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 … Continue reading “After a decade of intervention…”
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.
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 … Continue reading “84% of tablet owners play games”
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.
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 … Continue reading “Let go of the old…”
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.
I played some Day Z earlier. It consisted of running cross-country for ages. Then looting some tents owned by some very dangerous people. Then running again and running some more. Then meeting my brother and his friends and using my loot to heal them up. And running away from zombies. And being too scared to … Continue reading “Play Different”
I played some Day Z earlier. It consisted of running cross-country for ages. Then looting some tents owned by some very dangerous people. Then running again and running some more. Then meeting my brother and his friends and using my loot to heal them up.
And running away from zombies. And being too scared to enter villages alone.
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 … Continue reading “BBC Creative Collisions – Future of Media Technology #CC2012NI”
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:
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 … Continue reading “Perfect”
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?
Last night, the launch of the Cultural Apps competition was held in the MAC in Belfast and was attended by all the great and the good. Here are some images from that. Related posts: Jonathan Gems on the abolition of the UKFC The Broadband Blueprint (re DETI Telecoms Consultation) Cultural Tourism – new apps competition! … Continue reading “Cultural Apps”
Last night, the launch of the Cultural Apps competition was held in the MAC in Belfast and was attended by all the great and the good. Here are some images from that.
My Tour Talk, Ian Graham from Momentum , Rory Campbell from FordeCampbell (Digital Circle Steering Group member) and BT48.com sharing a moment.GAA, Comhaltas, Momentum and the Ulster Historical Foundation.Momentum and DCAL with BT48 and My Tour Talk
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 … Continue reading “TV, Games, Emergence, Agency and Death”
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.
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)
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 … Continue reading “Your definition of broadband is wrong.”
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.
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:
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.
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 … Continue reading “Same Genre, Vastly Different Gameplay”
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?
