Just attempted to have lunch and a catch up with John Squire from Coremetrics, carrying on a series of lunches with a Japanese scheme. Sadly a very smokey fire somewhere in their building curtailed that one… I would upload an iPhone picture but obviously the camera on the iPhone wasn’t up to it. Why would it be? Obviously a smokey basement resembling a Pink Floyd gig with a roadie who’s overdone the stage smoke isn’t something you’d want to photograph. Well not as much as say an overlit sunny summer’s day in Cupertino which the camera is clearly tuned for. 

Fortunately London now has so many dim sum places you can hit a Ping Pong with a ball of the same name almost anywhere in the West End so we had the great jasmine tea with the flower which opens in the glass and a large number of dim sum. Not quite as posh but much less smokey. 

John is one of my judging panel for the MySpace competition so it was really great to catch up with him as he’s not often over this side of the pond. It’s always an interesting discussion I seem to have with him. Yesterday’s clearly began and ended with the economy in some way shape or form. Analytics firms are probably in a very good place to see consumer confidence and although their business is good, they seem to very much be in the place that Tim Bray was advocating at FOWA - batten down for stormy times ahead. However they’re also in a good place to be able to spot and monetize emerging trends, which is why I wanted John to be on the panel as it clearly shows that without analysing data on your users you can’t spot trends which will make your app survive or fail.