Innovation

Monetizing your APIs is a complex challenge; creating your business, revenue, & pricing model, then translating into a technical implementation requires significant investment. Working with the Azure API Management team we provide guidance, videos and code to help accelerate your journey.

Some of my thoughts inspired whilst helping out on the farm over the weekend. What is the future of work given the increasing presence of machines in our day to day lives? In which situations can AI deliver greatest value? How can we ease the stress of digital transformation on people who are impacted by it?

Serverless data architectures enable leaner data insights and operations. How do you reap the rewards while avoiding the potential pitfalls?

I was recently invited on to Microsoft Mechanics to talk about the new on-demand SQL Serverless offering within Azure Synapse. If you have been following along with my previous blog posts you will know that we've been hard at work applying Azure Synapse against real customer workloads. In the video I take you through the service by solving a real-world IoT problem for one of our telco customers.

We use Wardley Mapping as a technique to give us situational awareness in our technical decision making process. We're sharing our Office 365 Templates for PowerPoint and Visio, so that you can make use of them too.

NDC London day 1 was mainly focused around the responsibility we all face when developing new technology. As developers we cannot absolve ourselves of the consequences of not considering diversity and inclusivity when designing our solutions.

In January 2020, Carmel is speaking about creating high performance geospatial algorithms in C# which can detect suspicious vessel activity, which is used to help alert law enforcement to illegal fishing. The input data is fed from Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2, and converted into data projections optimised for high-performance computation. This code is then hosted in Azure Functions for cheap, consumption based processing.

Structured apprenticeships provide a great way to build skills whilst getting real-life experience. Endjin's apprenticeship scheme has been refined over years, with an optimal mixture of training, project work, and exposure to commercial processes - a scheme which is designed to build strong foundations for a well-rounded Software Engineering consultant. This post explains the transition from university to an apprenticeship at endjin, including the types of work an apprentice could end up doing, and some examples of real-life learnings from a real-life apprentice.

Rest APIs underpin many Digital Transformation strategies. As with all software projects the devil is in the detail; your API strategy, governance, security, design principals are as, if not more imporant than building a working API.

We ran a two day hackathon with Watchfinder and Microsoft to build a conversational experience to automate the 'sell your watch experience'.

A career in software engineering doesn't need to start with a Computer Science degree. The underlying traits of problem solving, a willingness to learn and the ability to collaborate well can be built in any field. Internships provide a great way to get your foot-in-the-door in the professional world, and arm you with some real-life experience for future endeavours. This post describes an internship at endjin, including the type of work you could be asked to do and what you could learn.

We've been running workshops and training sessions for a long time now, and one thing we've learned from that is that PEOPLE DO WORKSHOPS WRONG. From MBA classes, to design sessions, there seems to be a common problem: burn-out. We give you a survival guide for multi-day bootcamps and workshops, to get the most out of them, and take care of yourself in the process.

We have produced an insightful booklet called "Embracing Disruption - Financial Services and the Microsoft Cloud" which examines the challenges and opportunities for the Financial Service Industry in the UK, through the lens of Microsoft Azure, Security, Privacy & Data Sovereignty, Data Ingestion, Transformation & Enrichment, Big Compute, Big Data, Insights & Visualisation, Infrastructure, Ops & Support, and the API Economy.

In this post we discuss the characteristics of a great FinTech startup, and the importance of the API Economy to innovation in Financial Services.

Hymans Robertson was set up in Glasgow in 1921 and is one of the longest established independent firms of consultants and actuaries in the UK. Hymans Robertson soon realised that the computational requirements of their models exceeded the capacity of their on-premise datacentres and that the most cost effective solution would be to use the cloud to perform their Big Compute. But before they could harness the cloud to help them solve their Big Data problems, the business needed to understand the ramifications of moving to the cloud; everything from regulatory, risk and compliance concerns,  to how their internal Ops team would need to evolve and adapt, and how to deal with moving data from on-prem into the cloud.

There is a lot of hype about the blockchain - usually wrapped up with talk about Bitcoin and crypto-currencies. In this article, we look at its impact on trust, and auditability in financial services, and why it may (or may not) be appropriate for your solutions.

In this post we review the FCA's guidelines for the adoption of cloud services by FinTech businesses, and help you to understand their impact across the value chain.

To celebrate FinTech Week, we've released an eBook based our our talk about Disruption in Financial Services at Future Decoded.

Running a start-up or bootstrapping a new product within an established business can feel pretty chaotic. We talk about strategies for managing the time of a team, and ensuring that you become predictable.

Technologists often get hung up on technology and forget about the customer (and the business!) We talk about a real-world example and some practical advice for getting your idea business-focused.

In the early days of a start up, the organizational structure is defined rather loosely, and typically by function. The technical founder has her domain, the sales & marketing founder his, and they work closely together to achieve their initial goals. As an organization grows, it is not possible to maintain that level of detailed personal control. How does a growing business structure itself for innovation? Or a larger organization pivot and allow an innovation culture to develop?

We've put our MVP out into the market, and we can start refining the information we have about our product, its fit to the market, and the real drivers and buying behaviours of our clients. How do we iteratively improve the offering, and deliver more value?

In this article, we look at how we're going to tidy up our assumptions list, conduct some more low-cost experiments to satisfy ourselves we know exactly what we're getting into, then take the leap and build something that satisfies some core part of the value proposition, and persuade some customers to buy it.

Business model design is all about sharing the value from the product. How do we ensure all the stakeholders get what they need out of it?

Although you do not want to lose focus on the beachhead market, it is always good to consider the TAM for follow-on markets. If we do this thing, where might we take it next?

Ultimately (however long you can put it off for by taking investment), you don't have a business if people aren't paying you more money than it costs to develop, acquire the customer, deliver it to them, and support them for their whole lifetime with the product. We look at how you can get to paying customers.

What does "competitive positioning" actually mean? Are your competitors all solving the same problems as you, or are they the people competing for the same kind of attention, or pool of resources? We take a look at the challenges of "competition".

Having got a very rough sketch of our product and its fit to the beachhead market, we now want to focus right in on that market, and better understand the size of the market, the customers, and our proposition to them. In this article we are going to explore techniques we can use to define our value proposition for the beachhead market.

The article is all about the very start of new product development: determining whether there is a market, and how the offering will fit that market's needs. We're trying to get a very quick, but comprehensive sketch of the whole product, and the market it is intended to address.

Evolving a proposition or product by increasing the fidelity is a better approach than incrementing feature by feature.

This is the start of a series on bootstrapping your new product development. We explore principles and tools that can be used in any environment, through the whole product lifecycle from inception to end-of-life.