Never Watch TV-Alone by Martin Malii-Karlsson

My intention was to write this post after attending the ip TV world forum 2008 in March at Olympia in London.

To come home full of inspiration and write about the latest innovations etc…but NO!

It was just a big hype, not any groundbreaking news… more information about who were manufacturing the boxes that were going to be delivered to client x.

Nosey as usual I asked a lot of questions e.g. Whats the point of having a box instead of just log into good old www…and view the content on line on a big screen?

Anyway…one clever solution developed by NEC captured my attention for a while. It was a broadcasting solution where you basically could watch a programme on TV and then continue watch it over the mobile phone in real time.

Imagine if you watch eastenders and must leave for an important meeting. You could then keep watching the program on your phone while you rushing out of the house and jumping on the bus.

Thursday last week I went to Pizzaonrails, a meeting point for people interested in Ruby on Rails and web applications. I was there to make more connections with developers for a few projects that I am working on at the moment, including a Social Network.

At pizzaonrails you´ll find the best programmers and web developers in London, and you can have a chat with people from Bebo, Co-minded, Net Auctions etc.

I got a few more contacts for my projects now, but was unfortunately a little bit too late for the presentations and the pizza!

Photo by Anders Billing: Henrik Toremark (kulturdepartementet), Ingemar Persson (SVT) och Charlotta Denward (Filminstitutet).

Frank Boyd and I did a Crossover talk at Gothenburg Film Festival the 28 of January, a day focussed on the Nordic Documentary Industry. (With a bad cold), I explained the vision about setting up a Crossover Nordic, a development lab for content in September this year and introduced Frank Boyd who talked about his experience in running successful Crossover labs in Australia, U.S and the U.K.

I have so far confirmed partnership and funding from SVT and Film i Väst and am in speech with more Nordic Public Broadcasters, Mobile phone operators, Film funds and National Film Institutes to participate. We are aiming to link up with Nordisk Panorama who run their festival in Malmoe, Sweden this year.

BETT show 2008 - National Hall, originally uploaded by Peter Bromley.

I attended the huge BETT show last week to have a few informal meetings with possible partners and for some inspiration.

A fantastic show and enormously much to take in. One day was not really enough to cover the hole show.

It struck me again (have been on quite a few shows about new technology now), there are loads of companies that offers LMS and CMS but there isn´t many that offers engaging content. I´ve been hearing voices from the exhibitions saying that the money is in selling the CMS and LMS and not in the content itself. A lot of talk about “content is king” 592,000 hits on google but it doesn´t seem to be true so far…it should perhaps be, CMS is King!

One exception is Espresso Education, now proud owners of Channel 4 learning which they acquired in March 2007. They have a really nice designed learning platform with engaging animations and video clips from channel 4´s clipbank.

A smart and well designed learning platform is Norwegian Fronter Open learning platform, VLE or MLE. They started up in 1998 in Norway and are now taking a good position on the European market with offices in 10 countries including the U.K.
I met by occassion Steinar Hov, Training and Delivery Manager at a café in Islington just after they won the final BECTA award in May 2007, after being one of ten accredited companies. They are now in full steam to implement their learning platform in over 2000 schools in the U.K.

Not so well designed but quite cool is the Just2Easy web based document processor. There is a great potential in this tool. You can create word documents, layout pictures, videos etc and draw animations in realtime on the web. You can invite people to take part of the creation and share the documents.

A quick explanation of Buzzwords:

ICT - Information Communications Technology

Curriculum Online - Curriculum Online is part of the UK government’s drive to get more ICT and multimedia resources in classrooms across the country. This is done primarily through the eLearning Credits scheme, which is operated by Curriculum Online.

VLE - Virtual Learning Environment

MLE - Managed Learning Environment = VLE

LMS - Learning Management Systems

Aluminium Crowd, originally uploaded by Ngọc Hà.

For quite a while I´ve been asking founders of Social Networks how they earn their money. Some has replied flippantly “through advertising” and when you go on to their community you can´t find any advertising, it makes you wonder…Do they really earn any money or is it just a hype to create interest among investors.

Well..there are certainly successful Social Networks out there and here are some ways to earn money and make a social network economically sustainable.

Advertising – Various sorts of banners, Skyscrapers. Measured by CPM (Cost Per Mille) or CPA, Cost Per Action. Many established Social Networks charge £20 CPM. It means per every thousand viewer/impression you earn £20, minus the fee to the ad-agency partner.

Partnerships - Add services that brings value to the community e.g a msn chat will increase the functionalities of the community and add value to the subscriber.

Member Subscription Fee - Members pay a monthly fee to subscribe to the Social Network.

Merchandise - Online shop - T-shirts for an example, check out Threadless a good example of a buzzing niched social network focussed on the design of t-shirts.

Commission - You can act as a broker e.g ebay, amazon and can charge a commission fee, normally a percentage of the sales.

Micro Payments - Members buy virtual gifts, greeting cards, a bunch of virtual roses or other gadgets. Someone bought a virtual space station in the game Entropia see previous post.

Donation - If your members or viewers “like you” they can contribute with a donation, payment often through paypal or similar.

Upgrades - Add functionality. e.g with a pro version you can do this and that normally for a monthly fee.

Customization - The member can change and add to their status. Engage more with the community, of course for an extra fee.

lust money, originally uploaded by catsfather.

A model that we will see more of is the Shared Revenue Model e.g Revver. The revenue is shared with the content provider or member after deduction of expenses.

You can find valuable information about most of the Social Networks, what they charge to advertise on their site, how many impressions they have per month and who sells their advertising in the book Brad which you can buy monthly or why not go and read it for free at the British Library´s Business and IP Centre.

To learn more go to events like mini bar or nmx. I attended an event called Pitch Camp that was very useful. It was about how to fund a start-up of a digital business. The speakers were, Paul Fisher Advent, a venture capitalist. He explained their investment strategies. Jay Bregman, Co-Founder of E-Courier and Paul Birch, Co-Founder of Bebo, explained how they got started and how they got their first investments. view talk.

Virtual Security, originally uploaded by svenwerk.

Is the solution for virtual crime to invent a virtual police force?

I read this article about a 17 year old teenager that was arrested for stealing virtual furniture worth £2800 at Habbo Hotel and I was thinking, How would a virtual police force would look like!

I remember when Mindark (from my old hometown Gothenburg, Sweden) where struggling setting up the virtual world Entropia and where fighting against their biggest enemy, the cashflow. I also remember the quite weird thought about buying a virtual redbull for 50p to get more power. A golden dream for brands, to be able to sell products without the need of stock.

Now its cash-in time, Last year MindArk had a turnover of $365,000,000 for selling virtual items. One user have paid $100,000 for a virtual space station!

Feedback, originally uploaded by FrankBoyd.

The Crossover Labs have been very successful and I asked Frank Boyd, Unexpected Media if I could use my contacts in Sweden to produce a Crossover Nordic.

The interest has been great and I have convinced broadcasters, film institutes and regional funders in the Nordic to be partners in a lab next year. I invited Desirée Engholm, Commissioner from SVTi (Swedish TV) to come over to the U.K for one day to study the lab. SVTi has now decided to be one of the partners in the Nordic version next year.

In the Crossover U.K everybody was really open to share ideas and to collaborate.

Frank Boyd describes the U.K version on his blog www.unexpectedmedia.com. “Crossover UK, which finished on Friday, was probably the best of the 35 creative labs we’ve done in the past 10 years. Good people, good projects, great pitches on the final day. Roy Ackerman, creative director of Diverse, described it as: ‘an inspiration, enjoyable, creatively empowering, almost life-changing’.

The Crossover labs differ from the BBC Innovation Labs in that people don’t come in teams and they don’t come with a project. The point is to get people from different backgrounds (film, tv, games, animation, web design) generating ideas and working together in interdisciplinary collaborations to develop them.

It’s a demanding creative process designed to be accessible and engaging at the beginning but which quite quickly encourages participants to move beyond their comfort-zones.

The ride can get quite bumpy, one of the documentary film producers said: “It was a remarkable week and I felt extremely privileged to have been part of it…I may have resisted at moments, but it’s given me a lot of food for thought, and since I like challenges, at least of the creative kind, then I am grateful for the push”.

Some of the projects developed at Crossover will take part in a pitching competition for a £10,000 development award at the Sheffield DocFest in November.”

My (brilliant) idea was to invent a tool, that you could use to scribble down notes, drawings etc online and use it when you are chatting or skyping with someone, in a conference or in a brainstorming session.

I did my research and I found out that there were at least three different existing tools already. There are probably more out there. Let me know if you heard of any others.

Queeky
Is an ambitious site, built as a community for people who like drawing and would like to share their knowledge.
A nice function is the replay function, where you can follow how the drawing was made.
In the Multi-Draw function you can create a drawing together with a friend.

Imaginationcubed.com
A clean and well designed site, sponsored by GE. You have the basic functions here, Multi-Draw, replay and you can share the drawings with your friends.

Offtype.net
A quite simple site, feels like hobby project by a programmer, but it´s functions works fine.

I read an article a couple of days ago about the usage of text messages in the U.S. It´s funny when you think about it… a service that we´ve been using for ages in Europe, and that is a part of our daily life, yet hasn´t been fully explored in the big country overthere.

Click to read more

This is an attempt to highlight success stories,
using new formats and Social Networks.

Lonely Girl15 was launched as an experiment by the creators, Greg Goodfried and
Miles Beckett. The format they are using is less than 4 min and they manage to capture millions of viewers.

I believe a key factor is the interaction between the viewers and the creators.
The creators read the feedback they get from their viewers and use it to produce upcoming stories.

Millions of viewers but how do they earn their money?

When the question comes up Miles Beckett roles his eyes.
They are moving over to a network called Revver, an online video
community that share its ad-revenue with it´s members,

but they are not interested in sharing the information with bloggers so
check it out on youtube - interview with the creators.

Is this the future of broadcasting?
I believe so…It´s just the beginning, just upload more crazy stories and themes, involve the viewers, or
why not ride on the wawes of the hype and launch your music video. This music video has so far 860 000 viewers!!!