Week 490

Howdi, folks.

I spent the week easing back into work after the arrival of our first child in May. I mostly worked at home and kept busy with company admin and business development while Ben, Chris and James finished up the work we were doing with the BBC.

BBC R&D

We finished our work on BBC R&D’s “Talking with Machines” project this week.

Monday and Tuesday were spent finishing up development in preparation for a final handover meeting on Wednesday. The BBC seemed really happy with the work we’ve done; remarking on how much we’ve achieved in such a short time. I don’t think we’re the best at recognising our achievements so it’s great to receive this sort of feedback.

We really enjoyed the project and are waiting for approval to write about it in more detail. In the meantime, if you’re interested to find out how we might help with your voice project please get in touch.

Internal product development

We’ve resumed working on a product we were exploring before starting the BBC work. We think we’ve identified something that’s relatively common to product teams that we hope we can make simpler. We’ve distilled the idea to a core of what we believe to be useful and are now building something that we can use to test it.

We’re all excited by the idea and hope to have something to share soon.

Cash flow

Chris and I started exploring improvements to our basic cashflow calculator. Our current calculator assumes that we keep aside money to cover all known liabilities (plus some contingency) irrespective of when they’re due. A combination of Ben joining, the new office and some delayed invoice payments means that we might have to “borrow” from our liability reserve. We want to improve the calculator to give us better visibility of what this means.

I found FreeAgent’s “How to make a cash flow forecast” particularly useful in understanding what we might need.

We’re continuing to investigate.

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. That's about all for now. Until next time. -- Chris