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4 episodes with uswitch
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2 episodes with uswitch
2 episodes with uswitch
Organisational effectiveness isn't just about making team members more productive, but [roperly structuring teams and understanding how they work together.Small teams with high trust can make decisions quickly and maintain better context of what they're building, while being mindful of the cognitive load placed on members.Matthew Skelton is the author of Team Topologies. He developed patterns for team organisation and devops that were adopted by companies like Netflix and Accenture. His work focuses on how to structure teams effectively in organisations, particularly looking at concepts like team cognitive load and team interaction modes.Three reasons to listenLearn how small teams can achieve faster results and deliver value more effectively to usersUnderstand the principles behind Amazon's "two pizza team" approach, including how trust enables quick decision-making in small groupsDiscover how organisations often lack self-awareness and how this becomes a major obstacle to their successEpisode highlights[00:11:47] The road to Team Topologies[00:17:18] Why collaboration is not the only answer[00:22:05] Creating flow for small teams[00:23:34] Making work humane[00:28:10] The Uswith example[00:30:45] Alternative schools of thought[00:34:56] Impact on team leaders[00:37:31] Conway's law[00:40:48] Decoupling of teams and architecture[00:46:08] Matthew's media recommendations[00:48:59] Takeaways from Pia and DanLinksTeam Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow –Matthew's bookThe jazz ensemble: the ultimate team? – We Not MeTeam Topologies' Uswitch case studyConway's lawEmpowered Agile Transformation: Beyond the Framework, by Alexandra StokesArchitecture Modernization, by Nick TuneFrozen II (2019)Leave us a voice note
Elise Melville, an energy expert from uSwitch, joins presenters Cath and Karen to discuss uSwitch's research titled "Pulling the Plug," which examines how rising energy prices are changing people's behaviour. The study reveals that one-third of people in the UK have stopped having baths entirely due to increased energy costs, while two-fifths have reduced their shower time. Elise also shares uSwitch's tips for showering more efficiently.
Unlock the secret to elevating your site's credibility and watch your SEO soar with innovative link-building through the power of awards. With two decades of experience under my belt, I'm peeling back the curtain on how cleverly crafted awards can catapult your website into the limelight, as we explore the lesser-known strategies that top industry players use to gain those precious backlinks.In this episode, we're steering clear of the beaten path and venturing into the world of creating your very own awards for backlink success—a tactic that has propelled brands like uSwitch.com to SEO stardom in the UK. Not only does this method bolster your authority, but it also attracts links from industry titans, turning your brand into an awarding powerhouse. So tune in and equip yourself with the practical tips and real-world examples I've amassed, ensuring your link-building efforts are not just effective, but award-winning.SEO Is Not That Hard is hosted by Edd Dawson and brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUse.comYou can get your free copy of my 101 Quick SEO Tips at: https://seotips.edddawson.com/101-quick-seo-tipsTo get a personal no-obligation demo of how KeywordsPeopleUse could help you boost your SEO then book an appointment with me nowAsk me a question and get on the show Click here to record a questionFind Edd on Twitter @channel5Find KeywordsPeopleUse on Twitter @kwds_ppl_use"Werq" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
------------------------------- 通勤學英語VIP加值內容與線上課程 ------------------------------- 通勤學英語VIP訂閱方案：https://open.firstory.me/join/15minstoday 社會人核心英語有聲書課程連結：https://15minsengcafe.pse.is/554esm ------------------------------- 15Mins.Today 相關連結 ------------------------------- 歡迎針對這一集留言你的想法： 留言連結 主題投稿/意見回覆 : ask15mins@gmail.com 官方網站：www.15mins.today 加入Clubhouse直播室：https://15minsengcafe.pse.is/46hm8k 訂閱YouTube頻道：https://15minsengcafe.pse.is/3rhuuy 商業合作/贊助來信：15minstoday@gmail.com ------------------------------- 以下是此單集逐字稿 (播放器有不同字數限制，完整文稿可到官網) ------------------------------- Topic: A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry Twirling above a strip of land at the mouth of Rotterdam's harbor is a wind turbine so large it is difficult to photograph. The turning diameter of its rotor is longer than two American football fields end to end. Later models will be taller than any building on the mainland of Western Europe. 鹿特丹港口一處狹長土地上，有座風力發電機在轉動，規模大到難以近距離拍攝，葉片旋轉直徑比兩座美式足球場接起來還長，日後更新版的風機將比西歐大陸上任何建物都高。 Packed with sensors gathering data on wind speeds, electricity output and stresses on its components, the giant whirling machine in the Netherlands is a test model for a new series of giant offshore wind turbines planned by General Electric. When assembled in arrays, the wind machines have the potential to power cities, supplanting the emissions-spewing coal- or natural gas-fired plants that form the backbones of many electric systems today. 這個位於荷蘭的巨型旋轉機器，是奇異公司所規畫新系列巨型離岸風機的測試模型，配備了收集風速、電力輸出及各零件所受應力數據的感應器。這些風機若以陣列布建，具備為城市供電的潛力，取代大量排放廢氣、組成當今許多發電系統骨幹的燃煤或燃氣發電廠。 GE has yet to install one of these machines in ocean water. As a relative newcomer to the offshore wind business, the company faces questions about how quickly and efficiently it can scale up production to build and install hundreds of the turbines. 奇異公司尚未在海上安裝此類機器。奇異在離岸風電業堪稱新兵，面臨的問題是，能多快、多有效地擴大生產規模，以建造並安裝數百座風機。 But already the giant turbines have turned heads in the industry. A top executive at the world's leading wind farm developer called it a “bit of a leapfrog over the latest technology.” And an analyst said the machine's size and advance sales had “shaken the industry.” 然而這種巨型風機已在業界引起轟動。全球頂尖風場開發商的一位高管稱其為「超越最新技術的一次飛躍」。一位分析師表示，這款機器的尺寸與預售量「撼動了整個產業」。 The prototype is the first of a generation of new machines that are about a third more powerful than the largest already in commercial service. As such, it is changing the business calculations of wind equipment makers, developers and investors. 這是新世代風機的第一個原型機，新世代風機功能比已在商業運轉的最大風機還要強三分之一左右。因此，它正在改變風力設備製造商、開發商與投資人的盤算。 The GE machines will have a generating capacity that would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago. A single one will be able to turn out 13 megawatts of power, enough to light up a town of roughly 12,000 homes. 奇異的風機將具有十年前幾乎無法想像的發電能力，一座就能產生13百萬瓦電力，足夠點亮約有1.2萬戶家庭的小鎮。 The turbine is capable of producing as much thrust as the four engines of a Boeing 747 jet, according to GE, and will be deployed at sea, where developers have learned that they can plant larger and more numerous turbines than on land to capture breezes that are stronger and more reliable. 奇異表示，這種風機能產生相當於波音747飛機四具引擎的推力，將部署在海上，開發商已經知道在海上能安裝比陸上更大也更多的風機，以捕捉更強也更可靠的風。 The race to build bigger turbines has moved faster than many industry figures foresaw. GE's Haliade-X generates almost 30 times more electricity than the first offshore machines installed off Denmark in 1991. 建造更大風機的競賽步調比許多業內人士預測的要快。奇異的Haliade-X風機，發電量幾乎是1991年安裝於丹麥近海的第一座離岸風機的30倍。 In coming years, customers are likely to demand even bigger machines, industry executives say. On the other hand, they predict that turbines will reach a point at which greater size no longer makes economic sense. 業界高層表示，未來幾年顧客很可能要求更大的機器。另一方面，他們預測，風機遲早會來到再大就不合經濟效益的時刻。 Source article: https://udn.com/news/story/6904/5180307 Next Article Topic: A Scary Energy Winter Is Coming. Don't Blame the Greens. Every so often the tectonic geopolitical plates that hold up the world economy suddenly shift in ways that can rattle and destabilize everything on the surface. That's happening right now in the energy sphere. 有時候，承載世界經濟的地緣政治板塊會突然移動，把地表每樣東西搖得嘎嘎作響。這種事現在就在能源領域發生。 Several forces are coming together that could make Vladimir Putin the king of Europe, enable Iran to thumb its nose at America and build an atomic bomb, and disrupt European power markets enough that the upcoming United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, could suffer blackouts owing to too little clean energy. 有幾股勢力正在匯聚，能使俄國總統普亭成為歐洲之王，使伊朗有本錢不把美國放在眼裡，進而造出原子彈，並足以打亂歐洲能源市場，讓即將登場的英國蘇格蘭格拉斯哥聯合國氣候大會可能會因為潔淨能源太少而停電。 Yes, this is a big one. 沒錯，問題很大。 Natural gas and coal prices in Europe and Asia just hit their highest levels on record, oil prices in America hit a seven-year high and U.S. gasoline prices are up $1 a gallon from last year. If this winter is as bad as some experts predict — with some in the poor and middle classes unable to heat their homes — I fear we'll see a populist backlash to the whole climate/green movement. You can already smell that coming in Britain. 歐亞兩洲的天然氣和煤價剛剛達到史上最高，美國原油價格創七年新高，而汽油價格每加侖比去年上漲1美元。如果今年冬天跟一些專家預測的一樣糟，一些貧窮和中產階級人家負擔不起取暖費用，我擔心會出現針對整個氣候和綠能運動的民粹反彈。在英國已經可以嗅到這個跡象。 How did we get here? In truth, it's a good-news-bad-news story. 我們怎會走到這一步？其實，這是個好消息壞消息都有的故事。 The good news is that every major economy has signed onto reducing its carbon footprint by phasing out dirtier fuels like coal to heat homes and to power industries. The bad news is that most nations are doing it in totally uncoordinated ways, from the top down, and before the market has produced sufficient clean renewables like wind, solar and hydro. 好消息是，每個主要經濟體都已同意，透過逐步淘汰煤炭這類比較髒的燃料給家庭取暖和給產業供電，減少碳足跡。壞消息則是，多數國家這麼做的時候完全沒有互相協調，由上而下執行，而且市場還沒製造出足夠多的風力、太陽能和水力等清潔能源。 But how did the bad-news side of this story emerge so fast? 這個故事的壞消息面為何這麼快出現？ Blame COVID-19. First, the pandemic erupted and signaled to every major economy that we were headed for a deep recession. This sent prices of all kinds of commodities, including oil and gas, into downward spirals. 要怪新冠肺炎。首先，疫情爆發，對每個重要經濟體而言意味我們正走向深度衰退，使原油、天然氣等各類大宗商品價格走軟。 This, in turn, led banks to choke off investment in new natural gas capacity and crude wells after seven years of already declining investments in these hydrocarbons because of lousy returns. 這進而使銀行停止投資擴充天然氣產能和油井。銀行已減少投資這些碳氫化合物達七年，因為報酬率很差。 As Bill Gates points out in his smart book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” the only way to reach our climate targets is to shift production of all the big heavy industries, like steel, cement and automobiles, as well as how we heat our homes and power our cars, to electricity generated from clean energy. Safe and affordable nuclear power has to be part of our mix because, Gates argues, “it is the only carbon-free, scalable energy source that's available 24 hours a day.” 就像微軟創辦人蓋茲在他那本睿智的書「如何避免氣候災難」指出的，達成氣候目標的唯一方法是，改變所有重工業如鋼鐵、水泥、汽車業等的生產方式，以及我們在家取暖和為愛車提供動力的方式，轉而用潔淨能源發電。蓋茲主張必須接納安全可負擔的核能，因為「這是唯一不產生二氧化碳又能擴增的能源來源，每天24小時供應」。Source article: https://udn.com/news/story/6904/5820545 Next Article Topic: Londoners are better off returning to the office as bills soar City of London workers looking to save money may want to embrace the office over winter as the cost of working from home soars alongside energy bills. 在家工作的成本隨著能源費用的飆升一起上漲，因此到了冬天，想要省錢的倫敦城上班族可能會希望進辦公室上班。 Those prepared to go into the office every day could save about €50 (US$60) per week in January 2023 if they can walk, run or cycle into their workplace. That's thanks to the money they've saved by not heating a home for the whole day, according to estimates by price comparison site Uswitch. 公室的人若可以走路、跑步或騎自行車到工作地點的話，在二○二三年一月，每週可節省約五十英鎊（六十美元）。根據價格比較網站Uswitch的估計，他們之所以省下這些錢，是因為家裡整天都不開暖氣。 Those working from home in January could expect to pay around €175 a week in energy costs and other incidentals included in Bloomberg's calculations such as buying in your own coffee, a freebie in many offices. The combined cost of energy bills — factoring in the lower consumption expected — and five return trips on the Tube from London's Zone 4 would be about €160 a week in January 2023, a €15 saving. 一月份在家工作的人預計每週要支付大約一百七十五英鎊的能源費用，以及彭博社所計算出的其他雜費，例如自費買咖啡——很多辦公室會免費供應咖啡。二○二三年一月能源帳單的總成本（以預期較低的花費計算），加上由倫敦第四區坐地鐵來上班來回五次，每週將花費約一百六十英鎊，因此跟在家工作相比，到辦公室上班節省了十五英鎊。 For those taking the bus, the total cost is about €140, a €35 weekly saving. In both cases, any rise in the cost of the commute will eat into those savings. 坐公車上班的人，總花費則約為一百四十英鎊，每週可節省三十五英鎊。在坐地鐵和公車這兩種情況下，任何通勤成本的增加都會消耗所省下的錢。 Uswitch estimates that the average monthly energy bill could hit €683 in January for home workers, compared to €492 for those heading to the office. It assumes remote workers use 25 percent more electricity and 75 percent more gas per day including from central heating. Uswitch估計，在家工作的人，一月份的平均能源費用可能會達到六百八十三英鎊，而到辦公室上班的人則為四百九十二英鎊。這是假設遠距上班的人每天多使用百分之二十五的電力，以及多百分之七十五的瓦斯，包括用於中央暖氣。 Coping Mechanism “People are going to be really struggling to heat their own homes and they are going to look for warmth in other places — we know that is a coping mechanism that people use, whether that is going to a public space, such as a library or a church maybe, or whether it's going to work when you usually would work from home” Matt Copeland, policy officer at National Energy Action said. “Those are the options people will consider and people will take to actually find warmth.” 因應機制 「要把自己家裡變暖將是難以負擔的窘境，所以人們會到其他地方取暖——我們知道這是一種因應機制，無論是去公共場所，比如圖書館或教堂，或是在你通常在家工作的時候到辦公室上班」，國家能源行動組織政策主管馬特‧科普蘭表示。「人們會考慮和採用這些選項，而實際上找到暖源」。 The incentive to come into the office is likely to be welcomed by some in the City of London, where finance bosses have been pushing for a return to the office. Right now less than half of workers in the UK's banking sector go into the office on an average day, and just 18 percent of insurance sector employees do so, according to a survey by consultancy Advanced Workplace Associates.準備每天去辦 對於這進辦公室的動機，倫敦城某些人可能會樂見其成。這些金融業老闆一直在推動員工重返辦公室。根據諮詢公司Advanced Workplace Associates的一項調查，目前英國銀行業平均只有不到一半的員工進辦公室上班，而保險業只有百分之十八的員工這麼做。source article: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/lang/archives/2022/08/23/2003783959
Campaign's journalists Gurjit Degun, Imogen Watson and Charlotte Rawlings discuss some of the latest news.They cover the Advertising Standards Authority investigating Nationwide's ads; the latest pitching activity from brands including National Express, Molson Coors and USwitch; and the shops shortlisted for the Agency of the Year Awards.The trio also talk about brands' activity around Valentine's Day. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode, we're excited to welcome Mike Jones, the CTO of loveholidays. loveholidays are not only the fastest growing travel agent in the UK, but also one of the UK's fastest growing businesses in the last five years (2019). They're on a mission to open up the world to everyone. They offer unlimited choice, unmatched ease and unmissable value, and are harnessing tech to be the go to platform in the holiday industry.Mike talks about his transformative role at the renowned price comparison site Uswitch, where he helped scale the company significantly - exemplifying his expertise in growing startups. At loveholidays, Mike uses his experience to drive innovation. We talk about the impact of partnering with Google to catapult loveholidays operational reach, improving technology infrastructure, and harnessing AI to enhance customer service.Mike talks on resilience, strategy and creating a supportive business culture and shares insights on the challenges of taking loveholidays global. Mike's the man to listen to on what to consider when scaling a business, and he delves into the dynamics of startup growth, technologies role in scaling, and the personal philosophies guiding his successful career to date.Follow The Start-Up Diaries Podcast on LinkedIn, Instagram, or find more free content from the Tech Recruitment Specialists powering The Start-Up Diaries - Burns Sheehan.
Michael Jones is a seasoned technology leader with a rich history in steering digital transformation and scaling platform businesses, especially within PE and PLC landscapes. As Chief Technology Officer at uSwitch, Michael was pivotal in navigating the company through three significant exits: an MBO to LDC, a £190m trade sale to Zoopla, and a monumental £2.2bn sale to Silver Lake under ZPG.
歡迎留言告訴我們你對這一集的想法： https://open.firstory.me/user/cl81kivnk00dn01wffhwxdg2s/comments Topic: A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry Twirling above a strip of land at the mouth of Rotterdam's harbor is a wind turbine so large it is difficult to photograph. The turning diameter of its rotor is longer than two American football fields end to end. Later models will be taller than any building on the mainland of Western Europe. 鹿特丹港口一處狹長土地上，有座風力發電機在轉動，規模大到難以近距離拍攝，葉片旋轉直徑比兩座美式足球場接起來還長，日後更新版的風機將比西歐大陸上任何建物都高。 Packed with sensors gathering data on wind speeds, electricity output and stresses on its components, the giant whirling machine in the Netherlands is a test model for a new series of giant offshore wind turbines planned by General Electric. When assembled in arrays, the wind machines have the potential to power cities, supplanting the emissions-spewing coal- or natural gas-fired plants that form the backbones of many electric systems today. 這個位於荷蘭的巨型旋轉機器，是奇異公司所規畫新系列巨型離岸風機的測試模型，配備了收集風速、電力輸出及各零件所受應力數據的感應器。這些風機若以陣列布建，具備為城市供電的潛力，取代大量排放廢氣、組成當今許多發電系統骨幹的燃煤或燃氣發電廠。 GE has yet to install one of these machines in ocean water. As a relative newcomer to the offshore wind business, the company faces questions about how quickly and efficiently it can scale up production to build and install hundreds of the turbines. 奇異公司尚未在海上安裝此類機器。奇異在離岸風電業堪稱新兵，面臨的問題是，能多快、多有效地擴大生產規模，以建造並安裝數百座風機。 But already the giant turbines have turned heads in the industry. A top executive at the world's leading wind farm developer called it a “bit of a leapfrog over the latest technology.” And an analyst said the machine's size and advance sales had “shaken the industry.” 然而這種巨型風機已在業界引起轟動。全球頂尖風場開發商的一位高管稱其為「超越最新技術的一次飛躍」。一位分析師表示，這款機器的尺寸與預售量「撼動了整個產業」。 The prototype is the first of a generation of new machines that are about a third more powerful than the largest already in commercial service. As such, it is changing the business calculations of wind equipment makers, developers and investors. 這是新世代風機的第一個原型機，新世代風機功能比已在商業運轉的最大風機還要強三分之一左右。因此，它正在改變風力設備製造商、開發商與投資人的盤算。 The GE machines will have a generating capacity that would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago. A single one will be able to turn out 13 megawatts of power, enough to light up a town of roughly 12,000 homes. 奇異的風機將具有十年前幾乎無法想像的發電能力，一座就能產生13百萬瓦電力，足夠點亮約有1.2萬戶家庭的小鎮。 The turbine is capable of producing as much thrust as the four engines of a Boeing 747 jet, according to GE, and will be deployed at sea, where developers have learned that they can plant larger and more numerous turbines than on land to capture breezes that are stronger and more reliable. 奇異表示，這種風機能產生相當於波音747飛機四具引擎的推力，將部署在海上，開發商已經知道在海上能安裝比陸上更大也更多的風機，以捕捉更強也更可靠的風。 The race to build bigger turbines has moved faster than many industry figures foresaw. GE's Haliade-X generates almost 30 times more electricity than the first offshore machines installed off Denmark in 1991. 建造更大風機的競賽步調比許多業內人士預測的要快。奇異的Haliade-X風機，發電量幾乎是1991年安裝於丹麥近海的第一座離岸風機的30倍。 In coming years, customers are likely to demand even bigger machines, industry executives say. On the other hand, they predict that turbines will reach a point at which greater size no longer makes economic sense. 業界高層表示，未來幾年顧客很可能要求更大的機器。另一方面，他們預測，風機遲早會來到再大就不合經濟效益的時刻。 Source article: https://udn.com/news/story/6904/5180307 Next Article Topic: A Scary Energy Winter Is Coming. Don't Blame the Greens. Every so often the tectonic geopolitical plates that hold up the world economy suddenly shift in ways that can rattle and destabilize everything on the surface. That's happening right now in the energy sphere. 有時候，承載世界經濟的地緣政治板塊會突然移動，把地表每樣東西搖得嘎嘎作響。這種事現在就在能源領域發生。 Several forces are coming together that could make Vladimir Putin the king of Europe, enable Iran to thumb its nose at America and build an atomic bomb, and disrupt European power markets enough that the upcoming United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, could suffer blackouts owing to too little clean energy. 有幾股勢力正在匯聚，能使俄國總統普亭成為歐洲之王，使伊朗有本錢不把美國放在眼裡，進而造出原子彈，並足以打亂歐洲能源市場，讓即將登場的英國蘇格蘭格拉斯哥聯合國氣候大會可能會因為潔淨能源太少而停電。 Yes, this is a big one. 沒錯，問題很大。 Natural gas and coal prices in Europe and Asia just hit their highest levels on record, oil prices in America hit a seven-year high and U.S. gasoline prices are up $1 a gallon from last year. If this winter is as bad as some experts predict — with some in the poor and middle classes unable to heat their homes — I fear we'll see a populist backlash to the whole climate/green movement. You can already smell that coming in Britain. 歐亞兩洲的天然氣和煤價剛剛達到史上最高，美國原油價格創七年新高，而汽油價格每加侖比去年上漲1美元。如果今年冬天跟一些專家預測的一樣糟，一些貧窮和中產階級人家負擔不起取暖費用，我擔心會出現針對整個氣候和綠能運動的民粹反彈。在英國已經可以嗅到這個跡象。 How did we get here? In truth, it's a good-news-bad-news story. 我們怎會走到這一步？其實，這是個好消息壞消息都有的故事。 The good news is that every major economy has signed onto reducing its carbon footprint by phasing out dirtier fuels like coal to heat homes and to power industries. The bad news is that most nations are doing it in totally uncoordinated ways, from the top down, and before the market has produced sufficient clean renewables like wind, solar and hydro. 好消息是，每個主要經濟體都已同意，透過逐步淘汰煤炭這類比較髒的燃料給家庭取暖和給產業供電，減少碳足跡。壞消息則是，多數國家這麼做的時候完全沒有互相協調，由上而下執行，而且市場還沒製造出足夠多的風力、太陽能和水力等清潔能源。 But how did the bad-news side of this story emerge so fast? 這個故事的壞消息面為何這麼快出現？ Blame COVID-19. First, the pandemic erupted and signaled to every major economy that we were headed for a deep recession. This sent prices of all kinds of commodities, including oil and gas, into downward spirals. 要怪新冠肺炎。首先，疫情爆發，對每個重要經濟體而言意味我們正走向深度衰退，使原油、天然氣等各類大宗商品價格走軟。 This, in turn, led banks to choke off investment in new natural gas capacity and crude wells after seven years of already declining investments in these hydrocarbons because of lousy returns. 這進而使銀行停止投資擴充天然氣產能和油井。銀行已減少投資這些碳氫化合物達七年，因為報酬率很差。 As Bill Gates points out in his smart book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” the only way to reach our climate targets is to shift production of all the big heavy industries, like steel, cement and automobiles, as well as how we heat our homes and power our cars, to electricity generated from clean energy. Safe and affordable nuclear power has to be part of our mix because, Gates argues, “it is the only carbon-free, scalable energy source that's available 24 hours a day.” 就像微軟創辦人蓋茲在他那本睿智的書「如何避免氣候災難」指出的，達成氣候目標的唯一方法是，改變所有重工業如鋼鐵、水泥、汽車業等的生產方式，以及我們在家取暖和為愛車提供動力的方式，轉而用潔淨能源發電。蓋茲主張必須接納安全可負擔的核能，因為「這是唯一不產生二氧化碳又能擴增的能源來源，每天24小時供應」。Source article: https://udn.com/news/story/6904/5820545 Next Article Topic: Londoners are better off returning to the office as bills soar City of London workers looking to save money may want to embrace the office over winter as the cost of working from home soars alongside energy bills. 在家工作的成本隨著能源費用的飆升一起上漲，因此到了冬天，想要省錢的倫敦城上班族可能會希望進辦公室上班。 Those prepared to go into the office every day could save about €50 (US$60) per week in January 2023 if they can walk, run or cycle into their workplace. That's thanks to the money they've saved by not heating a home for the whole day, according to estimates by price comparison site Uswitch. 公室的人若可以走路、跑步或騎自行車到工作地點的話，在二○二三年一月，每週可節省約五十英鎊（六十美元）。根據價格比較網站Uswitch的估計，他們之所以省下這些錢，是因為家裡整天都不開暖氣。 Those working from home in January could expect to pay around €175 a week in energy costs and other incidentals included in Bloomberg's calculations such as buying in your own coffee, a freebie in many offices. The combined cost of energy bills — factoring in the lower consumption expected — and five return trips on the Tube from London's Zone 4 would be about €160 a week in January 2023, a €15 saving. 一月份在家工作的人預計每週要支付大約一百七十五英鎊的能源費用，以及彭博社所計算出的其他雜費，例如自費買咖啡——很多辦公室會免費供應咖啡。二○二三年一月能源帳單的總成本（以預期較低的花費計算），加上由倫敦第四區坐地鐵來上班來回五次，每週將花費約一百六十英鎊，因此跟在家工作相比，到辦公室上班節省了十五英鎊。 For those taking the bus, the total cost is about €140, a €35 weekly saving. In both cases, any rise in the cost of the commute will eat into those savings. 坐公車上班的人，總花費則約為一百四十英鎊，每週可節省三十五英鎊。在坐地鐵和公車這兩種情況下，任何通勤成本的增加都會消耗所省下的錢。 Uswitch estimates that the average monthly energy bill could hit €683 in January for home workers, compared to €492 for those heading to the office. It assumes remote workers use 25 percent more electricity and 75 percent more gas per day including from central heating. Uswitch估計，在家工作的人，一月份的平均能源費用可能會達到六百八十三英鎊，而到辦公室上班的人則為四百九十二英鎊。這是假設遠距上班的人每天多使用百分之二十五的電力，以及多百分之七十五的瓦斯，包括用於中央暖氣。 Coping Mechanism “People are going to be really struggling to heat their own homes and they are going to look for warmth in other places — we know that is a coping mechanism that people use, whether that is going to a public space, such as a library or a church maybe, or whether it's going to work when you usually would work from home” Matt Copeland, policy officer at National Energy Action said. “Those are the options people will consider and people will take to actually find warmth.” 因應機制 「要把自己家裡變暖將是難以負擔的窘境，所以人們會到其他地方取暖——我們知道這是一種因應機制，無論是去公共場所，比如圖書館或教堂，或是在你通常在家工作的時候到辦公室上班」，國家能源行動組織政策主管馬特‧科普蘭表示。「人們會考慮和採用這些選項，而實際上找到暖源」。 The incentive to come into the office is likely to be welcomed by some in the City of London, where finance bosses have been pushing for a return to the office. Right now less than half of workers in the UK's banking sector go into the office on an average day, and just 18 percent of insurance sector employees do so, according to a survey by consultancy Advanced Workplace Associates.準備每天去辦 對於這進辦公室的動機，倫敦城某些人可能會樂見其成。這些金融業老闆一直在推動員工重返辦公室。根據諮詢公司Advanced Workplace Associates的一項調查，目前英國銀行業平均只有不到一半的員工進辦公室上班，而保險業只有百分之十八的員工這麼做。source article: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/lang/archives/2022/08/23/2003783959 Powered by Firstory Hosting
According to USwitch, a British research site, Americans spend an aggregate of 57 days out of their year on social media. That is 15% of our year – and it's just social media, it doesn't even count time we spend watching TV or on our laptops. The past two decades, the way that most Americans spend their time has drastically changed. We don't acknowledge that when the way we spend our time changes, we as people change.Please take our survey: https://lp.juliehartmanshow.com/survey/Don't forget to like this video, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and ring the notification bell so you never miss a future upload! Check out other Julie Hartman's videos: https://www.youtube.com/@juliehartman Follow Julie Hartman on social media: Website: https://juliehartmanshow.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julierhartman/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/JulieRHartman Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/timelesswithjuliehartmanSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We scroll through three miles of content a year on our phones. That's according to research in the UK from USwitch. For more on this Shane spoke to Jess Kelly – Newstalk's Technology Correspondent. Jess Kelly – Newstalk's Technology Correspondent
We scroll through three miles of content a year on our phones. That's according to research in the UK from USwitch. For more on this Shane spoke to Jess Kelly – Newstalk's Technology Correspondent. Jess Kelly – Newstalk's Technology Correspondent
It's been a rollercoaster week for markets, with the UK government's borrowing costs soaring after last Friday's budget announcement. Bloomberg's Valerie Tytel - a former bond trader - explains what happened and why politicians need to pay attention to gilts. Also in the show: the CEO of property website Zoopla tells us why some sellers are cutting their asking prices, and we hear from energy expert Ben Gallizzi of USwitch ahead of this weekend's gas and electricity price rises.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Topic: A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry Twirling above a strip of land at the mouth of Rotterdam's harbor is a wind turbine so large it is difficult to photograph. The turning diameter of its rotor is longer than two American football fields end to end. Later models will be taller than any building on the mainland of Western Europe. 鹿特丹港口一處狹長土地上，有座風力發電機在轉動，規模大到難以近距離拍攝，葉片旋轉直徑比兩座美式足球場接起來還長，日後更新版的風機將比西歐大陸上任何建物都高。 Packed with sensors gathering data on wind speeds, electricity output and stresses on its components, the giant whirling machine in the Netherlands is a test model for a new series of giant offshore wind turbines planned by General Electric. When assembled in arrays, the wind machines have the potential to power cities, supplanting the emissions-spewing coal- or natural gas-fired plants that form the backbones of many electric systems today. 這個位於荷蘭的巨型旋轉機器，是奇異公司所規畫新系列巨型離岸風機的測試模型，配備了收集風速、電力輸出及各零件所受應力數據的感應器。這些風機若以陣列布建，具備為城市供電的潛力，取代大量排放廢氣、組成當今許多發電系統骨幹的燃煤或燃氣發電廠。 GE has yet to install one of these machines in ocean water. As a relative newcomer to the offshore wind business, the company faces questions about how quickly and efficiently it can scale up production to build and install hundreds of the turbines. 奇異公司尚未在海上安裝此類機器。奇異在離岸風電業堪稱新兵，面臨的問題是，能多快、多有效地擴大生產規模，以建造並安裝數百座風機。 But already the giant turbines have turned heads in the industry. A top executive at the world's leading wind farm developer called it a “bit of a leapfrog over the latest technology.” And an analyst said the machine's size and advance sales had “shaken the industry.” 然而這種巨型風機已在業界引起轟動。全球頂尖風場開發商的一位高管稱其為「超越最新技術的一次飛躍」。一位分析師表示，這款機器的尺寸與預售量「撼動了整個產業」。 The prototype is the first of a generation of new machines that are about a third more powerful than the largest already in commercial service. As such, it is changing the business calculations of wind equipment makers, developers and investors. 這是新世代風機的第一個原型機，新世代風機功能比已在商業運轉的最大風機還要強三分之一左右。因此，它正在改變風力設備製造商、開發商與投資人的盤算。 The GE machines will have a generating capacity that would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago. A single one will be able to turn out 13 megawatts of power, enough to light up a town of roughly 12,000 homes. 奇異的風機將具有十年前幾乎無法想像的發電能力，一座就能產生13百萬瓦電力，足夠點亮約有1.2萬戶家庭的小鎮。 The turbine is capable of producing as much thrust as the four engines of a Boeing 747 jet, according to GE, and will be deployed at sea, where developers have learned that they can plant larger and more numerous turbines than on land to capture breezes that are stronger and more reliable. 奇異表示，這種風機能產生相當於波音747飛機四具引擎的推力，將部署在海上，開發商已經知道在海上能安裝比陸上更大也更多的風機，以捕捉更強也更可靠的風。 The race to build bigger turbines has moved faster than many industry figures foresaw. GE's Haliade-X generates almost 30 times more electricity than the first offshore machines installed off Denmark in 1991. 建造更大風機的競賽步調比許多業內人士預測的要快。奇異的Haliade-X風機，發電量幾乎是1991年安裝於丹麥近海的第一座離岸風機的30倍。 In coming years, customers are likely to demand even bigger machines, industry executives say. On the other hand, they predict that turbines will reach a point at which greater size no longer makes economic sense. 業界高層表示，未來幾年顧客很可能要求更大的機器。另一方面，他們預測，風機遲早會來到再大就不合經濟效益的時刻。 Source article: https://udn.com/news/story/6904/5180307 Next Article Topic: A Scary Energy Winter Is Coming. Don't Blame the Greens. Every so often the tectonic geopolitical plates that hold up the world economy suddenly shift in ways that can rattle and destabilize everything on the surface. That's happening right now in the energy sphere. 有時候，承載世界經濟的地緣政治板塊會突然移動，把地表每樣東西搖得嘎嘎作響。這種事現在就在能源領域發生。 Several forces are coming together that could make Vladimir Putin the king of Europe, enable Iran to thumb its nose at America and build an atomic bomb, and disrupt European power markets enough that the upcoming United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, could suffer blackouts owing to too little clean energy. 有幾股勢力正在匯聚，能使俄國總統普亭成為歐洲之王，使伊朗有本錢不把美國放在眼裡，進而造出原子彈，並足以打亂歐洲能源市場，讓即將登場的英國蘇格蘭格拉斯哥聯合國氣候大會可能會因為潔淨能源太少而停電。 Yes, this is a big one. 沒錯，問題很大。 Natural gas and coal prices in Europe and Asia just hit their highest levels on record, oil prices in America hit a seven-year high and U.S. gasoline prices are up $1 a gallon from last year. If this winter is as bad as some experts predict — with some in the poor and middle classes unable to heat their homes — I fear we'll see a populist backlash to the whole climate/green movement. You can already smell that coming in Britain. 歐亞兩洲的天然氣和煤價剛剛達到史上最高，美國原油價格創七年新高，而汽油價格每加侖比去年上漲1美元。如果今年冬天跟一些專家預測的一樣糟，一些貧窮和中產階級人家負擔不起取暖費用，我擔心會出現針對整個氣候和綠能運動的民粹反彈。在英國已經可以嗅到這個跡象。 How did we get here? In truth, it's a good-news-bad-news story. 我們怎會走到這一步？其實，這是個好消息壞消息都有的故事。 The good news is that every major economy has signed onto reducing its carbon footprint by phasing out dirtier fuels like coal to heat homes and to power industries. The bad news is that most nations are doing it in totally uncoordinated ways, from the top down, and before the market has produced sufficient clean renewables like wind, solar and hydro. 好消息是，每個主要經濟體都已同意，透過逐步淘汰煤炭這類比較髒的燃料給家庭取暖和給產業供電，減少碳足跡。壞消息則是，多數國家這麼做的時候完全沒有互相協調，由上而下執行，而且市場還沒製造出足夠多的風力、太陽能和水力等清潔能源。 But how did the bad-news side of this story emerge so fast? 這個故事的壞消息面為何這麼快出現？ Blame COVID-19. First, the pandemic erupted and signaled to every major economy that we were headed for a deep recession. This sent prices of all kinds of commodities, including oil and gas, into downward spirals. 要怪新冠肺炎。首先，疫情爆發，對每個重要經濟體而言意味我們正走向深度衰退，使原油、天然氣等各類大宗商品價格走軟。 This, in turn, led banks to choke off investment in new natural gas capacity and crude wells after seven years of already declining investments in these hydrocarbons because of lousy returns. 這進而使銀行停止投資擴充天然氣產能和油井。銀行已減少投資這些碳氫化合物達七年，因為報酬率很差。 As Bill Gates points out in his smart book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” the only way to reach our climate targets is to shift production of all the big heavy industries, like steel, cement and automobiles, as well as how we heat our homes and power our cars, to electricity generated from clean energy. Safe and affordable nuclear power has to be part of our mix because, Gates argues, “it is the only carbon-free, scalable energy source that's available 24 hours a day.” 就像微軟創辦人蓋茲在他那本睿智的書「如何避免氣候災難」指出的，達成氣候目標的唯一方法是，改變所有重工業如鋼鐵、水泥、汽車業等的生產方式，以及我們在家取暖和為愛車提供動力的方式，轉而用潔淨能源發電。蓋茲主張必須接納安全可負擔的核能，因為「這是唯一不產生二氧化碳又能擴增的能源來源，每天24小時供應」。Source article: https://udn.com/news/story/6904/5820545 Next Article Topic: Londoners are better off returning to the office as bills soar City of London workers looking to save money may want to embrace the office over winter as the cost of working from home soars alongside energy bills. 在家工作的成本隨著能源費用的飆升一起上漲，因此到了冬天，想要省錢的倫敦城上班族可能會希望進辦公室上班。 Those prepared to go into the office every day could save about €50 (US$60) per week in January 2023 if they can walk, run or cycle into their workplace. That's thanks to the money they've saved by not heating a home for the whole day, according to estimates by price comparison site Uswitch. 公室的人若可以走路、跑步或騎自行車到工作地點的話，在二○二三年一月，每週可節省約五十英鎊（六十美元）。根據價格比較網站Uswitch的估計，他們之所以省下這些錢，是因為家裡整天都不開暖氣。 Those working from home in January could expect to pay around €175 a week in energy costs and other incidentals included in Bloomberg's calculations such as buying in your own coffee, a freebie in many offices. The combined cost of energy bills — factoring in the lower consumption expected — and five return trips on the Tube from London's Zone 4 would be about €160 a week in January 2023, a €15 saving. 一月份在家工作的人預計每週要支付大約一百七十五英鎊的能源費用，以及彭博社所計算出的其他雜費，例如自費買咖啡——很多辦公室會免費供應咖啡。二○二三年一月能源帳單的總成本（以預期較低的花費計算），加上由倫敦第四區坐地鐵來上班來回五次，每週將花費約一百六十英鎊，因此跟在家工作相比，到辦公室上班節省了十五英鎊。 For those taking the bus, the total cost is about €140, a €35 weekly saving. In both cases, any rise in the cost of the commute will eat into those savings. 坐公車上班的人，總花費則約為一百四十英鎊，每週可節省三十五英鎊。在坐地鐵和公車這兩種情況下，任何通勤成本的增加都會消耗所省下的錢。 Uswitch estimates that the average monthly energy bill could hit €683 in January for home workers, compared to €492 for those heading to the office. It assumes remote workers use 25 percent more electricity and 75 percent more gas per day including from central heating. Uswitch估計，在家工作的人，一月份的平均能源費用可能會達到六百八十三英鎊，而到辦公室上班的人則為四百九十二英鎊。這是假設遠距上班的人每天多使用百分之二十五的電力，以及多百分之七十五的瓦斯，包括用於中央暖氣。 Coping Mechanism “People are going to be really struggling to heat their own homes and they are going to look for warmth in other places — we know that is a coping mechanism that people use, whether that is going to a public space, such as a library or a church maybe, or whether it's going to work when you usually would work from home” Matt Copeland, policy officer at National Energy Action said. “Those are the options people will consider and people will take to actually find warmth.” 因應機制 「要把自己家裡變暖將是難以負擔的窘境，所以人們會到其他地方取暖——我們知道這是一種因應機制，無論是去公共場所，比如圖書館或教堂，或是在你通常在家工作的時候到辦公室上班」，國家能源行動組織政策主管馬特‧科普蘭表示。「人們會考慮和採用這些選項，而實際上找到暖源」。 The incentive to come into the office is likely to be welcomed by some in the City of London, where finance bosses have been pushing for a return to the office. Right now less than half of workers in the UK's banking sector go into the office on an average day, and just 18 percent of insurance sector employees do so, according to a survey by consultancy Advanced Workplace Associates.準備每天去辦 對於這進辦公室的動機，倫敦城某些人可能會樂見其成。這些金融業老闆一直在推動員工重返辦公室。根據諮詢公司Advanced Workplace Associates的一項調查，目前英國銀行業平均只有不到一半的員工進辦公室上班，而保險業只有百分之十八的員工這麼做。source article: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/lang/archives/2022/08/23/2003783959
每日英語跟讀 Ep.K429: Londoners are better off returning to the office as bills soar City of London workers looking to save money may want to embrace the office over winter as the cost of working from home soars alongside energy bills. 在家工作的成本隨著能源費用的飆升一起上漲，因此到了冬天，想要省錢的倫敦城上班族可能會希望進辦公室上班。 Those prepared to go into the office every day could save about €50 (US$60) per week in January 2023 if they can walk, run or cycle into their workplace. That's thanks to the money they've saved by not heating a home for the whole day, according to estimates by price comparison site Uswitch. 公室的人若可以走路、跑步或騎自行車到工作地點的話，在二○二三年一月，每週可節省約五十英鎊（六十美元）。根據價格比較網站Uswitch的估計，他們之所以省下這些錢，是因為家裡整天都不開暖氣。 Those working from home in January could expect to pay around €175 a week in energy costs and other incidentals included in Bloomberg's calculations such as buying in your own coffee, a freebie in many offices. The combined cost of energy bills — factoring in the lower consumption expected — and five return trips on the Tube from London's Zone 4 would be about €160 a week in January 2023, a €15 saving. 一月份在家工作的人預計每週要支付大約一百七十五英鎊的能源費用，以及彭博社所計算出的其他雜費，例如自費買咖啡——很多辦公室會免費供應咖啡。二○二三年一月能源帳單的總成本（以預期較低的花費計算），加上由倫敦第四區坐地鐵來上班來回五次，每週將花費約一百六十英鎊，因此跟在家工作相比，到辦公室上班節省了十五英鎊。 For those taking the bus, the total cost is about €140, a €35 weekly saving. In both cases, any rise in the cost of the commute will eat into those savings. 坐公車上班的人，總花費則約為一百四十英鎊，每週可節省三十五英鎊。在坐地鐵和公車這兩種情況下，任何通勤成本的增加都會消耗所省下的錢。 Uswitch estimates that the average monthly energy bill could hit €683 in January for home workers, compared to €492 for those heading to the office. It assumes remote workers use 25 percent more electricity and 75 percent more gas per day including from central heating. Uswitch估計，在家工作的人，一月份的平均能源費用可能會達到六百八十三英鎊，而到辦公室上班的人則為四百九十二英鎊。這是假設遠距上班的人每天多使用百分之二十五的電力，以及多百分之七十五的瓦斯，包括用於中央暖氣。 Coping Mechanism “People are going to be really struggling to heat their own homes and they are going to look for warmth in other places — we know that is a coping mechanism that people use, whether that is going to a public space, such as a library or a church maybe, or whether it's going to work when you usually would work from home” Matt Copeland, policy officer at National Energy Action said. “Those are the options people will consider and people will take to actually find warmth.” 因應機制 「要把自己家裡變暖將是難以負擔的窘境，所以人們會到其他地方取暖——我們知道這是一種因應機制，無論是去公共場所，比如圖書館或教堂，或是在你通常在家工作的時候到辦公室上班」，國家能源行動組織政策主管馬特‧科普蘭表示。「人們會考慮和採用這些選項，而實際上找到暖源」。 The incentive to come into the office is likely to be welcomed by some in the City of London, where finance bosses have been pushing for a return to the office. Right now less than half of workers in the UK's banking sector go into the office on an average day, and just 18 percent of insurance sector employees do so, according to a survey by consultancy Advanced Workplace Associates.準備每天去辦 對於這進辦公室的動機，倫敦城某些人可能會樂見其成。這些金融業老闆一直在推動員工重返辦公室。根據諮詢公司Advanced Workplace Associates的一項調查，目前英國銀行業平均只有不到一半的員工進辦公室上班，而保險業只有百分之十八的員工這麼做。source article: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/lang/archives/2022/08/23/2003783959
本集學習內容: Londoners are better off returning to the office as bills soar City of London workers looking to save money may want to embrace the office over winter as the cost of working from home soars alongside energy bills. Those prepared to go into the office every day could save about €50 (US$60) per week in January 2023 if they can walk, run or cycle into their workplace. That's thanks to the money they've saved by not heating a home for the whole day, according to estimates by price comparison site Uswitch. Those working from home in January could expect to pay around €175 a week in energy costs and other incidentals included in Bloomberg's calculations such as buying in your own coffee, a freebie in many offices. The combined cost of energy bills — factoring in the lower consumption expected — and five return trips on the Tube from London's Zone 4 would be about €160 a week in January 2023, a €15 saving. For those taking the bus, the total cost is about €140, a €35 weekly saving. In both cases, any rise in the cost of the commute will eat into those savings. Uswitch estimates that the average monthly energy bill could hit €683 in January for home workers, compared to €492 for those heading to the office. It assumes remote workers use 25 percent more electricity and 75 percent more gas per day including from central heating. 資料來源: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/lang/archives/2022/08/23/2003783959 ------------------------------------------ MixerBox 英文學習方案介紹：https://youtu.be/YSsGDEDqL8g 加入每月英語學習一族：https://bit.ly/3lPNYdP ------------------------------------------ 喜歡我的節目嗎？ 請我吃個小火鍋 → 回饋你當月「咖啡豆」：https://bit.ly/3lPNYdP 請我喝杯飲料，溫暖我的心：https://pay.firstory.me/user/englishcoffeeshop 歡迎留言分享和評分
Health and Safety went ballistic when they got wind of this week's guest being both a Blades fan and one of the sharpest strategic minds in media. Safety goggles on folks, it's Rich Kirk. Rich is currently Chief Strategy Officer at Zenith UK. Named the UK's second-best media planner in 2021 by Campaign, Rich, like Avis, clearly tries harder, contributing to Zenith winning work from Lloyds, Halifax, Uswitch, Confused, Zoopla, and Nestle last year. This episode covers a sharp showdown (Billy vs Byron), his early interest in how stuff got sold, the volatile and ever-changing media market, media planning's pandemic shake-up, how on earth you quantify reach, risk, the world cup, corporate inertia, word soup, and more. Open your ears and let the smarts pour in. ///// Follow Rich on Twitter and LinkedIn Or pop into The Broadcaster at White City Listen to us talk attention metrics with Prof. Karen Nelson-Field here Timestamps (01:53) - Quick-fire questions (03:37) - First-ever job & getting into Google Ads (13:04) - The volatile media market (19:15) - How the pandemic shook up media planning (26:01) - Quantifying effective reach (36:19) - Why media planners should get excited about FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 (42:29) - The barriers to clients taking on the best strategy (49:43) - 4 pertinent posers Rich's book recommendations are: Changing the World Is the Only Fit Work for a Grown Man by Steve Harrison Management in 10 Words by Terry Leahy /////
In this episode, Jeannette talks to Jo Balfour, managing director of The Cambridge Rare Disease Network (CRDN). She explains how she went from being a teacher to setting up and running a charity that provides support for the thousands of people with, often untreatable, rare diseases. She and Jeannette cover a wide range of subjects. They discuss how Jo learned to push herself well beyond her comfort zone to grow her skill set and achieve more within her work life. They talk about, why rare diseases impact far more people than we realise. They discuss the work CRDN, HealX and others do to help people impacted by rare diseases to get their voices heard. An approach that is proving to be highly effective. One that is leading to change. Including better facilities for the disabled, faster diagnosis, more targeted research, new drug, and treatment options. All of this is achieved through rare disease communities that are made up of people who support each other. KEY TAKEAWAYS There are around 8,000 rare diseases. Only 5% can be effectively treated. With rare diseases, data is powerful. If you think something is not quite right health or development-wise, keep a diary of issues. Find your tribe. Seek out others in a similar situation. They will provide highly targeted guidance and support. Get involved, and share. Charities need the experience and voices of the people they are there to help. Eighty percent of rare diseases are genetic, so genome sequencing is proving to be an important diagnostic tool. When running a charity that helps people it is vital to listen to those you are trying to help. When working with large groups of people with quite different needs, find the common threads, the core challenges. When you address and find effective solutions for the core challenges you help everyone. Don´t be afraid to take risks and apply for jobs you are not 100% ready for. Learn on the job. Work collaboratively. Recognise and welcome other people´s skills and experience. If you have a passion that drives you, everything will eventually fall into place. Cash donations and fundraising are great. But giving your time and sharing your skills is also a powerful way to help a charity. Big problems get solved step by step. Take that first step. Start with the basics. BEST MOMENTS ‘I can´t believe I was that brave person who thought I was really ready for those jobs. ´ ‘If you have a passion, the passion will drive your desire to learn.' ‘Just take a risk, learn on the job. You can almost create a role for yourself.' ‘Find your community. You are not alone. There are lots of people out there in the same boat as you.' If you love what they do, you can support the Cambridge Rare Disease Network and their work through their Just Giving page https://www.justgiving.com/cambridge-rdn or directly via PayPal giving paypal.com/gb/fundraiser/charity/3232065 See how you can support CRDN here https://www.camraredisease.org/fundraising/ Sign up to support CRDN here – https://www.easyfundraising.org.uk/invite/HDFHN1/ Through easyfundraising you can raise FREE donations for CRDN every time you shop online with over 6,000 retailers. John Lewis, Argos, Tui, Uswitch, eBay and many more are waiting to give a free donation. Or use Amazon Smile (it's Amazon as you know it but automatically makes a 0.5% donation in your purchases.Sign up to choose Cambridge Rare Disease Network here https://smile.amazon.co.uk/ch/1166365-0 and make your shopping mean twice as much This is the perfect time to get focused on what YOU want to really achieve in your business, career, and life. It's never too late to be BRAVE and BOLD and unlock your inner BRILLIANCE. If you'd like to join Jeannette's FREE Business Impact Seminar just DM Jeannette at info@jeannettelinfootassociates.com or sign up via Jeannette's linktree https://linktr.ee/JLinfoot VALUABLE RESOURCES Brave, Bold, Brilliant podcast series - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/brave-bold-brilliant-podcast/id1524278970 EPISODE RESOURCES LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/balfourjo Cambridge Rare Disease Network (CRDN) website: https://www.camraredisease.org/about-crdn/ Healx website: https://healx.io/ Shop via Amazon Smile: https://smile.amazon.co.uk/charity?orig=%2F ABOUT THE GUEST Jo Balfour is a founding member of CRDN and Managing Director. She directs and controls the charity's operations and to gives strategic guidance and direction to the board. Read Jo's background here in the Womanthology Magazine. Jo leads the creative and operational development of CRDN's unique and innovative events programme to raise awareness about rare disease and promote cross-sector collaboration. She is the founder of the charity's regional rare disease community group, Unique Feet, and oversees all other aspects of the charity's work. From a background in Special Educational Needs Management and as an advisor for Looked After Children in schools, Jo's 25 year career in education has been one which offered support and challenge to schools to provide the best care for young people living in exceptional circumstances to enable them to achieve aspirational goals in all aspects of their lives. She has continued this ethos of support and challenge into her work in rare diseases, aspiring to a world where all those affected by rare diseases receive exceptional care, treatment and support. ABOUT THE HOST Jeannette Linfoot is a highly regarded senior executive, property investor, board advisor, and business mentor with over 25 years of global professional business experience across the travel, leisure, hospitality, and property sectors. Having bought, ran, and sold businesses all over the world, Jeannette now has a portfolio of her own businesses and also advises and mentors other business leaders to drive forward their strategies as well as their own personal development. Jeannette is a down-to-earth leader, a passionate champion for diversity & inclusion, and a huge advocate of nurturing talent so every person can unleash their full potential and live their dreams. CONTACT THE HOST Jeannette's linktree https://www.jeannettelinfootassociates.com/ YOUTUBE LinkedIn Facebook Instagram Email - info@jeannettelinfootassociates.com Podcast Description Jeannette Linfoot talks to incredible people about their experiences of being Brave, Bold & Brilliant, which have allowed them to unleash their full potential in business, their careers, and life in general. From the boardroom tables of ‘big' international businesses to the dining room tables of entrepreneurial start-ups, how to overcome challenges, embrace opportunities and take risks, whilst staying ‘true' to yourself is the order of the day. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
My sister gave up social media for 30 days. And it didn't kill her. But her personal and professional lives suffered some unexpected hits. A recent Forbes article cited a new survey from USwitch that found Americans spend about 1,300 hours a year on social media. My sister, Siobhan Fitzpatrick Kratovil, wrote about her 30-day detox of Instagram and Twitter for a parenting magazine. Social media isn't a technical addiction. But going cold turkey off posting sure sounds a lot like giving up other addictive substances. Siobhan describes a twitching for her phone that never really went away. And, she was surprised to find out how many school and work opportunities she missed because they were only communicated on social media sites. On the flip side, her productivity as a writer skyrocketed and she read six books. Her conclusion? It might not be practical to live a life off social media anymore. Maybe, we should strive for a more balanced relationship with our favorite sites? On this Dying to Ask: How to realistically evaluate if your time on social media is out of control The pros and cons of taking time away from your online persona How to reduce your social media time without a true detox
For our first episode of 2022 we are joined by loveholidays CIO, Mike Jones. This is the first in a series of episodes where we dive into the world of a PE executive outside of the CEO role. Mike explains how he implemented tech transformation programmes at uSwitch and loveholidays in order to help them scale effectively under private equity ownership. He also discusses the importance of authenticity and incremental improvements in his approach to innovation, value creation, hiring talent and the exit process.
Two members of the CyberWire's hash table of experts: Steve Winterfeld: Akamai's Advisory CISO Paul Calatayud: Palo Alto Networks' Chief Security Officer for the Americas discuss SD-WAN architecture and security. Resources: “A History of SD-WAN,” by CATO. “Broadband history,” by Dani Warner, USwitch, 19 July 2018. “SD-WAN: What's the big deal for security leadership?” by Rick Howard, CSO Perspectives, The CyberWire, 10 October 2020. “The 6 Biggest SASE Buys of 2020 (So Far)” by Tobias Mann, SDxCentral, 26 August 2020. “The Secret to SASE is the Right SD-WAN,” by Network World from IDG, 2020. “What is MPLS: What you need to know about multi-protocol label switching,” by Neal Weinberg and Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 16 March 2016. “What is SD-WAN and why do you need it? Quick Explainer Video,” by Drew Schulke, Dell, 18 October 2019. “Your security stack is moving: SASE is coming,” by Rick Howard, CSO Perspectives, The CyberWire, 5 April 2020.
Lukasz Zelezny is the former Head of Organic Acquisition at uSwitch and former director of SEO in Zoopla. Originally from Poland, Lukasz is well known in the global SEO community.I'm Delighted for him to join us, sharing a wealth of knowledge, tips and tricks you can implement today.We discuss schema, entities, inlinks (the tool and internal links), content gap analysis and how organisations can work with SEO consultants, more so the questions to be asking them!We talk about common clusters of keywords, how cloudflare can help your SEO, and explore tools like Jet Octopus, Drip, DeepL and personizely.netPlease enjoy the episode and thanks for being a fab listener. Support me by subscribing and telling your friends!#SEO #InLinks #Content
Rick discusses the history of enterprise connectivity, the benefits of SD-WAN, and the security obstacles to avoid when enterprises deploy SD-WAN today. He also makes the case for a coupling of SD-WAN and SASE. Resources: “A Brief History of the Enterprise WAN: How little has changed in the last 15 years,” by By Andy Gottlieb, Network World, 6 April 2012. “Bandwidth Key Words: DS1, T-1, DS2, T-2, DS3, T-3, DS4, T-4, OC-1, OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, ATM, Bandwidth Resources, MPLS, Satellite, Internet and Bandwidth Speeds: Explaining Bandwidth The Easy Way.” SolveForce. “Broadband history,” by Dani Warner, USwitch, 19 July 2018. “Cybersecurity Innovation Starts Here,” Lee Klarich, Palo Alto Networks, 13 November 2019. "MEF White Paper MEF 3.0 SD-WAN Services,” MEF, November 2019. “MEF 3.0 SD-WAN Services & Certifications – Frequently Asked Questions,” by MEF “SD-WAN drives managed network services trends for 2020,” By Tom Nolle, CIMI Corporation, TechTarget, December 2019. "SD-WAN Explained: The Ultimate Guide to SD-WAN Architecture,” by TectTarget “SD-WAN (Software-defined WAN),” TechTarger “SD-WAN vs. MPLS vs. Public Internet,” by Idan Hershkovich, CATO Networks, 28 February 2018. “SD-WAN security explained,” by ERICKA CHICKOWSKI, AT&T Business, 25 June 2020. “SD-WAN - What it means for enterprise networking, security, cloud computing "Software-defined wide area networks, a software approach managing wide-area networks, offers ease of deployment, central manageability and reduced costs, and can improve connectivity to branch offices and the cloud,” By Michael Cooney, Network World, 9 October 2019. “The 6 Biggest SASE Buys of 2020 (So Far)” by Tobias Mann, sdx central, 26 August 2020. “The Secret to SASE is the Right SD-WAN,” by Networkworld by IDG, 2020. “Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet,” by Andrew Blum, Published January 2012 by Ecco. “What is MPLS: What you need to know about multi-protocol label switchinig,” By Neal Weinberg and Johna Till Johnson, NetworkWorld, 16 March 2016. “What is SD-WAN and why do you need it? Quick Explainer Video,” Drew Schulke, Dell, 18 October 2019. “Why SD-WAN is the next breed of WAN optimization,” By Sean Michael Kerner, TechTarget. “X.25 – What is X.25 Networks?” By Dinesh Thakur, Computer Notes. “Your security stack is moving: SASE is coming,” by Rick Howard, CSO Perspectives, The CyberWire, 5 April 2020.
In this special episode of Marketing That Matters, sponsored by Google, Russell Parsons looks back at the key highlights from the case studies featured in the podcast in 2021: from TalkTalk's rapid digitisation of its sales journey to Ancestry and IG Group capitalising on new-found consumer demand, to how Samsung and Uswitch are meeting customers where they are with the right message deployed at the right moment. Plus, some sage advice from Google's senior industry managers on how to champion a digital transformation agenda within your organisation.
John Rentoul starts the show, reacting to Boris's comment about Kermit the Frog and going green. Trevor Kavanagh, Political Columnist at the Sun discussed the hypocritical Insulate Britain organisation. Policy Expert from Uswitch.com Justina Miltienyte gives advice on energy bills, and what to do if your energy provider has folded. Finally, Helen Dale gives her thoughts on the Melbourne anti-lockdown protests. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week it's all about the Apple Event that was held in California on the 14th of September. Steven, Robin and Tim are joined by Ru Bhikha, mobiles expert at Uswitch.com to talk through the event and discuss what's new from the big fruit company. Also we get an update on the latest tech news from Sophie Ashford including news on roaming charges coming back for UK customers when in Europe and how motorbikes can be harmful to your iPhone! There's also news on Facebook launching a new smart glasses product in partnership with glasses maker Ray-Ban but will the addition of a camera in the glasses as well as speakers and a microphone cause some to be concerned about privacy, and what is the capability of such a device? And of course there's more of your emails. Lots of comments about the new robot voice Graham we've started using to read the emails out, plus a thought-provoking discussion starter from Greg on whether or not we are all technology elitists here at Tech Talk. As always send in your thoughts and comments to techtalk@rnib.org.uk and follow the team on Twitter. Steven Scott @BlindGuyTech, Robin Christopherson @USA2Day and Tim Schwartz @timschwartz5
In the latest episode of Marketing That Matters, sponsored by Google, Russell Parsons sits down with Ethan Radtke, head of marketing, and Louise Saul, online marketing analyst at Uswitch, to learn how the brand stays ahead of the competition in the “cut-throat” comparison space. Radtke and Saul dive into Uswitch's paid search automation journey, explaining how the brand's transition from an in-house tool to Google Smart Bidding brought about conversion increases of up to 70% in some verticals, as well as freeing up more time and resources for broader innovation. Hear how Uswitch's focus on “facts over opinion” allowed the company to find the most fruitful way forward, as well as how Uswitch is evolving from a channel-focused to a customer-focused approach to marketing.
Welcome back to the CMO series of the Scale of One to Tech podcast! We've been lucky enough to speak to some incredible CMOs with an array of experiences under their belt, and today's guest is no different. Formerly at ClearScore, Wonga, uSwitch, and most recently SO-SURE, Nicola Vidal has enjoyed a prosperous career in marketing spanning over 20 years.With such a plethora of knowledge and experience, we hear Nicola weigh in on what makes a great marketing leader, FinTech's increasing appeal to Gen Z, diversity in the FinTech & CMO space, advice for CEOs hiring their first CMO - and that's just scratching the surface...This episode coversAttributes that make a great marketing leaderFinTech's shift towards appealing to Gen Z-ers and MillennialsMaking the most of influencer marketingAdvice for CEOs hiring their first CMOBoosting diversity in the FinTech CMO spaceWriting better, clearer, more inclusive job adsKiller interview questionsLinks and references at: https://www.acquiredigitaltalent.com/Get in touch: alex@acquiredigitaltalent.com
Mojo Mortgages CEO and co-founder Richard Hayes tells Lloyd Wahed how he went from a studying music to founding a leading UK online mortgage broker, that disrupts the sector through its hybrid of smart tech and human mortgage experts.After their Series A funding of £7.6 million, mojo has excelled, recently being the finalist at the British Bank Awards 2021. With their acquisition by RVU (the owner of Uswitch, Confused.com and Money.co.uk) underway, this is set to be a monumental deal that will enable mojo to set its vision to scale faster and have a greater impact.Richard has over ten years of experience in the financial services sector, this, combined with his passion for technology, is the driving force behind Mojo. On the podcast, Richard and Lloyd discuss the reason Mojo didn't just focus on the mortgage broking service, and expanded into the development of their own suite of APIs, the creative and musical traits that make so many great founders and what it takes to disrupt the archaic mortgage sector. Plus, Richard shares his favourite books and how to balance family life whilst leading a successful fintech startup.Follow Mana Search on TwitterFollow Mana Search on LinkedInEpisode Highlights:02:12: The Acquisition annoucements04:44: The potential of UK mortgages 13:48: The first mortgage broker with the API suite17:49: Who're the right people to be on the right problems 24:37: From music to a fintech founder33:34: A book guide for founders42:21: Disrupting the mortgage industry51:43: Richard's Mana
LJDS #70Bonjour à tous et bienvenue dans LJDS pour une revue de l'actualité éco, tech et impact du jour. SommaireA la Une #70 Uswitch et Website Carbon Calculator mesurent les sites internet dont l'empreinte carbone est la plus élevéeEconomieLa France a consommé une quantité record de fromage lors du confinementLe rachat d'HSBC France par Cerberus pourrait être acté « dans les prochaines semaines »Blockchain : Casino, Société Générale et Coinhouse lancent un stablecoinTech Le Conseil de l'UE donne son feu vert au nouveau programme pour une Europe numériqueImpactDIMPACT a mesuré l'impact carbone du Streaming de NetflixHubcycle lève 1 500 000 euros pour développer l'upcycling au sein des chaînes de production
RNIB Connect Radio have teamed up with Uswitch to help you get Smart with your money. January can be a tough time to balance the bills and we all need to make the money we have work even harder for us. That's why we'll be looking at a range of ways for you to get the best out of your finances including looking at how switching providers can help you get a better deal. RNIB Connect Radio's Toby Davey spoke with Jean Graham, Senior Community Engagement Manager from USwitch. Jean explains why you should switch energy suppliers and the easiest ways to find the best deals. For hints and tips, go to www.uswitch.com There's more at www.rnib.org.uk #RNIBConnectImage: A Gentleman Reading an Ipad
RNIB Connect Radio have teamed up with Uswitch to help you get Smart with your money. January can be a tough time to balance the bills and we all need to make the money we have work even harder for us. That's why we'll be looking at a range of ways for you to get the best out of your finances including looking at how switching providers can help you get a better deal. RNIB Connect Radio's Paulina Kuchorew spoke to Catherine Hiley, Senior Content Editor at Uswitch. They round up the best, and easiest ways, to save money when it comes to mobile phone deals. For hints and tips, go to www.uswitch.com There's more at www.rnib.org.uk #RNIBConnect
RNIB Connect Radio have teamed up with Uswitch to help you get Smart with your money. January can be a tough time to balance the bills and we all need to make the money we have work even harder for us. That's why we'll be looking at a range of ways for you to get the best out of your finances including looking at how switching providers can help you get a better deal. RNIB Connect Radio's Allan Russell spoke to Dominic Milne from RNIB's Legal Rights Service. They looked at some means tested and non means tested benefits, that many of us could be entitled to, as well as the support that is there from RNIB if your struggling with the Benefits Agency. For hints and tips, go to www.uswitch.com There's more at www.rnib.org.uk #RNIBConnectImage: A Gentleman Reading an Ipad
RNIB Connect Radio have teamed up with Uswitch to help you get Smart with your money. January can be a tough time to balance the bills and we all need to make the money we have work even harder for us. That's why we'll be looking at a range of ways for you to get the best out of your finances including looking at how switching providers can help you get a better deal. RNIB Connect Radio's Allan Russell spoke with Max Beckett from USwitch. Max gave us some tips on how to get the best Wi-Fi signal from your current internet router and how to look for a better deal for your broadband. For hints and tips, go to www.uswitch.com There's more at www.rnib.org.uk #RNIBConnectImage: A Elderly Lady Reading an Ipad
RNIB Connect Radio have teamed up with Uswitch to help you get Smart with your money. January can be a tough time to balance the bills and we all need to make the money we have work even harder for us. That's why we'll be looking at a range of ways for you to get the best out of your finances including looking at how switching providers can help you get a better deal. RNIB Connect Radio's Allan Russell spoke with Salman Haqqi from www.money.co.uk They look at ways to manage our money better, including tips for budgeting, reducing your debt and where to get help if you're really struggling. For hints and tips, go to www.uswitch.com There's more at www.rnib.org.uk #RNIBConnectImage: Gentleman Reading from an Ipad
RNIB Connect Radio have teamed up with Uswitch to help you get Smart with your money. January can be a tough time to balance the bills and we all need to make the money we have work even harder for us. That's why we'll be looking at a range of ways for you to get the best out of your finances including looking at how switching providers can help you get a better deal. RNIB Connect Radio's Toby Davey chats with Janette Scott to find out how easy it is for her and other visually impaired people to manage their money and energy bills. They look at the accessibility of bank and energy suppliers' websites, their apps and share some hints, and tips on how to save energy as a visually impaired person. For hints and tips, go to www.uswitch.com There's more at www.rnib.org.uk #RNIBConnectImage: A Gentleman Reading an Ipad
In this episode of Inside Octopus Energy, we focus on growth and what it takes to go from zero to over 1.8 million customers in just four years. Hosts Russell & Trudy were joined by our Chief Financial Officer and Co-Founder, Stuart Jackson, who talked through everything from bringing on board our first customers, through managing the rapid scaling of the business, to future plans on how to continue the successful growth of the company. We also hear from Claire Osborne, energy consultant & Founder of The Mindset Society, who focuses on Start-up to Scale-up coaching. Claire is currently working with Octopus but her background includes two years leading the energy business for the comparison site, uSwitch, just around the time of Octopus Energy's launch, so we were keen to hear her perspectives on the market at the time and the impact we've had in the market.
Some highlights of the show include: The company's cloud native journey, which accelerated with the acquisition of Uswitch. How the company assessed risk prior to their migration, and why they ultimately decided the task was worth the gamble. Uswitch's transformation into a profitable company resulting from their cloud native migration. The role that multidisciplinary, collaborative teams played in solving problems and moving projects forward. Paul also offers commentary on some of the tensions that resulted between different teams. Key influencing factors that caused the company to adopt containerization and Kubernetes. Paul goes into detail about their migration to Kubernetes, and the problems that it addressed. Paul's thoughts on management and prioritization as CTO. He also explains his favorite engineering tool, which may come as a surprise. Links: RVU Website: https://www.rvu.co.uk/ Uswitch Website: https://www.uswitch.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/pingles GitHub: https://github.com/pingles TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast, where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm your host, Emily Omier, and today I am chatting with Paul Ingles. Paul, thank you so much for joining me.Paul: Thank you for having me.Emily: Could you just introduce yourself: where do you work? What do you do? And include, sort of, some specifics. We all have a job title, but it doesn't always reflect what our actual day-to-day is.Paul: I am the CTO at a company called RVU in London. We run a couple of reasonably big-ish price comparison, aggregator type sites. So, we help consumers figure out and compare prices on broadband products, mobile phones, energy—so in the UK, energy is something which is provided through a bunch of different private companies, so you've got a fair amount of choice on kind of that thing. So, we tried to make it easier and simpler for people to make better decisions on the household choices that they have. I've been there for about 10 years, so I've had a few different roles. So, as CTO now, I sit on the exec team and try to help inform the business and technology strategy. But I've come through a bunch of teams. So, I've worked on some of the early energy price comparison stuff, some data infrastructure work a while ago, and then some underlying DevOps type automation and Kubernetes work a couple of years ago.Emily: So, when you get in to work in the morning, what types of things are usually on your plate?Paul: So, I keep a journal. I use bullet journalling quite extensively. So, I try to track everything that I've got to keep on top of. Generally, what I would try to do each day is catch up with anybody that I specifically need to follow up with. So, at the start of the week, I make a list of every day, and then I also keep a separate column for just general priorities. So, things that are particularly important for the week, themes of work going on, like, technology changes, or things that we're trying to launch, et cetera. And then I will prioritize speaking to people based on those things. So, I'll try and make sure that I'm focusing on the most important thing. I do a weekly meeting with the team. So, we have a few directors that look after different aspects of the business, and so we do a weekly meeting to just run through everything that's going on and sharing the problems. We use the three P's model: so, sharing progress problems and plans. And we use that to try and steer on what we do. And we also look at some other team health metrics. Yeah, it's interesting actually. I think when I switched from working in one of the teams to being in the CTO role, things change quite substantially. That list of things that I had to care about increase hugely, to the point where it far exceeded how much time I had to spend on anything. So, nowadays, I find that I'm much more likely for some things to drop off. And so it's unfortunate, and you can't please everybody, so you just have to say, “I'm really sorry, but this thing is not high on the list of priorities, so I can't spend any time on it this week, but if it's still a problem in a couple of weeks time, then we'll come back to it.” But yeah, it can vary quite a lot.Emily: Hmm, interesting. I might ask you more questions about that later. For now, let's sort of dive into the cloud-native journey. What made RVU decide that containerization was a good idea and that Kubernetes was a good idea? What were the motivations and who was pushing for it?Paul: That's a really good question. So, I got involved about 10 years ago. So, I worked for a search marketing startup that was in London called Forward Internet Group, and they acquired USwitch in 2010. And prior to working at Forward, I'd worked as a consultant at ThoughtWorks in London, so I spent a lot of time working in banks on continuous delivery and things like that. And so when Uswitch came along, there were a few issues around the software release process. Although there was a ton of automation, it was still quite slow to actually get releases out. We were only doing a release every fortnight. And we also had a few issues with the scalability of data. So, it was a monolithic Windows Microsoft stack. So, there was SQL Server databases, and .NET app servers, and things like that. And our traffic can be quite spiky, so when companies are in the news, or there's policy changes and things like that, we would suddenly get an increase in traffic, and the Microsoft solution would just generally kind of fall apart as soon as we hit some kind of threshold. So, I got involved, partly to try and improve some of the automation and release practices because at the search start-up, we were releasing experiments every couple of hours, even. And so we wanted to try and take a bit of that ethos over to Uswitch, and also to try and solve some of the data scalability and system scalability problems. And when we got started doing that, a lot of it was—so that was in the early heyday of AWS, so this was about 2008, that I was at the search startup. And we were used to using EC2 to try and spin up Hadoop clusters and a few other bits and pieces that we were playing around with. And when we acquired Uswitch, we felt like it was quickest for us to just create a different environment, stick it under the load balancer so end users wouldn't realize that some requests was being served off of the AWS infrastructure instead, and then just gradually go from there. We found that that was just the fastest way to move. So, I think it was interesting, and it was both a deliberate move, but it was also I think the degree to which we followed through on it, I don't think we'd really anticipated quite how quickly we would shift everything. And so when Forward made the acquisition, I joined summer of 2010, and myself and a colleague wrote a little two-pager on, here are the problems we see, here are the things that we think we can help with and the ways that technology approach that we'd applied at Forward would carry across, and what benefits we thought it would bring. Unfortunately because Forward was a privately held business—we were relatively small but profitable—and the owner of that business was quite risk-affine. He was quite keen on playing blackjack and other stuff. So, he was pretty happy with talking about probabilities of success.And so we just said, we think there's a future in it if we can get the wheels turning a bit better. And he was up for it. He backed us and we just took it from there. And so we replaced everything from self-hosted physical infrastructure running on top of .NET to all AWS hosted, running a mix of Ruby, and Closure, and other bits and pieces in about two years. And that's just continued from there. So, the move to Kubernetes was a relatively recent one; that was only within the last—I say ‘recent.' it was about two years ago, we started moving things in earnest. And then you asked what was the rationale for switching to Kubernetes—Emily: Let me first ask you, when you were talking with the owner, what were the odds that you gave him for success?Paul: [laughs]. That's a good question. I actually don't know. I think we always knew that there was a big impact to be had. I don't think we knew the scale of the upside. So, I don't think we—I mean, at the time, Uswitch was just about breaking even, so we didn't realize that there was an opportunity to radically change that. I think we underestimated how long it would take to do. So, I think we'd originally thought that we could replace, I think maybe most of the stuff that we needed replaced within six months. We had an early prototype out within two weeks, two or three weeks because we'd always placed a big emphasis on releasing early, experimenting, iterative delivery, A/B testing, that kind of thing. So, I think it was almost like that middle term that was the harder piece. And there was definitely a point where… I don't know, I think it was this classic situation of pulling on a ball of string where it was like, what wanted to do was to focus on improving the end-user experience because our original belief was that, aside from the scalability issues, that the existing site just didn't solve the problem sufficiently well, that it needed an overhaul to simplify the journeys, and simplify the process, and improve the experience for people. We were focusing on that and we didn't want to get drawn into replacing a lot of the back office and integration type systems partly because there was a lot of complexity there. But also because you then have to engage with QA environments, and test environments, and sign-offs with the various people that we integrate with. But it was, as I said, it was this kind of tugging on a ball of string where every improvement that we made in the end-user experience—so we would increase conversion rate by 10 percent but through doing that, we would introduce downstream error in the ways that those systems would integrate, and so we gradually just ended up having to pull in slightly more and more pieces to make it work. I don't think we ever gave odds of success. I think we underestimated how long that middle piece would take. I don't think we really anticipated the degree of upside that we would get as a consequence, through nothing other than just making releases quicker, being able to test and move faster, and focusing on end-user experience was definitely the right thing to focus on.Emily: Do you think though, that everybody perceived it as a risk? I'm just asking because you mentioned the blackjack, was this a risk that could fail?Paul: Well, I think the interesting thing about it was that we knew it was the right thing to do. So, again, I think our experience as consultants at ThoughtWorks was on applying continuous delivery, what we would today call DevOps, applying those practices to software delivery. And so we'd worked on systems where there weren't continuous integration servers and where people weren't releasing every day, and then we'd worked in environments where we were releasing every couple of hours, and we were very quickly able to hone in on what worked and discard things that didn't. And so I think because we've been able to demonstrate that success within the search business, I think that carried a great deal of trust. And so when it came to talking about things we could potentially do, we were totally convinced that there were things that we could improve. I think it was a combination of, there was a ton of potential, we knew that there was a new confluence of technologies and approaches that could be successful if we were able to just start over. And then I think also probably a healthy degree of, like, naive, probably overconfidence in what we could do that we would just throw ourselves into it. So, it's hard work, but yeah, it was ultimately highly successful. So, it's something I'm exceedingly proud of today.Emily: You said something really interesting, which is that Uswitch was barely profitable. And if I understand correctly, that changed for the better. Can you talk about how this is related?Paul: Yeah, sure. I think the interesting thing about it was that we knew that there was something we could do better, but we weren't sure what it was. And so the focus was always on being able to release as frequently as we possibly could to try and understand what that was, as well as trying to just simplify and pay back some of the technical debt. Well, so, trying to overcome some of the artificial constraints that existed because of the technology choices that people have made—perfectly decent decisions on, back in the day, but platforms like AWS offered better alternatives, now. So, we just focused on being able to deliver iteratively, and just keep focusing on continual improvement, releasing, understanding what the problems were, and then getting rid of those little niggly things. The manager I had at Forward was this super—I don't know, he just had the perfect ethos, and he was driven—so we were a team that were focused on doing daily experiments. And so we would rely on data on our spend and data on our revenue. And that would come in on a daily cycle. So, a lot of the rhythm of the team was driven off of that cycle. And so as we could run experiments and measure their profitability, we could then inform what we would do on the day. And so, we have a handful of long-running technology things that we were doing, and then we would also have other tactical things that he would have ideas on, he would have some hypothesis of, well, “Maybe this is the reason that this is happening, let's come up with a test that we can use to try and figure out whether that's true.” We would build something quickly to throw it together to help us either disprove it or support it, and we would put it live, see what happened, and then move on to the next thing. And so I think a lot of the—what we wanted to do is to instill a bit of that environment in Uswitch. And so a lot of it was being able to release quickly, making sure that people had good data in front of them. I mean, even tools like Google Analytics were something which we were quite au fait with using but didn't have broad adoption at the time. And so we were using that to look at site behavior and what was going on and reason about what was happening. So, we just tried to make sure that people were directly using that, rather than just making changes on a longer cycle without data at all.Emily: And can you describe how you were working with the business side, and how you were communicating, what the sort of working relationship was like? If there was any misunderstandings on either side.Paul: Yeah, it's a good question. So, when I started at Uswitch, the organizational structure was, I guess, relatively classical. So, you had a pooled engineering team. So, it was a monolithic system, deployed onto physical infrastructure. So, there was an engineering team, there was an operations team, and then there were a handful of people that were business specific in the different markets that we operated in. So, there was a couple of people that focused on, like, the credit card market; a couple of people that focused on energy, for example. And, I used to call it the stand-up swarm: so, in the morning, we would sit on our desks and you would see almost the entire office moved from the different card walls that were based around the office. Although there was a high degree of interaction between the business stakeholders, the engineers, designers, and other people, it always felt slightly weird that you would have almost all of the company interested in almost everything that was going on, and so I think the intuition we had was that a lot of the ways that we would think about structuring software around loosely-coupled but highly cohesive, those same principles should or could apply to the organization itself. And so what we tried to do is to make sure that we had multidisciplinary teams that had the people in them to do the work. So, for the early days of the energy work, there was only a couple of us that were in it. So, we had a couple of engineers, and we had a lady called Emma, who was the product owner. She used to work in the production operations team, so she used to be focused on data entry from the products that different energy providers would send us, but she had the strongest insight into the domain problem, what problem consumers were trying to overcome, and what ways that we could react to it. And so, when we got involved, she had a couple of ideas that she'd been trying to get traction on, that she'd been unable to. And so what we—we had a, I don't know, probably a, I think a half-day session in an office. So, we took over the boardroom at the office and just said, “Look, we could really do with a separate space away from everybody to be able to focus on it. And we just want to prove something out for a couple of weeks. And we want to make sure that we've got space for people to focus.” And so we had a half-day in there, we had a conversation about, “Okay, well, what's the problem? What's the technical complexity of going after any of these things?” And there's a few nuances, too. Like, if you choose option A, then we have to get all of the historical information around it, as well as the current products and market. Whereas if we choose option B, then we can simplify it down, and we don't need to do all of that work, and we can try and experiment with something sooner. So, we wanted it to be as collaborative as possible because we knew that the way that we would be successful is by trying to execute on ideas faster than we'd been able to before. And at the same time, we also wanted to make sure that there was a feeling of momentum and that we would—I think there was probably a healthy degree of slight overconfidence, but we were also very keen to be able to show off what we could do. And so we genuinely wanted to try and improve the environment for people so that we could focus on solving problems quicker, trying out more experiments, being less hung up on whether it was absolutely the right thing to do, and instead just focus on testing it. So, were there tensions? I think there were definitely tensions; I don't think there weren't tensions so much on the technical side; we were very lucky that most of the engineers that already worked there were quite keen on doing something different, and so we would have conversations with them and just say, “Look, we'll try everything we can to try and remove as many of the constraints that exist today.” I think a lot of the disagreement or tension was whether or not it was the right problem to be going after. So, again, the search business that we worked in was doing a decent amount of money for the number of people that were there, and we knew there was a problem we could fix, but we didn't know how much runway it would have. And so there was a lot of tension on whether we should be pulling people into focusing on extending the search business, or whether we needed to focus on fixing Uswitch. So, there was a fair amount of back and forth about whether or not we needed to move people from one part of the business to another and that kind of thing.Emily: Let's talk a little bit about Kubernetes, and how Uswitch decided to use Kubernetes, what problem it solved, and who was behind the decision, who was really making the push.Paul: Yeah, interesting. So, I think containers was something that we'd been experimenting with for a little while. So, as I think a lot of the culture was, we were quite risk-affine. So, we were quite keen to be trying out new technologies, and we'd been using modern languages and platforms like Closure since the early days of them being available. We'd been playing around with containers for a while, and I think we knew there was something in it, but we weren't quite sure what it was. So, I think, although we were playing around with it quite early, I think we were quite slow to choose one platform or another. I think in the end, we—in the intervening period, I guess, between when we went from the more classical way of running Puppet across a bunch of EC2 instances that run a version of your application, the next step after that was switching over to using ECS. So, Amazon's container service. And I guess the thing that prompted a bit more curiosity into Kubernetes was that—I forgot the projects I was working on, but I was working on a team for a little while, and then I switched to go do something else. And I needed to put a new service up, and rather than just doing the thing that I knew, I thought, “Well, I'll go talk to the other teams.” I'll talk to some other people around the company, and find out what's the way that I ought to be doing this today, and there was a lot of work around standardizing the way that you would stand up an ECS cluster. But I think even then, it always felt like we were sharing things in the wrong way. So, if you were working on a team, you had to understand a great deal of Amazon to be able to make progress. And so, back when I got started at Uswitch, when I talk about doing the work about the energy migration, AWS at the time really only offered EC2, load balancers, firewalling, and then eventually relational databases, and so back then the amounts of complexity to stand up something was relatively small. And then come to a couple of years ago. You have to appreciate and understand routing tables, VPCs, the security rules that would permit traffic to flow between those, it was one of those—it was just relatively non-trivial to do something that was so core to what we needed to be able to do. And I think the thing that prompted Kubernetes was that, on the Kubernetes project side, we'd seen a gradual growth and evolution of the concepts, and abstractions, and APIs that it offered. And so there was a differentiation between ECS or—I actually forget what CoreOS's equivalent was. I think maybe it was just called CoreOS. But there are a few alternative offerings for running containerized, clustered services, and Kubernetes seems to take a slightly different approach that it was more focused on end-user abstractions. So, you had a notion of making a deployment: that would contain replicas of a container, and you would run multiple instances of your application, and then that would become a service, and you could then expose that via Ingress. So, there was a language that you could use to talk about your application and your system that was available to you in the environment that you're actually using. Whereas AWS, I think, would take the view that, “Well, we've already got these building blocks, so what we want our users to do is assemble the building blocks that already exist.” So, you still have to understand load balancers, you still have to understand security groups, you have to understand a great deal more at a slightly lower level of abstraction. And I think the thing that seemed exciting, or that seems—the potential about Kubernetes was that if we chose something that offered better concepts, then you could reasonably have a team that would run some kind of underlying platform, and then have teams build upon that platform without having to understand a great deal about what was going on inside. They could focus more on the applications and the systems that they were hoping to build. And that would be slightly harder on the alternative. So, I think at the time, again, it was one of those fortunate things where I was just coming to the end of another project and was in the fortunate position where I was just looking around at the various different things that we were doing as a business, and what opportunity there was to do something that would help push things on. And Kubernetes was one of those things which a couple of us had been talking about, and thinking, “Oh, maybe now is the time to give it a go. There's enough stability and maturity in it; we're starting to hit the problems that it's designed to address. Maybe there's a bit more appetite to do something different.” So, I think we just gave it a go. Built a proof of concept, showed that could run the most complex system that we had, and I think also did a couple of early experiments on the ways in which Kubernetes had support for horizontal scaling and other things which were slightly harder to put into practice in AWS. And so we did all that, I think gradually it just kind of growed out from there, just took the proof of concepts to other teams that were building products and services. We found a team that were struggling to keep their systems running because they were a tiny team. They only had, like, two or three engineers in. They had some stability problems over a weekend because the server ran out of hard disk space, and we just said, “Right. Well, look, if you use this, we'll take on that problem. You can just focus on the application.” It kind of just grew and grew from there.Emily: Was there anything that was a lot harder than you expected? So, I'm looking for surprises as you're adopting Kubernetes.Paul: Oh, surprises. I think there was a non-trivial amount that we had to learn about running it. And again, I think at the point at which we'd picked it up, it was, kind of, early days for automation, so there was—I think maybe Google had just launched Google Kubernetes engine on Google Cloud. Amazon certainly hadn't even announced that hosted Kubernetes would be an option. There was an early project within Kubernetes, called kops that you could use to create a cluster, but even then it didn't fit our network topology because it wouldn't work with the VPC networking that we needed and expected within our production infrastructure. So, there was a lot of that kind of work in the early days, to try and make something work, you had to understand in quite a level of detail what each component of Kubernetes was doing. As we were gradually rolling it out, I think the things that were most surprising were that, for a lot of people, it solved a lot of problems that meant they could move on, and I think people were actually slightly surprised by that. Which, [laughs], it sounds like quite a weird turn of phrase, but I think people were positively surprised at the amount of stuff that they didn't have to do for solving a fair few number of problems that they had. There was a couple of teams that were doing things that are slightly larger scale that we had to spend a bit more time on improving the performance of our setup. So, in particular, there was a team that had a reasonably strong requirement on the latency overheads of Ingress. So, they wanted their application to respond within, I don't know, I think it was maybe 200 milliseconds or something. And we, through setting up the monitoring and other bits and pieces that we had, we realized that Ingress currently was doing all right, but there was a fair amount of additional latency that was added at the tail that was a consequence of a couple of bugs or other things that existed in the infrastructure. So, there was definitely a lot of little niggly things that came up as we were going, but we were always confident that we could overcome it. And, as I said, I think that a lot of teams saw benefits very early on. And I think the other teams that were perhaps a little bit more skeptical because they got their own infrastructure already, they knew how to operate it, it was highly tested, they'd already run capacity and load tests on it, they were convinced that it was the most efficient thing that they could possibly run. I think even over the long run, I think they realized that there was more work that they needed to do than they should be focusing on, and so they were quite happy to ultimately switch over to the shared platform and infrastructure that the cloud infrastructure team run.Emily: As we wrap up, there's actually a question I want to go back to, which is how you were talking about the shifting priorities now that you've become CTO. Do you have any sort of examples of, like, what are the top three things that you will always care about, that you will always have the energy to think about? And then I'm curious to have some examples of things that you can't deal with, you can't think about. The things that tend to drop off.Paul: The top three things that I always think about. So, I think, actually, what's interesting about being CTO, that I perhaps wasn't expecting is that you're ever so slightly removed from the work, that you can't rely on the same signals or information to be able to make a decision on things, and so when I give the Kubernetes story, it's one of those, like, because I'd moved from one system to another, and I was starting a new project, I experienced some pain. It's like, “Right. Okay, I've got to go do something to fix this. I've had enough.” And I think the thing that I'm always paying attention to now, is trying to understand where that pain is next, and trying to make sure that I've got a mechanism for being able to appreciate that. So, I think a lot of the things I try to spend time on are things to help me keep track of what's going on, and then help me make decisions off the back of it. So, I think the things that I always spend time on are generally things trying to optimize some process or invest in automation. So, a good example at the moment is, we're talking about starting to do canary deployments. So, starting to automate the actual rollout of some new release, and being able to automate a comparison against the existing service, looking at latency, or some kind of transactional metrics to understand whether it's performing as well or different than something historical. So, I think the things that I tend to spend time on are process-oriented or are things to try and help us go quicker. One of the books that I read that changed my opinion of management was Andy Grove's, High Output Management. And I forget who recommended it to me, but somebody recommended it to me, and it completely altered my opinion of what value a manager can add. So, one of the lenses I try to apply to anything is of everything that's going on, what's the handful of things that are going to have the most impact or leverage across the organization, and try and spend my time on those. I think where it gets tricky is that you have to go broad and deep. So, as much as there are broad things that have a high consequence on the organization as a whole, you also need an appreciation of what's going on in the detail, and I think that's always tricky to manage. I'm sorry, I forgot what was the second part of your question.Emily: The second part was, do you have any examples of the things that you tend to not care about? That presumably someone is asking you to care about, and you don't?Paul: [laughs]. Yeah, it's a good question. I don't think it's that I don't care about it. I think it's that there are some questions that come my way that I know that I can defer, or they're things which are easy to hand off. So, I think the… that is a good question. I think one of the things that I think are always tricky to prioritize, are things which feel high consequence but are potentially also very close to bikeshedding. And I think that is something which is fair—I'd be interested to hear what other people said. So, a good example is, like, choice of tooling. And so when I was working on a team, or on a problem, we would focus on choosing the right tool for the job, and we would bias towards experimenting with tools early, and figuring out what worked, and I think now you have to view the same thing through a different lens. So, there's a degree to which you also incur an organizational cost as a consequence of having high variability in the programming languages that you choose to use. And so I don't think it's something I don't care about, but I think it's something which is interesting that I think it's something which, over the time I've been doing this role, I've gradually learned to let go of things that I would otherwise have previously thoroughly enjoyed getting involved in. And so you have to step back and say, “Well, actually I'm not the right person to be making a decision about which technology this team should be using. I should be trusting the team to make that decision.” And you have to kind of—I think that over the time I've been doing the role, you kind of learn which are the decisions that are high consequence that you should be involved in and which are the ones that you have to step back from. And you just have to say, look, I've got two hours of unblocked time this week where I can focus on something, so of the things on my priority list—the things that I've written in my journal that I want to get done this month—which of those things am I going to focus on, and which of the other things can I leave other people to get on with, and trust that things will work out all right?Emily: That's actually a very good segue into my final question, which is the same for everyone. And that is, what is an engineering tool that you can't live without—your favorite?Paul: Oh, that's a good question. So, I don't know if this is a cop-out by not mentioning something engineering-related, but I think the tool and technique which has helped me the most as I had more and more management responsibility and trying to keep track of things, is bullet journaling. So, I think, up until, I don't know, maybe five years ago, probably, I'd focus on using either iOS apps or note tools in both my laptop, and phone, and so on, and it never really stuck. And bullet journaling, through using a pen and a notepad, it forced me to go a bit slower. So, it forced me to write things down, to think through what was going on, and there is something about it being physical which makes me treat it slightly differently. So, I think bullet journaling is one of the things which has had the—yeah, it's really helped me deal with keeping track of what's going on, and then giving me the ability to then look back over the week, figure out what were the things that frustrated me, what can I change going into next week, one of the suggestions that the person that came up with bullet journaling recommended, is this idea of an end of week reflection. And so, one of the things I try to do—it's been harder doing it now that I'm working at home—is to spend just 15 minutes at the end of the week thinking of, what are the things that I'm really proud of? What are some good achievements that I should feel really good about going into next week? And so I think a lot of the activities that stem from bullet journaling have been really helpful. Yeah, it feels like a bit of a cop-out because it's not specifically technology related, but bullet journaling is something which has made a big difference to me.Emily: Not at all. That's totally fair. I think you are the first person who's had a completely non-technological answer, but I think I've had someone answer Slack, something along those lines.Paul: Yeah, I think what's interesting is there there are loads of those tools that we use all the time. Like Google Docs is something I can't live without. So, I think there's a ton of things that I use day-to-day that are hard to let go off, but I think the I think that the things that have made the most impact on my ability to deal with a stressful job, and give you the ability to manage yourself a little bit, I think yeah, it's been one of the most interesting things I've done.Emily: And where could listeners connect with you or follow you?Paul: Cool. So, I am @pingles on Twitter. My DMs are open, so if anybody wants to talk on that, I'm happy to. I'm also on GitHub under pingles, as well. So, @pingles, generally in most places will get you to me.Emily: Well, thank you so much for joining me.Paul: Thank you for talking. It's been good fun.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.
Luca is an entrepreneurial Technology Leader, working with startups and scaleups in creating the next wave of innovation. Currently he’s the VP Engineering of Signal AI where he leads the Product & Technology provision. Prior to that, he was Strategy Product Lead at uSwitch.com, the leading UK comparison website. His experience also involves high level technology consultancy assisting clients in digital transformation and creation of new digital products. He worked as a Lead Consultant for ThoughtWorks, focussing on the European markets.Resources:Luca's blog - https://www.lucagrulla.com/SignalAI research blog: https://research.signal-ai.com/SignalAI GitHub - https://github.com/signal-ai/
So, let’s start with last week’s startup funding scene. We had a total of 391 funding rounds, $9.2 billion total funding, 146 acquisitions recorded, and a transaction of a total acquisition amount of $12.5 billion. Let’s dive right into the highlights now. Used car marketplace Motorway picks up £11M Series A Motorway, the U.K. used car marketplace, has raised £11 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Marchmont Ventures, the fund managed by Hugo Burge and Alan Martin (the former CEO and CFO of Momondo Group, respectively), along with participation from existing backer LocalGlobe. Founded by the team behind Top10 — the mobile and broadband comparison site that exited to uSwitch in 2011 — Motorway has set out to make it easier to sell your used car online. The website lets car sellers instantly see live offers from multiple car buying services and specialist dealerships. Indonesia’s EV Hive raises $13.5M and expands into co-living and new retail WeWork’s battle to win co-working in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, is intensifying after one of the U.S. firm’s key rivals issued a slew of announcements to double down on its business. EV Hive, an Indonesia-based co-working startup, said today that it has raised $13.5 million and expanded into new verticals. The company is putting off plans to foray into new countries in order to prioritize growth opportunities at home. The four-year-old company, which started as a project for seed-stage VC firm East Ventures, has rebranded to CoHive as part of the strategy to diversify its business. That’ll see it add new services for living spaces (CoLiving) and retailers (CoRetail), in addition to its core co-working and events businesses. Duffel raises $21.5M in Series A from Benchmark for its travel platform Ten months ago London startup Duffel hinted that it would be “a new way to book travel online, aiming at the booking experience ‘end to end,’ ” and announced a healthy $4.7 million funding round, but not much else. Last week, Duffel announced a funding of $21.5 million in Series A from U.S. VC giant Benchmark, which also backed Snap, Twitter and Uber. Benchmark is joined by Blossom Capital and Index Ventures, which participated in Duffel’s $4.7 million seed round last year. Duffel appears to be building a new software stack for travel, in the same way that challenger banks started from scratch to make themselves more agile than the laggard banks. SafeAI raises $5M to develop and deploy autonomy for mining and construction vehicles Startup SafeAI, powered by a founding talent team with experience across Apple, Ford and Caterpillar, is emerging from stealth today with a $5 million funding announcement. The company’s focus is on autonomous vehicle technology, designed and built specifically for heavy equipment used in the mining and construction industries. What SafeAI hopes to add is an underlying architecture that acts as a fully autonomous (Level 4 by SAE standards, so no human driver) platform for a variety of equipment. Said platform is designed with openness, modularity and upgradeability in mind to help ensure that its clients can take advantage of new advances in autonomy and AI as they become available. Two Sigma leads $12m series A for expert knowledge network NewtonX NewtonX is a “knowledge access platform” which attempts to intelligently answer questions posed to it by business clients. Clients answer a carefully calibrated series of questions to properly vet and scope a query, and then NewtonX farms it out to it network of experts for insight. That rapid-response network has now gotten the attention of Two Sigma Ventures, the venture wing of the high-flying algorithmic-trading hedge fund, which led a $12 million Series A round into New York City-based NewtonX. That’s a follow up to a $3 million seed round co-led by Third Prime Capital and Xfund last year. Moving on to acquisitions - WordPress management site WP Engine acquires Flywheel as it moves to a $1B valuation and IPO WordPress now accounts for 34 percent of all websites globally, and today one of the key companies that helps handle the creation and management of some of those WP-hosted sites is getting a little bigger through some consolidation in the wider ecosystem. WP Engine, which works with businesses to build and manage their WordPress-hosted sites, has aquired Flywheel, a smaller competitor. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, WP Engine, as Brunner describes it, focuses largely on mid-market and larger businesses, while Flywheel — founded and currently based out of Omaha — has focused on smaller businesses. That makes the two natural complements to each other, but Brunner notes that there will be more gained from the union. What else caught our eyes- Facebook just reinvented digital currency with its Libra cryptocurrency that will launch early next year. No they’re not calling it Zuckerbucks. Libra is like cash that lives inside your phone. Starting in 2020, you’ll be able to purchase Libra through Libra wallet apps on your phone or from some local grocery and convenience stores. You cash in your local currency like dollars and get nearly the same number of Libra coins, which are represented by wavy three-line emoji instead of the $ symbol. But first you’ll have to verify your identity with a photo. You’ll then be able to spend your Libra while online shopping, or potentially pay for things like Ubers or your subscription for Spotify, since those companies have partnered with Facebook to make Libra popular. Since it’s almost free to digitally move Libra from one account to the other, you won’t have to pay high credit card processing fees that can add almost 4% to your total. And some Libra wallet apps and shops will give bonus discounts or free coins for signing up and paying with Libra.
The second episode of The Internal Communications Podcast features UX expert, Dan Williams. We're going to look at what Internal Comms can learn from User Experience Design, how technology can help us make our messaging more efficient, and find out why content alone, simply won't cut it. Liked this? Join our webinar about scaling Internal Comms with Mike Klein, and Natalie Allen - Head of Employee Engagement at ZPG (Zoopla, uSwitch) on the 20th February. Sign up at happeo.com You can also join our Internal Communications Community for curated articles, an exclusive social platform, and information about our events at happeo.com/community
In this episode I speak with Lukasz Zelezny, Director of Organic Performance for ZPG Plc. Lukasz specifically works on the companies uSwitch brand. He has a vast experience with SEO and organic acquisition. We discuss the things he does to consistently improve the rankings for uSwitch. This touches on the customer experience and conversion rate optimisation as well. There are a ton of takeaways in this episode. Lukasz often refers to how the things we discuss relate to small and medium businesses.
" A lot of people within the industry, friends, family and wider, thought we were just crazy. So we were going to launch a business with 14 people, we weren't going to have any call centres, we weren't going to have any shops, we were going to be online only, and our members will do all the stuff, like get more members to join, will help with member queries... And people just didn't think it could work." On today's show I welcome Tom Rainsford, co-founder and brand director of telecommunications disruptor Giff Gaff. As one of the original founders Tom started with the simple idea of 'making mobile better'. They are the David among Goliath's in mobile-land, they have members, not customers, and don't tie them down with lengthy contracts. They were Uswitch's 2017 network of the year, and just had one of their video's voted in Youtube's Top 10 video's for 2017. Tom and I talk about how they were able to compete in such a competitive market, how their members drive the business for them and how they even paid their members over £11 million for their services..let's startup!
IMDb will soon close and erase their 18 year old message boards. Media coverage of this announcement has generally followed a similar theme: Trolls forced them to close. Blame the trolls. They were unstoppable. But that perspective is completely dismissive of the community profession, and the tools and strategies we have at our disposal. Trolls don’t force us to close communities. But apathy definitely does. Timo Tolonen, head of community at giffgaff, a community-first mobile phone service provider, joins the show for an in-depth discussion on the announcement and resulting impact. Plus: The value that exists within the IMDb message board archives Why quick community closures harm your most loyal members How giffgaff restructured its community team to focus on specialization Big Quotes “Trolls don’t force companies to close communities. Apathy is what leads to communities being closed.” -@patrickokeefe “I feel like moves like [IMDb closing their message boards] implicitly endorse the narrative of comment sections and communities being inherently worthless due to a minority, and that we are somehow powerless against those forces.” -@TimoTolonen “IMDb is the definitive movie site, so it stands to reason that there are posts [in their message boards] that were written by wannabe filmmakers, who are now winning Oscars. Or there are posts there by people who were no-name actors, who are now stars. It’s not uncommon. There are old hip-hop forums people talk about where that rapper, who’s now a big deal, was on there, or that producer who’s now a hitmaker was on there. So, culturally, IMDb is very significant to film, especially film from the ’90s on and the discussion and critique of film. To wholesale clear that out, it just feels like there’s a lack of appreciation for the significance.” -@patrickokeefe “[IMDb talks about] moving those people [from their message boards] over to social media – their Twitter account, Snapchat, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr. Aside from serving slightly different audiences at the moment, my concern [is] that they haven’t learned quite the right lesson out of all of this. It’s not a question of platform. It’s about how you manage that platform and what you do with your engaged people. It’s not so much about where you have them. It’s about what you do with them.” -@TimoTolonen “If a community’s doing something or has become something, it’s the fault of the community manager, effectively. Either you were rewarding or recognizing the wrong behaviors or something else happened along the line. It doesn’t just happen overnight, and it also doesn’t mean that you’re stuck there. You can make changes. You can take ownership of the platform and the people on it. It’s a lot of hard work and it’s not easy, necessarily, and the solutions aren’t always readily apparent, but you’re never beholden to the direction you’re heading in at that moment.” -@TimoTolonen “When it comes to closing a massive, 18-year-old community, I feel like you have to give people more than two weeks to connect elsewhere. You don’t have to keep the boards open for that long, but at least create a carve out so that people with a certain number of posts … can connect to other people that they have this strong connection to through your site. Some vacations are two weeks long. So, what? A decade-plus user of IMDb goes on vacation, comes back, and sees they are cut off from the friends they made years ago? That’s sad.” -@patrickokeefe “The guy who came up with the idea for giffgaff, Gav Thompson, he had sort of an epiphany one night when he was looking for help fixing his motorcycle. He’d gotten a quote from a BMW garage, and they told him that’s it’s going to cost an arm and a leg to adjust his suspension. He was like, ‘Well, I’m not having that. I’m just going to ask some random people online,’ and he did so at midnight after a couple of drinks. What happened was, he immediately got some responses and not only did he get responses, he got this overwhelming amount of support from members on that community with pictures and everything else. He got a better level of service for free, from the comfort of his own home, and that kind of gave him the idea of, ‘Okay, how about we translate this model into mobile?’ That’s where the concept of giffgaff came from. When launching, I wasn’t there for the early days, but the whole point was that in order for this business to work, it needed to have a community at the heart of it. It needed to be the core of it.” -@TimoTolonen "[After we won the uSwitch Best Network Customer Service] award from last year, we sent it to our members, and they've been passing it from one member to the other for a bit now. ... Usually, when we have awards ceremonies for member support or, in this case, it was a customer support services, we tend to take members there to accept the awards on our behalf, because effectively, they're the reason we're winning." -@TimoTolonen “You have somebody on Twitter, and they’re doing amazing stuff. They really love Twitter because of their own personal connection to it, or the format or something about it that really resonates with them. Then, you see somebody on the forum using that platform the way it’s intended for long form content. … You can tell they love it as much as that person loves Twitter. Those two people, if they got into a room together without platform, in real life, they would have so much in common, and so much to talk about. They would get on like a house on fire. The only reason they don’t is because the forum user never wants to use Twitter, and the Twitter user doesn’t want to use the forum, and the twain shall never meet.” -@TimoTolonen About Timo Tolonen Timo Tolonen is a people and project manager from the video games industry who saw the light and made the very sensible leap into community some 6 years ago and hasn’t looked back since. He is currently the head of community at giffgaff, a mobile phone provider in the UK that believes that together with their members anything is possible. Related Links Timo on Twitter IMDb IMDb’s announcement about their message board closure giffgaff, the United Kingdom-based mobile phone carrier, where Timo is head of community IMDb’s Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube profiles Patrick’s Twitter thread about the IMDb message board closure Timo’s responses on Twitter giffgaff Community NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments by Elizabeth Jensen of NPR We’re Getting Rid of Comments on VICE.com by Jonathan Smith of VICE One of the Worst Comments Sections on the Internet is Shutting Down by Sarah Perez of TechCrunch IMDb Kills Its Message Boards and Nothing of Value Was Lost by Bryan Menegus of Gizmodo IMDb’s Message Boards IMDb’s Get Satisfaction Hearst, publisher of Cosmopolitan Internet Archive, home of the Wayback Machine, which archives webpages MovieForums.com, managed by Chris Bowyer Community Signal episode with Chris Bowyer MovieForums.com’s IMDb alumni thread Col Needham, IMDb founder Col Needham discussing IMDb’s technology scaling efforts Col Needham discussing the “old boards software” and future community efforts at IMDb Comment on IMDb Facebook about the message boards being closed after 2 decades As a Conservative Twitter Users Sleeps, His Account is Hard at Work by Craig Timberg of the Washington Post O2, a think tank from which giffgaff launched from Gav Thompson, founder of giffgaff, who had the idea for the company after receiving help for his motorcycle in an online forum uSwitch, a UK-based price comparison tool uSwitch Mobile Awards, where giffgaff has won the Best Network Customer Service award for two consecutive years giffgaff Payback, the company’s program to financially incentivize community participation giffgaff Reaches 1 Million Customers, Starts Selling Handsets by Telecom.paper giffgaff Labs, the company’s ideation platform giffgaff’s community knowledge base Run By You, giffgaff’s community award program Community Signal episode with Brad Williams, who Patrick met in the SitePoint Forums Transcript View transcript on our website Your Thoughts If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be grateful if you spread the word. Thank you for listening to Community Signal.
/50 years ago Barclays launched introduced their credit card, revolutionising the way we shop. To discuss how credit has changed since 1966 Sarah is joined by Jane Clack from Payplan, Alastair Douglas from Totally Money and Tashema Jackson from uSwitch. First Broadcast: 09/07/16
Turning up the heat: the new energy companies breaking into a market dominated by big established firms. Evan Davis meets two small entrants to the sector to find out how they're gaining market share. Is the strategy to compete on price, customer service or green credentials? He'll discuss the role of the price comparison websites in encouraging customers to switch providers and hear how some smaller companies are cutting gas and electricity bills when their bigger rivals aren't. Guests: Dale Vince, Founder and CEO, Ecotricity Stephen Fitzpatrick, Founder and Managing Director, Ovo Energy Ann Robinson, Director of Consumer Policy at uSwitch.com Producer: Sally Abrahams.
An interview with the founders of Tapastreet.com Joe Mitchell CEO and Kathryn Tunney CMO about this new app which promises to link the worlds of social media and local consumption. Also Eoin Clarke from USwitch.ie talks about the Irish Broadband Awards which they have just announced as title sponsors.
In this podcast a feature interview with Eoin Clarke, Country Manager - Ireland for uSwitch - the online price comparison and switching service which this week received full accreditation by the Commission for Energy Regulation (CER) in Ireland. And a telephone interview with Eamonn Hession from Puca about an innovative app they have developed for the Fyffes brand.
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