Sam Talks Technology

Daniel Snell is the Co-Director & Founder of Arrival Education the UK's leading diversity and social inclusion (D&I ) consultancy firm, working with the country's best Executive Leadership teams, to unlock their Diversity Dividend. An increasing number of organisations are waking up to the power of diversity and social inclusion as a key driver of innovation, growth and increased business success. The evidence is clear: forward-thinking businesses know they need to diversify their workforce. However, many struggle to make the changes required to make this happen. We talked about whether D&I is just lipstick on a pig or really beginning to be a central focus for companies wanting to recruit the best people irrelevant of ethnicity or sexuality.   Daniel is just finishing off his new book Diversify or Die - How businesses have to unlock their diversity dividend if they are to remain successful.   Finally, Daniel is training for next April's Marathon Des Sables, or MdS, a six-day, 251 km (156 mi) ultramarathon, which is approximately the distance of six regular marathons.  We discussed how his training is coming along with his extreme diet.

NPR radio in America announced this week that they will earn more from podcasting than radio in 2020.  Google announced this summer that they will start to index and transcribe podcasts.  DAB+ radio is finally coming to the UK.  So what is the future of radio and podcasting?

My guest on this weeks show is James Cridland a radio and podcast futurologist who knows the answers.    

In the first half of this podcast, we discussed the critical challenges faced by podcasters:

• discovery - how do people find your podcast? 
• distribution - where should you post your podcast?
• accessibility - how can you transcribe your podcast?
• monetisation - how can you make money from your podcast? 

We also talked about the tools we both use to create, edit and publish our podcasts such as Headliner, Audacity and Libsyn.

In the second half of the podcast, we talked about the future of radio.

We discussed the future rollout of DAB+ in the UK to replace AM/FM and the different ways radio is being consumed from streaming on digital devices and smart assistants through to time-shifted consumption rather than listening live.   

If you want to know what's coming next for podcasting and radio, then I highly recommend you listen to this podcast.  

Nick Coleman is the founder & CEO of Snaffling Pig a pork scratching company that is taking on the £3.2 billion pork market, with an innovative, strategic and engaging brand with wit and purpose.   We discussed how Nick and his close friend and partner Udhi started the company with £500 and in less than 5 years, they are set to turnover £5m per year.   I asked Nick about some of the challenges he faced on his entreprenurial startup journey both in the business and his own personal growth, when his wife was diagnosed with a brain tumor soon after the arrival of their new baby son Jack.  Anyone else feel like an imposter? It's a feeling that's been with me all my life, ever since I can remember. I battle with it every single day. I'm scared that one day somebody will realise that I haven't got a clue what I'm doing. - Nick Coleman We talked about how they are raising £750k new funds via crowdcube and how they plan to keep their unique company ethos as they grow. We're not ones for big, gushy value statements, but we've got our three simple rules that we live each day by. Do great things. Have some fun. Don't be a dick. - Nick Coleman   --- 1. Company History and Growth:

• In 2014 Nick founded Snaffling Pig with just £500, a premium food and drink brand with an obsession in making flavoured pork crackling.
• In 2016 he took part in the 14th Season of BBC2 Dragons Den and gained an investment from Nick Jenkins
• In 2017 they won The Virgin Foodpreneur Award.
• By September 2017 they were doing about £1m a year. Not bad for business 2.5 years old. 18 months on from that they are well on their way to breach £4m in a year.
• In 2019 they were finalists in the Great Britain Food & Drink Entrepreneur of the year award.

2. (Crowd)Fund Raising: This September they'll be launching their BRING HOME THE BACON crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube and selling shares in Snaffling Pig.   They are looking to raise £500k through friends and family as well as through Crowdcube. Currently they are over 60% funded with 328 investors on board already. We're not looking for any old investors either. That's why we're not approaching any Venture Capitalists or Private Equity firms. We want to create an exclusive SWINE DINING CLUB of investors, all of whom get our brand, our culture and love our products. - Nick Coleman   3. Are Pork Scratchings a Healthy (keto) Food? Two-thirds of all the fat in a pork scratching is actually mono and polyunsaturated fats, beneficial for heart health, with 13 percent of its fat coming from stearic acid, a type of saturated fat that doesn't raise cholesterol levels   Snaffling Pig Pork Scratchings, Pork Crackling and Porky Puffs contain little to no carbohydrates, which makes it a great ketogenic diet snack.   Pork scratchings are great for diabetics because they contain very little sugar and so they are fairly easy on your blood glucose levels since they're pretty much just protein, fat and salt.   We think it's a great snack if you're low carbing, on a Keto diet or if you just feel a little bit peckish but don't want to mess around too much with insulin.

Julien Genestoux is the CEO of Unlock. They are based in New York. 

Unlock is a protocol which enables creators to monetize their content with a few lines of code in a fully decentralized way. There are no middlemen, no fees and no gatekeeper who could shut you down or control your distribution.

Unlock is building the web's new business model by enabling new ways for creators to monetize their content through their decentralized, access control protocol. Unlock are a team of 5 full-time engineers, they received early-stage funding from top tier VCs and they are building their company in the open to help fix the web's unhealthy business model while empowering creators.

Julien talked about some of the current unhealthy business models that exist today especially those that rely on advertising for monetisation or act as gatekeepers for distribution.   

Julien talked about how Web 3.0 needs to evolve towards 'Decentralised Autonomous Organisations' and how blockchain, ethereum wallets, smart contracts and unlock can make this new business model a reality. 

My guest recently was Stewart Townsend my good friend and often partner in crime for many fun startup events which we organised together along with Stuart Witts.   A chance meeting with Stewart, 20 years ago at one of the Open Coffee club mornings I had organised in Waterstones, led to the start of a great friendship.   This podcast takes you through those early days of the London startup scene. From Stewart's work with Sun Microsystems and working with Twitter developers. Through to events we did together such as Flowery Tweetups and Flowery Cinema; the one where we hired a Leicester Square cinema to watch the new Facebook film The Social Network and invited 250 of our Facebook friends to join us.   Find out why we also had drinks with Henry 'The Fonz' Winkler and Mark Zuckerberg as well as a private dinner with Scott McNealy then CEO of Sun Microsystems at Blenheim Palace, to name but a few.   Together with Manoj Ranaweera, we helped start the first Techcelerate: The Original Tech Ecosystem in Manchester and even recently attended its 11th-year commemoration.   Stewart also talked about his time with Zendesk EMEA, DataSift and Oracle through to his current project providing companies with a managed sales channel (Channel As As Service - CAAS).   Listen to the podcast. https://samtalks.tech/stewart-townsend

Tom Holder, CEO Tap, a startup based in Bristol, has built an app on the blockchain called Tap My Data to allow us all to quickly and easily request companies (SAR) to provide us with the data they are holding on us. 

Technology has driven a data explosion and vast fortunes have been made monetising your data. Respect for peoples' privacy has been lost, and it's time for a reckoning. Ask questions, take back your data, don't sell yourself short! - Tom Holder

Get the Tap app and discover what personal data organisations hold about you. Tap provides secure storage and instant access to a master record of your personal data.

Note: 

A Subject Access Request, (known as a SAR or DSAR), is a request to a company or organisation asking for access to the personal data they may hold about you.

Hannah Power is a Personal Brand Development coach. We discussed how to "Find Your Why". How to "Find Your Tribe" and "How to "Define the Audience You Serve".  

She has a six-step process to help people develop their own personal brand.  

• Clarity
• Customer 
• Communication 
• Content
• Channels 
• Connect 
• Collateral

Hannah discussed who her favourite people are with their own personal brands today. 

Charles Cadbury is the CEO of 'Say it Now' the winners of Amazon's annual UK & European Alexa Cup for best new skill on the smart speaker. They ultimately came third in the global awards. #congratulations

Today I had the pleasure to interview Charlie about the evolution and the development of their Alexa skill but also we talked about other Alexa features such In-Skill Purchasing, Alexa Presentation Language and Name Skill Intent along with the challenges of Internationalisation, Voice SEO and developer skill monetisation. 

The Skill:

'Book it Now' allows users to search for and book recommended local services using only their voice.

"Our vision is to enable thousands of local businesses to be bookable via Alexa, which will be available for people to use wherever they are," says Charlie Cadbury

Background:

Launched by Amazon in 2019 the annual Alexa Cup is a global competition designed to encourage the development of Alexa Skills (voice apps) that solve real-world problems in a way that enhances customer experience while also being commercially viable.

Links:

https://www.sayitnow.ai/

https://samtalks.tech/charlie-cadbury

Jamie Riddell CEO of Escaping Gravity was my guest. Jamie and I have known each other through social media for over a decade, this was the first time we really had a chance to sit down face to face to discuss the highs and lows of his successful entrepreneurial journey.   I had no idea that Jamie and his co-founder wife started Cheeze in 1999 and sold their first company for £10.5m and   Had it not been for GDPR, Jamie may have sold his second company BirdSong Analytics for a similar buyout return. Birdsong Analytics is the World's largest 'Pay as you Go' Social Media Analytics platform. We provide on demand reports to clients in over 120 countries across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. Our customers including IBM, The UN, Disney, KEA, Yamaha, Monsanto, Harvard and thousands more. Today Jamie is a board advisor, mentor to startups and an angel investor. We talked about some of his recent investments in startups such as Uni Salad and his personal goals as well as how he sees the future of technology evolving from online advertising through to new digital currencies like Facebook's Libra.       Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamieriddell/

Dr Alan Watkins is the CEO of Complete Coherence, a consultancy that specialises in developing enlightened leadership through individual and team development.   Alan is a polymath, neuroscientist and award-winning author of half a dozen books including

• Coherence: The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership
• 4D Leadership: Competitive Advantage Through Vertical Leadership Development
• Wicked and Wise: How to Solve the World's Toughest Problems
• Crowdocracy: The end of politics

We talked about the future of leadership, economics, politics, food and climate change.