FEATHERS

Magic mirror experiments

In 2014 I went to see the Digital Revolution show at the Barbican and was struck by a large...

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FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Global partnerships and connections

I've had a few nerve wracking road trips in my life, but a dawn taxi ride to the Cairo airport is...

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STORYTRACK

Photo album tablet

People tell stories as they look at photos together: grandmothers, grandsons, and everyone...

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BEACHSPOTTER

All the world's beaches

It was the time of Google Maps appearing on the scene, mashups, and web 2.0. We'd spotted a...

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CHERRY TREE

Ambient visualisation

I watched a talk by the great Edward Tufte where he mentioned the idea of using elements of the...

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ZOOMY MAP

Kid's travel planning

The bane of every parent's life is that book their little kids really love, the one you have...

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WORLD HIERARCHY

A page for everywhere

Chip Steinmetz was a larger-than-life character who had come to lastminute.com from Disney to...

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SCIMMER

Mobile robots navigating

I remember trying to make the damn robot go down the hallway in the computer science department...

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COUNTING BREATHS

Real-world digital biomarkers

Sending the clinicians to the toilets to remove their shirts and try out home-made iPhone...

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MOODY COW

Top secret flop

If you never make mistakes you never learn anything, and we certainly made a lot during this...

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SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE

Visualising world population

Sense of Perspective is a circle of lights showing global birth and death rates, in 60 directions...

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THE NEST

Creating innovation culture

Sparking creativity and innovation in a large corporation can be a lonely and uphill struggle, but...

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THEATRE CLUB

Group discounts on Facebook

Our colleague Jay Fichialos at Sabre in Texas had started doing...

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RADAR

Browser geolocation

lastminute.com had a long history of recommending nearby products based on mobile location, so it...

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SATCHEL

Mobile document store

You know you're working in an R&D lab when you're making a device whose two commands are...

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FONEFOOD

Mobile restaurant bookings

The iPhone is out, browsers on phones are getting serious, the App Store is launching. What...

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PIT STOPS

Starting an innovation business

Digital Catapult was funded by the UK government on the basis of a business plan, and that plan...

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FAB

Recommending pages

Do you remember the early World-Wide Web? When this work started there were under a thousand...

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CATAPULTING

Accelerating technology adoption in the UK

Our mission at Digital Catapult was insane: impacting the UK economy through driving faster...

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CLOUDS

Fridge Dashboard

I don't know what it is about internet-enabled fridges. It's been such a long time we've been...

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STATE

Global opinion network

Some ideas are so right you know they will succeed one way or another. Even during the early years...

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NHS DIGITAL BOARD

National health IT & data services

Writing this at the end of 2021, after five years as a 'NED' (non-executive director) on the NHS...

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HOME HACKS

Instrumenting the kitchen

I'll have to admit I've always wanted to have a house full of contraptions. Despite managing to...

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FLUTTER.COM

First betting exchange

In retrospect I should have known better. I was the 8th employee of a very stealthy startup, and...

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FISH STICKS

Teaching interaction design

You never learned as much taking a class as you did helping teach one, and I felt very lucky to do...

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SPLITTER

Clustering news articles

It was one of those endless summers, like you remember from childhood, except with more maths....

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BET2GO

WAP and SMS betting

Successful technology innovations are often the final step in a chain of trials and errors...

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AI POLICY

Infiltrating the corridors of power

I was sat on a leather bench in an enormously long wood-panelled hall, waiting for my turn to give...

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TOPSEE

Nearby top things to see

A personal favourite project: Topsee synthesized many ideas across a half-dozen-strong...

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TEENWAKER

Chatting to your alarm clock

Every morning at 6:45 my alarm wakes me. Not because I need to get up at 6:45, but so that I in...

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MARTIAN COMMUNICATOR

Tiny touchscreen interfaces

The Xerox EuroPARC lab in Cambridge was a heady mix of Wallace and Gromit-style crazy...

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CUSTARD PIE

Text adventure

"You are in a comfortable coffin, lined indulgently in red silk. The coffin is buried six...

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SNAFFLE

Mobile vouchers

Snaffle was an attempt to boil down an online travel business model to the absolute bare minimum -...

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PRONTO

Typing your search

When he isn't telling bad jokes Chris can be prodigiously creative, and I'm fairly sure Pronto...

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SLIDER

Personalised news

So it turned out computers could be pretty dumb. You enjoyed that article about beach...

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WHAT THE FLUTTER

Not quite viral

Vince, one of the three founders of flutter.com, had a ridiculous number of siblings, a penchant...

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TICKET APP

Very last minute theatre tickets

The idea of tickets had bothered me for a while. We all understand ecommerce - you go to a site,...

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UMBRELLA

Email warnings

Palo Alto before the dot com boom was already transitioning: prices going up, money moving in....

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POROUS BOUNDARIES

Connecting academics and startups

Stanford is the poster child for porous boundaries between universities, startups and bigger...

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RECENTLY VIEWED

Profitable personalisation

Every time I met my friend Antony for a drink he'd say "You still working on that little...

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BERTIE

Solving tangram puzzles

After a couple of summers working in the massed battleship of concrete by the Thames that was...

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POLO SEARCH

Radial date selection

Only once in my life have I been involved in a project that made a test user feel physically...

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TOUCHVERSE

Audio + pointing messages

Greg Wolff definitely had the most accurate frisbee throw of anyone I've worked with, having been...

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NRU

What's that way?

The most fun days in an innovation or R&D team are those when a team-mate comes along with a...

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