantly, we will develop an understanding of the linkages, trade-offs and tipping points, which should allow a better understanding of how best to manage this important area for sustainable utilisation of the vital resources for local communities.
After an interesting journey by Land Rover back down from Malumbe peak, we headed back to Annieâs Lodge to start discussions on the challenging but exciting ASSETS project. I was excited about the research programme before coming to Malawi, but the more I saw of the people and their landscape, the more I knew that we had a unique opportunity to do something special both scientifically and practically for the people, their environment and the country. The ethics training which we all then received took on a new meaning and engagement, to an extent I have never seen at ethics discussions at Southampton!
To read further blogs from Guy, please see the Sustainability Science website or the ASSETS project website.
Links:
Creative Digifest #SXSC2 Speaker Profiles: Hugh Glaser
October 3, 2012
by Lisa Harris
Hugh Glaser is Chief Architect at Seme4 Ltd., a company that specialises in Linked Data (Semantic Web/Web of Data). As such, he is a technology provider for a wide variety of industries – in fact it is hard to thing of any sector that has not shown an interest in finding out what Linked Data can do for it.
In addition to general work and consultancy he is responsible for a number of significant practical activities in Linked Data:
a) sameas.org, which helps to establish linkage between datasets;
b) dotAC.info, which is a Linked Data application that gives a unified view of some fixed datasets plus data from the Linked Data cloud;
c) See UK, which allows users to explore a number of Open Data resources against a geographical background.
Prior to joining Seme4 in 2009 he was a Reader in the School of Electronics & Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and is now a Visitor in the Faculty.
How are digital technologies transforming our lives?
Not as much as we think. In particular, humans are communicative animals, and we will use whatever works to communicate. It takes years before people work out exactly what a particular technology does, and how it fits into the lives they want. And I think that when they do work it out, it is often not as revolutionary as it seemed at the time, or revolutionary in comparison with the past. Take email as an example. It is very exciting when it first becomes available, and most of us who have used it for a while will have been irritated at some time with the flood of messages from people who have just discovered it for the first time. But slowly the users of the new technology work out what is good for them (and acceptable to others). And in the end it is often not so very different from what went before, just a little more convenient. For many people who have used email for a while, the vast majority of emails they send an receive will be messages that would have gone via another medium (letter, memo, telephone call, water cooler comment) in a pre-digital age.
When I first got an iPod all those years ago, I spent ages getting my music all organised and I needed one with a big disk because I had a lot of music. Now I have worked out that what I want the iPod for is to do time-shift on Radio 4 comedy programmes and a select few spoken podcasts, so that I can listen to them when I am driving. I used to do something similar with CDs and before that cassettes, only now it is just more convenient.
In the creative sphere, artists have always embraced new technologies for rendering their ideas. Hockney’s iPad art is a natural activity, but is not a significant abstract difference to his previous use of Fax. And it is less controversial in its time than the challenging idea that photography might be a branch of the creative arts.
I believe that Blogs and Twitter have close parallels with the various styles of pamphlets in the 18th and later centuries. Perhaps Charles Dickens and Thomas Paine would have naturally moved their pamphleteering to WordPress and Twitter.
I recently came across this enjoyable list of questions, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/termine/id=20104, which give some interesting perspectives on the historical developments of social networks.
I often think that Facebook moves us back to the villages that we lost with population movements. Many people will feel that they are now closer to the extended families that now live around the world, where these people would have lived nearby in past times. The incidental knowledge from the snippets on such sites is very similar to the comment you make as you pass a relative or friend on the High Street each day, giving background awareness of your circle of acquaintance.
I was (“lucky enough”?) to be in Prague during the revolutionary times of 1968, when the Warsaw Pact invaded. It was astonishing to see the velocity of information around the city. Newspapers and pamphlets were coming out hourly, there were amateur radio stations filling the radio spectrum, and in fact you could meet a radio station on the top of a car as you walked around (they would move to avoid triangulation from the KGB). When people celebrate Twitter as being a necessity for the Arab Spring to happen, I always have some concerns that such people have not experienced or even studied what could really happen without it. Revolutions did happen before the internet.
Of course, scale and accessibility do change, but it is arguable that the fact that people can access more sources of information is as much a political change as one brought about by technology. Printing was a tightly controlled activity in many countries in the 18th century, and the wider access came from relaxation of the controls. Interestingly we see similar tensions online at the present, where almost all countries control access to some extent.
The fact that communication across distance is undoubtedly easier, to the benefit of all, is tempered by the fact that distant communication becomes more necessary as people move apart in the knowledge that they have such communication.
What can the latest technologies do for you?
Ideally they make us more efficient, clearing space and time for activities that we find more self-fulfilling than some of the drudgery. In this sense, the digital technologies are little different from the hardware that emerged in the home throughout the early and middle 20th century. And it comes with the same contradictions: people could find themselves spending more time maintaing their vacuum cleaners, washing machines and especially unreliable cars than the time saved – time spent maintaining the new digital technologies can be very challenging. Again, the road to understanding what the technologies can do for each individual, what role they play and whether they are appropriate is a rocky one.
If youâre not online, are you out of the game?
No. It may seem like it, but things settle down in social circles, so that eventually people find a comfortable milieu. We should, however, have serious concerns about the claims that new technologies make about celebrating the heterogeneity of human interaction and activities. Many of the digital technologies were claimed to be liberating in this respect, the “long tail” idea that on the web there is a good market for minority interests that can therefore support suppliers. As this theory of the long tail has become questioned and even debunked, the interests of the users of digital technologies have become more restricted again, tending back to a more homogeneous world. Of course the majority “centre” shifts, but the minority at the edges is not necessarily being served as well as was promised in the brave new days of the web in the 1990s.
All in all, I’m not suggesting it’s not fun, and not enriching, but perhaps people with grey beards have a responsibility to try and help us all get it in perspective, while still experiencing the huge excitement.
Creative Digifest #SXSC2 Speaker Profiles: Alan Rae
October 2, 2012
by Lisa Harris
This is the latest in our series of speaker and panelist profiles for the Creative Digifest. Dr Alan Rae, in his own words:
“Research – Structure – Present – Set to Music”
I guess I have been a digital pioneer since we set up our first IT company in 1981. Iâve lived through the change from an analogue to a digital world (when I went to University we used mechanical calculators in the labs!) through word processing, computer aided design, e-commerce and social media and mobile working. My career started as a market researcher and marketing manager for a heavy engineering company. I set up my first IT business in 1981 and have been helping businesses large and small implement IT related change ever since as a supplier, trainer, presenter and author. From 1996-2004 I ran the Executive Studio in West London which was a pioneering demonstration and training centre for the use of IT In e-commerce and mobile and flexible working. Since then Iâve been applying what we know about digital commerce to a family horticultural business (the DPhil IS in plant science after all) and to researching how small companies can use the internet in practice to make their businesses work better. Much of this work has been carried out with Lisa Harris and you can check out our findings here
Iâm currently a guest blogger for Brandwatch and the National Farmers Union, run a How to do Business group on Facebook and Iâve created various training programmes for small business including 1 Man Brand and Punch Above Your Weight, and written books like âGrowing Jobsâ and âSocial Media for Real Businessesâ
In what ways are digital technologies transforming our lives?
Digital in the 80s was for large organisations and geeks. Now itâs for everyone. The single fact that you can create an object â a photograph, a video, a piece of text and publish it in many different media to a large number of people or share it for a specific business purpose instantly, completely changes the way we can do business or enjoy our lives.
The tools available to the small company marketer continue to astonish me â tools to assemble and publish information, tools for holding conversations, tools for promoting business or leisure activities, tools for collaboration.
What can the latest technologies do for you?
The I-Pad is a real game changer â supporting both wifi and 3G technologies it means that most of the time you have instant access to the whole body of human knowledge as well as your own stuff in a portable package that you can carry around in a handbag. You can take photographs and share them â the day before I wrote this I was in Bodrum looking for tiles for my daughterâs new kitchen. We can photograph what they have in the shop and she can have the info in Sussex at once. She can tell us what she wants to do when weâve got the details for price and delivery. When we were at the Olympics we could use the BBC feed for online updating of the positions of the competitors throughout the race on a course that we could only see via binoculars. In a windsurfing race where itâs quite hard to follow whatâs going on this gave a great boost to our enjoyment of the day. You can create short videos, annotate them and post them into an environment where they can be shared. For a creator or performer it transforms the dialogue with the audience. And you can access the terrain maps to help you visit ancient sites if thatâs what interests you. This is pretty handy in a country like Turkey where the map makerâs art is not well developed.
If youâre not online, are you out of the game?
That depends on the business â if most of what you sell goes locally and is sold in a traditional way face to face then no. Our organic veg business does not actually need the blog and web site to survive although it has its uses. If you are selling anything with knowledge embedded in it, or you need to build a national or international presence then you can use social media and digital creation tools to build and develop a substantial presence in your own field of expertise. However, you need to be selective â do some automation and some individual activity. Be clear about what you want to say and how to do business with you and work smart and be selective in how you use your time. Itâs like Desktop Publishing â just because you can use hundreds of fonts in one document doesnât mean that you should!
Creative Digifest #SXSC2 Speaker Profiles: Alan Patrick
October 1, 2012
by Lisa Harris
This is the latest in ourseries of posts profiling the speakers and panelists at the Creative Digifest.
Alan Patrick is the co-founder of Broadsight, which focuses on market intelligence, strategy and systems development across the multi-media ecosystem. Broadsight has consulted to many of the major digital-media players in Europe and has helped start or turn around a number of startups. They have also developed innovative technology for a number of clients. Alan also writes the well regarded Broadstuff blog on technology development. He has also developed the âBroadstuff Bubble-o-Meterâ tracking the current Social Media bubbleâs evolution, which has been picked up by other technology blogs and the Guardian.
Alan Patrick with Student Digital Champion Ivan Melendez at the first SXSC Digifest
How are digital technologies transforming our lives?
1982 – Just seen the new IBM PC with a 10Mb Hard Disk!! Am 2 years away from starting to write MSc thesis on interconnecting these new fangled Microcomputers on even newer fangled idea of local and wide area “integrated networks”. Thesis will be mainly typed on a typewriter, with lots of photocopying, cutting, and pasting.
1992 – whinging on new fangled in-company email system, on my luggable PC, about sitting by the fax machine late on a Friday night trying to send a large report to a client. Later that year got my first modem and Demon internet connection. Became au fait with Archie, Veronica, Gopher et al. Report was written on a Word Processor, but has to be printed out, graphics added via a DTP standalone system, then faxed to client.
2002 – Setting up my first new fangled 0.5Mb broadband connection from my new Home Office, writing major report on my laptop and cutting and pasting data from the Web, shortly to email it via my Broadband (so no anxious waiting over the dialup modem). My report is typed on a word processor, and I cut and paste it digitally via an integrated DTP software suite. I am on Skype for a conference call with colleagues as I write, co-ordinating our views. After that is done, I am considering whether Google is finally better at search than Yahoo and whether to buy a book I want via eBay or Amazon. Am very proud of my new mobile, which (in theory) has internet access, Â though it is a pain to use. Still, I can download my emails on it. Hooray!!!
2012 – Writing this while cursing that my 8Mb broadband connection in my home office is running at 1/4 speed, and the kids are sucking up all the bandwidth that it is a pain to synch my iPad, IPhone, laptop and home desktop email quickly. I have run a small company from my Home Office for 5 years now. I will shortly be going into London for a meeting, so I load the address into my iPhone and it gives me a map and directions. As I walk to the station I send a Twitter message to the people I hope to see there, telling everyone I am on my way.
2022 – My iPhone is a tieclip (ties are back in), running on bandwidth of several 100 Mb, and I wear my piezoelectric charging charging laptop on my head and plug it into my cortex. My UI is thought powered, and direct-to-brain display. My car is electric, as are my friends, because geeks still don’t get laid despite the plethora of Big Datamining online dating agencies…..
What can the latest technologies do for you?
- save time and cost all the way across my workflow
- replace physical commute and location limitations with online comms
- rapid access to the relevant information
- visibility of others’ activities
- integrate disparate systems
If youâre not online, are you out of the game?
No, but you may not see all the plays, or see them as quickly as others do.
Creative Digifest #SXSC2 Speaker Profiles: Tom Barnett
September 29, 2012
by Lisa Harris
This is the latest in our series of posts profiling the panelists and speakers at the Creative Digifest:
Tom Barnett is a co-Founder and Managing Director of Switch Concepts – a fast growing online decision engine that specialises in the delivery of online adverts.
In what ways are digital technologies transforming our lives?
I think that right now digital technology is verging on all pervasive – even if you don’t own a smartphone, pad, connected tv, computer or raspberry pi. Â Behind the scenes the digital cogs are whirring 24/7 working out what to do with and for you.
In many ways technology has improved our lives. Â Communication has generally taken on an entirely new meaning in the last decade or two. Â On the other hand I worry that things have moved so quickly – Google is only 14 years old, Facebook only 8. Â Have humans really kept up sociologically with the pace of change? Â Bruce Willis suing Apple over the right to leave music he purchased from them to people in a will summed it up for me. Â We all tick ‘accept’ without running the agreement by a lawyer (or counsellor) on ÂŁ500 an hour.
I’m excited about web 3.0. Â To me it represents a redress of the balance.
What can the latest technologies do for you?
Most practically the Samsung Galaxy S3 has meant I do not need to lug my laptop around with me as religiously as I have done for years. Â The raspberry pi is going to give my children the same sort of chance I had with a Spectrum and BBC micro. I am keen to see VRM (vendor relationship management) tools emerge.
If you are not online, are you out of the game?
Frankly, yes.