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[Image: David Mach]
Tales from the crypto: funerals on the blockchain
[Ten pun salute to @Contenthelen for that headline.] Imagine that you’re some smart men planning a startup in the funeral care industry. Your research concluded that funeral services are a bit pricey, that customers make purchases while experiencing very challenging emotional states, that there are sometimes difficulties getting access to funds in individual funeral plans so a relative can pay for the funeral, etc. Would your plan to enter that industry be to make a better service by focusing on the needs of customers? Or would it be to place funerals on the blockchain by creating a new cryptocurrency?
You guessed right. Global Funeral Care promises a “blockchain-based platform that enables fully customizable funerals and creates economically productive relationships between organizations operating in the 109$ billion death care industry”. GFC’s white paper asserts that the (US/UK/Dutch) funeral industries can be improved by adding a new intermediary layer, but unfortunately it’s not clear why that should fix the problems. Maybe the plan is that they’ll exert downward pricing pressure after they sign up every vendor in funerals and everyone that wants a funeral? Nor is it clear why funerals actully need a dedicated cryptocurrency. (Also, calling their planned cryptocurrency GFCS coins feels like a missed opportunity. Vanitascoin, Bitcinerem, Mementochain, and so on.)
In these parts, Co-op Funeralcare is trying to make the funeral experience better, but doesn’t seem to be planning a memento morICO.
If there is an area of life planning you’d imagine blockchain could possibly help, perhaps it’s wills and probate - smart contracts. Maybe.
Cows and CO2, sheep and solar
Climate change and agriculture:
Would shoppers pay a premium for products that come from farms that do things like this or supermarkets that support this? If someone doesn’t support efforts like these, what happens to carbon-intense agriculture as the effects of climate change become clearer? Farmers tend to respond to the demands of their customers further up the value chain - could a pioneering organisation like the Co-op take a lead on ideas like these?
Asking for forgiveness
When your product development philosophy is “move fast and break things” (Facebook until 2014 but since then covertly, surely) or “ask for forgiveness not permission” (various, since 1846), it is easy to lose sight of your ethical compass.
Meal delivery co GrubHub quietly bought thousands of domain names for restaurants that were using its service. If you squint, you can almost see it making sense (help your customers do well?), until the restaurants want their own websites or want to stop using GrubHub. And then it doesn’t look so good.
And a cool new email client called Superhuman turned out to be tracking not just its own users but all of its users’ email recipients in quite a punchy way. It sounded deeply non-compliant with GDPR. There was an almighty ruckus, Superhuman realised they’d done some dark product design, and said sorry.
It feels that both of these outcomes would have been predictable if the companies has asked themselves “What if this plan goes a bit wrong?” or “What are the possible wider impacts on people and groups that aren’t necessarily *our* customers?”
(Newsletter to do list: check what tracking is done by the software that runs this list, Mailchimp.)
Would you rent a bunk bed in a shared dorm?
Here’s a startup that provides cheap (by San Francisco standards) housing for young tech workers. The catch is that your bedroom is a bunk bed in a dormitory and your living space is shared by others, so “you give up your privacy” - explains the startup CEO matter-of-factly. Maybe podsharing is fine for young, single, career-focused workers, or maybe it’s grim hostel existence. You wonder though why they don’t all move to another city with a technology scene.
Previously on the newsletter: “expect Amazon to offer Living With Amazon house pods in the warehou, er residential communities soon”, Feb 2018.
Famous designer quits job at famous company
Jony Ive is leaving Apple. Some of the media coverage assumes that now the great man is leaving Apple must now be doomed. (Or that it was already doomed because the great man had been frustrated a while.) This what you might call the “great man” management theory - it’s an idea both seductive but reductive. Here are a pair of good corrective reads.
Other news
Co-op at Glastonbury.
You can’t trust anything digital these days, part 1138 - Apple Facetime: If Apple corrects what you appear to be looking at - changing how your face looks in a video - then what happens to all the small social signals that humans are hard-wired for?
“Spies fear a consulting firm helped hobble U.S. intelligence - Insiders say a multimillion dollar McKinsey-fueled overhaul of the country’s intelligence community has left it less effective”. Big Projects by Big Consulting seem to end up with bad headlines fairly often.
No more Computer Says No - Barnado’s starts a technology revolution that puts staff needs first, not IT’s needs.
“My hypothesis: these algorithms - driven by the all-consuming need for engagement in order to sell ads - are part of what’s destroying western liberal democracy, and my app will not contribute to that.”
Co-op Digital news
An accessibility audit for the Co-op Insurance website - “Being inclusive is part of what we do at Co-op and it’s what we strive for in our design.”
How contextual research helped us redesign the replenishing process in our Food stores - “Seeing the physical artefact in its context revealed a lot of needs we might have otherwise missed, because colleagues are doing these things subconsciously and most likely wouldn’t have thought to mention them to us”.
Most opened newsletter in the last month: the struggle for collection and delivery. Most clicked story: Communicating effectively through storytelling at Co-op Digital.
Events
Public events:
Internal events:
- Delivery community of practice - Mon 8 Jul 1.30pm at Fed House.
- Shifts show & tell - Tue 9 Jul 10am at Fed House 6th floor.
- What has the web team been up to playback? - Tue 9 Jul 1pm at Fed House 5th floor.
- Food ecommerce - Tue 9 Jul 1.30pm at Fed House 5th floor.
- Health show & tell - Tue 9 Jul 2.30pm at Fed House 5th floor.
- CRM and data ecosystem show & tell - Wed 10 Jul 3pm at Angel Square 13th floor breakout area.
- Manchester data platform user group - Thu 11 Jul 5pm at Federation House 6th floor.
- Membership show & tell - Fri 12 Jul 3pm at Fed House 6th floor kitchen.
More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at federation.events@coopdigital.co.uk. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.
Thank you for reading
Thank you, clever and considerate readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s news sparrow @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!
If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.
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