edublogs

Guy Kawasaki: The Art Of The Start in Scotland

Guy Kawasaki came to Edinburgh to help 100s of students, startups and investors understand better how to make the world a better place through startups.

1. Make meaning
The great tech companies did much more than make money. They made the world a better place, they brought meaning to people. If you want to make a great startup make sure that you are and that you surround yourself with people who want to make changes to the world - this is why an MBA is the worst possible member of your startup management team.

Efficacy, power and liberation is the message we get from cotton, leather and rubber, via Nike. What's the message we get from you about your startup or big idea?

Ice 1.0
Ice harvesters of the 1900s ran an explosive business gathering ice. Later, ice factories produced mass quantities of ice for people. Then refrigerator companies destroyed both businesses. The ice factories were not started by the ice gatherers; the refrigerator companies were not started by the ice factory people. Most people, most startups, fail to jump the curve - they think they'll just carry on without change. They think of the product they make, rather than what they provide (and then coming up with different, ever-changing products to achieve that provision better).

2. Make mantra
Find meaning for your mission, but don't make a mission statement. Delete anything that would qualify for a bullshit bingo competition: partnership, collaboration, cooperation. These are givens. A mantra should be repeatable by everyone in the company, and everyone in the company should be able to make decisions based on that: Do It First, Inspire Change, Make Trouble.

3. Get going
Think different - don't be another ice harvester
Polarise people - have the courage to create the product or service that you would want to use. Some people will hate it and some people will love it. If you try to make something that makes everyone happy then you'll make something mediocre.
Find a few soul mates - genius does not happen alone. You need someone to bounce ideas around with.

4. Define a business
Keep it simple - paradigm-shifting, patent-pending technologies are not going to tempt most people. Most folk want something that can be made, sold and collect money. Keep your business model simple.
Ask women what they think of your business model - Guy believes that men, deep in their DNA, have a deep disposition to kill things: people, animals, plants... the competition. Killing the competition is a bad business model in and of itself. Don't count on that to convince people.

5. Milestones, Assumptions, Tasks - Weave a MAT
Milestones are things you would brag about to your friends: "we finished the design", "we produced our product"; "we shipped today". It's not "we made a logo".
Assumptions are based on, say, getting a tiny percentage out of a huge market: there are 1.2bn on the net, and we only need 0.1% on our service to become zilloinnaires.
Define the tasks required to open up your potential: hire a sales person.

6. Work out your ability to provide a unique product or service

What is unique and valuable about your idea?

7. Follow the 10/20/30 rule
Every pitch a VC (or Commissioner) hears is unique, paradigm-shifting, patent-pending, with a proven management team who are experts in what they do, who only need a small part of a huge market to make loads of money (conservatively speaking). Less is more. Tell us:

• The title
• The Problem
• The Solution
• The Business Model
• The Underlying Magic
• The Marketing and Sales
• The Competition
• The Team
• The Projections and Milestones
• The Status and Timeline
• The Call To Action

More on what goes in these over on Guy's blog.

8. Hire infected people
If you get a great horse then any idiot can ride it to the finish line. But were they responsible for getting it there?
Ignore the irrelevant, the lack of their 'perfect' background for the job and, instead, concentrate on those who "get it".
Hire people, surround yourself with people who are passionate about changing the world with your stuff. Hire people who are better than you - the hardest part of the startup is not the engineering. Marketing and sales, CEO-ing, community-building are just as hard and you need to work out what you're not good at, and get in people are are good at it.

9. Lower the barriers to adoption
The learning curve for startups' products is often too complex. People need to be able to fire up and go for it. If they need a manual or training for your stuff, then it's too complex. Lower the barriers to adoption. In Edinburgh, the one o'clock gun goes off at precisely one o'clock so that you can set your watch. It doesn't go off at noon because they'd have to fire twelve times and the users wouldn't know whether to set at the beginning or the end of the 12 chimes.
Don't ask people to do something that you wouldn't.
Embrace your evangelists. Those customers or users who love what you do need to be thanked, embraced, give them information, give them the ability to help new people into the fold.

10. Seed the clouds
Sales fixes everything. Your investors are probably facing 90% of their portfolio not making money, so if you're in that successful (even vaguely successful) 10% they'll not bother you.
Let a hundred flowers blossom. When "the wrong people" are using your service don't freak out, don't tell them how it's not their service to use - take their money and embrace them. Apple made spreadsheets, but Aldus Pagemaker was the "wrong product" but turned Apple into a media-making-enabler company.
Enable people to test drive your product. People need to be able to be playing before paying. Find the key influencers in your community and give them the product for free.

11. Don't let the Bozos grind you down
Get yourself immunised against Bozosity:

• This "telephone" has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
  Western Union internal memo, 1876
  
  
• Everything that can be invented has been invented.
  Charles H Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899
  
  
• I think there is a world market for about five computers.
  Remark attributed to Thomas Watson, chairman of the board of IBM, 1943
  
  
• There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
  Ken Olsen, President of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

On the flip side, it's not the case that we should be writing off anyone who says no. People who say no can sometimes be right - take on their advice and work out if you can ignore it.

Pic: From Alex. Thanks ;-)

4iP supporting BarCampScotland 2009

In 2007 I was one of a merry band of four geeks and entrepreneurs who kicked off the BarCamp phenomenon in Scotland. Back for its third year now, I'm over the moon that 4iP is able to support an event that can provide the launchpad for new collaborations, ideas and inspiration in the online and mobile space.

The invite is open to the event on March 14th at Edinburgh's School of Informatics' Appleton Tower, and anyone with an interest in learning more about what's going on in the digital space or who has something to share can sign up their name on the BarCampScotland site.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. In the evening there is a (for some time, at least) free bar and one of the country's best opportunities to network with a wide range of entrepreneurs, startups, coders, creatives and researchers.

The opportunity for learning how Scotland's own technologies and talent can further our ideas is priceless. You can get a flavour for previous events on Flickr. The pic here is from Mike Coulter.

Social media and ambient intimacy for software engineers

When you're designing a new piece of kit, a platform for the web or a nifty widget for Bebo, it's vital that you have an audience in mind, an understanding of what might be possible, and the ability to change your plans frequently without sacrificing the integrity of your project. That was the main message at my lecture to the BScs and BEngs at Napier University, Edinburgh, today.

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Why the 'users' are different

The generation of 21st Century 'users' would not appreciate the title. They are contributors, creators, co-creators, participants... 90% of 15-25 year olds have visited their social network in the past month, vast numbers of these Bebo Boomers using the platform in ways the platform engineers hadn't dreamt of.

Expertise comes in different forms from before. It won't be long before PhDs will be submitted on YouTube. Wine buffs don't need to wear particular clothes and visit stuffy vineyards; you can be an expert on your own blog, or have your passion facilitated and encouraged by the platform itself. You don't have to visit a pub to feel like you're a regular. You can join its Facebook group or take a peek at what's going on through its Flickr photo pool.

The main global shifts affecting innovation

With technology providing a means for consumers, users, participators to take part in the co-creation of products, services and knowledge (think Dell's community, Seesmic's relationship around product development with its users (as many follow it as it follows; its users are fanatical) and educationalists around the world, or Wikipedia, even), it means that competition in the space to have your voice heard and your service used has never been greater.

Daniel Pink notices what technology has allowed to happen, and sums it up with the three 'A's.

Asia

What happens in Asia won't take long to happen elsewhere. At the moment if it's mobile, it's happening, yet so few software engineers start out by thinking how they'll make a mobile app usable on the web. Instead, we see companies struggle to make mobile products from the web. The one exception to this: Twitter. Asia's not only a growing market but a global one: China will soon be the number one English-speaking country in the world, its top 5% of graduates numbering more than the whole population of the UK. They have more gifted and talented students than we have students. Change is on the cards, with tomorrow's teens facing over 29 jobs in their lifetime, which means long-term planning and big budget developments risk more failure for software engineers than small-scale, agile, flexible development.

Abundance

The need for being mobile has never been greater. What's this? Or this? Try this then. With 426,000 mobiles being chucked out every year in the States alone, the signal is this: mobile telephony and internet access is not only burgeoning, but consumers are becoming fans, and want to engage with the latest, most powerful kit. They need apps that push their devices and they will be ready to chuck the device before they chuck the web service that makes their mobile tick (think iPhone).

Automation

Automation of search has probably been the one most important automation to have taken place since the net was born. Everyone has become a cataloguer, but people still need help understanding the stories large amounts of data can tell. To prevent information overload, we need computer designers and engineers to come up with ever more ingenius ways to find and present information to the 'user'/co-creator. Jonathan Harris is getting there, showing us some degree of geography in the way we feel (the web's never been great at location or time) or time and pace in a photograph.

Automation of copy and paste has also meant that we have the potential to be more creative - or a lot less creative. It might be down to software engineers to design interfaces that make it more fun to be original than to be a copy cat. Adidas seem to  be having some success on Jumpcut with their sneaker remizes.

We also talked about the role of the engineer in adoption strategy, especially when such a strategy feeds back into the development of further fuctionality, and how privacy issues, which can sometimes be the death of a project, can lend itself to structuring social media projects for particular groups of potential participants. Case in point: ARGs and Voluntary Computing.

Ultimately, as we started, we saw that the potent power of the net is not in code, but in people. If we can code to bring people together, the right people at just the right time, then we release the potential. It's hard to do this, with most software engineers working in groups where the ideas and direction may come from mere mortals like myself ;-) Communication, therefore, remains a key skill, and one that is often underdeveloped until the engineer is summoned to Demo and given a course by Shel. I love the way some developers express themselves in presentations at the likes of Demo or BarCamp, or in YouTube videos: this SecondLife development is more beautiful in its development than in the final product, I'd argue.

The easiest way to communicate with potential clients, employers or programming peers? A blog. In this case, if you're developing software for the web, for the social web at that, there's no excuse to be towards the end of a university career with no means to market yourself and build contacts in the slightly less cossetted world out there.

Software developers need to jump on every bandwagon going, to see if it's headed anywhere (thanks, Mike). They need to make sure that, using the tools of the ambiently intimate, they are at the front of the minds of everyone who matters to them now and into the future.

5/5: Having a bash - social media gets social

This is the final element of five parts in a personal learning log review of 2007. It might be of  help to you, might not be. Bear with me, and normal service will be resumed...

In 2006 I had started to organise TeachMeets and various other informal unconferences for teachers and techies to talk about teaching, learning and technology, preferably with large doses of beer, bordeaux and blogs. I eventually got around to learning some of the things to do, and not to do, and the events continue to provide a safe haven for some of the most inspirational teachers to inspire and be inspired. In 2007 this continued apace:

January 7th and March 3rd: The inaugural BarCampScotland, which I helped create, was announced and ended up being a resounding success, with 150-odd attendees from across the tech and education industry meeting on common social media ground. December 15th, and the second BarCampScotland is announced for February 2nd 2008.

January 19th, and Edinburgh Coffee Morning began, every Friday from that point at 8am in Centotre. Since then, these coffee morning boys (and the occasional woman) have become great friends and allies as we try to get more social media projects undertaken in Scotland. It continues to be a source of inspiration, finds, community-building and trading of work.

On February 4th we talked about Glow, life, love, blogging and education in a Stormhoek-fuelled haze as Hugh MacLeod paid some Scottish edubloggers a visit in their local.

On April 30th I announced the third edition of TeachMeet to be taking place in Edinburgh on May 23rd: we had a great time and learned loads.

By June 23rd we were ready for some more learning and drinky-poos, hence the inaugural Beer 2.0. Such as success it was, we did Beer 2.0.1 the following week.

August 9th marked the first steps towards TeachMeet07, the fourth edition to be held at Glasgow's Science Centre on September 19th, and gnerously sponsored for the first time, by Channel 4, whose In The Wild event brought the discussion of young people's media habits to a wider audience still.

Almost simultaneously, we had calls and requests for England and Wales' first TeachMeet, at BETT on January 11th 2008.

This will also be the first job to get through on the return to work this January, and I hope to be able to see you in London on January 11th. I wonder what the main innovations will be in 2008. Maybe I'll try to predict something which eventually becomes true, or gets lost until next year's roundup. That, however, is at least one more year to put down to experience...

Related posts:
1/5: Hit or miss? Spotting innovation that's worth spotting
2/5: The changing ways of the public sector
3/5: eduBuzz: East Lothian online publishing increases 5000%
4/5: Building a business
5/5: Having a bash - social media gets social

10 Top Tips for Unplanning the Perfect Unconference

What's the secret of some of the unconferences in recent years that have had educators and learners excited, enthralled and changing their ways of working and thinking? Well, I'm not sure there is a secret per se, but having unplanned a good dozen or so unconferences and visited a score more there are some things that keep cropping up from which we can all learn.

As we head hurtling towards an online-offline unconference at the Scottish Learning Festival, that is, TeachMeet07 on the evening of September 19th (sign up now!), I've also been preparing some of the ground for another year of TeachMeet Roadshows in East Lothian, informal, funky training events which have already proven highly successful in getting some swift and sustained adoption of new technologies in our classrooms. Both use the following ten top tips.
 
 

1. Get started on your (cool) terms
   "Right, if I can have your attention please. Just a minute. Great. Now, I would like to introduce to you..."... Oh dear. We all know it. It's like being back in the rows at school, waiting to see someone very important attempt to hold our attention for an hour with more bullets than you could point at the Sundance Kid and that drawl we remember from the adults in Charlie Brown (it was actually a trombone, did you know?).
   
   If you want people's attention before you get started proper, don't let someone else bring you down before you even get started, and don't start by effectively telling off your participants. Learn from the way jazz musicians get started. Make the opening to the presentation enticing, using some video or the cadence to some quieter musak you've cued up to grab attention or mark the beginning of your spot.
    
    
2. Conference participants, not bystanders
   From the weeks before the conference even takes place get your attendees to suggest topics, spread the word and market the conference to their friends, by displaying a logo or taking part in Facebook groups, for example.
   
   The worst thing that can happen for a conference or training event is for people to go home actively disagreeing with what one (or all) the presenters had to say. You've got to provide an opportunity for people to make their views known and give the presenters a fighting chance of bringing them around.
   
   Q&A is one way to do this but people haven't really had time to digest and come up with a good question. By far the best thing to do is get people up presenting themselves. Back-to-back shorter presentations of soapboxes are often entertaining, always interesting given the divergent views and let people get it off their chest. It also opens up the conversations in the more informal parts of the conference, since people know who they want to go to talk to.
    
    
3. Make the conference the coffee break
   We all know the best parts of conferences are, of course, the coffee breaks and social events, where you get a chance to pore over someone's laptop for 15 minutes and learn one new really cool thing you can actually use, have late-night discussions over serious stuff, helped along by a few drops of amber. Why not just make this the conference itself? Provide coffee and tea all day long, lots of muffins and biscuits like they did at Reboot and, even better, open a bar like we do at BarCamp.
    
    
4. Flat pack your conference
   Let people make up their own conference. One of my favourite parts of BarCampScotland and Reboot9.0 were the large blank sheets of paper as you walked in - the participants plan what they want to hear and when, by putting up what they are going to talk about next to a time and a location in the venue. Make sure you offer a number of large, medium and small rooms for the large, medium and small egos ;-)
    
    
5. Don't hold yourself to one sponsor
   A good unconference does cost some money although if everyone pulls in it needn't cost a fortune: food, drink, space, projection facilities, audio visuals, publicity beyond the web... Getting a good sponsor might seem the answer to your dreams, but it might end up being a noose around your neck. Do not take all the funding from one place, and then be held to their publicity, their terms and their way of doing things. Some BarCamps put an upper limit of £150 ($300) per contribution to have a feast of many, not a gathering for one. Once you've had a successful event or two under your belt the sponsors will come to you.
    
    
6. Encourage speaking at the back of the class
   It's cool to have a place where people can extend the discussion beyond whatever the presentation is about. This is called a backchannel. You can use a blog set up to receive mobile phone messages, but it's easier to get everyone onto a Jaiku channel, or display messages left by people from the mobiles or computers on Twitter (Twittercamp is lovely to do this).
   
   At LTS, because the digital savvy of many attendees at the Learning Festival won't stretch to Twitter, we've set up our own text service, for launch on Sept 7 or thereabouts, which will display comments on keynotes under the blog posts that talk about them. Clever, huh?
   
   In some conferences it's displayed behind the speakers. Much better, in my opinion for what it's worth, is to equip the stage with a large monitor so that speakers can take a peak and have a chance to respond to criticisms or misunderstandings before they're picked up by too many other people. Presenters also need to be aware that there is a public backchannel in the first place.
    
    
7. May the wifi be with you
   You need wifi. Ideally you have electricity in abundance, too, for bloggers to blog, photographers to Flickr and for the backchannel to survive. Good wifi is a must, but make sure everyone knows about it so that they actually bring their laptops and cameras.
    
    
8. Tag, tag, tag - and tell people about it
   Make sure that everyone coming to the conference, everyone who wanted to and couldn't and all the major events sites (e.g. Upcoming.org) know what the conference tag is, otherwise all that online coverage is going to be lost. Tags need to be short, memorable and mean something to the people there.
    
    
9. Cover the event yourself - but get young people to do it
   At every nearly every conference I organise I make sure that I have some young people producing the podcasts, the videos or some blogging. This isn't because I want cheap labour, it's because of the angle they take on it and what they are able to contribute in this way to the arguments given in the conference. Their legacy is also far more long-lasting than that of the adult participants this way :-)
    
    
10. Don't give a giveaway
    People increasingly don't need a memory pen, a linen bag, a pen, a pad (they're blogging, remember)... What's more, people are beginning to become more conscious of the environmental impact of all those wasted products and paper. Far better to make your giveaway on the web or via Bluetooth to people's mobile phones.

Here are some more hints and tips for budding unconferencers:

• Different types of unconference
• Some photos from BarCampScotland that give some clues
• The Unconference Blog
• Open Space Events
• What is speed geeking?
• The BarCamp way
• The BloggerCon way
• ...and, of course, Wikipedia

and some ideas for those wanting to create education training events around the same ideals:

• TeachMeet07
• TeachMeet Roadshows

You're invited: Edinburgh Coffee Morning End of Term Drinks

The Edinburgh Coffee Morning has been one of the most refreshing points of the week to get innovating, thinking about the next thing you might do, making new contacts and, above all, making new friends. And all that before 9am.

Unfortunately, being at 8am, some of the night owl geniuses are unable to make it all that often, as well as anyone with a proper job.

That's where our End of Term Drinks, being held at Whitespace in the West End on the last Friday evening either next Thursday or the last Thursday of June, might be just up your street. Regular Coffee Morning drinkers are welcome to come along and swap the java for some Pimms, but it would also be great to see some of those who might be doing some real work at 8am on Friday mornings.

Feel free to pop in, but let us know on Upcoming (where the up-to-date time and date will be after tomorrow's coffee morning).

BarCampScotland over - just wished I had seen more!

  IMG_1371.JPG 
  Originally uploaded by tones_space.

Well, I think we had a jolly good BarCampScotland No.1. The feedback from some of the 120-odd who came has been incredibly positive, the number of new friends and partnerships between companies blossoming and the discovery of the (quite large) scale of Scotland's social media business revealed for the first time. There'll be no more need to get speakers from 'down south' for tech conferences with some of the cool innovation going on up here.

But I managed to miss so much. There were about 10 hours of presentations and I saw a tony fraction of that as I juggled new friends, old friends, family coming up to see what madness we had hatched... The environment turns perfectly normal, sane and normally calm individuals into ADHD affected twitching geeks. There was so much stimulation around the large hall space and then in the Room Upstairs and Main Hall that I found my attention span greatly reduced.

Two main highlights for me: Revish, the book review microformatted sharing tool whose mantras for creating startups made me smile, and getting a chance to really explore Alan Coady's online multimedia music library for those wanting to learn guitar. It's come on so much since I looked at it in its early incarnations (the trouble, I guess, with reading the blog part through a feedreader is that you don't see the rest of his amazing site).

I hope that the presentations can be put online by those who were present, as mini websites, PowerPoints or PDFs - just put a link on the BarCampScotland wiki. I hope our BarCamp mummy and daddy are happy for us ;-)

ScotEduBlogs @ BarCampScotland

It's great to see such an amount of interest in the edu stuff going on in Scotland's social media landscape. Robert Jones and John Johnston are up talking about the ScotEduBlogs.org.uk project, and I think Robert has been (happily) taken aback by the interest to learn about the geeky backbone of the project. And it is interesting. Another step towards opening up the project to its max, in a way.

Edinburgh Community Technology Academy

Interesting idea to help unemployed people and businesses find each other, training the unemployed people to what the employers say is needed. Cool.

And a word to our sponsors...

BarCampScotland gets off to a start (a little too slow for my liking) with a word to our sponsors: Edinburgh University. Well, they have given us the venue and a large amount of the drink and food to be consumed at 6pm in Teviot Union so we'll sit through a five minute video in relative peace. You can see the BarCampScotland photo group here or just follow the photo tags here.

The assumptions made about BarCamp being a natural way for people to self organise don't work when very few/none of the those at one have ever been before. Talking about what you do is also something which, perhaps, we aren't very good at - "will anyone ever be interested in what I have to say?" I've heard it a few times already. I hope that we can give people a kick up the backside to talk about the cool stuff they're up to.

Needless to say, the ScotEduBlogosphere has been superb at coming up with a myriad of cool, interesting things to talk about and listen to. I'll be in on a few sessions there. I just hope that Scotland's creative, hi-tech and informatics industries can come up to meet the education sector for the interesting stuff going on in the country.