Leaving Tesco after 27 amazing years

This post first appeared on Nick's own blog at page

 http://www.lansley.com/?p=89 on 13 March 2015.

This techfortesco blog is no longer updated, so

please follow Nick's blog at http://www.lansley.com

Dear friends, I just wanted to let you know that Tesco have amicably accepted my request for voluntary redundancy.

After 27 amazing years of a career in computing and innovation, I will be leaving the Welwyn Garden City campus for the final time as a colleague on 13th April.

When I reflect on the last quarter century I’ve had enormous fun, from helping found and build Tesco’s online service, a founding member of Tesco’s staff network for LGBT colleagues, and helping create Tesco Labs innovation group with some incredibly talented people, to name but a few milestones.

I leave Tesco with a heavy heart but happy to be moving on to try something new. I’ll be taking a summer break with the hubby in our new seaside home and getting stuck into a few personal projects that have been neglected in recent times (including this blog!). I can’t wait to jump on our mountain bikes and explore the beautiful South Downs National Park. Time to get super-healthy by the sea!

After the summer, I want to get out there as an ‘innovation insider’ and help companies who want to start their own innovation teams, or who are struggling to get traction with innovation projects. We made R&D/innovation work at Tesco, and I can make it work in many other companies too!
A big thank you to all of you who have worked with me over the years, it’s been fantastic. I will always carry a torch for Tesco, of that you can be sure.

I’ll be announcing a leaving drinks event to my Tesco colleagues (and favourite alumni!) soon.

Postscript: If you're a fan of RSS then why not subscribe to the new Tesco Labs blog feed?

RSS: http://www.tescolabs.com/?feed=rss2
Atom: http://www.tescolabs.com/?feed=atom

Hello!

This is the final post from the techfortesco blog. Ah... but wait don't worry, this is only because we are moving to our brand new fabulous website to support our brand new Tesco Innovation Group which is called... Tesco Labs!

So for the Tesco Finest* insight into helping you experience the future, and to subscribe to our fabulous new blog, head to:

http://www.tescolabs.com

and we'll see you there. As for this techfortesco blog, it will remain here as a valuable archive of past innovation from the former Tesco.com Innovation Team, now at the heart of Tesco Labs. Follow the new Twitter feed from us at @tescolabs

So from the Techfortesco blog it's thank you and goodbye.

-

Postscript: If you're a fan of RSS then why not subscribe to the new Tesco Labs blog feed?

RSS: http://www.tescolabs.com/?feed=rss2
Atom: http://www.tescolabs.com/?feed=atom

New Year? Wow that was quick!

Good grief 2012 already..er Happy New Year!

Sorry for the radio silence on this blog recently; it has been non-stop for everyone here getting all their projects in before the IT change-freeze. The change-freeze is that magical day when all us programmers take our hands off our keyboards and let the many servers that run Tesco.com just get on with serving customers!

We then switch tack and do everything we can to support the service. Indeed in the days before Christmas many of our staff go and work in store to help our colleagues there.

My in-store job was to help run the newly installed Click & Collect service at the Tesco Extra at Gallions Reach. It's on the Thames estuary not far from Beckton - and yes it's where the large merchant ships of two hundred years had to moor up because the river became too shallow further into London.

It was a fantastic job - customers who had ordered through the online service just drove their car under our Click & Collect canopy at the time they had chosen on the web site. After an identity check, we simply loaded all their groceries from the ambient store and special chillers and freezers into the back of their car while they watched, and off they drove. Several customers on the shift I worked told me it was perfect for picking up the groceries on the way back home from dropping off the kids at school. A couple had become regulars and were known to my store colleagues working at the Click & Collect point, adding to the friendliness of the whole experience.

I took a much needed recharging holiday for Christmas and New Year, then it was a deep dive into the Consumer Electronics Show CES 2012 in Las Vegas to pick out some great themes and trends. Of course I would love to tell you about them but my employer paid for me to go and so my employer is the one who gets my report and presentations. Sorry about that!

The good news is that I can tell you about something I uncovered which caused my jaw to drop to the floor. I can tell you about it because I really can't think of a use in Tesco for it. I can also tell you about because, despite its expense, I nearly bought one even though I can't think of a use for it myself:
It is a 3D Printer.

That is, a printer that builds 3D models in plastic. It actually builds real tangible objects from scratch. You use a 3D graphics/design/CAD application to create an object of any shape as long as no one side is greater than 50cm. Then you press "Print", then you wait about 6 hours… and there it is for you to take out and hold.

So for CES, one of the printers was building a castle out of components, each component individually printed and then joined with other components like huge toy building blocks. The castle was already standing 3 foot high with walls with brick effects, a drawbridge, battlements, and soldiers (each character individually printed). As I watched, the printer was completing some intricate circular detail at the top of a turret it was creating.

The printer works using thin circular strands of plastic fed into a 'print head' which is moved by servo motors. As the print head scans across the space inside the printer, it melts tiny droplets of plastic which is deposited either on the floor of the printer or on top of plastic it has deposited previously. Thus, a model is slowly built up over time as the plastic is built up. I was intrigued how the printer could build the castle archways where plastic would have to be dropped into thin air with no plastic below it. This was solved by a simple case of the model being rotated in its entirety. So to build an arch, it is built upside down. Clever stuff!

Now I'm back in the office I'll get my usual review of the year written up soon - my what a year 2011 was! There's also been an exciting change in our R&D team which I'll update you on shortly. Watch this space!

Tesco demonstrates augmented reality with Kishino

As you have no doubt gleaned from the media by now, Tesco is taking augmented reality seriously as a great way of bringing a great experience of our products and services to customers.

Until now, a lot of augmented reality has been marketing led. The experience you get when you use your smartphone or iPad with the Blippar app and point the camera at our ‘Price Drop’ logo you’ll see what I mean. I include the logo below so you can try it on your smart phone with Blippar right now:

The first thing I thought of when I saw augmented reality in action was to consider how it might help customers visualise the size and shape of our products better. This is particularly true of products you can’t see fully-formed such as toy construction kits (for example, lego and airfix models). It’s sometimes difficult to visualise the size of a fully formed kit when its in pieces in a box and all you have to go on is the photo on the box cover.


Here is what you get if you hover an iPad 2 over the image above (click for larger version):

Augmented Reality can also solve a slightly different problem - how about TV sets where you wish you could turn the TV around so you could see what sockets are available on the back?

Problems solved - R&D and marketing teams worked with Kishino (formerly Total Immersion) who are trialling a list of TVs and construction kit products on a web page at:

http://www.tesco.com/augmented-reality

Congratulations to the team at Kishino who have done a great job - and even produced a video demonstrating how it works, available on Youtube:




So go have a play at the web address above and let me know what you think!

Thank you, Steve Jobs, for inspiring me so much.

I join many of my colleagues in being saddened to hear the news of the death of Steve Jobs last night.

Apple, through Jobs' leadership, used disruptive innovation to smash through the complexity of using mobile devices by making the utterly simple to use. For the first time, anyone - young or old - techno-savvy or techno-phobic - could pick up an iPhone and iPad and immediately 'get' how to use it. The massive complexity of the underlying technology was hidden under the covers of a simple and intuitive user interface.

The iPhone certainly inspired me to 'see' technology from a non-technologists perspective. The first Tesco-branded iPhone app, Tesco Finder, came from the R&D team as we worked through the (then) unknown process of programming for iPhone and getting it through into Apple's App Store. The app was an instant hit because, we found, many customers could use the simplicity of their iPhone to locate their nearest Tesco - then products in that Tesco branch - using the simplest of taps and swipes of the finger. We could do it because the tools to allow the simplicity of that user-interface were, for the first time, at our command.

Now we have the situation where many senior managers and directors in Tesco are using an iPad to do their job. Indeed a few have shunned their laptop in preference for using their iPad!

Tesco 'gets' mobile; we are so enthusiastic as a company about the future of this technology on behalf of customers, and the work of Steve Jobs and Apple has had a profoundly positive contribution to that enthusiasm.

Thank you, Steve, for being one of the greatest innovators and inspiring me so much.

A simple apple.com home page honours Steve Jobs today.

Tesco Triathlon app review

We've been evaluating a mobile application we set up for those participating in the Tesco Charity Triathlon last month. The app was created by mobile specialists mBlox so that triathletes could enjoy personal updates as the triathlon deadline approached. In this article, Ben Martin (who took part in the triathlon itself and raised £370 in the process!) shares his experiences with how the app - and its underlying content delivery system - worked for our event.

Ben writes:

Last month we trialled a pre-release beta technology from mBlox in an exclusive Tesco Charity Triathlon 2011 application. The application provided a method of keeping participants posted with the latest information about the event.

For this year’s Tesco Charity Triathlon we thought it would be great if the participants who attended the event could receive automatic updates about what was going on before, during and after the day. We worked closely with mBlox to create a mobile application for Android devices that could do just that.

The finished application had an HTML5 dashboard widget for uploading content (images, blog/Twitter posts, plain text and even video) that could then be sent to everyone who had the application installed on their Android device. We could even restrict the distribution to a defined location of our choice. The widget also provided analytical data reports of users who had downloaded the content and time they had spent viewing.

Before the Triathlon we used the app to send out useful information such as charity details, training tips/advice, blog entries from our leadership team, race numbers and race day details. During the event we published images of participants taking place in each of the activities and contestants could send images to us, which we could upload. After the day we sent out info on the winners, final messages from sponsors and info on the total raised for charity (impressively it was over £200,000!!).

Here’s an example screenshot taken from within the App:

The purpose of the trial was not only to keep participants up to date on the event but also so we could investigate the process of sending and receiving relevant information, and the value this would provide to the end user and to Tesco. We were also very keen to find out how valuable the analytical data was and how it could be used to improve future communications.

Sending and receiving information to mobile phones in a timely manner using technology is a research topic that we wanted to get some experience. Once we have completed the research we can think about how we might use this to incorporate this functionality into our existing customer applications or use it for our own internal communication methods. An idea that springs to mind is an app that can send delivery details to Tesco.com van drivers and we would receive confirmation on them receiving the info.

What we found out:
The application proved to send relavant information very quickly to the end users mobile device (instantly in fact) and was very reliable. It was really useful to have data that confirmed delivery of the content and even detailed when it had been read. Potentially this information could allow us to become more effective at our communication.

Another valuable learning from the trial was the speed in which mBlox helped us to deliver such a technology to market. Without their help we would not have been able to achieve this on such tight timescales due to our other commitments – thank you mBlox!

Thanks to all those who took part in the technology trial, we will continue to investigate its value and have passed on our learnings to our Mobile Development team.