Maplins is in trouble.  The company, which is a year older than me, employs over 2000 people across 200 stores and is in administration.  I am angry about this: not because I’ll particularly miss it, but because the company was uniquely positioned to capitalise on the rise of the Maker Culture and failed this new community completely.

It used to be the place to get electronic components and tools from: I daresay everyone who was remotely interested in electronics in the 80s and 90s will have had experience of using their one-time-extensive catalogue to learn, and pick stuff to buy. They used to employ people who knew the anode end of a diode from the cathode, and why that matters.  When I needed advice on which transistor to use for a project, for example, someone in store would be able to advise me correctly.  The transistors were pennies, but I’d buy other stuff from there because the experience was great, unique and not something I could get elsewhere.

I reckon it was around 3 years ago that my local store lost the last of their staff with electronics knowledge.  Since then, trying to buy components felt like you were inconveniencing them, and recently they’ve moved to having self serve drawers badly stocked and jumbled up.

The staff are typically enthusiastic, and would undoubtedly say they’re “into tech in a big way”, but asking a technical question will be met with “you need to ask X, he’s our tech guy, he’s even built his own computer” or alternatively, the answer “have you Google’d it?”

Maplins in 2014 started advertising their experts as their unique selling point: in 2014 they started a campaign suggesting maplins was the answer “when your tech know-how runs dry”

There is literally no reason to visit the place.  It’s not the experience, it’s not the convenience, it’s not the stock and it’s certainly not the prices.

The UK has a maker industry to be proud of.  The Raspberry Pi is utterly fantastic, British designed and British assembled.  I often want another for a project despite already having a brace of them.  My choice is to either drive to Maplins to find that they’ve got a battered boxed one in stock for £46.99 including a 16GB Micro SD, or order the same on Amazon Prime same day for £31.96 + £8.28 for the card.  I don’t really need the card, but Maplins never carry stock of their advertised £36.99 Pi 3.  The nearest store with stock is a mere 170 miles away, and you can’t order for delivery.

They’ve tried to appeal to the mass market and compete with random electronic tat you’d find in gadget stores, Menkind, Red 5 – or for a lot less on Amazon or ebay.  That doesn’t appeal to their core, and store locations are typically out of town centres so won’t be impulse purchases.

They used to be the go-to place for cables and connectors, but prices are so incredulous that it is cheaper to go to PC world, which is saying something.

They’ve dabbled with smart home, but staff appear to not have been trained beyond a demo script, so the value add of being able to speak to an expert and leave knowing how  you’ll set something up is

Their market position was to be the experts who could advise you on consumer technology.  They based their USP and advertising on their expertise: https://www.marketingweek.com/2014/05/02/maplin-launches-first-tv-campaign-to-promote-its-tech-expertise/ , but then failed to retain the people who could deliver this promise.  This could have worked, and would have differentiated from PC World, Amazon, ebay, and the online experience.  They were going after the mass market of consumers who didn’t know technology.

Whilst all this was going on, the Pi was going from strength to strength and a slow evolution was happening empowering people to build fantastic things.  Maplins were relegating the hobbyist geek to an unwanted draw on their time, reducing stock of components, and not valuing expertise.  The equivocated with geeks: they stocked 3D printers, but once again didn’t have the expertise to translate stock into sales.  Staff could print a demo, but when asked about designing your own models and what software is needed, simply no-one knew.

Some of their stores are unfit for purpose: the Leeds regent street store is a huge warehouse of a place, always cold, always empty, and always with a lot of wasted space.  As mentioned, location is an issue too for mass market footfall.

Interestingly, PC World have started advertising that their staff take technology home to understand and use it…  Maplins have lost that “expert” war, and if they are to continue, they will need to work out what their target audience and USP is.

What would I do?  Focus on makers, focus on experience, and focus on enabling and supporting a maker community.  They have the locations to be community maker hubs.  They don’t have the expertise, but they have enthusiastic staff some of whom would be willing to learn.  Their competition is specialist retailers, Pimoroni, The Pi Hut, and the online bazaars, but Maplin can fill a gap here, and use that community to move more technology into the mainstream…  They could have stock, run events, be the place to go to learn and practice things.

I am thinking of the Games Workshop model, but for Makers rather than Battlers.

There’s been a lot of noise in the popular technology press around the recent unfortunate hack of a Wired contributor’s digital life, which saw his iPhone wiped, his iPad wiped, his MacBook wiped, his gMail account wiped…  All to get at his Twitter account.

It all started from Apple allowing a me.com email address to be reset with practically no security required: just card billing address and the last 4 digits…  Just think how many accounts you’ve created on the web that show that information.  Amazon shows the last 4 digits of a payment card, as do the majority.

Still feeling smug?  It’s a chilling reminder to all of us that:

• We need to use better passwords, and not recycle stuff
• Social engineering renders passwords obsolete
• The cloud is not suitable to be your only storage
• Passwords are really not suitable as a security mechanism any more

On the back of this, many articles have said “TURN ON TWO FACTOR AUTHENTICATION”, sometimes in caps, for GMail.  There’s even been education as to what 2FA is, which is good.

But for clarity, 2FA is using 2 factors of security: those factors are, “what you know, what you have, what you are”.

GMail 2FA security, when using the web and when turned on, relies on you giving Google your mobile number, and them sending you an SMS when you want to log in.  You then enter the SMS, and you’re in.

SMS costs money: why are Google giving this away for free?  Could it be that they’ve now added a phone number to your profile, making you more attractive to advertisers?  Or is it out of the goodness of their heart?

And what about applications?  I collect mail from offline clients, as I’m not always connected to the net/cloud/whatever.  I also like a backup that I’m in control of.

GMail allows you to enable two factor authentication using application access (for POP/IMAP access, calendar access, Google Drive access) by setting up application specific passwords.  These are passwords that are not intended for humans so are long, complex and nigh on impossible to remember.

But it’s a password.  And if it’s compromised, it’s compromised anywhere but only for that application.

And a happy ending for Mat: he got his most precious data back… for $1700

For quite a few years, the concept of putting domestic appliances on the internet has been something talked about, and that a few have hacked at, but there was never really a big push to make consumer products internet enabled.  Sure, there’s been a few notable exceptions, especially around the PVR world, and there’s many competing, conflicting and downright difficult-to-use home automation products, but nothing has really got people’s attention in day to day life.

Nest came along in 2010, founded by 2 senior Apple engineers.  They take “the unloved products around your home and make simple, thoughtful, beautiful things”, and so far this has led to a connected smoke alarm and thermostat.  And an infrastructure to connect your home to your devices, seamlessly, simply.  And apps to control and inform.  And people, and the media, noticed.  And they have delivered product and service.  This is good.

A lot of clever people have joined Nest because of their absolute focus on making stuff better, making technology disappear and just work – like the iPod did.  This is making fairly advanced technology part of the day to day for the masses and Nest seem to be on a roll.  There’s even a beta SDK to connect your apps to Nest devices

So why did Google want to buy them, and for $3.2Bn in cash?  I’d say it’s definitely not for the products, which have shipped but in relatively low numbers.  The intellectual property is interesting, for sure, but the humans behind it are even more interesting to the big G, in my view.  What’s more, there’s the infrastructure, SDK, apps – or put another way, a total platform – which ends up in people’s pockets and people’s houses.

Think what Google knows, especially if you have a GPS enabled Android device.  Think what Google Now does, which is anticipate your needs before you realise them.  Now to that mix add a connection into your house. If you’re taking a trip, they could automatically turn down your heating.  As you approach home, and you hit the point where it’ll take as long for you to get home as it does for your house to heat up, your heating system could fire automatically.  Say you’ve got a relative visiting who has their nest set warmer, your system could automatically turn up the level.

Google already knows where you are, but it doesn’t know how much fuel you use, or how many times you burn the toast.  Arguably, that doesn’t matter.

I think it’s the platform that Google have bought, along with engineers in the Jobsian mindset of making sure something is absolutely the best it can be at achieving its purpose.  Coupled with home automation and the realisation of the internet of things, it makes sense.

But this will come at a price.  Every connected device is another little bit of privacy given up for what purpose?  Ultimately, Google is an advertising company, existing to help others sell you stuff.  I already worry about the data they have around me and my family, and adding this next level of my home into it is not a happy thought.

Even if it’s not Google, what will the Internet of Things mean to privacy?  We’re giving over data for convenience again…

I recently watched Wall-E again, where one company grew from making Yoghurts to controlling the world…  We’re going towards that world, with Google being the wannabe evil empire.  What astonishes me is that Google themselves recognise this, and appear to be quite happy with the moniker, even naming one of their shell companies “by and large“

In the age of social networking, powered by LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter and many, many other contenders, I have finally got around to setting up my blog on a vanity domain.

Yes, I know.  I am aware of the irony.

Despite this, the blog is forward looking, not backward looking.  Themes to come are:

• Retail banking, particularly payments
• Cloud impacts on a traditionally conservative business
• Consumerisation of IT, particularly around Mobile and BYOD
• Big data made real
• Digital Living with Millennials

So enjoy, get involved, comment, link and let me know your opinion!