Tag Archives: tech

Insight from IDEO: How to Prototype a Business

There’s a great post on IDEO‘s website on a topic that is fascinating to me: How to Prototype A New Business (from their Creative Confidence series).

The post is based around an interview (audio below) with Joe Gerber, the MD of IDEO CoLab, which is “a collaborative R&D Lab exploring emerging technologies and its future impact”.

Among some of the useful points, there is a nice lens that can be used to assess new businesses: Viability, Feasibility, and Desirability.

Source: IDEO

Prototyping is a key part of the Design Thinking process and this podcast shows how important it is in Business Design. This is because the hardest thing to predict is the desirability, so you have to test this empirically.

In the podcast, Joe goes into great detail about how you can do this by trying to sell the concept as if it were already a product to see if there is genuine customer appetite (he refers to setting up a “lemonade stand”).

There are some amazing resources linked on there such as Tom Hulme’s Business Model Canvas and a list of Prototyping Tools that can be used (both physical and digital).

Google to acquire Dyson?

Back in 2014/2015, I wondered whether it would make sense for Google to acquire Dyson.

Growth of Alphabet/Google hardware presence

In order to keep their advantage in the search and data sphere, Google (now Alphabet) ramped up their presence in lots of emerging hardware spaces via acquisitions such as Motorola, Boston Dynamics and Nest Labs. Also, Google has developed their own technology innovations at Google X (now simply X), such as the world-leading autonomous vehicle company, Waymo.

In order to fully commercialise such acquisitions and innovations, Google needed to have access to an abundance of world-class hardware product development and marketing experience.

Google made a step towards this in 2014 when they acqui-hired a design firm based in California called Gecko Design. However, I believed Gecko Design was not big enough to fill this void alone.

This left me wondering whether Dyson would be a good fit to help satisfy this need for design engineering firepower.

Dyson’s common interests with Google

Dyson was rumoured to be working on an electric car after it acquired battery company Sakti3 (which has now been publicly confirmed) and also invested £5m with my alma mater, Imperial College, to develop next-generation robots, resulting in the Dyson Robotics Lab.

Given Alphabet’s world-leading autonomous vehicle project, Waymo, and it’s previous interest in robots, I thought that an acquisition of Dyson would give Alphabet/Google a huge advantage with its massive team of 4,800 design engineers.

Dyson and Alphabet have other visions of the future in common. One notable example is Halo (see right), Dyson’s previous prototype of a Google Glass-type device that they built 10 years before Google launched it!

Would Sir James Dyson sell?

As of 2018, a tie-up between the two companies has not yet emerged. In many ways it is unsurprising, as Sir James and his family appear to own 100% of Dyson, so why give up control? (On that topic, there is a great interview with Sir James on NPR’s How I Built This podcast about how he grew his business which explains that surprising fact).

Also, Sir James is a vocal advocate of keeping engineers in Britain and growing British talent to boost industry and our economy.

His leadership on this issue includes launching his own university with a £15m investment, called the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, and his £12m donation to Imperial College to launch the Dyson School of Design Engineering (as well as the previously mentioned Dyson Robotics Lab).

In short, I’m not going to hold my breath for this one. However, it will be fascinating to see how Google and Dyson both fare in the autonomous and electric vehicle markets. Perhaps future collaboration or a joint venture could be on the cards?

MirrorMirror: booth-based 3D scanner for online shopping



Our product design: MirrorMirror





Technical Design





User experience





User Journey for MirrorMirror

Business Case and Financial Model




  • No time series for the values (everything is static)
  • Lag time between initial burn and revenue
    • A proper cash-flow model would have helped clarify this
  • No marketing and sales budget included at all!


Final Pitch


You can see our final pitch document here.





What didn’t we do?





Design Thinking Source: IDEO Mydhili Bayyapunedi @myd | @Young_Current

Design of the Perfect Trade Mission

In my role at Highview Power, an innovative cleantech company, I was part of British trade missions around the world: specifically to Poland, India, Brazil, and the USA. I also won a spot on a Singapore/Taiwan mission organised by the EU, but attending was later vetoed by management.

Trade missions, when done correctly, can be a valuable way to meet potential clients and partners in a totally new geography. The quality (and therefore usefulness) of these missions varied wildly.

Allow spare time in the schedule

The worst I remember was the trip to India. It was organised by a local partner entity that arranged for us to fly from London for a 4 night stop, speaking at panel events in Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bangalore.

This was far too much travelling as we were required to wake up, attend a conference, then immediately head to the airport to fly to the next city. After the final conference, we immediately headed to the airport to fly straight back to London.

As well as being exhausting, this was not a good idea because there always needs to be sufficient time allocated for side meetings and dinners between delegates. In order to build relationships to close future deals (or even to close a deal on the mission), these side events are essential.

Pre-introduce or screen high-quality delegates

This trade mission, and others I have been on, suffer from the scattergun delusion: the idea that if you get enough people from a certain industry or profession to attend, sooner or later one of them will be useful.

In an ideal world, delegates will be personally invited to attend the trade mission by the organisers based on a list of target prospects given by the trade mission attendees.

Even better, they could be pre-screened for interest/relevance based on a few criteria given to the organisers by the attendees, so that poor quality or low relevance delegates can be filtered out of the event.

The perfect scenario would be to actually introduce the relevant delegate to the attendee before the event so there could be the opportunity to engage in whatever initial due diligence discussions could make a meeting more valuable.

Essentially, anything the trade mission can do to get the prospect further down the Marketing Funnel, the better.

Invite high-ranking dignitaries relevant to the topic

The presence of high-ranking dignitaries, both local and visiting, can help to attract high-ranking members of potential customers and partners to the trade mission event.

They should be highly relevant to the field of the trade mission, for example the Minister of Energy that is responsible for a newly-launched policy on an Energy Mission.

This creates a great opportunity for public-private as well as international dialogue that senior attendees relish. The trade mission I attended in Poland was an excellent example of this.

Product Demonstrations and/or booths

As well as panel debates, allowing the trade mission visitors a short slot to demonstrate or present their offering to the whole event can be a phenomenally useful addition.

A good backup for this is allotting each company a small booth around the venue so they can present to delegates 1-on-1 during breakout sessions.

WaterAlert: Plant Moisture Sensor

Back when I was 15 years old, I won a Design Technology – Systems & Control prize at my school for my work on the design process around this little product I came up with called Water Alert (see photo, left).

It was a moisture detection probe that was designed to be inserted into the soil of a pot plant and provide feedback to the gardener about when it needed to be watered.

The end result that I manufactured wasn’t high quality as you can see (!), but I remember really enjoying the design process and that enthusiasm, combined with my corresponding diligence preparing the documentation, won me the prize.

Nowadays, you can buy something virtually identical as a toy kit for kids to build themselves. It’s called the Thirsty Plant Kit (see photo, right).

This got me thinking about how I could win a school prize >15 years ago with something so simple as the design for a toy with a circuit that only has 2 transistors.

What sort of amazing school projects can kids build in the age of 3D printing, Arduino, littleBits, Raspberry Pi, and the multitude of online resources and guides?

Secret History of Silicon Valley: Steve Blank

Below is an amazing lecture from Steve Blank on the history of Silicon Valley.

As military funding was a big part of it, the majority of the talk is around the role of electronic warfare in World War II and the Cold War.

Steve’s Secret History site shares the full slide deck and more.

Some interesting highlights from the talk:

  • World War II was the first electronic war – the German air defence even had radar-guided flak guns!
  • The ground-facing radar on Allied bombers that was designed to help identify targets was used by Germany to track them (and so was the radar warning receiver on their tails)
    • This shows the cat-and-mouse game of measures and counter-measures in electronic warfare
  • Allied bomber formations would throw out a cloud of aluminium foil “chaff” to reflect German radar, which was cut to exactly half the wavelength of the signal.
  • Fred Terman of Stanford moved East during the war to run the Harvard Radio Research Lab
  • He hired 11 colleagues from the Lab to join him at Stanford when he returned. Together they made Stanford the “MIT of the West”
  • Heretically for the time, he encouraged faculty to sit on tech company boards and his graduate students to leave and start companies (for example, Hewlett and Packard)
  • The Cold War became an electronics war as well
  • The USA use the moon to pick up reflected Soviet radar signals and map out the locations of the radar bases
  • CIA and NSA would fund big radio dishes for universities like Stanford as a result
  • Shockley came back to Stanford. He was a great researcher and talent spotter but a terrible manager
  • The “Traitorous Eight” left to start Fairchild Semiconductor and a suite of companies formed in the resulting ecosystem
  • The US military “primed the pump” as the first customer for tech entrepreneurship in the Valley.
  • But in the mid-1970s, the US Government slashed capital gains tax and told pension funds they could invest up to 10% of their assets in VC firms.
    • As a result, inflows to VC firms rose by an order of magnitude and Silicon Valley became a hotbed of for-profit innovation

Comparing Google Plus Codes with what3words

Geocoding systems are essentially software address systems that assign labels to geographic locations in order to improve navigation and the processing of locational data.

Apparently, around 50% of the world’s population doesn’t have a formal physical address, which is a barrier to the access of banking, mail, and emergency services. This is clearly, therefore, an extremely important problem to be solved.

There are lots of different types of these systems, but two notable examples are Google Plus Codes and what3words.

Google Plus Codes

Google Plus Codes, also known as Open Location Code (OLC), was designed by Google’s Zurich Engineering office.

The system assigns each location a short code that is used alongside the name of the settlement or prefixes it with another short string of characters. For example, Nelson’s Column on Trafalgar Square is either GV5C+4R Central London, UK or 9C3XGV5C+4R).

There is a great post by the creators of Plus Codes that evaluates the different “location encoding systems” and explains the rationale behind Plus Codes here.

The main benefit of OLC is that it is a free, open source system. However, a big negative for me is that it is extremely hard to memorise that many characters (see graph below to illustrate the point). I also find it confusing that there is both a long version and a short version of each address point.


what3words (w3w) is a system developed by a London-based startup of the same name that divides the world into 3×3 meter squares and assigns each one a unique 3-word identifier. In this system, Nelson’s Column is life.swung.pounds.

To use what3words requires paying to get access, so I do wonder whether this will limit the adoption rate compared to Plus Codes which has been opened up to the developer community.

However, the beauty of w3w is that the use of only three words makes it super-user friendly and memorable (see graph below).

There are some minor challenges: for example, two locations next to each other will have totally different codes, so you can’t look at two codes and understand if they are close or not. However, they are vastly outweighed by the user-friendly nature of having only 3 words to remember.


I think that the what3word system is a phenomenal tool and usage will grow exponentially over the next 10 years due to its simplicity.

I personally think that Google Plus codes, although a great invention and one with potential uses, will struggle to get adopted by everyday users in the same way.

One thing that intrigues me though. Could what3words make more money by making the entire address system available for free to everyone and then charging for services around it? It would be fascinating to play with the financial model there!

Protecting investors against earthquake risk in Silicon Valley

I’ve often wondered what would be the impact on companies in Silicon Valley when the inevitable earthquake hits. Turns out I’m not the only one.

Earthquakes in the Bay Area: a “ticking time bomb”

The Bay Area is subject to major earthquakes roughly every 145 ± 60 years at the current rate. Given that it is 150 years since the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1868, the next “big one” could happen any day now.

Apparently, about 2 million people live on the Hayward Fault and 7 million are in the surrounding area. A magnitude 7 quake would cause damage in the range of $95 to $190 billion, which would be a disaster for the citizens of the area.

Impact on the tech giants

However, my curiosity centers on what would be the impact on the giant tech corporations that are based in Silicon Valley and the wider Bay Area? Companies like Google, Facebook, Oracle, and Salesforce have their HQs and major footprints in the region, so they will be adversely affected by a natural disaster.

It doesn’t seem like they are particularly well-prepared for such an event, according to this report. Although most of the companies have data centers and operations distributed around the world, an earthquake could still cause potential disruption to the main office and therefore the leadership of the business.

As listed entities, this marks a real risk for their shareholders. Could their share prices or even the whole NASDAQ take a tumble if a major earthquake hits the Bay Area? After the 9/11 terror attacks, the Dow dropped by 14%, so this is not unthinkable.

However, I think the impact goes beyond just their own businesses. The services provided by these tech titans represent critical infrastructure for many European and American businesses, so any disruption could have a huge wider impact.

Early warning: a vital tool to prevent damage

Scientists are getting better at detecting earthquakes early. In Silicon Valley, there will soon be an app called QuakeAlert that can give up to 2-20 seconds of warning of an impending earthquake.

This might not sound like much, but even 2 seconds can be long enough for Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices to perform vital preparations such as: opening the doors of fire stations to prevent fire engines getting stuck; isolating certain parts of the electricity, water, and gas networks; slow down trains; and tell elevators to open their doors at the closest floor.

Solution: seismic sensor network to short the NASDAQ

Could it be possible to set up a network of seismic sensors to warn when an earthquake was just about to hit the Bay Area and then send an order to a trading algorithm that could short the NASDAQ?

A similar system could be used to create an early warning for tsunamis. One candidate is the mega-tsunami that geologists once predicted could be created by a volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands which would devastate the northeastern US coast (although further review of the original study showed that this is a worst-case scenario and probably will not happen for another 10,000 years at the earliest).

Hyperloop Alpha project concept

In 2012, Elon Musk and SpaceX published this project concept document for Hyperloop Alpha, a radical new method of intercity transportation.

The document is a 58-page proposed solution with rigorous calculations on all socio-techno-commercial aspects of the idea.

Hyperloop Alpha concept sketch (Source: original Hyperloop Alpha concept document)

How does it work?

Hyperloop Alpha is a public transport system that sends people in pods at high speeds through a tube kept at low pressure to reduce air resistance.

By using an electric fan at the front, you can mitigate the Kantrowitz Limit (think of the maximum speed limit of a liquid pushing through a tube such as a syringe). It also has the unique benefit of creating a low-pressure air cushion for the pod to ride on – known as an air bearing.

The design envisages using linear accelerators on the bottom of each pod to achieve a target speed of 760mph (1,2220 kph or Mach 0.99 at 20°C), albeit lower at points where there is a curve in the journey so that the g-forces experienced by passengers are lower.

On the topic of renewable energy, Elon mentions that the installation could be self-powered using solar panels installed on top of the tube. He also mentions that LightSail could provide energy storage, but this shows the age of the document as in late 2017 they all but went bankrupt. Perhaps Elon could consider Highview Power’s Liquid Air Energy Storage technology now!

Future of Hyperloop

SpaceX hosted a 1-mile long test track to help incubate Hyperloop technologies around the world. Now there are several organisations developing Hyperloop solutions, including Virgin’s Hyperloop One and a team from MIT.

Inspiration for me

The Hyperloop Alpha project concept was actually one of the main inspirations for me to create and write this blog, along with a previous thought of mine about Leonardo Da Vinci.

By publishing open source project concepts like this one, Elon found a neat solution to one thing that has always bothered me about Da Vinci’s notebooks.

The ever-creative Da Vinci noted down his abundance of ideas in personal sketchbooks that were way ahead of his time. However, as he didn’t always have the time or resources to follow them up and connect them with the right people that needed them, many of them represent lost opportunities for technology to advance.

Publishing an idea in an open source format, allowing access for others that are better placed to work on it, ensures that technology moves forward in a way that benefits humanity (even though the ideator as an individual may not benefit directly).

I am not assuming that anything I put on this modest site will be anywhere near the same league as those guys, but given that good ideas can come from anywhere it is a possibility that something I put up in my Ideas section may be useful to somebody, somewhere.

The Hyperloop Alpha concept document is more detailed than any of mine, but Elon Musk does have a big team of world-class engineers to draw from as needed!