PassWord – 21st October 2015

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Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Password Radio Show on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren, the technology show that explores explores our new connected world and gets beneath its skin. And in today’s show, it’s all about connections, whether we’re making them and at what speeds, what that can mean to us, and whether we should connect at all. We have a studio debate about broadband, certainly a more vital infrastructure project than the proposed job creation scheme known as high-speed rail. The company saying that taking our information from us to blast relevant ads to us is outdated, and another company that a week ago launched the fabled virtual assistant, the robot software system that will look after you from the cradle to the grave. And finally, for those whose heads are whirling from this talk of ultra-fast broadband and the robots that can surf across it, art is making a comeback as we begin to seek our identities not where we lost them on the web, but back in the high street. First, the internet. We all know that this world of milk and honey and mutual loveliness is fuelled on our personal information. And as we have heard on this programme, we’re beginning to become disenchanted with being the new oil. Some of us are withholding information and others are deliberately providing false data, according to the British Computer Society. It says there’s a need to negotiate a new social contract. Fortunately, there is a new breed of company coming that wants to encourage that. For those of us who are lucky to have access to a high-speed internet connection— and we’ll talk about that shortly— as the internet moves to its next incarnation, it will want to help us and look out for our interests. According to Liz Brandt of Control Shift, we should once again happily share data with the internet and move to a new world of trust with companies and away from broken banks and car companies like Volkswagen.

Speaker C: We are in the midst of a shift from a position where brands currently collect and use our data for a range of purposes, including creating the shoe haunting advert that follows you around the internet. We’re shifting to a position where the individual can control the permissions and the use of their and make that available to the organizations that they trust.

Speaker A: Can that really happen? I mean, we’ve all seen and we all know that now all of the social media companies are not really doing it because they want to make our social lives brilliantly better. The reason that they’re doing it is because they want to know a lot about us. I mean, there’s an adage that’s become almost repeated daily, which is, if it’s free, you’re not the customer.

Speaker C: Yes, and that’s down to the business model. And the only business model really that is existing at the moment inside the internet is an advertising business model, and that’s what Facebook and Google, etc., that’s the model they’re working on. And we at Control Shift have identified 13 different business models that enable the use of data in the hands of the individual, permissioned in the hands of the individual. To generate value for organizations where organizations are the center of new value that can generate value for them and their customers in 3 different ways. So enables businesses to do what they do now but better. So use my data to create new products and services that better suit me. Create a new insurance policy. Create a new insurance policy this week that suits me better, that suits the fact that I might be going sailing or that I might be going mountain biking. Create one this week that suits me. But that’s to enable them to do things that are better and then to, under the permission of the individual, monetize my data and use the data to data assets to monetize it. So share my data under my permission to enable other businesses to be more efficient or provide me with new services so that that data is monetized. And then deliver me new services, what we call personal information management services, where I, for instance, can have a service that helps me move house or helps me buy the right car or helps me find the right holiday. Just remove all the aggravation from moving house, Managing my solicitor, managing my surveyor, managing my estate agent, or in fact managing my seller’s estate agent. So smooth out that whole journey, use digital assets under my permission to make them happen more effectively in life. And we see those 3 things really driving value for organisations, whereas at the moment the only thing that’s really driving value on the internet is advertising.

Speaker A: Do I get anything out of that? Do I— they’ve used my data, they’ve monetized my data, do they give me any money back?

Speaker C: So, on one hand, they give you permission over your data. So, if they’re monetizing your data, they enable you to commission that. So, you’re more in control of that. And that might be that they’re sharing it with your local pizza company who then make sure that they’ve got the right pizzas available for the right people at the right time and right place. It’s a little bit of a distant value exchange net, but that still makes your life more efficient. And really, that piece is very much based on the fact that I might trust that organization to use data in their hands, my data in their hands, to create efficiencies in my life.

Speaker A: How do I do this? Where do I store this data? Surely I have to give my data to one company and then they give it to another company.

Speaker C: Well, there’s lots of different services. We’ve got a network of services that we’re monitoring in the market. There’s over 500 new personal information management services that are coming— that are in market, and about one new one a week that’s coming to market. And almost half of those are services that are gathering and managing and controlling data on the behalf of the individual. And they’re variously called personal data stores or personal data vaults or personal data clouds.. And an organisation that manages that on behalf of the individual creates the trusted information sharing relationship between that individual and organisations that are delivering services.

Speaker A: Well, that was Liz Brand on the new world that is being urged on companies. Leave the phone age behind and enter the information age, goes the thinking. Well, poor connectivity could be keeping us in this brave new world of technology that’s waiting around the corner. It’s a world, bizarrely, that the government wants us to embrace. He says smart cities and smart health should save money and make everyone’s life better. Where smart software looks after us, according to Geraldine McBride of Mywave. A week ago, her company announced Frank, the honest virtual assistant that’s going to be your lifelong companion. We’ve heard a lot about this, and in fact, only two weeks ago on Password, we heard about a similar system called Sherlock from Cardiff University, part of a raft of programmes like Cortana and Siri, that to work, you need to ask them questions. Frank is different. He knows what you want. And while we were told the virtual assistant was a world away, McBride is adamant it was only a week away. Here she is to tell us about it now. We did ask for Frank, but he said Geraldine would be better.

Speaker D: A virtual assistant is a piece of intelligence that actually is there to make your life easier. Now, there have been lots of early examples of virtual assistants out there, like Siri, where you talk to it and it does some things that’s not really— so effectively, you talk and it gives you something back, but not terribly useful. What we’ve gone and done is we’ve actually created a virtual assistant that’s centered on you and where you control your information, your data, and Frank, who’s your virtual assistant, is there to make your life easier. He connects you to the brands that you like. So you can say to Frank, “I want a red dress without tassels,” in natural language, and Frank will go off and find you a red dress without tassels, if that’s what you’re into. Or, I want to save money on my power bill, and Frank will automatically switch you to the very best energy price in the country. So these are the types of things that an intelligent assistant can do that’s centered on you and your data, empowering you, working with those brands.

Speaker A: So how does that work then? Surely for Frank to be effective, he’s got to know a lot about me.

Speaker D: Yes, true. So what you have is you have your data in your personal cloud. So let’s say Frank asks you, you say, Frank, I want a coffee. He’ll say, what kind of coffee do you like? And I might say, well, I like a soy cappuccino. So next time you ask for a coffee, Frank’s not going to say yet again, well, what kind of cup of coffee do you like? Because most systems in the world have no memory. Frank has a memory because he stores in his brain, inside the personal cloud, which is your data, that you like soy cappuccinos. So next time you say, Frank, get me a coffee, and I happen to be in New York, he’s going to look for places that serve a great sort of cappuccino. So that’s where, in conversation, he learns more about you. The next time you want something delivered to your home, Frank might say, well, what’s your home address? And you’ll give your home address. Next time you say you want something delivered to your home, Frank will say, well, do you want it delivered to your home? And then you’ll say, yes. So the conversation changes because he has to ask less and less about you over time because he will always remember it.

Speaker A: Isn’t that going to be a big issue? Because then Frank knows ever such a lot about me, my data’s up in the cloud, and so inevitably somebody’s going to hack that and steal my information and steal me.

Speaker D: Yes, well, we thought about that. So, so what we’ve done is we’ve encrypted all the data, uh, and the data is federated. So some of that information about me might be my bank balances and, uh, banking data that will be sitting behind a banking firewall. So we have instances of MyWave and Frank that can sit behind a banking firewall. It might be your healthcare data that could be sitting in the NHS behind the NHS firewall. And what My Wave and Sprout does is that we’re able to federate that data to give you use and control over it. You can update it through your personal cloud, but it’s encrypted in flight and at rest, and we only send tiny bits of data around in the ether. And so it’s very hard for people to be able to hack it. And we’ve thought a lot about security. That’s why using a technology that’s less than 3 years old means we’ve been able to put the very best of modern security into that.

Speaker A: Well, I mean, this sounds absolutely amazing. However, you’re going to be fighting against a large company like Google, for example, which has got huge amounts of money, very interested in sending me to various different websites so that I can get advertising directed at me because that’s where it’s making its money. So what’s to stop Google from directing Frank along the wrong path?

Speaker D: Basically, FRANK is centered on you and your data. So it’s not following an advertising model. What we do is we do related promotions and offers that are based on your control. So Google can’t get control of FRANK. And we’re different. So if you start to— to your point, when you’re interacting with Google Now or Microsoft Cortana or even some of the other assistants that are coming out there, it’s all about sucking up your data in order to be able to package you up and then sell your preferences and your likes and all the rest of it to somebody else. With my way of referring, that data is your data. We don’t often tell you, but advertising is not how we make money. And so your data belongs to you and you have use and utility over that. So it’s a secure trust network. And I often talk about, you know, let’s bring the norms of human relationships back to the digital world. And the norms of human relationships are Permission, trust, mutual value, respect, and relationships are based on conversation. So what we’re able to do with that technology is have all of these 5 elements so that it becomes like a trust network. And that’s really important. So we’re doing a lot of work with healthcare, with banking and retail, loyalty points, in automotive, many different industries and companies that get this. Realise that they’ve lost trust and they’re trying to get it back. And so they’re using my way of Frank and these norms of human relationships to stop sucking up data and stop turning me into a product and stop selling me to other people without my permission.

Speaker A: So is this the world that we are missing out on by not being caught in the web? Systems that help us and might create opportunity for us. Could we use a virtual assistant like Frank to help us build a business? Or perhaps we are taking this new connected world too far. Vika Miller is an internet-age writer and a top tech exec at DataArt who holds successful literary salons in art galleries in New York and is looking to expand her activities to St. Petersburg. And she says that art is actually the new way of being humanely connected and that people are tumbling to the fact that the internet is, at the end of the day, a bit of an empty place.

Speaker D: Why not?

Speaker E: I think it’s an excellent mix, and in fact I think it’s a mix that has always existed. It’s just being redefined probably every decade.

Speaker A: So how is it being redefined then?

Speaker E: For instance, let’s take video art, which has become something very ubiquitous. If you look at film, when it first came out, it was all done in analog and all the editing and things like that, and you had to shoot with real film, and then you were in the editing room and you could actually touch the actual film, and then you move to the digital realm and you have all of a sudden video, the video becomes digital video, and all of a sudden there is no physical component, but digital video becomes a solid player in the art scene. So what I’m saying is that all these technologies have been coming out, and actually a lot of technologies have been invented by artists. So I think it’s an ongoing sort of spiral process.

Speaker A: Okay, now I mean, one of the things that people will say is, yeah, okay, it’s an ongoing spiral process, but there’s not a lot new that’s happening, is there? You know, one of the things that we’re seeing is The main use for the internet seems to be for people to watch, as you say, to use your very good example, video anywhere that they are.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker E: Well, you know, as they say in fiction, there is really only 3 subjects. I write fiction, so they say there are really just 3 subjects that people want to read about and that writers would write about. You want to guess what they are, or should I tell you?

Speaker A: I think you should, but I bet you sex is pretty high up in there.

Speaker E: That’s right. It’s sex, death and money. So basically all the writers, you know, in every age would always have a component of that because this is what people are worried about. And I think art has always been, you know, I agree with you that maybe it’s all, you know, same old and we don’t see anything new. But I think it’s very easy to tell good art from bad art without being an expert in a sense that a good piece of artwork, whatever shape the artwork is, it helps you connect with it and with others, because I think all art is about expressing something which helps you connect with others. And in this particular age, it’s really so interesting because on the one hand we are so connected, but on the other hand we are more alone than ever because there is this illusion that we are constantly connected, but the actual connection, when you feel that you are sharing, not necessarily not necessarily physical space, but maybe spiritual space or somebody, that’s what art is. So if you’re saying it’s same old, perhaps, but if you nail that something that speaks to another person, it doesn’t really matter what the subject is as long as it evokes those feelings where a person feels, I don’t want to use big words, but say transcendent. And it goes for any work of art. It could be a painting, it could be a book, it could be a film. Something that makes you sort of linger and feel that you’re part of a bigger whole or that you’re connected to another person.

Speaker A: But isn’t that the issue? That we’re in an age that doesn’t let us linger. We’re in an age where everything is rapid-fire. How on earth are you going to make anyone linger in such an impermanent world?

Speaker E: Well, I mean, ultimately we’re all trying to, you know, we’re all going to die. I mean, that’s the big thing, you know, in art. It has always been. And I think loneliness is the next big thing. And that’s where this conundrum is that we’re so connected yet we’re so alone. And we try to, you know, that ubiquitous fear of missing out, you know, FOMO, that you’re afraid that you should be somewhere else, that you should be doing something else. There comes in Twitter, you know, 140 characters per say, and people say that people are not going to be reading novels anymore just because their brains are no longer wired to contain and process longer formats of information. And I think we have gotten to a point ourselves where there is a whole movement now where people try to disconnect and not necessarily go live in the woods and create their art there or change their careers entirely. But more and more often, even when an artist is working, you have to completely unplug from that connected world so that you can first get in touch again with yourself, and then hopefully by creating something meaningful you will again get in touch with others. But you absolutely have to disconnect, and that is an absolute phenomenon because on the one hand we want to be connected, but it doesn’t feel real. So in order to create something meaningful, people go off Facebook, cell phones, and not just for vacations, but again, to first of all get in touch with yourself again.

Speaker A: Right, well, we were hoping to bring you the Shadow Cabinet Office Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy, but unfortunately we’ve been hit by some connectivity issues. She’s had to dash away to do two votes in Parliament literally as we were about to bring her to you on the programme. But anyway, a week and a half ago, over the other side of the river from the studio here, the politicians in Westminster did debated the debacle of broadband in the UK. According to Virgin, one of the companies involved, 20% of the UK can’t get online. In South Korea, broadband speeds of 1,000 megabits a second will be possible in 2 years’ time. Here in the UK, the regulator Ofcom says that ministers are considering whether to set a mandatory requirement for being between 2 and 5 megabits in the UK. And that’s a year after they promised nationwide broadband. Hang your head in shame, Mr. Cameron, for all of your fine talk of silicon Cities, they won’t be of much use if we have to use a horse and a cart to get to them. According to some UK telecom companies, we could easily have the same speeds as the South Koreans. Well, we now have Maury Rumney, a telecoms expert for Keysight Technology, to tell us what the problems are. Hello, Maury, welcome. Hello, Pete. Hi. Maury, what are the issues that we have to deal with? Why are we so behind the Koreans?

Speaker B: Well, Korea is definitely a special case. There are factors there that make it have an environment that really means it can excel. There’s government planning involved that I think is beyond what we have here. They have a very healthy competitive environment, and their population density is particularly unusual, particularly around Seoul and Incheon. Very high density, lots of people living in apartment buildings where you can cable them up with broadband. And also Korean culture is such that they are a very connected society, not only with their broadband but also with their mobiles. So I think for many of those reasons, Korea is in a situation where they can provide some really high-quality services in terms of performance, and also they have some of the leading costs in the world. So I think Certainly a target to look at as a way things could be, although not everything that you see in Korea can easily be copied in other parts of the world.

Speaker A: Right. We were trying to actually get the minister onto the programme as well, though he would have been hit by the same votes as his shadow. But we did get a statement from them. So we have a spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport told us the rollout is going very well with an additional 3 million homes and businesses now able to access superfast speeds. Many of the projects are ahead of schedule and we are on track to reach 95% of the UK by 2017. Are we? I mean, you know, at the moment I live in a rural area. I’ve been trying to get fibre optic for a number of weeks now and people keep on turning up and giving me odd messages. Do you think that we are going to be there by 2017? Well, I think, you know, rollout—

Speaker B: the way you measure this rollout is typically in the larger cities and the big areas, and I guess it wouldn’t be too surprising if we meet some of these targets. I’m kind of more interested in this kind of last 5%, the fact that there are large parts of the country where you can’t get these sorts of services and people are really stuck. So it’s interesting to decide how do you actually measure performance. If we look at the, the international statistics, I mean, clearly Korea’s well out there in front, and it’s based on reports from Akamai. But if you look at the Ofcom’s own measure of connectivity speeds in the UK, they exceed what Korea claims. And the reason is, is how you measure it and who you measure. And the Ofcom statistics are based on measuring a small number of devices in certain places in the country. And those certainly are seeing improved performance in recent times. But that isn’t necessarily a good measure of what we’re seeing across the country. I think your example—

Speaker A: Look at some of that, Maury. I mean, look, Norwich is as parched for broadband connection as Somaliland. Some parts of the UK underperform the Serengeti. And, you know, you’re more likely to see a wildebeest than get a broadband, a good broadband connection in in some places. Why is it so patchy?

Speaker B: Well, it’s largely down to the choices made by commercial companies, and unless there’s a mandate coming from, you know, government that everybody’s going to be hooked up in a way that used to be the case with things like the, you know, the post office and wired telephones, then you’re going to see patchy coverage, in particular in the more out-of-the-way areas where the commercial aspects of providing service are still not viable.

Speaker A: I mean, that does have some big implications, doesn’t it? Because if we did go back to that system that we did have prior to privatisation, then the onus was on to give everybody the same connectivity, wasn’t it? And that would mean that lots of people would be able to work from home. So maybe that would have an impact on the housing situation we’ve got in London.

Speaker B: At the moment? Absolutely. I think we’ve kind of— we’re still kind of treating telecoms as a commercial service rather than as an essential service. And if we go back, you know, to the last century and look at what happened with things like the railways, the postal service, the telephone boxes, the wired phone services, and even things like the national grid and the water services, these were all considered to be essential services. They were managed by central government. And they were deployed nationally in a ubiquitous fashion, and it was known that the cost of delivery in certain areas was going to be higher than others, but that was accepted as a fact of life, and the government just got on and did it. Whereas when we move to the newer technologies, particularly broadband and also cellular, which is my main area of focus, we don’t have that same decision by government that we’re going to just do this in the way that perhaps the Koreans have done.. And so as a result of that, we’re now seeing this, you know, two-speed economy, the haves and the have-nots in terms of both broadband, mobile broadband, and the wired broadband. And that has big implications on the way people are working. There’s an excellent book I read recently called Remote: Office Not Required, written by the founders of 37signals, a company in America. And they point out that a number of things, that for instance, most talented people don’t all live and work in the same place, and the modern office has become an interruption factory. And when you do go remote, the most talented people can then collaborate to produce the best work regardless of where they are. So I think enabling this more rural remote connectivity in broadband and cellular would actually have a significant impact on evening out some of the pressures we have in modern society on various urban centers that simply can no longer sustain the level of people that are trying to live in them.

Speaker A: But there’s a sort of fight going on at the moment, isn’t there? Virgin have apparently been saying that they don’t want to tell the government where they’re putting in infrastructure because that’s competitive advantage for them. The government is saying, we want to know what Virgin is putting in, so that we need to— so that we can actually put in incentives for other people to fill in those gaps. Doesn’t that really mean that overall there is a need for somebody to actually start banging a few heads together?

Speaker B: Well, it does sound a bit like the railways, doesn’t it? I mean, we still have Railtrack, I guess, as a company holding together that infrastructure, but we then mess things up with the operating companies. And people are now talking about a need to return to a single nationalized industry, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be, you know, lower performing and inefficient, et cetera. I think it can be done properly. And in something like mobile broadband and wired broadband, there really is a need to do this properly. And what you’ve just described here about companies not sharing plans and that having an impact on investment levels just indicates that we really don’t have a joined-up plan right now in a way that’s going to allow us to start to even get on the list of the top countries in the world. Looking at this list here, there’s South Korea, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Ireland, USA, Hong Kong, Czech, Netherlands, Romania, Latvia, and Denmark. And the UK is not even mentioned. So if we— we do think we are a major power, what, 5th 5th biggest economy in the world, etc. You know, why aren’t we on this list of broadband supply quality in the world?

Speaker A: There is a terrible irony here, isn’t there? Because when Margaret Thatcher said that she wanted to actually privatise BT, one of the reasons that was given was the huge waiting list for phone lines for businesses. Now we’ve got a huge waiting list for people wanting to get broadband connectivity, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses, with only 50% of them in the UK having connectivity. Do you think that now, as a result of this, that connectivity should be one of the first things referred to through Lord Adonis’s new infrastructure organization that David Cameron announced?

Speaker B: Well, that would be nice. I mean, I looked at the headlines for this new infrastructure organization is Crossrail 2, HS3, and power stations. So I didn’t really see a lot of mention of broadband. I somewhat think some of those things will look after themselves, but clearly the connectivity side of things is not maybe getting the attention it should. And there is a tension between, you know, the consequences of having a government monopoly not performing. And you mentioned, you know, it used to be you used to have to wait ages for a wired telephone., and now we’ve got a private monopoly, mainly in terms of connectivity in the UK, and people are still seeing the same issues. So it’s really not so much about who owns it, it’s about regulation and motivation and policing what we want, setting targets that are sensible and funding it accordingly, and just basically planning for success.

Speaker A: Some of the companies have been saying— TalkTalk, for example— have been saying that The issue here is Ofcom itself. Ofcom’s in a terrible position being forced to regulate both Openreach and BT. It doesn’t actually work like that. And some people, Kieron Wuorla, for example, have called for Openreach to be broken off from BT. Do you think that that’s a solution?

Speaker B: Well, my views on this, I mean, certainly in terms of the cellular areas, I would like to see a single infrastructure company operating the networks on behalf of the government in a way that is properly regulated. And then we could start to see some of the economies of scale that are possible in— that we’ve seen with other industries, such as the national grid and, you know, the water industries, et cetera. So I think that’s how I would like to see it done, rather than having the competition between companies. But obviously that’s a politically sensitive point of view, but I do think properly regulated and managed, that will provide the highest efficiency solution.

Speaker A: Well, Maury, thank you very much. Thanks for coming on, and thanks for hanging on to the program. Thank you. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter. This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM.

Speaker B: If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.