jbsh

Another year, another Young Enterprise company starts up.

I’m acting as a Business Adviser for Colston’s Girls School again this year. Quite a large group of nearly 20 gathering after school to discuss their new venture. The usual chaos slowly subsided as roles were discussed and assigned.

Despite the best efforts of their link teacher to hold impartial voting for places, they pretty much conspired to agree the roles that would suit everyone and share the load. Fantastic stuff, taking charge from the outset. About half way in the teacher and I retired to the back of the classroom and handed over to the girls (lobbing in the odd pointer and clarification to keep them on track).

Things got a bit more chaotic again when they started to throw out ideas for products and services. What quickly emerged was a strong environmental and recycling ethic, which also ties in with their school’s new specialism as a soon-to-be Academy. Or perhaps is because of the School’s focus, either way it’s a great over arching ethic that allows lots of product ranges and opportunities within a consistent marketing message.

They didn’t finalise the product range, very sensible as they haven’t done any market research yet, or company name. Have to leave something for next week!

Just seeing how strong the Jobs Reality Distortion Field really is. And we did talk about the iPhone…

Last night’s Bristol SkillSwap relaunch at Goldbrick House had a new (for us) format with something Laura called ‘Talking Points’. 5 chairs, 4 people, discuss a topic, if you want to contribute you fill the empty chair and someone else has to leave. A bit slow starting but with an opening topic of (roughly speaking) ‘…is anyone (still) looking forward to CSS3‘ and a free bar courtesy of Siftware, things got up to speed pretty quick. Andy Budd from Clearleft in Brighton was the protagonist pointing out that CSS3 has been +10yrs in coming and still isn’t here.

There was a bit of a diversion about rounded corners and visual degradation and we never really got into the meat about what was better with CSS3.

There wasn’t a firm conclusion, except that if there are features that developers want to see, they should lobby the browser owners. It seems the W3C is set up to allow the incumbents to hold things up while they figure out the political and financial impact of any change. Despite falling market share, IE is still dominant and they’re not introducing any new features in a hurry for fear of breaking their existing bloatware.

Laura mentioned Safari coming to a future SkillSwap, so that’ll be a cool opportunity to hear their side of the story.

Elliot Jay Stocks from Carson Systems was up with should we support IE6? I think the beer was beginning to kick in as the discussion really picked up. Ultimately it came down to, if your clients’ target market are predominately using IE6 then you’re probably stuck with it. There were subversive ideas about intentionally degrading the web page for IE6 users but that was mainly left for personal pages and blog sites. According to Google Analytics, just over 52% of visitors here are on Firefox, 38% on IE and nearly 8% on Safari.

Matt Jones from Dopplr took the last slot on the eponymous iPhone. The displeasure was largely aimed at the demand for your attention that the iPhone makes of its believers. I’ve not used one (obviously) so this is all second hand but I can fully appreciate that you probably can’t just make a phone call, or listen to music, or surf the web without actively and completely focusing on the device and not the service. Leaving aside the potential iBrick upgrade - I’ll admit that I never ‘got’ the iPhone or the Mac fandom.

<disclosure>I am probably a HTC Fanboy, owning the XDA, XDA II and now XDA Exec, but they were all on O2 so I guess that cancels any geek cred I might have had.</disclosure>

My current HTC Universal is fine and only lacks built in GPS. WM6 isn’t the prettiest UI going but it does a good job of being a phone/MP3/MP4/Web/Office/etc service and the device doesn’t get in the way. The camera is a bit crap but then so are my artistic abilities.

All in all a fantastic evening, the iPhone thing was a great end to the proceeding.  I met Dan Hilton for the first time (his blog is not loading but there’s always Facebook), the conversation was lively and informed. Looking forward to the next SkillSwap!

The early start this morning wasn’t just to catch up on the overnight Google Reader (where I’ve pretty much dropped del.icio.us in favour of the search on GReader and shared items).

Headed over to the Bristol Golf Course (bit of a sterotype thing going on there) and was promised the secret of being ‘Disgustingly good at selling’. Saundu Hellings from riskHIVE and Barry Watson from PolicyCheck did an admirable job of presenting their take on sales and building the relationship with the customer (even if Barry did some across at time a little sterotypically wide boy sales man).

They were somewhat outclassed by Nick Drake-Knight (NDK Group & Performance in People Ltd) who I’ve heard speak before. Nick had a very clear process he advocated (the NDK Group website has pdf flyers), the 10 min was just about enough to rattled through his Rapport - Understand - Demonstrate - Recommend - Close. The questions provided scope for Nick to expand on the process. The setting wasn’t really appropriate for details and the whole event was under Chattem House to encourage openess, which worked very well.

The breakfast side of things was OK, but the table layout meant that once we’d chatted around the table and done the business card shuffle, you couldn’t very easily hop to another table. After the formal meeting, the tables pretty much meant you had to relocate to talk to anyone, which didn’t make for informal serendipitous meetings. As it was I had another conference to shoot off to so didn’t hang around quite as long as I’d normally have wanted to.

On the basis of this, I’m not about to sign up for the whole IoD package - BarCamp is a much better use of the money, I’m pretty confident I’ll learn more.

Laura Francis and Tim Beadle have put together the inaugral BarCamp Bristol (12 October if you haven’t booked) in association with SkillSwap Bristol.

Sign up and register! There is a GBP5 fee to help towards costs. Loads of folks (currently 11) have contributed sponsorship, including me.

There’s the Upcoming, FaceBook, and probably loads of other notifications out there.

There are only 30 places and already 18 people signed up on Facebook, and 14 on Upcoming. There is some duplication and the Facebook event seems to have more traffic / comments associated. In addition to the 14 that have said they’re attending on Upcoming there are another 7 ‘watching’ - by contrast there are 16 maybe’s, 34 not attending and 38 MIA on Facebook.

So why am I stumping up cash for this rather than going to a conference or painting the spare room?

Basically its an investment in the entrepreneurship capacity of Bristol. The BarCamp model lends itself to the ‘Bristol underground psyche’ - if such a phenomenon exists. It’s been a frequent topic of discussion at Open Coffee; that it can be difficult to get the digital innovators to congregate with the money people. Simon Bunker has done a terrific job in keeping Open Coffee Bristol going and if only through sheer bloody mindedness! Numbers are building gradually and folks are increasingly comfortable with the relaxed format and the open agenda is increasingly around building new products, discussing new services, and what next big ‘thing’ might be.

Companies in and from Bristol are proving that there is innovation and ideas with commercial potential from the stratospheric (XMOS getting $16m Series A) to the funky (BuilderSite’s success at Seedcamp).

No one is expecting the next XMOS, Buildersite, Skype, iLike, etc, to emerge from BarCamp (though it would be very cool ) this together with the relaunch of SkillSwap next week are all part of a momentum that’s building from the ground up.

So I’m going along to brush up on some geek tendencies, try out some new technologies and learn a whole bunch of cool stuff.

I was at the Creative Technology Network event last Thursday: Beyond the Console.

Toby Barnes from Pixel-Lab kicked things off with a very brief overview of some South West Screen sponsored research on the Games Industry in the SW (not yet on Pixel-Lab, SW Screen or CTN websites).
Toby noted that the 5 year technology shift (PS, PS2, PS3 etc) makes for a very distruptive development cycle. There is very little other than basic principles that can be carried from one platform to the next, a huge barrier for small developers. Examples of disruptive (and expensive) changes were increased photo realism & development assets, improved AI, etc, (Toby was going quite quickly so I missed some detail).

Interestingly Toby noted that across the UK games sector there has been a dramatic reduction in the number of separate companies; 400 - 150 companies in few years - but that more people are now employed in the sector than before.

New business models were touched upon (and discussed in the Open Spaces session at the end of the event), especially the download market for consoles and increasingly episodic design. Despite the event title, the work Toby had been asked to undertake was concentrated on the main console platforms and so there was little data from this report on casual gaming & mobile / micro games as a sector in the SW.

The perennial issue of businesses in the SW choosing not to be more successful (Life style businesses) came up again, but coupled with the proposition that to be successful they’d have to leave the South West.

Best quote of the event (can’t remember direct context but I think it was linked to the meat grinder approach to big budget console games that replace game play with more detailed graphics and explosion effects, and thus why sticking to smaller casual games): Developing games that are actually fun!

Darius Pocha of Enable talked about their work on building a branded campaign in Second Life, mainly for the WWF conservation island (conserving Panda bears, not aging wrestlers as Darius pointed out).

In a slightly surreal moment Darius was describing the use of the fairly recent introduction of VOIP to Second Life being used by BBC Radio One to host an ‘outside’ broadcast on WWF stage.

One good point (I thought) was the point that traditional brands shout really loudly about how good they are and ‘better = louder’; Darius condends that this doesn’t work in the ‘brave new web 2.0, social networks, virtual world thingy’ ; you can’t replicate RL online.

Darius closed with two slides showing technology developments in console games on the last 5-10 years (going from a handful of pixels representing a car with wheels, to the super-photo-realistic-first-person perspective) and asked; what happens when you factorup the development in consols to virtual worlds?

Phil Stenton of HPLabs on mscape

Much of this was describing the potential of immersive and pervasive media. One interesting proposition was that WOW was the new golf - as much about turning up and chatting with your friends as with slaughtering orcs. Ended with plug for the planned Pervasive Media College.

Hazel Grian of Licorice Film on producing an Alternative Reality Game
Much of Hazel’s short presentation looked at Meigeist, a ARG in Bristol over summer that was by accounts very popular. I had a quick dabble but never really got into the game. One question that came up from several audience members was if anyone had made a commercial ARG that you could sign up for like a Murder mystery weekends (which are popular here in the UK at least)? The consensus was that, for the moment at least, ARG’s are the domain of art projects and advertising driven brand strategies.

Steve Hinde ran the Ideas Generator based on Open Space which was great but a lot of people seemed to dissapear after the second session and before the ’serious’ networking began. My excuse was Open Coffee was starting down the bar.