Power of One Live Blog – #P1event

I’m at the Battersea Power Station today for the Power of One event.

It’s a conference focused on how the individual can achieve in the technology industry.

There is a whoppingly impressive lineup of speakers from Jason Calacanis to Charles Arthur discussing everything related to technology and start up companies. If I miss quote you, please let me know!

The event was sponsored by Telefonica, so credit to them.

I’ll be updating this page throughout the day with the best bits. Hit F5!

Morten Lund - How I survived the European tech start up world, lessons learned

Disclosure: Morten is chairman of Tradeshift (an EML Wildfire client)

  • Be very careful about seeking capital. You can only really understand it if you do it yourself and there is no formula.
  • I love sales and people with stamina!
  • Made 50m EUROS so was loaded but bored. And then I fucked up and went bankrupt! It was scary. I saw how amazingly nice people can be.
  • Now I just focus. Focus on two companies.
  • Love marketing – I made this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP_vLqc9fnU
  • It’s simple, not easy.
  • Everyone should have done Dropbox, but no one did. If you don’t spend your investment on your prototype, you’re stupid.
  • Networking – people need to know you are in the game.
  • What is the next big thing? We don’t have a fucking clue.
  • You have to have no fear of losing. Starbucks lost $60m on Living.com.
  • Money matters less. People is everything.
  • There is a fine line between vision and hallucination.
  • All the odds are against you. Be speedy, be fast and be original.
  • Good people can succeed with a bad idea, bad people can’t succeed with a good idea.
  • If you pay in bananas, you get monkeys.

VC Panel chaired by Elizabeth Varley

Investing in companies that embody the Power of One – Jason Calacanis, Gonzalo Martin-Villa, Carlos Eduardo, Tyler Crowley

Here are the Twitter links for the panel – @evarley @Jason @steepdecline @delossantos_h @ceduardo

  • Do you need a lot of money or people to create something game-changing?
  • JC – depends on the product. For bio-tech you do. For internet startups it is possible for a few people to create something great with no funding.
  • TC – This question wouldn’t have been asked 10 years ago. In 10 years the question might be should you take VC money.
  • JC – when intelligent people invest in a company, you also get their attention. You get their input. It’s not the money, it is the attention on your business. These people are playing for pride, they are playing for the win.
  • TC – the question in music 10 years ago was can you make an album without a record label and, today, that is reality.
  • What is the optimal number of founders? Some VCs won’t invest in one-founder startups
  • CE – often we’ve seen the quicker a startup has a bigger team, the quicker they can kick off. They stop drinking the cool aid.
  • Do you invest in a person as much as you invest in a product?
  • CE – yes, often. It’s often a combination of the two though.
  • JC – typically with an entrepreneur either a light will shine on them or it won’t. It’s hard to say it is any one thing. If I had to pick a relentless entrepreneur with a glow in a tough, unattractive market than the other way round. As an investor if you know ‘that person is going to be successful with or without me’ then that is very attractive. When someone says ‘seven year projection’ I walk out the room. Why would I read your business plan? Show me your product.
  • JC – there are two buckets – people that create and people that talk about creating

Richard Kramer - When Finance Meets Tech: Not a Pretty Picture!

  • Former analyst and investment banker
  • See 200 tech companies a month – try and help investors see through the crap
  • Tech IPOs from the first half of 2010 really haven’t done very well. IPOs are not all they are shaped up to be.
  • The device market is the only growth area in the tech industry at the moment
  • The amount of money we spend on phones is rising quickly
  • There is way to much focus in this industry on the US and Europe – check out Asia
  • “Apple is God but we need a Chinese God” - quote from Chinese manufacturer
  • App stores are content stores
  • [These 70s slides need to be seen to be believed!]
  • Big opportunity in emerging markets for tablets to really be successful
  • A tablet is a big phone, a TV is a big tablet – apps need to be cross platform
  • Apple makes all its money by marking up flash – the higher spec iPhones/iPads are a cash cow. The same with iPad ‘smart covers’. Apple have a retail channel that makes it millions.
  • Samsung has the industry’s biggest advertising budget. Samsung makes money in a different way to Apple. Samsung Telecom is a distribution model for its memory and display products.
  • HTC have made $1/2bn of acquisitions in the last year. They are the only ones that have innovated on top of Android.
  • Nokia and RIM: the difficulty in this industry is execution and that is the problem these face. But they are still profitable so can get back in the game. But they need to change their lack of internet innovation.
  • Google has had colossal failures but it is big enough that it can just wipe them off. They should use Motorola to prototype new features.
  • Mobile payment – going to be very difficult to make money on it
  • Mobile advertising – even Google isn’t sure how much they are actually going to make on mobile advertising
  • Telco marketing is stale – based on device and price – nothing else. No innovation.
  • What’s unique about the customer experience with operators? Nothing. What about letting people change phone every 6 months?
  • Start with a community and the needs of that community.
  • A billion smartphones in 2013 and all will be co-branded with an internet company with deep integration [I guess Twitter is doing this with Apple now]

Stuart Arnott – The Power of One Pitch

  • The problem – I’m better connected to people I lost touch with over the years than the people I really care about
  • Started using digital photo frames to send photos in real-time. Connected to picture feeds with captions and linked to a calendar. You can include apps including weather and Facebook etc.
  • A way of staying in touch with people that live on their own or who are ill or infirm
  • www.mindings.com

Yosi Taguri - Launching a Mad idea – lessons from the Pah! iPhone app

  • “When I started my first company I fucked up!”
  • [This guy has plenty of energy!]
  • Talking about he was messed around by WPP and Google from an investment standpoint
  • Hard to live blog this, but he’s sharing lots of videos of people playing the Pah game
  • 1.5m YouTube views led to 2.5m game plays
  • Their measure of success? The number of shouts of Pah! 63m shouts! (they also made $60,000). Now they have made $250,000 developing similar apps for others
  • What did I learn from all this? If you make cool things, people will buy it. China has the biggest piracy but they also generate the most money from downloads. get the pricing structure right.
  • “If you have an idea and you are not doing it, you are stupid and ugly!”

Media panel with Charles Arthur - The shift to the Power of One – Stuart Dredge, Ewan McLoed, Tim Green

  • CA – everything these days is the media’s fault! Why does the media write about things? Why does it write about things?
  • How do you decide what to write about?
  • SD – I spend a long time trying to find the interesting stuff from all the other stuff out there
  • What makes something interesting?
  • SD – often it is a gut feel – it just stands out. It seems new, interesting, entertaining
  • TG – it is impossible to write about everything. So we have to focus on things that do things differently
  • EM – use my first name, read my site, check what I’m writing about
  • CA – It’s not about are you a big company, it’s more about if what you trying to do is different or interesting
  • SD – There is a lot of bullshit at the moment. Often it is the low key pitches that are the best – don’t over PR it
  • CA – first it was “we’ve got a website” that was news, then it was “we’ve got VC funding” that was news but then it stops being new
  • CA – often more sceptical if a company is making lots of noise, professional PR
  • CA – how important actually is journalism? Angry Birds wasn’t successful because it got lots of good press
  • What do you write about?
  • SD – it’s got to be about the readers. At the moment more readers have iPhones than Android but that will change in the next year
  • TG – it’s a self selecting audience as well as selective journalists
  • Is the future HTML5?
  • TG – a lot of this is about distribution. Better to go straight to the source, so web apps are clearly going to be important. The other angle to look at is perception and reality but how many apps do we all actually use on a regular basis?
  • EM – if you require high performance – games etc. – then clearly you need native apps but for everything else, HTML5 is the future. I think we’ll see 95-99% web app.
  • SD – as a consumer I don’t really care – I’ll go for what I want/need where I can get it and if it works then that’s all that matters. How you pay for stuff is interesting too with Facebook Credits now coming to the web.

David McCandless - Trends in tech start ups, the data you need to see

  • Title of presentation is ‘information is beautiful‘
  • Billions and trillions – it is impossible to get your head around them – made a visualisation
  • Do horoscopes all just say the same thing?
  • The story is often the journey through the data – this is data journalism
  • Never been to design school and have never been trained – only been designing very recently – had an innate design sense which was absorbed by working through media
  • We are all visualisers – we all expect data to be visual these days. Our eyes are always looking for patterns – it is the language of the eye combined with the language of the mind.
  • Who is suing whom in telecoms
  • Visualisations and infographics are a new kind of camera – Racist Profiling
  • David has a book of his infographics - http://www.davidmccandless.com/books/
  • Snake Oil visualisation app
  • Spend time curating your data and it becomes an asset

Sam Ramji - API’s are The Power of One companies secret weapon – @sramji

UPDATE – slides are here

  • Think about Darwin’s Finches and evolution
  • In the past business went from direct to indirect and the web is going through the same, that is why APIs are important
  • For successful companies 80% of traffic will come from beyond the browser, in a few years it will be 100%
  • Everyone has to play in the world the winners make – the 80:20 rule
  • In the world of APIs, the 80:20 rules often becomes to 99:1
  • Current environmental pressures – social, mobile and cloud – they can all come together
  • You can’t build new Facebooks or Twitters but you need to access them through APIs
  • Change agency – what is so damn wrong with the current model? I like it and I understand it – people fear the unknown
  • You need to be as close as possible to the problem you are trying to solve
  • Software is eating the world – Marc Andreessen
  • Bake your business model into your API

Jason Calacanis - Start your own tech business, you need attitude

This should be interesting. I’ve always had a bit love/hate with him but, whatever he is, he’s always engaging!

  • We live in fascinating times
  • He is a technological optimist – everything can be solved by technology
  • e.g. turning roads into solar panels to solve energy problems
  • The feature film Forks Over Knives examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled
  • The China Study details the connection between nutrition and heart disease, diabetes and cancer
  • There are more prescriptions for depression in the US as there are people
  • [He insists all this is coming back to tech and startups!]
  • Being an entrepreneur is painful and it is going to be depressing. You get through that depression by focusing on the end goal and getting excited [a good angel investor is really a therapist!]
  • Jason’s new book is called “A broken clock is right twice a day”
  • If your chance of winning is one in ten, have ten startups!
  • Key rule = create, don’t wait
  • Don’t worry if its not perfect, iterate
  • Ten years ago the cost of setting up a web startup was huge, now it isn’t – think what existed ten years ago
  • What do winners do? Stick with it and survive
  • We are the last generation that will remember when the internet didn’t exist
  • The problem with startups is too many people aren’t sticking with it - Steve Jobs quote to end the session

PR coup? Steve Jobs saves the best for last

The news that Steve Jobs has been forced to step down due to illness is incredibly sad. He was without doubt one of the business and technological pioneers of our age and the tech industry will be worse off without him.

But perhaps the best legacy Jobs could leave is a company that will continue to go from strength to strength. And I saw all the hallmarks of what has made him a great businessman and marketer in his resignation announcement last week.

As Charles Arthur suggested on the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast, the announcement – and its long build-up – was as perfectly staged as one of Apple’s product launches and is a PR coup; not so much for the short-term results but for the long-term survival of the company.

Tumbling stock

This might sound surprising. After all, the announcement made the front pages of newspapers throughout the world, had technology journalists pulled from their beds and caused Apple to lose $10bn off its stock price.

And yet, there was a general sense of inevitability that pervaded all the coverage. Jobs is clearly suffering from a terrible illness from which he may never fully recover and, by leaking details of this fact over the last few years, he has prepared the world – and the company he loves – for this day.

Stock prices recovered, journalists caught up on their beauty sleep and newspapers went back to the humdrum of August news.

So why was this a PR coup?

Just imagine how different it could have been if the world had known nothing of his struggles and if the announcement had come totally out of the blue. By leaking elements of his illness and by having periods where he even (temporarily) handed over full day-to-day control of the company, we’ve all been able to ‘get used’ to the fact that Steve Jobs wouldn’t be at the helm in the future.

In fact, Apple has always gone out of its way to push the ‘business as usual’ message and to continue its aggressive product release cycle, even when Steve was absent.

Timing is everything

The timing is interesting too. This announcement has come during a relatively quiet period in the global newscycle and only a few weeks before what many expect to be the launch of Apple’s latest incarnation of one of Steve’s most potent developments: the iPhone 4.5/5. It will mark the start of one of the most critical times of the year for the company in the run up to Christmas.

There have been many during the last week that have cast doubt on whether Apple can survive without Jobs. I think these assertions are naïve.  If we are to believe the rumours, Jobs is the master of preparation, making sure that every detail is completed before any product or service is released into the wild.

I have no doubt therefore that he will have planned long and hard for this. He will have made sure the right people are in place to take over the company and continue to drive it forward. Jobs is clearly a massive influence on Apple, but one man does not make a company. And he’s still around in any case, as Chairman of the board: another great PR stroke (amongst other things).

Filling a void

There is no doubt Apple will miss Jobs and indeed, so will the whole technology industry; this is a man that has achieved great things and his illness is tragic. But his greatest achievement will be to ensure that the company he has built into the richest in the world, continues to thrive long into the future.

I for one wouldn’t bet against him.

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Even Scoble agrees with me that Quora is all hype!

On Thursday, I wrote a blog about how I was amazed at the amount of hype Quora was receiving.

One of the main perpetrators of this hype has been tech blogger extraordinare, Robert Scoble.

A month ago, he was full of praise for the service:

“Thanks Quora for providing a great community and way for people to communicate about what’s interesting in their lives in a new way. That’s innovation in blogging.”

And yet, today we get this:

“Turns out I was totally wrong [about it being a good service for blogging]. It’s a horrid service for blogging, where you want to put some personality into answers. It’s just fine for a QA site, but we already have lots of those and, in fact, the competitors in this space are starting to react… Even worse, I’m getting dozens of emails from people pissed that their questions have been changed, their answers marked “not helpful,” or that they got kicked off the service altogether. Admittedly one of the things I really love about the service is there is very little, if any, spam and everyone is forced to use their real name, but lots of people want to talk about their business or not use their real names.”

Hyperventilating nerds

Scoble is part of the problem. He is the embodiment of the problems the technology industry (and the media) has when it comes to overhyping the latest thing.

Those of us who class ourselves as geeks are always running around hypervenilating over the next ‘new thing’. If you’ve seen any of Scoble’s videos with new tech CEOs you’ll know what I mean. The sycophantic idol-worship he emits as he runs around demoing every new piece of software like a hamster on steroids is quite laughable really.

To be fair to Scoble, he’s pretty honest when he’s made a mistake and judged something unfairly as this post shows

And maybe we need people like Scoble. He pushes things into the limelight for the crowd to decide. Some succeed, most fail.

Services like Quora become victims of their own hype (or Scoble and Techcrunch’s hype). Victims of their own PR.

All PR isn’t good PR

Is this a bad thing? Maybe services like Quora that try very hard are just never deemed to succeed, or at least not on the scale some might think. They won’t be the next Twitter or Facebook or Google, but then the vast majority of businesses never will be.

In the comments in Scoble’s piece, some are comparing Quora to Digg. The latter is a service that, although has often promised much, it never reached the heights some predicted. Instead it is a pleasure ground for geeks. Not that this is a bad thing. Digg is a very successful operation with a healthy revenue stream. Quora could do worse.

The wisdom of the crowd

At the end of the day, the wisdom of the crowd will prevail.

While some of us geeks would love everything we see to become super brilliant, with Scoble at the front as some larger than life cheerleader, most of them never will.

The market and the crowd will always decide.

And that’s what makes this roulette wheel of the tech start up world so utterly addictive!

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How much do musicians earn online?

Following on from my post last week about the digital economy bill, I came across this really interesting infographic from Information is Beautiful, which presents a fascinating side to the debate.

The conclusions are, I think, quite self-explanatory, but it still doesn’t make the bill itself any more justified…

hat tip to Max :)

Technological ignorance and the digital economy bill

I watched with interest the progress of the digital economy bill last week. If you missed the news about it, the Government succeeded in pushing through the bill in the ‘wash-up’ period – the days before parliament is dissolved in preperation for the election.

The DEB brings about a range of new laws and legislations, but the most controversial are the actions that ISPs can now take against illegal file-sharers. ISPs must now send a series of letters to any internet account holder whose line has been used for illegal activities. If the activities still occur, the ISP will be permitted to terminate the account for a certain period.

For me, the bill is a great example of how badly technology is still understood and how difficult this issue is to solve. This bill is clearly intended to root out the worst file-sharers and stop the downloading and sharing of illegal material; but it will do nothing of the sort.

File-sharers will always find ways round the system – the use of VPNs or FTPs have already been touted by many as a way of encrypting the flow of content.

The people this bill will potentially hurt is those who don’t know that illegal activity is happening on their account – parents, small businesses, hotels etc.

Could this even see the end of free Wifi?

For me, this is an incredibly short-sighted bill. One that has come about through intense lobbying by a body that is shit scared of what will happen to it in the future – the music and film industry. And both of the main parties (excluding of course Tom Watson and a few others) are equally to blame.

I have much sympathy for content creators, indeed I used to work in the music industry so know the problems inside out. This is just not the way to deal with it.

When technology is concerned, there is often no quick fix, but there is often plenty of ignorance.

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6 different Apple-related tweets you’ll see today

Just a bit of fun – I’ve done at least 3/4 of these today alone. Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments – I’ll add to the list…!

The fan-boy – probably best to avoid this person today

Likely tweet: “only 8 hours to go….”

The greater-than-thou – feels they are above all the Apple talk”

Likely tweet: “Apparently there is some sort of product launch going on today”

The I-like-all-gadgets-except-Apple – goes out of their way to buy anything but Apple”

Likely tweet: “If the iSlate ran Android it would be so much faster”

The journalist – riding the Apple buzz wave

Likely tweet: “We’ll be live tweeting blow-by-blow coverage from 6pm today”

The denier – will talk about anything apart from Apple all day

Likely tweet: “Nokia just launched the N756483647 everyone”

The PR analyst – will be consumed by the brilliant way Apple manages the PR around the launch

Likely tweet: “Love the way Apple leaked the news to the Walt Mossberg in advance”

The social media guru – will go on incessantly about how the buzz is being picked up on social media

Likely tweet: “Expect to see a fail whale very soon”

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What will be in the iPhone 4G?

Everyone that knows me well, knows that I am slightly addicted to my iPhone. And, Nexus One withstanding (it’s not a game changer), I’m looking forward to upgrading to the iPhone 4G when it likely comes out later this year.

With Apple set to announce the iSlate next Wednesday, combined possibly with an upgrade to the iPhone’s OS, it’s set to be an exciting year for Apple fanboys.

So I was intrigued to see this little infographic yesterday from French website Nowhere Else – it’s enough to whet my appetite…!

Mingly – a possible solution for social media overload

I don’t want to write another 2010 prediction type post – I’ve written a few already! But, in the first few days of the New Year, I’m already seeing a lot of noise around a trend that I expect will grow by necessity in 2010 and beyond.

As social media and social networks in particular increase in popularity, there is an increasing information overload. Managing your connections across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Foursquare and the like becomes a full time job in itself.

So services that try and combine this are going to become more and more prevalent.

One example of such a service is Mingly. The product is currently in ‘alpha’, but you can read all about it here.

Now this is my kind of startup – a company that sees a real need and tries hard to solve a problem without borrowing millions of VC money to get started.

Could this be a good example of a brave new wave of post-recession entrepreneurs? I hope so, there are too many useless startups around at the moment.

With Chrome Google can conquer the world

If you were in any doubt as to where Google’s big new focus is, then the advert above in the Metro last week should give you an idea. Google has been relentless in its advertising of it’s Chrome browser across the UK and abroad. Google even suggests you give your loved ones the (gift-wrapped of course) browser for Christmas.

Following my post last week about the new Chrome advert, it seems Google is determined to really push the browser out to a mainstream audience.

Is this final frontier for Google before world domination?

Despite having control of most of what we do in the browser, Google knows that for full technological control over our lives, it needs to own the one thing we need to link the offline and the online – the browser.

And with Google Chrome OS set to launch next year, the rewards for getting this right could be huge.

I’ve been using Chrome on my work PC and it is prett fast, I like the new extensions too (the only aspect that until now was forcing me to cling onto Firefox).

If cloud computing really is going to be a major trend for 2010, then it looks as though Google – and Chrome – is well placed to take advantage. How will Microsoft et al respond?

About

This is my story. I've always been fascinated by the internet. My first passion was music and I studied a music degree at Birmingham University. But once graduated I quickly went back to the web working as a digital marketer. I also ran a web startup for a few years. In the need of a new challenge, I turned to the world of PR and now work as an Account Director at EML Wildfire. My interest is primarily looking at how PR professionals can make the most of the web and digital marketing. This blog contains my thoughts and things I find inspirational.

© 2012 Danny Whatmough - Made by me