Ethics Takes Centre Stage

Last night I attended an event where Ann Roberts of Badoo and Nick Lisher of Nextdoor were discussing the meaning of enterprise values and their application to governance for Digital Platform based enterprises.

In the wake of the various regulatory issues that Facebook has had with Data Privacy legislation in Europe and Uber has encountered with employment law and regulation of taxis in a number of countries and cities, including London, this was a highly relevant discussion. It was pparticulalry refresshing to hear Nick Lisher say "I find GDPR liberating." as he went on to expound the fact that Nextdoor's values and approach meant that they had not had to alter or adapt their product at all to ensure compliance, which confirms assertions that I made in an earlier post that GDPR forces you to do the things that you should do anyway. It gives a great argument to persuade finance that it is necessary to pay for them.

All in all it boils down the the issue of running a digital enterprise as an ethical concern, which is a pre-requisite that I identified in "The Way of DAU", my take on how to adopt a Business as Usual business model.

Digital Business models amplify the concepts behind customer care theory. Traditionally this has proposed that 70% of sales are repeat sales to existing customers and that it is roughly 10 times cheaper to do something to keep a disgruntled customer, by addressing complaints positively, than it is to gain a new customer. Also if you manage to delight a customer, he or she will tell 10 people and sell your company. If you annoy them, they will tell even more and damage your reputation. Badoo's business model actually relies on this, because if you successfully match someone up with another person, Badoo may lose them as customers, but they will tell everyone that it was how they met and sell Badoo positively. Conversely, there have been significant backlashes over how Facebook uses people's data, and recent slow downs in growth and consequent loss in market value, are not the first time that Facebook has suffere significant customer defections.

Google used to have a great reputation when everyone believed in its "Do no Evil" credo, but is gradually losing mindshare with significant portions of people as a result of failure to translate this into a positive corporate culture where ethical concerns are addressed and seen to be addressed by the people who work there, its customers and increasingly EU regulators.

However, whilst we were discussing this and what happens in many traditional PLCs, a penny dropped. It's not just the the Leaders of a digital enterprise who need to be focussed on instituionalising ethics as a core of company culture, but also the shareholders. The llatter need to align themselves with the long term view and how value is created. There's too much emphasis on quick results and returns and not enough on long term value and scalability. Ethics needs to be seen part of a digital business's scalability, not just the architecture of digital products and operational robustness.

UK Government Destroys UAVs' Value Proposition

The UK Government has just ammended the Air Navigation Order of 2016 to ban the use of small Unmanned Automated Vehicle (UAV) aircraft and Remote Piloted Vehicle (RPV) aircaft (sometimes referred to as "drones") near people, private buildings, airports and large public events. Additionally, there's a height restriction of 400 feet. It is also pproposing to introduce a registration and licensing scheme, backed up by "safety tests" for operators or in effect the intrduction of a driving licence.

Whilst one can understand the need to assure safety around airports and large public events, this appears to have totally destroyed any means of usefully using the technology for valid reasons.

Firstly, Amazon, there's no chance that "drone based delivery can now be introduced into the UK.

Then, the police and border security people should give up because it cannot be used for any kind of patrol and surveillance work which helicopters often use.

If you are in mountain rescue, give up, you cannot fly the aircraft over 400 feet. Even if you did and were searching for someone to rescue, you risk breaching the 50 metre proximity rule when finding the people you are looking to rescue.

Use in many applications of building and engineering surveying now risks being outlawed.

Hobbyists should give up. If the aircraft takes off or lands within 50 metres of you, its a breach and there is a risk that someone will wander into whatever remote field that you have found and create a breach of he law.

Kids who have been given small flying helicopters with remote controls, are not even allowed to fly them in their own gardens or within their bedrooms without causing a breach.

At the same time, there does not appear to be any concern about privacy in the arrangements or regulation of what is an acceptable or safe design.

Note, for heavier aircraft, the rules become more onerous...

So, this looks like a well intended piece of legislation has largely hashed the issue and broken the value proposition for everyone. this can only be due to the lack of public awareness and therefore participation in any consultation process before the regulations were formulated.

Personal Dreem Experience

So, I am midway through the first 5 weeks of using the Dreem Headset. This is the period that apparently you need to start gaining optimum benefits. This is my mid term update.

The headset arrives in a well presented package with all the extras that you need to operate it, plus a quite neat and stylish carry case. The headset itself is about as attractive and minimalstic as it coul be and definitely a quantum step in refinement from the prototypes demonstrated a couple of years ago at the Weareble Technology Show in Excel. Actually it is quite comfortable, and although I am awarw of it when in bed, it does not bother me during the night. Although, when I have been extra restless, it has fallen off a couple of times in the 20 nights that I have worn it.

It is controlled by an app on your Android or iOS phone, synching via blue tooth. Although there is a feature on the headband which allows you to start it with last used settings using a touch pad. I actually used the latter for the first couple of nights, because I had some trouble with bluetooth synching, which required me to reload the app and re-do my settings to clear the problem.

The online technical support is pretty responsive and gives good support advice.

So what is it really like to use? well apart from feeling like a character from a Phillip K. Dick novel when I wear it, it does seem to work. There's a choice of sounds that you can play to get you off to sleep, e.g. soothing harp music, trcikling strams etc. You can also activate sounds to time your breathing to slow you down and there are some meditation options as well. This does seem to be getting me off to sleep quite quickly, despite the recent torridly hot weather we have been enjoying which usually keeps me awake for ages. The sound is very quiet and is supposed to use bone conductivity to transmit it from the headband into your ears. Though my slightly deaf wife can sometimes hear them and also finds them soothing.

In the middle of the night, the head set monitors your sleep using brain wave activity and plays "pink noise" to enhance deep sleep. So far I have found out that if I over consume alcohol there is not much deep sleep, but otherwise I seem to be getting around 10-12% improvements of deep sleep.

The final interesting part is that to wake you up gracefully, you can set an alarm and it then waits until about 20 minutes before your alarm time and looks for a light period of sleep to start plying your preferred sound, e.g. frogs croaking, to gradually bring you into conciousness. It's quite an experience to gradually realise that you are surfacing in the morning.

So how do I feel. Well, it seems to be working. I don't feel as exhausted as I did and the feedback from the app encourages me to think more about positive sleep behaviour, e.g. to go to bed a bit earlier and so on. The metrics it gives you includes things like, how long you took to get to sleep, how long you slept, how long your deep sleep lasted, how much deep sleep was encouraged by pink sound stimulations and your average pulse rate through the night. There's also an overall sleep quality score and the app gives you messages on how well you are doing and where you sit with respect to typical sleep patterns.

So overall I am pleased with the purchase and think that this is a positive thing for my wellbeing.

Would I want to see some enhancements? Yes. I would like a wider range of choices for the sounds getting off to sleep and I find the sea one particulalry wierd. I would also like a built in mask or eye curtain that I could use to block out light at night, because its difficult in hotel rooms and with modern street lighting to get a completely dark room at night. I would also like to see an anit-phase noise feature to cancel out ambient noise, because the recommendation is to use head phones instead in a noisy environment, but they are uncomfortabel in bed.

However for a first generation product, this is excellent and the best praise I can think of, is that my wife wants to use it, not realising that this would corrupt the stats. So perhaps a multi user feature would be good, if only to let partners try it out to see if it works for them without disrupting its machine learning qulaities.

So if you suffer from disrupted sleep and can afford the price tag, I would recommend that you get one now.