Well, SIME told me that humour was the way to get your point across, so here is a very good reason for people like Short Fuze to make tools like Moviestorm to the best of their ability:   more »

Before launching into the promised coverage of the technology and trends sections, I thought it a good idea to describe what makes SIME unique, and also to put down a few caveats which are relevant to all that comes out of SIME. First up, SIME is not a pure business event. There is a strong visual arts theme, with in house AV teams, video creatives, live camera crews who mix and edit for the next sessions and a lot of traditional 2D paper and fabric arts. Each show has its own purpose and theme. If you want television and video, go to Milia. Movies, go to Cannes. Top level finance networking, go to ETRE. Lots of rapid data to assimilate? Then go to Essential Mediatech. Games? GDCE, Brighton or Leipzig (if it is running next year). US connections required for your start-up? Then get out to Web 2.0 Expo, DEMO09 or similar. Want to know how the money moves? Try something like EconSM. .... What is SIME for?   more »

SIME is a very hard thing to summarise, as I mentioned before, and I have deliberately ducked out before the wrap up session to make sure I have a fresh set of thoughts on the matter. Something really important is happening in digital media and it is not what I expected to find. I’m going to try to explain it, but first there is a heap of ground to cover. I’ll cut it into chunks, not necessarily in chronological order: markets, content, technology, trends. I’ll cover the first two here today, more to come.   more »

Normally I post a fairly "blow by blow" account of major conferences. SIME08 is not going to be the sort of event that really lends itself to that. Aside from the uniquely Scandinavian sense of style, the event is marked out by its coverage of the broad sweeping issues illustrated by real life stories. It is also massively blogged in the Nordic region, and I don't really want to set myself up in competition to a room full of ravening professional journalists. Also, some of the key events (certainly those at the best Night Clubs) are being held only in Swedish, which is cool for them, but hard for anyone else to follow.) What I will try and do is this: within a day or two I will try to boil down the real guts and grit of the event from the amazing list of speakers and come up with some useful pointers for other Mediatech entrepreneurs to use in their own businesses.   more »

Essential Mediatech 2008 is the authoritative voice on the state of play in the mediatech sector, bringing together some of the most influential movers in the industry and assembling the most exciting companies, with the aim of answering the most pertinent questions facing the sector. Speakers come together and share insights in a series of keynote speeches, chaired panel sessions, and stimulating company showcases, selected from the Library House exclusive “Mediatech 100*”, with opportunities for high level face-to-face networking, and interactive Q&A, at what will be Europe’s must-attend mediatech event. Shortfuze was delighted to make that list and be invited to speak. There were some company presentations, which I will cover separately, and a panel session which I spoke at. I'll probably have to ask someone else to blog what I said, as I was not able to take notes, blinded as I was by the spotlights...   more »

The Hype Curve is a wonderful abstraction that, while it may or may not have a sound theoretical underpinning, does have a certain compelling internal logic. What we are seeing - as in two examples I give of Moviestorm modded content - is that users are not only making content, but they are influencing and even making the creative tools that make the content (IYSWIM). This factor can only act as an accelerant to the development and adoption of the new tools of video creativity. Is the "trigger point" coming sooner than we thought?   more »

In start-up land we spend a lot of our time being concerned about the competitors that we perceive in our ecology. Partly this is because all startups perceive themselves as the underdogs in this situation. It is far too easy to be carried away believing that larger, better funded, or more advanced companies in the same space either oppress startups, or are “the enemy”. This is another area in which I believe are biological analogy carries well: we have to perceive ourselves as being an ecology, where we all contribute to the flow of energy (money) through a widely connected and diverse ecosystem. The clever strategy is on cooperation to grow an ecosystem that captures more energy, that has less leakage, and more recycling.   more »

The role of CEO is notoriously hard to define. We all get the leadership bit. The enabler. The decision maker. The team creator. Pretty well all books on management deal with those areas. Fewer of them give perspective. Only time can do that. Let us see what the perspective of time, and some careful time and motion recording can tell us about the job of start up CEO...   more »

Combining, iClone, Moviestorm and other tools seamlessly and editing it together wonderfully while keeping the lighting, style, colour and theme all coherent, Phil "overman" Rice has produced something that, in my view, is at least as good as many things my children can watch on television.   more »

Yes, my very first experience with the Google G1 Android phone. if I was a highly skilled hardware reviewer, I would no doubt write a really good review   more »

The robots are coming, and they are going to be smarter, better, stronger, faster and harder than we are. Not only that, the network is going to know them, and they are going to partly or completely live in the network. The march of innovation is barely going to miss a step because of the Credit Crunch. I’m going to make sure I spread the word on the web that I love the idea of robots and distributed computing sentience. Because real soon now, it is going to want to know who its friends are. You might want stop and think about that. In a world where we have ubiquitous airborne broadband, high powered chips, massive data access, rapid advances in robotics, fantastic advances in embedded OS (Zebor), and new sensors and displays (see Penny AB) then we are on the very near edge of a massive, world changing revolution. It is inevitable, it does not have a keyboard and is not flat.   more »

Friends have been telling me for years that I need to hear J-P speak, so I was keen to get to this segment. What I was surprised by is that he is such a simple operational salesman. Straight forward box and licence shifting is a major part of his life. Probably the right way to get to the top in his job. His view is that impact on software is patchy and not predictable at the customer company level, and that the impact is being felt worldwide at about the same level across territories. With IT investment being 50% of most CEO’s decisions, this is a tough time, so the winner – if it is be Microsoft – will emerge from winning market share in a down cycle. CIOs are being told to cut budgets by 30%.   more »

Some small companies got toasted. I came away from the innovation session having realised that there were some amazingly clever venture capital companies with serious long-term investment profiles who were not only ready, but willing, fully capitalised, and in many ways determined, to buck the negative trend that seems to be emanating from places like Sequoia capital, and their ilk.   more »

Globalisation. Well, it seems like an old theme, but the events in the financial sector this week have made us all much more aware that we are in a small interconnected world. Given that, it seems amazingly appropriate that ETRE should have started talking about globalization 18 meetings ago. Here at the 19th ETRE, the conversations are all about how we - the entrepreneurs - deliver balance in that world. That balance is all about the cost of globalisation for citizens, for governments and for investors. Tim Draper, Rob Glaser, Travis Katz and others put some points to us and sometimes sang, and sometimes made us laugh.   more »

As we have said all models are wrong, but some are useful. By using the bioogical models above we can rapidly prioritise features and functions of your product and the associated websites and services so that we can maximise the initial rate of uptake and adoption of your product amongst target users whilst also maximising the long-term rate of increase of your products use.   more »

I was interviewed by Megawhat TV recently at the Cambridge Innovation event. See it here, or on YouTube   more »

I'm a nice, tolerant guy. Most of the time. But today, for the 3rd time this year, Tucows and NetIdentity have let me down...   more »

If you have ever felt like that, then this is a book for you. Singing along to Nickelback's "If Everyone Cared" is just not enough for you. Really, you need to get a few thousand people to change the world with you. And Tom's book can help you. CauseWired - using the internet for massive social change   more »

This is a small video made in Moviestorm by one of our fans. It reminds me why I got into ...   more »

Part 5 - Your users can get immune to your product: they can be bored of it, fail to find challenge, or not receive direct personal benefit. Whatever the cause, they will, eventually, stop using the product unless you know they are changing and then do something. Problem is: which things do we need to to do?   more »

The news is full of doom and gloom about the Credit Crunch. Many blogs and learned pieces are covering the impact on the sanity and mental health of investors and entrepreneurs. It all seems rather bleak, doesn't it? I'm not so sure. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the issues for business have strong ecological parallels and that we can find answers in nature.   more »

I've found some new blog friends in the world of biological models of business. I think we might be the start of something new (ha! every blogger says that!). Over at the Bumble Bee, Ken Thomson has been really busy looking at how animal life communicates. It turns out that animals already have better solutions to group co-ordination than Skype or Twitter.   more »

I've getting a bit jaded of the stories of 3D screens, mobile phones that show video over captured images, and MMO's. The idea that the human race is - over the long term - going to allow any business or technology to mediate it's shared creative or social experience through a screen and keyboard is so risible as to make me want to smack technology pundits with a wet kipper. I am, however, a big believer in Augmented Reality.   more »

Part 4 - still thinking of our tech ideas as a benign infection, I'll chat about how you can speed up the rate at which your "idea disease" spread by working on some simple factors and tweeking them in your favour. Contact Ratio, Speed of Transmission, Transmission Losses all affect how fast our idea spreads.   more »

Part 3 - spreading the sickness. Method of transmission - any good virus will take advantage of multiple methods of transmission and Moviestorm is no different in this respect. The three classic methods of transmission: direct (physical contact), vector mediated (carried by something else), and sporulation (leaving something infectious lying about to be picked up).   more »

Part 2 - One very important use of a biological model of infection as a tool to understand marketing of tech products is that it reminds us that traffic and discussion between people who are already infected with a love of our product does not, of itself, drive new users. The product has to be taken up and used for that to happen. We are mostly concerned with how we actually drive the stage of uptake, ensuring a productive infection passes from existing users to uninfected users. I'm not ignoring the vital need for potential customers to be exposed to communication about the product, but so much is written about that that I hardly need bother. But very few writers have dealt with the need for someone to actually take the plunge and download, use and pay for our products. (side note: I suspect that this is because Marcoms execs love to write about themselves more than they love actually selling anything....). Remove the barriers = transmission goes up   more »

Part 1 - The marketing world has widely adopted the word "viral" as some sort of magical conjuration which implies that for zero cost, in zero time, an infinite number of consumers will tell each other about, and that subsequently adopt, whatever the latest product you have delivered is. Nature provides an answer to that sort of optimism in that we are not all instantly killed by the next real virus that evolves. Therefore there is no rational reason that we should expect our product to instantly conquer the world for zero effort in zero time. Understanding the dynamics and flow of viral contagion can give us real and deep understanding of how “passion” for a product propagates in a community. That kind of insight is the difference between life or death for tech start ups, so I will try to write this in terms aimed at them. I'll try to cover what sort of people help you spread an idea (pretty well covered in books like "The Tipping Point" and "Fast Company" and "Idea Virus. I'll try to deal with how fast products can spread, and what limits that, and how you can influence it. I'll try to deal with how to maintain an idea in the market, and I'll try to explain why ideas are not entirely the same as virus particles and what practical effects that has.   more »

It is only about 10 uses, sorry, but in the saturated media age, I thought a little bit of artistic licence worth it to get you to read more about how digital animation will change the ways in which you can express yourself. By the end of the year, I dare say that we will be into the dozens of uses, and we might reach that 101 uses in a year or two. After all, who knew what a word-processor would eventually be used for or evolve into? What is delightful and surprising in equal measure is how quickly people - with no prior media experience - have taken to using digital animation to express themselves. Long Movies, Short Movies, Adverts, Political Speaches, Personal Blogs, Jokes, Bands and Performance Reasons, Rapid Scripting, Comic Books. uh ... Comic Books????   more »

One of the hardest things to do as CEO of a small company is judge if you are on the right lines. Sure, there is gut instinct and a heck of a lot of people want to tell you how they would do it, but the CEO has to make the call.   more »

thank to Jemima Kiss for picking up on NMBX and posting this article about the companies there.

Makes me realise how few tech bloggers we rely upon ...   more »

Bobby Johnson appears to get it right in his Guardian piece on pirates. I've long held that piracy occurs mainly because publishers (not creatives) fail to engage with the full range of potential customers. So why don't the monolithic media companies "get it"?   more »

I'm dead proud to be CEO at Moviestorm, and today just added to that. The team updated the website with ...   more »

So, two days are drawing to a close here at NMBX. It has been great getting to know more ... Some brave forecasts. Some observations on living rooms. And a conclusion ... So, it is all getting more complex, more video and more interesting. I'm glad to be in it. Roll on the future of media.   more »