Chief execs are getting younger

Submitted by jamiewallace on March 19, 2006 - 15:40.

We (that is myself and Terry and Martin - the technical supremos behind walkit.com) met up with the Department for Transport, the Ordnance Survey and our first client, 4Holborn, on Thursday. And all the meetings went suspiciously well.

4Holborn, the Business Improvement District (BID) that camps out in Holborn police station, have really bought into the idea and we had a great chat about all the creative opportunities for ‘marketing' walking/walkit.com through their upcoming transport portal. Their CEO (and in case this conjures up a mental image of a 50 or 60-something bloke, no, I think she was in her twenties...) had some great ideas and will hopefully help us make links to the other BIDs in London.

So we're now moving from the largely conceptual development phase, to delivering ‘products/services' to ‘clients'. This is a bit of a leap - but a welcome one. I now need to get my head round things like contracts and licensing agreements.

We had a good meeting with the OS too. They're a funny old outfit the OS. They certainly charge out their data in a very commercial manner, but they also behave partially like a statutory body. There's a huge amount of debate amongst mapping experts about them: on the one hand recognising that they produce some of the best data in the world, but on the other complaining that their charging model stifles innovation (wholly in contrast to the US where much of the equivalent data is free). The guy we met has been there only 6 months and certainly seemed to have a ‘can do' attitude. I suspect ‘can do' will morph into ‘can't help'. But I'm happy to suspend disbelief for a while longer.

We also trooped off (or did we troupe off...?) to the DfT in Marsham Street. It's strange wandering around government buildings. We were led through large open plan offices and past a sea (though I can think of other collective nouns...) of civil servants. I did have a momentary, and very unfair, thought about whether the sum total of the UK's quality of life would be harmed or aided should a virulent strain of bird flu hit Victoria and wipe out half the nation's civil servants...

Such thoughts, of course, didn't apply to the guys we met who, once you get past the caution that is surely hard-wired into the DNA of every departmental employee, I think are actually very supportive of what we're trying to do. But to an extent their hands are tied. Although ‘sustainable travel' is slowly marching up the agenda of the DfT, not least because it can be bloody cost effective, the boys and girls in ‘walking and cycling' have astonishingly meagre budgets to deal with compared to the men and women in ‘cars and rail'.

At least they're keen to receive v.3 of our proposal, though I might lose the will to live if they ask for a v.4.

(Are the above paragraphs ‘death by blog'? I've no idea if the guys we met read this - though I do carefully delete from my email signature the link to the blog whenever I get in contact with them. Anyway, in case they do, guys, I think you're great. No genuinely, you've bothered to engage with that slightly maverick walkit.com bloke, which is more than can be said for other governmental bodies...)

So progress. And now the deputy chair of Transport for London has called me in for a coffee, and even the CEO of UnLtd (and, yes, you have to revert to type with your mental image...) wants to ‘do coffee' too.

Maybe we're reaching a tipping point?