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Friday Inspiration

February 12th, 2010 By zpittman Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

Startup Lessons for the Proto-Founder

“I started SpeakerText in October 2008 during the financial apocalypse. No one funded us. No one was gonna fund us. And I’m definitely a nobody. We launched in January 2010 after burning through just $4k of cash. While I’m still mostly a clueless hack, there are a few things I learned along the way that I think founders and proto-founders reading this blog might find useful. Here’s a few them, in list form:• Fake it ’till you make it. No one is interested in the company you’re going to start in the future. Starting is a declarative act. Just go for it. People won’t follow unless you lead. And once you convince yourself that you’ve got something, it’s a lot easier to convince others to join you”

• Pitch like a mofo. The difference between your initial idea and your ultimate product is the difference between a slab of rock and the David. There’s a thousand problems you need to solve, and the only way you learn about them–much less solve them–is to pitch, pitch, pitch and pitch again to every smart person you meet. Listen to what they have to say and regardless of how jumbled and contradictory their suggestions or complaints are, try to look for patterns and distill the deeper underlying pain points or problems with your model. Think of it as crowdsourcing. The masses have much to teach you, if you let them.

• Advisors, they’re easier to find than you think. This goes along with my above point about pitching everyone you meet. Most people are afraid of embarrassing themselves, so they keep quiet, especially around successful, important people who could help them. Don’t. I landed my first advisor–Joe Kennedy, the CEO of Pandora–when I pitched him after a talk at Stanford. He gave me his card; I followed up. There was no formal arrangement or anything, but I was persistent, hit him up with questions only when I was truly flummoxed (ie didn’t waste his time), listened and kept him updated on our progress.

• You need a Co-Founder, not an Engineering Bitch. Lots of business-y, idea-type people who say they’re looking for a co-founder are, in reality, looking for what is best described as an “engineering bitch.” Here’s how the pitch sounds from the engineer’s perspective: ‘For ten whole percent of equity, you will slave away to build a prototype out of my shitty idea, not have any say in the decision-making process…and oh yeah, you could be fired at any point.’ This does not make for a happy long term relationship. Instead, find someone you know and trust–I called up an old college friend–who will call you out on your bullshit and push back when you overreach. Date for a bit, then split the equity.

• Recruit college kids. They’re young, hungry and don’t need a living wage. Experienced, talented software engineers have lots of options in life, and most of them involve getting paid. College students, on the other hand, have less options, and probably have their living expenses covered by financial aid. Thus, the opportunity cost of joining your half-baked venture is dramatically lower than it is for legit professionals. For students, your startup is more like a resume-enhancing ‘extra-curricular’ than a regular job. The right person will love the responsibility you’re handing them. Score for you, score for them.

• Go to job fairs. You’ll be the only startup there. This is a corollary to the previous point. I went to the Columbia Engineering Career Fair in October 2009 and left with ~150 resumes. We hired three guys from that batch and paid them in iPhones. Doubtful we’d have access to such a rich employee pool any other way. Bonus: Distinguish yourself by being the approachable guy in the T-shirt. Lots of the attendees will be wearing suits for the first time–and hating it. Your casual garb will looks very enticing.

• Sell the Vision, Not the Reality. You may or may not have a working product. Your product may or may not suck. You “team” may not really exist. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is your vision of what the product will be and how it will change the world. That is what gets people excited. That is what will make people work like dogs for no money, tell all their friends and drop everything just to get a product built.

• Treat everyone you hire like a co-founder. In normal jobs, people put up with a lot of grief and bullshit because they’re getting paid. In a ghetto startup (like mine), that’s not really an option. Treat people well, be honest, and don’t bullshit them. Trust and your rep is all you got. Err on the side of sharing too much. It builds trust and earns buy-in from the people you hire.

• Try before you buy. When you’re hiring folks, don’t promise equity upfront. Specify some sort of trial period where the person is to accomplish a specific, delineated task. Make sure you own all the IP created during this trial period, and make no promises for later. After the month or so is over, then sit down and talk equity. Making this clear from the outset will put both parties at ease.

• “Stealth Mode” = FAIL. Your idea, as it exists today, sucks ass. Ok, let me rephrase that: My idea started off sucking ass. But I pitched smart people…and dumb people–and learned from both. Originally, SpeakerText was going to be a tool for journalists (I was a journo) to automatically transcribe and search within their audio interviews. Tiny, contracting market. Huge upfront software licensing fees. Customers are technophobes.
FAIL just waiting to happen. Had we kept our plans a secret, SpeakerText would probably just be one big bucket of fail today. Instead, after having tons of holes poked into our idea by friends, cousins, VCs, baristas, entrepreneurs and bored women at parties, we turned SpeakerText into a tool for video publishers and even our crappy v1.0 works with the massive market that is YouTube. Outcome: last night a Biz Dev guy from Disney/ABC sent me an email asking about partnering with some of their online properties. Reminder: we launched on just $4k.

• In case you missed it earlier: PITCH PITCH PITCH. Over the last 15 months, I have pitched nearly every sentient being I have met. This includes a guy I met at 4am after doing CPR on his mom (I’m a paramedic). The dude turned out to be a senior partner at a major international corporate law firm, and 6 weeks later he offered to take me on as a pro bono client. My point here is that you never know who can help you and you never will until you open your trap and pitch. Not only will this help you find help, but it will DRAMATICALLY improve your pitch and lower your fear/nervousness when time comes to pitch real investors. Plus, it adds big time on the competition research front, because your friends/acquaintances/ex-girlfriends will see articles about competitors and share them with you on Facebook.

• Vest, young man. Starting a company without vesting your stock is like getting your girlfriend pregnant on the first date. Sure, it could work out, but if it doesn’t, you’re completely hosed.

• Get creative with compensation–use the iPhone Payment Plan. Imagine you’re a highly-trained software engineer. A crazy guy with a “startup” (i.e. me) approaches you about doing some work. Scenario #1: Dude, I’ll pay you $2,000 for 150 hours of work…3-4 months from now. Scenario #2: Dude, promise to build this and I’ll give you an iPhone right now. Plus, as long as you’re working on it, I’ll pay your phone bill. If I like it and it works, I’ll toss in an extra $250 at the end and we’ll talk equity then. If not, you can keep the iPhone and I’ll even cover the cancellation fee if you want to ditch AT&T. We tried both approaches at SpeakerText, and surprisingly, Scenario #2–despite being a lot cheap–actually worked out a lot better. There’s something about the psychology of receiving a cool gadget that doesn’t quite equal out to the cash equivalent. Also, paying up for the iPhone upfront fosters trust, which in turn boosts productivity.

• Yammer is an awesome tool for fostering camaraderie on distributed teams. Use it.

• Build something people want before you attempt to raise money. The word for “visionary investor” is “entrepreneur.” If you’re an unproven schmo with no credentials like me, people generally–and investors in particular–will tend dismiss you and your crazy idea. (If you’re a former Google VP, then you can probably ignore this tidbit.) The only–and the strongest–track record you can have is the product you’ve built and the traction/market feedback you’ve gotten.

• Need legal advice? Do the Lawyer Hop. Every lawyer will give you an hour of their time for free. Remember that. Need 10 hours of legal counsel? Talk to 10 lawyers. Need to learn about IP, patents, etc.? Call a patent lawyer! More questions? Call another one! Don’t feel the need to restrict yourself to a local geography either. You can call up America’s leading legal luminaries and get an hour of their time for free, every time. This won’t work for producing legal documents, but it will work for fundamental questions of “is this legal?” “do I need to patent this?” etc. Also, different lawyers have different perspectives, so the lawyer hop a good way to get a holistic, composite understanding of a particular issue. Plus, when you need to actually hire a lawyer, you’ll know what a good one sounds like–and have a fat rolodex of people you’ve already talked with to draw from.

• Patent lawyers will always want your money…except the good ones. Asking an IP lawyer, “Is my invention patentable?” is like asking a car mechanic “Does my car need any work done?” Unless you find a good one, the answer will always be yes. That’s how they make their money, but not how you make yours. Buyer beware.

• Start a blog. Sound intelligent. Be interesting. The same reason you’re probably dying to pitch Fred Wilson and/or Chris Dixon is the same reason you should start a blog. Again, if you’re a no-name nobody like me, you’ve gotta build a name for yourself from scratch. Writing an intelligent sounding blog and then submitting posts to Hacker News, Digg, etc. is a great way to put yourself on people’s radar. Just last week I met up with an big time seed investor from the Valley. He had messaged me on Facebook after seeing one of my blog posts on Hacker News. Now he’s making intros to other big dogs and generally helping to legitimize our brand.

• Tell a good story. Deep down inside, all Americans love entrepreneurs. People are suckers for the crazy, epic shit we do as founders. Don’t downplay it; wear it your on your sleeve like a badge of honor. Although it may not feel like it now while you’re in the trenches trying not to die, you’re living what lots of people (especially older, middle-management types) consider the dream. Tell your story to the right person (i.e. the frustrated wannabe founder with 3 kids and a mortgage) inside of a big organization and they’ll become your champion, guiding you through the sales process and giving you lots of actionable intel.

• Comment on Brad Feld’s blog. But don’t kiss his ass. Important point to remember: powerful, successful people tend not to like having their ass kissed. People do that to them all the time, and my sense is that they hate it. And if they don’t, fuck ‘em–don’t waste your time on people who want you to kiss their ass. More often, people in positions of power crave genuine interaction. The more powerful the person, the more they are surrounded by sycophants. Don’t be a sycophant. Outside of intros, a good way to approach these guys is to comment intelligently on their blog. I turned an exchange in the comments section of Brad Feld’s blog into a pitch for SpeakerText that turned into an intro to someone else. Never met Señor Feld before, but we had a legit exchange in the comments and took it from there.

• Help people. It just feels good. Honestly, I feel very lucky to have been helped and guided by lots of smart people who probably had much better things to do with their time. Guys like Seth Sternberg, the Founder/CEO of Meebo. Awesome dude. Sequoia-backed. Ridiculously helpful. When I grow up, I want to be like him. Starting a company can be really stressful and scary; depending on the day, it’s easy to lose hope and dwell on how fuct/clueless/ready-to-fail you and your startup are. If for no other reason, helping people who know even less than you do will make you feel good about yourself, boost your ego and as a result, make you into a more productive founder. Win-win-win.

• Tenacity is impressive. A lot of people “start” companies, but very few actually have the tenacity and drive to bring a product to market, hire people, etc. People will expect you to quit, and part of how you will impress them is by simply keeping at it, iterating your idea/product/vision, and making progress. As my Dad likes to say: Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/02/startup-lessons-for-the-protofounder.html

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Brave Maddie!

February 11th, 2010 By zpittman Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful, Maddie's Blog

LOCAL girl Maddie George (24) will next month be off on the Cycle Challenge, a 370kms ride through India where she will be raising money for the Lymphoma Association, a charity which supports those affected by the disease – the UK’s sixth most common cancer.
Maddie, whose mother lives in South Street in Caistor, was diagnosed with Hodgkin Lymphoma in January last year, has undergone chemotherapy and radiotherapy at St Thomas’ Hospital in London and now wants to raise money to support the charity.

Maddie, who works in London, said: “After experiencing first hand the difference a charity like this can make to a young person who is newly diagnosed with cancer, I felt like I wanted to do something to help others.”

Training hard for the challenge, Maddie hopes to raise £3,200 for the charity.

She said: “Until now I haven’t been on a bike in five years so it was a challenge in itself but I am really enjoying the training and luckily have good friends who are doing it with me to motivate me.

“I get tired and have had a few ups and downs but I am excited about taking part in the challenge although rather nervous.”

Supporting the work of four special cancer charities, the second Big Cycle Challenge is raising funds for Children with Leukaemia, Lymphoma Association, Marie Curie Cancer Care and Ovarian Cancer Action.

The challenge is to cycle through Rajasthan and it starts with a visit to the Taj Mahal before setting off on a spectacular journey through rural India.

Maddie and her four friends start the Cycle Challenge on March 6 and although the required money has been raised, Maddie says if anyone would like to donate to the charities please contact the charity.

If you would like to support Maddie in her challenge please visit www.justgiving.com/Madeleine-George or by contacting the Lymphoma Association fund-raising team on 01296 619419.

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The Limit of friendship

February 9th, 2010 By zpittman Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

The internet has created the illusion of mass intimacy but how many Facebook friends is too many?
The asnwer, says Robin Dunar, is 151

It’s the internet world now, so you can speak to anyone anywhere in the world – right? Blog away, and every Tom, Dick and Harriet from Anchorage to Cape Town can admire your wit, marvel at your wisdom and might even offer a comment in return. Sign them up to your Facebook site, where you can now boast 300,500,1000 friends.

But how well do you really know all these peopl? Would you really respond with a cheque for £50 to an em-ail plea from one of them? OK, OK, I know a suprising number of people get hoodwinkey by 15-year old Nigerian spammers on a franky old village internet connection, but I’ll warrent that most of you aren’t so gullitile – and it’s precisely because you don’t treat everyone on your Facebook list as equally worthy of interest.

The bottom line is that our social worlds are actually very small. It’s easy to add friends to your social network site (or SNS in the trade) but it’s another thing whether you’d really lay down your life for all of them. The reason is simple: our brains aren’t big enough to allow us to have deeply meaningful relationships with more than a handful of people. There is a general relationship between brain size and social group size in monkeys and apes, and that relationship predicts a natural group size of just 150 for us human beings, now known as Dunbar’s number (thanks to some anonymous internet wit).

In fact, 150 – give or take a few – turns up in all sorts of obscure and not so obscure places. It was the average size of villages in the Domesday Book and 18th-century England, as well as in traditional small-scale societies today. It’s the average size of parishes among community-focused sects such as the Amish and the Hutterites, and the typical size of companies in most armies around the world.
When Brigham Young sent his fledgeling 5,000 Mormons of f to found Salt Lake City and the Mormon state, he did so in groups of 150.

It’s the average number of people to whom most of you send Christmas cards – not the number of cards, but the number of people in the households to which you send your cards. It’s the number of relations, friends and aquaintances you think enough of to be worth the time, effor and expense of writing out a card.

Dunbar’s number seems to demarcate a clear boundary between those with whom you have relationships of trust, obligation and reciprocity and those you don’t.
Beyond lie the many people whom you recognise by sight, might even be happy to have a passing conversation with, but whom you really wouldn’t count among your personal friends.
We are able to remember the names and faces of many of these “outsiders”, but we don’t have significant past histories with them.

But even within the hallowed circle, all is not equal. In fact, your social world consists of a series of circles of friendship, running from an inner core of about five intimates, through a series of layers of increasing size but declining intimacy until we arrive at the cliff edge at 150.

One slightly curious feature of this social world is the extent to which we people it preferentially with kin. Kinship, it seems, still has a singularly strong hold over us. We have examined large numbers of personal social networks – all laboriously and generously listed by long-suffering subjects in our studies – and there is a very striking tendecy for the number of friends to be inversely related to the number of kin included. Especially so from those who come from very large extended families, who as a result have fewer friends.
And kin are interesting for another reason if we don’t actively keep up our friendships, they gradually but inexorably slide down through the layers until eventually they will drop off the edge of the 150. But not so kin.
Not only are we stuck with them from birth (or marriage), but we can ignore them and abuse them and they will still come to our aid in a way that no similarly abused friend would ever do.

But for the rest, it is the opportunities that we have to interact that lie at the core of building relationships. We have to work at it in ways that only seem to work well if we do it face-to-face. There is no substitute, it seems, for doing stuff together if you really want to get to know someone to the point where you have a reciprocal level of intimacy, trust and obligation. It’s got something to do with triggering deeply buried emotional responses that need to be physically triggered by touch, smell and sight.

And this is where the virtual world of the internet lets us down. Yes, we can list 1,000 names on our social network site, but names is precisely all they are unless we have first grappled with them in the flesh.
The bottom line is that a touch is worth a thousand words. In real life, we gain signals about an individual’s true feelings and honesty from a touch taht we simply cannot replicate virtually on the internet.

And that’s why it is easy to be deceived by that terribly nice young man in Nigeria. In real life, ever senistive to subtle hard-to-disguise signals of the underlying intentions, we would never fall for this so quickly. It’s the way someone smiles at you that we notice, not just the fact that he smiled.

For those who don’t fall prey to scammers, our internet world is not that different from our everyday life. Most of the traffic on a website, or the texts that stream out of the mobile phones of our children, are directed at small numbers of individuals. And when we hit the keyboard on our own SNS, we seem to assume we are speaking directly to that handful of intimates.
We think we are engaged in one of those intimate late-night conversations. But on social network sites many other are peering in. It’s another version of those infuriatingly public mobile phone calls on trains.

For some, that’s the whole point: for them, a blog or an SNS is just a lighthouse beaming out its message to the anonymous world, a form of exhibitionism that offers its own pleasures. But the lesson that the world is full of voyeurs whom you don’t necessarily want to see the photos of your drunken behaviour in Ibiza takes time to learn. That’s why, in the end, SNSs have introduced options for censoring who has access to what parts of your life.

In real life, our social network consists of semi-isolated sets of people – family, work friends, the group with whom we play football at the weekend, the painting class we attend on Tuesdays and sometimes go on outings with. Most of us maintain different personas for each of these worlds, for they are just sufficiently isolated from each other to allow us to do that. The internet has cut a swath right through taht. Everyone from Granny to the stranger with whom we carelessly swapped addresses at that party now see the same “us” whether we like it or not. Defriending has become a necessary part of the SNS toolkit.

The internet has had another unexpecteed effect. Those indefinably special friendships of the late teens adn early twenties reappear casually on Friends Reunited. Forged in the white-hot heat of the emotionally most turbulent period of our lives, there is something deeply enduring about these relationships. Not a few old flames have been rekindled, sometimes fatally disturbing current relationships.

This is a reminder that some deepy meaningful relationships can remain half-buried in our minds, for ever occupying slots in a way that prevents later friends reaching those coveted innermost five positions of greatest intimacy. More evidence, perhaps, that our social world is limited by our capacity to manage relationships.

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10 reasons why small businesses should blog

February 8th, 2010 By greg Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

Blogging is almost the grandfather of social media. There are millions of blogs and bloggers worldwide, some read by millions, others by only a few.But, done properly, blogs can be a very important part of social media marketing for small businesses. Here’s why:

Convey your brand personality – even the best websites can be a bit dull. The best way to spice up your site is to include a blog. Here you can be more informal and get across your personality and the personality of your brand.

Demonstrate your knowledge, experience or expertise – blogging is a great way to demonstrate that you know what you are talking about. By going into greater depth on a subject you will engage with your visitors and demonstrate your knowledge

Make your website feel alive and up to date – static business websites can often feel as though they are ignored and are rarely updated. A blog will give regular, dynamic content that is changing on a frequent basis.

Give your customers added value – by blogging regularly, you can give visitors yet another reason to come back and visit your site, especially if you are using RSS or Twitter to send out updates about your recent posts
Help with search engine optimisation – a blog is a great way to build extra visibility with the search engines. Make sure your content is relevant and includes plenty of your popular search keywords.

Give visitors a reason to buy – whilst your website will give visitors lots of information about your products or services, your blog will offer a way for you to demonstrate why they are important or valuable. This could be through tips, guidance or possibly even case studies.

Become a thought leader – by blogging on a regular basis, you will build up a following in your industry and this will improve your recognition and publicity far and beyond your traditional customer base.

Valuable content for other social media channels – with so many social media networks out there, the challenge is often knowing exactly what content to share. Having regular blog posts provides a vast array of new, fresh content that you can tweet or share to your heart’s content!

Show you care – the time and effort that you dedicate to blogging will show to your website visitors that you really care about this business and are happy to go that extra mile

Embrace the blogosphere – blogging isn’t the end of the matter. If you are really going to make a blogging strategy successful, you need to be out there in the blogosphere commenting on other blogs and joining in the conversation. If you do this, your blog will be better known and your traffic will really start to grow
What else is there? What other reasons do you have for why small businesses should blog? Let us know in the comments!

By Social Small Biz on November 29, 2009

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Ingredients of Marketing

February 5th, 2010 By zpittman Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

On the 3rd of February 2010 our own Mash Co-founder Phil Edelston conducted a presentation named the “Ingredients of Marketing Mix”.

He delivered an engaging and inspirational session to a group of thirty ambitious students, all of whom harbour an ambition to become successful entrepreneurs.The presentation was part of a three day course linking in with NACUE – The National Consortium of University Entrepreneurs (www.nacue.com) which took place at the London Metropolitan University. Phil aimed to provide a detailed and practical coaching strategy covering key points such as:

• The background of marketing.
• What a marketing strategy is.
• How to put a strategy together.

Phil prepared by digging back into his own university lectures, using his own knowledge and experience combined to deliver an interactive and productive presentation.
Once the basic points were covered, Phil focused on marketing in today’s society and the accessibility that has been created through the current digital and social media.

As a widely expanding and popular domain, the participants were able to benefit in learning how to use these opportunities to their advantage.

As a successful entrepreneur himself (Phil co-founded Mash – www.mashmarketing.co.uk and Dylan* – www.dylanlondon.com ), Phil’s aim is to empower up and coming entrepreneurs, assisting in fast tracking their goals and provide any knowledge share that can help drive successful marketing initiatives through their businesses.

You can link in with Phil through www.linkedin.com/in/connectphiledelston

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Soccer Ball generates and stores energy!

February 3rd, 2010 By zpittman Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

Over 1.5 billion people-one quarter of the world’s population-live in areas with no access to electricity, according to a recent UN report.Capitalizing on a sport’s global appeal to address this problem, a group of Harvard University students developed sOccket, a soccer ball that turns energy from a kick into electricity.

The portable energy-harvesting device captures the impact energy normally dissipated when the ball is kicked, storing it to charge lights, cell phones and batteries. It works with inductive coil technology, similar to that found in flashlights that power up when shaken.

For each 15 minutes of play, it can store enough energy to power a small LED light for three hours. sOccket could eventually help ease the reliance on toxic kerosene lamps in developing nations, thereby reducing the associated health risks.

Currently in the prototyping stages, sOccket has been successfully piloted in Durban, South Africa, and the development team has plans to market a commercial version of the sOccket in Western countries as a high-end tech toy, possibly using a “buy one-give one” model, to subsidize the cost of distributing sOccket in developing nations.

Being an all-in-one soccer ball, portable generator, community builder and global health tool, sOccket is another shining example of the functionall trend covered in our sister site’s latest briefing.

sOccket has attracted several development funding grants and is now in the process of developing production and distribution partnerships.

One to partner with or otherwise get involved in? (Related: Hippo water roller – Single-use toilet bag turns human waste into fertilizer.)

http://www.soccket.com/

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Arsenal v Manchester United to be shown in 3D on Sky

January 28th, 2010 By greg Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

BSkyB is aiming to do for sports broadcasting what James Cameron did for cinema with special effects blockbuster Avatar, with the move to air this weekend’s Premier League clash between Arsenal and Manchester United in 3D.

The satellite broadcaster, which is showing the special 3D feed of this Sunday’s Premier League clash in a handful of pubs across the country, claims it will be the first transmission of a live 3D TV sports event to a public audience.

Sunday’s test broadcast comes ahead of a plan to roll out the 3D TV service to hundreds of the tens of thousands of UK pubs that subscribe to Sky TV from April.

BSkyB then has the ambitious plan to bring 3D to the living room by the end of the year. The 3D channel will initially be made available at no extra cost to the million-plus Sky high definition TV subscribers who also pay for its premium sports and movies services.

This weekend’s test, a chance for BSkyB to “kick the tyres” of the service, will see nine pubs kitted out with a number of 3D-ready TV sets.

BSkyB will not name the pubs, for fear of overcrowding, but has said football fans at four London establishments, two in Manchester and one each in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Dublin will find they have the option of watching the game on a 3D screen.

The company estimates that between 450 and 700 viewers will get to see the match in 3D and is confident they will not balk at having to don 3D spectacles to watch the game.

“We have done consumer testing and people forget pretty quickly that they are wearing them and if a large group is doing it people don’t really worry about it. I’ve seen people wear far sillier things in the pub [than 3D specs],” said Brian Lenz, the director of product design at BSkyB.

“People will get a sense that they are looking through a window right into the game, a portal into the Emirates [Arsenal stadium] with the best seats in the house. It is going to become a must-have, a must-want,” Lenz added.

He said TV manufacturers such as Sony and Samsung intend to make sure that up to 40% of their ranges will be 3D ready in the next couple of years.

“The programming has to be top quality, we view 3D TV as an ‘appointment-to-view’ proposition, we don’t intend to try and fill the whole schedule with 3D programming,” he added.

BSkyB plans to make the Sunday 4pm match it airs every week the special 3D broadcast.

Earlier this month mobile operator O2 said that it intended to screen two of England’s rugby matches in this year’s Six Nations tournament in 3D in 40 Odeon and Cineworld cinemas.

In 2008 the BBC broadcast one of the world’s first live matches in 3D when it beamed back the Six Nations match between Scotland and England to a cinema in London.

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7 ways iPad will be revolutionise Media by 2011

January 28th, 2010 By greg Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

Apple’s new iPad at first might look like a bigger version of the iPhone although it has the capabilities to change the way publishers sell content and help package goods. As a multimedia tablet it supports not only textbooks but also video, audio and whole heap of applications, 140,000 o of which are out already. Best of all you can pick one up for as little as $499. So how will this effect the media market?

1. Paid content gets more attractive. Suddenly major publishers will have the opportunity to sell their content on a subscription basis, bundled into your monthly iPad contract. A bit like Spotifyselling music on their platform. You have the option to buy advertisement funded content or if you want it uninterrupted just subscribe.

2. Social Media subscription. Suddenly we will have social networking application which be designed for Apple iPad only. What are the advantages? Firstly you have a big enough screen to navigagte easily. It will help form a niche social network which will work like real social networking events. It will work online when you are away (via video chat perhaps?) and will require you to hold up the iPad in your hand when you are physically networking to identify the members. Great example of online meets offline.

3. News readers. Apple iPad will become the preferred gadget for news readers on your television. They will ditch their bulky laptops and embrace the iPad. This will happen sooner than you think!

4. Video game market. More video games will be released on a 12/18 months contract basis. Games as a Service (GaaS). This will bring the prices down and distribute the cost to a affordable monthly payment. Making game publishers a recurring revenue and boosting sales by making it affordable.

5. iTunes will be your digital subscription Walmart. If you haven’t still realised iTunes now sells anything from video, music, applications, e-Books and games. More so it will become the one stop shop to buy anything digital, whether it’s news, jokes, video games, social networking etc. In essence like your local Walmart store.

6. Movie premier on iPad. As iPad becomes popular there will be movies which will be released on it before they hit DVDs. It’s already happening to an extent on iTunes but now the tablet has given us a reason, especially for people who spend a awful amount of time commuting everyday.

7. iPad ready websites. Soon we will have wesbites compatible with the ipad i.e. they will render the experience to fit your iPad. A bit like iPhone/iTouch websites (example Facebook iPhone). These will provide new opportunities for web developers and publishers, providing a new range of rich media pages and e-commerce transactions. iPad-commerce?

In conclusion, these 7 changes are only the tip of the iceberg. We will see a wide variety of innovative products and services on the iPad. The mobility, screen size and mainly the prize have really made this an exciting opportunity for publishers and consumers.

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Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

January 22nd, 2010 By greg Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams…

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Naked Sushi returns to the capital…

January 18th, 2010 By greg Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

Flash Sushi is bringing the shadowy Japanese tradition of Nyotaimori, the art of eating sushi off a naked female body, back to London until March this year.
For centuries this rare practice was the preserve of Japan’s elite, but has been brought to the event scene in London, with reportedly high demand.

Flash Sushi will offer a limited number of places until March 2010, when the concept ends.

Diners are invited to varying locations at different times of the month. Once you have a confirmed place at the Flash Sushi table, the dinner’s location is divulged 24 hours prior to the event.

All locations are within Central London, and diners are alerted by SMS message.

Between 12 and 24 other gastro thrill-seekers will gather at each session for a champagne reception before taking seats for a ten-course, seasonal Omakase style sushi dinner.

For more click on the original link:

http://www.eventmagazine.co.uk/news/bulletin/newsbulletin/article/977923/?DCMP=EMC-NewsBull etin

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