In general we’ll be in Glasgow on the last Thursday and Friday of the month to meet with our partners, 4iP projects and those who have pitched or are considering pitching for 4iP investment.
We had some very productive meetings during our trip in January and we’ll be back on Friday 19th February and Thursday & Friday 25th-26th March.
Do get in touch via if you’d like to arrange a meeting.
4iP were at City Hall with Boris and others yesterday for the GLA’s announcement about the London Datastore, and he promised to release two hundred public data sets into the wild. With the expected release of Central Government’s own open data initiative, data.gov.uk, also at the end of the month, Government and its agencies are at the start of their journey to open up their data.
With significant political and developer momentum now behind this 4iP would like to offer it’s own unique support.
4iP is teaming up with Facebook to offer two individuals or companies up to £100,000 each to create Facebook apps, websites, tools, services or mobile products which people can use to understand how Britain really works - or doesn’t.
As Tom Loosemore said yesterday, while not trivial the development of applications and services is but the first part of the challenge. To be successful the products need to attract and retain a large audience. We feel that with the added support of the world’s biggest social network and a national broadcaster we should be able add significant value and expertise to ensure the public gets the most from this new opportunity.
While 4iP will provide the funding, Facebook will help us mentor companies and individuals as they build their products and, where appropriate, advise on how they can use Facebook to help develop and promote them.
For the first time, we would be happy for you to come and work here at Channel 4, alongside the 4iP team to get you started and help shape the model for sustainability and help scale.
If you have any questions or have submitted an idea then let me know: jamie at 4ip dot org do uk. I look forward to talking about your ideas.
]]>To support greater openness in government 4iP is launching a fund that will offer up to £100,000 to two companies or individuals with an outstanding idea for a product or application that uses information available at the London Database and via data.gov.uk. The fund aims to encourage developers to come up with innovative ways of transforming this data from rows of text and numbers into accessible and useful information.
4iP has always looked for ways of holding power to account. But raw data often doesn’t tell you anything until it has been analysed or presented in a meaningful way and most people don’t have the tools to do this. So we’re after ideas that transform rows of numbers into accessible formats – maps that show crime in your area, a mobile app that tells you how many police patrols operate on your street or an image that can illustrate the recycling rates in your borough.
The 4iP fund will be available to UK based companies for ideas that use data or content from data.gov.uk or the London Database. Ideas should be submitted through 4iP’s submission system and be designed to act as a catalyst for greater political transparency helping foster openness and accountability in government. Submissions should be completed by February 28th and the successful candidates will be notified in March.
Tom will say more tomorrow and we still have a few exciting secrets up our sleeve to reveal on the day.
]]>We’ve been busily updating our investments page with an overview of our live and launched projects and there are a number of other exciting products currently under development that we’ll announce here in due course.
During our first year at 4iP we focussed heavily on experimenting with innovation and new talent. Over 80% of our investments were made in companies and people who have never worked with Channel 4 before, with over 60% based outside London. In 2010 we’re going to track down even more of you with great ideas and brilliant ambitions to continue this trend.
We’re pleased to have worked with a fantastic range of partners across the UK to co-fund and support the projects and companies backed by 4iP in 2009. Over two thirds of our investments were co-funded with our partners and we’re keen to find even more shared opportunities in 2010. We’d like to thank all our partners for their hard work and for sharing our vision of nurturing great talent to deliver sustainable, viable and most importantly, engaging digital media with public value.
The New Year provides a great opportunity for 4iP to translate the knowledge gathered during 2009 and improve its operating and investing models to deliver further public value.
We’ll communicate specific priorities for 2010 via this blog and at events throughout the year but we’ll be continuing our search for innovative, scalable, challenging and cheeky tools and services that:
a) hold those with power and money to account; or
b) help you perform an MOT on your life.
One of the recent changes here at 4iP has been the shape of our team. Whilst we’ll remain a team of seven, at the end of 2009 we bid a fond farewell to Ewan McIntosh, Digital Commissioner for Scotland, NI and the North-East, who goes on to pursue a number of exciting new opportunities.
Ewan was the first member of the 4iP team; joining in late summer 2008. During his 18 months with the fund he was responsible for seeding the 38minutes digital media professional social network for Scotland and NI, working closely with our partners at Scottish Enterprise, Scottish Screen, Northern Ireland Screen and Northern Film & Media and spearheaded 4iP investments in these exciting projects:
- Central Station
- MirrorMe
- You Booze You Looze
- FestBuzz
- Phabling
We wish Ewan every success in his future endeavours and thank him for his fantastic contribution to 4iP.
Our remaining Digital Commissioning Managers (Dan Heaf, Lucy Wurstlin and Claire McArdle) will now cover Scotland, Northern Ireland and the North-East. If you’re based in one of these regions and would like to submit an investment proposal to 4iP - the process remains unchanged, simply submit your idea via our submission system and we’ll be in touch.
We’ll continue to attend events and meet-ups in those regions and if you’re organising one please do get in touch with us at and we’ll let you know if we can come along.
In addition, one of our Digital Commissioning Managers and I will be in Glasgow on the last Thursday and Friday of each month. We’ll be meeting with the companies behind existing 4iP projects, catching up with our partners and most importantly, seeking out new people with exciting investment opportunities. Please do get in touch via if you’d like to arrange a meeting. We’ll post precise dates on this blog in the next week or so.
Finally we’re looking for a new team member to support our core operations. As our investment portfolio grows we’re keen to maximise the benefits and opportunities for every company within it. We are currently offering the position of Investment Analyst and full details can be found here.
We plan to be very busy throughout 2010 and will be kicking things off shortly with some calls to action. We’d love to hear from you when we do.
]]>MirrorMe
In partnership with Northern Film and Media, 4iP is providing start-up funding for MirrorMe, a facebook application that uses advanced facial recognition technology to help users see the effect their current lifestyle will have on their appearance over time. Users upload a photograph of their face and then answer questions about their lifestyle and habits including smoking, drinking, diet, drugs and sun bed usage. The application then scours over 86 individual points on their face to generate a new image of how they will look in the future if their current lifestyle continues unchecked. Designed as a light-hearted and easy to use application, MirrorMe has a serious message and aims to use fun, laughter and a dose of shock to inspire change in users’ habits helping them ‘MOT Their Life’.
GymFu
Continuing the theme of ‘MOT Your Life’, 4iP is also providing funding for two innovative iPhone applications. GymFu is a new application designed to make exercising fun and compelling, encouraging the public to take control of their fitness. The new application will allow users to train and track their progress in a variety of exercises, enabling them to squeeze the recommended 30-60 minutes of daily exercise into their lives in bite-sized chunks. To keep you motivated, users can follow and comment on the progress of their friends and share their own progress on the web.
Splashpath
Splashpath is an iPhone application with one clear goal; to get as many people enjoying the health benefits of swimming. In partnership with the Leisure Database Company, Splashpath will open up a comprehensive database of UK pool information. In addition to providing information about the opening hours of their local swimming pools, SplashPath aims to connect users with other swimmers creating a virtual world of ‘buddies’ to race against.
4iP has also invested in two significant new projects designed to help people discover stuff that could change their lives.
School Report Card
School Report Card is an online application that helps parents simplify one of the most important decisions they will ever have to make – how to choose a suitable school for their child. Historically this has involved wading through pages of impenetrable Ofsted reports and local authority websites to find reams of data you then need to analyse. School Report Card attempts to address this problem. The application will bring together multiple sets of information in an accessible and user-friendly way. In addition to league tables, School Report Card will provide a meaningful interpretation of what a school is really like – the atmosphere, internal organization, teaching standards, facilities, discipline and much, much more. Simply by making this data easier to access and navigate, 4iP believes School Report Card will provide a significant benefit to many parents at a stressful time in their lives and its funding will be used to help build, launch and run the initial product.
ScraperWiki
4iP is also providing start-up funding for ScraperWiki, a platform for gathering, storing, aggregating and distributing publicly useful data sets. The Liverpool based project will unlock data hidden away in unstructured and unusable formats on the web and make them usable. The project aims to bring together a community of data savvy journalists and developers with a civic conscience to use their respective skills for public good. For more information or an invite to the alpha version go to http://scraperwiki.com/.
Slugger O’Toole
Slugger O’Toole is a Northern Irish based news and research portal that looks at various strands of political life in Northern Ireland, bringing together comment from the full range of the political spectrum. Already established as a political platform with a reputation for ‘knowing it first’, 4iP’s joint investment with Northern Ireland Screen will enable the platform to extend its reputation for hyper-local political coverage to other areas around the world, creating a more sustainable business designed to support a free online service.
Yoosk
Finally, 4iP is also confirming it has agreed follow-on funding for one of its most talked about projects; Yoosk.com. In partnership with Screen West Midlands (“SWM”), the development agency for screen media in the West Midlands through its Digital Media Fund supported by Advantage West Midlands, 4iP first invested in Yoosk in January of this year, providing funding to enable Yoosk to develop a number of ideas to help grow the feedback and rating elements of the platform and to integrate its features into other news and social networking sites. The second round of funding for Yoosk, provided jointly by 4iP and SWM, will be used to add further functionality to the service which is already being used by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Justice.
Tom Loosemore, Head of 4iP, said: “When we launched 4iP last year we always said we wanted to help companies use the best of digital media to create projects that would make a genuine difference to people’s lives and our recent projects definitely achieve this. From mobile applications that encourage you to stop your bad habits to websites that make data easier to navigate and use, these projects demonstrate how digital media, when used wisely, can have a hugely positive impact on our day-to-day lives.”
]]>
Last week they announced their latest partnership, with the Independent, to discover the UK’s best MP.
As we hurtle towards May and the general election, putting further investment into a site which facilitates a credible interaction between the public and their elected representatives is absolutely right for 4iP.
One of the ideas we’ve funded off the back of our iPhone 3.0 call to action is Splashpath.
Splashpath’s core functionality will help people find their local pools and checking opening times. Trust me, there’s nothing more frustrating than being kicked out 20 minutes in to make way for the 60+ aqua jogging session. Swimmers will be able to record their swims and unlock achievements through completing goals and competing with other users. In partnership with the Leisure Database Company, Splashpath will open up a comprehensive database of UK pool information. This information will be further enhanced through close collaboration with pool operators. Here are some early screenshots Here are some early screenshots
So let’s take the customary tour through 4iP’s reasons behind the investment.
Firstly there’s is the size of the opportunity. Over 5.6 million adults regularly swim in the UK. Not only is swimming the most popular sporting pastime, it is also the sport that 12% of the adult population would like to do more often. Despite it being the most popular sporting pastime, it is currently poorly marketed and hasn’t really embraced new technologies. Swimming websites don’t help either. Most pool timetables are available as downloadable word documents or PDFs. SplashPath develops a new route to market and introduces new swimming opportunities via new technology.
Secondly, there is the clear public service benefits. 4iP has always had a stated it’s interested in funding ideas that improve the health and fitness of it’s users. By making swimming more accessible and more fun Splashpath hopes to coax the metaphorical whales off the beach. With free swimming now available to anyone under-16, there has never been a more perfect time to encourage people to seek a healthier lifestyle.
Finally as we continue to invest in this area we will look to enhance the network effect of our investments. For example, it’s possible to imagine a single web service for consumers that allows tracking and recording of numerous health and exercise applications.
]]>
4iP recently invested in ScraperWiki, a platform to scrape, store, aggregate, and distribute unstructured public data in more useful, structured formats.
OK, so I admit I usually lose most people at this point so I’ll explain why this investment is so exciting for me and for 4iP.
At its heart ScraperWiki is a data store. The outputs of the scraper code are stored online and accessed via a .csv, GoogleDoc or an API. The ambition is to fill ScraperWiki with thousands of public data sets that can be used by developers, researchers, journalists, and public bodies. For an example and to find out what crimes Londoners worry about then read the ScraperWiki blog.
For the developer it is also a beautiful browser-based coding environment. It allows developers (“swikis”?) to extract information from websites, pdf and Word documents from the Internet and transform them into structured data.
The ScraperWiki team are working hard to make this experience simple to use and familiar to developers. Key to success is making this right for developers so the platform provides version-control, a console, shortcut keys, scheduling and access to ScraperWiki code libraries that make the job of web scraping much easier. If you’d like to get involved then for an alpha invite.
ScraperWiki geo-location libraries will allow a developer to scrape data and a location (a postcode, long/lat) and overlay boundary information (a constituency, a local police ward). I am really excited about the possibilities of this. It should produce some interesting and valuable data-sets.
I declare a personal weakness for all things open-data-ery and I once studied politics. That declared I can tell you ScraperWiki is an important element within the 4iP eco-system of investments. Everyone needs a bit of data in their lives and 4iP is no different.
The ScraperWiki team have a reputation for civic hacking, transparency and holding power to account. They are some of the people behind Public Whip (see how your MP votes), Planning Alerts (email alerts of planning applications near you), UNDemocracy (transcripts of UN meetings), FarmSubsidy.org (who gets what from the Common Agricultural Policy) and Rewired State hack days. They are a great team and they have all been a source of inspiration.
ScraperWiki have embraced the sustainability requirements of the fund with gusto and I see success ahead. A platform for scraping public data (i.e. it’s not the Scrapers’ data, but the Crown’s) was not an immediately obvious revenue generator but we worked together and figured it. We discussed a volunteer sustained platform, but the ScraperWiki team are now out and about talking to interesting people about transactional and service based revenues.
Public launch is set for the end of February but you can follow ScraperWiki on Twitter to keep tabs on progress or for an alpha invite.
]]>
The 4iP investment will be used to fund the next round of development in the ActionFu series. I’m dead keen to tell you all about it but you’re going to have to wait. Jof and the GymFu team are keen to keep the product details under wraps.
I’ll attempt to give the usual high level investment justification without giving anything away. From a 4iP perspective the public service remit is clear. Perhaps no other investment to date so explicitly makes the case for improving people’s lives but importantly it tackles the problem in a ‘4’ like way. The application/ platform will cater specifically for people who only do modest amounts of exercise not beefcakes in the gym. As with the existing ActionFu series, it encourages users to compete with others and makes the whole experience more entertaining.
]]>Schools have been inspected by Ofsted and reports produced for almost a decade. These reports are published online where they can be read by parents and the media. The form, however, is convenient only as a report archive, and not for the deeper goals of knowing. When you have pages of information how do you know what information is important?
This investment by 4iP in School Report Card addresses these problems. It will bring together multiple data sets to provide a newly accessible way of researching and comparing schools. This product will go beyond the idea of league tables to show schools in context and provide a meaningful interpretation of what they are really like - the atmosphere, internal organisation, teaching standards, facilities, discipline and much more.
Unlike the numerous books and school guides this product doesn’t just provide for parents researching new schools. School Report Card goes beyond selection providing existing school communities with the ability to take what they’ve found and act on it socially, whether that’s sending a link to a parent-teacher association or contacting a councillor. This product takes users from being informed about a system to having agency within the system. It will always provide a positive step next step that is localised and appropriate.
The team are making positive and friendly responses to school reports central to the product. School Report Card’s motto for the first public release is to celebrate the many great schools, making the data equivalent of school photos: a memento for every school’s performance.
So for the customary reasons why 4iP have invested. Firstly, and most importantly the team are incredibly talented. We care more about how smart you are than how old you are, and more about the quality of your ideas than whether you have a formal business plan. With Matt Jones (ex Dopplr) and Matt Webb (ex BBC) leading the business you know you can guarantee they’ll deliver something innovative and different. But talent attracts talent so as they ramp up I’m sure we’ll see distinguished designers and developers come on board.
Secondly, we know there is a user need and the opportunity is large. There are well over 7M parents of working age in Britain and we know that many parents care deeply about their kids’ education. We can see there’s a high demand for schools information with all the major newspapers and the BBC providing supplements or online products that surface the OFSTED data. But we have both qualitative and quantitative information that shows their needs are ill served online at present. We hope this product will be a first for giving schools data meaning and gives parents agency to affect change.
Finally, we know School Report Card will tackle this problem in a ‘4’ like way. The products will be fun, engaging and controversial; challenging the views people hold about schools and teachers and informing and opening the minds of parents.
Get more information on the BERG blog
]]>
.jpg)
Initially launching as a Facebook app, MirrorMe launches this week and comes out of young North East games development studio Ideonic, from Middlesbrough.
MirrorMe takes advanced Facial Recognition technology, turning it into a fun app available to everyone on the web and, soon, on the iPhone.
Users upload an image of their face or use their Facebook profile pic, and then answer questions relating to their lifestyle and habits. The app then scours for over 86 points on the face, generating a new image of the user’s face based on how they might look in future if they continue in their current lifestyle. These are then used to accurately distort face shapes to show changes with aging and weight variation. By detecting the exact contours of the user’s face, multiple photorealistic overlays can be morphed and blended to the individual’s face to given a unique and scarily accurate facial distortion.
A later version will show a short video of the user’s progression from current day vitality to their last wrinkly days.
Although primarily designed to be fun, the app does take medical factors into account, creating rules that can be applied to each individual user based on factors such as their location and ethnic origin as well as their habits.
The technology behind the app is based on advanced facial recognition technology developed by German face recognition experts BetaFace.
This light-hearted way of helping people connect how current day health habits affect their future is pure Channel 4 territory, with obvious connections in content terms to a host of prime time programmes such as Embarrassing Bodies - in fact, last Sunday night we tried out the app on Channel4.com for the Embarrassing Old Bodies Special. It offers an entertaining yet troubling app that shows every user how they can prevent the impending lines, discolouration, bags or spots from happening in the first place.
The app has its viral loops baked in, with users’ curiosity piqued the moment one of their friends shares the gruesome results to their friend feed. It therefore fulfills our public service role in two swipes: it gets people talking about what certain activities could do to their good looks in the long term, and gets them using the app to play around with the effects of different habits.
We’re hoping that the forthcoming iPhone app will ride on the back of a successful implementation on Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, and take the game away from the PC and to the locations where many of the habits begin: the pub. The app also provides one element of the revenue model for the investment.
Importantly, MirrorMe is just one more example of 4iP helping stimulate the creative industries outside the M25. The idea, born out of a 4iP- and Northern Film and Media-supported cross-creative lab earlier this year, uncovers Ideonic, a young, innovative company, to the wider attention of the digital media world and is 4iP’s first investment in the North East of England with Northern Film and Media, who this week announce a new £2.4m content fund to further stimulate the sector.
Visit www.MirrorMeGallery.co.uk to add the app to your Facebook profile, and see how future iterations of the product develop over the next few months.
]]>
Investing in the stability and growth of the UK’s political blog with arguably the most local reach represents what Channel 4 and 4iP is all about. This week 4iP announced its investment in the Northern Ireland-based political blog Slugger O’Toole, in the fund’s first co-investment with Northern Ireland Screen. The investment adds to a range of web products running along the theme of “keeping an eye on money and power”, providing a means of exploring localised political debate at scale.
Working with Belfast-based developer and instigator of beautiful things Andy McMillan (@GoodOnPaper), we’re helping to revamp the Slugger site for existing readers, with a relaunch of the site planned for the New Year. The goal is to make what is currently a crowded, busy and perhaps intimidatingly quick-posting blog more accessible for newbies and more enjoyable for current readers and commenters. The next step is to take the most influential political blog in Northern Ireland and turn it into a sustainable collaborative public service media platform, moving the means of pluralistic political debate forward elsewhere in the UK. We’re also keen to explore how we amplify the voices of those commenting: the debates under each post are just as vital as the posts themselves.
Slugger is unique among political blogs for its combination of public service levels of trust with the blogosphere’s forensic and adversarial demands. According to a recent Stratagem/ComRes poll, 96% of Stormont’s politicians read it regularly, and it’s demonstrably reaching deep into local political issues. With many major political news stories being broken by its readers before the mainstream media gets hold of them, it is also Northern Ireland’s journalistic watering-hole of choice.
For politicians and the public, the value of good political blogs has never been clearer. The last twelve months have shown what the power of social media can do to inspire and engage the public in the decision-making processes that affect them, from digging though expenses claims to helping claim electoral victory for the Obama administration.
But proximity to what ‘real’ people think and the provision of a forum to amplify those voices is what Slugger O’Toole has been doing for the best part of seven years.
Why did I want to pursue an investment in Slugger O’Toole, though, and not any one of the other political blogs out there? Slugger’s readership is large, and arguably more varied than any other political blog, especially given its geographic focus: to have both your national Assembly and a critical mass of your local councillors coming to you for genuine breaking stories on a regular basis is something that any national newspaper would be content with. Their support was particularly demonstrable on Tuesday night, as nearly 300 politicians, journalists and readers from across Northern Ireland packed into Belfast’s Black Box for the Slugger Awards. For goodness sake: even Bob Geldof joined us.
I’m particularly fond of Slugger’s ethic of “play the ball not the man”. ‘People want to debate the issues, not the politicians’, believes its founder Mick Fealty. Many of his political blogger compadres would and do disagree. But when we’ve excluded the political hacks and scandal junkies, the vast majority of us want change on specific issues and we want a place to debate them where our politicians see our view. Slugger provides that. In spades.
At a time when politicians and citizens are subject to more noise than signal in a growing web of unmoderated “citizen-produced democracy”, and national news repeatedly fails to account for local political issues, 4iP’s investment is a timely one.
In the next four weeks we will finalise a refreshed design for the site, with new functionality in the New Year which should help spread Slugger’s ethic further into the mainstream, further into its already highly localised audiences. We will uncover yet more voices that need amplified for the eyes and ears of the political classes in Stormont, Westminster, Brussels and Strasbourg; we will see Slugger pushing these representatives to get more done for their people, rather than just talking about it.
Towards Spring we will see Slugger trying to replicate the same, honest “play the ball” political coverage in Scotland, and perhaps further afield. We’re building some business cases around the work Slugger’s authors are arguably the most capable people in the world at carrying out, having lived through Western Europe’s worst civil war and come out the other side with an online forum for genuine political discussion between all sides. Slugger will help fill a significant media gap of coverage and comment on politics at local levels while having a growing impact nationally in Westminster.
This is not a 4iP ‘investment’ on the same level as some of our six figure sums, but with the impact Slugger-the-blog is already having, Slugger-the-platform is a win for “amplifying voices” from the word go. It is exactly where Channel 4 at its most cantankerous should be.
Picture Credit: John Baucher, with permission, aka Moochin Photoman. Blogger Alan In Belfast picks up his Martin Rowson portrait after winning Slugger Awards Blogger Of The Year for his “election monitoring” of the darker side of the EU election processes.
]]>
During the heady summer months I led 4iP’s investment in Newspaper Club. The wonderful team at Newspaper Club are building a tool to help people make their own newspapers. And by ‘newspapers’ they mean anything you can make with ink on newsprint.
They’ve been documenting ‘the start-up dream’ on their blog which I suggest you read but if you’re a joyless, number crunching, fact loving capitalist you might prefer this investors summary.
Now, despite their best efforts to manage users’ and investors’ expectation by constantly reminding us that ‘it won’t be as good as you’re imagining’ they’ve been getting on rather well. In fact they’re getting on slightly better than I had hoped for. Here’s why.
Firstly, they’ve hit their beta revenue targets prior to actually launching their beta. Investors like this. Cynics amongst you may make the point out that Russell Davies is the master of disappointment management only to swoop in at the last minute to over deliver and delight! But the revenue targets weren’t set by NC they were set by 4iP’s investment manager (see scowl here). Generating revenue is a good thing for all the obvious reasons and because I believe start-ups that generate revenue early-on will show more financial discipline from an earlier stage. This is even more important when a company is funded rather than bootstrapped. Hey now they’re spending their money and ours!
Secondly, it seems that this newspaper idea is proving rather popular. Yes, they may be in alpha but they already got a lovely selection of paying customers. In investor land we call this traction or product / market fit and we love it. 4iP loves it a little less than most but that’s because were odd and put product first. 4iP literally fizzes with excitement when the club’s newspapers pop up at events like Playful09 and Wired’s Intelligence Briefing. Don’t even get me started about the data newspaper.
Finally, I value management integrity and openness above almost everything. 4iP can do it’s bit to bring in external directors, advisors and specialists but this no substitute for competence and maturity from those running the show. I never leave Newspaper Club with the feeling that I’m not 100% in the know. Yes, they make mistakes but they don’t pretend everything fine when it isn’t and give a balanced view of how things are going without my having to dig too hard. I can see this openness flowing through to the customers convince people that they’d like to spend their money with them.
Get ready for the beta..!
]]>When 4iP launched in October last year we knew one of the key questions we’d be asked was how we would deal with IP and rights. Our blog post (http://www.4ip.org.uk/blog/post/4ip_update/) last September attempted to address this, explaining that 4iP’s commitment to innovation and experimentation would require a flexible approach to both the business models used and the way in which we dealt with IP and rights. This was principally because, with such a wide range of projects and partners operating in such a dynamic and fast paced sector it was impossible to come up with anything remotely ‘standard’.
However, there was always a danger that, in the absence of done deals, some would interpret this flexible approach as ‘we’re not going to tell you because you’re not going to like it’. So, just over a year from the launch and, with around 30 projects under the 4iP belt, we thought it was a good time to clarify our position.
The principle of flexibility remains; the widely differing needs and requirements of our various investments combined with the rapid and ever-changing development of business models in this fast-moving sector means it remains appropriate to consider the circumstances of each and every deal: this approach is sound and sensible.
We adopt a range of approaches to rights ownership and rights exploitation, and believe that the responsibility for the latter should be placed in the hands of those best able to maximise availability and potential for revenue. We believe it makes sense that whoever is in the best position to market, distribute and sell the product should be given the responsibility to do so contractually. For all 4iP projects to date that has been the company that pitched the project, with 4iP providing support and advice as needed. .
In all deals done to date, the companies 4iP has contracted with own the project IP and are the party primarily responsible for realising the value of that IP. However, we need to retain flexibility as this approach might not be appropriate for all projects.
We also believe that 4iP should leverage its access to the assets of Channel 4 to increase the impact of the projects it backs. That may mean using our platforms to feature 4iP products, where appropriate. However, the successful sustainability of web and mobile products and services lies in their breadth of distribution. To that end, 4iP generally takes a non-exclusive license to use and promote the output of the project.
Risk and reward
Finally, it is also worth remembering that with the responsibility of owning and exploiting IP comes not only reward but risk. Live products have running costs and require plenty of ongoing maintenance and development. It is rare that the IP created in a project can simply be exploited for commercial gain without requiring ongoing investment in terms of time, effort and funds. We therefore structure our contracts to recognise the input and risks taken by everyone involved in the creation and ongoing exploitation of our products and services, which we believe is ultimately of benefit to everyone.
]]>
What’s more it lands at the perfect time of year, no more scratching your head wondering what to buy those who have everything for Christmas - everyone needs some new skills or hobbies.
So check out the site now and follow the guys on twitter @EverythingHQ to keep track of the growing range of gifts on offer.
Oh, and on the offchance you’re surrounded by super-perfect people with nothing more to learn, why not add a gift of learning to your own Christmas wishlist? I’m already penning a letter to Santa asking for photography lessons and a bread-baking course.
