Thought this might be helpful to share. I was looking at Kickstarter UK and amongst the concerns about making things, fulfilling rewards and trying to raise money at the same time, the financials can be quite a headache.
This is a budget form, you just have to fill your numbers in and see the effect on fees, fees per pledge, total Kickstarter fees, & VAT. Then once you start fulfilling, I’m assuming you’re paying the person fulfilling minimum living wage by London standards.
View Working in London in a larger map
I wrote a blog post 2 years ago about the Tech City announcement, then I wrote another blog post a year later. Because of this compulsion to write about Shoreditch and its transformation at the hand of the government and corporations, I was interviewed on Friday for BBC News as part of a piece on the new Barclay’s sponsored Central Working building on Bonhill St. To avoid giving the impression that I’m simply a grumpy bastard, I thought I’d elaborate a little on the point I’ve been trying to make.
Then & now
I love Shoreditch. When I moved to London in May 2007, I set up Tinker and sold Arduinos from my at-the-time boyfriend’s apartment (thanks Matt) for the first 6 months of the business. We were the first UK distributors of the platform that had grown from a platform for students designed and used in my MA course in Italy to a world-famous tool to easily learn how to tinker with electronics & programming. Since 2007, I moved around the area, constantly hanging around Shoreditch for meetings, vietnamese dinners and pints in local haunts.
Now, the things I love the most haven’t changed much. The vietnamese is still great, the few pubs I go to are still around and I still have meetings in the Book Club even if they insist on deafening their customers with their increasingly loud music (don’t get me wrong, the music is great). I get the most out of the area, professionally, by walking the streets at lunch, discovering new places and bumping into people all the time. If anything, the “Tech City” thing has increased the amount of serendipity in the area. It’s made my network very accessible and made the area very friendly.
These are all good things, and also why I don’t understand the construction of what I can only describe as innovation factories. What Google Campus and other such large buildings do is to cut people off from that serendipity. Places where lunch can be had at a desk because the café is downstairs and the coffee machine is only 3 steps away actively disengage people from the area they work in. Not only that, but it puts pressure on the environment to deliver “value”. They act as hot-houses for a particular type of business as opposed to help different types of businesses meet and knowledge sharing to happen.
The informal innovation machine
Back in 2008 when Dopplr started and Matt wrote about the Silicon Roundabout, the heartbeat of the area was the offices of Moo on the Old street station roundabout itself. Already quite large at the time, Moo had extra space in their offices which they rented to small businesses and startups. Both benefited from great press with the early days of the new Wired UK. A few years later, Tech Hub had moved into the same building, White Bear Yard had properly started and Moo moved to the building I have worked in for the last 3 years. They continued until recently to host companies like Tweetdeck, arguably the last great success of the area in terms of acquisition. None of these transactions, moves or relationships were formalised by calling any particular space an “innovation hub”. The pressure wasn’t necessary and the space was cheap.
Do the maths
View Les carnets d’Alexandra: the price of a desk in a larger map
With its new building and desks costing £449 + VAT a month for single occupancy, it’s hard to think how Central Working will compete with the informal San Francisco laptop-in-a-café culture. The point of being a startup is that you have no money! The types of startups that will have the money for 3 desks ie around £1 500 a month won’t be the ones who are starting out, they will be the ones that will already have received funding and are looking for a second round. The ones that need help will still be in cafés, university libraries or at home.
This is typical of London’s approach to business and the corporatisaion of space and activity that can often be found in the way areas like London Bridge are getting turned into shopping malls or Spitalfields market in 2008. Once an area gains in reputation, corporate interest emmerges and prices go up. The cost of a square meter in our postcode has gone from £24 in 2010 to around £32 in 2012.
What to do?
Shoreditch is an environment that not unlike an unkept garden, benefits from a light touch approach. Concentrating on creating pedestrian areas, event spaces and allowing the creative people in the area to take over a bit more would help get people out of their ivory towers and foster the type of serendipity that makes things happen and allows artists, designers, coders and fashion designers to hang out and influence each other’s work. Because that’s exactly what makes Shoreditch so special.
View A New Shoreditch in a larger map
So with that, I think I’ll steer clear of the topic for a while. I’m busy with my own startup after all :)
I’ve been producing events on occasion and it was my great pleasure to produce the Mozilla Festival for the second year in a row. The event was very well reviewed but the most pleasurable part of it is being able to plan an event in a very small team of 5 women, Michelle Thorne the Festival Lead, Diana Proca who leads the army of volunteers who make this a really unique event and Ravensbourne College’s leading ladies of events Claire Selby and Laura Lillepruun. Directly after the Festival I flew over to Barcelona to talk about smart cities and the Good Night Lamp on a panel at the Smart City Expo World Congress.
There’s something important in being able to exist on both sides of the equation as a woman in technology. Producing an event of around 1K attendees in a small team, it’s like running a small company for a short period of time. Speaking at events on the other hand is an opportunity to distill professional experiences and share it with others. I would hope that projects like Lady Ada Day and Articulate are the starting point of a generation of women who are certain that what they make is also worth sharing with others in a public context. It takes confidence, but there is no other way.
Next month i will have been co-organising Cosm’s Internet of Things London Meetup for a year. When Usman and Ed approached me, the attendance was around 20 and the group had around 140 members.
After a year, the meetup has attracted 906 members , between 40 and 70 actually attend every month, the meetup sells out within a few days of a Twitter announcement and there is always a waiting list. This is a good sign.
My job with this meetup is to make sure that as many varied people come together and think about how they might collaborate, interact with Cosm as a company and generally get a sense of what the internet of things means. What motivated me to get involved includes:
1. My fascination with worlds loosely joined and a lack of definition for the internet of things.
2. The importance of meeting face to face.
Coming from the world of design (I studied product & interaction design) I’m used to a world that has a very organic and fluctuating view of itself. If you look at the history of product design for instance, you’ll find that it started with applying engineering skills in a creative way to car designs, new home products that emerged after the second world war, etc. There was a lot of space to innovate with materials that didn’t exist like the Eames did with moulded plywood. It was a time of discoveries and elation. Then the technologies and materials became well known, it became affordable to make one-offs and the designer’s role started to be considered by collaborators as one of aesthetics, bordering on art. Thus a debate that the world of design has been having for the past 20 years about what is design and what is art, because the perception of the word design has changed.
The Internet of Things is in a similar situation. People from the Machine-to-Machine world who have been providing smart infrastructures for buildings, the military and others have embraced the term. RFID & barcode providers have used it to put a new spin on a technology that is more than 30 years old. Product designers use it to talk about connected product ideas. Electronics manufacturer are excited about the idea of selling low-powered chipsets to manufacturers who will introduce them on the market.
All these players all use the “internet of things” to define what they offer, some even build marketing campaigns that extend the term like Cisco’s Internet of Everything, or the Web of Things and others add on obscure academic expressions like Collaborative Objects (which I heard the head of Marketing for ARM use in an internet of things presentation at the Houses of Parliament last week). This is a bit like talking about experience design vs service design, it’s a marketing strategy to associate a business to an industry/trend while still retaining some uniqueness.
With these fluctuations in definitions and visions from larger players, the role of the meetup becomes one of making sense of the noise and highlight how much is happening in the UK, on the ground in people’s homes, SMEs and R&D departments away from marketing departments.
Presentations so far have included:
- how to connect a mobile project with Cosm
- how Kickstarter works for internet of things projects & art installations using the latest open hardware platforms
- sensor platforms for environmental monitoring
- mobile apps for the internet of things using sound
- companies working on White Space
- internet-connected robots, geiger sensors and bubble machines.
All these various companies, startups, people and research labs are happy to come and talk at an event that is on a topic that lacks definition. This means that right now, the term is loose, open and people feel they can use it without asking for permission and that’s brilliant.
You don’t build an industry on bickering about semantics. You build it by encouraging cross-collaboration and cross-fertilisation of ideas and having a beer while doing it.
It’s my privilege to help make that happen every month and I look forward to the next years of presentations to see how things shape up. Hope you’ll join us.
There’s a lot to be said for the amount of money technology projects receive on crowd-funding platforms versus charitable organisations or good causes. The Paralympics are starting in London tomorrow and I found this project on Indiegogo. A young woman looking to get a new prosthetic leg for her athletic career. I hope she can get the type of support that a technology community is happy to give to the latest gadget, because this might just change her life.
I think an area we don’t quite talk enough about is the link between the internet of things and anthropomorphisation. When our things start to speak, who is to say we won’t assign values and behaviours to them like we do to people. Is that good, might that curb consumption? Will ponder some more.
via Geek and Poke.
So you have an internet of things startup? I have one, my friends have one, and Kickstarter is coming to the UK. But really, money is only one part of the entrepreneurial equation.
With the brith of IOTWorks last week in Boston, really, the only question is: why not in London? I have been living and working here for 5 years and the confluence of web development / product development and manufacturing expertise in the UK are a perfect mix for anyone wanting to start an internet of things startup. It’s also a type of business that has challenges that are unique but also predictable. Here are some challenges which I’m encountering which would make a good framework for a 1 year internet-of-things incubator:
IP
- IP advice and support for ideas that cross the boundaries of product / web
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
- Training in Arduino for initial prototyping & pitching needs
- Training in more advanced electronics prototyping to prepare for electronics engineering support
- Training in using CAD packages and rapid prototyping tools for prototyping 1.0 (beyond paper prototyping)
- Support in finding local industrial designers to give you advice about engineering the product so it is easy to manufacture
- Support in finding local manufacturing partners for prototyping 2.0 needs (pre-production prototyping)
- Access to electronics engineering consultancy services
- Access to workshop space for light prototyping / light production for user testing.
- Access to web development expertise for CTO level positions
- Access to expertise from Cosm, Evrthng and other web-based iot platforms.
SELLING STUFF
- Support in making e-commerce decisions
- Traning in understanding the challenges of selling in retail environments
- Training in how to manage PR / press
- Help in making links to local retail environments like Selfridges
FOUNDERS DEVELOPMENT
- Training in investment structures / processes
- Training in presentation skills for Founders
- Training in financial models
- Organisation of show and tell events with investors
This isn’t rocket science but a mashup of what the British Library IP Centre, Metropolitain Works and White Bear Yard might offer. The combination of support across business, product design and web development are really paramount and often founders will have strong links in one area and not in others.
I have no ideas how such a place would make money initially unless it’s sponsored by the government, a local university (yeh right) or a corporation. But the opportunity is there.
PS. If someone in government is still wondering what to do with those buildings in Stratford…take note.
I went to see New Designers last week in London, a yearly pilgrimage. I went to product design school at the beginning of the century and I was really hoping that in a digital age, things would feel, well, modern. They didn’t really. If you’ve never been, ND is a fair for product design graduates in the Design Business Centre in Islington. A real meat market for design talent, they are represented by their schools, still hang posters, and show non-functional prototypes. Furthermore, they are mostly just excited to be in London and so bored with their thesis work they don’t hang out next to their projects. A strange environment to visit to say the least when I’ve been hanging out and working in industry for a while and was actually interested in hiring young talent for Good Night Lamp. I couldn’t help but wonder where these graduates will end up after they’ve taken their summer holiday and realise there’s not a lot of work out there.
If we could imagine a product design undergraduate program that was concerned about giving graduates a fighting chance out there in 2012 and involving them in the growing field of #iot , this is what it might look like:
- An introduction to Social Media / WordPress / portfolio design in Year 1. ND was full of graduates with last minute business cards with Facebook links and phone numbers but no digital portfolios. This isn’t the 90s.
- An introduction to electronics / Arduino / hacking in Year 2 so that functional prototypes become part of the language of presenting ideas.
- An introduction to video prototyping in Year 1. Video is the medium of choice for complex interactions between products and people. Just look at BERG‘s work.
- A constant interaction with industry through workshops / lectures / etc. in small groups. Making sure the time spent together always starts with students presenting their latest project (1mn each) or thinking so the guest lecturer can understand what they are interested in. Don’t make it compulsory but reward engagement. There’s nothing worse than being forced to meet people you’re not interested in as a student but it’s good to be reminded that there is a world beyond the school walls. Something someone told me is “the best time to look for a job is when you have one” and students need to get that.
- Get students to put their thesis work on Kickstarter and grade them on how well they do. This is a brilliant test of whether an idea has legs and on graduation, they will get the money to make it happen. That’s how you’ll get more entrepreneurs out there.
- Give them strong business support so they leave with a Linkedin profile, a good idea of the studios they want to work with, or organise meetings with future mentors who can help them after they leave.
- Make it a group of 15. None of this 100 students a year thing. There isn’t enough work. If you want it, you have to fight for it. And your peers become the first people you work with, help, collaborate with. I graduated with 72 other people and only keep in touch with about 3, 2 of whom have retrained away from design because there was no work.
- Get them to work on a project with computer science or engineering students. Cross-departmental projects hardly happen but they should. That’s how industry works.
Happy Friday everyone.
I’ve been asked to speak at Saachi in a few weeks about the internet of things. I’ve had clients before who were agencies before and we did some fantastic work together but I’ve also had 15 minute conversations with agency types asking more or less the same questions or interpreting the internet of things in more or less the same way. These are a few answers to those questions.
Why is it relevant?
1. The Internet of Things is a way to make a brand more tangible by connecting a users’s digital presence with the real world, or vice versa.
This might take on the form of a one-off installation or piggybacking on a client’s existing infrastructure. These are mostly done as research projects internally and often for Christmas or a big national holiday as a way to promote an agency’s approach or work.
For example, social media platforms can be used as a way to link users to installations or objects such as:
- Hashtags that trigger Space Hoppers
- Fuss Ball results that are published on Twitter
- Ice tea dispenser triggered by Twitter
- Coca-Cola sponsored space where people use their bracelets to “like” the event.
- Red Pepper built a Facebok Like Light
- Renault built a way to use the tradeshow badge to like the booth on Facebook.
- GE Social Fridge opens with a set number of Foursquare checkins by iStrategyLabs
- Baker Tweet is an example of an agency (Poke) working with a neighbouring business.
2. Sometimes the internet bit isn’t the most interesting bit, it’s the story you tell.
Moving Brands have been building some really interesting projects like a rapid prototyping a chocolate advent calendar. The models were built on a website and then sent them to the hacked 3D printer. The web bit of this isn’t the important part but it makes these experiments possible.
A few years before, they published a site where people could draw an image in a grid of pixels and they collected them to make the patterns of a scarf they sold. This is a lovely way to make your agency stand out.
Casa (on of JWT’s companies) built a beer fridge that is only opened on Fridays when everyone has filled in their time sheets.
Momentumem Madrid built 18 temperature sensitive vending machines for Coca Cola.
3. On process & people
Most of the time, these projects are internal only and the result of a small team of people inside the company working away from billable hours. This is a sacrifice worth making if you’re willing to keep those people playing and inventing to help new business leads. Do not have those people work on these things for only some of the time, it won’t be worth it.
These people are often called creative technologists, you will find they graduated from computer science programs but ended up involved in design somehow. You might find them at Goldsmith’s or the RCA’s degree shows. You might find them in hacker meetups. Some of them have online portfolios that include doing great things with Arduino.
This type of work is also work you can decide to outsource to other vendors, but this means you won’t develop the ability to have new conversations with clients on a daily basis. Having a senior creative technologist on a retainer to hang out to talk to planners would be best. If they are quite junior (ie quite cheap) they might sit on their desk hiding, building interesting things, but not be respected or understood by the CDs. This is an important challenge which is why experience and confidence will go a long way. This person will also help the producer find the right people to make the thing as well.
4. If this then that…slowly
The best way to come up with an “Internet of things” idea that will be possible to make is to think “if someone does XXX online, then it triggers XXX elsewhere” and vice versa. But remember there is always a lag. Nothing happens across media as quickly as it happens online. So that r/c car you want to move with a flash game will not respond automatically.
5. What it means for the future of marketing.
At the moment, anyone from IBM to Bosch is interested in making their products connect to the internet. This will have an impact on marketing only in as much as it will make communicating these emmerging products a real challenge. Youtube, & Vimeo are going to be a big part of the equation because explaining a thing that does something is better done through video. E-commerce and online PR will also lead the way for a really long time as the retail space tries to adjust to hybrid devices. Understanding where a connected lamp like GNL sits in John Lewis is a nightmare. Existing clients who have some new and kooky thing they’ve made might wish to take a leap of faith online before committing their supply chain to these experiments. These are all choices and a world that advertising can help navigate. It’s going to get very exciting.
6. Who do you call?
Some lovely people can help agencies get started in this world (in the UK):
Berg
Vitamins
John Nussey
Technology will save us
Adrian McEwen
James Gilpin
Shawn Bonkowski
Martin Spindler
…is that, sometimes, the best projects have no budget & the people with a budget and the best intentions fall in the hands of agencies with no ability to think outside the box. 2 days, and 2 videos to illustrate this point.
The first a video attempting, I suppose, to get young women interested in science. It’s best to think about it as the opening credits to a Sex & the City Science Special. Grotesque. Commissioned by the EU, it’s received a healthy amount of criticism. A representative, when asked if it was a joke, said that “the EU doesn’t really do irony”. Maybe they should.
The other, I saw in the cinema and was for Code Club a project started by 2 brilliant women to teach kids how to code after school. The whole thing looked a bit DIY-Youtube-just-shot-this with-my-iPhone and not in a good way. It looked like it might have been organised at the last minute backstage at Davos. And to end with Prince Andrew getting hired is also, well cheesy.
These 2 groups are clearly trying to do good things, but the budget and tools they had at their disposal clearly don’t make up for the lack of leadership from the agencies they worked with. Work like you care people, the women and kids you know will thank you.
