Minibar tonight (2 Mar) Friday, March 02, 2007

Tonights Minibar seemed less full for some reason albeit 132 folk were signed up on Meetup. Demos tonight.

From a selfish perspective Minibar is a clear second to Opencoffee because
- too many geeks pushing tech solutions & not businesses at minibar
- its simply too dark & noisy (loud DJ) to network
- people don't go to network
- tech is the focus, not entrepreneurship

Anyway, the usual format of demos operated with the following companies presenting tonight.:

Sellaband
- its provides a platform to provide finance to new bands to help launch themselves & produce their first album
- they advance that labels are risk averse & talent struggles to be heard. Yet some consumers like to discover stuff.
- Sellaband enables passionate "believers" to buy fractions in bands they like/discover up to a max of $50k to fund their recordings. No commitment applies on either side until $50k is reached and then both sides are locked in. Sellaband the organises studio time & recordings.
- The believer's investment buys firstly albums ($10 per unit) which they get delivered - god forbid you invest $1k & end up with loads of CDs..
- The music is then given away by Sellaband on the site to drive traffic & generate ad revenues which is shared between investors & the band.
- So far 2 artists raised have raised the $50k, with 400k of pledges. 7500 investors have signed up & 2500 artists. Page views of several hundred thousand have resulted.
- artists get their own promo page with embedded player. Consumers hear music for free but can choose to invest.
- However, here's were the deal goes sour. Investors only get rights to the ad revenues on sellaband. Ooops. So my investment gets them the necessary push and they go onto greatness - sorry, you get nothing!

Apologies if I misunderstood the model (I did check with those around me) but what a lousy deal. If my money promotes a band & helps them get big, I want a share to payoff all of the flops I backed.

Spikesource
It's a non profit consortium dedicated to promoting open source and minising risk of using open source.

Flirtnik
"Smart personal for smart people". Translated it sounded like a social network site targeted at people searching for casual sex. Can't deny there's probably a market.

Rouq
Developed by one of the Barcamplondon organisers, Jason, they offer a search engine that geographically divides up search results but their USP is that results are returned as images of the web pages. Search is driven by yahoo results. Whilst some searches might benefit from visuals, the selection seemed to push people towards the best visually stunning site. Their pitch lacked clarity, especially as the first two minutes of five were devoted to talking about their testimonials on other sites.

Trusted Places
Still flush from their £500k of funding this week, Sokratis and Walid introduced their site. Their sites provides a trust network for finding recommendations of places to go (bars, restaurants mainly). Using the "neighbour" concept, Trusted Places finds recommendations from people with similar profiles (profile data driven by upfront questionnaire). This isn't trust per se since it actually uses Amazon-like filtering to say people like you, like this. This is different from people whom you know giving you recommendations.

Trusted places look to make money from advertising & sponsorship.

It was great to see Helen Keegan (Swedish Beers & beepmarketing) and Deirdre Molloy (Chinwag) for a long chat. I also saw/spoke with
- Ian Delaney who replaced Deirdre as NMK editor
- Sophie Coudray of Antersite
- Angel at Inkpak
- Jemima of the Guardian Unlimited
- Simon of Bellhope
- Caz of rugbypix.com

It was also good to see one of the co-founders of Last.fm, Martin, coming along.

Well done to Christian for his continued efforts in making this event happen.

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Charles River Ventures startup scheme - a marketing con? Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Paul Kedrosky reports that the Charles River Rivers much heralded startup scheme offering a $250,000 venture loan program and which launched late last year has been very disappointing. Stats to date are:
As Paul observes, these are lousy odds.

So, was it just one heck of a cheap marketing campaign to endear oneself to the tech community.

Or was it that they applied the same valuation techniques to startups as they do to their usual investments and found the price:risk ratio off the scale?

Or was it that they received a ton of trash from highly unsuitable chancers with dreadful ideas, that read about the scheme? Bear in mind that most VCs don't look at unsolicited pitches, preferring to rely on trusted sources to refer businesses. For these VCs, you would expect the ratios to be significantly higher.

Wouldn't it be great if all the applications could be posted to an public site for wider scrutiny. If the entrepreneurs consented, it's possible they could find other firms/angels that are willing to talk to them.

I suspect most applicants would be terrified by this notion, fearful that their "unique" idea would be stolen. However, as I explained a couple of weeks ago at Barcamp London, ideas are rarely unique and often benefit from "sunlight" (slidedeck is here http://www.slideshare.net/johndwilson/sex-the-investor). Moreover, if your idea is so simple to copy and exploit, that in itself may well be a deterrent to investors.

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Wow, I made it onto Slideshare's front page Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Heck, I rarely achieve fame, so making it onto Slideshare's front page with my Barcamp slide deck as a featured presentation came as a pleasant surprise. I suspect the viewing figures of 228 views after 2 days may have something to do with hitting the buttons of money & sex in the title.


Towards the end of the slide deck, I've included some sites I think are cool from a personal use point of view.

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Its' delicious salted - a fun party game for geeks! Sunday, February 18, 2007

Pecha Kucha is a fabulous style of presenting involving 20 slides, each of which is shown for 20 seconds. Presentation content and delivery therefore has to be well co-ordinated so as to neither run out of time on a slide or have an embarrassingly long silence.

However, a fun thing created by Matthew Brindley and Paul Farnell for the first Barcamp London is an on the fly run through of your last 20 delicious bookmarks. Most people won't necessarily specifically remember what they last bookmarked, nor can they selectively show them. Consequently, the webpage appears regardless of how embarrassing it happens to be and you simply have to talk about why you bookmarked it and found it interesting.

This was one of the late night sessions at Barcamplondon2 last night and people were simply called up to the stage to do impromptu sessions.

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Other interesting folk at Barcamp London

In no particular order here are some of the interesting people I've been chatting to (more will be added as I located their blogs, links etc).

Niqui Merret: a flash developer, she was kind enough to come and see me do my presentation. She is speaking at the next Brighton Geek Girl Dinner (in March). Details on her blog here.

Tom Reynolds: The first person I got chatting to when I arrived. A London Ambulanceman, who been working all of the previous night and had come straight to the event. His "adventures" as an Ambulanceman which he records on his blog, have been published under a creative commons licence in a book deal.

Neil Ford: A photographer, who I confess looked as though the camera was surgically attached to his face because everytime I looked across, he was taking pictures.

Andy Mitchell: I last met Andy at the Xmas Backstage Party and we had a great chat last night about his new venture Webcards. I intend to blog about these separately.

Caroline Mockett: Who is a talented photographer and a passionate rugby fan (Saracens fan).

Julian Harris who is presently at Conchango and his wife

Simon Liu who is the founder of Bitcartel Software, which focusses on softwarefor macs. Has done some interesting stuff with digitising comics and rip music.

Tom Hughes-Croucher, who works at Yahoo, who I met at the first Barcamp.

More to be added as I wade through the business cards.

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Neighbourhood Fix It - Telling the council where to fix it!

Matthew Somerville of Mysociety.org. always delivers great stage presentations - the style and the content is always compelling.

His Barcamp London 2 presentation was on Neighbourhood fix-it, an incredibly simple way of letting your local council know of problems such as potholes, litter, street furniture that needs fixing, graffiti, or fly tipping. Initially developed as a pilot involving two London councils, Newham and Lewisham, Matthew realised that by changing one line of the code it would work for the entire country.

The website uses Ordinance Survey maps using the Yahoo! javascript library to scroll around. As the work was done for the Dept. of Constitutional Affairs, MySociety avoided having to pay the extortionate licence fees to Ordinance Survey which are a min of £20k pa.

It's amazingly simple to you - you specify a place, then click on a point within the map and a form appears that you fill in which is routed off to the relevant council via email. If that Authority is not by the service, it suggests that you contact the Council and propose that they include themselves.

Tom Reynolds is similarly impressed.

Matthew also mentioned about some of the other projects they've done including Travel time maps - heat maps identifying journey times.

As for Matthew himself, he has done some amazing stuff which you can peruse on his website, Dracos. My favourite is the BBC News Front Page Archive which you can search for old stories. An excellent feature is the timeline to watch how a story has changed, which has an impressive interface, and which allows you to navigate directly to the original story.


Entertainingly, the BBC got in touch with Matthew to ask him for copies of his archive for days in July 2005 of the London bombings, because they apparently don't archive them but had been asked for copies by the Police. Seemingly, content management systems are not a feature of the BBC.

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Barcamplondon2 programme

In case you are interested, this is/was the schedule of events at Barcamp London 2 kindly created by Jeremy Keith on his blog Adactio.

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My presentation at Barcamp

As you may be aware, every attendee at Barcamp must contribute usually in the form of a talk/presentation on a topic of their choosing.

So, here's the slide deck of mine, which I gave on Sat 17th Feb at Barcamp London 2 entitled "Sex & the Investor"



My presentation from Barcamp London 1 is below, on the subject of "trust" networks

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Analysis of Social Communities by Tom Coates Saturday, February 17, 2007

Tom, who works for Yahoo and writes a blog called plasticbag, did an excellent and passionately delivered presentation on social communities/networks. Its available here online. He covered lots of interesting material in the slot including:

Why people contribute to communities?

He cited the work done by Peter Kollack in his work "Economies of Online Cooperation" who advance the following reasons why people contribute

He advanced that social communities break the traditional expectations of what motivates people, namely
His tips for successfully Social Community sites were
Tom believes that the "Show us the money" element of communities comes from
Good session

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Second Life to introduce virtual RFID tags

One of the presentations at Barcamplondon2 today was given by Jim Purbeck of Linden Labs who are the company behind Second Life ("SL"). He outlined plans that would overlay meta-data onto all the objects that existed within SL. This notion was described in the context of virtual RFID tags.

As such SL objects henceforth could be individually
and these objects would accumulate properties and data. This information would be publicly available both within SL and could be queried via APIs from outside. The notion about this was that ideas could be easily tried out, with feedback gathered by their developers and views also shared by a wider community.

More significantly, it was advanced that SL would provide an excellent testbed for examining whether RFIDs might add value in the real-world. For example, were they to be embedded into music CD jewel cases, then consumers might be able to both access extra data e.g. reviews, music samples. In addition, consumers might be able to contribute, albeit it was acknowledge that it doesn't work well in the example since leaving a comment on a CD in a single physical store didn't really make sense, since their comment was more widely targeted. But it might be a physical store RFID tag. Obviously it was hard to predict what the popular outcomes might be but that was the point.

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Wireless is a scarce resource

Or at least it is if you are attending BarcampLondon2.

BT who are hosting the event have allocated each attendee 24 hours of BT Openzone wireless access, for a two day event. Sadly the 24hr period is continuous from the first time you log in.

So, once you've used your 24hrs, you'll be off air at Barcamp - unreal yet so BT.

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BarcampLondon2 has started

Hosted by BT in the City, the event has drawn over 150 people for the weekend. Organised by Ian Forrestor (bbc backstage), the event has been sponsored by Backstage, O'Reilly, BT & Torchbox.

The auditorium is littered with people with a) apple macs b) cameras. As I have neither, I am in a small minority.

There's a few familiar faces including Jay from Snipperoo & Tom Morris, but there look to be many new faces at the event.

I am also the only VC investor here! Guess the rest must be recouperating from being in Barcelona at the mobile telecom industry event.

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