Traveling Geeks

The acceptance of failure as a spur to innovation

Recently, I was part of the Traveling Geeks tour of UK tech, including the
Reboot Britain conference. (The Geeks are a collection of talented
journalists, and myself.)

I was struck by the repeated comment that failure is stigmatized in UK
business culture. In Silicon Valley, failure is just a normal phase of
one's career. You might succeed in your first endeavor, probably not, so
you're ready to persist in subsequent efforts.

That is, there's some expectation of failure and the expectation that
you'll get over it.

This is not unique to Silicon Valley, but it's far more expected here than
anywhere I've heard. The attitude is the norm here, but in a lot of
places failure continues to be stigmatized, and it's hard to recover.

It seems that widespread innovation and success requires the acceptance of
failure, and then a readiness to move on.

That's generally true in Silicon Valley, maybe needs to be true in the UK
and maybe everywhere else.

UK Diary: Tuesday – It Never Rains But It Pours . . . More BT Innovation

Tuesday afternoon with the Traveling Geeks and we are over at BT HQ seeing half-a-dozen presentations from its business units.

We were a little wet from dodging torrential rain bursts. But the afternoon sessions are interesting.

Meghan Asha was impressed by BT’s programmable broadband service:

BT’s Open Broadband is a BRILLANT solution to broadband issues for businesses. What is it exactly? As far as I can understand, it allows companies to easily program broadband strength with a couple paragraphs of XML for specific websites. This is fantastic for stream gaming where you’re gaming via the cloud. In short, this is perfect for any application that needs guaranteed bandwidth. I love this idea, if only someone would implement it in the US. My first site request would be YouTube (bah!).

Click here for more info on the development of Open Broadband.

BT’s Programmable Broadband!

Innovation apprentice

We also heard about BT’s apprentice program, which involves several hundred high school students every year. BT sets up day camps where young people brainstorm new ideas. Then it offers to show them how ideas are developed into commercial products. It’s an excellent program. Interestingly, school drop outs are encouraged to attend — it’s more about ideas and passion than it is about how well someone did at school.

A level playing field

BT is tightly regulated and it must provide equal access to its telecom infrastructure to any company. This is fine for BT because it is keen to have many companies create innovative applications on top of this platform, in addition to the new services it is rolling out itself.

I asked JP Rangaswami, Managing Director of Innovation and strategy at BT, how does BT avoid the impression that it could become a competitor to the companies it is hoping will use its advanced communications platform.

“We make sure that we only innovate around platform services and leave the applications alone,” he said. “We want to avoid the criticism that others such as Microsoft have had about this issue.”

I mentioned that four years ago I was at an event where Rob Hull, a business development manager at BT Group was talking with local entrepreneurs and hoping to lure them to the UK and have them use BT’s telecom platform. Mr Hull said that BT would split the revenues with the startups 80 percent, with 20 percent for BT.

However, should their service become hugely popular, BT reserved the right to port the application to its machines and reverse a 20 percent / 80 percent revenue split in its favor! I was shocked.

(Silicon Valley startups told: Come to London … BT wants your business! – SiliconValleyWatcher)

Mr Rangaswami said that this provision no longer exists. Since he joined BT in 2006, he’s made sure to ensure there is very competitive platform for developers without fear of BT coming in and scooping up the rewards from popular services.

Next: We’re back into the rain and off to the Guardian newspaper…

Tips for Using YouTube for Affiliate Marketing from Econsultantcy’s “The Innovation Report” #TG2009

As a Traveling Geek in London, I participated in a Round Table Discussion event with some of Econsultancy’s clients.

See the TG2009 Econsultancy Flickr Set Here

As a follow up to the event, I was given a copy of their very well done Innovation Report.

Econsultancy Innovation Report for Digital Marketing

If you want a high level overview of some of the hottest technology companies in the digital media and marketing space, this report does a great job with highlighting best practices in the following disciplines:

• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing
• Online advertising
• Multichannel marketing
• Online customer service
• Online PR
• Social media and communities
• Search marketing
• Usability and user experience
• Web analytics and optimization

One of the most interesting sections to me was on using video to drive affiliate traffic, written by Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit. (Most of the companies featured are European, but this example of a “best practice” was from Shawn, a US affiliate champion.)

For more free and in-depth coverage on video, I interview Bruce Clay about Video SEO on DishyMix airing today:

Bruce Clay on Video SEO, Page Rank Sculpting and Search Siloing Strategies

From Econsultancy’s Innovation Report

Video as a channel to drive direct traffic to affiliate links
Category: Affiliate Marketing
Company: http://blog.affiliatetip.com/
Many affiliates use video as a channel to drive traffic, but one innovative tactic to drive through higher volumes is to include the URL of the affiliate site and embed it within the video itself.  According to Shawn Collins, few affiliates are making use of video to either drive traffic to their
own sites or to affiliate links directly. Shawn Collins tested various online video engagement strategies, trialling videos through a number of popular sites, including YouTube, MySpace, Revver and Yahoo Video.
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkX7xHvTIe0

http://blog.affiliatetip.com/

Per Shawn Collins, co-founder, Affiliate Summit

?I have tested various methods over the past year… and found that the following format works best:
http://www.affiliatesite.com/product-name – I then create a redirect via an .htaccess file, so that /product-name
points to the affiliate link. The URL is featured for the duration of the video uploaded to the video sites.

?Conventional wisdom may be that people do not type in URLs in videos – I‘d like to share a secret that the
conventional wisdom is incorrect!

UK Diary: Tuesday – Seed Camp’s Highflyers

(Photo Susan Bratton.) Tuesday morning the Traveling Geeks were at Seed Camp. I couldn’t make it but here are some of our reports:

Susan Bratton: My Impression of UK and Euro Entrepreneurs from Today’s Seedcamp NESTA “Speed Dating” Adventure

We started off the day today with a fun event created by Reshma Sohoni and Alasdair Ball ofSeedCamp. SeedCamp is an early stage fund that also provides exacting business support and grooming for UK and European start ups who are socially-oriented. Typical investments are up to 50 thousand Euros for about 10% of the business.

By the caliber of the entrepreneurs and the quality of the business ideas I witnessed today, Reshma and her team are making smart investments and providing wise and plished council for the entrepreneurs they back.

Every single one of the thirteen companies was, in my estimation, a great idea combined with a terrific leader or team. The most successful to date include Spotify, the European version of Rhapsody’s “all-you-can-eat for one monthly fee” celestial jukebox…

My Impression of UK and Euro Entrepreneurs from Today’s Seedcamp NESTA “Speed Dating” Adventure

Craig Newmark reports:

Hey, the folks at Seedcamp, with NESTA, have done remarkable work with a number of British Net-related companies. My fellow geeks spoke with the following day; I was consistently impressed, these guys have real stuff. I’ve already started using some of their work:

Basekit Rapid website design and development tools.

Groupspaces Group webspaces.

Huddle Huddle.net combines live conferencing,
project management software and document sharing.

Kwaga creating a new revolutionary service that will
help you manage your mail.

Moo miniature business cards

Qype Local reviews on everything

School of Everything puts teachers in touch
with potential student

Skimlinks hyperlinks keywords in websites

Spotify legally downloading songs.

Stupeflix automatically arranges and animates
banks of pictures.

Ubervu meta-web 2.0, merges and tracks
conversations and feeds across the web.

Zemanta dynamic text editor that assists in
content creation and addition

Songkick music concert online database.

Cambridge’s Nokia Labs Key Research Areas

I’m at Nokia Labs in Cambridge England looking at their latest innovations under the hood. Four Key research areas for them include: rich context modeling, new user interfaces, high performance mobile platforms and cognitive radio.

We looked at smart surface materials that externally control color change as well as nano sensing in future mobile devices.

Consider the mobile opportunities with over 3 billion mobile subscribers today. The Labs folks tout an outstanding statistic: up to 90% of the 6 billion people on earth will have mobile coverage by 2010. Note the adjective coverage, not mobile phones.

We also covered physical and digital worlds from personal to global sensor information.

Below Nokia’s head of social media worldwide: Mark Squires in Cambridge.

Colalife: using Coca-Cola distribution network for social good

Well, Colalife.org, something casually observed at NESTA, as part of the Traveling Geeks tour in the UK, is a bigger deal than I expected.

UK Startups Look For Funding And Escape From Echo Chamber

I’ve been meeting a lot of UK entrepreneurs as part of the Traveling Geeks trip and I’m hearing a lot of the same things US startups tell me. They are looking for funding and also fed up with seeing the same people at their meetups.

Funding is a big problem in the UK because there are very few European VC funds actively investing. And very few angels. Many startups are looking to the US for funding but they tell me that most US VC firms have closed their UK offices.

One entrepreneur told me: “We’re thinking of relocating some of our team to San Francisco so that we can be closer to the VC firms. Several VC firms have told us that they love our product but we are not over there. And so they wouldn’t consider investing.”

That was a common theme: that US VCs won’t invest in startups unless they are in Silicon Valley.

I didn’t have the heart to tell people that even if you are in Silicon Valley funding is really tough right now.

I ran into Don Thorson from Silicon Valley based Ribbit yesterday. Ribbit had a very nice exit about a year ago when BT bought the company for $105 million.

Mr Thornson was in town for a board meeting at BT. We began talking about startup funding and he was complaining that the Silicon Valley VCs aren’t doing any investing. He says there are some very good startups around but many have just a few months of runway left.

This is a serious situation. If we can’t have sustained funding we won’t have a crop of next generation companies to harvest when exits open up.

It’s one thing to have no exits but it’s another to have no companies to exit. That means no new money to reinvest in Silicon Valley.

The UK entrepreneurs regularly get together at various events but many are getting fed up seeing the same faces and hearing the same stories. I can relate.

– One entrepreneur told me: “I’ve started going to fewer events because I wasn’t getting much value from them. And everyone’s business ideas started sounding very similar. I’d rather spend some time developing some original ideas.”

The UK entrepreneurs are heavily into social media and Twitter. Some hope to be acquired by larger startups that have the potential to go public once financial markets open up. But when that happens is anyones guess because the UK economy continues to splutter.

Right now, it seems that a few seed investments would go far in the UK. A few angel investors could make some smart bets at good valuations.

I’ll mention some of the startups I’ve been meeting in a later post.

My Impression of UK and Euro Entrepreneurs from Today’s Seedcamp NESTA “Speed Dating” Adventure

We started off the day today with a fun event created by Reshma Sohoni and Alasdair Ball of SeedCamp.  SeedCamp is an early stage fund that also provides exacting business support and grooming for UK and European start ups who are socially-oriented. Typical investments are up to 50 thousand Euros for about 10% of the business.

By the caliber of the entrepreneurs and the quality of the business ideas I witnessed today, Reshma and her team are making smart investments and providing wise and plished council for the entrepreneurs they back.

Every single one of the thirteen companies was, in my estimation, a great idea combined with a terrific leader or team. The most successful to date include Spotify, the European version of Rhapsody’s “all-you-can-eat for one monthly fee” celestial jukebox; Huddle, which bills itself as the collaboration tool for the MySpace generation (I will do a separate post on Huddle for you as I know you will want to try it) and Moo.com, the on-demand printing company with a smart solution for mass-customized printed products like business cards, stickers and “moo cards” which are their own smaller, clever creation that’s become a standard with the social set.

Other companies that stood out for me were SkimLinks not only because Alicia Navarro was the only female CEO, but also because she’s in a very hot category – website monetization infrastructure. More on SkimLinks arresting start up story and how it works in a very smart way in another post.

The one person with whom I didn’t get to meet but still was very impressed with their initial presentation was Stupeflix. Perhaps the name doesn’t translate well in the US – why would someone want to start the beginning of their company name with a word that sounds like stupid? Nonetheless, this is beyond a cute video creation tool like Animoto, Stupeflix allows you to use XML to slightly change the assets within any video to create multiple unique versions of a video. Best explained by example, they showed a weather video where the location and temperature were automatically changed for various locations on the fly. You could master one video and then have unlimited versions automatically customized by city.

Andraz Tori of Zemanta gave me a quick and helpful demo of his blog writing suggestion tool. This authoring suggestion tool provides related links, images, related stories and more which make every blog post have more robust content and links. I’ve been using it so far this week and can tell you I would not give this tool up now that I’ve used it.

Another tool I have not yet tried but know will be addictive is UberVu. This is one of a new breed of social meta tools, like MobyPicture (recent post about MobyPicture) that aggregates comments from across one’s social sites into a single interface where you can see comments from your followers to your posts, all threaded together in a single application. You can reply to those threads within UberVu and it will place your replies back out in context without requiring you to do so much webpage traveling.  UberVu’s idea of providing reporting for rollup data will significantly help the social media managers and social listening companies keep track of all their conversations in a single UI. There’s a business model in this one, though it may take a few attempts to right-size the offering and prices.

I have to run off to The Guardian – we’re doing a podcast round table there. It’s pouring rain like hell and I wish I could just keep telling you about the companies we met today. I promise to write more to you about some of the individual companies, many of whom are in early or private beta.

On Organizational Growth & Use of Sales at Reboot Britain

Jeff Saperstein spoke today at Reboot Britain in London on opening up organizations for growth. He walked the audience through various case studies, which included how sales is currently being used in these organizations. Here’s a quick overview on two of them in a short video clip.

How one company uses Web 2.0 tools to run and promote their business

Everyone wants to be more efficient, productive, and successful. We’re constantly seeking advice on Lifehacker. We gravitate toward any post entitled “How to …” or “Top tips to …” And we’re feeding self-help book publishers who dominate 25 percent of the publishing market.

Rarely, though, do we get an opportunity to see one person or one organization completely open up the kimono and show us step by step how they deploy all of these time and cost saving techniques to actually run their business. (more…)