Written as editor of the New Statesman’s NS Tech and first published here.

Nothing represents more of a clash of civilisations than the announcement that Google’s Android Pay has launched in the UK, followed very ceremoniously just an hour later by the Queen’s Speech.

One is all bells and whistles, following a secret press briefing in a trendy coffee shop last week, the other is all the usual pomp and ceremony. But does either have any substance?

Digital Economy Bill

The Digital Economy Bill has now been outlined as part of the Queen’s Speech and should apply UK-wide if it makes it into law.

It had been rumoured for some time and is likely to have been informed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s UK Digital Strategy consultation.

The Bill is set to mandate the right to “request fast broadband” of 10Mbps for all homes and businesses across the UK.

The government admitted in its own consultation on this issue that still one in 10 homes doesn’t yet have this service.

On the new provision, it explained back in March: “This will give people the right to request an affordable broadband connection, at a minimum speed, from a designated provider, up to a reasonable cost threshold.”

Which, in spite of the fact it could soon be heading into law, doesn’t exactly scream “we’ve all got internet now!”.

A new Electronic Communication Code proposal published yesterday should also make its way into the new Bill, promising to make it easier to build phone masts and lay broadband cable.

According to a report by O2 following a Digital Communities pilot in St Helens last year, the economy could be boosted by £1.5bn by 2020 if just 30 towns got better digital infrastructure.

Modern Transport Bill

Thankfully the Queen didn’t have to say drone or spaceport, but both are likely to get some attention in a new Modern Transport Bill. Presumably until now all government transport bills were focused on old-fashioned tech?

Government has actually been pretty relaxed about driverless car testing to date, compared to other countries, not least because it believes that those 235 hours spent driving every year could be better used for work.

It published an action plan back in February last year, where it had already established: “Real-world testing of automated technologies is possible in the UK today, providing a test driver is present and takes responsibility for the safe operation of the vehicle; and that the vehicle can be used compatibly with road traffic law.”

Motorway testing is already slated for 2017.

The Modern Transport Bill is expected to create more opportunities for investment in autonomous vehicles, plus electric cars, drones and even space rockets.

It’ll also enshrine provisions for driverless car insurance. On this, Caroline Coates, head of automotive at law firm DWF, told NS Tech: “It is not yet clear what the references to insurance will mean in practice. Does this mean insurance only for the purposes of testing or consideration of a wider government scheme for when driverless vehicles are on our roads?

“The insurance industry are already grappling with these issues – the Association of British insurers recently created a working group to focus on how they are responding and the Government will listen closely to their suggestions.”

The hugely debated Investigatory Powers Bill has made it over from the previous session of parliament. It could present a huge problem for companies that use encryption to protect their data.

Android Pay

Where the Queen was light on detail, Google has been pretty forthcoming with its plans for mobile payments.

Already people are able to leave their wallet at home if they are an Apple user, battery power notwithstanding, and today many Android users in the UK can too.

Depending on who you ask, Android has around 52% smartphone market share in the UK. That’s where Kantar had it in January, with Apple on 39%. But, as with older iOS handsets, Android Pay only works on phones that have an NFC chip inside and that’s by no means all of them. So the potential user figures aren’t exactly clear.

If you have already updated your systems to accept contactless payments, Android Pay should work seamlessly. But for users, after you download the app and start adding bank details, it only works with “eligible” Visa and Mastercard credit and debit cards from participating banks, which doesn’t include Barclays.

Android Pay also now comes as a payment option in-app for brands like JD Sport. All payments using Android Pay are of course tokenised, the industry standard security for payments.

Android Pay is launching with a slew of brand partners offering ‘Android Pay Day’ deals to customers who buy from them, the kind of targeted ads that have long been the dream of mobile loyalty believers. This really could become critical as a business tool, mediated by Google, for upselling and offering contextualised offers in a mobile payments world.

“The number of contactless card payments is set to surpass 3bn in the UK this year,” Jeremy Light, MD of Accenture Payment Services, told NS Tech. “But with mobile payment now available to more customers than ever, we can expect to see contactless payments shift from cards to smartphones in the coming years.

“For the time being, however, cash remains king among UK consumers with more than half of transactions relying on coins or notes.

“The acceleration of cash displacement can’t come soon enough for banks,” he adds “With an increase in electronic payments comes a reduction in the costs associated with handling and processing money.”

But will potential users be rushing onto Android Pay, given how much Google already knows about them?

“We’ve been weaned onto ‘tap n go’ credit cards on the high street, and plane and train boarding cards opened in emails or in apps,” says Professor Paul Springer from the University of East London, and author of Pioneers of Digital. “But with a phone as credit card it’s more significant, and instills more anxiety about security.

“How are we guaranteed that yet more personal details that link to our finances can’t be stolen, by putting all our eggs into one basket? When security measures are proven, take up will soar. Until then it may still be an uphill marketing task.”

Hence the cheeky Starbucks launch deal.

“In the long term though, it is moving towards the end of cash,” he agrees. “This is better for small businesses as it cuts out the number of transaction processes, and gives customers less stages to change their mind.

“Small businesses will still have to pay though for every transaction. The question therefore is not what it means for small businesses but for consumers, because the levy will ultimately be passed on to them.”

Google versus Queen

We’ll have to wait for more detail on what the government has planned for the UK’s digital economy up to 2020. Good connectivity for everyone is certainly something that’ll give business a nice bump and it’s certainly a long-standing item on gov’s to-do list.

Android Pay is now out in the wild and presents another pretty seamless service from Google (beyond the handset and banking caveats) that it’s very difficult for customers to say no to.

Google wins, again.

Written as editor of the New Statesman’s NS Tech and first published here.

It’s really not often an industry report will terrify you – but TheCityUK‘s new ‘Cyber and the City: Making the UK financial and professional services sector more resilient to cyber attack’ should come close.

The industry body for the City of London’s financial services and associated professions reckons we can forget the 2008 financial crisis as the key moment when the banking industry was moments away from collapsing – it’s cyber attacks from criminals to governments that isn’t being taken seriously enough in the boardroom.

“The very things that customers value – round-the-clock access their money, single sign-on, one-click purchase – have created new path for criminals and shared dependencies for the financial system,” explains the group’s chairman, John McFarlane, who’s also chairman at Barclays.

“We in the financial and related professional services sector need to act with the urgency of knowing that a large, systemic risk is upon us. That means individual firms acting to make themselves safe and ready to recover. It also includes the industry acting collectively to make the system safe.”

You only need to look at today’s ‘cyber information sharing landscape’ from the report to understand there might be a potential for things to turn bad, quickly.

To make matters worse, the chair of TheCityUK’s Cyber Taskforce Mark Weil points out that there is no potential for a cash injection from a finance minister to save banks this time.

The group gives a hat-tilt to government plans announced in March to open a National Cyber Security Centre but that’s only going to open in October.

He also states that, just as in pre-2008 when credit risk wasn’t an issue on the boardroom table, cyber is still something that’s a faraway technical team’s problem.

Fortunately, the report offers lots of practical advice, including a (it really can’t be that simple?) simple ‘board cyber check-list’.

Poppy Wood, chief of staff for London’s cyber security accelerator Cylon, told NS Tech: “We warmly welcome this report, and specifically the encouragement it gives for our major City institutions to support UK-based cyber security companies and entrepreneurs.

“As early customers and proving grounds for innovative technologies, City institutions can make a huge difference to the UK cyber sector.”

Written as editor of the New Statesman’s NS Tech and first published here.

GCHQ has only just launched a Twitter account.

You might think that it’s coming very late to the party. Or, indeed, as a historically secretive organisation, this might sound like the very opposite of a good idea.

Either way, a document has surfaced on coding repository GitHub written by three staff at GCHQ entitled ‘GCHQ: Boiling Frogs‘ that actually makes for an interesting analysis of organisational change.

The boiling frogs metaphor is a well-known one and the document has been created to help organisations that are struggling with increasingly disruptive tech change.

Change too slowly, realise to late, and you’ll be boiled alive by a more agile competitor.

“Change is never simple, and this paper doesn’t offer a quick fix, specifically it doesn’t cover how to change a complex organisation or what an end state would look like,” explains Niel Kempson, director of general technology at GCHQ.

“Part of the point of embracing this kind of change is that there isn’t an end state because change is constant.”

The paper looks at the changes needed across 11 key areas, everything from culture to big data, security and HR, in order to manage constant and disruptive change.

It even includes an internal blog post that outlines why there are actually only four jobs in today’s modern workplaces.

Download it here to see what you think.

Written as editor of the New Statesman’s NS Tech and first published here.

Mumsnet started just before the Dot Com Crash, a tech investment bubble that claimed many victims nobody cares to remember anymore.

The company not only weathered that storm, it’s gone viral more than once, made a respectable £6.8m in turnover last year and has just joined the first cohort of scaleup accelerator Growth Builder.

Co-founder and chief executive Justine Roberts spoke to NS Tech about exactly what it’s taken to get to here. And it all started with a $50 piece of forum software.

“It took us eight years to really earn enough money to pay anyone a salary,” Roberts says. “We launched before the Dot Com Crash and failed to raise investment. It was eight years before we even got a proper office.”

As with many ‘tech for good’ type ventures, Roberts admits that the idea of allowing mothers to swap wisdom was a useful one, but the “business model took a while to evolve”.

Now the company boasts 100 staff, who are a whopping 85% female, which must be approaching a record for what is ostensibly a technology company.

“We had to rebuild the site to allow us to scale – and add on all the bells and whistles that our users want. So our chief technical challenge lately has been developing in a new language, Ruby, which is more agile and enables us to offer a responsive, mobile-friendly experience.”

She says the dev team of 12 is largely male, but explains: “It’s true of most companies that it’s hard to compete with a cooler, sexier brand – but we put purpose before profit, we’re fairly out there and stand for something.

“That’s proved attractive to developers with a conscience.”

Penis Beaker?

The company’s chief technical challenge three years ago was managing the backend when things scale or indeed, go viral. Penis Beaker, where a member rather bravely asked the crowd about a weird routine her and her husband have, was that moment.

“They are the things that you can’t plan for. But we have since overhauled our systems so we’re now using multiple servers where space can be added on as we need it.

“Penis Beaker broke Mumsnet,” she admits.

Times have changed and the company is now smashing out great apps as soon as an interesting demand arises.

Mumsnet launched three in the last year alone, one for pregnancy, one for when your baby is born and one for accessing that rather infamous forum.

Unlike Facebook, which has begun to insist that users use real names in order to sell ads, Mumsnet allows anonymity.

“Our users say this actually allows them to be more honest, more yourself than under real names. We try to intervene as little as possible – and mainly ask people to be civil to each other.”

Mumsnet now has a full-time team of community managers who are on the look out among the 30,000 posts made per day for comments that break the law – whether they’re racist, homophobic or transphobic, for example.

“But the users are our police people, really” Roberts says.

The company makes money by helping corporates to reach its audience, which is around 85% female, whether that’s through market research, advertising or sponsorship.

But it’s taken a strict stand against Nestle, for example, for its “aggressive marketing of formula [milk] in breach of international standards,” as well as saying no to payday loan ads.

Biscuitgate?

Although politically independent, Mumsnet has taken up a number of different campaigns that its members have felt strongly about, from abortion care to lads mags.

Mumsnet’s Webchat has also become a “rite of passage for any self respecting politician” after David Cameron first took up the opportunity to speak to British mums in 2006.

Gordon Brown famously appeared to refuse to answer the question when asked about his favourite biscuit in what some newspapers dubbed ‘the Mumsnet election’.

“‘I just hate the way that politicians dodge all the important questions,” one member joked.

Roberts actually puts ‘Biscuitgate’ down to the fact that the then-PM was too busy broadcasting what he wanted to say, rather than talking with his audience.

Obviously there were many other factors at play, but in 2010 the Labour Party lost a huge number of votes they could usually expect from women.

International expansion

Mumsnet is now a strapping 16-year-old company, as well as a pretty powerful voice for parents in the UK, and its next step is global expansion.

It already has users all over the world, but it’ll soon be working with experienced international outfits as part of Growth Builder to work out how to create proper, hyperlocal online communities.

“We’ve got hard-earned experience that it takes a long time to build a genuine online community so we’re hoping to learn from other people about going international, to avoid some of the pitfalls.

“This is going to be bottom up, not top down – we’re not just going to open an office in New York tomorrow.”

Mumsnet has brought a simple idea to life and actually turned ‘tech for good’ into a proper business.

Most tech companies fail to target their products to or hire women into their team, where Mumsnet is positively built for them.

Written as editor of the New Statesman’s NS Tech and first published here.

Remember when Canadian PM Justin Trudeau batted right out of the park the suggestion from a reporter that he might not understand quantum computing?

Yeah, his simple explanation was pretty impressive on the fly, but we wanted to find out a bit more about what quantum computing really is – and what it isn’t.

Luckily, IBM has just launched a cloud-based platform so anyone can try quantum computing.

NS Tech caught up with Dr. Andreas Fuhrer, quantum scientist at IBM’s Research in Zurich, to talk about the facts and the legends surrounding this new technology.

That thing Justin describes is called ‘quantum parallelism’

So we all know that classical computer bits are either 0 or 1, on or off, current or no current. Well, the ‘quantum parallelism’ of qubits means they can hold many states at the same time.

“Imagine – a classical bit is planet like earth – 0 would be the south pole and 1 would be north,” Fuhrer explains.

“With a quantum bit, you can be everywhere. The number of configurations is much, much larger. They’re not physically smaller – it’s just quantum bits can hold much more information.”

You can’t touch a qubit

Trouble with qubits is, if you try to measure one to see what state it’s in, it loses its information.

You can, technically, touch them. Indeed a single, tiny qubit will fit right in your hand at about a third of a millimetre. But you shouldn’t. It’s broken the moment you do.

“For that not to happen – we’ve had to create a scheme that can correct for errors – and to do that, IBM is working on a five qubit basic unit,” he says.

“Four of those qubits contain information – but the central one is used just to measure the parity – checking whether all of them are in the same state. We don’t actually measure the state, just the error.”

In fact, if you touched it right now, you’d probably die

“That’s one of the reasons why they have to be at very low temperature in an extremely protected environment,” Fuhrer says.

“IBM’s qubits are kept at -273 degrees celsius – absolute zero – inside a really big, five-layer thermos.”

The scientists there manipulate the qubits using electric signals. So, it won’t replace your laptop, unless you have an appetite for cold.

But it is definitely better at some stuff than a computer

If you put together IBM’s 5 qubit units to make a 100 qubit system you would need a computer the size of the universe to hold that same data processing power.

“There are some applications where we already know a quantum computer would be exponentially faster than a classical computer,” he explains.

“There are certain problems in nature at microscopic scales – individual molecules and atoms – where you can’t currently describe what’s happening exactly, you rely on approximations.

“Using a quantum computer you could emulate and learn something about novel molecules, which will aid in drug and materials discovery.”

But it’s really not the computer to end all computers. “It will be able to tackle some of the problems it’s difficult to tackle with a classical computer, and faster, but some would be cheaper to still do with a classical computer,” he adds.

So, it won’t be your next laptop – will you ever get to use one?

Yes and no. The experience will be not unlike using a super-computer today – a cloud-based service, accessed over the internet. You’ll add your calculation to a queue, then get an email when it’s done and the results are ready to be retrieved.

But even in five to 10 years, the system would still fill a small room. So why all the noise around quantum computing if most of us will never use it?

“There are several reasons why we wanted to open our platform up to the public,” Fuhrer explains.

“A lot of people don’t know what it is, think it’s mysterious or unclear, but have heard it’s emerging. Now people have a place where they can play around with a real system.

“That could be educational institutions, particularly for those who are exploring careers as quantum scientists.

“Also small companies that could deliver a product to be used by quantum scientists or uses quantum technology.

“We hope to foster a community of people that are active in this field – to spark new ideas that use quantum in the market.”

If you fancy yourself as the next Dr. Andreas Fuhrer, or even if you’re more of a Justin Trudeau, you can head to IBM’s Quantum Experience right now, from the comfort of your own home.

Written as editor of the New Statesman’s NS Tech and first published here.

Apparently, it’s a yes, if you check out the latest figures from TalkTalk.

It suffered a cyber attack last year that saw 160,000 accounts accessed, with 21,000 bank account numbers and sort codes stolen. And it’s now revealed it lost 101,000 customers following the breach.

Its profits also more than halved in 2015 compared to the previous year – from £32m to £14m. Customer dissatisfaction, it seems, plus a massive payout for new, secure infrastructure, can hit you right in the wallet.

I really wasn’t convinced. People say they’ll boycott companies for all sorts of things: Apple because of how it treats Chinese workers, Google because of its visibility on data, Starbucks and Amazon because tax, McDonalds because it’s gross…

But can you really say you’ve never woken up on a Sunday morning with an empty Big Mac box next to you on the sofa?

New research from cybersecurity software firm FireEye appears to comfirm this increasing public awareness of shoddy data security.

The company found that in a survey of 1,000 UK consumers, 72% said they would boycott a brand because of a data breach.

Customers are already starting to withhold personal data, according to the survey, 62% refuse to hand over details to brands to prevent it from being mishandled.

As many as one in 10 actually said that data security is now their main consideration when purchasing goods or services.

Just over half of those surveyed also claimed they would even take legal action if their data was stolen.

This should be a bit of a wake up call to those businesses who have not yet suffered reputational damage from a data breach.

In Monday’s release of the government’s annual Cyber Security Breaches Survey, just 4% of more than 1,000 businesses asked said that a cyber attack had harmed their reputation.

But a staggering 90% of large firms and 74% of SMEs said they had suffered a data breach in the last year.

There won’t be any firms left to boycott if we continue to see figures like these.

Written as editor of the New Statesman’s NS Tech and first published here.

Compliance and risk aren’t exactly the sexist topics – but you’ll certainly feel the full force of the law if you’re making a big business transaction and something goes wrong.

London’s DueDil has been working since 2011 to make private business information, like that contained over Companies House, actually useful to business professionals.

It’s now added an Ownership hub to its data visualisation platform, making it simple for you to view corporate governance data for companies you may be thinking of getting involved with.

Many companies now have complex shareholder structures, but DueDil has made its new interface easy to see who owns what.

When trying to make connections between owners, shareholders, investments and subsidiaries, it now gives a ‘confidence score’ for related companies, even where there is not always a clear link.

We had a demo of the updated tool here at NS Tech and it beats the PDF-based system at Companies House hands down.

You can get a free trial of the DueDil Platform now and, just for fun, you can even use it to find out more about who owns DueDil.

Written as editor of the New Statesman’s NS Tech and first published here.

You might have guessed that a tech startup led by a lord, and one who used to be science and innovation minister in the UK government, could be one to watch.

Drayson Technologies, named after its CEO Lord Paul Drayson, is certainly more than its rather innocuous name suggests.

The six-month-old startup is using our love of devices to power the “third wave of internet connectivity”. That’s the Internet of Everything, to the uninitiated.

And it’s is actually deploying 60-year-old technology to do it.

“Our energy consumption, because of all our connected devices, is going up,” Drayson tells NS Tech. “That’s in spite of the fact that the efficiency of microprocessors is getting better.

“But manufacturers are recognising how important energy is – every joule has to be provided by a battery, which takes up precious space, and frankly there’s not even enough lithium left to power all of these batteries.”

Today, there’s unused energy leaking from the radio wavebands that power our cellular networks – particularly those that are less heavily used today, like our old pal 2G – as well as those that make Wi-Fi work.

Drayson’s tech, Freevolt, uses “radio frequency harvesting technology” to capture and recycle that waste – which then powers other connected devices, namely sensors, beacons and wearables measuring anything from temperature to movement.

Because these devices are now being powered by waste energy, you don’t have to recharge them – particularly good if you’re deploying sensors in hard-to-reach places.

The pilot, powered by the company’s CleanSpace tag, has created an IoT network that measures air pollution, something that’s increasingly concerning for individuals, employers and cities alike.

“Technology does offer, for the first time in humankind’s history, a genuine opportunity to connect people and things – so you can show that collective action makes a difference, Drayson says. “That’s what excites me.”

This is also a fine example of a good British idea, as it came out of Imperial College, has been designed in London and is manufactured in the UK.

But because the company started with the principle that this has to work globally – to scale, as the startups call it – it’s designed to global standards and can work anywhere. That’s why the company has pretty quickly been able to start rolling out internationally.

“Most business people will have been aware that this third wave was coming and wondering how it’s going to affect their business,” Drayson adds. “That’s why we’re working directly with them yo explore how this is relevant for their business, in anything from transport to consumer products.”

The £8m cash, which is part of £26m raised to date, will be used to further develop and commercialise Freevolt.

Written as editor of the New Statesman’s NS Tech and first published here.

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that being ‘always on’ might not exactly good for your health or well-being.

Well, the French government is about to vote on a long-standing plan to force companies to let their staff properly switch off from work.

Businesses with more than 50 workers will be obliged to draw up a charter that outlines when people are free to ignore emails, typically at evenings and weekends.

The plan was apparently borrowed from telecoms giant Orange, whose CEO for Middle East and Africa Bruno Mettling has voiced concerns about staff working while supposedly offline.

The ‘disconnection clause’ is part of the new French labour lawthat also plans to extend the standard working week from a rather gentle 35 to a pretty brutal 46 hours.

So, would you be happy to switch off so you can enjoy your evenings and weekends – or would that feel more painful than working 24/7?