Last week I enjoyed participating in Computing and the Cloud – a day of brainstorming – so that Knowledge Transfer Networks justify their existence, by picking our brains to pass on an overview to those who sit nearer to the honeypot.

This is exactly opposite to the talk I enjoyed last night at Political Innovation, where ENGAGEMENT was the key word, besides LISTENING, when we talked about Policymaking in the Cloud.

On the first occasion, I met The Islington Twins who encouraged me to make a pitch about my innovation and I said something like:

Hello, I’d like you to fast forward to 1-2 years, when you take your favourite online device for looking through my “software lenses”. You’ll choose:

• an objective for
  • selecting images, complex data or time series
• a focus to choose the scale
  • nano and below, human or astronomical.

And then you pick a domain from a drop-down menu and begin to vary the parameters with which to examine in more detail what you are already familiar with.

Only you know the significance of the quantifications that my software will offer you.

Only you will be able to name the quality that now becomes a ‘measuring unit’ with quantifications.

But not only you will benefit from your experience: by feeding your familiarity into the system, others who are less skilled can learn from this new ‘smart web portal’ later.

See you in the cloud!

That’s what I like about living in London: the many opportunities for events that bring together people who illustrate the state of the art – of thinking, business and, above all, funding:

• whether it’s Dimensional Analysis at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge which confirmed once again why my thinking is different and solves mathematical problems that people are trying to solve
• or a BioWednesday entitled Creating the Right Culture and Supporting Entrepreneurs in Life Sciences that gave me a chance to present my innovation with one slide in three minutes
• or today’s Connecting the Supply Chain which I attended for I suspected applications for the layering of complex data.

The outcome?

1. An invitation to use my prototype to forecast data from a lecturer in Sustainable Electrical Power Engineering from the University of Greenwich for an academic publication.
2. The possibility for writing a proposal to bridge the “Smart Meter” roll-out (top down, single product) with the OpenHub and LightSpeedDerby projects (bottom up, multiple products, multiple applications in the context of Smart Cities).
3. Discussions about my innovation with an electronics firm that is looking for partners.
4. The challenge to get my prototype working on my new laptop.
5. A critique of the governmental conference centre that wastes energy on coloured lighting but wasn’t able to heat our room sufficiently.

If only I could meet the right people with an ‘intelligent chequebook’ instead of having to fit into yet another ‘scope’ of a ‘funding competition’. For this  funding style is a complete waste of resources, if follow-on funding is not built-in which is the case for the OpenHubs and LightSpeedDerby. What does it take for government to wake up???

Related articles

• Why a Smart Meter Can be a Smart Investment (txu.com)