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Normally I’d be sat here writing up tonight’s event in the Watershed featuring the Pervasive Media Sandbox mid-term report / presentation thing.

But I’ve already done that on Twitter.

In fact there were at least 2 others twittering (@iamdanw & @sammachin) and I suspect a few others as well. The inimitable Scoble has noted that he’s pretty much on Twitter now and a quick perusal of his blog shows much reduced posting activity. Whereas he’s allegedly tracking 16,000 Twitter feeds (which is quite likely given previous form).

So what does that mean for this blog?

Well I’m not really in the business of reporting on events and stuff. I’m not a geek-hound rooting out the latest technologies and dissecting / discussing them.

I am a business developer with an engineering background and research credentials, working in some pretty interesting areas (at least I think they’re interesting). So I’m going to try and write a few thought pieces relating to what I’m doing. These roughly fall into 3 categories music, education, entrepreneurship; with business development and digital technologies as a common thread.

Lets see how things turn out.

There’re a ton of networking events taking place in Bristol, but there appears to be a gap around the business of doing business in the digital media / interactive technologies / software
development type area. Simon Bunker launched Open Coffee Bristol almost a year ago but it never really achieved critical mass and became a bit of a pub session to discuss technology (mostly mobile), which is cool but doesn’t address this gap.

So is there a gap? Well I think so, and from the feedback at a South West Screen event promoting access to digital media finance, quite a few others think so also. The one clear call after the event was for more structured networking with investors. There was a corollary to that, Andy made the point that there’s no shortage of ideas in Bristol but that’s different to commercial propositions (rather than grant applications, lifestyle support schemes, and one-off art commissioning). The Angel/VC representatives at the event suggested there was no shortage of money, though getting to it might be a bit harder at the moment.

A recent lunch hosted by Nigel Belletty at Milsted Langdon saw the local banks cautiously talking up the business environment in Bristol. Clearly it’s in their interests not to run to the hills screaming “Doomed, we’re all dooooomed” but they were talking about businesses with revenues, customers, products, markets all seeing growth and approaching them for conventional banking services. The point of concern (from my perspective) was the lack of local angels that were prepared to consider digital media / innovation investment prospects. If you have a physical product to show off, you’re probably OK, otherwise you’re probably looking to London or beyond. Which is nuts. This is the 21C, the knowledge economy, mobile, ubiquitous, always on, digital, global, blah blah blah.

Oil and Water Fusion
Originally uploaded by JBR_JBR.

So I’m thinking of a series of Open Coffee-type networking events (to build commercial propositions) with occasional semi-structured evening dinners where entrepreneurs can mix with investors with a view to building relationships towards high growth. This isn’t Investor Readiness and it damn sure ain’t Dragon’s Den, it’s about getting local entrepreneurs, business owners, and start-ups into a support network that will let them learn, practice, connect, and refine their business idea and then decide if they want to jump on the high-growth escalator or carry on with their lifestyle/corporate job. It’s also not all about being the next Google, there are plenty of businesses that are growing very nicely thank-you-very-much on revenues but that may have hit a growth block, or are thinking about the next transition. Clearly the hockey-stick 10x return in 9 months is great PR but that’s not a practical business model for a city-region.

The sort of topic that each session would nominally work around will be familiar to anyone in the start-up, business growth support world:

• Addressable Market vs 6bn people on the Internet
• Business models (the whole free thing and monetisation)
• Financial instruments (equity, debt, share options, convertible debt, SFLGS, etc)
• No “I” in Team (though there is a “me”) – role of the entrepreneur and their management/advisor team
• Patents, Open Source, Copyright, Creative Commons, GPLx.x
• Forecasting growth (and presenting that forecast)
• Hiring – firing – outsourcing

And so on. If people need specific advise then there are lawyers, accountants, etc that can help, there are Business Link courses, and business professionals (me for one) that will help with planing, strategy, presentation, etc. In fact there’s no shortage of help but it’s not working together in a critical mass that become self sustaining.

So have I had one coffee too many? What would you want to talk to fellow entrepreneurs about? What are you doing in your city/region that’s similar? What works, what doesn’t?

Until I hear otherwise I’ll keep plugging away, everyone I’ve spoken to since the SW Screen event broadly agrees with me. There may be some developments in the near future with Bristol Media but I think there’s a momentum here in Bristol that doesn’t need huge resources to accelerate, just a bit of doing. Which I guess means I should shut up blogging & twittering about it and start putting some events together Read the rest of this entry »

Last night was the BBC/AHRC Knowledge Exhange Programme panel discussion on collaborative learning (British Broadcasting Corporation and Arts and Humanities Research Council, Mark asked on Twitter what the AHRC was, turns out there are at least 11 AHRCs and 79 BBCs).

Andrew Dubber has a pretty good write up of proceedings, there should be a podcast about at some point also.

There was a pretty good University turn out and a few companies along also to see what the BBC were up to and how that might represent future collaborative opportunities. I’m not sure there was a whole lot of encouragement outside the fairly academic sociology / ethnography work that seemed to be the bulk of projects undertaken. It didn’t sound like this was the start of a lanscape shift in terms of commissioning or technology R&D collaborations. But then the BBC is a pretty big beast and change takes time.

I did have a good chat with the AHRC folks on evaluation and how you measure the longer term outcomes and impact of Knowledge Exchange programmes.  This is a tricky topic since the impacts of knowledge exchange tend to become apparent long after the event, and can rarely be attributed to a single cause. What we tend to end up using are approximations and indicators of success (by ‘we’ I refer to my ‘day job’ with Knowledge West where we’re currently designing and implementing an evaluation of the Knowledge Exchange activities and their wider impact). This is also something that hopefully the newly formed Institute of Knowledge Transfer will champion (Disclosure: I am a member of the IKT and currently standing for election to the Board).

Last night was spent up in Bristol University’s Chemistry lecture room courtesy of Bristol Enterprise Network (this evening chaired by Prof Stephen Hagan, Director of the University of the West of England’s Research, Business and Innovation group). The delegate list was rather larger than the turn out, but there were still plenty of entrepreneurs and business leaders to mingle and discuss leadership and business developments before and after (a very polite University porter had to throw us out, the networking was going so well).

First up was John Kirwan (Partner, Strategic Planning Solutions). A very good lead with solid theoretical grasp on leadership, psychology, and the practicalities of moving a group of people from a current reality to some future vision. This basic concept of leadership was backed up with quite a few concepts, quotes (from Mintzberg & Goethe to Paxman), stories and good humour. In the Q&A John even got into locus of control.

Possibly his best quote was:
“If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse. However, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.” Goethe

John ended with a description / definition of Living Leadership - The cornerstone of inspiring leadership is efficacy:
the capacity to make things happen that you consider important, starting with being and acting as the kind of person you want to be in your life.

Next was Chris Farmer, Founder & Leader, Corporate Coach Group. Chris had thoughtfully provided us with an advertising brochure, after-dinner speaker flyer, a diagram of his key message and 6 self-administered assessment questions on the leader-managers within our own organisations. Unfortunately it was more fun watching Chris, who I suspect is actually a very nervous speaker but managed very well, than listening to Chris. He had an interesting take on the basic foundations that John had talked to, his approach is probably as good as most, but there didn’t seem quite as much substance.

A slight change of pace introduced Melissa Henry (Marketing Director, Sustrans), talking about leadership and entrepreneurialism in the not-for-profit sector. Melissa began by asking “Why are charities founded?” and it turns out it’s often for the same reasons (in many ways) as any other start-up. To make a difference, do things better, fill a gap in the market/social need. Another point was that no one works for a charity / start-up for the money - it’s taking a stake in something bigger (social or commercial). An interesting element that Melissa touched on was the need for clear succession planning as an element of leadership (the idea that the charity has to be bigger than the leader). She also made the point that monitoring and evaluating outcomes were critical to ensure vision is relevant rather than idealistic. Too many charities (and start ups) spin themselves into a froth without checking their customer base for feedback on outcomes.

Melissa also talked about back casting (as a planning tool; start with a ‘known’ future and then work out how to get there; rather than a fly fishing technique). Charities use back casting because they have a clear vision of the future and need to plan a route to get there (and explain that route to funders). Start-ups do the same when they predict a future (100m users in 3 years) and then try to figure out the how. This became most obvious in the Q&A when someone asked about planning horizons and leadership. The 3 for-profits confirmed that most of their planning went out to around 6 months, with broader visions/goals out to around 2-3 years. As an in-the-thick-of-it entrepreneur Paul admitted to occasionally working to a 1 week horizon when critical issues hit, but that he always made a point to regroup post-crisis to learn from it and re-plan the following 6 months in the light of what he’d learnt. Melissa started with a 15-20 year vision then then worked back to the current projects.

One issue that Melissa did share, and that is probably quite common in the third sector, is the double edged sword that the open sharing knowledge to achieve vision brings. If you ‘give’ everything away and work to bring about social change, the important message is sustainable transport options, rather than Sustrans itself. Ultimately they don’t really mind who builds more cycle paths, green-ways, etc, but if no one know that Sustrans was behind it then grants and donations dry up. I’m pretty sure there’s something to learn from Hugh Macleod’s global microbrands, Jeremiah Owyang, JD Lasica, Chris Brogan to name a few (leaving aside the significant pack of marketeers on Twitter)!

Anyone out there have experience of working with non-profits and these open communications challenges?

Paul Tinkler, (Managing Director, Mirifice Ltd) rounded out the group with no theory (though a lot of thought) and lots of personal experience. When are you successful - never as an entrepreneur, there’s always the next goal, target, business, market, etc to conquer.

The 6 traits of an entrepreneur;

1. unswerving self belief in success, complete unwillingness to look facts in the fact that don’t support vision (not inflexibility
2. being a risk seeker, that is where fortunes are made (not reckless, know the risks)
3. durability, mental toughness
4. disregard for rules, at least the ones that don’t apply to ‘me’
5. know when to step down/ aside (though this one has to be tested at Paul is still in the thick of it)
6. communications are critical - be excellent - constantly learning / getting better, fear of not being the best (rather than of failure)

All in a really good evening.

Last night at the Pervasive Media Studio we gathered for the second iGLab.

The (by now usual) silliness ensued with various games organised and played in the interests of research. If there was a comment for the next Lab it would be for a bit more reflection between games on strategies, game play, ways of improving.

There was a return of scramble (this time played with SMS) with emerging words displayed on a projected board in real(ish) time. A couple of audio games involving dancing to try and find other dancers with the same random tune as you were listening to on headphones, and running around Millenium Square calling out sounds (mine was a police siren) and trying to find your team mates making the same sound.

And of course there was a game of Werewolf. The wolves won, easily.

Werewolves at iGLab.

Originally uploaded by Poo Bar.

Last night’s MoMo London was hosted by TFL and the presentations were on how technology was being used to the benefit travellers (almost exclusively in London, and largely on the underground).

Dan Appelquist got in a quick plug for Over the Air with BBC Backstage and Imperial College - mobile hackathone over 4-5th April; aiming for 450 developers. I think it’s a bit hardcore dev for me but I’m sure folks from Bristol are going (from the twitter-stream it looks like Dan Hilton, Dan W and Sam Machin are going at least).

Anyway, back to the evening; there was a sustained procession of projects, presenters, technology, slides, data, some information, and more than a few technology hiccups. Being in a bunker under the museam rather put the kybosh on mobile/gps demo’s other than canned examples. Everything was QIK‘d but the resolution and sound isn’t that great in places. Hopefully slides, etc will be posted shortly.

In general the Nokia 6131 received lots of kudos for its NFC with lots of contactless payment ideas being trialled and prototyped. There was some good networking going on (caught up with Chris Gare and his just launched Trymehere product, and found out about Cloud Made and their mobile focussed mapping from Nick; though I managed to miss Josie) the slight overrun and my skinflint purchase of a cheap non-transferable train ticket back to Bristol meant I had to dash ‘early’.

Heading back from Coventry last week on the train I bumped in to Matthew from iamthemightjungulator fresh from a gig at Birmingham’s Children’s Hospital.

After we reminisced about the Jungulator development with Futurelab and caught up on latest news, he proudly showed off the latest toy he’s playing with - 3D Harmonium. The sound it produced was pretty awful but the visual was very cool, certainly helped pass the time between Birmingham & Bristol!

(I’ve just joined the Institute of Knowledge Transfer team of bloggers, this is a repost of my inaugural submission.)

After a long consultation, the Government published their strategy paper ‘Creative Britain – New Talents for the New Economy‘ on Friday, 22 Feb. The commitments take their inspiration from the Work Foundation’s 2007 publication ‘Staying Ahead‘.

As with many strategy documents, unpicking the actual, deliverable actions, is kind of tricky. Please feel free to add in the comments where I’ve missed something, or in particular where this joins up with (or cuts across) existing activities/plans/programmes/etc.

As outlined in the Foreword, the approach is two pronged; developing creative talents at school, and structured pathways into creative careers. And there’s at least £70.5m in backing (though of course there’s no single break down on where that number is spent and over what time frame).

More interestingly from a KT perspective, when it gets down to the Creative Economy, there’s £10m from the Technology Strategy Board for their Collaborative Research competition that recently opened. This £10m, together with £3m from NESTA are the two most frequently mentioned investments; I lost count how many times they were referenced. There’s also the long awaited Knowledge Transfer Network for the Creative Industries* due in ‘early 2008′.

One of the big discussions during CEP consultations (which I contributed to on the Technology panel) was around financial barriers to accessing innovative and cutting edge technology. This seems to have been partially answered with the £10m fund being split between three initiatives, two of them targeted at encouraging innovation within small creative industry companies. The feasibility study fund will provide grants of up to £15,000 (with a matching £5k from industry, pdf overview) and, the fast track programme up to £50,000 for small collaborative projects. Application to the third scheme that follows the ‘normal’ Collaborative Funding Competition rules is open to all UK based creative industry companies.

It will be interesting to hear from IKT members how they find the new rolling application process for these smaller TSB funds.

There’s quite a good (if well worn) description of the challenges in raising finance for innovation in the creative industries and the reluctance of the finance markets to engage with the digital industries in particular. In Bristol we’re holding some events to try and educate our creative entrepreneurial community to the economic models of the digital world (yes, there are some that are working; turns out even ‘free‘ can be profitable).

Unfortunately we have to wait until later this year for the Enterprise White Paper to find out specifically what the Government proposes to do.

The Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, Eastside Arts Academy and Skillset Screen & Media Academy Network look to be fairly major planks in the ambition to get academia, students and industry working together. (Disclosure: In my role with Knowledge West I wrote the market assessment and HEI business case for the Pervasive Media Studio) The other five projects that get a mention are an animation ‘finishing school’ (also in Bristol), a Couture Academy, a National Skills Academy in Thurrock, a National Centre of Excellence for Computer Games in the North West and a UK Design Skills Alliance. Where these have industry backing (HP Labs, EMI and Aardman animation are variously mentioned) that might make a viable TSB large project consortium.

I’ve not had much direct contact with Apprenticeships, I’d be interested to hear thoughts on how/if they can facilitate knowledge transfer similar to Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. There’s a throw-away line that the number of KTPs is due to double, while becoming more flexible and responsive.

Again, any comments from KTP Advisers that getting a KTP with creative industry partners is getting easier (or how to go about positioning them)?

I am intrigued by the announcement of a ‘World Creative Business Conference’ in Spring 2009. Anyone have any idea what that is?

So there you have it, some good news, some business as usual, some details to be announced. As ever, the devil’s in the detail but the sentiment is encouraging.

*(advertising, architecture, art & antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software & computer services, television, and radio).

This is one of a serious of posts about the Culture, Heritage & Tourism Technology Workshop at the Serious Games Institute on Tues, 4 March.

The last session had two moments that really stuck in the mind, the first was Kevin Williams (KWP) talking about kid vending (aimed at 6-9 years olds), basically charge cards for toddlers to play arcade games and use with vending machines for toys, as being a really good idea.

On a more positive note was Andrew Caleya Chetty (The Public Gallery that is due to open in June 08). Andrew was benchmarking the new gallery space against Ars Electronica & some UK entertainment venues. It will be a paying attraction and is looking specifically at the family demographic as their “target” & value for money as the differentiator. What was interesting was that each visitor has an RFID tag so that visitors can then receive personalised art exhibits.

The first activity in the gallery is ‘choose’. Visitors make curatorial choices that then tailor the other exhibitions. This is a kind of profiling, visitors get to sort colours, textures, etc and these then influence the presentation of the digital and dynamic artworks. A couple of examples that Andrew shared were “Flipme” - make your own stopframe animation and save to personal portfolio. Another was to save secrets and thoughts as ‘flowers’ and collect on way out (not quite sure how this one worked, might have been a paper flower based on your thought/choices. The final installation was an agumented reality flying - dancing - fighting game called Flypad from BlastTheory. This looked a bit like a cross between VirtuaFighter and …, actually it looked like VirtuaFighter but overlaid on a background that was fed from a webcam behind the screen looking across the atrium. So your fighter/dancers were flying around the atrium in VR. When you leave the gallery you can choose to take away a personal exhibition of the art as influenced by your choices and activities.

And that was our lot. There was a short jazz gig from SecondLife and a couple of mohijtos that the catering staff whizzed round the room and then disappeared with before anyone could really call it a drinks party. Mind you most of us were at such a level of information overload that I was quite glad of a beer and 3 hrs on the train to work through it all.

This is one of a serious of posts about the Culture, Heritage & Tourism Technology Workshop at the Serious Games Institute on Tues, 4 March.

After lunch Graeme Duncan from Caspian Learning launched into a very comprehensive drill-down into ‘what do we mean by Serious Games’ and when should we use them? Graeme proposed a 3-way Venn diagram of 3D worlds, simulations, games. Caspian locate themselves in 3D worlds but with informed input from games & simulations. This wasn’t meant to be a formulaic or constraining model, but it did help in understanding the contributions from each circle to any one example of a ‘Serious Game. In particular Graeme noted that games speak to our cultural guardians (the young), not in a dumbing down kind of way but perversely in a upping the ante as they were expecting very high fidelity game experience.
Graeme went on to suggest 5 situations (as identified by the ‘learners’0 that should point to a need/benefit for Serious Games;

• Dull dry content
• Context is king (or more accurately a lack of context)
• People oriented interactions
• Exploration & familiarisation
• Decision making & problem solving

As a quick demo and example Graeme described a client (major publisher but not allowed to say who yet) that had asked Caspian to look at Rome in Danger (14-16 years). Everything was based on their core proprietary technology, Thinking Worlds. What Caspian did was to build in a graphic fidelity that matches the zone of tolerance for learners. What was far more important were the very detailed briefs with learning reasons for having particular game-like features. On a last technology note, the game runs in Realtime 3D Shockwave in the browser.

I’ll skip over a couple of presentations that weren’t quite up to par and get on to…

Dr Esther MacCallum-Stewart (Post-doc researcher, SMARTLab). Esther was specifically looking at MMORPS’s and stealth learning (a term introduced by Prof Henry Jenkins from MIT). In part of the description of games as learning experiences, Esther noted the huge discussions around Civ II sequence of technology advances (did alphabet lead to code of law?). While these are slightly artificial (its only a game) the arguments, research and competing theses of how civilisation really did advance were evidence of learning. Esther also noted that because they were games, there was a very diverse mix of realism & fakery (or fantasy to be more generous). This is clearly an issue for people trying to use off-the-shelf games for teaching and has been the cause of Sid Myer back tracking in recent years on the historical veracity of his games.

Esther also noted that players hate thinking that they are learning. If people are told they’re being taught then its not a game, if its a game then its not learning. However, the online games are now so big that players have to take different roles in order to advance past the most lowly of levels. At this point we moved fairly solidly into WoW. Here there were examples of structured, reflective in guild learning and sharing of knowledge. I asked about authority and reputation in the Q&A and Esther pointed out that there were very strong social & peer forces that managed to an extent, they were also very unstable within Guilds and across worlds. There is a wiki but there didn’t appear to be any emergent structure for learning or teaching or sharing heritage other than a (very traditional) guild based one.

Esther also touched on RuneScape as having gameplay around knowledge rather than slash’n'burn. This led to some notes about grinding (or doing small repetitive tasks for an incremental benefit as part of a larger quest or character improvement). The clear message was that players enjoy learning - even if they don’t admit to it. These games often have unexpected outcomes - learning about machinama and YouTube are technically quite advanced and yet many people are learning these skills in order to present their character in a story.

A huge amount to take in, and I’m still working through some ideas that have been triggered but definitely a highlight of the day.