Alexa. When is technology useful?
Date:
4 November 2019
Those aren't recognised terms of art; they're just categories that I've made up myself and which I apply to things that I see on my travels.
I realise that many people will disagree with me, but two inventions I've come across, and which to my mind are really UOTJFTSOI are Alexa and Hive, the central heating controller. Rather than getting out of your armchair to turn up the lights, or using the BBC Weather app on your iPhone (and if you don’t mind a permanent microphone in the corner listening to your every word) you can just sit there and shout instructions at Alexa to turn up the lights or read out a weather forecast. For people with restricted mobility, being able to use Alexa can be a god-send, but most of the people I know who have an Alexa simply like the gimmick value (which I'm not saying is a bad thing, and it certainly sells).
If, the morning after the night before, you could shout 'Alexa, bring me a coffee with two sugars and a bacon buttie with brown sauce', and it did, that would be a UUOT. However, I've been told that Alexa doesn’t even make coffee, never mind bacon butties.
According to the Hive website you can "Get the temperature at home just right from wherever you are with the UK's favourite smart thermostat." I don't have Hive because I don’t want to send unnecessary data to goodness knows who, telling them when I'm away from my house. In this day and age, unless you don’t own a 'phone and you always pay in cash, lots of people already know when your house is empty anyway, but the convenience of being able to order taxis from your iPhone, or load a Caxton card with foreign currency seem to be benefits that outweigh the privacy risks. Telling my central heating pump when I'm abroad, from abroad, seems to be a tad unnecessary when I have a thermostat and a timer on the wall at home, and just before I leave the house I can manually programme the timer to leave the heating off until a week come Thursday. Also, why do I want the temperature at home to be 'just right' when I'm not there?
My wife and I recently had a trip to Lisbon and while we were there, we saw people whizzing around on e-scooters. We fancied a spin so I went and had a look at one of the e-scooters that was propped up against a wall. Within three minutes I’d set up an account with Circ via my iPhone and I was off, gravely endangering both myself and anyone within a ten metre radius, but otherwise thoroughly enjoying myself. I fully appreciate that someone at Circ HQ in Berlin knew immediately that I was in Lisbon and could have sent the boys round to burgle my Alexa-free house in Edinburgh, but the convenience (and fun) of being able to hire a GPS-enabled e-scooter there and then seemed to be a UUOT and outweighed the risks of compromising my privacy. Circ claims that it plans to go beyond just e-scooters. It's apparently a 'micro-mobility' service and wants to install e-scooter hubs at railway stations, thereby creating seamless mobility for rail and e-scooter users. I can see how that might work, and if Circ and the other e-scooter companies can go some way towards achieving that, then that would, by my reckoning, be a real UUOT.
So, whether your tech business is a UUOT or a gimmicky and marketable UOTJFTSOI you're going to need a lawyer so please give me a call and I can help. I'm also considering pitching to raise money for my Alexa-bacon-buttie module idea, but that's still a work in progress. Finally, if you have a snappier acronym than UOTJFTSOI, I'd like to hear from you too.
Austin Flynn austin.flynn@morton-fraser.com 0131 247 1260
