I'm going to tell you about myself when I was about 11 or 12, and there's just no way that won't be embarrassing in some way. But mostly this is a nostalgia piece about getting online in the mid 1980s, and what that can tell us about our digital way of 21st-Century, post-COVID life. So focus on that, rather than how nerdy I was, and still am.

In a Start-Up or rapidly-scaling business, I've often seen that as long as business aims were achieved, it didn't matter if the rules went by the wayside sometimes. Or a lot of the time. Today it's clearer than ever that businesses need to achieve results while at the same time respecting their impact on our well-being and safety, our legal rights, the environment, and other such unprofitable concerns.

I've been helping SMEs to adjust to the new "GDPR Way" of doing things for many months now, and I'd like to share some brief observations from my travails.

 With the neutrality of the internet itself under threat, it is the author's view that only we, the individual data subjects, should have control. 

Who do we trust exactly when it comes to personal data? 

It turns out that all the talk about Big Data over the past few years was a serious understatement. Data volumes were already big when the term was coined, but are now growing at such a rate that legislation is necessary to protect us all from an unstoppable deluge.

Football's great stories typically involve dramatic turnarounds, or the underdog triumphing over the odds. This is how many of us become hooked in the first place, but is the unpredictability of the game is being challenged by the new data-driven approaches to analysis and statistical measurement?