An innovative saving product: “With myAgro’s Mobile Layaway platform, farmers save for seeds, fertiliser and specialised training via scratchcards – in the same way they might buy phone credit” https://www.theguardian.com/social-entrepreneurs-solving-problems-around-the-world/2018/apr/04/developing-mobile-technology-manage-funds-farmers-poverty-myagro-anushka-ratnayake-skoll-social-entrepreneurship-awards Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship winner: Anushka Ratnayake, myAgro

An interesting concept – obvious when explained, but of course, many of the good ones are: “While paradigms like imperative or functional programming characterize certain underlying aspects of our mental model of program, gradual programming describes a process by which a mental model is formed” http://willcrichton.net/notes/gradual-programming/ Programming is a fundamentally incremental (or gradual) process, and…

A fascinating tool to support developers. I'm proud to say they had  only a few recommendations and findings from my code/repositories (although i have subscribed, so i'll get notifications for others in future too) – and i can see how a tool like this could really help developers to produce better, more supportable, more secure code.…

While IBM's latest figures show that perhaps the elephant can't dance after all (https://www.ft.com/content/84dfe694-432f-11e8-93cf-67ac3a6482fd), Microsoft's pivot from a software to cloud services company is really starting to pay off – reporting revenue nearly $1bn higher than market expectations last year. Changing the direction has clearly been hard (e.g. disbanding the Windows Engineering team, previously the…

Scratch is a great tool for introducing young children to programming, so I’m glad to see it continues to evolve and grow. https://medium.com/scratchteam-blog/3-things-to-know-about-scratch-3-0-18ee2f564278 A new version of Scratch is coming this August!

Construction sites are perfect examples of chaotic environments – a massive number of moving parts, unpredictable environmental conditions, hundreds of people – and there’s a very real risk of injury or even death for every human present. Automation therefore is highly complex, but the first steps are starting to be taken, with robots moving parts…

Most power outages are due to failures in the transmission network (storms, broken power lines), not instability in supply. Making the move to newer, cleaner energy solutions is going to be difficult and take time – and cause pain for those involved. But that's not a good reason to prop up old, dirty, under-utilized coal…

I'd love to have a robot butler. Previous attempts have been hilariously unsuccessful – so i'm not holding my breath – but the goal is certainly worth chasing. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/amazon-is-said-to-be-working-on-another-big-bet-home-robots Ten years ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle and established the appeal of reading on a digital device. Four years ago, Jeff Bezos and company rolled out…

Find yourself snowed under with no time to come up with your next big idea? Most of us come back from holidays refreshed and with new goals and objectives – but how do we achieve that level of innovative ideation on a more regular basis? Make time – two hours a week, locked away from…

“AI is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire,” Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said at Davos said. “Any time you work with technology, you need to learn to harness the benefits while minimising the downsides.” https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/google-ceo-ai-will-be-bigger-than-electricity-or-fire The technology could eliminate…