Versatile Amphibian

I’ve recently become fascinated with the potential of domestic voice assistants, such as Amazon’s Echo. Although they have their flaws of interpretation, they enable access to content from the internet for people who are unused to, or unable to use smartphone interfaces. It’s easy to forget that although a great many people pick up their iPhone as soon as they wake up and rarely put it down until they close their eyes at night, there’s a whole generation my parent’s age and above who don’t habitually carry their phone around or really understand how to use it. Devices like Echo/ Alexa get around this by making it easy to get facts about things from the web or play some music just by speaking clearly, bringing some of the benefits of ubiquitous connectivity without the learning curve. Xperia Agent expresses its frustration at its long gestation I was therefore excited to see how Sony were getting along with their Xperia Agent, AI assistant product, which they sh...

Last week I was lucky enough to present the keynote at Oracle Modern Business conference in London. I used it to test some thinking that's emerged from client work over the last few years. I've been gathering data around it and applying the ideas in real businesses... needless to say that there's some promise there. The central thought is that dinosaurs were once unicorns. Rather than the common rhetoric that the latter are intrinsically better than the former, I wonder whether unicorns should actually aspire to be dinosaurs and seek to learn from them in the same way that big organisations seem desperate to sip some unicorn-flavour Koolaid in the Valley. Anyhow, here's the transcript of my speech. Hope you find it interesting. Disruption was an exciting new concept when I started my career. It was much like Lean Startup is today: if you felt that you understood it, you were in an exclusive club possessing of knowledge that could topple empires. Disruption is dar...