money – ɔimoɈɒ

Content is King, Again

Amazon Studios greenlights five new children’s pilots, all 11 in-production pilots to hit LoveFilm too tnw.to/s0cy by @psawers — The Next Web (@TheNextWeb) January 31, 2013 And now I have a serious reason to consider LoveFilm. Bravo Amazon. Netflix is releasing their remake of House of Cards tomorrow, starring Kevin Spacey. The idea that these … Continue reading “Content is King, Again”

Amazon Studios greenlights five new children’s pilots, all 11 in-production pilots to hit LoveFilm too tnw.to/s0cy by @psawers

— The Next Web (@TheNextWeb) January 31, 2013

And now I have a serious reason to consider LoveFilm. Bravo Amazon.

Netflix is releasing their remake of House of Cards tomorrow, starring Kevin Spacey.

The idea that these companies who are not traditional media companies are now investing in content as a differentiator is incredibly interesting and it’s also something I’ve said every mobile and fixed line broadband carrier should have been doing for the last five years. People subscribe to HBO to get Game of Thrones. People love the BBC for their natural history documentaries. Content is important.

Vote for Transformational Change

My Dad is a lifelong Tory. Almost institutionalised. So he is looking forward to this election. It’ll bring change. David Cameron said: In Northern Ireland it is quite clear – and almost every party accepts this –that the size of the state has got too big,” Cameron said. “We need a bigger private sector. There … Continue reading “Vote for Transformational Change”

My Dad is a lifelong Tory. Almost institutionalised. So he is looking forward to this election. It’ll bring change.

David Cameron said:

In Northern Ireland it is quite clear – and almost every party accepts this –that the size of the state has got too big,” Cameron said.

“We need a bigger private sector. There are other parts of the country, including in the north-east. The aim has got to be to get the private sector, to get the commercial sector going.

“Over the next parliament we have got to see a faster growing private sector, we’ve got to broaden our economic base and we need to have a rebalancing of the economy between the commercial and private sector on the one hand and between the state sector on the other.”

The thing is, this is common sense. This is not Conservative policy, this is plain economic policy and should be supported by every party. They may not due to losing potential votes – but this will need to happen anyway.

We do need a bigger private sector. And this will mean massive cuts in the ~~private~~ public [Thanks, Andy – M] sector but this is not a bad thing if it spurs more private sector. And we can’t always look to the government to provide jobs, we need to be part of that change.

I have ideas on how to do this. But it requires sweeping, transformational change in the way we educate, the way we support innovation and the way we legislate for business. These things need to be in place before the cuts and ready to receive the newly unemployed once the cuts hit.

Square is for tomorrow’s mobile workers

Square is a neat solution from one of the Twitter founders, Jack Dorsey. It’s a little dongle that plugs into the audio port and allows you to scan in credit cards and take payments. Anywhere. The launch site was some bohemian coffee shop somewhere in the Valley but the real value is the ability for … Continue reading “Square is for tomorrow’s mobile workers”

Square is a neat solution from one of the Twitter founders, Jack Dorsey. It’s a little dongle that plugs into the audio port and allows you to scan in credit cards and take payments. Anywhere.

The launch site was some bohemian coffee shop somewhere in the Valley but the real value is the ability for anyone providing a service or product to sell wherever they are.

Put it another way. There’s less need for this:

When you can take this:

It’s a very important distinction. The number of exhibitions and conferences I’ve been to where we come away with pockets full of business cards that we absolutely will follow up. Bollocks to that. Make the sale. They give you money, you give them money and get down to business. After all, it’s all about the business.

The iApp Pricing Dilemma

Around a hundred years ago in 1984, I owned a ZX Spectrum 16K (which my Dad had bought for Christmas in 1982). This tiny little computer cost £100 or so, hooked up to your TV and the games had to be loaded over a audio cable from a tape recorder. I remember my Christmas Day … Continue reading “The iApp Pricing Dilemma”

The games I bought were sold in two shops. Tandy on the Antrim Road in Lisburn and a video rental store. At the time the full price of a game was around £7.99. The rental store also rented the game for 99p for two nights. This was achievable to my 11 year old mind and I rented the game which caught my eye.

You see.

TRON had been released in 1982 and I was obsessed. (In hindsight I really should have stayed with the computers thing.) And a company called Personal Software Services in Coventry (England) has produced a game called Light Cycle.

Evidently Disney wasn’t paying attention to computer games in 1983. But anyway – this game which entranced me (before I knew what the gameplay looked like), was £7.99. (I know it says it was £5.95 retail on the web site but I tell you, it sold for £7.99 in pre-globalised, pre-internet Lisburn).

So, iApp prices.

I think everyone knows that 59p (99c) is too cheap for anything of value.

That said, the iPhone has proved quite the opposite (and it seems to be everlastingly sustainable) as we fill our home screens with games and utility apps that are, quite frankly, too cheap to be good, but so good you’d be stupid not to try them. I’ve got pages of apps and games which cost very little and yet I get hours and hours of use out of them.

We knew that iPad apps would cost more. Sure, you can run your existing iPhone apps on the iPad by stretching them up to fill the screen, but there’s a heap of new apps coming. Some of them are refreshes of existing iPhone apps with new content but some of them are new and exciting.

So iPad apps and games will cost more.

They’re not going to cost like PC games or console games – between thirty quid and fifty quid for a single game – but they’re also not going to trend towards 59p! As you can see below!

These images are from MacRumors:

Expect bigger prices from big names. We’re going to see some amazing content on this device. Just be prepared to pay for it.

Tax Breaks for UK Games Companies

From Pocket-Lint The chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, has offered tax breaks to video games developers in an attempt to encourage the burgeoning industry in Britain. Darling said that the “creative industries, including the video games industry, make a valuable economic and cultural contribution to the UK”, and added that a tax credit system … Continue reading “Tax Breaks for UK Games Companies”

From Pocket-Lint

The chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, has offered tax breaks to video games developers in an attempt to encourage the burgeoning industry in Britain.

Darling said that the “creative industries, including the video games industry, make a valuable economic and cultural contribution to the UK”, and added that a tax credit system will be on offer, similar to the one offered to the British film industry. It’ll make it cheaper to build games in Britain.

While the amount of tax break has not been made apparent, it should help spur some games development companies into forming in the province.

The question being – tax is a problem for companies making money. How is Northern Ireland placed to take advantage of this tax break?

[and as @jearle pointed out, he and I are both available to develop game ideas and settings. His website is http://nightfall.me and my games website is http://lategaming.com]

“Music: an aperitif for the maw of Digital”

In 2009, Infurious spent some of their hard-earned cash from the NBC Universal deal to send one of the team to SXSWi. So lurid were the tales of new technology, I resolved to get more of the Digital Circle to attend this conference. From Wikipedia: SXSW is one of the largest music festivals in the … Continue reading ““Music: an aperitif for the maw of Digital””

From Wikipedia:

SXSW is one of the largest music festivals in the United States, with more than 1,400 performers playing in more than 80 venues around downtown Austin over four days, in March. Though it is an industry-based event, SXSW Music links locally with events such as the annual Austin Music Awards show. SXSW is the highest revenue-producing special event for the Austin economy, with an estimated economic impact of at least $110 million in 2008.
In 1994, SXSW added film and interactive conferences. SXSW Film has become one of the world’s premiere film festivals, focusing on new directing talent. Similarly, SXSW Interactive has attracted a strong following among web creators and entrepreneurs. SXSW Interactive’s focus on emerging technology has earned the festival a reputation as a breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies. Twitter launched at SXSW Interactive in 2007.
The music event has grown from 700 registrants in 1987 to nearly 12,000 registrants. SXSW Film and SXSW Interactive events attract approximately 11,000 registrants to Austin every March.

So, this year a small contingent from Northern Ireland headed off to Austin facilitated by InvestNI Trade and Export. You can see their timetable for future trade missions.

Bruce Sterling muses: ‘Is the digital world eating the music world?’ with some select quotes.

*Man, they don’t know the half of that… But on the other hand, we’re not halfway there yet. The music world was a kind of aperitif for the maw of digital.
…
“There are definitely two different mindsets. Interactive people, all they do is go to panels with smartphones and laptops and music people are like, ‘let’s get to a club, get a beer and watch a rock band’.”
…
“By midway through the festival the city’s hotel lobbies are abuzz with activity as the techies check out to leave and, sizing them up a little suspiciously, the music crowd arrive and check in….”

This comes mere days after I read FREE, by Wired’s Chris Anderson which demands reading (even just listening to the audiobook made me want the hardback).

The music industry wants paid for music whether you listen to it or not. Even if you buy a copy of a track from iTunes DRM-free and you want to shift that to another media, like put it on your iPod or record it onto a mix CD for the car (currently against UK law), the music industry would like you to pay more. So I pay a little to get one copy of a single performance of a well practised track and rightfully, this price should be decreasing. The effort put into the multiple copies is spread over the number of copies so with wider distribution, the unit price per song decreases. This sucks for bands which have poor distribution (i.e. little fame) and sucks even more for bands who aren’t very good.

The software industry would also like you, in general, to pay per copy but in the case of both open source and recent developments in mobile (i.e. the iPhone), the mass market has pushed the price of this commodity towards zero. Developers in the AppStore might complain the pricing of apps are too low but they have to realise that they contribute to that precedent and they put the value on their work. So software as a whole is decreasing in price – you can get better products for less money (consider Apple iWork versus Microsoft Office) and for the most part the market is very equitable

The reason I find it easier to pay for a digital copy of “Plants versus Zombies” than a copy of “Mountains” by Biffy Clyro is that bands have other methods of bringing in income. They can tour, they can sell merchandise, open supermarkets – they can become rock stars and get into the whole sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll lifestyle. While this is the exception, it almost never happens for developers. The blood, sweat and tears which go into a good software product are, in my opinion, at least comparable to the effort put by musicians into recording a great song in a studio. Once done, the software developer puts the software on sale and can pray for sales. The developer will not tour, few will buy his merchandise. The exchange of small amounts of money for bits is pretty much his only income. The question of piracy therefore affects them differently – for the software developer, it undermines his only income, for the musician, piracy of the music track becomes marketing, a harbinger of the album, the T-shirt, the tour.

It is a shame that the most talked about experiments of music into the digital realm have all been either shams (Arctic Monkeys) or efforts by big bands with established fan bases (NIN, Radiohead). I’d love to hear more successes and failures of bands embracing digital and I’d love to see some software developers becoming rock stars.

End of the day, I want smart, creative people paid for their work.

Devotion to Duty

Back in my network engineer days at Nortel, uptime was something that was seen as vitally important. With the growth of the business pre-dotcomBUST, the production lines and the servers managing them needed to be up and serving 24×7. 24x7x365 was a very hard thing to measure, never mind achieve in pre-2000 information systems. In … Continue reading “Devotion to Duty”

24x7x365 was a very hard thing to measure, never mind achieve in pre-2000 information systems. In the end my overseers and bosses had to reconcile the need for maintenance and upgrades with the 24x7x365 myth and the uptime was achieved though we were able to maintain a very reasonable schedule – so reasonable in fact that the business was able to celebrate when we relinquished some of our regular maintenance windows.

But the message was clear, uptime was the most important metric.

Entrepreneurship

Fraser is absolutely right. What’s stopping you? When I was being consulted on a funding programme recently, it was made clear that funding would not be available for capital (hardware and software) purchases. My response – “Everyone already has a computer or access to one.” So, to start your company, what do you need? Sound … Continue reading “Entrepreneurship”

Fraser is absolutely right. What’s stopping you?

When I was being consulted on a funding programme recently, it was made clear that funding would not be available for capital (hardware and software) purchases. My response –

“Everyone already has a computer or access to one.”

So, to start your company, what do you need? Sound off in the comments!

There’s no need for VC in the UK. Apparently.

Richard Tyler of The Telegraph writes how “Public venture funds make very little difference”. This is based upon a report by the British Venture Capital Association and NESTA and it states the following points: Britain has no untapped reservoir of high-growth companies starved of venture capital This is a contentious point at best. Does this … Continue reading “There’s no need for VC in the UK. Apparently.”

Britain has no untapped reservoir of high-growth companies starved of venture capital

This is a contentious point at best. Does this mean that either there is overfunding or, as is my opinion, there is no supply chain of deal flow to provide venture funds with suitable startups?

…when companies receive investment from one of various publicly backed venture funds, the change in their performance is only “modest” compared with the step change seen when a private fund invests.

This speaks volumes about the sort of folk who are hired to manage public venture funds. Either they’re not very good investment managers or they don’t treat public-backed venture funds with the same attention or respect as private money. So – examine what the problem is there.

The report says: “Companies that are recipients of funding under one or more of the government hybrid funding schemes examined do not yet exhibit significantly better performance. This suggests that the UK does not posses an untapped resource of high potential firms whose (greater) performance will be unleashed by simply making available more equity finance within the ‘equity gap’.

Or alternatively, the way that government funds are managed is not suitable for young startups. The equity gap exists for the average startup at several positions in their life – initial seed, business growth, market share expansion. It is my opinion that the earliest stage equity gap means that many companies are unable to take advantage of venture funding due to poor engagement from the VC market and, frankly, red tape barriers for access to public funds. Understanding that we, the people, are responsible for this red tape is important but a small percentage of wasted funds if placed in the hands of a blame-averse (as opposed to a risk-averse) seed capital, would reap significant rewards.

The report also confirms the anecdotal impression that venture funding is a poor way for Government and the regional development agencies to create jobs.

Is this really all about jobs? I would have hoped that this would seriously be about generating wealth – not just making sure that people are sitting in offices. Northern Ireland has had a disastrous history of selling itself short as a cheap place for a call centre. We don’t need to inspire people to take low level internships – we need people to think bigger.

A sceptical eye on a new fund…

News Distribution Service for Government and the Private Sector The Prime Minister has today announced the creation of the UK Innovation Investment Fund to invest in technology-based businesses with high growth potential. The new fund will focus on investing in growing small businesses, start-ups and spin-outs, in digital and life sciences, clean technology and advanced … Continue reading “A sceptical eye on a new fund…”

News Distribution Service for Government and the Private Sector

The Prime Minister has today announced the creation of the UK Innovation Investment Fund to invest in technology-based businesses with high growth potential. The new fund will focus on investing in growing small businesses, start-ups and spin-outs, in digital and life sciences, clean technology and advanced manufacturing.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, with the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Department of Health, will invest Â£150 million alongside private sector investment on an equal basis known as pari-passu.

OK, so Â£150 million is coming from the government on an equal basis with private sector investment which, by my calculations, should create a Â£300 million fund.

It is the Government’s belief that this could leverage enough private investment to build a fund of up to Â£1 billion over the next 10 years. The UK Innovation Investment Fund forms part of the Governmentâ€™s strategy for Building Britainâ€™s Future.

We’re obviously not in receipt of the facts (and this sort of addition might be responsible for MP allowances scandals). Â£150 million of public money plus equal participation from the private sector equals Â£300 million and not Â£1 billion. Now – we can make allowances that this is over 10 years so the revenue gained from licensing and exits of companies funded might contribute sufficient back to increase the value of the fund. Might.

Either way, the Â£150 million will barely cover the administration fees of the various private VC funds that will be needed to make up the other Â£850 million to make this into a Â£1 billion fund.

Just sayin’

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