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 »

This image reminds me so much of dealing with amateurs in mediatech. ...   more »

I'm not saying that just because the BBC just gave an outstanding review of Moviestorm but because I am in ...   more »

So, at last we meet. 20,000 Moviestorm users now and it is ...   more »

I did not quite manage to turn the discussion on Virtual Worlds over the last few days around to my favourite topic: biological analogies. Now I can. Throughout the talks of "design", "aesthetics", "laws", "rules" and "software" I kept hearing one refrain. I was sung in many voices and in different words, but it basically went like this: 'we keep making all this clever stuff with all these clever rules and deep stories and then the darned users go and chose to do something else' Now, it is stretching the Darwinian analogy just a bit far to claim that what we are seeing in Virtual Worlds is the inhabiting species putting selection pressure on the environment. Or is it? Because that is exactly what we are going to see in Little Big Planet (a Virtual World that is a game), and in Metaplace.   more »

Raph Koster was speaking at Living Game Worlds at Georgia Tech, and I think what he said needs wider understanding. Not that he is shy about coming forward. The issue is that a lot of what he said is wrapped up in metaphor and allegory and may not have got out to the audience. Or perhaps we each saw our own meaning in the metaphors. You know how it is with clever people explaining themselves: “the only problem with communication is the illusion that you have achieved it.” Many people at the end of his speech wondered if he had lost his love of games. That was probably because it was hard to extract a clear message. This is what I think he was trying to tell us.   more »

I had a great time at Living Game World IV at Georgia Tech this week. While I am not a hard core Virtual Worlds games designer, the connections between VWs, Social Media, User Created Content and real life are now so great as to be an essential part of any media tech executives thinking. That is the official travel request I put in, anyway. My friends will know that I would not have missed a chance to see the heroes of gaming all assembled in one room and get to talk to them. I got to meet my heroes and talk to them. I saw virtual wonders and met some of the new Wizards of the shared mind. I learned of the history of games worlds and the urgent need for the developers of new worlds to combining learning from past mistakes and exploring new spaces. We can all learn from the past while we move forward with the new media tools we are forging. I look forward to putting the things I have learned about group creativity and ‘playfulness’ into practice. And to think, my mother was right when she said “you should join that computer club at school, you seem to enjoy it, and you never know, it might be useful one day”.   more »

Every day we perform miracles. Consider walking across a room, taking a chair, sitting down and reaching across to pick up a coffee cup and drink it. Why does it look so unrealistic when I try this in a computer game or simple animation package? Hollywood makes great animated movies on budgets of about $100m, and that means they spend about $1m per minute of finished movie or about 10,000 hours per minute, or about 5 person years. We want to enable you, the normal person, to make movies at a cost of $10 or less per finished minute and with less than 15 minutes of effort per finished minute. Moviestorm is a fun product, it makes video creation easy, and making your lives easy makes our lives difficult. Which is how it should be. Each step towards better bodies in motion is a good thing for you, the video creatives, and another problem solved for us. Buckle up, it is going to be one heck of a ride for video creatives over the next couple of years. Now, can someone get me a cloth for that coffee I just spilled?   more »

Please vote for the hardworking team at Moviestorm (and me) in the annual Tech Crunch awards - the Crunchies! Best Time Sink Most Likely to Change the World Best Startup Best CEO So, there you have it. Ask not what we can do for you, but how many votes you can cast for us. Get clicking!   more »

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 »