I’ve just read in The Grocer that more than 7,000 Tesco head office staff are to be sent to work in-store between September and December this year. It’s weird to think that, after all these years, I won’t be stacking the shelves or picking online orders alongside my Tesco colleagues this Christmas. In Tesco.com we started ‘helping hands’ originally to help the in-store team pick the massive online grocery orders for Christmas. I’ll never forget my first stint: Colney Hatch Ex

The unit in this picture is the Davis Vantage Vue weather seneor, which measures wind speed and direction, rainfall, atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity. It’s mounted on a pole above the roof of our house, and updates a weather console with this data ervery few seconds. Inside the weather console is a data-logger which which retrieves this data and builds up a historic archive of data measurements. Connected to the logger is a Raspberry Pi micro-computer running so

It’s new year and time to get stuck into my big project for 2015 which is to experiment with technology that together form the ‘connected home’. In simple terms, connected home tech consists of sensors that detect and measure various pieces of information in the home environment and devices that can take action where necessary to lower heating or energy costs, improve comfort, and offer automated protection. The first stage of any ‘connected home’ project is gathering data,

Romford going well, off on holiday now! #Uncategorized

Sometimes it’s worth taking the team and escaping from the office for some fresh air and fresh thinking, specially when some of the extended team are joining us for the week having escaped from Tesco’s offices in Bangalore, India. The thinking doesn’t get any fresher than when it takes place at TechHub London, the community office space reflecting the vibrancy and global outlook of the technology scene right on the ‘silicon roundabout’ at City Road/Old Street in central Londo

If you love what we, at Tesco.com, have created with our mobile apps (and think we could ‘do better’ of course!), it’s time you came and joined the team at Tesco.com HQ in Welwyn Garden City. Yes we have an amazing vacancy for a ‘Mobile Product Owner’ who will help shape our mobile/device offerings going forwards. It’s an amazing chance to be in at the heart of what we do at Tesco.com. To quote the description, your job will be “To create and manage the mobile backlogs for An

Thanks to all of you who have applied to join the Tesco Freeview Experiment. Applications are now closed, and I am sifting through the postcodes to confirm the 20 different main service transmitters that will be used in the experiments tonight and I’ll announce on this blog tomorrow morning the applicants to receive the Technika Freeview HD set-top box with ‘Channel Zero’ capability. The way I’ll perform the selection is simple: I’ll check each postcode against the data at ht

I absolutely love this info-graphic that has been created describing how our Tesco Groceries app works with the rest of our service. Now do you see why I so enjoy working with the marketing team? A picture paints a thousand words, and us geeks should remember that a little more than we do! #Uncategorized

Just about every external email I’ve received over the last two days seems to ask one question: We have barcode scanning in Tesco Finder for iPhone, so why haven’t we put the scanner into Tesco Groceries for iPhone? The reason is technical and to do with the new barcode scanning code that needs to be compatible with Apple’s new iPhone operating system, iOS4 in a way that is satisfactory to Apple who are quite strict about the way that this must be performed. Indeed, until thi

Sorry for being a bit quiet here over the last week or so. We’re just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s before we plunge into the public arena with our most exciting adventure yet. I feel that any time spend away from my core duties as part of the team delivering this adventure is time not spent well, so forgive me while I – we – keep focus. If that’s not exciting enough – the R&D team in Tesco.com has just exploded in size and I’m now part of a team that includes the most

If you comment on any article in this blog more than a couple of weeks old, it goes into an “approval” queue which I check and process 3-4 times a week. I often find that, combined with some useful comments, a few spam messages. Over the last month or so I’ve suddenly found these spam messages have been written in such a way that they sound quite credible! Indeed I approved one of them until it suddenly dawned on me that it was a little strange and had to go back through all

Today I have written to our 809 registered Tesco API developers telling them about an update that took place this lunchtime. Dear API Developer Just 7% of customers to go and we’ll have 100% of them on our new ‘project martini’ Tesco grocery web service – and available to you through the Tesco Grocery API. The API (and its documentation) has been substantially updated this lunchtime. You’ll find the updated documentation in the Reference section of the TechForTesco forum. Fir

It’s the 16gb Wifi only version and I’m sat in the garden typing this entry on it. Enough said. #Uncategorized

The team just informed me that they’ve reached the 20% mark – which means that as a Tesco.com customer you now have a 1-in-5 chance of being on the new service today. You can tell if you’ve been upgraded, because you’ll see the new home page as shown above when you next login to http://www.tesco.com/groceries. Don’t worry if you haven’t been upgraded yet; the aim is to have moved everyone over by the end of February – we’re just taking it step-by-step at the average rate of 3

A delighted Steve Semenzato, CEO of Cortexica the company whose visual search system runs Tesco Wine Finder, has emailed me to let me know that the app is now on the front page of the iTunes (UK) App Store in the ‘New and Noteworthy’ section. I’ve just checked and so it is! Click on the image below for a larger view: #Uncategorized

Whilst it’s great to see that Tesco Wine Finder has had a positive reception across the web, some more wiley readers have emailed me as they see into my thinking about the potential of automated object recognition of the sort that Cortexica Vision Systems have built for us. So rather than remain implicit, I’ll state it explicitly here: using barcodes to recognise a product is frankly a compromise. Indeed it’s saying that computers are too ‘thick’ to understand what they are s

I’m just back from a nice holiday away in Republic of Ireland visiting friends and relatives, enjoying Irish hospitality, buying Christmas presents and being blown about by 50mph winds. The things I do for a delicious Dublin-brewed Guinness! Listening to local radio is great but there are a couple of UK stations I miss when I’m away. Not this time! My iPhone, sat in a JBL powered speaker stand, happily tuned into the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 each morning, and the odd do

Sorry for this off-topic message but, in the light of feedback concerning the announcement of Tesco’s new staff network “Out At Tesco” (of which I am a committee member), I am taking the opportunity here to help readers understand why such a network exists and to announce that I will be hosting the Tesco stand at a recruitment fair taking place next Friday 20th November in Covent Garden, London (so come and say hello!). I will be staffing the Tesco stand at the Diversity Care

Dear API Developer There are some important updates to the Tesco API and the developer portal that have occurred today, and there is action you must take to keep your client application running against the community technical preview edition of the API. Developer Portal Moved ——————————– The API developer portal, where you manage your developer & application keys, and consult the online API documentation has moved to its new home at techfortesco.com where your developer accou

It may be a poor attempt at phishing but look out for this email message and delete it. Mine came from “Tesco Webmaster” webhelpdsk02@gmail.com but there may be other email sources. The perpetrator may be trying to snag a Tesco email account to make future phishing emails look more authentic. Help me make sure his/her failure is complete. —-Tesco Webmail Technical Services—– Account Subscriber, We are currently performing maintenance on our Digital webmail Server to improve t