IBM's Andy Stanford-Clark uses existing technology in quirky ways to solve every day problems...

This video really demonstrates the sort of skills that young people in Britain need to build if we are going to continue to be world leaders in innovation! It’s definitely one NOT to be missed.

Where's my Ferry?

One great little example of the way he is able to make use of technology is when he played a practical joke on a ferry on Apri Fools Day this year.

Earlier in the year, he’d written an application that grabbed the data about each ferry every few seconds, and using geofencing, a virtual perimeter around the GPS position of each ferry, he was able to predict arrival and departure times. He would then post a message like this to Twitter: “10:05: RedJet 3 will be 10 minutes late arriving at Southampton.”

While looking up the ferry schedule for a friend on April Fool’s Day, he noticed that Red Funnel, the ferry company, was posting live ferry positions on their Web page, which they’d never done before. And the feed was coming from his Twitter page. He was flattered, but since he was controlling the Twitter feed, and they’d never asked him if they could post it, he couldn’t resist the urge to prank them to get their attention.

So, he sent a tweet that said, “RedJet 4 has arrived in Milton Keynes." Milton Keynes is about a hundred miles inland.

After Andy sent the tweet, he went to lunch with friends and had a good laugh about it. Then he decided he should own up to his prank, so he called the ferry company and said, “We need to have a chat; have you seen where your ferry is?”

The company's representatives had a good sense of humor and the relationship grew from there. Red Funnel became one of our clients. Their new marketing group had wanted to improve customer service by using the Web to tell their customers where their ferries were. They just had no idea how to go about it. Andy presented them with a solution, the IBM product Lotus Expeditor, and now all their ferries are twittering and their commuters are happy.


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