4iP Blog

The 4iP commissioning team asked me to post a few words about my forthcoming project, Landshare, which although linked to a TV series (River Cottage) is very 4iP in feel and doesn’t depend on its TV element to succeed.

eBay, Couchsurfing, Freecycle, Park At My House - one of the greatest strengths of the Web is connecting and aggregating supply & demand. Landshare plugs into exactly that power - it links people who want to grow their own fruit & veg (but can’t get an allotment) with people who have bits of land they can grow it on. This could be an arthritic granny who can no longer do her garden, a property developer with some wasteland, a hospital with overgrown former gardens, a church with glebe land, anywhere where unproductive land can be safely used to grow your own and the resultant produce shared between grower and land-owner.

The project started last summer when the series producer of River Cottage came in to Horseferry Road with members of the Keo Films team who produce the show. The idea was to develop a story featured in the TV series by exploring how the Web could facilitate the kind of land sharing Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall had highlighted on screen. What immediately appealed was the simplicity and clarity of the proposition, and the fact that it revolved around this core strength of the Web. It also felt very much of the moment - even more so now, 6 months on.

We started by building a first phase site at www.landshare.net to test the level of interest. Using the Autumn series of River Cottage as a springboard, we had 15,000 registrations within 10 days. The mix was healthy in terms of the balance between would-be Growers and Land-owners. We also had people register as Landspotters - participants who might know of potentially usable land in their locality - and Facilitators - participants who could help vulnerable people, those in need of help on the computer front and anyone requiring extra support to take part. Like-minded groups and organisations were also able to register interest.

With the level of interest sufficiently proved, the next few months is to see the design and build of the service, as well as the follow-up work on partnerships with all manner of enthusiasts small and large, local and nation-wide.

Issues of legal compliance have been considered and worked through from the off. Since the process involves transactions and meetings in real life a good deal of thought has gone into how to make those work effectively and safely. Projects like School of Everything (in which 4iP has invested), which likewise involves real-life encounters, have provided useful precedents and approaches to such issues.

It’s always a good sign when a project has an organic feel of wholeness and rightness and Landshare has that vibe for me. The new year saw it flagged up as a trend-setter for 2009 in The Guardian and rippling over the pond to be picked up by Huffington. It has caught the eye of the Scottish Parliament. All these are promising indications that Landshare is the right idea in the right place at the right time. So here’s to a fruitful 2009…

In today’s Sunday Herald comes a ‘reveal’ on 4iP’s first major project in Scotland, with independent interactive designers ISO. Central Station is a place to share your art and find new talent, be mentored by some of the art world’s best names and be entertained by and engaged in the making of a web fiction. The action starts this April.

Edd McCracken’s piece concentrates mostly on the web fiction, to be filmed in and around Glasgow School of Art, one of many partners in the project.

But far from being “telly on the web”, something 4iP’s not interested in, the web fiction elements will in themselves reflect the art, artists and techniques being talked about by communities of artists aggregated in and around Central Station; as Damien Smith of ISO put it in our planning meeting last November, they will be “of the medium”.

Amateur artists aspiring and those already making moves in art schools around the country will also find a place where they can share their artwork, with the chance to win regular prizes that, really, money cannot buy. The final award after nearly a year of frenzied publishing will be a major cash art prize, we think, the world’s biggest for social media creativity.

Dive in a take a peek at the article, and also at our new featured group this fortnight, covering the company with whom we have the pleasure of developing this artistic beast: ISO.
Cross-posted on 38minutes

Robin from the Screen Yorkshire team working with Channel 4 in bringing 4iP to the region blogs about the brilliant offer of development funds for 4iP-ey ideas a month before the fund opens for business proper:

To celebrate the launch of the 4iP Fund in Yorkshire, in partnership with Arts Council England and Yorkshire Forward, Screen Yorkshire is offering companies and individuals working in the creative and digital media sectors in the region the opportunity to get ahead of the game by winning one of our £5,000 development funds. This is an opportunity to access development funds for your 4iP proposals prior to the fund’s operational launch in March 2009.
The pitching competition is open to any Yorkshire based company, individual or consortium. Ideas will be accepted through joint venture project providing at least one person within the team is from the Yorkshire region.

Once you have an idea of the kind of projects that 4iP is looking for, you should submit your proposal on this special online form. The deadline for this is 19th January 2009

Shortlisted applicants will be notified by 26th January 2009. Individuals must be available to attend a workshop in Sheffield on Wednesday 4th February 2009, where they will receive mentoring from industry experts to hone their proposal. They will present a short pitch at the 4iP industry launch event that evening to a panel of judges led by Tom Loosemore, Head of 4iP. The winners of the pitch will be announced later that evening.

Pic: Orchard Square, Sheffield

Part five of a series of posts on the elements that have made the best propositions to 4iP work well.

I was at a Channel 4 event in London two weeks ago and, in the after-speech drinks, I was told by an indie producer that “only stupid people submit ideas through the website; the people getting their ideas commissioned see the commissioner face-to-face”. Let’s say I, eh, put the record straight.

With well over 500 ideas in a little less than two months, face-to-face pitches are out and our online submissions system, while concise and simple, is the key to our commissioning process and more often than not the starting point for face-to-face discussions. But what happens once you’ve pressed ‘submit’, and your idea enters the ether?

1. I pressed submit and the idea disappeared. What happens?

Not quite. In draft form the commissioners can’t see your idea at all, so once you press submit you reveal it in our version of the 4iP.org.uk site. It will be dealt with quickest when you’ve specified the region in which your office or your production is based and, when you work out of Scotland, Northern Ireland or the North East, it falls into my dashboard. Every day I check to see what new ideas have appeared and ‘pick them up’ virtually, downloading their PDF version to my Mac for reading in depth later on.

2. What was it Geldof said?

I happen to love Mondays. The 4iP team meet face-to-face, normally in London though as soon as the other commissioners are in place we’ll be traveling about a bit more (other people can have the 4am starts). We spend time on the ideas that we’re sure are great, try to find ways to work them up and make them better. We also look at those ones that, on a first glance, aren’t so clear cut.

3. “Sorry seems to be the hardest word”

Most ideas, by now, have been not been given the green light. We use the same system on which you submitted your idea to keep a tally on where each project is at, hence the automated email when your idea is accepted, put on hold (which means we think it might fit in to something we’re planning later on, or that the idea needs rethought significantly) or is rejected. The rejected emails contain some automation, but most of them contain advice on why the idea was rejected. The most common reasons by far are:
* Ideas that fail to take account of competition, or to differentiate themselves enough from the competition ("ours is better” doesn’t quite cut it)
* Ideas that make great (or alright) businesses, but which don’t take into account Channel 4’s values or the Next On 4 outlook (i.e. they’re not public service broadbanding)
* Ideas that don’t have collaboration and participation as key, which are about viewing stuff online more than interacting with other people or collaborating on- or offline to create change.

Where we can, we also try to help identify who else might be interested in the idea.

4. Accepting ideas in principle and working them up

Rarely does an idea come in perfectly formed, and part of the commissioning process is not just £s, but is also working up those ideas together so that they’ll work now, as they build into the mid-term and thrive well beyond 4iP’s involvement. Every week I meet without about a dozen producers, programmers or writers to see how far we can take their idea; during this time we draw up a more detailed Case File, which contains more information than the initial pitch:
* Deliverables, timescales and costs
* Potential risks
* Rights and IPR details

It’s also about this time that we start to involve co-funders in the project. These could be private companies with an interest in the idea’s success, or public partners, such as those that form structural partnerships as part of 4iP (Scottish Screen, Northern Ireland Screen, Scottish Enterprise...)

It’s also at this point that quite often I’m finding myself trying to marry expertise that could help make the idea come to fruition. Most ideas can’t be produced by one indie or one individual - they need partnership not just in the funding but in the making, too. It’s a lot more hard work, but it’s hopefully going to make stuff that’s better for it.

5. Legal, compliance and finance sign-off

Another Monday, another meeting. This is where the new information on some of the detail of the idea is worked through by our team of experts in legal, compliance and finance, and also where decisions are made to pay for projects. Sometimes the idea won’t make it past this (it’s happened just once so far), and often it’s either just small tweaks or sound Ts&Cs that need confirmed.

6. Commissioned

A few clicks on a C4 app (the only time I’m obliged to use Windows, eurgh) and contracts can be drawn up and money put through the system. Your work on the idea begins.

Conclusion: The waiting game...

With over 500 ideas in the system, some of them still in draft phase and most of them needing some degree of partnering up to get to commissioning stage, the initial relatively speedy return to people is countered by a little more time than we’d like getting the right teams and the right funders together. However, it’s still a lot faster than telly, and faster still than many startups would manage going it alone. Add to that three or four exciting equity deals on the cards in Scotland and we’ve got our work cut out in 2009 to create not only great ideas that change the lives of people in Britain but also to create and build up some great new companies, too.

Pic of C4

Cross-posted at 38minutes, the community of 4iP in Scotland and Northern Ireland

“And when it came time to vote, everyone showed up, waiting in those five hour lines to have their voices heard. This is the most engaged electorate in modern times, and encouragingly, it’s the youngest generation that seems to be the most intent on participating in the system. So I look out at that landscape, and I think: yes, the country is in a terrible state, and it’s going to take an immense amount of work and sacrifice and intelligence to turn things around. But the system that lets us choose our leaders seems to me to be as healthy as it has been in a long time.”

Stephen Johnson

Since Barrack Obama won the US presidential election I’ve been meaning to write a post (or two) on how the Obama digital campaign transformed the US democratic process and why this is of significant interest to 4ip.

To my mind, Obama’s digital media campaign is one of the best multiplatform offerings of the year and Blue State Digital (BSD), the company behind the digital campaign, clearly have a very sophisticated understanding of the latent power of networks as well as contemporary media in general. Just like the 4ip BSD recognised how open networks provide a powerful force for evolving connections, organisation, participation and conversation rather than merely an alternative way of broadcasting to presupposed passive audience.

Just like lots of web innovations, the Obama campaign didn’t actually invent anything technically new. They bolted together the most appropriate social media and participatory feature sets under the banner of a movement to create a powerful force that bled out of digital networks into the real world and ultimately into the ballet box. Without going into exhaustive detail I’ll explain some of my favorite bits:

Supporters’ database

On February 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois but more significantly for me this was the day he launched MyBarackObama (MBO). MBO is a bespoke social networking site that built not just a political base but a database of supporters who could be engaged almost instantly. Unlike traditional ‘support sites’, this was no afterthought and no token bolt on but integral to Obama’s campaign. For the next 20 months Obama grew a database of supporters from the ground up who could be queried, filtered, contacted and motivated as the situation required.

With almost 1 million individual members never has a US presidential candidate has such an opportunity to take his message directly to voters circumnavigating both special interest groups and the media.

Digital to real world engagement

Once a visitor registers as a MyBarackObama member, he or she can post blogs, join discussion groups, send each other messages, organize events, and create networks of friends, just like other social network. While the ability to contact other local voters and build support for Barrack digitally was good it was propelling users the digital to the physical that set the site apart. The tools provided for calling and walking campaigns were the most impressive.

With a walking campaign you could print out a walk list with the names, addresses and map of voters to visit with a script to help guide your conversation.

Critically the site the incentives you, through basic game mechanics, to come back and report your progress so the campaign machine could use and learn from that information. This is an online presence that begot offline behaviour that was all the more important on polling day.

Of course, fundraising was another high profile feature reportedly adding $500 million to the campaign war chest. In the style of JustGiving members were encouraged to set fundraising goals and badger their nearest and dearest for donations. Not rocket science but the right functionality in the right space at the right time.

It’s the platform stupid

Without dwelling too much on my pet subject Obama wasn’t guilty of trying to shoehorn functionality developed for the web onto other devices. The iPhone app was beautifully executed. Rightly, for a phone, its primary function was to encourage you to call your fiends and persuade them to vote Obama. If you wanted to donate it didn’t connect you to a web page where you’d go mad trying to enter your credit card details it dialed a campaign line. The application gave you the latest media from both official and user generated sources while tailoring it for your phone’s current GPS derived location.

As Obama moves from presidential elect into office we’ll seen how the new administration engages with citizens in a more open and participatory manner. It’s one thing to use the power of the web to inform, organise and motivate potential voters it’s another matter altogether allowing the web to influence, shape and define policy.

Nevertheless, the signs are positive. Enter Change.gov, a site launched just three days after the election that’s designed to continue the social media communication methods leveraged successfully in the campaign. Let’s hope this mean that we see the beginnings of a highly accessible open source government.

We’re a touch slow off the mark here but thought it would still be worth mentioning the latest offering from Amazon Web Services. For those of you who don’t already know Amazon is more than an online bookstore; it’s one of the most innovative players in the nascent cloud computing sector. Over the last few years they’ve launched a suite of web services covering hosting, processing and distribution challenging some of the traditional businesses in this sector.

4ip is a big fan of digital services making innovative and appropriate use of cloud computing and we’re particularly interested in launch of public data sets on AWS where select public data sets will be hosted for free as an Amazon EBS snapshot. According to Deepak Singh, business development manager at AWS: “Public Data Sets on AWS provides a convenient way to share, access, and consume publicly available data within your Amazon EC2 environment”.

In theory this significantly lowers the barrier for researchers and data analysts to access and use some of the most commonly used data sets in their communities without the need to manage data within their own AWS accounts. From a 4ip perspective we hope that, growing the number of people with access to important and useful data, and making it easy to compute on that data with cost-efficient services will fuel innovation and further accelerate the pace of new discoveries. AWS + hosted data sets should allow individuals to do the types of computing once reserved for large businesses and educational institutions. The potential to cause trouble here is HUGE and it would be great to see what could be done with shared instances of the Royal Mail’s Postcode PAF file, Neighbourhood Statistics from the ONS, Health care information, from NHS Choices, a list of all schools in England and Wales from the DCSF or the Official Notices from the London Gazette.

A by-product of increased access should be improved participation. Dr. Peter Tonellato from the Harvard Medical School commented that: “Public Data Sets on AWS will enable me and many of my colleagues to collaborate with each other by sharing our commonly used data sets, research environments and tools”.

Unsurprisingly, most of the data sets currently available have a US flavour but if you have a public domain or non-proprietary data set that you think is useful and interesting to the AWS community you can submit it to Amazon for inclusion. Typically the data sets in the repository are between 1 GB to 1 TB in size (based on the Amazon EBS volume limit), but Amazon can work with you to host larger data sets as well. However, you must have the right to make the data freely available

Local football journalist Rick Waghorn submitted one of the first ideas to 4iP using our online submission form and within four weeks the prototype was reviewed, contracted and code running on Rick’s site, http://myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity.

Rick’s idea was simple.  He already had a website and an active audience of tens of thousands of Norwich City fans. He saw an opportunity to change the way people engaged with his work.  He recognises that the role of the journalist is changing. People no longer wait for the the post game analysis, they are already talking, texting, swapping pics and videos during the game with their mates.  So where does this leave the journalist? Late to the game, if you pardon the pun!  As Rick sees it his role needs to adapt to the times.  He is the shepherd to his flock’s conversations.  Read his blog post where he puts it so nicely.

So what’s interesting about this for 4iP?  Maybe it would help if I share which criteria from our guidelines he met with this project .

• Supporting local talent- check! Rick set up his site two years ago and has carved out a space for his work as a trusted, independent voice for Norwich City football.  He clearly has balls and talent and this is local - Rick’s mobile doesn’t work at his home.
• To champion alternative voices and fresh perspectives - check!  The fans have a voice in the world of crowd sourced commentary.
• Making trouble and inspiring change - Journalism as a real-time conversation - that could change things.
• 100% native to digital networks, with its centre of gravity in participation or collaboration - check, check, check!

Also, from our point of view it was simple to commission and it allowed us to test the commissioning process (more on that in another post soon).

I know for you old Twitter hands out there this will not come as new news, but for the average football fan this is new and anyone can get involved using SMS.

There is a trial period of another four games and we’ll see what happens. There is still plenty to tweak and none of us know how well it will be received. That’s exciting. So, if there are any Norwich fans out there and you want to give it a go then check out the site and remember to tweet with #ncfc.  It would be good to see any constructive comments.

As we head towards a new week in Scotland and Northern Ireland’s new media world, 38minutes will bring Christmas a little bit early with some broad indications on the latest projects whose contracts’ ink is still waiting to dry. Keep your eyes peeled for that, but in the meantime feast them on these 38minute tidbits:

* 4iP’s first project in the ‘simple but effective’ bracket brings football fans together around the game, whether they’re at the match or on their radios.

* Scottish businesses can sign up for Doug Richard’s School for Startups in Glasgow, while the Belfast Digital Circle will be helping you understand how to make the most of your R&D budget.

* We continue a look at the 4iP pitching process, with the fourth in a series. This week, how to take advantage of the brief space to pitch on the submissions site.
The other posts in the series can be accessed through the 38minutes blog.

* The featured site this week has created a group, too, so that everyone can enjoy the simplicity, beauty and amazing community that has been gathering around Blipfoto.com, a Scottish startup whose site already seized a legendary following. Another 38minutes featured site needs your support to win a Mashable award. Cast your Hubdub votes.

* Check out other great posts this week, from Clay Shirky’s masterclass on what makes communities tick, to Tim O’Reilly’s definitive post on why Twitter should be taken more seriously.

Jan Younghusband (Channel 4 Commissioning Editor for Arts) and I have been following closely the evolution of Ivo Gormley’s new film ‘Us Now’ and throwing a few thoughts into the pot along the way. ‘Us Now’ explores territory close to the heart of 4iP and I asked Ivo to explain briefly where he’s coming from with this work. There are two imminent opportunities to catch the film this month in London and talk about its themes (one as soon as tomorrow evening) - do get along to have a look if you have the chance, you’re bound to have an opinion…

Ivo Gormley: In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?

I’m excited to be alive now because the abundance of information in the public domain, and the tools we use to transfer it, are starting to change many of the structures that dominated the 20th century.

My new film, Us Now, explores examples of transparent, self-organising groups who are achieving large-scale, complex results.

It follows the fate of Ebbsfleet United, a football club owned and run by its fans; Zopa, a bank in which everyone is the manager; and Couch Surfing, a vast online network whose members share their homes with strangers.

There are many implications of these organisations for public services, as Sophia Parker says: “...public services are going to need to change the way in which they see people. They are going to need to find a way of tapping into people’s own resources. Then they are going to need to find ways of connecting people to support one another in the way that sites like NetMums do.”

I think this is the crux of what this change is about; citizens collaborating to create valuable, reliable systems of information and activity are starting to rival the capabilities of governments.  The film explores the ways that these networks operate and asks some leading thinkers in this field what they reckon it all means. 

There are two screenings coming up, one on 3rd December (tomorrow!) at the RSA which can be signed up for here.
And one at the Prince Charles cinema on 10th December which can be signed up for here.

Play and playfulness

This month, it’s been great to see a bit of play and playfulness enter our world courtesy of the 4iP delicious network.

Several of you brought our attention to Akoha described by ivoivo as “social gaming in the real world”. The project is currently in private beta but you can get an idea about how it might work at http://community.akoha.com/help/learn/.

At a more basic level, we love Playscapes, the blog about playground design, bookmarked by addictive_picasso. How’s this for a reason for being (or in 4iP-speak, ‘an itch being scratched’)?:

“Because it’s difficult to find non-commercial playground information. And I find that frustrating.Because a playground doesn’t have to cost a million bucks and come in a box. In fact, it’s better if it doesn’t.Because playgrounds are under-recognized as an artistic medium. Because everybody loves a playground.”

And it’s addicitive_picasso again who takes us from from small spaces to big spaces: after a trial run in Bogota, the Future City game is being supported by the British Council amongst others and is described as ‘an interactive game to develop citizenship and policy skills whilst also considering the future of our cities.’ So does this, perhaps, inspire you to add some more playful elements to your 4iP idea?

Thinking global

People, it seems, do search far and wide for inspiration - whether it’s looking at the way Australians keep tabs on their politicians, or how Americans help each other monitor their health service options or find open-all-hours shops and services.

One option for expanding your horizons and gaining an international perspective on your work is to plug into an existing community like the UNESCO-backed Design21 social design network. ‘Better design for the greater good,’ Dominic_Campbell calls it. Or if you work with schools, check out Rafi.ki, an online learning community using simple technology to build successful school partnerships, transforming pupils into global citizens.” ‘Bit of a corker this one’, notes Dominic.

Trendy Twitter

Ewan’s recent blog entry about Google flu is just one piece of evidence of a dramatic rise in online data analysis and visualisation tools for telling us more about ourselves – what we’re talking about, how we’re feeling, what we all might be thinking about doing next etc.

Monitoring Twitter, in particular, to spot social trends and commercial opportunities appears to be very much flavour of the month. monicatailor bookmarked Twist, a service for charting the occurrence of individual words used in Twitter (from which we learn that people use the word ‘ church’ twice as much on Sundays than any other day...). And monica also led us to Magpie an application for supposedly ‘converting your tweets into bling bling’…

At a more sophisticated level, it’s good to see Christian Nold’s biomapping work getting noticed by no less than four 4ip-ers inclusing podnosh and danbri. Christian specialises in mapping and visualising emotional responses to specific environments, buildings and pathways. His work has all kinds of consequences for the way we design public spaces, and also share our more personal responses to the world.

Complaining can be fun

What with flu viruses, bad weather and the credit crunch you probably don’t need to monitor feeds to realise how most people feel in the UK right now. The good news, though, is that if you’re feeling mouldy at the moment, there are now new ways of moaning about it all. The suitable named delicious user itsallgonewrong has bookmarked Kvetch: a community complaints service that lets you delight in other people’s sarky comments.

Sharing your rants is one thing. Putting them to music is quite another. But that is exactly what a Complaints Choir does – takes in letters of complaint, turns them into song and sings them loudly in public, preferably in front of the people or the organisation being complained about.

If there isn’t a choir near you, you can start your own. First choir to put any moans about 4iP into song wins… er… the admiration of their peers.

Last week Tom participated in a panel event at Channel 4 on what public service means in the digital age, which enabled him to talk about 4iP in more detail. In addition to Tom, the prolific panel was chaired by Reuters journalist Eric Auchard, and included web investor Saul Klein, Chair of Ofsted Zenna Atkins and CFO of Last.fm, Ryan Regan. The discussion included the potential for 4iP, as well as the role of entrepreneurs, the impact of the US election on the technology sector, the future of news, the importance of locality on the internet, how you measure the value of services, and a lively debate on just how useful public institutions can be in a digital world (and how 4iP can be any different to the rest of them).

The Polis Media Leadership dialogues are a series of guest appearances from influential media figures in London and beyond. Each week they host a different talk from a media leader followed by an expert response.  At this week’s session Tom Loosemore will be speaking about ‘4iP: Reinventing Public Service Media for a Digital Age’ with expert response from Charlie Beckett, Polis Director, London School of Economics and Political Science.

You can find out details on the Polis webiste, and for those that are interested in keeping up to date with 4iP events and guest appearances we’ve started a 4iP Upcoming feed.

Held at Channel 4’s London headquarters on Thursday November 20th, Tom will be speaking alongside a prestigious panel that includes Saul Klein (Index Ventures/The Accelerator Group), Zenna Atkins (Columnist – The Guardian), and Martin Stiksel (last.fm), and will be talking about the challenges of how best to harness innovation and entrepreneurship to deliver public service in the digital age. Further details are available here -

http://www.theglasshouse.net/content/glasshouselondon

Channel 4 are sponsoring the event, and have been allocated a limited number of free tickets for those with an interest in 4iP. If you would like to attend then please drop me a line ( ) and we will get back to you early next week to confirm details. 

I’ve just found out about Google Flu, an effort to capture all the data we now possess on how many of us succumb to the winter gremlins in the USA so that back here in Europe we can avoid going. Well, maybe that’s not the USP of this service, but it certainly is a lovely way to take health information and get older generations out to their doctors for those injections before it’s too late. My question: where’s ours? With the damp we’ve had this past few weeks a UK map would surely make more interesting viewing.

Last week I was invited to attend old haunts at Edinburgh University as Doug Richard held another of his School for Startups for 150 Scottish entrepreneurs, hosted by the uni’s School for Informatics. Within an hour or two I had seen how some of the current proposals had come about, both the compelling exciting ones and those which leave the Commissioning Editor genuinely hoping there’s something really obvious and cool (s)he’s missed.

“All businesses aren’t created equal.”

(William Egan II, Venture Capitalist)
When we’re starting with an idea we have to ask whether the opportunity really stacks up. The key starter question has to be: “Why won’t this work?” In almost every case, I find myself putting forward the “devil’s advocate” position, trying to draw out the answer to this question. In more than a few cases, there is no genuine answer, yet taking the time to consider it is important, so that version 1.1 is better than version 0.1 that you’re proposing now.

Finding your micromarket (aka “The Niche")

We always need to know who it is we’re trying to appeal, and you can work this out on two levels. In the small, ask yourself how attractive your idea is to the people you see using it or having fun with it.

This question needs to be answered not with USPs or product descriptions, but with benefits to people - another reason for driving people to submit all their ideas online, where we ask about this specifically. Doug tells the story of the dry cleaning business in LA which based its business on speed: with drive-thru windows and pre-packaging of your clothes ready for pickup, his business thirved despite, in fact, being the most likely to lose your clothes. Dry cleaning success was not about clean clothes or accuracy, as ‘normal’ people would have expected. It was about speed.

In the large, we have a more tricky question about how attractive the market is to us. This is all about niches. So, by all means tell us which market are you in but, more importantly, which segment or niche are you in? Entrepreneurialism works when the marketplace is sufficiently large to sell into but your business starts in the infinitesimally small. In appealing to the marketplace, growth potential comes above accessibility. So, in your market segment, what do the customers have in common and is this group of customers growing? Where’s the proof that it’s growing? What other segments adjoin this group. What unique capabilities would make this appropriate for another, adjoining segment? All of these questions help come up with ideas for the web, mobile or in social gaming which will not end up one-hit-wonders, but which will find growth well into the future without the need for much more support from 4iP.

Niche Thyself

Guy Kawasaki sums it up nicely in his Art Of The Start talk, and book of the same name: Niche thyself:

You can hear more of Guy and plenty of other inspirational starteruppers at Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner.

Cross-posted at 38minutes.co.uk

Less is more in practice.

A big thank you to members of the 4iP delicious network for bringing to our attention so many sites and services that contain elements of what 4iP is all about. From hereon in, we’re planning to summarise regularly what you’ve found for us, and also provide links to specific projects of interest in the ‘Be inspired’ section of the website.

If you have suggestions, we have various ways for you to get in touch. More details here.

Sharing ideas, pooling resources

So what’s new? Well, recently, you’ve clearly been showing interest in projects that allow people to share ideas and to pool skills and resources. the_pied_pipes, for example, steered up towards crowdspring adding the note: “perhaps an idea for how public service projects can be filtered, made better, before commissioning stage even begins?”.

Other links that fell into this category were ideablob and amazee which mattweston describes as “web2.0ish collaboration platform for social entrepreneurs / NGOs”.

Easy access to public data

Projects that make better use of public data sets, as well as making statistics more accessible and meaningful, is clearly something 4iP could support. Thanks to philip_sheldrake for highlighting gapminder which, as he puts it, is all about “making sense of the world by having fun with statistics!”
Philip further demonstrates his fascination with all things statistical by bookmarking widgenie, a neat online tool for creating and sharing visualisations based on your own data sets.

For a really beautiful example of how data visualisation might make people think differently about the world about them, check out RealTimeRome the MIT SENSEable City Lab’s contribution to the 2006 Venice Biennale, directed by professor Richard Burdett. (thanks to danbri for this one). The installation “aggregated data from cell phones, buses & taxis in Rome to better understand urban dynamics in real time: by revealing the pulse of the city, the project aims to show how technology can help individuals make more informed decisions about their environment.“

Via Twitter, markrock mentioned a couple of projects that rely in various ways on access to data. maps.met.police.uk is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to thinking of ways people might share and use crime data. Mark’s also linked to vimeo.com/1561578, a video presentation about Firefox Ubiquity, a tool for creating and embedding mash-ups wherever and whenever you want to using plain English. It’s mind-boggling but also inspiring.

So what would you do with a tool like this?

There are three ways to flag up benchmark projects:

1. Use the free bookmarking facility Delicious to add sites/links to the 4iP pool. A selection from the pool will then regularly appear here. You’ll need to join the 4iP Delicious network and tag your suggested bookmarks ‘4ip’. Using Delicious.

2. Recommend something via Twitter. Send out a tweet with your recommendation and remember to use the term “4ip” somewhere in the message. That’ll be picked up at this end and added to the Delicious pool. Using Twitter.

3. your suggestion. Again it’ll be added to the Delicious pool.

When you send in a recommendation please do include a brief comment about why you feel it points the way forward for 4iP.

Thanks to Jane Moch for sending in a Wordle term-extracted-tag-cloud-thingy of 4iP’s newly-published submission guidelines. Lots of ‘people’.Lots of ‘ideas’. Shame about the ‘nobody’!

Last night we gathered together many of the people and organisations who have made possible the unique flavour of 4iP’s organisation, partnerships and funding, to flick the most important switch on the 4iP website:  you can now submit your ideas for consideration by the 4iP team.

We’ve provided fairly brief submission guidelines which will help tech companies, new media outfits, film-makers, coders and designers find their role as the instigator of new ideas.

Enjoy coming up with those innovative, crunchy ideas and firing them through the site. Tom and I hope that within days and weeks, rather than months, we can start supporting some of the best of them.

Pic: from Flying Bee, with some rights reserved.

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of working on and off with Stephen Heppell, a stimulating visionary who also does stuff (he’s current involved in a pilot of a learning platform in China, a ‘pilot’ with 25m participants). One of his recent moblogs sums up his eye for seeing the metaphor that makes sense. At Dubai Airport he notices the different approaches to using moving walkways:

Some get on, keep walking and make great progress. Others get on and, mistaking their relative progress, stop walking thus holding up everyone behind. Still others keep well away from the “new fangled devices” and walk alongside, but are constantly flustered and exhausted from trying to keep up. A few arrive early, and wait nearby rather than getting on - but then suddenly realise that the moment has passed and miss their flights. Some get on, relax, don’t look where they are going and hurtle off in diametrically the wrong direction.

He’s right in his assertion that this is also how people approach innovation. As we prepare to open the floodgates to submissions for 4iP projects in the next couple of weeks I wonder how many of each variety we’ll see. There’s more. Which one are you?

"Hunt for Bin Laden: Experts Agree: Al Quaeda leader is Dead or Alive". Yossi Vardi‘s photoshopped CNN reportage was certainly amusing but was, above all, a completely accurate forecast. What forecasters mustn’t do is try to eliminate the uncertaintly from our futures.

Paul Saffo, formerly of the Institute of the Future, shares some of his secrets and insights from his main job: forecasting the future.

The Information Revolution is over. This is the Media Revolution
Everything in the knowledge and information world is uncertain. The information revolution is done, gone, in the past. We are now gripped by a media revolution - media is information that goes deep down and makes a difference in our life. It’s also a shift within this field, from mass media to a very strange new world of personal media. Indeed, it’s what my new job is all about - making the convergence of media count and make amplification have a new, almost reversed sense.

Even the information devices of old are now media devices. 1998 saw the first ring tone sold, and 2005 it had become a $2b business, accounting for 10% of the music business. Cell phones are entertainment media devices that happen to be communication devices. They are not information devices.

As Jane McGonigal, still at the Institute of the Future, has repeated: you need to look back twice as far back to see what’s ahead. It might not be repeated, but the future will rhyme with it. If we peer back to the 1950s we see huge experimentation in mass media, in ways the television could be used, developed, enhanced. Today’s use of the web is probably not even a bump on the landscape compared to what we will use our discoveries today for tomorrow.

When television emerged in the 1930s, it took some 20 years until it began to take off. Time-sharing (through email) took time from its first developments in the late 70s to become accepted in the 90s. Technology takes time to take hold, but in recent history technology is taking less and less time to make an impact:
This means that email and internet apps are nowhere near the peak of their activity.

Never mistake a clear view as a short distance
The challenge for those trying to predict the future is that, at one stage on the uptake curve you’re made to look foolish as no-one joins you in the adoption of the technology. After a while, you give up on that bandwagon and think about what is worth betting your efforts on next. Just as you give up on it everyone else starts to adopt. You therefore look foolish twice over. I’ve written off many a fashion faux pas on that S curve theory.

SecondLife is one such maligned technology - I’ve managed to hit the middle part of that S Curve about a dozen times in the past three years, and have kept on it; something’s afoot in this space. Paul believes it has a smell of the 20 year S Curve in it. He mentions the Cisco SecondLife meetings that my now-Cisco colleague John has talked about before. Likewise, in the nineties publishers would have scoffed if you said that something like the MacBook Pro Nano would make reading books online or on a computer doable - and enjoyable.

The changing nature of innovation
The next big thing is not the semantic web - it’s sensors and robots
1950s TV - Broadcast
1980s Time-sharing - Email
1990s Cient sharing - WWW
2000  P2P - Napster
2010  Sensors - Smartifacts

Sensors will lead to smartifacts, robots that can make life easier, more enjoyable, more connected… Think of the current indicators: Roomba, the first robots to kill a human in the war on terror in Yemen in 2002, Nabaztags, robots that drive cars more safely than us… The indicators are already in place, though I think we’re probably missing it for the immediate ideas and opportunity that the web is offering in 2008.

We’re moving from TV to the web, from the living room to everywhere, from watching and consuming to participating and creating, from few and large organisations to many and small individuals.

We are moving at a tumbling rate from the Consumer Economy where buying and selling rule, to, markedly in the past two weeks, an economy where there are new actors in a Creator Economy. Google makes the perfect example of the success of the Creator Economy. It costs $0 to subscribe to Google, the usage charges are $0 and every time we use it we make it better. That last part is the cost - our search string contributes to the richness of what, in days past, would have been the Manufacturer. The question is, do we care if the $ cost is zero and the [heart] cost is information?

One forecast is looking a dead cert: the future’s looking like one heck of a ride.

Quinn’s photo of Paul Saffo.

Paul Saffo speaking at the ebic Thought Leader conference, Berlin.

At the start of last week, Channel 4 announced a significant cost reduction initiative. This reflects the long term changes in media industry business models, and the more immediate impact of a down turn in advertising revenues.

At the end of last week, Ofcom announced its next stage of its PSB review, acknowledging the urgency of finding a funding settlement for Channel 4, and re-enforcing the importance of Channel 4’s multi-platform future.

And finally, Tom Loosemore arrived on Monday to take over the reins of 4iP and ensure we open for business later this month.

Each of these is worth some commentary.

First, it’s been suggested that Channel 4’s commitment to 4iP is being reduced. This is categorically not the case. 4iP remains a strategic priority, and it remains our intention to spend around £20m during the next three years. That said, we have not yet confirmed our budget for 2009, and we may need to phase some of our plans differently. But that’s a pragmatic response to the severity and suddenness of the current economic turbulence.

Second, Ofcom’s PSB review document contained some interesting perspectives for what 4iP is setting out to do. Their recent consumer research suggested that there is a problem in discovering new content online. Specifically, respondents “felt that when using the internet the likelihood of having their views challenged or their knowledge expanded ‘by chance’ was minimal.” Channel 4 is proud of its heritage in broadcasting in bringing new talent, ideas and perspectives to audiences, and challenging them to see the world differently. We are passionately interested in exploring how we can continue to do this on new platforms, in a world in which millions of people can create and share content which has public value. Cracking this problem would be one of the most profound contributions 4iP could make.

And finally, Tom’s arrival is long overdue. We’ve focused most of our attention so far on the partnerships, operations and processes which will ensure 4iP’s success. It’s great to have Tom on board to lead the project, and he’s already galvanising our thinking on creativity and commissioning.
All the pieces of the puzzle are now coming together, and we’ll be open for business later this month. Better crack on then.

Jon Katz’s inspirational feature gave me the confidence - the belief - to walk away from a cosy career building bridges, and aspire to build a better future using 1s and 0s rather than concrete and steel.

On Monday, following a tortuous period of gardening leave, I started work at Channel 4 as Head of 4iP.

The point of 4iP?  To reinvent Public Service Media for the 21st Century.

Have no poverty of ambition, as a wise man once advised me…

I can’t wait to get stuck in.