Passion

“What is Ferrari? ....Ferrari is a dream”, Enzo Ferrari

Passion is important in anything you want to do in life. If you aren’t passionate about whatever it is your doing, you may as well not be doing it and go do something else instead: ok, so maybe this isn’t a hard and fast rule, and there are times when you are asked to do things that you need to do that you perhaps aren’t so passionate about, but lets put those to one side for a moment.

Passion is all about the absolute love of something and there is one aspect of my life right now where my passion and my love are being tested: Formula One. I am a huge Ferrari fan and have been for numerous years (certainly since I started avidly watching F1 over 10 years go), and through out those years my beloved Ferrari have largely dominated the sport, to my absolute delight. But if any team can ignite so much passion, its passion embedded deep within the scarlet ‘Prancing Horse’ team. Through ups and downs, rights and wrongs, the Tifosi (the name given to the Ferrari fans), remain loyal and stand by the team through thick and thin, the winning and the losing. Not that the Tifosi particularly enjoy losing of course, but then again, who really does?

Right now the Tifosi are being tested – Ferrari are enduring the worst start to a season in over 20 years and four races into this season, they have only scored three points courtesy of Kimi Raikkonen’s sixth place finish in the Bahrain Grand Prix. It hurts to see a team you are so passionate about struggling, especially when our former technical director – the brilliant Ross Brawn – has seemingly stepped into the breach at Honda, survived the withdrawal of the car manufacturer, saved the team and then in the midst of all that, has found time to inspire and lead his team to engineering excellence and to three wins out of four starts this season.

Issues with new technical rules regarding diffusers haven’t helped Ferrari’s cause – an area where the Italian Squad used to be so good (look at the 2004 car for example, dominant mainly because of its diffuser technology far in advance of any other team). Not that the diffuser issue can be used to explain all of Ferrari’s lack of pace. Reports were circulating that Ferrari had accused Brawn of bending the rules and exploiting the agreements between the teams on the design, whilst also ‘allegedly’ saying some nasty things about Ross’ character. As a Ferrari fan I’d be shocked if these comments turned out to be true, especially as the team were so dependant on him during his tenure at the Italian team. I for one don’t agree with those comments and still pine for the return of Brawn to the Ferrari fold, which as Brawn is now a team owner seems extremely unlikely to happen now.

But, let’s not lose sight or lose faith and hope; Ferrari have won eight out of the last ten constructors championships – two without Brawn’s leadership, demonstrating strength and depth in the team. Our worst season of late was 2005 and even then the team managed to secure third place in the championship with Michael Schumacher. Quitting is not a word in the Ferrari vocabulary and Ferrari President Luca Di Montezemelo will not allow the team to quit or falter without extreme just cause.

All around me those who so strongly supported Lewis Hamilton last year for his drivers championship have now started talking with increased vigour about Jenson Button (I am based in the UK and British drivers are of course the preferred drivers to support – especially when they are doing well). Whilst I am a bit of a Jenson supporter too, I have been for a long time, when you spot a driver with talent its difficult not to follow their progress. I also admire Fernando Alonso and believe he is the most talented driver on the grid right now. However, when asked who I would prefer to win the next race or the championship, I would prefer a Ferrari team or a Ferrari driver to win every time. I will not abandon support of “my team” just to switch to the ‘glory’ of whoever is doing well – my loyalty lies much deeper than a single season.

This isn’t the blog post I intended to write this week, but after arriving in the office on Monday morning to be greeted by the “Lewis Hamilton Jenson Button fans” and sarcastically congratulated on Ferrari’s first points of the season, I felt I had to write about the passion and loyalty of sticking to my guns through thick and thin, no matter what.

Ask me why I’m a Ferrari fan and I would probably be unable to come up with a convincing answer. Why would a Briton be such a fan of an Italian team? Would I not prefer a British driver or team to win instead? The answer for the second is much easier – I would love a British driver to steer the Ferrari to victory, however the car would have to be from Ferrari and adorned with the famous Prancing Horse logo. Ferrari is about history, it’s about passion, and it’s about winning. It’s easy to forget that Ferrari are an independent team, with its past littered with examples of beating ‘manufacturers’ like Alfa Romeo and Mercedes.

Modern day Ferrari, whilst now considered a manufacturer in its own right, they still only exist for one reason only: to go motor racing. Chassis and engine all “Ferrari”, all Italian, all for that soul purpose to its existence: to win. The expectations of the Tifosi are huge and pressured for success, but that pressure is only there because of the undying passion instilled in the fans of this great motor racing company founded by Enzo Ferrari.

That passion runs through me too and whilst I may not be able to explain it to someone (who can explain the feeling of love anyway), I plan to remain loyal and dedicated to those scarlet cars and whatever the outcome at the end of the season, I will remain devoted to Ferrari with a burning passion.

Future Banking

"Money Makes The World Go Around"

Most banks right now are in disarray. If financials and economics weren’t already confusing customers enough, an added element of which financial institutions to trust with their hard earned pennies is becoming increasingly difficult to judge accurately. We all know by now how we got into this ‘meltdown situation’ but what happens next? Where is the next paradigm shift in the banking industry?

I think the first step is for someone to create a brand customers can start to trust. Which means everything about the operation needs to be made transparent and visible to the customer – alright, your average Joe public may not be able to understand the more finer details, but with transparency, comes trust and ergo with trust, comes customers. Let Google search answer and educate on the finer points of banking for those who wish to understand the details in full blown Technicolor.

How do banks become transparent then? Easy, they go online! Of course, this has been tried before – remember HSBC’s FirstDirect was an internet bank, as was Egg and a few of the other brands which are now owned by the bigger, more traditional banks. This is because the traditional banks were slow in responding to the early waves of internet banking and were sceptical of what their customers really wanted. Who knew that customers would want to check their balance in the middle of the night? By buying these ‘online banks’, they effectively closed down the competition and built their services around them.

The problem, however, is that there are now no independent online banking institutions and with banking currently being an industry in turmoil, who would want to step up and start a new online bank right now? How would they attract customers and how would they actually run? See, any new bank start-up would have to be able to generate money and make investments and be attractive in terms of generating interest and making loans available, etc – all which is pretty tricky right now and could go wrong at any time, meaning attracting customers is also difficult and the potential of stability or collapse is no less risky than the existing institutions.

I believe there are, however, a few who could make this happen. Way back when one of the earliest web 1.0 success stories was PayPal, a ‘trusted’ company created as ‘man-in-the-middle’ to handle payments made across the internet between third parties. It’s most recognised use is on the auction site eBay for payment of goods. Look again at the services offered by PayPal today and they can now provide payment protection on your purchases! They make their money by taking a small percentage of each transaction, as any good middle-man does. However, PayPal still depends on its users linking their traditional bank accounts to the PayPal account, meaning they don’t have the added worry of looking after their customers’ bank/savings accounts; and they don’t have to worry about the added services such as loans and mortgages that traditional banks provide almost as standard now.

Google have a similar “PayPal” like service called “Google Checkout”, which operates in exactly the same way, they take small percentages of transactions between the customer and the seller. We all know that Google is a billion dollar company. Just for one moment imagine what could be achieved if Google were to start offering banking services; digitising its customer’s finances right across the board: bank accounts, savings accounts, mortgages, loans, everything.

In addition to Google continuing to operate like a traditional bank and making investments and walking that fine balancing act of picking the right companies to invest in and selling at the right times, they could also capitalise on their position as Google and do the second best thing they do and sell advertising that is directly aimed at individuals. Your latest transaction from your G-Bank account says you purchased the latest PlayStation, well, why not advertise the latest games directly to that person, providing a very convenient “Google Checkout” link directly below it, generating not only advertising revenue, but also capturing that percentage on the next online sale; money which can then be ploughed back into further investments or paying interest on customers accounts.

Google don’t have to do it all themselves though: take loans for example, there are already web start-ups out there that can match those with money to those who wish to loan money, using their clever systems they can negotiate on interest payments, duration and penalties, etc and the two parties can opt in or out of these ‘online loans’. Google could guarantee the loan repayments or act as middle-man between the two parties (taking a small cut in the interest on the repayments themselves perhaps in exchange for guaranteeing the transaction).

Perhaps it’s not all as simple as this and selling our financial data and transactional activities over to Google isn’t the way forward for some people, after all, a lot of people are already wary about just how much Google knows about us, from hosting our documents, email, searches, etc. It’s also believable that Google wouldn’t want the hassle of controlling a large number of financial accounts and having the burden of providing these banking services. So then who do we rely on to provide these; Microsoft? No, they’re not that type of company. Yahoo? They already have too much to worry about. Facebook? Unlikely, they are too young and already have their own financial worries (reportedly spending $1million a month on electricity alone). Tesco? Possibly, they are already operating savings accounts and car insurance services, plus they have the financial might to set up and operate such a scheme, but it is a risky strategy for them to diversify into an unstable industry.

What about one of the existing banks? There are some of them that are still able to pull off such a paradigm shift in the industry, but with so much attention focused on them right now, spending any of their money on branching out onto the web will come under large scrutiny and is therefore unlikely to happen.

Who can possibly make this happen then? Only one answer; a tech savvy web entrepreneur with a large amount of financial backing. Now, where to find one of those?.......

Haunted By Streetview

“What’s this ‘ere Google?”

Yesterday, as a travelled a well known route to me, I passed by a black car at around 60 miles per hour, travelling in the opposite direction to myself. So far nothing unusual, but mounted on top of said car was four panoramic cameras and situated just at the back of the car, the infamous “Google” logo. Yes, that’s right, I passed the “Google Streetview” car.

A real thrill in itself seeing the actual car in the bare metal, but some how I feel haunted by the concept of “Streetview”. It has literally followed me everywhere this week; pretty much every tech site or news website I visit these days seems to reference Streetview in some way, I visited my nanna earlier in the week who asked out right “What’s this ‘ere Google?” and after racking my brain searching Google-like through my head for the simplest explanation for a non-techie to explain in a nutshell just what “Google is”, the follow up question was even more tricky to answer - “So what is Streetview?”.

“Well”, I said “they are taking photographs of people’s streets and putting it up on the internet”, now feeling pretty smug with myself for having a simple answer that didn’t require any break down of how the internet works and how a multi-billion dollar company pretty much owns the “searching” of said world wide web. “Why?” came the next question, “errrr….” – stumped!

Seeing the actual car today, I started to ask myself the exact same question, just why are Google going to all of the effort to photograph every street right across the world? They already have, after all, Google Earth which stitches together a view of the entire planet, how much more detail do they need to provide? And to what purpose?

Sure, as the Streetview launches in each part of the world, it will attract a large audience who will search out their house and take the photographic tour of down their road…..and then go back to Faceback or pornography or YouTube. I mean, seriously, does anyone use “Google Earth” any more, except for the occasional peek to see if their house has been updated or to use some navigational tool that plugs into the G-Earth service.

Now, if the boys over at Mountain View are going to turn Streetview into some sort of real-world SatNav I can see how that might work, however will anyone want to look at a high-detailed satellite navigation device when they can just look out of the window? I don’t know, I don’t think I would, there are already far more complex ‘head-up displays’ that paint the route onto the windscreen using some virtual technology – all very clever.

So, what are they going to do with StreetView? The honest answer is, I don’t know!

Whilst we’re talking Streetview, I want to share a story with you and also point something out that I think goes against Google’s policies. First the story, my Nanna was asking out Streetview because in the local newspaper someone, massively mis-informed, had wrote a letter complaining about the service as, and I quote, would be able to go onto the internet and see if your car was parked outside your house, and upon realised you were out, you would then be burgled”.

For those who are starting to think the same thing, let me now point out that the images won’t be real-time, so if you were out on the day the streetview car goes past your house, will be the photograph that gets uploaded, they won’t send the elves round to take fresh photos every time you go out or wash your windows!

The reason I think Streetview goes against Google’s policies is thus; G’s one policy is to “do no evil” and as a result they pump massive amounts of money into environmentally friendly schemes and alternative energy programmes, etc, and one of the Google “Claims to Fame” is on their Mountain View site they have customised Toyota Prius cars, which have solar panels built into them to help generate the electricity used to power them; thus making the Google Prius more environmentally friendly than the standard Toyota model.

The car I drove past today – I may be wrong, but it was black and I think it was a Vauxhall Astra. Hardly the most environmentally friendly car on the market when compared to the Google Prius. So, how do Google justify the plethora of cars they have motoring up and down every road in the country, in every major country of the world almost?

Hoping someone can provide me with answers for Google’s Streetview, because as much as I think I like and understand the idea of it, I still haven’t been able to answer the question – “Why?”.

Pimp My PC

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I will freely admit that I’m a bit of a techie nerd. There’s no denying it, I spend my time reading websites such as TechCrunch, The Register, a number of Microsoft blogs and have been in the past a buyer of PC Pro magazine and have a small collection of techie related books.

There’s something about technology that just fascinates me, discovering how it works, understanding the processes behind the magic and being free to use software in the most appropriate way for me; to steal a Microsoft phrase, “Your Potential, Our Passion”.

Back to the point, when required, I can talk techie. I understand how hardware components work and the software utilises that hardware to have pretty good idea what each of the components are doing and how certain threads and processes are handled by the operating system, etc.

I’m not a games player, but the guys in my office are and they have a bit of a tradition of ordering and building new PCs all at the same time so they can collectively research the best options and discuss the purchase of each part to the nth degree in order to maximise and order the most effective hardware. When I, on the other hand, want a new computer, I open up a browser hit a few select websites and compare the best deals on laptops and order the first one that best meets my requirements, which also have one or two good reviews. The whole process can be done in an hour or so.

The talk in our office about component parts has been going on for weeks! It seems just about every PC customisation magazine or website has been consulted and every review and performance testing result has been sought and analysed. For me, it really is quite mind-boggling why gaming on PC’s is still big business with the rise of dedicated gaming machines like the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox360 that cost far less than the costs incurred for purchasing a machine that has been specifically designed to maximise the software and smooth running of games and the constant upgrading required to run the next game and the next game after that and the additional costs this incurs, rather than selecting a game that has been designed to match very specific hardware requirements.

Don’t get me wrong, I built my first PC from component parts and I enjoyed the process of doing so. At the time my main motivating factor was to play games (I was very young back then and knew no better, plus the “dedicated gaming consoles” were far less superior back then). But now, PC manufacturers are able to design and engineer machines that are sold much cheaper than trying to build the machine yourself, especially when balanced against the amount of time you need to invest in researching components and ultimate set ups, etc, and then still have the added costs of buying operating systems and finding the correct drivers.

Listening in on the guys in the office this week, I feel very much less of an IT geek (even though I know what they are talking about), knowing my head isn’t full of statistics on the very latest processors or memory performance actually makes me feel rather good about myself. And knowing that I’m not about to enter into an argument about which is best motherboard on the market right now is also a blessing.

The closest thing I can think of to compare the techie talk in the office of selecting components and building PCs, is those people who modify cars for fun and continue to eek out every slight performance gain from their cars, whilst maintaining that unique “look”, comparing their latest creations to those featured in the specialist magazines.

So there it is, there’s the conclusion of my week: those who customise and build PCs are in the same league as those who customise and modify their cars. They continue to search for the very unique, and are never satisfied with what they have, as there’s always searching for and dreaming about the next thing.

Me? I must be a very different techie, my laptop is off the shelf and my car is as supplied by the manufacturer. Both belong to me, both are unique to me, both will depreciate and both will be replaced over time, and probably at a much cheaper cost than the constant investment of the very latest, the minute I lose half a percentage point to the next big thing.

Beating the System on Web 2.0

For those who haven’t been keeping up, one of my most fascinating projects at work over the past month or so has been a migration from SurfControl web filtering to WebSense. Despite the hiccups along the way with the project and perhaps just a touch of frustration every now and again, I have found that this project has some interesting aspects and I’ve learnt an awful lot about just how far some people will go to satisfy their thirst for access to the internet.

I’m told the company I work for has had web filtering technology in place for numerous years and quite rightly so in my opinion, so I perhaps wrongly assumed that introducing a new system would be a relatively painless experience. How wrong.

Before installing the system, I set aside a week to monitor the types of web traffic that flowed through our SurfControl solution and using a very scientific (ok, maybe not scientific), approach set about designing the new policies that would be written in stone and govern the internet usage for all. Every aspect of the design was agonised over and cross-referenced and when the day came, I presented the new policy design to the IT Managers for approval.

Much to my surprise, the designs weren’t picked apart or vastly altered in any way, sure a few tweaks here and there where a bit of gray area existed, but all in all, a successful weeks worth of planning and design. The system could be introduced and a ‘live testing phase’ started. But this is where things get interesting.

Users accessing the internet quickly realised that their internet access was being monitored and as all seemingly clever users do when faced with something they aren’t quite sure of, being to look for flaws in the system in order to cheat and bypass their way to unrestrictive access to their favourite websites. However, I was one step ahead of them – unknowingly! It seemed that a small percent of our users knew about online proxy servers that mask the website addresses they are trying to gain access to, which provide them with unfiltered and untraceable access to just about every site they visit through the proxy pages. I was amazed to see how quickly these users adapted to their new IT networking environmental module.

Alas this is not where the story ends however, you see foreseeing that I wouldn’t be able to make every site that was available before the switch over to WebSense available and unrestricted; I built in a mechanism to allow us to “Explicitly Allow” individual websites or make them available via a limited “quota” time. Once again the users flocked to exploit the system, submitting non-work related websites to be added into these lists (I kid thee not, I’ve had multiple requests to allow toy train websites into the allowed list – who am I to judge?).

The users are all trailing in my wake however, for I am, according to the daily reports, one of the top internet users in the company, and yet I never get near to my quota. Looking at the report, my hit rate to websites is far higher than every other person, yet I still get the majority of my web content and appear only as online for short periods of time as not to raise suspicion to my ‘online’ activities.

How I do this is very simple; the majority of my favourite websites all feature RSS technology, meaning I can simply subscribe to the link (normally feedburner.com), open up 5 minutes of my quota time to refreshing my links and watch the web articles come to me. For those sites that aren’t RSS enabled, simply open them whilst the RSS feeds are downloading and open each site one by one, opening each article I want to read in its own tab in my browser. Once the feeds have been downloaded, simply disconnect from the internet, grab a cup of coffee and read away. Simple, yet highly effective – and at the same time entirely legal in regards to the companies internet policies and ‘fair usage’ for limited personal use.

On a more serious note though, I do have my concerns about web filtering and restricting our users from a vast section of the information super highway. Yes, there are sections of the internet, such as pornography (which apparently, according to Qi only makes up 1% of the entire internet, despite everyone thinking it is much higher), that should be blocked, but social networking and Web 2.0 sites, I believe need to be opened up.

As a Twitter user I find that I’ve been cut off from my ‘online world’ and my contacts and as yet-unmade connections with those who find themselves working in similar positions, with similar interests and similar problems. By making those connections, answers could be more forthcoming or gained faster or with more direct, specific results, tailored to my exact needs – completely the opposite of a standard, generic response one might find from searching Google. And whilst I’m on the subject of Google, why does my company insist on displaying the company’s corporate webpage as my homepage every time I open my browser? Today’s working environments are all built on speed and efficiency, yet every time I wish to search I have to navigate away from the forced-upon-me home page.

iGoogle could provide me with everything I ever need to know, without even having to search. Yet, the company I work for can’t seem to see past the end of its nose to realise that. Facebook (whilst I don’t use it myself), and other social networking sites are also untapped resources for information – sure if these services are abused and productivity goes down, then they need to be controlled, however I believe there is more to these sites than first appears. Linkedin.com for example is the perfect social-networking web 2.0 website that could be allowed and taken advantage of by loosening up the internet policies, and I’m sure that many others would be found if only they were able to be found by a less restrictive policy.

Nothing frustrates me more as an IT guy, a digital explorer, a web 2.0 evangelist than being restricted in my online movements and having to apply work-around solutions in order to get access to the information that most matters to me. There are better ways, if only companies would relax their heavy handed policies in favour of allowing inspiration, creativity, invention and evolution of working practices to flow in their own natural ways allowing technology and the internet to drive them forwards.

Customisation should be everything; computers are after all “personal”. As long as security is maintained and productivity continues, then I say “allow”. Screw the consequences of users being allowed to do something personal on work time, forget about enforcement of locking down desktop colours and disallowing ‘tasteful’ photographs to be placed on the desktop, open the internet up and let the users embrace. Those that abuse the system, lock down, they’ll soon change their ways as those around them enjoy their online and technological freedom.

If they then find a way around the system,....well,....then that’s just part of the game.