Secure printing is on its way to being one of the casualties of the digital revolution. It hasn’t yet gone away of course, with bank notes remaining its apotheosis. There is a reason for that complexity and the costs which go with it, which is that fundamentally bank notes are self-authorising.
That used to be true for lots of other things as well, some of them quite banal.
The train now approaching platform 2 has been delayed for 155 years. A few weeks ago, I found myself on the Cornish Riviera, the fastest train from Cornwall to London, stopping only at Plymouth, Exeter and Reading between the Tamar and Paddington, and timetabled to go from Penzance to London in exactly five hours. Splendid. Except […]
We are approaching the traditional time of the silly season in UK news and politics, the quiet period when in the absence of real news, the frivolous and the dotty get more column inches than they otherwise would.1 In Poland and indeed much of the rest of Europe, that period is known as the cucumber […]
It’s the Monday1 after the Govcamp before, the day Dave Briggs once described as the most depressing day of all, as the exhilaration of the event crashes into the realities of working lives. I like Govcamp for a long list of reasons I wrote about last year – I won’t repeat them here, but they are implicit […]
Most of the time, the hottest place in the solar system is the core of the sun. Some of the time, the hottest place in the solar system is tucked away in an obscure building on an anonymous industrial estate on a former airfield in rural Oxfordshire.1 There they use extreme heat and power […]
Somehow we used to manage without knowing when the next bus was coming, and somehow life still went on. In London, that distant past is less than two years ago. All that time ago, bus arrival information was new, exciting and empowering. Now, of course, it has just vanished into the background. It is how […]
You can’t institutionalize innovation. If you could, everyone would do it. Carl Bass, quoted by Brian Bergstein
I went to two events yesterday. The first was the launch of the Government Digital Service, or rather a housewarming party for their shiny new offices. In fine agile tradition, they put on a slick show and tell with short sharp presentations about their work and achievements topped and tailed by Francis Maude, Mike Bracken […]
Archimedes had taken baths before. Quoted by Alistair Croll
[Large companies] fear disruption far more than they do destruction. They push the decision to innovate back because things are OK today. George Buckley, chairman and chief executive, 3M