Roo Reynolds - What’s Next?

Moving on from IBM

Posted by Roo - 18/07/08 at 09:07:10 am

Having been an IBMer for more than 10 years, I’m moving on.

I’ve accepted the position of Portfolio Executive, Social Media at BBC Vision. What that means is that I’ll be helping to define, develop and execute BBC Vision’s strategy in relation to social media. Simon Nelson gave a speech in September 2007 about some of the progress made (and challenges faced) by the BBC in regard to multiplatform (more discussion about that here). That’s the backdrop to what I’m going there to help with. No doubt I’ll talk more about the specifics in the coming weeks and months. Oh, and I get to work with such cool people as Dan Taylor and Jo Twist.

10 years is a long time (I got my pen last year) so although I’m very excited about the new role I always knew that I’d be sad when the day finally came to leave IBM. Hursley is a great place to work, but more than anything I’ll miss spending time with some very good friends who work there.

Things I’ll miss about IBM:

• Friends. Lots of friends. So many very good friends. The good thing is that we don’t have to lose touch, but not seeing you all around on the intranet and in person is going to be sad. (Which leads us on to…)
• Regular tea runs. The Hursley Cha Bar is a sort of second home. 66p for a small PG Tips. The Starbucks in White City just might not be the same.
• Hursley itself. The site is a big gorgeous leafy campus with a nice walk around the site, a library, a reading room, 2 pubs in walking distance as well as an onsite bar/clubhouse and a couple of thousand geniuses. It’s beautiful.
• A short drive to work, with a lift-share. (A train + tube journey from Southampton to Wood Lane is probably going to hurt a little bit, even factoring in some working on the train. I haven’t started yet and I’m already looking forward to the London Overground line opening. Southampton - Clapham Junction - Shepherd’s Bush has to be better than Southampton -> Waterloo - Bond St - White City)

Incredibly, I’ve been an IBMer ever since I finished school and started my degree as a sponsored student, way back in 1997. I was initially based in North Harbour before relocating to Hursley because that was where the interesting technical work seemed to be. I had roles in middleware development teams including spells in test, service and development. I’m glad to say that each role was more interesting and fun than the last. I have never had a master plan. I’ve never had long term goal, other than to say yes to everything I physically can, and have as much fun as possible.

In more recent times, that attitude has meant helping develop Business Integration for Games (before IBM, or the world, really took games seriously). I went on to be the the lead developer for a small messaging product called Microbroker before joining the Emerging Technology Services team making proof of concept and first of a kind prototypes for clients. Most recently, I was pleased to see that it really is possible to carve out a new role when I joined Ian in calling myself a Metaverse Evangelist and we were both picked up by the CIO office’s Innovate Quick team on a virtual remote assignment.

I got to meet a lot of clients and business partners in this role, so I know very well that IBM continues to impress people as being surprisingly advanced and interesting for a company of its age and size. Not only that, but IBMers are treated as grown ups; we get to use our common sense. If it was not for the freedom and trust which IBMers enjoy, I’d have left a very long time ago.

The thing that has made IBM such a great place to spend a third of my life (!) is the people I’ve worked with. Don’t lose touch - I’ll still be on LinkedIn, blogging, Twittering, etc.

I’ve worked with some great people and on some great projects, and it’s good to be leaving on a high. I don’t regret anything about my time at IBM, and I’m only going because it’s time for me to have even more fun elsewhere.

Goodbye, IBM. Hello, BBC.

Update: I’m overwhelmed by your lovely comments, compliments and travel tips. Thank you, everyone.

X is the new Y for 2007

Posted by Roo - 30/12/07 at 01:12:28 pm

The Boston Globe’s Ideas section today features an updated version of my “X is the new Y” diagram. [Update: it's actually the front page feature of the Ideas section. Thanks to Kelly for the picture...]

Originally inspired by the LeisureArts chart from 2005, I decided to bring the idea up to date in September. Essentially, it’s a few pages of results from a Google search for “* is the new *” (and “* are the new *”). For this latest version I also added “+2007″ to the search term, so it picks up things that happened (or were at least written about) in 2007. I then ran the results through some basic text processing. “x is the new y” became “x -> y”. This happens to be the required syntax for Graphviz, which then automatically drew the directed graphs for me.

(bigger version)

The search was a bit of a manual process, and I ended up doing additional searches in order to flesh out the diagram (oh.. pirates are the new ninjas.. I wonder what are the new pirates… I’ll search for “* are the new pirates”).

All of this is very similar to my first pass at this idea in September except this latest version, being 2007 specific, misses out more general links and includes culturally specific recent references such as the werewolves -> vampires -> zombies -> pirates -> ninjas chain (which I’m really happy about) as well as the iPhone and a few other recent highlights of this year.

Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe wrote a thoughtful piece about it.

If you want to know what happened in 2007, you could do worse than noting what it was that people decided was the new black, or the new oil, or the new golf.

…

Because it is so ubiquitous and so adaptable, because it so easily captures the human mind’s penchant for analogies, and because it is constantly rendering itself obsolete (what is the new iPhone? who is the new Amy Winehouse?), this off-the-shelf rhetorical device makes an ideal marker of a year’s conversational currents. The charts here are an unsystematic attempt, culled from Web searches, to trace the patterns that emerge.

…

Eventually, sapped by this sort of subversion, the phrase might have to give way to another equally handy one. What the new “new black” would be remains anyone’s guess.

The Boston Globe - ‘The new, new things of 2007′ - December 30, 2007

The team at the Globe took my ugly diagrams, which looked like this…

…and turned them into something beautiful, like this…

If you don’t happen to get the dead-tree version, you can read the article on the Boston Globe site.

Happy Birthday (and thank you), SlideShare

Posted by Roo - 05/10/07 at 02:10:41 pm

It seems my presentation from yesterday’s talk at IT4Arts has been selected, by whatever selection process exists, to be the “slideshare of the day” on SlideShare. I’m glad I added the audio track last night.

In other, related, news: SlideShare is one year old today. Happy birthday, (and thank you), SlideShare.

10 years at Big Blue (and how it feels)

Posted by Roo - 18/09/07 at 04:09:49 pm

This week marks my tenth year working for IBM. That means I’ve been working at IBM for 35% of my life, and a whole 12% of IBM’s existence, or 10%  if you include the time it was called CTR. (This feels like a lot, and more than I realised.)

I started ten years ago this week as an undergraduate on the Integrated Degree Scheme, the IBM sponsored programme at Portsmouth University. (Sadly this course was closed a few years after I completed it.)

The first few (six? nine?) months of my working life were pure training, learning programming skills, presentation skills, and generally how to be an IBMer. (In subsequent years, that first chunk of training was reduced and then dropped altogether.)

Although most of my time has been spent in Hursley, I first started in the ground floor of F-block in North Harbour, IBM’s UK headquarters. (That building no longer belongs to IBM. It was sold off, and most of the buildings leased back.)

In ten years I have had ten different first-line managers (and fifteen different desk locations).

I’ve worked in test, service and development for big (and small) messaging middleware products. I was invited to work on a couple of prototype innovation projects including something from 2003 called Business Integration for Games. I joined Emerging Technology Services, and am currently on assignment to the CIO’s office as a metaverse evangelist. Each role seems more satisfying, and more fun, than the last. (In the meantime, many of my friends and colleagues from those 10 years have moved on to other companies.)

Will I still be here in another ten years? (I’m not sure.)

Ask not what an Information Revolution can do for you

Posted by Roo - 07/04/07 at 01:04:00 am

Ask.com’s latest attempt at wresting “sleep searchers” from Google: the Information Revolution.

I saw the posters on the tube and thought “looks interesting” and made a note to visit the website. Although the site now displays the Ask.com logo, it initially didn’t declare who was behind it (and I wasn’t sharp-eyed enough to spot the red oval on the poster is the Ask logo sans-”Ask”). Marketing-savvy readers - cynical about apparent underground activism and viral campaigns - did soon identify who was behind it though, with Ask.com finally showing their hand four days later.

And that was probably the biggest problem with it. By initially concealing the messenger, the message itself becomes tainted.

It’s not even an original approach. Didn’t SanDisk already do almost the exact same thing with iDont, complete with guerilla-style tube ads and cheap-looking white-and-red-on-black website? The one thing Ask’s campaign does better is to allow comments on their website. Of course, the comments being left are almost universally negative, as people vent their disappointment and resentment. This one sums up the tone of most:

“Like other people here I was expecting a net neutrality site. I was curious where the money for your tube ads had come from though, and now I see this is just a poorly executed PR stunt for Ask.com.”

And what are other people out there saying?

• “build a better product“
• “You lost some points“
• “What were they thinking?“
• “You’ll never make friends at a party if you’re that fake“
• “Much of the Ask.com campaign relies on hiding the fact that it is advertising“

Personally, if I’m disappointed it’s partly because I really want companies to try interesting ways of engaging with the web. With us. With me. This failed, and failed really horribly badly. While it’s crass and vacuous (almost on the scale of WalMart’s ‘School Your Way’ flop) hopefully at least the world is learning from it.

[CC-licensed photo originally uploaded to Flickr by Larsz]

Flying high with IMB, apparently

Posted by Roo - 19/02/07 at 02:02:33 pm

I have traveled quite a lot recently, but must confess to never having opened the British Airways inflight magazine, ‘Business Life’. It was something of a surprise to be informed by Andy that my name gets mentioned in the February edition, and it makes me wish I was a regular reader, and had discovered it for myself.

It’s a six-page article on business in Second Life (which starts on page 26 by the way, in case you happen to be reading this on a domestic or European BA flight) and includes quotes from and mentions of…

• Philip Rosedale aka Philip Linden aka ‘El Presidente’
• Ailin Graef aka Anshe Chung
• Alyssa LaRoche aka Aimee Weber
• Justin Bovington
• Stefano Marzano of Philips Design
• Brian McGuinness of Aloft
• Reuben Steiger of MOU
• Andrew Reynolds, “Metaverse Evangelist at IMB [sic] labs”

I wonder if IBM know about this unexpected job move? :-)

The brief quote about me says that I’m “helping [companies] explore the potential of becoming v-businesses” and mentions that I’m “very busy indeed.”

So they got everything spot on with the very minor exception of the name of the (supposedly rather famous) company I work for then. Superbrand indeed.

Good news for Southampton

Posted by Roo - 10/02/07 at 10:02:25 am

A story in other people’s Flickr photos…

Can you guess what it is yet? Mouseover for clues. You got it.

NMK conference: “My so-called 2nd life”

Posted by Roo - 26/10/06 at 02:10:16 pm

So speaking at the NMK event was fun. I’ve done a longish writeup about it on Eightbar already, which I won’t repeat here.

Who was blogging about it? Well,

• Mike Butcher who chaired the event made some notes.
• Gauti Sigthorsson was speaking, and was wondering in advance about the best way to pronounce MMORPG
• Esther MacCallum-Stewart was speaking, and has put her presentation up (must do this).
• Tom Hume was there, and has writeups for the talks given by Michael Smith, Esther, and myself
• Alan Patrick was there, has a thought-provoking piece on Web 3.D
• Helen Keegan has a comprehensive review of Michael’s presentation.
• Jemima Kiss put up a piece on paidContent.org.

For some reason, this particular post attracts a lot of spam. For my own sanity, I’m turning off comments on this one. Email me (contact details in the sidebar) if you have anything to add. Thanks

Testing

Posted by Roo - 12/07/06 at 09:07:36 pm

Tap tap.. Is this thing on?

Right then. I’ve been writing on Eightbar, and other places, for a while, but I sometimes itch for a personal blog of my own. Darren, Richard and Andy (to name but a few fellow IBMers brave enough to blog in public) make a pretty good job of it. It’s time to finally join the party and try it for myself. Bear with me while I find my feet and get some content flowing.

Important update: I’ve been importing old stuff. Anything on this site older than this post has been imported from an older blog. That is all.

Election night links

Posted by Roo - 05/05/05 at 09:05:05 pm

Below are some tools to help with your election night enjoyment…From the BBC:

• Scorecard - refreshes annoyingly frequently, but keep you up-to-date with results.
• Map - watch your constituency, or the overall picture.
• Blog - BBC blog content has traditionally been excellent
• Seat-by-seat results
• Streaming news player - watch headlines and election news online.
• News Alerts app - get election news flashes on your (Windows) desktop.

Play with Ordnance Survey’s election-maps.co.uk

Nick and I kept some notes until sleep got the better of us.