trendpreneur

Here’s an interesting one for anyone looking for seed funding: The Difference Engine.

We are a mentor-lead (sic) acceleration programme that offers successful applicants £20,000 of investment capital and sixteen weeks of intensive business development.

More discussion on deburca. It’s a North-East England approach to Y Combinator, something I’ve said before needs to at least be tried over here. The fact it’s publicly funded makes it a little different; presumably, similar to Scottish Enterprise and the EU’s funding of EPIS, part of the motivation is regional economic stimulus, job-creation and growth. (It also means there are some things you can’t do with the cash, such as use it to match a SMART award).

Looking forward to seeing what comes out of the programme, though. It’s open to applicants from anywhere, and the application is virtually identical to Y Combinator’s (no business plan required), so off you go.

I’m off to San Francisco, that hub of tech buzz and excitement, for Startup School, Astia Doing it Right Silicon Valley, and general plotting and madcap tomfoolery next week. In typical shoestring mode, I’m being sponsored to do Startup School by Informatics Ventures (woo!) and a mystery sponsor is putting me through Astia (double woo!) – it is heartwarming when people are this helpful.

There’s a group of us from Edinburgh heading over, and we’ll probably have some sort of meetup the day after Startup School, so watch this space or Hacker News for info.

I have a week to ‘kill’ between the two events and hope to, finally, do some proper sightseeing and exploring of the area. I’m hatching a plan that will relocate me to SF for at least some of next year, and my previous visits, while tons of fun (GDC especially), didn’t get me to really see the entire place in the way I had seen Edinburgh and decided “I could live here”.

We shall see. Anyway, if there are any events I should know about in the last week of October, or you want to buy me a pint, be my guest!

Silicon Valley-based seed fund and incubator Y-Combinator have started nudging smart people without ideas in the direction of a few pet ideas they’re keen to fund. While I think on one level this is a great idea, I also can see a few problems: people abandoning existing half-formed ideas to pursue something they think has greater chance of being funded, people shoehorning themselves into topics off-kilter with their actual instincts and skills, and people trying to game the system by applying with a ‘request for startups’ idea but turning it into something else once funded.

Fortunately, the guys behind YC are pretty smart, and have almost certainly thought of more ways this could go wrong than I have. On the “great idea” level it is definitely a good way to 1. learn how the guys with the money and experience actually think, and 2. encourage people to focus on something worthwhile — though, as the HN comments say, if you don’t already have a few ideas of your own then are you really the right sort of person to be jumping into the startup world?

However, above all, these ideas get people thinking. The HN comments are already raging, the TC commenters are partly missing the point and partly supportive, and I expect to see plenty more discussion on the topic as more ideas to be funded emerge.

As to the RFS1 itself – ‘the future of journalism’ – it’s interesting to see people who are already getting it, and others who are already shooting far off the mark. At the moment, journalism’s trying to marry the need to make money with processes and a business model that stem back to the printing press, evolving over the years but still firmly rooted in a concept that people nowadays have trouble dealing with — paying for stuff.

It’s actually quite interesting to think how we’re innovating in this space – almost accidentally. FestBuzz is competing with several types of journalism, online and off; some of our ideas for later down the line marry different types of media, new and old, with data-mining and magic to do cool stuff. The thing about FestBuzz in particular is we found a way to make money off something that’s free to consumers without using advertising as our main source of income. I can’t help but think that some of the lessons we’re learning about how to bridge the print and online industries, how to deal with information producers and consumers, how to make information free to all in a way they want to consume it… all of that fits right in with this idea of reinventing journalism as something that might actually make money rather than die out.

But enough about us. There are plenty of other business models and ideas floating around to kickstart any thoughts you might be having on reinventing journalism starting with the need to make money, not the assumption that people will pay:

Pro-blogging.
Obviously a subject dear to my heart, this ticks the box of ‘paying people to write content’ which is something most journalists like to hear, but on the other hand: reduced barrier to entry, low pay rates, constant small trickle of content is more rewarding than occasional big articles (so the concept of a feature/column is somewhat worn away) – yet big flashy content is needed to attract viewers through viral means (digg etc). Less of a focus on daily news and current affairs, partly due to reduced access and budgets to cover them.

Citizen journalism.
A poncy term for “people on Twitter are on the scene of breaking news first”. People submit their news/pictures to a central site, news agencies pay a subscription fee, extra for exclusivity, some of which goes back to the citizen journalists cited/used in a story. Reduces costs for news organisations to have people on the ground in key locations, democratises news, allowing bloggers and online-only organisations to cover breaking news too, but still somewhat reliant on current business models.

Subscription based news access.
Either online or via Kindle/mobile/iPhone, a centralised news gateway that you pay for (possibly freemium). Challenge: Convincing people to pay, and working out where the money goes. Multiple approaches here: personalised aggregation, collaborative news filtering, topic-specific news streams; access to ‘professional’ articles consolidated into one place; cross-media integration with paper headlines, multimedia, known brands; cross-platform access i.e. RSS on steroids, including filtered twitter, facebook, etc, streams.

Would you pay for an iPhone version of HN tailored to your own preferences (no articles on Erlang for me, please!)? Would you pay for a paper, virtual or physical, that consolidated the best of the day’s current affairs as voted by other people – the Times’ political commentary with the Guardian’s media coverage, the FT’s straight-faced finance with a little bit of Daily Mail celebrity-spotting sprinkled in for tea breaks? Would you pay to consume RSS as you do today but with the ability to collaboratively view it, chatting with other readers? The problem is to most of these the answer is never going to be an immediate ‘yes!’. Maybe you’d get a hit from sales of the iPhone app or other one-off costs, but many things along these lines have been tried and have failed admirably.

Topic-specific physical news.
Instead of paying £x for a paper which you don’t read half of, pay £x/2 for two halves of a different paper and build your own. Again, fairly linked to current models, but a sort of physical hybrid of the stuff above with the need (or desire) to consume a dead-tree version.

The final point for today (I could go on all afternoon, but there’s work to be done!) is on how to think about this stuff.

The above are all ideas I’ve been thinking about for a while, in one form or another – and you can tell where my recent thoughts have been focused. But if you’re set on reinventing an industry, you don’t start from an idea or an application, you start from the industry itself. How does journalism work? How do journalists and news providers make money? What do people consume? What do they pay for (note, they may not be paying in money, but in clicks, in eyeballs, in time..)? What other data can you get about the way people consume news and media, and the way it’s delivered to them? Where are the weaknesses in the value chain? Why does the business model look the way it does? (Hint, it’s in pg’s post.)

Then think about how people of 2010 (not that far away any more) might consume news. What’s different? What happens if the news organisations go out of business, or go online-only? Are their current sources of income viable long-term? Short-term? What other ways can they make money? What do they own and what can they sell? How do journalists get paid? How else can they get paid? Who else can write news? Who else can deliver news? Does ‘news’ mean what’s happening now, or anything that someone somewhere finds current and interesting? How do news organisations gain and retain credibility? How do companies and celebrities rely on the news machine to make money and gain fame? How do paparrazzi and news photographers fit in? What would the world look like if there was only one video news channel in each country? What levels of competition and collaboration are necessary to keep ‘good’ reporting alive? What can someone with a BBC badge do that someone with a ‘my-blog.co.uk’ business card can’t? Why?

So many questions. Have a cup of tea and a think. And in, ooh, about two or three months, maybe, I’ll write more about my personal view on these things and how what I’m doing at the moment fits into the picture.

The idea of spending a week divided equally between Silicon Valley, London and various international airports might not sound exotic to some people, but for me the last seven days have been quite an adventure.

This time last week was April’s NESTA session, including exercises on blueprint planning (how to visualise/mindmap the path from where you are now to a specific goal), product positioning (are you unique or mass-market? are you cheap or premium?) and a little on cashflow, with a delightfully complicated spreadsheet to complete in our own time.

I then spent Thursday travelling to Palo Alto — despite having visited San Francisco before, this was my first trip to The Valley. Immediately enmeshed in startup culture due to staying at Hacker House, kind of like a frat house for coders (well, not really, but that’s the best one-line description I could come up with) it was already a far cry from Edinburgh’s misty morns.

Friday saw me fulfilling a wonderful stereotype and coding away in a coffee house in Mountain View — which has to be my favourite place ever due to the ubiquitous wifi — as well as discovering that even in the US I have freakish feet. Apparently size 10.5 isn’t something many places stock. Tsk. With cofounder in tow, we got ready for our YC interview the following lunchtime, surrounded by others who had been through it or were about to face it as well.

After the interview (which I’ll write about separately) I had a great time at the Computer History Museum. It’s weird to see stuff in my parents’ attic enshrined in a museum, but nostalgia is fun. We even saw a working PDP-1 with an amazing story behind it; a MIT undergrad, hacking on the machine at night, created a music synthesiser. When restoring the PDP-1 at the museum, they unearthed a box of tapes which turned out to be the music input for this program, but the program itself was long gone… fortunately, the original programmer was involved in the project! 40 years later, he rewrote it and we saw the machine play music. The creator of Spacewar! was also there demonstrating the game. Amazing stuff.

The last big event in the Valley for me was the HN/YC BBQ where a ton of local entrepreneurs, hackers, coders and assorted miscellany turned up and partied the night away. It was pretty nerve-wracking for those of us waiting on a decision from YC, but definitely a great atmosphere in which to be.

I would say that it was a novel, unique type of social event, one where the first question wasn’t “So, what do you do?” but “What does your startup do?”, but let’s fastforward through planes, trains, taxis, shuttles and the Tube to yesterday and Geek’n'Rolla, which had very much the same feel to it.

(We got a no from YC, by the way; but an incredibly valuable experience nonetheless.)

Geek’n'Rolla was an amazing event – both a celebration of startups and a quick-fire crash course in various aspects of making them successful, from user experience to tools to funding. Having just come back from the US, it was also interesting to see the various comments on whether one should launch in the US, how best to do so, etc.

I spoke to at least one young entrepreneur who planned to jump over to Silicon Valley and start a business there, and while I entirely sympathise with the — perhaps somewhat romanticised — notion that going to a place where everyone lives and breathes tech startups is a good idea, I also wouldn’t discount the UK just yet. Events like yesterday’s really give me the same feeling of camaraderie and startup spirit that I got the other side of the pond, and I’ll cheerfully point out programmes like EPIS and the various Governmental initiatives that try to make it easier to get started over here. (Even with all their flaws, at least they exist.)

As of this morning I’m back in Edinburgh, collecting my thoughts, preparing to write more about Geek’n'Rolla — especially a few thoughts on the women panel! — the YC experience and so forth, as well as getting ready to pitch at the Guy Kawasaki event next week. Thanks to everyone who offered comments on my pitch yesterday; I met some fantastic people and it’s definitely made me realise I need to spend more time in London.

Oh joy. More planes.