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 »

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 »