Gee I am glad we have the herald here in Sydney. This morning, one section in particular caught my eye.

New product idea; an irony detector for online newspapers which is used to place online articles automatically so as to avoid claims of utter stupidity.

In the gambling world there is a long odds phenomenon where a emotional bias to betting on long odds reduces the return on investment. See the plot below.

Government intervention into the business environment in a democracy suffers a similar fate. Long odds are guaranteed by a non-financial aversion to risk, driven by the fear of negative publicity, in turn driven by claims of favoritism or negligence.

The result? Government initiatives driven by process and not outcomes.

It’s a chronic problem in the west highlighted by the success of certain government interventions in some countries with less representative electorate systems.

Of course, there is a inflexion point where less public review just results in corruption and rubbish returns for the tax payers.

What I am trying to say is that there is a sort of sweet spot in democratic systems where a certain degree of public feedback is entertained and ensures the best returns on government investment.

We are way past this sweet spot here in Australia, which is ironic given that, almost to a man or woman, we look to government to fix every problem

You know, if I was running for government in opposition, I would preface all my promises to the electorate and the lobby groups with ‘Senate-willing’.

And if the Senate rejected my policies I would drop them until the Senate changed their collective minds. Bugger negotiating with the black-mailing independents or irrationally opposed opposition.

And then I would head off to the pub for the rest of my term in office.

My suspicion is that Australians wouldn’t really mind a government that did bugger all, just for a change. Most wouldn’t even notice.

And if this process was spun out for the whole first term the government would almost assuredly be reelected with Senate control.

It’s called the long game.

I can’t for the life of me understand why the incumbents, having watched the last mob strive to actually do things without control and subsequently fall miserably, attempt to do the same. Just plain silly.

If you want to float a pet hypothesis, just say it mate. Nothing worse than a gutless question for a heading.

PS the answer is ‘I doubt it. The government’s pressure on wages is probably just a second order affect, the primary affect being the softening demand for our exports and under-scale business investment in differentiated growth.’

Little things…

When I get too busy in life the first victim is my fingernails. They simply don’t get cut. It’s great having such an obvious indicator for stress. Thank god I don’t chew them.

With respect to emotional matters, a truth is just an opinion that dwells comfortably with kindred opinions. Sometimes even complacently so.

Last night a friend limited her alcohol intake due to concerns about her breast milk; she has two babies.

We concocted a new first world product – a mother’s milk alcohol level analyser.

It probably already exists but we couldn’t be arsed checking.

My wonderful nephews  unfortunately did not receive much of an education.

This renders then susceptible to influences of any which persuasion.

To wit; right now they are buried in YouTube, convinced that ISIL is out to kill each and every Australian.

The defining data to support this hypothesis is that ‘four of our women’ have gone ‘over there’ to marry terrorists.

You have to admit there’s not much to work on here.

I just had a quick peruse of the Sydney papers whilst a Microsoft update rendered my laptop functionless.

The respectful moratorium for the victims of the chocolate bomber seems to be over and all sorts of questions are being asked in the media.

The big question that I haven’t seen addressed is whether all those businesses with business continuity insurance have found an exclusion in their contracts for acts of terrorism.

Was this terrorism or a nutter? This will be painful

Misinformed commentary persists on the matters of patents….

Patents provide for less risk into investment into new technology.

Stronger patent rights lower the risk of investment in technology, resulting in more investment.

Data point; USA. The strongest patent rights in the world underpinned by jury-led high damages, product injunctions, and contingency lawyers for patent enforcement.

And it’s the most inventive nation in the world with the highest investment in R&D. This is not a coincidence.

In a pure game of chance, if played long enough, everyone reverts to the mean and gets their money back.

Unless the house takes a cut in which case, over time, everyone loses all their money betted.

The severity of the house cut just determines how long the punters get to play, on average, before they lose their money.

In a game where there is no house cut but there is a little predictability, those that know the correlations act as the house and everyone else gets to lose their money as of they were playing a game of chance.

If there is a house as well then that just compounds the problem for the punters.

And for what it’s worth, over time the longer the odds that these guileless punters play, the less average gambling time they get per dollar.

I was asked today what improvements I would make to my Breville espresso machine.

Where do I start?

A thermocouple in the steam wand with a gauge on the front panel

A low water warning LED light

A larger range on the grinder  quantity adjuster so my double espresso grind doesn’t always end in spilled grinds

Pertaining to the above a basket with sloped sides to avoid grinds spilling over

Instant cutoff on the steam wand so you don’t risk bubbling your foam when you withdraw the wand

A steam wand that doesn’t scream at you

A coffee counter

A basket which doesn’t hold water after rinsing, causing dribbles all over your kitchen

See, innovation isn’t that hard! All you have to do is use your own product.

I have just set up a new WiFi router.

This one was a tough one because I couldn’t get the setup software out of Chinese.

But it made me think, from a user interface point of view these things haven’t improved in a decade.

You still plug in an Ethernet cable into the router and a PC, and then go to a specific net address in a browser to access the router setup

Why not a phone app accessed via WiFi?

Taxi apps with maps were created to frustrate people like me.

My current booking had been circling my location for 15 minutes and he has been ‘4 minutes away’ the whole time.

They only reason I haven’t cancelled the booking is that I want to find out why he can’t use a GPS.

Terror sieges probably happen at least once a quarter somewhere on the planet, possibly more frequently.

We seem to care much more about them when they are close to home.

It’s probably the ‘it could have been me factor’.

Given the tweets, emails and blogs that I have been receiving it looks like a pretty step distance correlation function.

Internet marketers take note!

When I change laptops now it doesn’t take much effort thanks to Google.

Between Chrome and Drive it all just sort of happens. In fact the only reason I store files locally is in case I am ever working offline, which is becoming more and more of a rarity.

So why do we use the Microsoft OS at all?

I think it comes down to the Microsoft Office suite and isn’t it fun watching Google slowly and surely add functionality to their online equivalent?

The other apps on the Microsoft OS aren’t critical for me – sure there are some good ones, but they are succumbing to online services at a rate of knots.

For Microsoft it must feel like having an alien in the belly; slowly growing and with complete surety it will eventually burst out thereby killing its host.

The chocolate terrorist is gone, along with two of his hostages. What a sad and pointless way to die.

I wonder what the reaction will be?

The paper says he was asylum seeker who came to Australia in 1996. They also say he is a lone wolf, possibly an angry man acting by himself.

It’s hard to eavesdrop on a lone wolf; there is little to monitor. If the security forces want to stop this sort of attack then they need to identify and target each and every individual who fits a profile.

And once identified they will have to be monitored for risk factors. I don’t think we can yet arrest people for crimes they might be thinking of committing? Maybe we can.

Of course they could always go the other way and push the suspects at risk into counseling and possibly also give them free holidays in Hawaii every 6 months. We could call this the Pacific (aka peace) solution.

This might work – it would be cheaper than shutting Sydney down every few months.

I have been texted by Melbournians to check that I am ‘OK’.

Initially perplexed, I eventually responded ‘all OK, but getting sick of chocolate’.

It just goes to show that you can’t just take what you want and expect no blow back. Especially in a system which encourages technological unemployment and a marketing driven sense of worthlessness.

I expect out governments will embrace the opportunity to show ‘leadership’ and plug the holes with increased security expenditure.

Maybe it’s the right response. Maybe there is no other response that makes sense.

One thing’s for sure, we are who we are and we aren’t who we were.

We thought hard about it and decided to ditch the Xmas shopping for the pool. Easy decision in the end

I just got a spam email addressed from an old friend that has been dead for almost a decade. Despicable.

In the last week two pairs of my glasses, reading and sunnies, both lost their screws while I was traveling. Both useless.

It’s the 21st century surely we can do better than screws?

Soluble fiber; the term has never made any sense to me.

If a fiber is truly soluble then it would break up into it’s constituent molecules and the fact that it started life as a fiber would mean nowt.

What they actually mean is ‘water dispersible’ fiber. In water such a fiber would be substantially extended and free of entanglement with it’s brethren.

And only a chemist would care about such definitions.

How about hiding a smartphone battery charger in a belt; as in the thing that holds up your pants.

You can get these flexible lithium polymer batteries and there would be no need for the belt to be any thicker than usual.

While watching Silk, the legal drama, it has occurred to me that our adversarial court system is odd.

It appears to me that the defendant is always on trial, whereas in fact it should be the evidence of the prosecution that is on trial.

Furthermore, the jury members are forced into making a binary decision on an individual level and then collectively they must argy-bargy until all, or a sufficient weight of them agree on a binary decision.

If the evidence of the prosecution is on trial, then maybe it’s best if the judge and the jury members each give a score from 0-10 on the weight of the evidence. If the average jury member’s score and the judge’s score are both over 50% (or any number between 50% and 100% as chosen) then a guilty charge is upheld, and the severity of the penalty is then impacted by the average of all scores.

A new report shows that over 80% of American ‘believe’ in climate change.

The only thing that I ‘believe’ in is that other people believe in things.

The problem with belief is that it requires all issues to be reduced to binary choices, and that a mental coin is tossed as to whether one is on that side of an issue, or this.

Why not just assign a probability based on the evidence, do a risk and return analysis and then decide on an action plan, which can be modified as new evidence comes to light?

Of course the answer is twofold:

1. At an individual level this requires a practised and rigourous mind – lazy is easier, and

2. Socially, it is actually easier to count up for the beliefs, the for’s and against’s, than it is to enter into a debate based on probabilities.

Maybe the outcome is the same. Maybe not. But why have we bothered to develop intelligence if we don’t use it?

A good fraction of the world’s patents are in the automotive industry – one of the most technology advanced and intense product sectors.

Therefore I have always been puzzled by the lack of patent enforcement in this industry, excepting the odd patent troll activity.

I have just had a chat to the senior legal counsel at Hyundai and it turns out that the major players in this industry have a gentleman’s agreement not to enforce their patents against each other.

They don’t cross license either; they just don’t enforce their patents.

So you might wonder why then they have patents at all? Well it’s a gentleman’s agreement so they need to patents just in case someone is silly enough to break it.

This then explains why Tesla can sell cars and infringe thousands of patents without fear. And why Elon Musk can make a bold statements about Tesla not enforcing any of it’s patents – no one would license them anyway. He is giving away nothing.

Google must have really pissed someone off in China.

Not only have they built latency into Google services here so that they are virtually unusable, there is more.

To get around the embargo I use a VPN. But on any Wi-Fi connection I don’t even get the login page unless I close Chrome, Drive and the VPN software.

And Google isn’t doing themselves any favours elsewhere either.

They have started up the LOT consortium – an attempt to get all companies with phone patents (hardware and software) to sign a non-aggression pact, so that Google doesn’t have to worry about patent rights on it’s loss-leader software and hardware design products. It will just cream the cash off the advertising revenue.

Basically it’s an attempt to keep the rest of the supply-chain barefoot and pregnant.

They are starting to look and feel like Microsoft in the worst days of their monopoly, and in such arrogance do empires falter.

New business idea …

Vacation accommodation website … for tradies. Free accommodation for trade work at the accommodation site.

When you think about it religion is a form of anxiety. As societies develop advanced social and emotional intelligence this anxiety is addressed at the root cause and the need for religion diminishes.

Ashes to ashes – we don’t need no anxiety control.

Hashtags, really?

Why aren’t they all the same colour as the background so we don’t have to look at them?

Have any of you seen a standard Australian incubator termsheet? (for investment into a startup)

Similar to VCs they overpay for control (veto) rights, but on tiny, tiny investment increments.

And they often insist that existing fully paid common stock gets reverse vested – over a period about 5x the time it will take the company to burn through their  investment, leaving the founders a nasty legacy to unwind with later investors.

A truly bizare starting point by which to start a trusting relationship with founders and executive, since they will be relying on this trust to protect their investment later on in rounds that they can’t participate in.

My concern for the startups that sign up for these deals is as always, the problem of ceding control to investors without follow on capital.

They also have a put option were they can get the company to buy back their shares at any time, making the investment a sort of reverse con note, unsecured but with control rights. Weird.

They generally behave to structure deals to protect their investment which results in non standard behaviour, adding massive risks to next round funding.

Unlike the US there isn’t a functioning investment ecosystem in Australia. So the usual relationships between incubators and larger investors, that get sorted in the US, simply don’t exist.

These deals start funky and probably end in tears or a long painful path to SME-dom.

If I was these incubators I would put my money in as a con note and just get over the idea of exercising investor control. They rarely have either the skills or the bandwidth to do so anyway.

Ethically, they are better placed as viewing themselves as vaguely institutional angel mentors and not nano-VCs.

When I have a bad flu or cold the membrane that keeps my subconscious out of my head seems to falter.

On top of a fever I get a  little glimpse of the madness going on under the cover. Thoughts going around and around, clashing on top of each other. I have not a chance to stop it

It gets so bad that sometimes I can’t sleep, which is very unusual for me.

That filter that is there most of the time and just let’s the important stuff through. I love that filter.

Everyone would, but many don’t seem to have it. As a result they suffer anxiety and other conditions. I wonder if anyone has even identified this filter function of the brain?

What do you reckon is the ratio of tweets written and tweets read?

If it hasn’t already done so I suspect that is going below unity.

That is, a substantial fraction of tweets never get read.

The situation would be even worse for click-throughs from links in tweets.

A lot of noise looking for a purpose.

Curation is needed. And something much better than ‘trending’.

ps Android’s spell checker doesn’t even recognise ‘curation’

Instead of a bit of cardboard for a boarding pass, how about we get one those buzzers you get at restaurants when they want you to pick up your own food?

It could buzz when you have to board and it could even have a little instructional LCD to tell you where the gate is, serve up the odd ad, etc.

They would be handed out at check in and swapped at the gate for a paper chit with your seat number on it.

Benefits….

1. Passenger management … You could for example buzz people in the order you want them to board.

2. No need for announcements at the airport

3. By incorporating a position sensor you would know where every passenger is in the terminal in case they don’t board.

4. Since airports are just big shopping centers think of the data analytics opportunity!

Sydney international terminal now has almost continuous audio announcements.

It’s not necessary!!

New word for the day.

Campusification.

When a relatively new inner city university campus, such as UTS or RMIT, grows to the extent that eventually they take over all the streets inbetween their buildings and turn them into park-like pedestrian areas.

I am fascinated by the changes wrought upon written communications by the Internet.

Once there was a definite structure and a clear and difficult path to being worthy of being published, whereupon an audience was virtually guaranteed.

Nowadays anyone can publish but it’s very difficult to rise above the noise and get read by more than a handful of friends.

It’s also possible that the concentration span of the average reader is suffering a form of Zeno’s paradox, i.e. heading inexorably towards an infinitesimally small tweetish-like length.

I have a number of potentially mutually exclusive hypotheses as to the future of the written word:

1. That the worthy will get read anyway, especially after a short period when all the social media and online publishing technologies settle down, and control by the middlemen emerges again, and

2. The worthy will have to work harder to get read, but will have to suck up less as well. They will be more tired but feel better about themselves, and

3. The length of the intelligent tome will expand or shrink (depends on where you are coming from) to become a super-pamphlet; everything else will be considered as marketing or a boat anchor.

4. A form of never-ending reading will emerge – non-linear stories and information that flow with the reader’s interests. Unconstrained by the paper book format there is no reason why every reader should get the same words. Or why a story should even stop.

5. The never-ending stories might come in increments of 140 characters or 14,000 characters – it depends on what the reader can stomach.

6. Reading will always trump hearing (including videos) – because it is so much quicker. And time is increasingly of the essence.

7. I fear the rise of automated writing. Starting with remixes, this trend will emerge to challenge human writers. It has already started in fact.

8. Every format of the written word will be littered with ads. Off to the side, surveys between chapters, buried in the text, you name it … this is the price we pay for not having any upfront fee.

My latest connection request. Really LinkedIn?

This morning I continued my unsubscribe campaign; three weeks in and my inbox(es – thanks Google) are much emptier.

This morning I unsubscribed to the newsletter of a hotel chain that I once used in Spain. They emailed me back confirmation.

Clowns

What do we do if we all get caught up in the long tail of social media content and there is no high value head?

The existence of the narrative is required to extract meaning from the fractured non-commentary.

Narratives…

From tweets to four years in office, they all must have one.

Or else they don’t.

In which case the narrative is the absence of a narrative.

The question I would pose to them is how can you wrap a narrative around a void?

Maybe that’s the narrative.

It’s making my head spin.

And you can’t really spin in an empty universe so even that needs a narrative.

Wisdom derives from deep and immediate understanding, whereas grace is using your wisdom to know when and how to do nothing until something must be done.

An industry insider told me that the rough plan of action for gas was:

1. Starting with our 175 years of supply at estimated rates of domestic usage
2. Export our gas so that the price of local supply goes up substantially
3. This will create the political support required to frack for gas so prices go down again

Simple!

I have to got to the stage, finally, where I don’t ascribe much value to being the first to have an idea.

Does it matter if you are first or fifth to have a specific idea? I think not.

The truth is, with 7.2 billion people on the planet, ideas are in abundant supply.

I believe that the average idea has an implied negative value when the costs of executing upon it is analysed in the context of (a) the risks of failure and (b) the shortage of people with access to means that are willing to take the risks associated with executing upon the idea.

So if the average idea has a negative value how do we get people to do themselves a favour and give them away?

My idea (sic), a world-wide web-based repository of good ideas, just like an animal welfare shelter where some find good homes (for a small fee to the adoptee covering all the vaccination shots) and the rest are humanely put down.

A colleague recently floated a discussion about a world patent system. The basic idea is that, instead of patenting in every individual country, a single world patent would cover all member countries.

The motivation is to reduce the cost and complexity of getting a patent, and more importantly, to introduce some simplified and less complex system of enforcing patent rights. Enforcement is currently done on a country by country basis.

Given that the most likely defense in any patent dispute is an attempted patent invalidation by the defendant, my view is that we should give up examining patents altogether, in all countries. If the granted claims that get through the patent offices are going to get challenged in court, then why bother granting them in the first place? Also there’s simply too much prior art out there to examine any other than the commercially important patents; examining unimportant patents just adds costs to the system. Which is why it is done so badly I guess – it would cost too much to do it properly for all patent applications.

We could, for example, set up a world patent that acts like the innovation patent system in Australia – you write a patent application (the patent ‘option’) and then automatically receive an option to enforce your invention at any time in the future for the life of the patent, subject to a few simple administrative rules being satisfied.

Any such enforcement would be by ‘examination’ in the court with prior art courtesy of the defendant, or anyone else that wishes to supply the same.

So, firstly, if you ever feel compelled to enforce your implied patent right, your option, the first act would be to use speciality consultants to stress test your implied patent with prior art. The art and science of this would be systems to find prior art from within and without the patent systems. Consultants that do this already exist in the US and they already find prior art that patent examiners never would.

The problem remains of the multiple jurisdictions. However me-thinks that once you had stress tested your patent and enforced it in one, two or three jurisdictions that any defendant would just roll over at that point rather than spend money trying to invalidate your patent in another jurisdiction.

This would be a much cheaper system in some ways. It would cover the whole world with a relatively low cost entry fee. Higher costs would only be incurred when a party started privately stress testing the patent ahead of litigation.

Litigation is and would remain expensive – and this usually favours the wealthy corporations ahead of smaller companies and individuals. One way to address this to allow for contingency lawyers and non-practicing entities to enforce patents, and also to encourage large damages for parties willfully infringing. I personally favour damages that scale with the financial means – just like speeding fines in Sweden that scale with income.

I would also introduce a ‘reverse’ enforcement – a party could take a party to court if they believed that their patent option is invalid, and then provide the prior art evidence to get the patent option cancelled. This would give an operating party a means to create a clear space in which to operate without the risk of potentially infringing a patent right. Business does need certainty to invest, and this is the promoted purpose of the patent system which seems to have been lost of late.

Re-reading this blog entry, it is clear that each country would have to introduce a special patent court to handle all this. I would propose that this court steers away from the adversarial model of the English and towards the more intelligent magistrate system of the French. The purpose of any court proceeding in this model is to create a focused period of time, the proceeding, wherein a definitive answer to the validity of the patent claims is adjudged, once and for all.

I am down at Bunnings this fine Sunday morning.

The place is packed with puzzled unhandy people looking for the apparently unobtainable.

One of the guides, a casual student employee by the looks of him, is ignoring the lost and instead is watching a promotional video in the kitchen section.

Just as I am walking past he gets sprung by the boss.

When challenged as to what he thinks he is doing, I hear this pearler;

“Market research”

It’s a total mystery to me how some people can shed tears for a dead person that they didn’t personally know.

Subaru have been making cars since 1954 and yet birefringence in polycarbonates, liquid crystal polarization and polarised sunglasses are obviously not on their check list.

I can’t see the climate control display in my new Outback from any angle without taking off my sunnies.

And then there is the electronic handbrake. It’s retarded beyond belief.

Firstly, it’s a ‘push to engage’ number, unlike every handbrake that has ever existed. Secondly, it’s hidden out of the way such that you have to look for where it is in order to use it. Thirdly, under some conditions it will automatically disengage when you start moving off. But not always, and I can’t figure out why.

Hidden away, right next to the electric handbrake is the hill start button. This little number automatically applies the handbrake when you are stopped on a hill. But only sometimes, subject to the degree of incline which is not indicated! So you don’t know it’s not on until you start rolling backwards. Also you have to remember to turn it on every time you start the ignition – it defaults to off.

Then there is the big touch screen. Every single time I use it after starting the car, before being able to access the radio or the map, I have to “agree” that it’s dangerous to use it while the vehicle is moving. Which I can do even while the vehicle is moving.

The hazard lights are usefully placed right under the airco controls so that at least once a week they are accidentally engaged.

The driver’s seat memory function only works some of the the time. Subaru is famous for intermittent electrics. In my last one it was the cruise control.

I know that these are first world problems but my professional R&D manager’s training is severely offended by these obvious shortcomings.

It’s what happens when senior management is totally disconnected from the products. Especially in Japan where there is no direct translation for “calling it”.

About the only person that gets excited about an odometer of a car clicking over to 100,000 kilometers is a ten year old boy.

Just staring at the thing when it is at 99,999 and not willing to miss the big transition; it’s a very fleeting pleasure indeed, not usually shared by the owner of the rapidly depreciating car.

In the same vein I noticed the other day that I was on 999 Linkedin connections. When the 1000th connection request came in I noticed something very odd.

The “number of professionals in your network” had shrunk substantially – see the pictures below. And where was the expected “congratulations you have a thousand connections, etc etc” message?

That mob at Linkedin are asleep at the wheel.

Whilst riding my bike I day-dreamed up a new bike.

Lo and behold, all the bits exist.

Vivax Assist, a German company, has an electric motor that assists the crank of a bicycle and hides in the downtube. It doesn’t impede the free-wheeling capacity at all.

The battery can be disguised as a water bottle. It would be nice if they could re-format this so it too could be hidden in an over-sized carbon downtube.

And there is this tiny little button to activate it that can be hidden in the bar-ends.

They will even provide the thing in a carbon frame, ready to go.

I don’t want it for a road bike with gears as they use it. I want it for a single speed bike.

Normally the gear ratio of a single speed bike is limited by the biggest hill you are likely to face. But that gearing isn’t optimised for fast cycling on the flats or downhill.

By having this electric assist for hills the gearing can go up on a single speed which makes them even more useful but without adding any extra maintenance issues, which would take away the benefit of a single speed.

The system only weighs 1.8kg and with a carbon frame and lightweight wheels and such the whole thing could still be less than 7kg’s.

An additional option would be an automatic mode where the system assists only once you hit a specific angle up a hill and fall under a certain speed, or a quick bit of assist from standing start to help get off the mark if you a very high gearing.

I have also asked them to ponder the idea of a rear-wheel system with a push button to automatically switch between free-wheel and fixie modes. This would be a great.

Venture capital funds intermittently have to report the holding value of their portfolio to their limited partners (their investors).

Now a company may take 3-10 years after investment to be sold, listed or liquidated, and in the interim the stock is very illiquid.

So in order to value a whole venture portfolio the value of each start-up in the portfolio also has to be guessed at.

The usual approach is to take the value of the last round of funding as the last crystallised valuation point. It’s as good as it gets.

The issue of course is that VCs overpay for their stock and in return they get liquidation preference rights (the right to get their money out first and a double dip on their investment) as well as control/veto rights.

My personal view is that the true valuation of a start-up and that calculated by the last round post-money valuation is separated by a fair gap – as per the chart below.

A more accurate means to estimate the true value of the company at any moment is to subtract the total of all liquidation preferences from the last post-money valuation.

This approach is very simple for a VC to validate – I say to them; liquidate your portfolio today and I am sure your proceeds will be far closer to the common stock valuation (or less) than the full last round valuation, inclusive of a liquidation preference premium.

By taking into account the liquidation preference premium into your holding value you are inherently introducing a bias towards a successful outcome (the two lines meeting in the plot below) for all the companies in your portfolio. Which you know is not the case.

Below is the beast that I confront every time that I buy groceries.

The beast works but it could have been so much better with so little extra effort. All they need to do is to fix up their software. I won’t bore you with the details.

The day is coming when every item in the shop has a wireless RFID tag. Then you will just walk in, pick up what you want and walk out.

Your smartphone will have an app that collates your purchases and charges your account when you leave the store with your goods.

Is this a good thing? I don’t know, but it’s coming.

Look at this; a bar of free radical scavengers.

I have been watching the UK legal drama Silk and it occurs to me that our adversarial court system, and this is not very surprising I guess, is strongly biased in favour of those that have financial means.

The quality of the solicitor and the barrister seem to make a large difference to the outcome, if the show is to be believed.

I wonder if the relationship between dollars spent and legal outcomes have been quantified? That is a statistical analysis of cases that correlates dollars spent in defence versus other factors. This study would attempt to understand the relationship between dollars spent and the likelihood of not guilty verdict, or the impact of dollars spent on the severity of the punishment.

I also query whether the benefits of more being spent asymptotes, or is it non-linear?

If there is a relationship then maybe those with greater means should be handicapped.

Considering that it would be hard to handicap the binary guilty/not guilty verdict what is needed is a scaling factor which increases with dollars spent on defence, and is then used to multiply any financial penalty or the term of any gaol sentence.

This would also work to limit how much people spent on defence because if they spent a lot and still got a guilty sentence then the severity of their penalty would go up accordingly. They would have to start weighing up the cost benefits of spending all that cash on silks and the natural outcome would be a contraction of the spread in legal defence costs.

Just kidding.

One of my former work colleagues was a great one for HR quotes.

One of his favourites, that I liked as well, was:

“You don’t increase your own sense of security by increasing the sense of insecurity in others”

The application of this mantra in the work place makes one a conciliator. I have noticed that there are some less ethical types that sometimes take advantage of conciliators – so it does pay to mix it up a little.

For people that don’t like being ‘constrained’ in their lives, i.e. people that react badly to be being caged or controlled and could be labelled as “emotionally claustrophobic”, this could be re-drafted as:

“You don’t increase your own sense of security by increasing the sense of security in others”

Now there’s the paradox for the ages.

However I have it on good authority that, although trying to control such a person isn’t going to work, not trying to control could be just as bad as it might portray a lack of interest or caring.

The solution is shared and authentic involvement. As it always should be and hardly ever is.

From Crunchbase today – “YPlan provides a platform for users to discover things to do and buy tickets via its mobile app. Founded in London in 2012, YPlan is now available in Edinburgh, San Francisco, New York and Las Vegas, YPlan will use the new cash to pivot into a self-service platform that allows all event organizers to add and manage their own listings.”

When will people learn that we don’t need new apps and services in already crowded markets? There are only so many waking hours in which to fill up people’s minds. Putting it another way, we can only mentally manage a couple of brands in every one of the thousands of B2C internet app sub-segments. Even then, most people struggle.

Because of this I suspect that aggregation in super-categories will eventually occur. For example, one of the travel players will suck up Trip Advisor, Air BnB, Pin Drop, Flight Track, WeatherPro, XE Currency, Perfect World Clock, Foodspotting, Better Translator, and even YPlan into one super travel app service. The trick will be making it simple to use.

Every university in Australia has some sort of incubator. And there are now tens of corporate and commercial incubators in each city. All of these are filled with startups with 2 or 3 kids doing some sort of Yplan. Underfunded, and with a unshakeable belief in their ability to go viral based on their special social media skills, all of these guys really believe that they are going to replace the incumbents in their chosen sub-segment; or get bought by the incumbents due to the sheer beauty and genius of their tweak on the standard app.

YPlan’s Series B funding press release made me laugh because they used the Silicon Valley bullshit term “pivot”.

What this means is that the original business idea was a failure – they couldn’t make it work. Or they might argue they weren’t sufficiently funded to make it work, but this ignores the fact that, if so, this is because the risks factors of funding it were too high – wrong business model. So they changed it to get Series B funding and some VC’s bought it.

Fail fast, they say. Pivot, if needed. It’s the team not the business model that makes a great start-up. A great team will fail fast and then find another opportunity if the first one doesn’t work out.

And the use of the term “pivot” is designed to give this process a sense of authenticity, professionalism and even hints that the the pivot was planned to some degree.

If you have ever seen a B2C internet play that enters into the fray late in the day then you know three things; one, they are odds-on to fail, and, two, when they do they will pivot, and three, when they pivot they will proposes a B2B play in the supply chain they are already working in.

I wonder if anyone has done a study on the ROI on start-ups that pivot? My guess is that for internet plays that do a pivot that the non-participating prior investors get a negative return and that the post-pivot investors probably have a lower return on their post-pivot investment than investors into non-pivot deals, at equivalent rounds and equivalent tier VC’s.

That’s just a guess.

Why do pivots get funded? Well for existing investors that double up, it’s just very hard to write off sunk capital. Even the most battle hardened VC has an unreasonable bias towards hope when there is a semi-reasonable story on the table. And new investors in the deal, well they might buy the story that they are getting an extra cheap deal because all that sunk capital has bought the team expensive insights and networks into the industry. We call that a free set of steak knives! Who buys that story?

Oddly VCs don’t often commission quantitative research into their own industry. Research that could use readily available data and that would make all their decision-making more reliable. What they actually do is follow the pack and hope the pack is right. Which it sort of is, on average, because there is an ‘evolutionary’ process going on ensuring that failure modes of investing do not get funded; but this feedback loop can take time to process and in the meantime a lot of VCs can lose a lot of money.

I like watches, always have.

Which is a segue into my noticing an unusual (to me) watch on the guy ordering drinks next to me at the bar of the pub, at 530 pm yesterday evening.

We chatted for a while, as watch enthusiasts do, and I discovered that the watch is branded as MVMT and was bought online from their website.

[Technically – these are mechanical watches using a low-end, but more than adequate Japanese movements (often shorted to mvmt, hence the in-joke brand name I guess); people that worry about fractions of seconds lost per year need to realise that one change of time zone in a plane will lose you easily 30 seconds of accuracy. MVMT exists because the technology to put together a simple mechanical watch is extraordinarily cheap, so they trade on design and the use of a low-cost online sales channel]

Sitting down with my beer I used my Android phone to google ‘MVMT’ and then perused their website on the Google Chrome Browser.

Then, fearing goldfish futures, I ‘shared’ the page by email to my own Gmail account.

Two hours later whilst trawling through the banalities of my friends’ Facebook postings I noticed an ad for the very obscure and never previoulsy heard-of MVMT watches!

So who is the culprit?

Either Google and Facebook are colluding, or the Facebook app is watching my browsing efforts, or both.

I found this graphical tree representation of the hierarchy of the intelligence of animals.

I wonder where the smartest machine or robot is on this tree?

There’s no doubt in my mind that we already have forms of artificial intelligence with greater intelligence than my daughter’s silkies. It wouldn’t be hard.

These things have been breed for looks or their blue-black meat and bones, depending on who you believe. But in the process their brains were bred out, and they picked up a few extra in-bred claws.

So the great apes at the top of the tree can push the other animals around the tree (e.g. silkies are now definitely below horses, even thoroughbreds) and introduce whole new forms of artificial intelligence (that are slowing climb up the tree).

Every week I get numerous emails from my daughter’s primary school.

There is a weekly newsletter, a classifieds for parents selling stuff (in this day and age, really!), a parents and citizens (what are they?) committee update, a class liaison mother’s update and then a bunch of spurious communications such as upcoming concerts, trivia, fund raising and sports events, details on uniform purchasing, info on open days and public assemblies, missives from the principal, and other stuff that is inexplicably considered too important to put in the newsletter.

Nothing from the teacher of course! The missing link that is most important.

My overall impression is that it is an uncoordinated mish-mash of stuff produced by rank amateurs that have only ever considered half of their target market, i.e. mothers and not fathers.

I vote for the department of education to hire some proper marketing consultants to overhaul all of this rubbish and come up with a standard format on the web for all schools to use (and maybe an app), and that also appeals equally to mothers and fathers.

There is a dodge app already but they only put the weekly newsletter in it and it is so last century, the app. But it’s the content and layout that is the real problem.

In the meantime, my plea to the mothers clubs and their mates on the school staff, please leave my inbox alone.

How hard would it be to write some learning algorithms to detect scammers on Linkedin?

Not hard. Their behaviour is quite different to the norm and there is a lot of data to work with.

And then you would just ask the suspects to go through a tougher than normal profile identification program.

There seems to be two types of scams in Linkedin:

1. Totally false people looking to extract something (money) off people. An example was a nice looking young woman that connected with me some time back, with some totally falsified story. Her follow up message had genuine scam written all over it – here is a quote:

“Based on this statistics, Kwesi Bunso family resident has decided to request for genuine foreign partnership with very truthful and honest buyers or investors who will come down to buy their product (Gold Dust or Cooper Ore) and in return, pay for the produce part in cash and the balance”. Really!

I just checked and her profile is still up and running, as thin as it is. She claims education at the business school at Oxford Uni. Her prior work experience is one job as a beauty technician and now she is a director of a gold mine. Heh – I could write an algo to catch this one.

2. The there are real people using Linkedin as a channel for unwanted sales. I had an example the other day where a real estate sales person from Queensland sent me a connection request. I glanced at it and it seemed legit and she (they are often ‘she’s’) had some links in common (more fools). Anyway after we connected I was duly sent a sales pitch:

“Thanks For the Linkedin connection. Glad to connect. Wish to make a positive cash flow property investment in Queensland?”

At least it was upfront. Linkedin should find these guys are force them to go through their own sales and marketing channels in Linkedin so that (a) we can easily identify and ignore them, and (b) Linkedin could get some income off these guys.

My prediction; they will automate the driving of cars before we have a breathalyser test for fatigue.

Anxiety and insecurity can be difficult to live with and they can hard to distinguish from each other. However only one of them is attenuated by Valium.

So this makes we think that we need (a) a Valium-equivalent pill for insecurity, and (b) a non-toxic and non-addictive Valium-equivalent pill for those that suffer from permanent anxiety as part of their personality make-up.

A new watch design.

This one is an analog-digital effort, noting that it could be full digital also.

The middle number (a digital display) shows the hour.

And the outer hand shows the minutes – this can be a mechanical hand, or part of the digital display. If mechanical it can be like some car speedo dials with an outside connection.

There is no need for a second hand since the digital display shows that it is powered and we have smart watches for the unlikely scenario when we want to time something to the second.

I haven’t shown the crown but it would be needed to adjust the time and a press would give a light for night viewing – it would light up the LCD hour number and the minute hand and minute markers.

The display could be e-ink also.

The time is 9.09 below.

The sign below is courtesy of one of the local churches.

I believe it’s a sentiment shared by just about all religious denominations.

Only one of them can be right, or none.

The odds against this one being right is less than or equal to one over the number of competing denominations of all the religions on the planet.

Which means that church goers are keen gamblers. It’s tough to hedge this bet too.

And it also implies that only a very small fraction of people get to heaven.

Or they’re all just plain wrong and dumb.

PS this is Pascal’s wager for the gen Y’s

To counter counterfeiting why not make every banknote unique?

These days we have networks, computers, image processing and databases after all.

Then if two notes turn up anywhere in the country that have the same image then it’s red alert.

Or if a note turns up that isn’t in the database, same deal.

Of course they could do all this with the existing numbers on the notes. Maybe they do. Maybe not.

My daughter’s latest effort; maybe some talent there.

From a review of the Moto 360 smart watch …

“normally you get more than 24 hours from a charge, but with ambient mode enabled it’s closer to 18 hours.”

I have to take my watch off and charge it every night? A non-starter for any consumer that currently wears a watch.

The only people to sell this to is young ones that don’t already wear watches and don’t have any specific expectations

And maybe the word ‘watch’ needs to be dropped for marketing purposes.

PWA

The Business Council of Australia (BCA) is recommending that government focus on four key functions to secure the economic future of the nation – and here I QUOTE:

“1. The first is direction-setting. It is a role of government to set a vision for the country. This is
fundamental if we are to take the community on the difficult journey of change.

2. Secondly, government needs to develop a sector lens on the economy.

3. Third, government should use what it learns from a sector analysis to move from an intervention and subsidisation role, to a facilitation and coordination role.

4. The fourth responsibility of government is to build the innovation infrastructure needed to support the agility of the Australian economy.”

The BCA is big business in Australia, including the local arms of foreign corporations. Think of it as a jobs club for the privately schooled.

Interpreting their recommendations to government isn’t too hard:

1. Government needs to do something, anything; preferably lower corporate tax rates, reduce the minimum wage, get rid of unions, and stop new any new competition from entering our markets by surreptitious means (actually any means will do), and in a way that doesn’t piss off the voters and let Labor back into power.

2. Government needs to focus on The BCA member’s needs. Bugger the voters that they are supposed to represent under the constitution.

3. The BCA members want even more handouts from government, preferably diverted from government funds currently granted to non-business recipients so that the deficit isn’t impacted too much.

4. All of this should be hidden behind a facade of being ‘innovative’ as a nation, at least while this buzzword still has some currency.

I have chatted to some of the spokespeople that talk up this stuff.

I believe that they actually believe that they are promoting policies which are good for the country.

The rationale that they use is that ‘if business is flourishing then so is the nation’.

But not if it’s an oligarchical business environment, it’s not.

They seem totally unaware that there is not a single concrete proposal in their demands. They are floating a ‘vibe’ only. And in heavy code. Their hope is that the government gets their drift and implements the changes they want to see in the handouts accordingly.

I don’t think this will go well for our supposedly innovative but yet ‘complacent’ nation.

Just to answer the random question that came in (once and for all) …

A start-up is no longer a start-up when one of the following is true

1. It has been sold to a larger corporation or listed on a stock exchange, or

2. It is cash-flow positive and has no intention of raising funds at all or, if so, only off a bank, a PE firm, a hedge fund, or the public markets (i.e. any thing other than a VC or an Angel investor), or

3. It goes out of business, or

4. It converts to a ‘zombie’ company that just stays alive and has no chance of ever raising investor funds again

And a startup that never risks losing all of its equity investors’ capital, in order to supercharge growth, never was a startup; rather it was a small business

Noting than stimulating the metabolism is the best way to lose weight then here is a new idea for (snigger) diet chocolate:

Chocolate with guarana and lots of caffeine.

Let’s call it Blue Cow chocolate.

We will know when we have true artificial intelligence when a machine can own money.

OK, say someone invented photo-chromatic sunscreen that went either darker or lighter with sunlight intensity.

Would you want look darker or lighter out in the sun?

[Scene] convenience store.

A young bloke and I ended up admiring each other’s fixies (single speed bicycles).

“It’s nice to see someone your age riding a fixie.”

I wonder why we say ‘profoundly’ deaf and ‘totally’ blind?

I reckon it would be more intense to be totally blind.

New product idea …

I wrote an article recently which was a well thought through and a referenced effort. And yet it was only published on my own website repository (on Issu in this case), with a shorter version in an online newspaper (the Conversation) that pointed to the original article, as well as a radio interview with ABC Radio National.

Now this got me thinking – there is no formal reference to this article so it would be hard for others to cite. Sure you can use a web address but there is no guarantee that in a couple of year’s time that the web-link will still be valid or the content the same.

So what we need is a virtual online journal where people can drop their articles and get an actual formal reference that is good for all time, and also a permanent web repository for the article in addition to wherever else it is stored.

By this approach other people can actually cite these articles within (or without) the academic system if they choose to.

The problem that is being solved here is that not everyone really wants to go through the tedious process of getting an article peer reviewed in order to get a journal reference. Especially if it is a field where one doesn’t normally practice nor does one have an academic profile. But if you don’t publish it to a proper journal then it’s difficult to usefully have these articles cited; a web address or WordPress address just doesn’t cut it.

Further, content published this way could remain the copyright of the author or even convert to commons. Both are better than handing over rights to a for-profit academic journal that doesn’t even pay you for the privilege.

Going one step further, if I was writing a paper and I wanted to cite something that I found on the web, then I would like to be able to drop it into this system. For example, if I wanted to cite a Wiki, knowing that Wiki morphs over time wouldn’t it be nice to be able to automatically drop today’s version of Wiki into a service that keeps a copy of today’s version of the website forever, together with a readily usable citation reference.

One might wonder about copyright issues. Of course the whole thing would have to be commons, and maybe the physical service could be set up on a floating boat or in New Guinea just to make sure no one complains.

I imagine this service being a hosted site where you simply paste in the link to the article of interest and it’s automatically sucked up into a cloud server, bundled into some un-morphable pdf-like format for people to download, and given a journal reference. Let’s call it the Journal of Citable Internet Content.

Time for Google to step up.

Microsoft is a misnomer. They should have called themselves Macrosoft.

The latest windows update has been jamming up my laptop for 2 hours now … they got it’s name sort of right.

I prefer ‘Windows Malicious Software Addition Tool x64’

New drink. Dark rum, soda, elderflower cordial, ice, lemon and mint.

From a ‘product innovator master practitioner’ that I met today:

“Innovation without insight is invention”

What she meant was that invention is the creation of something out of nothing, and that the ‘nothing’ includes an absence of customer insights.

It’s a pretty sad statement but probably a true reflection that in Australia the concept of solving heavily-researched customer problems with genuinely new invention is totally foreign. To such an extent that the word ‘invention’ is not even understood in business.

Three interesting graphs from the US.

In inflation adjusted dollar terms, petrol prices have remained between $1.50-4 per gallon for the last century. Until 2000 the long term price trend was downwards probably representing enhanced productivity for exploration, extraction and transport. Since 2000 the price has been trending upwards reflecting the diminution of supplies compared to demand.

In inflation adjusted terms, new car prices started high at $35k in 1906 but pretty quickly dropped, and since 1916 they have been trading in a range between $10k and $25k. The slow increase in new car prices over this period represents the fact that people have been getting a lot more for their money as technology has improved over the years. This slow increase in average price has been enabled by increasing purchasing power.

I would note that Tata (with their Nano) has shown that if we built a T-model Ford today, in volume, we could probably sell it for $2k at a profit.

In real terms neither the price of cars nor petrol has significantly changed for over a century. What has changed is median income which, in inflation adjusted dollars, has gone from $10-15k at the start of the 1900’s, steadily increasing in a linear fashion to around $70k in 2004 (in the West).

So in terms of affordability the costs of purchasing and running a car have shrunk by a factor of about 7 over the last century. No wonder there is so many of them out there.

Patents again – notes to self:

The drive to patent hardly makes sense outside of the USA. So what drives companies in say Europe to file for patents in Europe?

My guesses…

1. The fear of making a mistake by not patenting. That is a fear driven by a lack of understanding.

2. Also, most companies have always patented so it’s a habit derived from older days when patenting made financial sense (from market benefits to their market share of profit margin), before the prior art documents became heavier than the planet.

3. The economics of patents are so complex that no one has ever done a proper economic assessment to show that patenting outside of the USA in the modern era really isn’t worth it.

4. Patents are an insurance policy in case anyone ever sue a company for patent infringement. A lottery ticket for an insurance against being sued.

5. It is oligarchical behaviour – the big guys patent all their inventions and then cross-licence them. The net costs of cross-licensing to their business is zero minus the nuisance cost of patenting. The patents are just a ‘coupon’ which gives them something tangible to discuss in their licensing contracts. The little guys don’t get to play and are to a large degree kept out of the market by the fear of litigation.

I have an idea for the gub’ment.

Firstly, I note that we badly need cash notes greater than $100 due to inflationary pressures, and yet they seem to resist doing this.

Why? Well large banknotes just open up greater risks of higher value transactions in the black market (tax free) & criminal economies.

My solution – why not introduce a hybrid between cash and electronic money?

That is, a banknote which is backed up by an electronic identification system. The difference between this new idea and cash is that a new owner of the note would need to notify the relevant government agency of their new ownership for it be valid currency. And this could be checked on-line by any prospective recipient of the note, similarly to how a car buyer can check a car for encumbrances on line.

That is, the note needs to be validated by identification to be usable in a transaction.

Why is this a good idea you might ask?

Well, for one it puts high value notes into circulation and we need them.

Two, it fills this void before some other non-government (untaxed) currency like Bitcoin does the job.

Competition is the mother of invention I say.

Notes to self.

1. Patent Trolls

If patent trolls are supposedly detrimental to innovation why then is the US, the only jurisdiction where patent trolls are seriously active, the most innovative business environment in the world?

People who argue that patent trolls are bad for innovation tend to focus on individual cases, or anecdotal evidence. Shame on them for missing the bleeding obvious.

2. In the UK by far the most likely outcomes of any court proceeding related to a patent dispute is revocation of the patent. How messed up is that? Why have a patent office at all?

I would like to point out to them that (a) the purpose of a patent system is to encourage innovation, and (b) investment in innovation requires certainty of patent rights, which (c) they are undermining in their own courts.

They should stop worrying about Patent Trolls and start a dialogue between their patent office and their judges.

The car of my dreams when I was 11 years old was a Ford Landau.

I just stumbled upon one at Bar Italia. Pictured below; it’s the first time in years I have seen one.

Wiki tells me that only 1,385 were made; what were they thinking? Where the business case?

Inexplicably named after an old style of luxurious horse drawn carriages first produced in Landau, Germany in the 1700’s, this thing was a beast.

It was considered an upmarket vehicle in the day. Only two items were offered as optional equipment: a cassette deck and full leather interior trim. Other that that it had all the fruit that the 1970’s could offer.

You can buy them in mint condition for around $40k. I just checked.

No. Stop it.

Why on earth does ‘earthling’ have an ‘l’ in it?

After almost two years and 85 investor updates, I finally got my bike seat.

The black molded nylon number I received is nothing like the nice marketing renderings of the red upholstered version.

My guess is that I paid 5-10 x its eBay value. And if I gave this to some Chinese boys that I know, they could have them coming off the production line by tomorrow.

However you gotta like the little arsehole indent. My design is better though (last picture below) – there’s no need for a hole.

Kickstarter 1 Max 0

One can’t help but notice the odd headline or two from the G-20, which is getting more than it’s normal fair share of press coverage, it being in Australia and all.

This one made me laugh – ‘The G-20 announces policies that will add an additional 2.1 percent to global GDP from current trajectories by 2018’.

This is the same crew that obviously planned the global economic crisis of 2008. Knock yourself out boys!

Let me furnish the interior of my heart as I please and I will wear a hat like everyone else’s

After watching three series of Borgen (the Danish political drama) I am starting to re-think our need to modify our political system. If this show is anywhere near reality (which I am guessing it is since most political drama has to survive the local sniff test) then the Danish multi-party system (MPS) system looks like a disaster to me.

Some commentary …

1. The need for constantly shifting coalitions means that politics rules over policy at all times. There apparently is never a calm moment for a government to implement an agenda.

2. As a voter you never know what you are voting for since the governing coalition is bound to be a mish-mash of policies, some of which you hate. Countering, this is a problem in our system too – at the last election, when it came down to marking the box, I found that I couldn’t in good conscience vote for any of the parties.

3. Most worryingly, the politicians in Denmark seems to dream up policy on the run whereas here the ideas go into the departments for anti-wrinkling and budgeting only to re-emerge as totally different beasts. This could be due to the small size of Denmark and possibly a smaller public service.

4. The influence of personal morals on policy. There was an episode on the laws related to prostitution and it looked as though a large fraction of the parliamentarians were quite happy to ignore facts in favour of their dearly held prejudices. This is the one aspect of our system which is quite amazing – the system’s inherent resistance to moralistic bullshit.

5. The need for every major new policy to be negotiated between multiple parties means that, as implemented, most new policies are compromised. This is fine when it’s business as usual but could be major impediment if there was ever a need for immediate and drastic action in light of a major change in the environment. Especially if that major change was not immediately apparent (like global warming for example).

6. Their queen is up the road and ours isn’t even a citizen and could resign at any minute without any succession plan. This is something we should fix.

7. They don’t have states so the national parliament is it. God help the Danes on this one. I would hate to be fully exposed to the stupidity of our national government. The fundamental issue, here, there and everywhere, is that no sane person wants a job in politics. Long hours, high stress, zero privacy, low pay, and an environment like academia that rewards the arseholes – it’s not much to aspire to and no wonder we have dickheads for political representatives. In this context, the more layers of government that we can have, the better. Sure it costs us, but the payoff is that the fuckwits all end up neutralising each other and for us this is like a useful insurance policy.

The smartwatch movement doesn’t work for me, as it is today.

The displays are too small to be useful (especially with my aging eyesight) and their presence chews through the battery meaning regular charging.

I can cope with daily charging of my smartphone and not much else. I even stopped using the Bluetooth headset because of its charging needs.

In my opinion the smartwatch should ditch the OLED or LCD screen or any other pixel-addressable display.

My ideal watch would just display the quartz-movement generated analog time – hours and minutes hands only.

Since second hands are the best way of telling you that the thing hasn’t run out of battery it needs to be there too. But the second hand would be a continuous movement only approximately associated with seconds and not connected to the quartz movement. The continuous movement makes it look expensive.

In addition all the smart watch functions (which are very optional if you ask me) such as biosensors can be built in to the thing so long as they are super low power (at least a year’s battery life is required) and this data can then be communicated to the smartphone for processing.

I can’t see the need for a return comms channel. I argue against alerts in the smartwatch – they require power, add bulk and duplicate smartphone functionality that works just fine.

And the watch needs an electroluminescent night light activated by a button push. This capability inexplicably doesn’t exist on an analog watch. If you want a night light you either get always-on optical radiation on mechanical watches (glow in the dark madness even when you don’t want it) or a nice button push, but only on a digital or analog-digital watch.

What I would like to see is a slightly over-sized watchband buckle (on the inside of the wrist) that incorporates a normal digital watch. A larger version of the one below, taking up the whole buckle surface area.

This way the buckle will be where you read the time during daylight hours and the analog top watch would be just for it’s fashion value, night time light function and its smart watch biosensors if present.

Oh, and I wouldn’t put a brand name or symbol on it – it’s much more fun if people can’t estimate the value of the thing.

I wonder why we wear watches on the outside of our wrists?

It’s much easier to read the time if they are worn on the inside of the wrist. And on the inside of the wrist, watches would be much less prone to knocks.

I suspect it’s because watches are also a fashion item and what’s a fashion good for if it hard for others to see it?

It occurs to me that the best way to automate milk foaming for coffee is to have:

(a) A height adjustment capability which varies the height of the steam wand in the milk, and

(b) A microphone that records the sound (frequency profile and intensity) of the milk foaming and adjust the height as per (a) – either built into the wand or external to it

(c) A temperature probe built into the wand

(d) Optionally an adjustment mechanism for the steam pressure in the wand

(e) Optionally an adjustment mechanism for the wand angle and position in the milk receptacle

The system would work by having one of the following:

(a) Simple rules to adjust the height according to the frequency and type of milk foam required, or

(b) Pre-recorded audio profiles for specific foam types and the height is adjusted using an algorithm to achieve this profile, or

(c) Learning algorithms to optimise all the adjustable parameters to get desired foam properties

It would stop foaming at the required temperature and foam consistency.

Note to self only.