jbsh

I spent yesterday at the launch of the Sandbox, the upside there were lots of people in Waterside 3, possibly drawn by the £9k commissioning offer (but then only 24 admitted to having an idea to pitch and only 14 actually did). Ed Mitchell facilitated and did an excellent, if noisy job with various horns, cymbals and German songs about fish.

Th first activity was about networking and knowledge sharing. We’d each filled out a mini-profile on what we had to offer and what we were looking for. Copies of everyone’s profile were posted on the walls of Waterside 2 and you had to swap your profile with someone you didn’t know, and then take their profile and find them two people from those on the wall to network with. Quite sensibly no-one admitted to having or knowing anything about funding (over 50% on a rough eyeball count listed that as a ‘need’). Profiles returned to their rightful owners we set off to find those identified targets!

In the end I only found one person on the list of likely candidates, but in wandering around I got chatting to several folks that were either very close or had interesting ideas of their own.

There followed a wide discussion around what pervasive media was, with tables coming up with post-in notes of ideas. Dan Dixon & Pete Ferne then made a first cut aggregation of those ideas.

We were then invited to come forward if we wanted to pitch, or adjourn for coffee otherwise. I decided to take the plunge. 20min later I had an A2 sheet with a (very) badly draw storyboard (sorry Rich).
We had 90sec to describe the concept and Ed was being ruthless with the clock. There were a few game-type proposals (including the one I presented), a couple of location / mapping type ideas, a couple of event ideas and a couple that didn’t seem to be that related to media or pervasiveness at all.

Then followed a brutal ranking process where everyone in the room got to allocate votes to the ideas (each person had 4 blocks of 4, 3, 2 and 1 vote – they could be allocated in a whole block of ten or split between up to four ideas). My idea didn’t make it through the vote but since this wasn’t the commissioning process (yet) I wasn’t too disheartened. There followed a period where each idea was worked on to ‘improve’ it, before a final pitch to a volunteer panel. Watching the panel process I was doubly glad not have made it through as they were pretty brutal but it still wasn’t part of the commissioning.

The actual commissioning criteria were then worked on another group activity. This worked less well because each of the four groups had to come up with 5 criteria. These were keywords on post-it notes. Without a very clear understanding of the purpose of the Pervasive Media Sandbox, it was impossible to come up with a coherent set of criteria. There wasn’t unanimity over any of the criteria. These have now been consolidated into the ‘official’ criteria so we’ll have to see if the idea I was proposing still fits.

Stay tuned…

Been a hectic couple of days, and it’s going to get busier. I found out on Sunday that someone dropped out of tomorrow’s launch of the Media Sandbox here in Bristol and I was let in.

There are quite a few initiatives flying around the field of pervasive media in Bristol. This funded sandbox to build new ideas, there’s the Mscapers two day festival/conference next Mon/Tues, murmurings about a collaborative studio supporting business, research and community (more on this later), and new companies starting up (more also later).

Will definitely be posting on the Sandbox event, hopefully posting on the development of a very cool new game, and this is a hot space to watch at the moment in Bristol.

[Update: Ok, seems this has been going on for a while. Though the twitter post below did relate to the thing I was searching for it didn't actually give me a link to the conference. The reason I was searching was that Tom Morris had just twittered that they'd arrived in Bristol for the SWIG conference at HP Labs and I've got Bristol as a track term. Move along now, nothing to see.]

Sorry if this is old news to some but it’s the first time for me.

One of the features of life in general is that things happen, quite often in a particular sequence and usually within a specific time frame. In this instance there’s a school play next week and a major sales opportunity at the St Nick’s market that Young Enterprise SW put on for the companies.

Except stylECO don’t have a plan.

Both myself and the teacher to this year’s company had to crack the whip and ’strongly encourage’ the girls to figure out exactly when they were going to order raw materials, how long they would take to arrive and how long they would spend making products. It looks like they are going to miss the school play with their own product range so will fall back on buy-low-sell-high strategy but still need to buy something to sell anything…

At least the accounts are now on the Young Enterprise spreadsheet.

It also seems that the enthusiasm within the Board meetings isn’t carrying over into the rest of the week. I know that school life is very busy these days, but running a company isn’t a 1hr once a week activity. No one’s expecting 100hr weeks from them on Young Enterprise. They’ll each find their balance but at the moment an undue amount of pressure is being placed on one of the Managing Directors and she’s not quite strong enough to shoulder the leadership role (hence the intervention and support).

As a first action they’re raising the profile of the reward & retribution developed by the HR Directors so that everyone is fully aware of their expected performance levels. Agenda, minutes and action plans are beginning to make a formal appearance and a step-by-step guide to Google Groups has been handed out. The crunch will come over the next four weeks when they have the build up to the Christmas Trade Fair, the School play and several swimming galas to contend with.

Just found out that a photo I took of a Cornish Gig under sail outside the Cottage Inn back in the summer has been spotted and used in an online guide!

So there’s a new widget on the sidebar with said establishment and loads of other places you can see photos and reviews of (I didn’t do a review but they serve a mean Hunter’s Chicken after a long day on the water).

Actually the double events of the World of Learning & Festival of Innovation, both at the NEC, both today. Separated by a hundred yards but with so few attendees that you could happily walk around them in less than 30 mins and then circle back to the relevant companies.

ION - innovation owners network. Prof Adrian Cole started the lunchtime session with the rather provocative ‘Do we need Chief Innovation Officers’? Provocative because for a network about innovation and high level buy in the answer was a resounding, maybe, but they also come with health warnings. There was a very light touch plug for the network.

Personally, I would say that if innovation isn’t already (or any longer) a core part of what each C-level exec is doing then it’s probably a good idea; if only to kick people into action. However, innovation is a hygiene factor for success that should be part of each C-level exec’s portfolio.

Keynote from Michael Perrault (recently the Manager of the Personal Leadership Development Team at Intel Corp) - very impressive. Mike presented two sets of analyses frameworks. Michael introduced and explained a 3-day course in human dynamics in about an hour. You wouldn’t want to try and implement but there was enough there to know if you should.

The first framework considered decision styles and separated out amount of information used in decision making (satisficers and maximisers) from the solution focus adopted (uni-focussed and multi-focussed). This gave rise to the ubiquitous consultants 2×2 matrix with decisive, hierarchical, flexible, and integrator styles. To this Mike added a fifth style of systemic which was a combination of hierarchical & integrator (apparently very rare and difficult to work with). He further nuanced this picture by identifying the leadership role (public facing) from the thinking role (private) in decision making.

Mike also talked briefly about the Facet5 framework of personality assessment (from University of Edinburgh and building on the Big Five). Four main axis (will, energy, affectation, and control plus a fifth in emotionality which acts as a conditioner on the others). This boiled down to team roles, approaches and the suitability of a mixed team with different personalities within it. The Facet5 assessment was being used to identify the causes of conflict and suggest routes to resolution.

Unfortunately I didn’t stay for Darrell Mann, but they gave out the book & slides. Even more unfortunately, the paradigm shifting talk I left to attend wasn’t.

However lots of good innovation and showcase for the SPEED entrepreneurs from the Universities. It was a bit of a shame that the conference hall was nearly empty every time I popped in.

IoD South West - Young Directors

The perennial issue of raising finance was the topic of this morning event. The speakers had some entertaining stories and Brian Dorricott from SWAIN was on hand to put the ‘Dragons’ perspective (though he was also speaking as someone that had built two successful high tech companies himself).

The mix of speakers was refreshing. Rob Law of Magmatic and infamous Dragons Den fame was there with his Trunki. Having turned the dragons down he has built the company on a mix of friends & family, bank debt, blood, sweat and tears. Mark Steer from Null Hypothesis - The Journal of Unlikely Science - was there as a SWAIN success story, fresh from being recognised as the fastest SWAIN deal, 11 days to handshake (though it wasn’t quite clear when the money actually hit their account, still impressive). Mark Bullingham was part of the team that saw their sport & brand marketing company bought and then MBO’d out a couple of years later as brandRapport.

Talking to Rob and Mark before the formal session it became clear why Mark had seen such quick success. They had a successful print based product with growing subscribers, clear route to a digital market and a clear idea on what they wanted from their Angels above the cash injection.

The common message from the Q&A was that the team and relationship with potential Angels was probably the most important factor to raising early stage finance. This ties in with the ambition of Open Coffee and some ideas I’m working on with South West Screen to provide opportunities for relationship building between entrepreneurs & creative inventors to get to know and be known by potential investors.

I spent a couple hours last Tues at a 3CR event as part of the Creative Technology Network learning about new and recent funding announcements.

Nigel Derrett k (CEO, 3CR) kicked things off with an overview of the latest Technology Strategy Board’s Autumn 2007 funding competition.
There are 8 subject areas, first 3 open now; Phase 2 opens on 19 Dec and closes 27 March, it includes Low carbon Energies.
Phase 3 opens on 30 Jan, closes 8 May, with two areas of potential interest;
- Gathering data in complex environments
- Creative industries

More information (though not much) is available from BERR: the information on the Phase 2 and 3 calls is very scant. BERR are asking for input on what the funding should go towards so now is the time to contact them and make the case for where to spend our money!

Mustafa Rampuri (Project Manager, 3CR) gave an overview of European Framework Programme 7 (FP7) call for Intelligent Content and Semantics in about 10 min. Well actually he ran through a mass of links and information but you can’t sensibly cover the whole 32 billion Euro, multi-modal, thematic, cross-cutting, etc thing that is FP7 in less than a couple days, but he did a pretty good job.

Geraint Jones (Project Manager, 3CR) introduced the new Digital Communications Knowledge Transfer Network
Launched last Thursday with joint directors in Dr Richard Nicol & Prof Mike Short. The network has funding of £3m over 3yrs but doesn’t appear to have much resource for additional prototyping or research? It seems to come down to a networking and soft-lobbying on TSB funding - lots of events but no projects. I guess if it can influence the Tech Strategy Board into allocating funding then that’s a good thing.

This could be a possible model for future networks (we’re expecting announcements for Creative KTN in Jan).

I was talking to Charlotte Greenman yesterday following a conversation started at the Startups Live Brisol event a while back. As a  a tele-marketeer, Charlotte was chasing me as I’d said to get back towards November (and obviously hadn’t, oops). Even though I’m not sure that my business is quite ready for the B2B services that Charlotte offers, we had a chat about some of the people I am working with and there may be mutual referrals that are relevant.

Charlotte also mentioned a qualified referral service / business that she’s building. I guess a bit like LinkedIn but more selective and related to those closer businesses that she’s either worked with or had a personal reference for. I have to admit to being a bit of a social network junkie, apart from MySpace (where I couldn’t get past the flurecent green & pink home pages everyone seemed to use) I try and build as wide and diverse networks as I can on LinkedIn, FaceBook, Plaxo. I’ve also used MyBlogLog, and increasingly Twitter as a source of network updating and information.

There’s been a ton of stuff written about social networks, the value of trust and how the on line social networks aren’t always that valuable in marketing terms. The most recent storm in the blogosphere being around the new Facebook SocialAd, probably the best analysis is by Jeremiah Owyang, with additional insight from Charlene Li. I don’t think any of the on line solutions have completely cracked it, but in an increasingly fast paced world, they are useful for not having to remember everything about everyone you ever met. Which is pretty cool.

The Startups Live evening was really good, the highlight of which was a tour de force from Tim Smit (Eden Project). He took us all on a ‘Cresta Run of philosophy, business and social enterprise thinking’ roughly his words. There was too much, too fast to make sensible notes and Tim was very clear that these were just things that worked for him. I guess the 4 things I took away (at last the four things I noted down) were;

• Future Truths - put yourself in a position where failure is jut too scary, it’s amazing what you’ll accomplish (trying that out with a couple ideas at the moment)
• Live with risk (OK kind of goes with the future truth stuff)
• Trust to Intuition - this one’s more difficult, I probably do try and over analyse, probably some latent engineer thing
• Concentrate on the 10% chance of success not the 90% chance of failure

All in all a great evening, I met some really interesting folks. Hopefully some will be featured as future conversations.