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.

Ages ago I wrote some fluff about how Northern Ireland was well-positioned for a Technology and Innovation Centre investment from the Technology Strategy Board. We have certain areas of expertise combined with a desire to excel and, in this area, we are not restricted by geography or telecommunications infrastructure.

We are, however, restricted by a sociopolitical landscape. This is from the Closing the Gap document published by the TSB.

The first confirmed technology and innovation centre is in high value manufacturing. … The partners are the Advanced Forming Research Centre (based in University of Strathclyde), the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (based in the University of Sheffield), the Centre for Process Innovation (located in Wilton and Sedgefield), the Manufacturing Technology Centre (sponsored by the universities of Birmingham, Loughborough and Nottingham, and TWI Ltd), the National Composites Centre (based in
the University of Bristol), the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (sponsored by the universities of Manchester and Sheffield) and the Warwick Manufacturing Group (based in the University of Warwick).

With six of the seven partners in the High Value Manufacturing TIC being university-based, you can begin to see the politics of a TIC. In order to create a viable proposition, we need to work very closely together.

The second technology and innovation centre to be established will focus on cell therapies and advanced therapeutics.
The third centre will be in the area of offshore renewable energy.
The further priority areas that we are exploring as potential candidates for a centre, are:

• complex systems
• digital media/creative industries
• future cities
• future internet systems
• photonics
• resource efficiency
• sensor systems
• smart grids and distribution
• space
• transport systems and integration

There’s so much cross-over here that, I believe, an opportunity exists for Northern Ireland to create a TIC based around:

• digital media / creative industries – because we have a heritage here and also a young and ambitious population. We may not be entirely competitive with the SE of England here (just due to population) but I’m seeing more exciting ideas coming out of Northern Ireland.
• future cities – apart from the vision work being done on Future Belfast and City of Tomorrow, we have some very ambitious councils who have expressed interest here. Our own open data work has been focused on informing people (and machines) and digesting machine-generated content for consumer use.
• future internet systems – this is about the disruptive effects that advanced technology could have on information flows through connected objects. Again, the core here is about machine-generated content. That’s the stuff we use every day when we check our weather apps or look at what trends on Twitter.
• sensor systems – we already have some pioneering work being done at our local universities and extending / partnering these efforts would reap rewards. These technologies easily fit with future cities, future internet systems, smart grids, transport systems.
• smart grids and distribution – we already have a collaborative network based on Smart Grid and two clusters around wind and ocean power. The smart grid concept is really about software – the ability to monitor and control the information and flow of power.
• space – while we may not have anyone building rockets (legally), we do have a lot of businesses which are relevant to this sector. Any time anyone fires up Maps on their phone, they’re using GPS-assisted data, collected from satellites (more machine generated content). I’d like to see companies like Wrightbus and Bombardier get their teeth in here with local digital companies.
• transport systems and integration – correct modelling of transport and the handling of the data flow can easily replace the need for expensive (and often redundant and environmentally damaging) road extensions. We don’t have traffic issues – we have timing and information issues.

The interesting thing is that we’re already doing stuff in these regions and the crossovers between them are already happening here – though it’s on a much smaller scale than a multi-million £ investment. This is why I think it needs a TIC approach. We need to centralise these efforts – invite in the various brothers and sisters in the networks, mix up our clusters and have a centralised place for them to network, post progress and plan for the future.

From The Guardian:

President Obama was elected because he argued for more open, imaginative government, saying in his inaugural address: “The economy has unravelled, but America is the same nation of people who work hard, invent ingeniously, and produce the services the world needs. This is not a nation which has come undone, and it will be true America which in adversity summons the strength and resolve to remake itself.”

Sean Blanchfield writes about Startup Capital in Ireland:

I believe that online technology companies are the way forward for Ireland. It is now clear that online technology companies can be as financially successful as more traditional businesses. However, unlike other sectors, it takes very little money to start an online tech company. Neither does your geography limit your market. All you technically need are brains, and enough money to pay other brainy people to work for you. No need for factories, or 20 years of lab research, or anything like that.

Unfortunately, there are problems providing capital in the relatively small amounts these companies need to initially launch themselves (say €20K to €200,000). There aren’t enough sufficiently cashed-out former technology entrepreneurs to fund at this level as angels. Instead, we rely on small investment firms doling out government money, and a couple of loose angel networks that can make small aggregate investments. At this scale, it’s not viable for investors to have excellent in-house domain expertise to help understand and vet opportunities. Because of this, the dynamics are not what you might expect. You may encounter:

• Folks on the investment side getting confused and thinking they are on Dragon’s Den
• Rife suspicion that entrepreneurs exist to con money out of investors so they can run away with it to paradise island

He goes into a lot more detail so it’s a recommended read.

A friend of mine has posted some lyrics and this is my response.

Look, if you had, one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted – one moment
Would you capture it? Or just let it slip?
Yo

A hundred years ago, when the Titanic sank, I think we lost a lot more. I think our current track of celebrating the memory of the ship has changed us. Our heroes are drunk footballers and snooker players and not literary academics or physicist philosophers. We talk about the Titanic in terms of what it could have been – like our national heroes – if they had stayed off the bottle, they could have conquered the world. We glorify the almost and the could have been.

His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti
He’s nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready
To drop bombs, but he keeps on forgetting
What he wrote down, the whole crowd goes so loud
He opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out
He’s chokin, how? Everybody’s jokin now
The clock’s run out, time’s up over, blow!
Snap back to reality, oh there goes gravity

Whether we’re talking about freestyle rap or an angel network pitches, the idea is the same. We want the pitches to drop a bomb, we have hundreds of “could be greats”. Everyone is hoping that someday someone will notice them for their brilliance and pluck them from the nightmare.

The soul’s escaping, through this hole that is gaping
This world is mine for the taking
Make me king, as we move toward a, new world order
A normal life is borin, but super stardom’s close to post mortem
It only grows harder, homie grows hotter
He blows us all over these hoes is all on him
Coast to coast shows, he’s know as the globetrotter
Lonely roads, God only knows

The people I meet every day have passions to succeed. But most of them won’t get the chance. The combination of environment and bias, the restraint of being a poor person in a poor region and, perhaps most damning, maybe the killer idea isn’t all that killer. Passion alone is not enough, it’s all about the delivery.

No more games, I’ma change what you call rage
Tear this mothafuckin roof off like two dogs caged
I was playin’ in the beginning, the mood all changed
I been chewed up and spit out and booed off stage

Taking a stand is always unpopular when people are comfortable with the status quo. But that’s what we have done. We have found our feet, we have stamped our feet. And sometimes we were booed off stage. Sometimes things that were inspired had to be removed. But these things do not go away, nothing ever disappears from the Internet.

But I kept rhymin’ and stepwritin’ the next cypher
Best believe somebody’s payin’ the pied piper
All the pain inside amplified by the fact
That I can’t get by with my 9 to 5
And I can’t provide the right type of life for my family
Cuz man, these goddamn food stamps don’t buy diapers
And it’s no movie, there’s no Mekhi Phifer, this is my life
And these times are so hard, and it’s getting even harder

While we might campaign for corporation tax, it’s not the only story. I’m actually more concerned about skills gaps in the workforce and how to plug them considering that there isn’t the ability (nor the will) to quickly respond to industry. Too much focus on credit and qualifications means the real work doesn’t get done. The Northern Ireland Block Grant is going away; the question being, when it goes, what will we have in it’s place?

This is why we started NISINE two years ago. This is why we started NISW eighteen months ago. This is why we started StartVI a year ago. We have to change culture among industry and make them speak out for what they want. We have a status quo which rewards poor behaviour. We have a too-heavy public sector and no-one seems willing to address the inevitable: There will be job losses, they will be severe. So what are we going to do about it?

Too much for me to wanna
Stay in one spot, another day of monotony’s
Gotten me to the point, I’m like a snail
I’ve got to formulate a plot or I end up in jail or shot
Success is my only mothafuckin option, failure’s not

Success is the only motherfucking option, failure is not.

Yesterday on the train, we were talking about the gender bias in ICT and software. One of the options for resolving this was positive discrimination. My solution was promotion of computer programming to the status of reading, writing and mathematics. My school had five compulsory subjects: maths, english language, english literature, french and religious education. Bollocks to that. Mathematics, English and Software Engineering are the three core disciplines of 21st Century Northern Ireland schools. We need to make it compulsory so we not only manage to catch every opportunity to educate potential software engineers but also we train them in spite of the gender bias; a bias that might be genetic, but again it also just might be cultural.

We need to take bold steps to establish what they call a “knowledge economy”. Bold steps – not gentle gradients which lead into ineffectiveness. And if the will is not there, then we need to take matters into our own hands.

So here I go, it’s my shot.
Feet fail me not, this maybe the only opportunity that I got

Tomorrow is a new day. It would be lovely to think that I wasn’t alone in doing this. But, in the end, everyone has to stand alone.

You can do anything you set your mind to, man

I know.