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 can't remember my name. I'm blinded by sweat running into my eyes, my legs feel like someone is playing a blow torch over my things, I panting like a steam train and I can't remember my own name. It is only 20 minutes into day two of the RAB Mountain Marathon and I have no idea what I am doing here or why. I do vaguely recall that it was my wife's idea to take up the sport and that once (a billion years ago) I said I might like to do one of these mountain marathon thingies with her.   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 posted a new photo to Photos.
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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 »

I would chose a glass of wine (my other half is a Master of Wine), but while it encourages creativity for a while, it also leads to sleepiness. I have no time to sleep - too many Moviestorm movies to watch on YouTube :-)   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 »

Faintheart is really about how everyone was embarassed by their Dad and how love is never a linear experience. A nerd movie with a specific UK historical background that appeals to me, and, perhaps more so, to all the Moviestorm people in the audience last night at the CFF2008   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 »

off to the Cambridge Film Festival tonight (and most ...   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 »

Blatant favour: Please can you get all your friends to vote for Moviestorm on the BBC Technology Tigers home page! ...   more »

One of the great joys of being the CEO is going out on the road and seeing what people - be they media, finance, investors, advisors or (the best) just the public - think of what we do. We are at the Cambridge Enterprise Event, SIME, ETRE, ARCADIA ......and a couple of other trips to the USA (both coasts) which will be deserving of their own posts.   more »

It has been a particularly fine year for nettles in England: warm, damp ...   more »

Several friends from the American side of the pond sent me copies of a Clay Shirky video on how making things easier makes more people do something, but that while the average quality falls, the total amount of good stuff rises. I’m paraphrasing as I lost the original video clip, but you’ll probably get the gist of the argument. Basically a bigger bell curve has a broader base on both sides and a higher peak. But how ?    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 »