you want to start something?

I caught a comment on Twitter recently that “a company built on free would be a pretty shitty company”. The author has since deleted that tweet, presumably because some of the best companies are built on free.

Brands like Gillette ($43B), Google ($185B), Apple ($205B) all leveraged ‘free’ in some form. King Gillette gave away his razors and sold the blades a hundred years ago. Google gives away ‘freemium’ access to their apps and services. The foundation of Apple’s amazing operating system is open source and given away for free and they’ve created and given away a world-class web browser engine, WebKit, which is being used free of charge by Nokia, RIM and Google in mobile products that are competing directly with Apple.

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary celebrates the notion of free (paying for flights using anciliary revenue – in-flight meals, bag checks, hotel and car bookings, internet and games):
“The other airlines are asking how they can put up fares. We are asking how we could get rid of them.”

Amazing companies are built on free. 20th Century companies were built on the notion of scarcity. They focussed on the shipping of real goods, the transportation of atoms. The scarcity was real. With the exception of High Fructose Corn Syrup, we have a scarcity of many items because duplicating items means duplicating costs. But there’s no scarcity of bits. Bits are the lingua franca of the Internet and we have an abundance of them. Bits enable ‘virtual goods’ to be duplicated endlessly. The cost of duplication is zero so you’re left with the initial cost of creation which, when amortised over the potential millions of recipients, drives the individual cost towards zero.

Now the economics of scarcity keep some people in power – this is the essence of the haves and have-nots. But in a future where the real currency, the currency of bits, is something that is abundant, even more abundant than the air, how can these people retain their power? They can’t obviously and what’s worse, they don’t understand it and it scares the shit out of them.

The scarcity/abundance economics are the reason we’re setting up StartVI. In Belfast there is an artificial scarcity of office space (with over 1.26 million square feet of empty office space in Belfast). The scarcity is created by pricing the office space beyond the means of the businesses which could make use of them. It seems utterly insane that we’re talking about a scarcity of empty space. So, we’re removing the essence of that scarcity. And we;re providing more than empty space. Desk space in StartVI is free. Internet access is free. Light and heat are free. And we’re filling the empty space with people: hopeful entrepreneurs, wise business advisors, savvy investors. And they’re giving their time for free.

Tags: CoWorking, Startup by mj
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The Economist: Nokia tries to reinvent itself:

ASK Finns about their national character and chances are the word sisu will come up. It is an amalgam of steadfastness and diligence, but also courage, recklessness and fierce tenacity. “It takes sisu to stand at the door when the bear is on the other side,” a folk saying goes.

We have this feeling. We have it. We likely don’t have a word for it. And that’s a damn shame.

We need something to change. Northern Ireland will always have difficulties because we lack the environment we need to excel. Part of this is historical, part of it is just the way our culture is built. We have the talent, we have the brains, we just lack part of the execution. We will never have the same number of angels and funds as Silicon Valley. So we have to make better use of what we have. We will never get the massive DoD contracts that Israel secured so we’re going to need to find other ways to make our mark. We need to have the foresight to prepare for the future, the charisma to make friendships that will last and the heart to build it. Not for our own gain but for the gain of tomorrow. Well, starting from today, the first week of January 2010, we’re going to change that.

We’re going to start an incubator.
We’re going to start building a fund.
And we’re going to do it in Belfast.

So I’m looking for a word in Irish to express something. To express the passion about how I choose to spend my free time. There’s some candidates here – and the front-runner so far in bold.

Tags: Commentary, Do Something Now, Social, Startup by mj
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Workplace 2010 is an initiative within the Civil Service. I recently met with Mark Bennett, who works for the Department of Finance and Personnel (DFP) and is specifically charged with OpenDataNI along with a team of talented anarchists within the walls of the Civil Service. Mark took the time to show me around Clare House which is the home of the DFP (as well as other departments including the Strategic Investment Board).

I took a short video:

This shows some of the facilities, including the circular meeting rooms, a glimpse of some of the ’standing room’ for visitors as well as the copious amounts of hot-desking space and collaboration areas. This, a booth not dissimilar to that found in a restaurant, was my favourite:

A booth with ethernet, power and a monitor. Plenty of room to spread out or work with someone. Perfick!

Did I mention the entire place was flooded with WiFi? (BTOpenZone so not perfect but still, progress, and from somewhere you would not expect).

Tags: Bedouin, CoWorking, Commentary by mj
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Today I posted a quick note about a workshop being held in the OhYeah building (with special thanks to OhYeah and NoMoreArt for helping pull it together). The event itself was conceived during an OpenCoffeeMorning conversation between myself and Marty Neill of NoMoreArt – as he puts it, democracy without bureaucracy.

The workshop is designed to help those in the “creative industries” find the time to fill in the forms for the Creative Industries Innovation Fund. I’ve spoken to a lot of people about this Fund and extolled it’s virtues and I hear a lot of the same story – it’s something they’ll get around to.

Well, time is up. The closing date for this first call is Thursday the 5th of February and if you miss this one it’s months until the next. And the best reason in the world to hold a workshop is to help people focus the mind. Ideally we’re aiming for a largish group of people all focussed on filling in their forms and getting the paperwork out of the way.

There will be two sessions: one from 11 am to 1 pm and the second from 4:30 pm to 6 pm. The content for both is the same and it straddles part of lunch and just after work so that people from all walks of life can make some time to come in and at least get the forms.

The workshop itself is not about guidance – it’s not about trying to ensure success - it’s about getting the forms in on time, because if they’re not in then you’ve got no chance. I have invited representatives from the Arts Council (who are managing the fund), NIMIC and NIScreen (who are especially relevant to the digital content industry) and the Digital Circle Steering Group – hopefully an individual might be able to talk to these representatives and maybe get some guidance or inspiration from people who have experience with this sort of thing.

It’s meant to be collaborative, it’s meant to be a learning experience and it’s meant to be a shared social experience. At the most basic level it’s a heap of forms and pens and desks and chairs. What’s more is that it’ll be a collection of people who all have something creative inside them which they feel is deserving of public funding in order to have it realised.

There’s a form for registry – just to help us get an idea of how many people will turn up so I’d appreciate it if people could register beforehand. The format will be informal and it will be about completing forms.

Tags: CoWorking, Commentary, Cool, DigitalCircle, Do Something Now, Social, Startup by mj
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I was very happy to see Andy post this on Twitter just a few minutes ago as we’d been sitting on it for so long, working out numbers and trying to figure out how to pay for things.

The Good: The rent and rates are affordable and the room itself is great for the purposes. The café below is also not bad and the food seems pretty healthy. The room itself is very nice, has heaps of natural light and is in a popular part of the city. I think the atmosphere in the room will be very enjoyable for dynamic, ‘agile’ companies. It’s not going to suit everyone – and that’s fine – CoWorking isn’t meant for everyone.

The Bad: We’re realistic. This is a temporary home – it’s going to take us a couple of years to build to the point where we have enough people and momentum to take CWB to the ‘next level’. The vision for CoWorkingBelfast has always been ‘an entire building’ so we’ll start here and see where we go. There’s no parking though – which is a pain and an expense but that’s going to bite you anywhere in the city. You should be using public transport anyway.

The Ugly: We’ve still got a heap of paperwork to do and we could do with a reasonable solicitor to help us through some of the muddle. Nightmare. Anyone got much experience with non-profits and want me to owe them a favour?

Tags: Bedouin, CoWorking by mj
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