I got this question yesterday. If I want to do this, why not use Kickstarter as it’s been such a success for heaps of stuff.

The world famous Double Fine Adventure sets a precedent. A small team of dedicated people can achieve great things.

But, ultimately we’re not ready for that. We’ve got the start of a team with Aidan and Willem. We’re trying to raise some cash for assets – images, music, animations, movies. We have our Lo-Fi movie, a wiki that’s growing with game design features and background and we’re talking to Northern Ireland Screen about what they can do to help.

We’re not ready for something like Kickstarter because we don’t have the twelve year background of Double Fine Productions, the reputation of Tim Schafer, the back catalogue of 2 Player Productions. Kickstarter is a big step and we’re not ready because we don’t have anything to show.

We’d like help to get there.

Though, to date, we’ve had one inquiry. So rather than hide it all behind a wall, here’s what we’ve written. As my theory is that telling no-one was getting us nowhere, I’m now telling everyone.

About Matt

1990-1994 BSc Hons Genetics
1994-1996 PgCert Computers and IT
1996 Joined Nortel
1996 Published first game: The 23rd Letter
1998 Published second game: SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO
2001 Published third game: Zombi: the earth won’t hold the head
2003 Started own IT company, MacSys Ltd
2006 Started Infurious software
2008 Started developing Digital Circle in Northern Ireland
2011 Put together the team for Conquest Dynamics

Business Opportunity

We will need an initial £200,000 of funding to produce the first game and the development of the initial IP for the second and third. We are not aiming for the 69p market, but rather delivering some new ideas in social and multiplayer games which will drive payer recruitment and engagement.

Our initial game has a basic game design document but this also needs enhancement and we are keen to find additional advice as well as funding to assist in the delivery of this.

The opportunity in a global, networked marketplace is immense thoughwill only be realised through appropriate marketing, use of social media and development of a die-hard player community.

We aim to sell more than a million copies of each game each year and establish four important new properties over the next five years.

Product/Service

We will make games and sell them. A lot.

We have one developed idea and three further games on the slate and a dozen more in the distance.

Market Information

We are aiming for a market segment that is at the intersection of 11M subscribers to World of Warcraft and 65 million iPads.

We will be targeting a sector we know well. Gamers who have limited time, some money to spend and a desire to play games which have more depth than casual games. We’re targeting gamer dads.

Financial Information

To be decided. Come and talk to us.

We’re looking for a committed partner who will provide more than just funding. We’re in for a roller coaster; we have big plans so come and talk to us.

Intellectual Property Information

We will be developing new content-based intellectual peoperty based on original ideas and tell engaging stories.

Does Digital Circle need to do more?

Simple enough question.

Between August 2008 and September 2011, Digital Circle was funded to create presence, to motivate and accelerate, to help provide a communications stream between government and the digital media industry.

The funding was to hire one person, provide some admin support and a little travel and a marketing and events budget. We managed the budget to deliver on time (though we moved a chunk of cash from salary to the travel budget).

• We have organised dozens of events over the years and sponsored dozens more.
• We have organised special interest groups for mobile devs, for games development, for open data and more.
• We’ve pushed the envelope in innovation across our industry. Encouraging and promoting, funding and managing.
• We’ve over delivered on every metric we were given and created new metrics where there were none.
• We’ve pushed digital content to the front of the minds in government and we have weathered every knock back and every threat with renewed vigour.
• We’ve secured millions of pounds in public funding and procurement for the local industry.
• We’ve engaged the industry at every point, challenged them and we have never considered this to be a 9-5 job.
• We’ve worked with colleges and universities to deliver hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of value into the skills chain with helping advise on new courses, getting free training for local businesses to help them compete.
• We have sent hundreds of people to international events over the years for business, training and awareness. These include Apple’s WWDC, SxSWi, Games Developers Conference, IBC, Mobile World Congress, Microsoft Partner Conference, Learning Without Frontiers, Paris Regional IT Conference and EU events in Brussels.
• We have helped companies with over £4M of additional revenue
• We have provided administration support for the Creative Industries Innovation Fund (CIIF) in previous years and we will continue to do so. This means attending hundreds of individual workshops, assessing hundreds of project plans and being an advocate for the dozens of projects which have a chance of getting funded.
• We provided responses to the Consultations on the Independent Review of Economic Policy, the new Economic Strategy and the Inquiry into the Creative Industries. We have met regularly with InvestNI, DETI, DCAL, DRD, DEL, DFP, The Arts Council, NI Screen, eSynergy, Clarendon Capital, L&PS, Translink, NISP, QUB, UU, BMET, SERC, SRC, NRC, SWC, NWRC and a dozen other acronyms.

We didn’t do everything perfectly, not by a long shot. The App Economy resulted in half a million jobs in the US and by that scale we should have managed a thousand. We managed probably less than 20% of that. We simply didn’t campaign hard enough for the additional training that would be required to deliver that scale. The local software industry is currently facing two challenges:

Companies cannot grow without new staff and the rate we are training software engineers is significantly lower than the rate they are leaving the industry (through career change, emigration, retirement and death). We currently have over 650 vacancies in ICT-related jobs and this number will be a lot higher next year.

Software engineers are the skeleton of the industry and this discipline is becoming more and more important as our media services move ever more digitally focused and delivered. Upon this skeleton, we estimate four times as many jobs can be created in other disciplines. Artists and designers to add form to function, managers to ensure delivery, marketing and sales to generate cash and then the ripple effects of the spread of wealth.

From October 2011 until March 2012, Digital Circle was funded by the Department of Culture Arts and Leisure and though the future is uncertain, the future is always uncertain and it needs to be uncertain in recessionary times. The challenge is to constantly provide value for money.

I wasn’t concerned when a local tech magazine started even though someone suggested we should do that. Or when a series of big ticket event started and people said we should do that. Or when a venture fund appeared and, yes, people said we should do that. Or a dozen other things – all of which would be fun and worthwhile but it would require a much larger team. Because while we might have been able to do one of those things, we couldn’t do them all and nor should we try.

Digital Circle was not meant to do everything. It’s really just one person, restricted by delivery requirements and job roles and a network of volunteers each of which have their own careers and businesses to manage.

Towards the end of March we will be asking everyone in our industry to comment on what we plan to do in the future. Not so much on Strategy but on Implementation, Roadmap and Milestones.

We have no idea what happens after March with Digital Circle. We have no promises from government, no idea what the size of the ask should be (and in recession we don’t know what’s available). We know what we can expect and what we would hope for (and yes, they are vastly different).

We want to do more.

A school in Maine deployed iPads:

“classes using iPads … outperformed the ones without them in every literacy metric used.”

“The objective has to be learning, not just getting the technology out there”

“We are paying attention to app selection and focused on continuous improvement — we aren’t just handing equipment to teachers.”

“many educational institutions have not put in enough effort.”

It has never been about the “new and shiny” though detractors of 1:1 computing programmes have always used this as a defence against the investment in learning. This isn’t about putting Angry Birds into the hands of students or distracting them from their studies with FaceBook but rather adopting a permissive approach to technology. When you permit students to use technology in learning, they use technology in learning. Obviously. There’s no need to compete with FaceBook or BBM for attention if the materials and delivery are engaging.

Note that none of the quotes put the responsibility on teachers. But in the end it is the teachers who have to be engaged with the process before the students can be engaged. We’ve been thinking how the Department of Education in Northern Ireland (DENI) and the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment (CCEA) can help in this without just funding cheap iPads (which is not the desired end result). And it obviously has to be in the development of the curriculum and assessment of students.

In the interests of being pro-active, Momentum and Digital Circle are supporting the next TeachMEET in Belfast (because ICT pervades every teaching subject), have published a position paper on 1:1 computing (and the need to accelerate development of resources) and support the removal of ICT in its current for at GCSE and A-level (as it has become the 21st Century equivalent of Typing Class). We are also in the process of creating a new collaborative network for educational content and technology where we hope to bring together local industry, sectoral bodies, academic research and primary/post-primary education to attempt to resolve the big issues we see before us. From what we can see, we’ve inherited decades of legacy and centuries of process, something has to change.

Of course I’m interested, I’m a parent.

From Slugger O’Toole

It seems we in Northern Ireland aren’t doing so well when it comes to innovation, at least according to InterTrade Ireland. Simon Hamilton tweeted this announcement from one of his fellow ministers yesterday:

“Arlene Foster reveals only 1 of 18 nominations in InterTradeIreland awards from NI & this is a trend. Does ROI have monopoly on innovation?”

I do wonder what “innovation” has to do being represented in an awards show. Does a panel from IntertradeIreland actively search for innovation and inspiration or is this yet another nomination exercise? Someone, maybe even the MD of the business, fills in a form, tells a story and enters a dog’n'pony show?

And shame on our ministers for making a big deal of it. Obviously we’d all love to win an award, parade around with a few suits, have my picture taken (obviously proffering an iPad or laptop towards the camera) and get our pictures into a local advertising aggregator web site. That would be a real measure of innovation in our region.

According to the Technology Strategy Board, Northern Ireland companies do not respond to their competitions as much as they should (based on population). NESTA say that Northern Ireland has a poor rate of response to their programmes. Channel 4 “4IP” told me that they got very few applications from Northern Ireland, much lower than expected. Is it just that we don’t play well with others?

Looking south of the border, they have their own sovereign nation which is an advantage as they have their own controls over corporation tax and other economic drivers. While they were holding out their hands to Europe for a national bailout, they were spending like mad to encourage enterprise. They realised that you have to invest your way out of a recession. We initiate a game development pilot, they copy it but boost the numbers by 10. We have been arguing for a publicly supported incubator, they have about ten of them. We’re playing catchup, yes, but it’s not the private sector who needs to wake up and smell the coffee.

All my life has been in a divided nation. As a vaguely union-supporting post-graduate professional from a middle class catholic background, I have very little national identity of any form and quite literally I am not involved in the politics of the region; I have not voted in years. I feel no loyalty to our political parties because I don’t feel like any of them have any loyalty to me.

Northern Ireland is the most isolated region in the British Isles. We’re the only region of the UK which shares a land border with another sovereign nation; a nation which uses a different currency, offers extremely competitive corporation tax rates and didn’t really suffer thirty years of civil war. We’re separated from the rest of the UK by one of the most expensive stretches of water in the world and due to decades of mismanagement, our pointless little country can only survive in handouts from the UK government. When the block grant goes (and it will), we will have to deal with some very hard questions. Either that or revitalise our previously successful crime and terrorism industry.

It aggravates me when Invest Northern Ireland hands back £50m of their budget to the DFP and blames the private sector for not investing. It makes me ask questions about their ability to forecast when a third of their budget goes unspent. It makes me wonder if they are even aware of recession economics – most businesses I talk to are unable to spend days filling out forms for grants because they are paying the bills and when they’re not working their butts off to pay the bills, they’re trying to build the next big thing on their own time; time, according to Invest Northern Ireland, is worthless.

I have started three businesses in Northern Ireland and I am currently working on starting my fourth. I have never taken a single penny of grant aid from Invest Northern Ireland. The job I’m currently doing means I am supping from the public teat and it can be argued whether or not I would be better off doing my own thing or continuing in this line. I feel that I signed up to a duty of care for the digital sector in Northern Ireland when I took this job and right now I wonder whether I’ve taken on too much responsibility and whether I care too much about the outcomes. Being part of the process of helping our startups has somewhat overtaken my life.

So, in short, no, obviously, the ROI does not have a monopoly on innovation. And yes, our programmes in place are not adequately supporting our startups. And no, it’s not the startups fault.

A report on the boom in the media industry despite the worst recession in 70 years.

I misinterpreted a message earlier today and it led to an exchange on Twitter, the core message being:

I did apologise for being a grumpy sod but I’m a little sensitive about this predicament.

There’s a lot to be said for product validation and building something iteratively that people will buy. Getting sales from big customers and using that to finance your first build (either directly or using bank money) is a completely valid way to start out. For certain types of business.

It’s no use for games.

With a game, even if you don’t succumb to hubris and insist on writing your own engine, you’re going to be in the shed for months with development tasks, getting code written, getting art and sound assets made and getting it all put together.

And my personal experience of hiring developers and artists has, almost without exception, been disappointing. It’s too hard to find people who have vision. Another Tweeter asked me if I was looking for a co-founder? Of course I am but I’m uncompromising in my vision and I would expect them to be the same. Co-founder? Maybe. But I’d rather just pay them. So, in the absence of big sales to make your balances, how do you pay for code to be written?

Government grants are a way of getting some risk cash to make games. Finding a private investor is another way. But both require considerable (and onerous) conditions. And (speaking for myself here), I’m pretty much excluded from government grants due to my day job and I doubt I’d find any succour from our local VC due to the general abrasiveness I have applied to their latest term sheet.

This is why Kickstarter matters so much to the average game developer. They can figure out how to provide value to customers who choose to buy the higher levels of product. With exclusive graphics, promo codes, special attributes and physical items like T-Shirts and Posters make all the difference. And this is why I often contribute to Kickstarter projects – even projects that I don’t personally want for myself – if they show a little spirit, a little vision.

So, I’m down but not out. There are others to be helped, dreams to help bring to fruition and I can live vicariously through the assistance I provide to others in their aims to create their own games studio, inadvertently helping me create a local industry.

So we soldier on and in our spare time, we chase only the things we dream about.

This morning I had coffee with Marty Neill (from AirPOS and Brian McKimm (from eSynergy). I could have done with another couple of hours (and a whiteboard) but in all I was very pleased with the conversation even though we may not have agreed on the finer points.

In essence, I was pitching to try to increase the “ideaspace” in Northern Ireland.

I’m of the opinion that there are small ideas and big ideas. The theory is that all of these ideas tend to have equal chance of happening in any given time. The difficulty then is not only finding the time to just have ideas but also having the space, time, resource and, probably most importantly, the network, to realise the idea.

Sometimes what seems to be a small idea can turn into a big idea and it’s not always apparent immediately. Facebook began as a blog, turned into a college network and is now permeating every aspect of our lives. Twitter began as a way to send text messages to groups (and have them be able to easily reply to the group). Google began as a search engine and now does pretty much everything.

I can’t speak for others in this but I’m pretty sure that AirPOS started because Marty realised that Point of Sales systems were hopelessly outdated and none of them used the Internet. I’m sure that Onotate started because Rumble Labs needed a controlled way to share graphical assets with clients and generate appropriate feedback. I’m certain that Planzai started out as a way for Richard to organise some of the activities in his dual life as a rockstar software developer and a rockstar. But these were big ideas masquerading as small ideas.

We’re working on methods now to increase the ‘idea space’ in Northern Ireland. We’ve been doing it through the InvestNI Collaborative Network Programme and we’re continuing it with the development of an “innovation hub” in Belfast. Part hub, part incubator, part soft landing zone; the intent is to provide the default industry location for the development of ideas and collaborations. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last three years – with the ideaspace being virtualised – and it’s what we’re going to be executing on for the next three years.

If you’re interested in being a part of it, drop me a line.

Further to my earlier post about CIIF, I think it’s important to point out what an amazing opportunity this is for web and mobile companies in Northern Ireland. I remember the first time I saw a CSS-based parallax scrolling background (Example) and I marvelled. And then I saw the Safari tech demo pages (Example) and I marvelled again. I just loved the falling leaves demo and I absolutely love what Paul Hayes did here.

It cannot be underestimated what the creation of toys can bring in terms of eyeballs. For a talented web developer team, they might get 100,000 hits from Hacker News but it only takes one new client (resulting from the coverage) to pay for the investment in the tech demo. The Creative Industries Innovation Fund can help a smart development team make great amazing toys.

For instance: look at this Kickstarter for A Canvas and WebGL Programmer’s Text Editor by Robey Holderith. He’s seeking $4,096 in order to “pay” him to build this. CIIF is offering up to four times that amount of money to get people to build amazing stuff.

I also look at the recent release of Kindle Cloud Reader which, although not perfect, really shows how good a web app can be (especially on iOS if you pin it to your home screen and therefore lose most of the Safari borders).

CIIF is looking for 50 great projects. Some of them will be tour guides, some of them web apps, some of them promotional videos but I’d love to see some really REALLY inspiring HTML/CSS stuff. I want developers and designers to thin hard about breaking the laws of (web) physics with this stuff. Do something that makes your peers go “wow”. Make it kick ass with WebKit and use your network to test and refine it.

And if you’ve already made some wonderful toys then please send me the link for it. We need to showcase talent when we see it. I want to rave about my colleagues and countrymen and tell everyone about their talent because while there may be appsterdam, we were doing it first with XCake.

Now, I know this isn’t always going to be possible but I am reminded of when the XCake folk have been able to stand up in front of their peers and tell them all about their latest view controllers. It’s gobbledygook for the rest of us but it shows the talent of the teams involved.

What I’m saying is: Make something awesome. Make a wonderful toy. And tell everyone.

Following a couple of nights of civil unrest, I exercise my white, middle-class, male privilege to think about what’s going wrong in Northern Ireland:

In the aftermath: how disenfranchised and disengaged with the status quo must you be if rioting is more attractive than any other activity?

Steven replied:

@cimota Lower east, seems to still be reeling from loss of shipyard/shorts, real lack of something to aspire to.

My reply:

@playfordrants Yeah, of course I think that building leisure yachts would be a good solution.

Stevens last reply:

@cimota whether its wind turbines or whatever something needs done we have ceased to be a society that actually seems to make anything?

While I may focus on the “digital media” microcosm and it gets a decent amount of attention because it is seen as an easy win for global reach and income generation, it’s sobering to remember that we remain the minority.

We used to have a thriving linen industry. During the 18th Century, a fifth of the worlds linen was shipped from Belfast. We used to make ships and planes. In 1912, Harland and Wolff was the largest shipyard in the world and Shorts was the first aircraft manufacturing company in the world.

Since the 1970s, more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost from Belfast – a situation made worse by the escalation of “The Troubles”.

And no, I wasn’t joking about building leisure yachts. We used to be good at this stuff (East Belfast Sailing Club is still renowned as somewhere to build ferrocement hulls).

So, how would we get back into the swing of things? How do we move upwards in the value chain?

My friend George runs a little manufacturing company in County Down. He’s a craftsman himself:

So far I have resisted the temptation to invest in ‘lean manufacturing’ techniques (which include extensive use of computer controlled machines) and have instead, built a team of real craftsmen who build Lowden guitars by hand using Japanese chisels, planes, knives and spokeshaves. It would have been much more economical to make our guitars with assembly workers and machines, but our choice is to build skills and understanding of wood, and in so doing the guitars feel and sound like individual ‘works of art’”.

So why can’t we do this in other areas? I’m not sure we can create 100,000 new craftsman jobs in the three years that we’d be allotted under an official work programme but we need to have that vision. It’s not about creating low end jobs or even really high value jobs – it’s about the middle ground. How do we raise the level of the lower end jobs – and to my reckoning, it’s about skills.

I had a debate with my co-worker about how to achieve some of this. He says I’m a top down thinker and he’s a bottom up thinker. Whereas I want to start programmes, he reckons I need to raise aspirations and allow them to think for themselves. My response is simple: if it were that easy, it wouldn’t be needed. We need to give people something to aspire to. Spread the story of master craftsmen like George and his team. Bring in existing master craftsmen across multiple industries and engage them in doing stuff. We have all of this empty space in Titanic Quarter and beside it on the old Sirocco works site – just beside where the unrest happened. I do not believe this to be coincidence.

And if it was me, I’d want to be involved in building boats.