Published in Viator, 2012. Original article here.

On the real hippie trail in San Francisco

“Are you looking for a restaurant?” I look around and find a little Chinese man smiling at me. You cannot stand on a San Francisco street looking uncertain for long before someone will offer their assistance (or alternatively, ask for some). The old man has found me on the kerb outside the Buddhist temple in Chinatown, my hair and clothes now pungent with the smell of incense and burning paper. Or is it holy smoke? But yes, I confirm, I am indeed looking for a place to eat. He then asks if I am alone, and nods knowingly when I confirm this: “I came here alone once too, from Hong Kong. This city gives you wings.”

We end up having lunch together, the old man and I. At home I’d have been a lot more reluctant to go off with a stranger like this, but San Francisco has a knack for making you surprise yourself. Its main attractions aren’t the bridges or the cable cars, but a feeling; maybe it’s in the water, maybe it sneaks under the door while you are sleeping. Out here on the foggy peninsula, something’s up. People actually wear flowers in their hair, as San Francisco does a surprisingly good job at living up to its substantial reputation: hippie paradise, rebel haven, magnet for idealists, non-conformists and the occasional nut-job.

Simply walking down the street will give you a decent fill of the San Francisco hippie flavour, with chatty strangers, talented street performers, wafting smells of various substances, as well as general friendliness and curiosity. But if you are serious about gaining your flower power credentials, here are ten must-see destinations.

Swedenborgian Church, 2107 Lyon Street (on Washington)
Hidden out in Pacific Heights, this lumber and redbrick building from 1894 is the brainchild of Emanuel Swedenborg: theologian, scientist and receiver of divine messages. I arrived there in the early evening not expecting to find it open, but the priest, just about to lead a group in bible study, was kind enough to unlock the church for me. It’s a small, homely space: pulpit at the front, hearth at the back. Madrone tree trunks hold up the roof, and the priest pointed out how the maple chairs are made without a single nail. Swedenborgianism is founded on the belief that humans are spirits in a material world, unified by nature, love and luminous intelligence. Swedenborg called it ‘New Age’.

Yoga to the People, 2973 16th Street (on Mission)
‘This yoga is for everyone,’ is part of the guiding principle of this yoga studio. This literally means anyone, as this organisation is run on donations only. Concerned that people may become priced out of yoga, which will set you back at least three figures a month for regular practice, Yoga to the People aims to be a place where the spirit of yoga is made available to all, regardless of means. ‘All bodies rise,’ they say. Namaste.

Bound Together Anarchist Collective, 1369 Haight Street (on Masonic)
This floor-to-ceiling bookshop is chock full of books, zines, posters and pamphlets for the anarchist within. Bound Together has operated in Haight Ashbury for over 35 years now, having turned into a cultural gem in an area that still flies its hippie flag proudly. The bookshop is at the more political end of the hippie spectrum, meaning those more keen to re-live the more, let’s say, mellow elements of the Summer of Love, which happened just up the road, will find plenty of opportunity to do so on nearby Hippie Hill.

Iskcon Hare Krishna temple, 2334 Stuart Street, Berkeley (on Telegraph)
Across the Bay, another pocket of hippie history can be found in Berkeley. The Nag Champa incense lingers on Telegraph Avenue, where hoodie-clad students from the university add a freshness to the tie-dye. I was sitting in a coffee shop near the campus when a robe-clad man came up to me, asking if he could give me a booklet to the nearby Krishna temple. They can teach me how to change my karma there, he said. I have had worse offers. Lectures, chanting and vegetarian meals are also available for those looking for a more step-by-step approach.

Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, 1111 Gough Street (on O’Farrell)
Most San Francisco visitors will go to Grace Cathedral, the Episcopal house of prayer designed in the old French-Gothic style. But Saint Mary, the modern Catholic church sitting on Cathedral Hill, is by far the more unusual, and probably even more awe-inspiring. Built in 1971, the saddle roof exterior is intriguing, but it’s the inside the place that will take your breath. The concrete columns, interspersed with strips of coloured glass, sweep up to form a point high above the altar that tilts everyones heads back.

Konko Temple, 1909 Bush Street (on Laguna)
Near the windswept Japantown plaza is the Konko Temple, a small, unassuming building constructed from blond wood. In the Konko faith, heaven and earth are equally important to make a person whole, explained the reverend when I visited. I’d been sitting in the modest room for a while before he came over, patiently answering my questions and cracking the occasional joke. Kami, the Parent God, is not off in some faraway place, but here with us right now, he explained. Everything is related.

Zen Center, 300 Page Street (on Laguna)
New faces are very welcome at the modern-looking Zen Center, which holds tours for beginners so we can learn how to behave in the temple. A quiet, bright-eyed man in a robe took us around to explain what the bells mean, how to bow and how to take off our shoes in the temple. This was on a Saturday morning, just after we’d listened to a talk by the Buddhist Soto Zen reverend, a soft-spoken woman who explained It takes six months just to learned how to sit. And if you can’t … well that’s just the way it is that day. Instead, take a step back and see things for what they are.

Peoples Temple, formerly at 1859 Geary Boulevard (on Fillmore)
The Peoples Temple is a reminder there is a darker side to San Francisco’s penchant for new ways of thinking. The Symbionese Liberation Army, the radical group which kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst before she joined them to rob a bank, started in the Bay Area, and Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones decided San Francisco was the right fit for his flock. Initially, he adhered to the utopian dreams of the International Peace Mission movement, but things took a darker turn when 918 of Jones’ followers committed mass-suicide from drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.

Vedanta Society, 2323 Vallejo Street (on Fillmore)
This 1905 building, with its concoction of styles, has seen better days. Still, it provides an interesting glimpse into the Vedanta Society, an order associated with monasticism and a basis in Hinduism. Just look at the building itself: each turret carries the symbol for a major religion, signalling the basic principle of ‘oneness of existence’. Vedanta teaches that the essence of all things infinite and eternal, and that all religions lead to the same goal.

Tien Hau Temple, 125 Waverly Place (on Clay)
In an alley in Chinatown, on the top floor of what looks like a residential building, is the oldest Chinese temple in the US. This, however, is not a place to sit in quiet contemplation, but a working temple. Ladies sit along the wall busily folding paper, which visitors buy to burn in the fireplace. The ceiling is covered in red and gold lanterns, with dangling messages attached, while every surface is covered in icons and incense. The smoke fills the temple before escaping out the open door, taking the prayers along with it.

Megabuyte, October 2012. Original article here (£).

The Early View
Organised chaos: Keeping the start-up spirit alive
Valve, the Washington-based gaming company, has been proudly boss-free since its launch in 1996. Founder Gabe Newell remains in charge, but there is no evidence of this in the company literature, which boasts “no middle management, no bureaucracy, just highly motivated peers coming together to make cool stuff”. This is how most start-ups look when they first start tinkering, enabling a spirited environment where ideas matter more than job titles, but often this is lost as the organisation grows.

With 400 employees, however, Valve’s start-up days are over, but still the group is sticking to its boss-free guns. 400 people wheeling around without managers sounds chaotic, but clearly what they’re doing is working: Valve is reported to be valued at $893m in an ongoing takeover attempt from leading Korean gaming groups Nexon and NCSoft. We take a look at a few companies that are maintaining the start-up spirit as they’ve grown, and how technology provides vital tools for the task.

The Common Good
“Just like in a marketplace, everything in Valve is in flux,” explained Valve’s economist-in-residence, Yanis Varoufakis, in an insightful blog post on the company’s philosophy. Google is famous for its ‘20% Time’ policy, where staff get to spend one day a week on a project not necessarily in their job description, but at Valve this number is 100%. People’s desks actually have wheels on them, meaning staff are given the freedom to literally roam about, picking projects and forming new teams. “The idea here is that through this ever-evolving process, people’s capacities, talents and ideas are given the best chance possible to develop and produce synergies that promote the Common Good,” wrote Varoufakis. “It is as if an invisible hand guides Valve’s individual members to decisions that both unleash each person’s potential and also serve the company’s collective interest.”

Providing permission for employees to go rogue is well and good, but with hundreds of people around, a layer of technology may be necessary to help organisation, discovery and communication. While less extreme than Valve, Google, Apple and Facebook all have more or less flat organisational structures (unlike Microsoft, with its 6 to 12 layers of middle management). Mature organisations in awe of these innovators are curious about emulating their methods, in the hope of finding the source of their good fortune. Chris Robinson, CIO of business collaboration software expert Tibbr, explained at a recent company conference how tax giant KPMG is looking into changing its structure in an effort to reduce staff turnover and attract young talent:

“Organisations are turning to enterprise social networking because it breaks down silos [and hierarchy], creates a more open environment where employees can be more collaborative, think non-traditionally and share innovative ideas across the organisation with the integrity of doing what’s good for the organisation.”

Innovation at the edges
Tibbr, owned by Tibco, is among the leading providers of social collaboration tools for enterprise, according to a new report from Forrester, the others being Yammer (now part of Microsoft) and Salesforce’s Chatter. WMVare’s Socialcast and Neudesic’s Pulse are also notable contenders.

“As older companies think about how to become more innovative they are doing it in an old way: ‘We need to figure out the next innovation.’ But there is no next innovation! It is about constant innovation, and organising around letting everyone innovate,” said Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni when we met in San Francisco earlier this year. Yammer’s collaboration software, which aims to create a productive breakdown of company boundaries, is one way to try and stave off rigidity as a company grows. It may even be possible to predict when this will be an issue: history is full of examples of how 150 is the maximum group size before the individual becomes unable to keep track of the relationships and unity is lost, if evidence from Malcolm Gladwell’s famous book ‘The Tipping Point’ is to be believed.

One way to look at Yammer’s service is how it enables staff at large organisations, where size means they can’t keep track of who does what anymore, to do what they would naturally do in a smaller environment. Software developers at PerkStreet Financial, a Boston start-up, use Yammer to facilitate its morning meetings: each member of the 37-person team posts what they did yesterday, what they’ll do today and tomorrow, and the barriers for moving forward. Members can follow the conversation using the hashtag #scrum, and chip in if they have something relevant to add, or otherwise remain uninterrupted yet reachable. Tasks can be delegated to other members using the @-reply, and keeping these conversations out in the open instead of individual inboxes means no duplications. The transparency also creates a social stigma to not pulling your weight, while at the same time it makes the group efficient by letting tasks fall to those with time and inclination to do them.

Into the Scrum
While a so-called Facebook-for-business interface will give employees the tools to organise themselves, this is not enough; a company that is serious about tapping into the innovative impulse among its staff will have to drive through what could be some big cultural changes. Before venturing into collaboration tools with Chatter, Salesforce was a red hot CRM start-up experiencing rapid growth. Seven years after its 1999 launch, however, Salesforce realised its size was starting to make it less efficient: over 200 people now worked in R&D and the department suffered from a lack of visibility, late feedback, long and unpredictable release schedules and a general decline in productivity. In response, Salesforce initiated a brisk three-month transformation to the ‘Scrum’ working methodology, the dominant technique for creating an adaptable, feedback-driven and outcome-oriented organisation with open lines of communication.

In other words, Scrum can teach companies to work like start-ups again. Also used by Amazon, key principles of Scrum include coming together to work in project cycles, during which a team runs itself, report to the customer, and management does not interfere. Another popular system is ‘Kanban’, used at Xerox and music streaming service Spotify. While similar, Kanban is arguably easier to implement successfully than Scrum, whose values go against the grain of a traditional command structure and requires goodwill from all its participants in order to work. Kanban, however, is mainly focused on openness around workflows and does not necessarily require people to throw away their job descriptions.

Satisfaction
Generation Y, accustomed to the organic nature of social media, may well prefer a flat office hierarchy because it lets them run with ideas instead of dealing with office politics. But pleasing the ‘web kids’ is not the only reason corporations may find agile working methods to be in their best interest. In the first year of changing to Scum, Salesforce released 94% more features, delivered 38% more features per developer and delivered 500% more value to their customers compared to the previous year, according to Mike Cohn’s book ‘Succeeding with Agile’.

For a large company with a strong culture and an established pecking order, it may seem daunting to throw tradition out the window and place so much trust on staff to do good. But in addition to improved output, Salesforce found employee satisfaction doubled after its adoption of Scrum, while Deloitte found a correlation between staff retention and active use of Yammer in its own organisation. People like to feel in control of their work, and to be a part of creating something that matters. If allowing people to work organically on projects they are drawn to can help a large company keep the start-up spirit alive, this may well be the secret to staying innovative in the age of constant flux.

Megabuyte, September 2012. Original article here (£).

The Early View
Big Data, Big Bang: Change is the new constant
The technological Big Bang, courtesy of the coming-of-age of the internet, shows no sign of abating. For businesses, it’s proving useless to wonder where the merry-go-round of change will stop next because in all likelihood it will just keep gathering pace, and nowhere is this pace of change more prevalent than in the phenomenon that is Big Data.

“Digital innovations are transforming the economic landscape, far more profoundly than other big shifts in our economic history such as deregulation, oil shocks or mining booms,” said Deloitte’s access economics director Dr Ric Simes in a new report on digital disruption. The consultancy wrote this for the Australian market, but the lessons are global: supply chains are being scrambled and categories are being blurred, and while the timescales will vary, the disruptions apply to every single industry. Technology has leapt forward before, but how it’s different this time is that this is not a blip, it’s a new reality where ongoing change is the new permanent state.

Life in Big Data
At the core of this change is a growing realisation that the internet isn’t a virtual experience anymore, but it’s becoming an aspect of real life. The generational element to the blurring boundaries between virtual and physical experiences was eloquently summed up by Peter Czerski’s ‘We, the Web Kids’, which has become something of an internet meme: “We do not use the internet, we live on the internet and along it. […] The web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes, with us and through us.”

Everything the “web kids” do comes draped in a digital layer which is starting to feel as real as anything in the physical world, explains Czerski, but what enables the internet to exist in our lives like this is the proliferation of Big Data. This includes the sheer amount of data now available for us to pick out of the ether, but equally interesting is the amount of information we ourselves put out there, via location-tagging apps, online shopping histories, Google searches, links to newspaper articles on Twitter, and updates to Facebook. In the past two years, the capacity of the internet has doubled, to 77 terabits per second, according to analysis from Telegeography. Big Data is getting obese, meaning there is a significant opportunity for start-ups that can sift through the noise and present information in an intelligent and ultimately useful manner. Here are some companies that seem to be getting the message at the core of Big Data: the internet is no longer separate from us, but it has become real life.

Visual effects
Space-Time Insight enables users to spot connections they would otherwise have missed by visualising geospatial data in map-form. The West Coast group has just raised $14m in a Series B round to further develop its technology and take it to the mainstream. The company’s funding, which totals an estimated $16m, this time came from Novus Energy Partners, EnerTech Capital and ClearSky Power & Technology Fund. The energy- and utility markets are Space-Time’s main customers at present, but the group is starting to see traction in areas such as oil and gas exploration and transportation. Space-Time enables companies with geospatially diverse assets to visualise and manage factors beyond user data to also include factors ranging from weather to social media.

Another geospatial startup freshly injected with cash is SpaceCurve in Seattle, whose second round of funding brought in $3.5m from Triage Ventures, Reed Elsevier and Divergent Ventures. Total funding is now $5.2 million. SpaceCurve doesn’t actually launch its product until next year and the descriptions of what they do are a bit vague: “The technology will tie people or entities to a precise point in time and space, immediately discover the social and semantic relationships between them, and deliver this real-time intelligence instantly to identify new opportunities, and support better decisions and more profitable actions.” A lot remains to be seen regarding SpaceCurve, but there is no shortage of potential and the backers seem to be pretty excited.

Security and mobility
Sqrrl recently raised $2m in seed money, from Atlas Ventures and Matrix Partners, to aid in their mission to make Big Data applications more secure. This will hopefully make Big Data utilisation more palpable for customers in sensitive industries such as financial services and healthcare. Massachusetts-based Sqrrl’s mission is aided by co-founder and CEO Oren Falkowitz’s roots of working with Big Data questions at the US National Security Agency. The CEO explained Sqrrls methods to GigaOm: “An electronic health record might have a hundred or a thousand components and if any one of those requires an extra control, like the patient’s social security number, the current method is to control that entire record. We have fine-grained access model so you can assign different security to the patient name, to allergies, to medications, to doctors names – they can all be individually controlled.”

Palo Alto’s Factual has spent the summer launching a couple of interesting applications for mobile. As providers scramble to make better location-specific offerings, Factual’s Geopulse API provides everything the Big Data group has on file about a specific location, mined from its constantly growing databanks. In Texas, Datafiniti is only one year old but comes with a compelling mission: to become a search engine for data. The hope of founder-CEO Shion Deysarkar, formerly of data crawler 80legs, is that Datafiniti will make finding relevant data as easy as finding relevant web sites through Google.

World Wide Kaggle
On the subject of mind-boggling Big Data ventures, it’s hard not to be excited by Kaggle. The San Francisco-based start-up has a unique solution for how Big Data can be used to predict future behaviour, by linking scientists to companies sitting on mountains of scrambled data. Kaggle’s method is to offer cash prizes to the global PhD community, asking them to find the best solution to the problem on behalf of clients such as NASA and Ford. At the moment, insurer AllState is offering money via Kaggle to scientists who can come up with the algorithm that best predicts which customers are going to renew their car-insurance policies when there is six months left. Boffins worldwide can take a crack at this using historic data from 2008 to 2011 work out a predictive model, and similar methods are being used to solve problems for music companies wanting to know which songs will be most popular, and banks wondering which customers will be most likely to default on a loan.

Kaggle’s founder is Australian native Anthony Goldbloom, whose previous employment was macroeconomic modeling for the Reserve Bank of Australia. Speaking to Silicon Valley news outlet PandoDaily, Goldbloom told of how he taught himself to code after learning about Big Data and becoming fascinated with what it would mean if the right information was linked to the right people. Goldbloom launched the first version of Kaggle in 2010, and last November the group raised $11m in a Series A round led by Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. Kaggle claims its unorthodox approach means its competitions have always yielded a solution that outperforms in-house efforts, and often the best models will come from unpredictable candidates which may not have been hired for the job in a traditional setting. There is something wonderfully egalitarian about a system that promotes solutions purely based on talent instead of people’s backgrounds, but Kaggle proves this counter-intuitive system also makes the best business sense. Dreamt up by a “web kid” born in 1983, Kaggle’s audacious concept shows just how intriguing the results can be when Big Data is put to work on big problems in a world where the distinctions between “digital” and “real” life are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

*** The Early View from London ***

My series on the UK technology start-up community, written for Megabuyte in 2012-13. This followed on from my series about start-up life and tech trends in Silicon Valley (below).

* Real time data: Right here, right now. Interviews with GoSquared and Geckoboard – read

* When ‘new media’ is just media: Content monetisation. With interviews with Taggstar and Playmob – read part 1 / read part 2

* Big Data, big bang: Change as the new constant – read

* Scrum, and keeping the start-up spirit alive – read

* Let’s fill this town with start-ups! Interview with Seedrs – read

* Land of plenty: Angel investors and the London opportunity. Interviews with Seedcamp and Passion Capital – read

* The fundraising experience for London startups. Interviews with company founders – read

* Is London the hottest place in the world to be a startup? Interview with Julie Meyer of Ariadne Capital – read

*** Letters from the West Coast ***

My series about start-up life and tech trends in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, published in Megabuyte in 2012.

* The magic in the Valley. What is it about Silicon Valley that makes it such a dynamic place to start a business? – read

* The social revolution. Interview with Yammer, plus how social tools are changing how businesses collaborate and create – read

* The mobile internet takes shape. Interview with HotelTonight, with notes on internet evolution from Spirent – read

* The dark art of content monetisation. Interview with VigLink, with notes on mobile advertising from Blinkx – read

* The innovation cycle: The agony and the ecstasy. The trouble with innovation and keeping the start-up spirit alive – read

* The view to Britain: How is Britain’s technology scene viewed from the West Coast? – read

Megabuyte, September 2012. Original article here (£).

The Early View
Let’s fill this town with startups!
The experience of raising money for Seedrs, the startup crowdfunding company, was exactly the kind of hard slog that Jeff Lynn’s company wants to provide relief from. “We struggled desperately to raise our first seed capital. We kept joking: If only we existed!” I sat down with the co-founder and CEO at a coffee shop overlooking London’s Old Street roundabout, the epitome of the hotbed of activity that is Tech City, also known as Silicon Roundabout. Lynn is on his way to look at his new and improved offices just up the road; there’s money around for this now, following a £1m fundraising round secured in May with contributions from DFJ Espirit, Digital Prophets and angel investors. This takes the total raised to £1.3m.

“As we’re a startup, we started our fundraising process by going to the angels. But what we didn’t understand was that none of them really got financial services. The moment they heard the word ‘FSA’ they didn’t want to touch us,” says Lynn. Seedrs got FSA regulatory approval in March, meaning the company can position itself as a serious investment vehicle. The funding came primarily from the financial sector in the end, says Lynn, which turned out to be a perfect fit because although they may not get tech, they do understand finance. “For companies, raising capital is generally a very inefficient process. A lot of it is based on personal introductions, […] there’s a lot of needle in the haystack because you have to find the person who’s looking for exactly your kind of company,” says Lynn, recalling running around London to attend numerous meetings while trying to secure funding. Seedrs wants to remedy this by creating a portal to bring investors and companies together.

While Seedrs has only been up and running for two months following its July launch, it took three years of preparation to reach this point. “The tricky part was the legals. This is a brand new type of financial services, and getting regulatory approval was the hard part,” says Lynn, whose experience as a corporate lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell in London and New York meant the young company could manoeuvre the regulatory challenges without going broke on legal fees. “I think a lot of people, over a long period of time, looked at this area and thought it couldn’t be done, or they thought it would take too much time and money to do it. We saw it as a challenge.”

The initial comparison for what Seedrs does is often Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, the popular crowdfunding platforms. While Lynn is a fan of Kickstarter, he is quick to point out that this is mostly for creative projects; it provides no real financial upside and it’s not a platform approached with the mindset of an investor. Seedrs, on the other hand, is for companies looking for their first round of funding, up to £150,000. This means potential investors will benefit from the Government’s SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme) initiative, which provides 50% income tax relief on investments and exemption from capital gains tax upon exit. Seedrs takes 7.5% of the funds raised, and if the company proves profitable, Seedrs also takes 7.5% of investors’ profit. Seedrs will structure the transaction, including carrying out legal due diligence and executing subscription agreements, plus holding and managing the shares on behalf of investors; “That last one is critical, and one of the points often misunderstood in this space,” says Lynn, explaining how having a few hundred people supporting you is great for providing capital, support and early adopters, but having this number of people on the shareholder register is a bit of a nightmare. Seedrs’ role will therefore make it easier for the entrepreneur to expand later by making sure it doesn’t have to reach 300 people to get consent to waive a particular provision or agreement. Seedrs will also vote on behalf of investors, and while they don’t sit on the board, they take on a “guardian” role to protect investors against effects of dilution or other “nasty things” that can happen to investors of private companies. Concludes Lynn: “We don’t think the role as mass-funded startups would work at all without some central party doing the management. The crowds can make great investment decisions, but crowd management doesn’t tend to work very well.”

On that note, Seedrs will not have an opinion on the companies it helps to raise money, as that’s for the market to decide. What they will do, however, is filter for operations that may be illegal, unethical or generally not what they say on the tin. Potential investors will need to fill in a short questionnaire, designed to prevent money laundering but also to make sure people understand the risks of startup investing. Lynn certainly doesn’t mince his words on this point: “It’s vital people understand that in any given investment they will most likely lose their money. As part of a portfolio they can make a good return, but they need to be prepared to lose their money on any single investment.” Lynn reckons you need as many as 100 startups in your portfolio to ensure sufficient diversification to get the rewards. Consequently, Seedrs sees itself as an attractive option for high-net-worth investment angels keen for a more efficient way to access new companies, as well as smaller investors previously unable to access the sector for being too complicated or requiring too big a cash pile.

So far, Seedrs has successfully channelled funding for four companies: two web tech, one financial tech and one games group. While the “Shoreditch crowd” was first to clue on to Seedrs, Lynn wants to attract a broad array of companies, including services, restaurants, niche manufacturing and so on: “We want everyone. We’re limited to pre-revenue companies seeking £150,000 or less, so as long as you’re starting out, and that amount of money is properly useful to you, we want you.”

At the moment, Seedrs employs four people in London, soon to be six, while co-founder and COO Carlos Silva runs a seven-strong development team in Lisbon. Lynn, who is also Chairman of the government’s Coalition for a Digital Economy group, wants Seedrs to ultimately be the go-to place for UK startups seeking their first cash. Having said that, Lynn readily admits the sky’s the limit: “We want to be a global player. We are very keen to expand to Europe, and we’re also looking at other markets.” The legalities means this has to be done on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis, so bigger countries such as Brazil, India, Japan and China are key geographic ambitions. And then there’s Lynn’s native US, where next year’s likely implementation of the American Jobs Act will make business crowdfunding legal: “There are already dozens of platforms lining up to do this for the US market. […] So while these platforms fight it out for the American market, we want to go around and build up the rest of the world. Entrepreneurship exists everywhere.”

Published in Whitehot Magazine, 2012. Original article here.

Art about the Unseen
Hayward Gallery, London

‘Art about the unseen’ asks a lot from us. After all, most of the works are things we cannot see: blank papers, empty pedestals, a charge in the air. So when you first step into the Hayward Gallery, all you can see are the visitors standing in silence, facing seemingly blank walls before they take a few steps, then stopping again to stare some more. But of course, this is not actually performance art, as these people are in deep concentration: invisible art demands its audience to commit fully to the experience. And if we do, we will be amply rewarded.

This large group show features works spanning between 1957 and 2012, and had it not been so well put together it may have had an ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ sense about it. If a picture paints a thousand words, what can you say about a show which does not really have any pictures at all? The empty frames and blank canvases nudge us, inviting us to dream, or draw us into their histories. If we suspend our disbelief, the only limitation to what we will take away is limited by our own imaginations.

The first images to greet visitors as they enter the gallery are from Yves Klein’s attempt to telepathically transmit ‘a great concern’, alongside a video of his display of a room filled with his ‘sensibility’. Klein wanted to capture ‘immaterial elements’ such as fire, air and water, and referencing this work is certainly relevant to the Hayward exhibition. Still, we only really start to get an understanding of what Klein was hinting at once we reach the interactive pieces, and this happens with the recreation of Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin’s 1966 show. Moving past a plastic curtain, the temperature drops inside the small room, courtesy of two air-conditioning units. Granted, the concept of controlling our environment was a bit more novel back in 1966, but it sets the tone of the works to come in the exhibition by priming us with an awareness of the things we cannot see.

Such as Robert Barry’s ‘Energy field’ from 1968: this is a small wooden box with a battery circuit. It is impossible to tell whether or not it is powered up, but what Barry was after was the idea of being ‘sensitive, emotionally or physiologically, to the space you are in’. Next up are references to Chris Burden’s ‘White light / White heat’ show from 1975, where the artist would lie in the gallery, out of sight, for 22 days without speaking or eating. The audience reported the room felt haunted. Back at the Hayward, immediately after Burden’s work, we encounter a sign declaring that artist Bethan Huws is here with us, roaming about in disguise as a fellow gallery visitor. This is also the point where ‘Art about the unseen’ is no longer just an exhibition, but it is turning into an experience.

A series of invisible drawings start with the works of Bruno Jakob from 1993, made from ‘invisible ink, water, steam and light’. Staring at the one called ‘The third hand’ I start to become certain I can see a hand in there somehow, or am I imagining it? Next is ‘Philosophy escaped’, made using ‘Zurich snow, water and brain energy, primed with unseen green colour’. The wonderful ‘1000 hours of staring’ by Tom Friedman is less of a visual treat and more an exercise in mind-boggling, as you picture the artist standing in front of this canvas for all those hours. Friedman’s erased Playboy centrefolds are also exhibited, again providing nothing for the eyes but a rich backstory to explore for the mind.

‘The ghost of James Lee Byars’ is a clear highlight. Of course, it does not sound like much, being just a pitch black room. But then you realise you have no choice but to walk through it to continue, feeling your way through a space where your eyes are useless. Is there a ghost in here? I can hear whispers, probably from fellow visitors, but I cannot be sure. I stand still in the dark for a moment, feeling increasingly uncomfortable and intrigued.

As the exhibition continues upstairs, this is when demands really start to be placed on the visitors. Tom Friedman’s ‘Untitled (A curse)’ is a simple pedestal, but the artist hired a witch to curse the air above it. Carsten Höller has made a parking space for an invisible car, and a room by Roman Ondák’s comes with a hidden eavesdropping device. A poster informs us that Lai Chih-Sheng has traced around every single element of this room with a pencil, down to the cracks between the tiles in the floor. Everything about this room is charged with intent.

And then Teresa Margolles takes it to a new level with ‘Aire/Air’, where two humidifying units are running on the water used to wash murder victims ahead of autopsy. It is muggy inside the dedicated room, which visitors enter without knowing what is going on as the sign is on the inside. I find myself reluctant to breathe too deeply as I make myself stay, watching two other gallery visitors turn sharply on their heels to leave once they learn what they are breathing. Margolles’ work hits you in the guts.

Jeppe Hein’s ‘Invisible labyrinth’ is the final piece of the Hayward show, providing us with headsets that buzz when we are on the right path in the electronic maze. With our backs straight we all walk very slowly, turning around to find that connection again once we lose it. For a moment it is refreshing to just follow instruction: step, feel the charge, turn. ‘Art about the unseen’ asks a lot from its audience, it takes a lot out of you by leaving you no choice but to engage. The Hayward Gallery has created an extensive exploration of a fascinating subject: art which exists almost solely in our minds, and how this can be shared with others. This is not a visual experience, but one that is highly interactive, creating a strong connection between the audience and the individual artist. It is engaging and it is personal, and most of all, it is such a buzz.

Megabuyte, July 2012. Original article here (£).

Letter from the West Coast
The view to Britain
While the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem is the biggest in the world, this does not mean it is the only place capable of growing good technology companies. The West Coast scene is 4.5 times bigger than London, according to research from Startup Genome, but the UK capital is still the third biggest technology hub in the world, just behind New York and ahead of Toronto and Tel Aviv. But how is Britain’s technology scene viewed from the West Coast?

While the gap between the Valley and London is closing, the sheer size of the former is a factor that smaller startup cities really struggle to compete with. The vast amount of talent, history and knowledge present in the area attracts more of the same, perpetuating the trend. This also translates into better access to funding and nurturing for new companies; Startup Genome found that Silicon Valley has 54% more companies reaching a stage of aggressive growth than London; furthermore, Valley companies raise on average 2x or 3x times more money in their first three stages of development.

The ‘cool’ factor
These are all practical elements, but for a UK technology journalist visiting the Bay Area, one of the main elements that sets the West Coast apart in a distinct way is a “can do” attitude – there is a pushiness about it that is just not very British!

“There is such an enthusiasm out here for what we do,” says Suranga Chandratillake, the founder of video search group Blinkx, who has recently been promoted from CEO to president and Chief Strategy Officer. Blinkx started out in Cambridge, but Chandratillake was already in San Francisco from the beginning and now the operations are split between the UK and US. “Technology and engineering, and the sciences in general, is looked down on a bit in the UK, as if it is something very difficult that you only do if you are a boffin with no friends,” says Chandratillake, when asked about the attitude to technology in the UK. He explains how his peers at Cambridge University would view tech chatter as a bit un-cool: “But out here [in San Francisco] it is very cool to talk about technology. And those who are really good at it are treated a bit like rock stars.”

Still, the UK connection has been good for Aim-listed Blinkx. Cambridge’s contribution to the world of technology is not to be dismissed, as the town has nurtured some of the greats such as ARM Holdings and Autonomy. More recently, the town has provided plenty of raw materials for Blinkx in the form of people: “It is much easier to find and retain talent in Cambridge, whereas in the Valley, talent is constantly flowing. Where Cambridge came up short for us was on the business and marketing side. Your partners are here [on the West Coast]. The startup press is here. The venture capitalists are all here. […] From a technology point of view you can start businesses in lots of different places, but the connections you get out here are unique.”

For similar reasons, Blinkx often brings members from its Cambridge development team over to San Francisco for a month at a time, so they can tap into this buzz. “It is a particular Californian optimism, what you get out here,” says Chandratillake when asked whether the West Coast cheer is just a reflection of Americans’ generally more optimistic, less self-deprecating outlook. But no, says Chandratillake, in New York you will find a similar scepticism as you do in London. The Startup Genome data supports this assessment: Silicon Valley has 30% more founders wanting to change the world than London or New York, where founders are more focused on financial rewards. This translates into vastly different attitudes to risk and failure.

West goes East
How to export the Silicon Valley attitude once the company expands abroad is now a challenge faced by Yammer, he enterprise social network company focusing on its push into London. Lately, news around Yammer has circled mainly on the Microsoft acquisitions, however the company is hiring at its London offices. And Yammer co-founder and CTO Adam Pisoni thinks it is possible to export the vibe that makes the Valley such an efficient incubator.

“You can export this in as far as our company embodies these principles. We believe we can set up offices that will also embody these principles, so hopefully if enough companies like us do that in a place like London, you get a critical mass that has a life of its own,” says Pisoni. Still, the process is not without challenges: “When we interview engineers from Europe, the way we work and how we think is super foreign to them. They have never been in an environment where they have had this much autonomy to do their jobs.” Pisoni explains how Yammer’s engineers are not just handed a task, but they are expected to play an active role in determining the direction of the product. Providing staff with equity in the company is one way which Yammer keeps everyone’s interests aligned: “There is a different mentality [in Europe], there is more of a hierarchy. Or course we have that here too, but Silicon Valley is the centre of an attitude where you hire smart people and you throw away their job descriptions. Their job description is to use their talents as best they can to further the mission of the company.“

Pisoni says he is excited about the opportunities in the UK, even if it may be a more cautious business environment. “The best way to articulate that pain point is how companies used to value predictability above everything else. And predictability is the thing you have to trade if you want to become more innovative and and adaptable. Companies are now making that transition without knowing it, because they are expressing a wish to become more innovative and adaptable but they do not want to give up predictability. Those are incompatible.”

World-class technology
While London may currently be at the centre of attention for technology expansion, Bill Burns, the American CEO of UK-listed technology testing group Spirent, is quick to point out that the more established technology hubs are probably outside the capital: in places like Slough and Reading, plus CSR and Imagination Technologies in Cambridge and Hertfordshire respectively.

“It is hard to compare London and Silicon Valley, as they are so different. Everyone wants to be Silicon Valley: there was talk of Russia building a Silicon Valley lookalike, and Michigan wanted to start one up and advertised a job fair appealing to laid-off Yahoo-engineers,” says Burns in Sunnyvale. “There is a lot of initiative around trying to encourage more patents and intellectual property in the UK, but it is hard for anybody to rival Silicon Valley, simply because it is here already. […] It is hard for anyone to form that same dynamic anywhere in the world. But that does not mean that the city, the people or the service providers are any further or less advanced.”

After all, the UK competes just fine with the US when it comes to appetite for actually using technology, both in terms of business customers like BT, Vodafone and RBS, and in regular consumers’ hunger for new gadgets and intelligent software. And there are plenty of examples where London is ahead of San Francisco, which lags a decade behind London by implementing electronic public transport tickets only this year.

“Look at the London Congestion Charge. No-one called it that then, but what they were trying to drive was a smart city: ‘How do I control congestion in a downtown area by using technology to read licence plates?’ Ten years ago that was pretty advanced. Lots of cities are now trying to control and limit traffic on highways by charging. These are simple things we all overlook,” says Burns. Another example is CCTV, where London is the world’s most advanced city.

So while London, and the UK in general, is a different environment to Silicon Valley for operating a technology company, this does not necessarily mean it is inferior. While this is the last of the Letters from the West Coast, we are keen to further explore the UK startup scene; we are planning a spin around the Silicon Roundabout startup circuit to further explore how the UK is developing as a startup incubator. We will come back with ‘The Early View’ in the autumn.

Megabuyte, July 2012. Original article here (£).

Letter from the West Coast
The dark art of content monetisation

As the internet is becoming the primary portal for the delivery of the written word, this structural shift is rendering old revenue models in need of some significant new thinking. Newspapers have long accepted the inevitability of the change, with magazine- and book publishers following a bit further behind, as everyone knows the internet is the future; it means immediate delivery, low production costs and a world of multi-media opportunities to boot. But what about the money? Advertising, subscription and freemium are all possible solutions, and publishers cannot be accused of lack of trying. But the ideal method for monetisation of content, now that it is online, remains at large.

New alternatives to advertising
“The traditional way this has been done is mostly display ads, more so than subscription fees. But as every percentage of the page that you devote to advertising is one not being devoted to content, I think we have definitely started to hit diminishing returns,” said Oliver Roup, CEO and founder of VigLink, the San Francisco start-up aiming to provide a solution to the trouble with monetisation. One problem is that readers lose interest if there are too many ads, said Roup when I met him in his office, but Google is also increasingly penalising websites that overload on ads. As websites are becoming easier and easier to set up, online real estate is just not worth what it once was; generally speaking, web outlets are finding it harder to survive just on advertising alone.

This is where VigLink comes in, as an additional means of generating revenues through affiliate links. Back before the company was founded (in 2009), Roup was at Microsoft, where he learned about the Amazon Associates Programme: if a website is a member of this scheme, anyone who follows a link away from the site and onto Amazon will yield a commission for the site of the original link. Curious to see how many people were actually using the affiliates programme, Roup wrote a web crawler and discovered it was less than half: “People were linking to Amazon, but they were just not getting paid. They were not doing that little bit extra you need to do to get paid. So I thought, I am going to start a company that does that for you. And now we do that not just for Amazon links, but for many tens of thousands of other merchants too.”

Asked how much money a website can generate from affiliate marketing, Roup said this depends on numerous factors: who you are, who your audience is, what you are talking about, how much traffic you get. “We find our customers often earn in the range of what Google AdSense earns them. The good news is that it is completely incremental. The question is not, should I run ads or should I run VigLink. It is yes to both.”

Full disclosure
Pinterest, the social network based on curating images, drew headlines earlier this year when it emerged the group was monetising users’ content by inserting affiliate links. This was through a partnership with market leader Skimlinks, a four-year old startup running out of London. Pinterest ended up terminating its relationship with Skimlinks following criticism it had been concealing the arrangement. Still, the Skimlinks has continued to grow, having raised $4.5m last autumn which brings the total funding to $7.5m. CEO and co-founder Alicia Navarro responded to the Pinterest controversy by writing a blog post with a headline that sums it up nicely: “It’s not a secret. We do monetise social discovery, and it’s great.”

Bringing this up with Roup, he is quick to emphasise that sites using affiliate links need to be upfront about this fact. “I think users get upset when they do not know, so we say to the publishers: tell your users.” While there will be those who have issues with affiliate links, just as they may take issue with advertising, providing this information in advance will go a long way to prevent any problems. “We also offer an opt-out that mean no one will make money from their clicks, but the number of people who do that is vanishingly small. Still, it does defuse the issue.”

Boosting the hyperlink
Specifically, VigLink’s product works by trawling through content and changing links into affiliate links. Visually, nothing changes on the site, but any clicks through to the merchant will generate money back to the site. VigLink then gets a cut of this commission. Roup gave a nod to Skimlinks as the main competitor, but the industry is only a couple of years old and in constant development: “We think 2012 is the year the hyperlink gets smart. so, Now, when you pull up a web page, you see display ads that are decided on a very complex algorithm. But the hyperlinks you see are completely static. […] We believe the hyperlinks – which ones you see and where they point – should be decided as the page comes up just like display ads: depending on who you are and what is going on in the world. Our vision is to make the web better by making every link intelligent and valuable.”

Roup currently has 22 people working in his company, after first securing funding in June 2009. Last year the group did a Series B round, raising $5.4m from Emergence Capital, Google Ventures and First Round Capital, taking the total raised to $7.3m. Roup told me had 96 meetings before seducing the seed money for the company, which is a lot – but then considering what year it was, and the fact that Roup was, as he puts it, “just me and a Powerpoint deck; no team or customers or website,” it starts to look quite impressive. Roup’s team is working on the sales expansion now, but ultimately what the entrepreneur wants to do is to take the hyperlink to the next level. Links technology that has been almost static since the start of the web, but as anyone knows if they read newspapers online, they can add significant value to the user experience; “So making every link on the web intelligent and valuable is what we are about.”

Advertisers: look sharp
Affiliate links look poised to become a straightforward tack-on to advertising for monetising online content, especially for materials unlikely to attract subscription fees. While the likes of VigLink can grab a slice of the market by helping to shape this area as it develops, the move to online has placed significant demands for revival for the advertising industry. As people become more discerning, ads have to become smarter to earn our attention.

Online advertisement is moving from static ads towards more moving content, meaning the focus is less on how many clicks generated but on getting people to actually watch the ads, explained Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of Blinkx. A key selling point for Blinkx is the ability to recognise meaning from audio and video, enabling only relevant advertising to be placed alongside. A similar change is happening at YouTube: five seconds in, you often get the option to skip the ad. This means the ad has to be good enough for the viewer to actually not mind watching it, or no one gets paid. This further personalises the experience for the viewer, and it raises the game for the advertiser to come up with something good, and ultimately, effective.

But throw the mobile internet into the mix and the issue of monetisation becomes a lot more challenging. Static ads do not work as well on the tiny screen, and people accessing data on the go will have less patience for video ads. “The mobile world is fascinating,” said Chandratillake. “There is a usage revolution happening, not just with apps but also with accessing web services through the mobile phone. The size is a disadvantage, but the advantage is that the platform knows who or where you are.”

Copying the web content monetisation models is not working on mobile, asserted Chandratillake, pointing out that even relatively new companies such as Facebook are running into problems as their mobile interface does not support ads in the same way. 69% of UK Facebook users have a smartphone, a statistic that rises to 82% for Twitter users, according to a recent Ipsos Mori poll. So how can companies monetise their content when users increasingly access it through mobile devices?

The mobile experiment
“The truth is that no one really knows how to make money from this. It is causing big problems for big as well as small companies,” said Chandratillake. “At Blinkx we are actively working on capitalising this opportunity though. We are building mobile applications, we are partnering with mobile companies, and 10% of our audience comes through mobile devices. But ultimately, everyone is in the same position. We are all experimenting.”

So far, these experiments include making mini-ads that fit smaller screens, as well as more interactive ads, but as demonstrated by the rise of affiliate links we are likely to be looking at hybrid solutions. One example is how earlier this month O2-owner Telefonica announced agreements with Facebook, Google and Microsoft that will let users pay for digital goods and services via their mobile phone bills, in an effort to drive downloads of paid content.

While the move towards mobile is a major structural shift that is likely to have casualties, Chandratillake believes there are numerous elements from the web that will transfer well to mobile. Brands with strong customer relationships is one of them, and Yelp, the restaurant reviews site, is a company that has done a good job on this: “They realised mobile was perfect for them, and they used their existing relationships with users and partners to build an app and got it out there very quickly.”

Yelp, a Silicon Valley success story which floated late last year, boasts 71.4m users per month and makes its money from selling advertising packages and banner ads to businesses. Currently valued at $1.6bn, the company has however been running at a loss for the past eight years, and critics are wondering whether this will ever change. Yelp, however, as well as everyone else, will undoubtedly have their best heads working on it, as online content delivery, and now mobile delivery, is the undeniable trend. But when it comes to making proper money from it, even the industry leaders are admitting it is still a hit and miss game.

Megabuyte, July 2012. Original article here (£).

Letter from the West Coast
The mobile internet takes shape
HotelTonight is a mobile business with its eye on a future. Specifically, the future where we will all have fast internet available on clever gadgets in our pockets. HotelTonight, which is just this summer launching in London, provides an app where users can book same-day discounted hotel rooms using their iPhone, iPad or Android device. It is a great example of a service that is made specifically to take advantage of the main benefit of the mobile device: solving a problem at the last minute, while on the go.

Keen to try the service ahead of my meeting with CEO and co-founder Sam Shank in San Francisco, I found myself in something of a “the cobbler’s children have no shoes” moment; this technology journalist’s phone is too old for apps, and HotelTonight’s services cannot be used on a regular computer. Shank takes this in good spirits, pulls up the app on his iPhone and hands it to me. It turns out there is no need to spend time familiarising yourself with this app, because the interface is so sleek and the options so self-explanatory that you would be hard pressed to struggle. The app is designed to enable users to move quickly through the options, with minimum fuss on the small screen.

But, I ask as we sit down to talk, would it really detract from the mobile app to just have a basic website that people can access from their computers? This was what I tried to do in a cafe earlier that day, using my very mobile laptop. “There is a reason why we have stayed mobile-only,” says Shank. “As a start-up you have to focus to be the best at something. And the bottom line is that online travel is growing at single digits a year, whereas mobile bookings are growing at 100% per year. So if you had to choose which one to be in, it is very obvious where to go.”

A mobile focus
Shank believes a web portal would distract the team, now at 45 people and counting, as they would have to support another platform: “Our message is very clean, it is mobile-only and that is why the deals are great. You are getting people when they are already out. It is a better message on the brand, and it is a better message for the hotels. It has been working really well.”

In addition to streamlining the focus, the mobile-only focus also has other benefits: “Being entirely based around mobile means we have a different way of thinking. The approach to the market is different, the marketing channels are very different,” says Shank, adding that the customer service also sits within the app. “If we were trying to do a website, we would be doing things very differently in terms of all the other aspects of the company as well. We want to be really good at mobile because that is where the future is.”

It is hard to argue with this argument, as Shank is betting on a future trend – the spread of the mobile internet – that looks pretty certain. Financially the company is no slouch either, having just secured $23m in a fundraising round led by US Venture Partners, which includes participation from Accel Partners, Battery Ventures and First Round Capital. The group has now raised a total of $35.8m since its establishment in December 2010. Shank, who was also the founder of DealBase.com, a travel deals search engine, has a lot of travel sector expertise with him; his co-founders are COO Jared Simon, previously online-video production and distribution outfit TurnHere, and CTO Chris Bailey, formerly of DealBase.com and Adobe Systems.

Shank, Simon and Bailey are up against some big names in the travel industry though, including Expedia, Priceline, TripAdvisor and Orbitz. The CEO says he actually waited a few months after having the idea for his business before going ahead, because he thought, surely something similar must already be in the works. It is such a simple, obvious product idea. “But then I realised: no one [else] is going to do this. And if no one else is going to do it, I want to be the company that does it.”

Poised for expansion
HotelTonight takes a 20% cut of each transaction, an amount Shank says is standard in the industry. With over 2.3m customer downloads under its belt, the group is now pushing hard to include more cities, both in the US and internationally, a process that is labour-intensive. HotelTonight has great traction, says Shank, but admits there is some work involved in explaining the benefit of this new business model to hotels: “The message we have for hotels is very friendly and very complementary to what they already do. We say: ‘Only use HotelTonight if you have rooms available on that same day that you know you are not going to sell otherwise. Give them to us and provide a discount to consumers, and we will help you fill those rooms.’ It is a very different message to what is being sent by the bigger online travel agencies that are competing with the hotels for advance purchase bookings.”

HotelTonight customers can book up to five nights, but the first night must be the same day. The app only shows three of hotels at any one time, meaning there is a level of unpredictability. Half the users are business people, explains Shank, using the app on last-minute trips or maybe after a delayed flight; “The other group of people are what we call ‘impulse bookers’. These are people that would otherwise not stay in a hotel at all. […] For the hotel industry [this means] it is not cannibalising, but it is growing the entire audience.” Another advantage for HotelTonight over the competition, according to Shank, is having the best booking process, the best merchandising, the best bargains and the ability to deliver the best quality guests to the hotels.

Bigger, better, faster
Unlike in the UK, 4G mobile internet rollout is well underway in the US. Spirent CEO Bill Burns, whose company is a leader in testing the newest networks and gadgets for manufacturers, says the coverage is still patchy even in big US cities, but AT&T and Verizon are working on it consistently. What this means for people is that soon the internet in our pockets will be as good as broadband at home.

“There is a significant difference in speed from 3G to 4G, maybe around four times faster. This all depends on coverage though: what aerial you have, what is your connectivity, how close you are to cell towers,” says Burns, adding that 4G phones will fall back on 3G when the former is not available. “4G will roll out over the next 10 years. But there will be many years where we will also continue to go to faster data rates for 3G. There is lots of hype around 4G and LTE (long-term evolution), which is just in its infancy.”

Today, most people would be thrilled to get a broadband-level internet service on their mobile phones, and it seems a bit greedy to ask for more. But we will – increasingly better gadgets, expanding social networks, online phone calls and better video streaming services mean that soon we will ‘need’ faster data, and we will ‘need’ it not only at home but at our fingertips. Verizon and AT&T in the US are the furthest along with 4G, with progress also made by DoCoMo in Japan and providers in the Nordic countries. “In the UK, if one of the operators moves ahead with 4G the others will follow. They need to compete with those faster data rates,” asserts Burns. After all, the technology is already being developed to take things to the next level beyond 4G: LTE Advanced.

“Early adopters will move to LTE Advanced in three years from now, but the ones that are just adopting now will get to LTE Advanced in about 10 years. […] The capacity to push data from the devices, out to the wireless network, to the core network and back to the data centres are all evolving at the same time, and that is the opportunity for anyone inside technology and IT,” says Burns, adding that the reason this is so exciting now is that the demand is already there: “If you look back to the year 2000, you saw a lot of networks being built without a lot of users demanding that bandwidth. Today the demand is really coming from people who want to use these devices like you and me, and they are demanding all of this, and truly pushing the use and demand from everything from social networking to video.”

Right here, right now
HotelTonight is sitting pretty in the middle of a big trend, with founders wasting no time trying to pander to more dated models with lesser growth. Starting out as a purely mobile company means the likes of HotelTonight can create a product that is ideally fitted to mobile. This goes beyond designing the product to fit on the small screen, to truly taking into account the unique needs of a user who will be in different situations than those using a desktop computer: in the street, in a rush, maybe on a slow connection, and in need of something specific to their exact location.

HotelTonight covers all these bases, but there are lots of others who have done well: the Uber app offers on-demand car service to US customers; Hailo is a UK black cab app launched by three cabbies and three tech entrepreneurs; Trover is an app similar to Instagram, but the photos are organised according to geographic locations. “Beyond that, there is a lot of personal expression apps and companies, whether that is finding people that are close to you, or photo-sharing or local discovery,” says Shank. “This is a very natural fit for mobile: ‘I am out, I need to get around.’”

Megabuyte, July 2012. Original article here (£).

Letter from the West Coast
The social revolution

“Yammer is going to be huge,” I remember thinking as I walked down the street after meeting with co-founder Adam Pisoni in San Francisco, feeling buzzed up and inspired about how technology is changing the way we live and work. Yammer may be an enterprise social network group, but what CTO Pisoni and CEO David Sacks are trying to do is to change the way companies collaborate and innovate.

It was only a few weeks later it became clear that the mighty Microsoft had reached a similar conclusion, putting down $1.2bn to secure Yammer. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pledged to let Yammer continue to develop standalone services and “maintain its commitment to simplicity, innovation and cross-platform experiences”, before talk turned to “complementary offerings” and integration with Microsoft Office. We can only hope this coupling works out for Yammer, which is only four years old and could potentially benefit from a hand in dealing with its supersonic growth. And as Microsoft’s move into social follows Salesforce’s buying of Buddy Media, and Oracle’s buying of Virtue and Collective Intellect, let there be no doubt: social business tools will be part of our future, and it will happen soon.

The cross-platform hub
The day I met with Adam Pisoni, however, there was not so much as a whisper around to reveal what was in the works. If Pisoni knew, he certainly gave nothing away. Yammer has been doing pretty well on its own though: over 5m corporate users on a freemium model, including employees at 85% of the Fortune 500, of which 20% are paying customers. This percentage is double that of the industry average, as estimated by Constellation Research. Yammer’s revenues have not been disclosed, but speculation puts it between $22-30m. So how did Yammer manage to get so far so quickly?

“The market is so large and growing so fast. We are partially a catalyst for the growth of this market, but it is growing despite us,” says Pisoni, pointing out that more than half of Yammer’s traffic is now in Europe even though the company is not really present there yet. A big push is now underway in London, which Pisoni expects to be huge this year. But still, Yammer must have something going for itself; it is not like customers are lacking in options, especially with Salesforce’s Chatter benefiting from the name-recognition factor. On this note, Pisoni argues that Chatter is a good activity stream sitting on top of Salesforce’s other functions, but it is not really an enterprise social network because it does not let people collaborate in the same way as Yammer does: “Chatter is not meant to be your aggregated activity stream across all your applications. … Our goal is to be the enterprise social network, to be the hub of where people come to get work done, communicate and collaborate.”

Innovation at the edges
As 13-year-old Salesforce is getting on a bit in technology years, this brings about the questions about innovation and cannibalisation of the old models. This, however, is where Yammer starts to look different, as part of its business model is to avoid exactly this pattern: “What is becoming more important is how quickly you can innovate, not how quickly you can preserve value. Companies are not going to be defined as much by a product or service, you are going to be defined by your velocity and your ability to adapt.”

Most technology companies will say this, but for Yammer this shift is not only their philosophy: it is also their business plan. While Yammer is still small, Pisoni explains how customers are changing from an attitude of centralised innovation, where ideas are generated at the top and spread outward, to a system of innovation at the edges: “As older companies think about how to become more innovative they are doing it in an old way: ‘We need to figure out the next innovation.’ But there is no next innovation! It is about constant innovation, and organising around letting everyone innovate.”

Yammer’s software is designed to enable this new culture of creation to unfold on a practical level. The key elements to empower employees and decentralise execution, says Pisoni, as well as to operate on a transparent model where everyone can see what others are doing and build on it. This lets people connect and organise themselves in the optimal way, pushing past the boundaries of communication and job descriptions. “Yammer is all about self-organisation and empowerment but also transparency and trust, and you need both of those things to be successful,” says Pisoni. Better informed employees make better decisions, and in turn make the company more adaptable and innovative.

Creating the roadmap
As a former office worker, this sounds downright wonderful. But, I put to Pisoni, middle management is going to hate this. This is such a significant shift in thinking that it that may even require a generation shift to come to fruition.

“People ask us, who is your target customer? But is not a geography, it is not an industry, it is not a size. It is companies that recognise that they have to make this shift. [Our demographics are] an even slice across industry, geography, and size, but the consistency is that they are using Yammer to transform into a new kind of company.” While some people get it right away, Pisoni acknowledges that the novel nature of Yammer’s offerings mean lots of conversations with customers to help them see how they can take these ideas and use them in a practical way in their companies. “There are not really any good roadmaps. Plus to become a transparent company is difficult and there is friction involved,” says Pisoni. Explaining how this can be done, and why it is beneficial, is a big part of Yammer’s challenge.

‘Facebook for business’ tends to be the shortest way to explain what it is Yammer does, and it has played a significant part in helping people understand the basics of Yammer’s operations. But considering Pisoni’s face when I bring this up, these reference points are starting to feel limiting.

“The comparison was somewhat useful in the beginning, but yes, now we find a little bit annoying.” Pisoni laughs. “Really early on, we started Yammer because we recognised where this new form of [self-organising meta-to-meta] communication was going. It was revolutionising how we communicate in our personal lives [through social media], and this was likely to go to enterprise,” says Pisoni, emphasising that Yammer was the first to come out and state their intention to become a social enterprise. The manifestation of this, however, looks very different from Facebook. In the business context, the focus is on people self-organising into groups, getting work done as teams, and integrating with applications and business processes.

Yammer’s interface also distinguishes between content generated by people and applications, a factor which Pisoni highlights as an advantage over Chatter and Tibbr: “You do not want the human generated content be pushed down [the information stream] by a mass volume of computer generated content such as printers out of ink. Over time we will let people interact with [computer-generated] stories: they can comment on them, or ‘like’ them, and that will move them over into the human-generated content feed as it has been signalled that people care about it.” What Yammer is doing now is developing its cross-application workflow systems, meaning data will flow together whether it is from SharePoint, Salesforce, NetSuite or elsewhere. As data volumes grow, the human interaction with the content will be crucial to determine its importance, hence helping the system keep noise at a manageable level for the individual users.

A softer world
Business evolution is no longer a seminar that is held once a year: it is becoming a way of life. Pisoni is proud that Yammer practices what it preaches: a decentralised organisation where innovation happens at the edges. Staff who feel empowered make for better workers, and the role of management is shifted from telling everyone what to do, to organising people so they can interact and create in an efficient manner.

This approach is different from what came before and can feel a bit fuzzy and difficult to quantify, but this is what happens in a social space. What Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and all the other social networks have done is to take something people do naturally offline and move it online, and the likes of Yammer are picking up the elements that can improve business relationships. A new entrant on on the social technology scene is Pinterest, which was founded three years ago in Palo Alto by Ben Silberman and Evan Sharp. Now with over 10m users, Pinterest lets users create ‘pinboards’ of images and share them, like themed scrapbooks: “The things you collect says so much about who you are and what you are interest in. That is what I wanted to capture with Pinterest,” said CEO Ben Silberman at March’s SXSW gathering in Texas. “I cannot say the idea came from hard-nosed business analysis. It was just something I really wanted to see built,” said Silberman, who admits the company is still experimenting with revenue models. So far affiliate links seems to be the main method.

Pinterest’s product-before-money attitude is mirrored by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who declared in his IPO letter an intent to make money to create better services and not the other way around. There are two reasons this is not as crazy as it may seem, starting with the fact that social tools are based on people choosing to spend significant amounts of time on these sites; in order for this to happen, people need to feel they are having a genuine experience with other people, with the selling kept in the background. Then there is the fact that our expectations have never been higher: “People can use Facebook which is the pinnacle of social design. They can use Apple which is the height of interactive design. They can use Google products which are beacons of efficiency,” said Silberman. “If you do not give people something that is worth their time, they should not give you their time.”

The differentiation is often a sleek interface and beautiful design, as efficiency is no longer enough and we need a little something extra to be charmed. Pisoni talks about the joy of creating a product that makes people’s workday better; Silberman kept saying how satisfying it is to create a beautiful site where people can share things that make them happy; Zuckerberg wants to change the world, plain and simple. The new social layer means technology is no longer just about creating something that works and making some cash, but to make things better, more beautiful, more meaningful. Now that the human element has been mixed into technology there is no turning back.