Dear Entrepreneur

"it is going to take twice as long and four times as much money as you think to get half as far as you expected to go"

When you approach an experience investor, this thought is going through their minds. They are not casting aspersions over your competence, ...   more »

I strongly suspect that far too few game designers really understand what “entertainment” means. They do appear to be getting better at it, but are not quite there yet. They are also somewhat unaware of the “unintended consequences” of really good game design – consequences that can serious damage the long term viability of a game or even the publisher. - I'll explain a little hear about the 'pre-cradle to post-grave' user experience, and fun, and some design issues in games of every type - There is one drawback of getting this absolutely right, of course. Can you guess? Yes, long term: a really great game is compelling, addictive, rewarding and so damn fine you don’t want to play anything else. Which means, of course, you will never sell another game, as everyone will keep playing the last one. Did you think about that in the design phase?   more »

There are two good excuses for going to trade shows technical knowledge and business knowledge. I’ll examine both as they affect start-ups and innovators in computer and video games, and hopefully show you ways to make the $5,000 cost of getting to a trade show for a week (including beer!) much better value for money. I’ll also dig into what a world in which games are released on 3 to 6 month cycles means for innovators and trade shows. [PART 1]   more »

Rapid cycles of development and rapid changes of business model are now the norm in iPhone and mobile games. 3 to 6 month cycles, with constant patching and upgrading in the released version mean a radical change in the games environment. Much has been said about the technical and games designs issues involved, but what about the cash flow?   more »

Quite often, you may have noticed, I will summarise a conference in a blog post. I’ve done it for SIME, ETRE, WebMission, Entrepreneur Country, and many more. This afternoon I met my nemesis. Simply put, AWA digital (www.awadigital.com) beat me to the punch by putting the whole thing online ...   more »

After a month or two off, one topic has risen to the top of my agenda sufficiently to be blogged about. I’ve been concerned for years now in how people use software to entertain themselves. Then, more recently, how software can be used to help people realise creative tasks at home that previously required professional tools and teams of people. Since around 1996, I have been personally concerned with how the internet enables communities to socialise and co-operate. During that time, I’ve enjoyed watching ‘serious business’ people look down their noses (sometimes figuratively, but surprisingly often, actually) at computers being used for creativity or entertainment. My views are clear “the only proper use for a computer is entertainment”. I’ve had to stretch that to include “the only proper uses for computer are entertainment and empowerment of everyone”. Still, it has proven hard to convince business people that they owe more to the fact that consumers love entertainment than they ever cared to acknowledge. OK, there have been pockets of prescience in the major software companies: Oracle (in the form of David Christopher for one), BT (with Dan Baillin), Sun (the inestimable Stewart Townsend), Microsoft (Claire O’Halloran then Bindi Karia both carry the new media torch elegantly), and in those places the social media / entertainment revolution has clearly found its voice. Elsewhere, not so much. Which is why I have been delighted to attend a short seminar this morning on Software as a Service sponsored by Spectrum. The speakers were really excellent, insightful and relevant. They all had a core theme (apart from, obviously, trying to sell us their solution...). That theme was: the real pressure on business software is coming from your employees’ and your customers’ experiences at home of consumer entertainment and social media. The speakers were Keynote Address: Dr. Steve Garnett, Chairman EMEA, Salesforce.com  Emerging Venture Perspective: Andrew McGregor, CEO, eCommera  Sector Update: Claudio Alvarez, Principal, GP Bullhound Client Perspective: Bernie Segal, European Head, Software as a Service, Infosys I won’t embarrass anyone with quotes, but will try to pick up on themes.   more »

Sorry to the few people who were reading this. Had four months in the world of motion picture finance, and found no time what so ever to write. Also, as the company was NASDAQ listed, I felt it unwise to post anything publicly given the company was in a close ...   more »

Oxford Venturefest, held at the Kassam Stadium provides the regional focus for start ups and VC investment, as well as providing a forum for VC information exchange, mentoring and learning. Over 1,100 registered attendees, dozens of little presentation booths and some large (but jam packed filled) seminar and lecture theatres made for a busy schedule from 7am to the evening dinner session. By way of context, it appears to me that the local start-up community draws heavily from engineering (motor business has concentrated design and metals engineering in the area), biomedicine (spawned from the University and the local hospitals), energy tech (with Didcot, Harwell, Culham and Aldermaston all nearby). On top of that, we have at last begun to see the rise of local internet based companies. Oxford’s innovation cluster is coming into the C21st. From this event, I’ve concentrated on two sessions that I think were at the heart of what was on offer: one for entrepreneurs wanting to sharpen their skills, and one on investors trying to get to grips with the success factors for current investment.   more »

Merlin, Lord Errol really bought a smile to my face by asking us to google "home office bollocks" in his speach on digital identity and personal identity footprints in the digital arena. A clear and plain language summary of the issues involved in the Government operating in areas of digital identity. As an aside, I am open to offers for back issues of Keble College's paper based newspaper, The Brick, c. 1980 to 1987 which I helped publish and archive, as it may just be that Ed Balls, and Lord Adonis have forgotten what they did while at college. They were lucky enough to live there vulnerable teenage lives protected from CCTV and digital personas. How will this generation of up-coming young people now at college fare in 25 years? I suggest we adopt the principle of data prudency and "digital forgetting" as soon as possible. We all say things we regret online, and we all allow secrets to leak (for instance, in the location EXIF data on our photos), and we need to be properly educated as to the likely consequences and protected from the more dangerous predators. Yet the education and tools do not exist, and there is almost no one to help us do it.   more »

Tony Fish runs Mashup, which has quickly grown to be a solid addition to the technology travelling circus in the UK. Being Digital is a flagship for them.

You could trawl the Twitter feeds for #BDE as a hashtag, but it is a jumble... Charles Cohen of Probability Plc gave us a quick “don’t do list” for start ups: Don’t go public as it means you can’t ever tell jokes, make things up or speak ‘off script’ in public again. Being public means losing entrepreneurial control to a large extent, and agreeing to play by the market’s rules. Don’t do a ‘Barney deal’, which has lots of PR song and dance routines but never delivers and is never followed up. The clues are press releases, the word “synergy” and a lack of clear delivery timetables in the information. Don’t do deals to get investment. Deals should be for the business, investment for the investment. Mixing the two is almost always fatal, and you should have known that your investors know nothing about entrepreneurship. Don’t do commercial deals with huge companies when you are small, unless you are 100% certain that you have 200% of the resources needed to deliver to them. Large companies will suck you dry, taking 6 months to sign a deal and then demanding endless services and meetings (which satisfy their internal needs and give nothing to your startup) The right answer is to start small, deal small, deal ‘stupid’ and get the business tested and working before reaching higher. Raise small money first, test and refine and then look for investment. Even established news carriers are shying away from content or editorial policy: they are allowing it all to flow through (facts checked, we hope) and allowing the technology to give prominence to the stories which customers are actually asking to see. Again, the public decide what they want, and are not being told what they should see. (There is a really good business here in having a system that feeds up ‘requests’ from a mass audience for news on specific subjects, and then tailoring that news feed - drawn from hundreds of sources - to each recipient. You can have that idea for free. If you make it, you can buy me a beer or two.) I quite like my new internal model of social media as 200 million ropes dropped into a dark room until you feel someone pulling, then dropping down to join the party. Social media is made of strings that pull, not sticks that push. What the world has not yet got to grips with is the impact of the huge crowd of experts who can genuinely contribute value to reportage and editorial. I personally struggle with the problem that, when I read a story about a subject in which I am an expert, I realise that most journalists are rushed and – at best – partially accurate and partially informed. If that is true on subjects where I know things, surely all the other topics, on which I previously trusted the newspaper to inform me, are equally inaccurate? Would a crowdsourced reportage and editorial help us? Would it be no better (or worse) than Wikipedia? How would we get people to give the right amount of expertise at the time it was needed? Ultimately, crowds are moving in, and technology is helping them. How the traditional print media, broadcasters, and advertisers react to that is up to them. The game is not yet played out, and the solutions are not yet here, and may never stop evolving.   more »

I've been pitching to a lot of smaller investors, angels and funds over the last couple of years, so I thought it worth boiling down what I have learned about the process of "pitching on the day" to audiences of investors at events like SIME, ETRE, Essential MediaTech, London Business Angels, South West Business Angels, Cambridge Angels, and through Silicon Valley. I don't claim it is all 100% original (some of the core ideas were liberated from a course run by Chris Padfield at London Business Angels), but it has been tested to destruction by me personally and updated and simplified for the benefit of time stressed business owners and managers. Enjoy - and feel free to comment, adapt and amend with your own war stories of pitches that worked or were #epicfails. :-) A downloadable PDF is here ...   more »

In step one, here, I spoke about the benefits of exposing ideas to potential investors as a way of gaining information and confidence at an early stage. This is not the same as approaching potential investors and asking for investment. But are quite different processes and should have quite different outputs, and for that reason alone should be kept quite separate. You may approach some of the same people, or you may approach completely different people, but it is absolutely certain that the time you go out asking for money you will need to be far better equipped, are better prepared, and armed with a very focused message. I've cobbled together another little table to help myself in this, and you may find it useful.   more »

One of the big divide is that you find in the management teams of start-up companies is between those who have ideas, those who assess ideas, and those who implement ideas. We could bore each other now for weeks talking about psychological profiles, Belbin tests, and the like. I don’t propose to do that here, as I am one of the people who spends more of their time having ideas, and finds it very tough to assess those ideas and put them into practice. Indeed, the times at which I’ve had the most success, have been those times where I have worked with people who are far better than I am at the other two stages. So, I have worked out a matrix of decisions that helps me to cull out good and bad ideas, making bad ideas better and good ideas commercial as it goes along. I've given an example in the piece that follows:   more »

For those of you following me on Twitter @davidjwbailey the fact I was just in California will come as no surprise. I thought it worth summarising what I learned, in general terms. I had the chance to speak to half a dozen seriously connected and insightful people in the Sililcon Valley community, and it all came down to 'C' Words:   more »

Good businesses should have a lot in common with trees. I’m not just saying this because I happen to have a couple of degrees in forestry, I’m saying it because in our current credit crunch times, trees are model that I strongly feel business should strive to emulate.


OK, I ...   more »

Dear Web, when one of your applications is as essential, nourishing, widely available, demanded and with half the utility of a loaf of fresh bread, then, and only then, can you claim to have a mass market product. Until then: STFU   more »

I've been wandering about today in sort of a "credit crunch" mentality. Being made redundant has, as with many people, made me incredibly careful with money. This has led to me taking longer and longer to decide on relatively simple purchases. So far, so rational.

The irrational part has been ...   more »

A great, short and very pithy post by Broadstuff has really cheered me up, in that they have gathered empirical data on the viral uptake rate and the decay of that rate in a real 'viral meme' (the "25 things" meme on Facebook). The more of this we get, the better we will be able to tune Andrew Chen's excellent little formula, probably using some of the techniques I went through in six parts before (here). Nice to see marketing catching up with biology.   more »

Short amateur video creation. An interesting concept. You make a short video, say 30 to 90 seconds long, and people watch it, then they tell their friends to watch it, and suddenly you are famous and can give up the day job. Why does that not happen more? The only metric that ultimately matters to the consumer is "was that the best use of the 60 seconds I devoted to it?" if someone has made something that is "better"(*) to watch then they get the attention, and that drives the onward recommendation engine and before you know it, that "better" video has 6m hits and you have 600 (from your 1st and 2nd circle friends only, usually). What is the solution?    more »

Casual Video Tools - the natural partners to Social Media, and the antidote to frustration and irrelevance. Casual video is simple and deep. Casual video is browser based, but not slow to respond. Casual video is fun, but not trite or overly stylised to the point of silliness. Casual video is drag and drop, but it helps educate and illuminate. Casual video empowers self-realisation, and never seeks to "reprogramme the user". Now, having staked a claim on the title of Casual Video Tools (c) me, 2009, I need to go do something else for a while.   more »

Wanted: intros to best exec recruitment people in UK, EU, US, Mid East. Must have techmedia focus, must deal at ...   more »

Digital Britain is a report to the UK Government from a Steering Committee of the usual suspects and television presenters. ...Full of promise, but no means to deliver? No, sadly they get it "wronger" than that, as you will see...Would it not be easier to just do the sums, as TIGA did some years back, and put some cash behind one of our most vibrant and export generative industries, just once? My vote: FAIL.   more »

The coffee at IoD was pretty vile, but the conversations and demos were pretty good, so that kind of reset the karma of the event. (see how reasonable I am being? normally bad coffee turns me into a screaming monster, but the promise of a presentation from Caffe Nero founder in the afternoon helped calm me down.) Quick run down - if you wanted the detail, you would have been there. General mood = optimism for mediatech and for new ventures in general. Specific advice = weatherproof your business and cash is king. In slightly more detail:   more »

I'm not known as a follower of fashion, joiner of clubs, or even someone who knows a good idea when they see it. Not normally. The Entrepreneur Manifesto from the wonderful, effervescent, Julie Meyer at Ariadne Capital is, however, a good idea and I can see it. I've endorsed it, even if previously agreeing with clause 5 has got me into significant disputes with some investors (and even though I agree with clause 5, I have happily taken investment in my current company from NESTA with whom I have no disputes and even find things to agree with :-) ) The only reason I can think of that you would not want to do just that is if you are already based in Silicon Valley (and if you are - please invite me as I love it there) and have access to staggering pools of talent and investment and live in an environment that really understands and respects entrepreneurial zeal. And now, back to a cold, damp, grey day in England...   more »

Today I am mostly in receive mode. Things did change as expected last year. The summary from ETRE, SIME, NMBX and Essential Mediatech remains true and things are playing out as expected through the down turn. Mediatech and entertainment is holding up, tech innovation continues and pretty well all the rest of the world is in melt-down / panic mode (most of which is pure emotion, some of which is long overdue correction, a little bit of which is actually quite serious).   more »

Moviestorm follows on from its trips to San Francisco, Stockholm, London and Atlanta in 2008 with a trip to Texas ...   more »

I've been looking into why I enjoy working with smaller companies more and more recently. It is not that I ...   more »

I recently asked for votes in the TechCrunch Crunchies, and I know many of Moviestorm's fans did put us up ...   more »