A couple of weeks ago, our CEO Gary had a new heating system fitted, with the new tado° smart thermostat. It’s pretty impressive, carefully reducing the temperature to an optimal level as soon as the last person has left home and calculating how to pre-warm the home most efficiently for your return. It also monitors the weather and claims to cut overall heating costs by 31%. Even more interestingly, tado° announced earlier this year an open API. This got us thinking. Our developers are not known for their ability to focus on the mundane when a new bit of kit…

Building an analytics platform is about more than extracting data from your business application, it also needs to be transformed into information that is meaningful for the user. This is traditionally part of the process of engineering your data warehouse, deciding what data marts are required and engineering some code to transform the raw data from the business application into these more meaningful data objects. It’s an expensive and difficult process, requiring significant engineering skill and knowledge and is almost impossible to get right first time. While this approach does have advantages, and there will always be a place for…

Just under a week ago today the much anticipated Apple Watch arrived in our office. If there’s one thing we could all learn from Apple, it’s how to build hype around a new product launch (even the delivery man hung around to see it opened). It was (as ever) not the first device in this category, but certainly the most anticipated. So a week later, how does it compare to the Android Wear devices we already had in the office? The first difference is something of a given with Apple, it’s a lot prettier. Particularly compared to the LG G…