BarCamp Session 1 - 4IP funding.

Today I am at BarCamp Scotland so I'll be live blogging what I hear as I go. The idea of BarCamp Scotland is that you share all your thoughts and ideas as you go hence I'm liveblogging as I go. I'm signed up to talk about quality checking, credentials and reuse of ephemeral content (I think I've managed to describe it ok on the sign up


I'm starting at a 4iP presentation from Ewan McIntosh who is talking about getting your ideas funded by 4iP and also touching on pitching/ideas development more generally.

Ewan starts with destination sites to which he basically says "NO!". People don't use destination/portal sites. Normal people use maybe 6 sites regularly. Facebook, maybe a picture sharing sites, work and/or personal webmail, bbc news, amazon. that's about all. So you have to bring content to them.

4iP is looking at various areas:

APIs, plugins etc. Lovely firefox plugin about local news in development (can't talk more about it).

Games - one of biggest games cos in UK (PlayPen) makes facebook games. 5 are in top 10 of facebook games. And in total they make 7 games. Very Wii look and feel. Collaborative and friendly looking. Growing sector - social gaming.

iMob - biggest iphone/ipod game - text based adventure! Missions etc. Links to address book and you can skip levels by buying credits. Kids nick parents phones and empty parents iTunes accounts!

4iP has an iphone game in development - should be self funding even if only moderately successful. Game about drinking (you booze you lose?) to self assess drunkeness.

To make things participative and interesting - some piece of media, code, etc that plugs into people's existing spaces. Channel 4 are quite good at watching media but trying to get more into participative spaces. Want to get real world outcome to online spaces. Performing spaces (e.g. SecondLife). Publishing spaces - most in the room have blogs, but most have small readerships. "A place where..." is about the riskiest place to be.


Group spaces - bebo, facebook, tagged etc. People complain about C4 pitch process - 800 words but many say it's too much, they want funding to go figure that out. You'd be a mug not to use group spaces to research your ideas and try things out.

Secret spaces - get no idea that take advantage of Instant Messager BUT it's the number 1 place to make money from advertising on the web. Huge amounts of trust etc. which you can use well. For example: Embaressing Teenage Bodies (C4 TV show) had anonymous comments so people contributed. Skins has a realtime Instant Messanger service with private chat but also referrals to useful parts of the C4 support sites. Very cheap, very effective ideas.

Pitching is a tough thing - you should be able to do short Elevator Pitch. Some come in at 400 words. Too much. All you need is "X is the only Y that allows these folk in this place to do this at a time when...". This is a great micro public service orientated pitch.

School of Everything - learning platform. You pick what you want to teach, you search for what you want to learn. Some people charge, some are free. Match up is geographically designed so real meet ups can be had and real learning can take place. 4iP has invested in this twice in the last year.

Through the Roof - wanted to measure how much money through energy loss the UK government through their roofs (with thermal imaging). Two models: can licence data and create a story (and bump a 4 logo on it); can also send data from those images - there is a company in Dundee that can work out lost heat from those images and sell that data on. Timely as lots of reviews of school buildings etc. Major undertaking.

Return On Investment
Try to keep investment small so returns can be good. 30% fees on project management is not a good budget. 10% production fees is fairly realistic. Education not traditionally appealing to advertising. Changing on the web. However for 4 the importance is also Return On Attention: most people are on the web because they can't see what's relavant to them there. Ofcom has researched and confirmed this.

Attention
There is about a 99:1 ratio on social sites. Lots of people consume but very few create. About 4.5% of wikipedia users contribute, they are exception to the rule. Discussion here about Twitter and Twitter "going mainstream" - Jonathan Ross's show encouraged people to read and watch, not contribute.

Once you have attention how do you keep it? YouTube lures you with new/recent/popular videos and allows subscribing to streams etc. Maybe they embed/share a video if they are more proactive (A graph here suggests some levels of use: Visitor/Fan/Contributor or Distributor.

If you have an idea you have to grab attention, keep attention again and again and turn that into a tangible result.

Mobile Content
4 like the iPhone - can give stuff away for free in UK and Europe but also sell the content outside EU. It's a nice model for public service/publically funded remit. Examples include graphic novel app, AudioBoo (lots of auto cleverness built into audio capture and sharing).


Questions & Discussion
How does business to business work for this model for 4ip. Facebook is important as well. People criticize use of Facebook but Bebo is bombing. All these things have a natural half-life so you pick with that in mind. Ewan makes differentiation between users and consumers. Users want more from an idea. How does your idea change people's lives?

Follow up question: Facebook is essentially a platform. What happens if people come with a platform idea. Ewan says 4 aren't against this but it's a big deal. Signing up for a platform asks a lot. If there's a logical reason or need then that's fine. Comment from the floor re: Google single profile idea. You can be compatible with lots of different extant logins and if you can you let your users use whatever login they want. Also lets someone else worry about users data. Ewan adds that user data has really limited use for 4: real liability and expensive to manage. Ewan is showing the site of Matt Locke who does education for Channel 4 (turning programmes into sites). He has A Manifesto for Data Literacy which calls or transparency, portability and not sales of data. 4 likes OpenID - you can access and move data. Facebook is almost the oppositte of this!

Funding wise 4iP have a match funding deal so they put in money and various Scottish bodies match it. You can sign up to 4iP: http://www.4ip.org.uk/. Ewan claims this is the easiest and most open VC and media pitching opportunity going. Maybe it'll take you 15 mins to fill in. 4iP have over 10 million to spend in Scotland and NI. Small good ideas are what they are after. A catalyst fund though, 4iP want out in about 18 months. Needs to be a sustainable model and be self-funding as soon as possible. Speedy ideas desired. Small ideas might take a month from idea to funding. Lots of money and support available in exchange for good useful ideas. Pretty but useless is a no. 4iP wants to be first or distinct second. Otherwise don't bother pitching. Want ideas that are participative and collaborative. And it must thrive without telly. 4iP might link from channel4.com. It's not about 4 marketing. Mostly they fund other things. 4 commissions they don't make. Themes for the next year for 4iP: ultra/local news; health and wellbeing; mobile gaming; environmental/green stuff.

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