you want to start something? » Commentary

After a decade of intervention…

Matt Johnston — Wed, 23 May 2012 22:14:26 +0000

Got this in iMessage just now. Describing frustration with trying to kick off a startup in Northern Ireland.

I’ve met with a few private investors, a couple of angels, a few venture capitalists, lots of public sector funding managers and a few deal brokers. I’ve read a few term sheets – enough to realise when I need help but also, thanks to three friends in particular, read enough to realise when someone is being shafted. We’re a long way from having this fixed. And, if I am honest, after a decade of intervention, I don’t think we’re any closer to the answer.

Why?

Because the intervention was In the wrong direction. It was top down and not bottom up.

84% of tablet owners play games

Matt Johnston — Wed, 23 May 2012 08:44:16 +0000

From Alan O’Dea at SimpleLifeforms:

There were 56 million tablets purchased worldwide in 2011, but a new report from Forrester Research predicts that number will explode in the years ahead: its researchers say that there will be 375 million tablets sold by 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate of 46 percent, and that by 2016 there will be 760 million tablets in use overall.

According to the survey, 84% of tablet owners play games, ahead of even searching for information (78%), emailing (74%) and reading the news (61%). 56% of tablet owners use social networking services on their device, while 51% consume music and/or videos, and 46% read ebooks.

28% of respondents say their tablet is now their primary computer, while 43% say they spend more time using their tablet than they do their desktop or laptop computer.

Can you see a trend here?

Let go of the old…

Matt Johnston — Tue, 22 May 2012 10:54:19 +0000

Toronto Sun: “Film is dead, long live digital.”

David Cronenberg: So, actually, you can’t process film in Toronto any more. If you shot on film in Toronto, you’d have to send it to L.A. to get it developed. And why would you ever want to shoot on film? Well, I don’t. Creatively though, what you do as a director, how you work with the actors and what the lens do and what the light does is exactly the same.”

While this is about film as media rather than format, the same applies to books. I was raised in a household where books were sacred. You only have to look at the hoard of books held by my father and my own overflowing library to see that the desire for printed paper is strong in my bloodline.

But from an outsider point of view, film and paper books occupy the same technological niche. It is bizarre that we have preserved film and books with such religious zeal. Books were hand written. They used vellum and reeds and hide. But for some reason, the modern book; mass-produced at rates of hundreds every minute, made up of card, wood pulp and cheap ink has become revered as if it represents the original works of art created by hand in bygone ages.

The assumption becomes that books will never disappear. And they may not. And maybe newspapers will never disappear. And we might be right about that. But the use will decrease and I foresee a time, not too far away in the future, that paper newspapers and books are reserved for the sort of specialist or hobbyist who demands film in their movie-making.

BBC Creative Collisions – Future of Media Technology #CC2012NI

Matt Johnston — Thu, 17 May 2012 14:16:31 +0000

Friday 8th June 2012
10am to 2pm includes lunch and refreshments
BBC Blackstaff Studio 62-66 Great Victoria Street – Belfast – BT2 7BB

Creative Collisions 2012 is an opportunity for you to engage in the cutting edge of media technology and innovation. Whether you want to harness technology for practical media solutions, diversify your innovative ambitions or simply enhance your knowledge, Creative Collisions 2012 is the place to be.

BE INSPIRED

BBC’s Stephen Nolan will host a ‘Live’ studio debate exploring the future of media
technology – Suggest hot debate topics NOW using Twitter #CC2012NI

Key Speakers:

Peter Johnston (Director) BBC Northern Ireland
Mervyn Middleby (Head of Technology Operations) BBC Northern Ireland
Alistair Hamilton (CEO) Invest NI

SHAPE THE FUTURE

An exciting opportunity to develop the broadcast technologies of the future with support from Invest NI, DCAL and BBC Northern Ireland – details revealed on the day!

Demonstrations from a top team of experts, including:

HD Solutions
Next Generation toolsets
Virtual Studios
iPads on the Road
Graphics innovation and many more…
Network with fellow media professionals

MANDATORY RSVP Nicola.Hollis@bbc.co.uk by Wednesday 30th May 2012

Spaces are limited – please confirm your attendance as soon as possible to reserve a place. We operate a ‘first come first served’ policy.

Perfect

Matt Johnston — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:03:27 +0000

Instagram was the topic of conversation in the office yesterday.

Date	Event	Revenues (Cumulative)
March 2010	Received $500K Seed funding and founded company. Launched 6 months later.	0
February 2011	Received $7M in Series A on a valuation above $20M	0
April 2012	Received $50M in Series B on a valuation of $500M	0

One month later they were bought by Facebook for $1.01B. Based on $57.5M of funding, two years of activity, zero revenue and millions of users.

The conversation revolved around not how to create the next Instagram but around how far behind we are in terms of an investment environment. Taking Instagram as a perfect result – investors are happy, founders are happy, employees are happy and presumably the buyer is happy.

It’s obvious that the environments are completely different between San Francisco and Northern Ireland but how different are they? There’s no way you could get $500K seed money in this province and to even get $7M in Series A would mean just leaving these emerald shores. It would be maybe not too much of a stretch to declare that it would be impossible, with public or private intervention, to get the sort of result that Instagram got. But the analysis that interests me is …

…if I came with an idea and said I wanted funding to build a company that is kinda social like Instagram and I didn’t necessarily have a revenue plan, nor did I have anything more than single product on the shelf and though it’s a deliciously simple idea, it doesn’t go far beyond tapping into a market of real geeks. It’s not for photo-nerds because they’re using DSLRs. It’s not for happy snappers because they’re just going to use the default app. It’s for a demographic that takes pictures and then applies filters and then show’s them off. (like Flickr, but for people who want weird effects). I’m building this company to flip, to exit like a swan. Risky eh?

So, armed with that idea, what would I get in Northern Ireland?

TV, Games, Emergence, Agency and Death

Matt Johnston — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:28:01 +0000

I don’t often do link lists but I have a few articles to share.

After spending some time with NI’s television industry yesterday, I have to give a shout out to Greg Darby, Philip Morrow, Colin Williams and Michael Hewitt. It was good to see the TV industry united under a single cause. I would welcome many more of the indies to rally together.
Slightly related is a C21Media article with notes from Gamesbrief director Nicholas Lovell on what TV companies get wrong when making games about their IP
1. It’s not about story
2. Find the fun
3. Make it iterative
4. Commission earlier
5. Have a post-transmission plan
6. Games are about retention
7. Make it free, make it profitable
8. Don’t think about revenue after the design
9. Cater to the whales
10. Learn
And to understand those, read the article.
A poignant tweet by RocketCat Games:

Things that the game industry will never bother to touch (short list): Emergence, player agency, permadeath. It’s up to modders/small devs.

Emergence - The development of solutions and strategies not originally designed by the creators of a game, using provided tools in novel ways. This can also include social mechanics (without in-game rules) that are supported by players; e.g. the notion of conduct or fair play. (Wikipedia)
Player Agency: - “the feeling of empowerment that comes from being able to take actions in the [virtual] world whose effects relate to the player’s intention” and it “depend[s] on what’s going on in the interactor’s head, on what’s communicated between the technical system and the person, not only on technical facts like counting the number of system actions that are available at each moment.” [Quote: Micheal Mateas]
Permadeath - a situation in which player characters (PCs) die permanently and are removed from the game as opposed to having the option of restoration. The implication of a consequence to actions resulting in permadeath can create new emergent gameplay. (Wikipedia)

Your definition of broadband is wrong.

Matt Johnston — Tue, 15 May 2012 09:18:15 +0000

A few months ago I had the pleasure of attending a Deloitte paper launch and the guest speaker was Peter Cochrane. I’d not heard of Peter before but he eloquently (and authoritatively) put forward an argument that I have tried to explain to stakeholders across the province. While it’s hard to get the full effect of his persuasive speech, you can view his FTTH @ Last slides at the link above.

His core argument was:

Your definition of broadband is wrong.

During the talk, he said that if an internet link is not 100 Mbps up and down then it’s not broadband. Many people scoff but they fail to realise several things about the demand for broadband. The demand is there, it’s entirely in the supply that we see the issue.

In 2003, it was exciting to download a 3 Megabyte music file from the newly opened iTunes Store. My broadband was 512 Kbps down, 256Kbps up and it had a reported 20:1 contention. In 2013, my bandwidth demands have increased a thousandfold. I want to download 3.2 Gigabyte movie files from the iTunes Store. But my broadband speeds have increased only by a factor of 10 in a decade. I’m imminently to order BT Infinity but that only can provide 24-80 Mbps (“SuperFast broadband”) and not the 80 Mbps+ (“UltraFast broadband”) that the modern media consumer demands. And that’s just the download speed because idiots have, over the last few years, decreed that download speed is the only important metric.

There are four metrics I measure broadband by:

Upload
Download
Latency
Contention

Upload speeds are just as important (and more important for the media industry) and they tend to still be sub-10 Mbps. Contention on BT Infinity is 50:1 – the opposite of contention is a term called “non-blocking” where everyone paying for access gets the access they are paying for. When Telcos promise a certain bandwidth, they’re actually selling that same object fifty times to their customers and you’re all supposed to share. (The logic being that not everyone will be downloading at the same time). Latency is, for most people in our industry, immaterial though you can feel the effect in online games, video-conferencing calls and other time-senstiive operations. In many cases, the latency is not caused at the “broadband” end but due to the series of interactions between you and your content across the Internet. The delicious irony being that if your upload speed is limited, your latency jumps considerably as your “content requests” are competing with your uploads.

One of Peter’s slides regarding the island of Jersey:

(He goes on to clarify that 3G runs at 14 Mbits, WiFi at 50 Mbps.)

Sweden:

100Mbit for 299kr (£25) a month is the slowest broadband in Sweden. And it goes up to a Gig for £75 a month

Keep this in mind when talking about our “digital platform”. Our broadband needs to improve by a factor of 100 for our consumer markets and for our business markets, probably 100 times that.

Same Genre, Vastly Different Gameplay

Matt Johnston — Mon, 14 May 2012 09:04:00 +0000

ARMA II OA running Day Z mod.

Left 4 Dead 2

There are similarities.

Mostly non-military weapons (though they are accessible in both).
The Zombies are fast.
There’s a certain amount of scavenging and defence required.

The differences are considerable.

Left4Dead uses an episodic format whereas Day Z is a vast open world. The former has no persistence – even between episodes whereas the latter is always persistent (and the effects of death are much more profound)
In Left4Dead, a horde of zombies is an inconvenience easily distracted by a beeping pipe bomb. In Day Z, a single zombie can send panic into a group of survivors, leading them to accidentally (fatally) wound team members.
In Left4Dead, your avatar is almost superhuman; tireless, able to dismember zombies easily, and in some cases even able to leap from building to building without harm. Survivors are extremely resistant to accidental hits from team members automatic weapons. In Day Z, it’s the zombies who are tireless and strong. Even a single hit from a zombie can lead to death through blood loss. Even vaulting a fence is a challenge. And gunshots are usually final.
During a Left4Dead session, you are running from one safe-house to another along a predetermined path and in many cases, the only opposition are AI-controlled zombies and a few (4) “special” infected who, again, are like zombie superheroes. In contrast, Day Z has all players being survivors but there’s no assumed alliance and the ability to easily kill other players with a stray round creates uneasy alliances and paranoid loners.

While I doubt I have the time to play this game (though it enchants me), the idea of applying different gameplay to the same genre is exciting in itself. It challenges the assumptions we have about games development especially in a connected environment (the Internet, Game Center, cloud-games). What if you applied the same persistence principles to Angry Birds, Plants versus Zombies, Farmville, Mario?

Dawson’s Creek

Matt Johnston — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:11:46 +0000

We’ve been watching Dawsons Creek and we just finished the last episode of Season 3. It is with great joy that I present this image, because Dawson has been a selfish, whiny shite for the last three seasons.

And while I sneered at Dawsons Creek back when it played on terrestrial television, watching it with my lovely wife is probably my favourite time of the day.

MY-SCHOOL from #c2k

Matt Johnston — Thu, 10 May 2012 10:29:43 +0000

This is the brochure for the new C2K: C2k My School Network 30 March 2012

I have a few reservations. And that’s just based on a quick glance through the brochure.

MY-SCHOOL is ground breaking and unique, as it can be accessed from a range of devices, with any operating system using any supported browser.

It’s unclear what is a “supported browser”. Does this mean Internet Explorer 9? Firefox? Safari? Opera? Skyfire? What about Internet Explorer 6? Safari Mobile? iCab? Dolphin? Camino?

LearningNI will be replaced by Fronter, an e-learning platform which is being used by schools globally.
…
The new service will provide a fully searchable content repository called Equella

They’re offering a centralised VLE and searchable content system. Which will be accessed by any computers running supported browsers and…running SECURUS. What’s SECURUS?

An application called Securus will be introduced which logs key strokes on managed and users own devices (with Windows and OSX operating systems) connected to the managed network. On detection of inappropriate words or phrases, an alert is sent to nominated individuals to allow immediate intervention and action.

I would be extremely sceptical and critical of any keystroke-logging software that a third party IT company would install on a computer that my sons or daughter brought to school. This is designed to limit access to inappropriate material, it won’t work on an iPad and it’s going to be installed on my computers, running my software; computers that may be shared with other members of the family to check banks, Facebook accounts? Absolutely preposterous.

And if I don’t install it? I’m not allowed to access the internet? That seems to be the implication.

Under the new solution, schools will benefit from substantial increases in bandwidth by moving away from the traditional contended broadband provision. This new service has been designed to give all schools a direct connection to the network giving better performance across the whole service.

You mean the contended broadband networks which schools installed to get around the frankly daft restrictions imposed by C2K? Or the contended broadband networks installed by C2K the first time round?

SIMS Discover is a powerful tool that enables the teacher to analyse and present SIMS data in a variety of ways, including Venn diagrams, bar charts, pie charts and line graphs.

Oh! Pictures! That’s all right then!

In short, this short brochure document leaves me a little cold. There are elements I welcome, such as faster broadband (though claiming to offer an un-contended broadband service seems to me to be a marketing lie) and better access to learning resources outside the school network but I am left chilled by some of the developments which are intended to increase security.

Schools are for education and an important point about educating students is to arm them with the knowledge of what is appropriate and what is not. If a child wants to look up inappropriate content then they will find a way – whether that’s by turning off the School WiFi and relying on their own home-bought 3G chip or by connecting their device to any third party wireless network. You can’t stop this using technology, you have to solve it using relationships, education and communication.

I was told this new contract was great but I see it very much like the original C2K vision. It says some of the right things but the detail is missing, there is an onerous undercurrent of IT administration gone mad and, if past behaviour is to be judged, the delivery of this will be loathed by student and teacher alike.

Use of the application SECURUS on computers that are not owned by the school is not only a ridiculous concept but also extremely dangerous. Do you trust the IT delivery company who won the tender? Enough to install a key logger? I’m certain I do not. The question is whether or not SECURUS is a condition of access. If it is, this is a preposterous concept. If not, why are they bothering?