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?

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

There are around 1.5bn people across the world who have no way of proving who they are, according to the United Nations.

The UN believes this a such a profound problem that addressing the issue became one of last year’s 169 targets that make up the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

Right now, the UN is convened in its New York HQ with industry, government, NGOs and tech folks for the first of 15 annual meetings to work on this exact challenge.

They’ve been brought together by one man, essentially, John Edge, who’s now chairman of nonprofit ID2020 that will be used as the focus for getting the job done.

“Without legal identification people are invisible to society and vulnerable to trafficking, prostitution and child abuse,” ID2020 explains.

Already, its mission is pretty clear. By 2020, create a legal digital identity for every person without identification. If all goes well, by 2030, it’ll roll out to at least 1bn at risk people.

Now they are working out the how. No pressure.

Edge doesn’t sound like your typical world leader, not least because he’s from the North of England and still carries a certain twang.

An engineer by training, he worked as trader for JP Morgan, getting out just before the good times turned bad in order to establish his own firm, Redkite, which used existing infrastructure to spot insider trading.

This, he says, was because he was more driven by the purpose than the money. It’s also his trading past that sparked his interest in the idea he’s working on today.

Just as Jim Leman created the institutional standard FIX (Financial Information Exchange) Protocol used for most global trading by re-purposing telephone lines, Edge thinks blockchain can do something similar for the web.

“Somebody’s invented FIX for the internet,” he told NS Tech as he explained how he got to thinking that blockchain could be part of the solution.

“I started thinking about the implications for turning the internet into a system where you can verify facts and exchange things. My concern was that because of the fear of the technology, the benefits might be overlooked.”

Since 2013, he’s been building his network, talking to engineers and setting the wheels in motion for today.

He helped set up a think tank to explore the idea, which led to the production of the government’s own report on the technology by Chief Scientific Advisor Mark Walport.

Now ID2020 has been created as a facilitator for achieving the goal at UN-level, through public-private partnership.

“If we’re going to create a planet-wide system for identity – 15 years is not a lot of time,” Edge agrees, that’s why ID2020 has been founded with a “lean startup” mindset.

“If it works, it might be a model for all the remaining 168 goals,” he says.

Edge thinks that by targeting the last 1%, the ones who are never touched by traditional aid programmes, it’ll be easy to address the rest.

It’s likely that’d be through a combination of mobile devices, blockchain and AI, but Edge says this isn’t for him to decide.

“Right now we want to be asking questions. Is the technology relevant to the problem? Can we create a system leveraging new technologies that are massively scaleable to 1bn-plus people?”

The likes of PWC have already given it their backing – but Edge says he’s all too aware of the implications of corporate involvement.

“ID2020 can’t be owned, controlled or bought. You will never see – ‘XYZ Megacorp buys id2020’. The idea is not PWC’s to roll out.

“But there are kids, millions, that are in trouble and technology may be able to help – so I say to anyone – if you are able to help and are not conflicted then it’s a duty to help.

“It’s the age old problem with any new technology – can you do something with it without creating a weapon?”

He points to India’s Aadhar project which has had “tremendous volumetric success” in databasing 750 million identities.

“But what about the data? Having all that data in one place means someone could take control over it and use if for something like religious targeting.

“It has to offer self-sovereign identity to make it non-weaponisable. Your own personal data store – your data.”

This is just the beginning of ID2020’s journey to potentially solving one of the world’s most pressing problems.

The talks could come to nothing. Blockchain could be the wrong solution. The idea could fall into the wrong hands.

But speaking to Edge this week, he’s definitely determined to bring people together to try.

Good question.