broadstuff

A bunch of us Tech Startup entrepreneurs were talking yesterday about investigating setting up a Social Enterprise to supply office space to ourselves and others in London - a sort of DiY incubation chamber. (We had also noticed that we had quite a lot of overlapping supply chain / value chain capability which bred potential synergies). There is a real need for this sort of thing, but of the reasonably priced, flexible usage, and highly wired variety. I've also been following Lloyd Davis's work on the Social Media Cafe project with interest, and we actually looked at the economics of this a few years ago. Thus this article in the New York Times about just this today is very timely.

The article is also interesting as it goes into the business models:

Citizen Space lets people drop in without paying, but if someone uses the space regularly, the group asks the person to pay for a key. For $350 a month, a worker can rent a desk and get a key to Citizen Space for 24-hour access. For $250 a month, you get only a key. The space has seven desks, a large table for drop-ins, a private conference room, whiteboards and other office amenities — some less typical, like beer and wine.

Ms. Hunt and Mr. Messina say they don’t make a profit on the space. “We could get our own office with 800 square feet and spend the same money,” Mr. Messina said, “or we can be here, and have a space where people can come and work and have meet-ups that serve the community, and it gives us the opportunity to meet some fascinating people.”

Other coworking spaces are set up as businesses. Roman Gelfer, a former equities trader, and Sasha Vasilyuk, a writer, started Sandbox Suites in San Francisco last October, renting out 4,300 square feet on three floors. Their rates start at $135 for a once-a-week drop-in slot and go up to $495 a month for a private desk.

“If you build a space from the ground up for coworking and networking as well, you could do a better job, and I definitely believe it’s a great business,” Mr. Gelfer said.

Still, he allows free events in the space, like hackathons — weekends in which programmers get together and build, say, Facebook applications.

The Hat Factory has a more informal feel. One might call it messy. The lore is that the room, in an industrial loft, once belonged to a woman who made hats. It’s now occupied by a Web video producer, a guy who runs a Web video start-up called Viddyou and a Yahoo employee. About seven others work in the space, which is open during daytime business hours.

There is no doubt that being in an open space with lots of like minded people would be a real boon to a small company or even a SoHo player, not just economically and from an infrastructure point of view. I've found that it is really great to spark off like minded people, and in many ways its better if you are in a collegiate rather than a (competitive) corporate environment.

As to London, the Co-Working Wiki mentions some existing players:

The Hub : Various membership plans, as of Feb 07 here are some sample plans, prices inc VAT. £295/unlimited, £195/100hrs/month, £115/50hrs/month, £65/25hrs/month
Studio One : £377 per month + VAT
eOffice.net: £599 per month (for office), £129 per month + for hotdesking
Hubworking: £6 per hour for desks, £6 per hour per person for meeting rooms, £25 per month for mailing address
Happiness at Work Desks and offices in Wapping for creatives

These economics are "interesting" in that I think they are still aimed at de facto startups who want office space, rather than truly wired SOHO companies that need a base sometimes - the Institute of Directors is probably the nearest equivalent to a true open source model in London that I know of, its about £300 per annum for a table and wifi, and that in my view is more the sort of economics that make sense for useful SOHO/Social Cafe Co-Working rather than "Company" Co-working. The fact that its nowadays always crowded makes me think that their price point is very attractive, but I could imagine that a few more IT services could be supplied.

What was quite good was the article also discussed the downsides:

Despite such ideals, the arrangement does not always work perfectly. Thor Muller, the chief executive of Get Satisfaction, a San Francisco start-up, said he had opened his offices to friends to come in and work. One day, a friend started aggressively recruiting Satisfaction’s employees for his own start-up, and he was banned from the office.

“There should be honor among start-ups,” Mr. Muller said, still rankled.

Ms. Hunt and Chris Messina, her partner in Citizen Agency, said they have had to make sure that people respect their space and leave it clean.

“Someone wanted to bring her dog in, and we had to say, ‘That actually doesn’t work for us,’ ” Ms. Hunt said. And Mr. Vlahides at the Hat Factory griped about “some humorless European guys” who sat at the common table and talked loudly on their cellphones instead of going outside.

Ah yess....Mobile A**holes....maybe just ban mobiles with smoking inside completely! It also reminded me that some people are less, ummm...socialised? than others - maybe a monthly recommendation system that throws out people who are too insensitive may be required.

Couldn't make last night's Chinwag event on measuring social media, a pity as its a subject dear to me own heart (its damn hard!) - so here is a summary of some notes from last night.

Wadds kicks off the game:

For those that missed it, the debate went like this: We need to measure social media! You can’t, it’s about people! We need to measure people! We are doing it! No we are not! It’s complex.

Then, Simon Collister sez:

...the idea of 'social media measurement' got me thinking: why do we seek to measure social media? The thought led me to two immediate answers:

1. Because as the management rule goes - if you can't measure it, you can't manage it
2. Because we need to justify ROI for a) clients b) investors c) advertisers

But then I asked myself are these two reasons the best and and most compelling reasons to try to measure social media? Possibly according to the following counter-arguments:

1. the opportunities offered by social media are born of the fact that as a (social) medium it resists management and control, so why try to measure it in order to manage it?
2. is commodifying or monetising members of online communities and their networks and itneractions the best way to measure and judge ROI?

I'm not saying we shouldn't measure social media per se, but rather asking why we need to measure it?

Stuart Bruce (Expurgated Version of his post below) drives towards the same question:

Measuring social media is easy

Measuring social media is easy, as there are a myriad of tools available to provide you with numbers. The difficult bit is evaluating it - how you interpret these numbers and what you do with your findings. The problem is that a lot of the numbers are misleading and fool people into thinking they have some meaningful data.

Focus groups are dead…

… all you need to do is monitor online conversations. Yeah, right how dumb is that? Online and social media, although absolutely an essential part of any corporate communications strategy, are only half the story and will only ever be half the story. There are not only millions of consumers who will never contribute anything online, but millions more who aren’t even that interested in online.

It’s not that you can’t measure it, but you have to ask why?

Advertising and web people are the ones obsessed with measuring social media, mainly because that’s their background. Those of us from a professional public relations and corporate communications background have a much more relaxed attitude.

I think that it was Will who gave the best bit of advice of the evening when he said: “understanding is more important than measuring.”

Brendan Cooper starts to structure an answer:

My take-aways are, not necessarily connected or in any order…

Numbers

CEOs love them because they usually come from accounting backgrounds. But how can we boil all this qualitative, subjective, ’squishy’ material down to one number?

More importantly, how can we cook these numbers back up into something that we can get ROI from? And when?

This is something that PR hasn’t even cracked yet. It’s incredibly difficult to measure influence and motivation, but someone somewhere needs to know when the money’s coming back.

Standards

Standardised metrics of some kind would be nice.

We already have this for other media, so why not the web? Even if it’s just a set of questions, or some framework for understanding and measuring.

One suggested framework was ‘Kudos’ - looking at whether a blog/post/interaction is knowledgeable, useful, desirable, open and shareable, that is, do you get kudos from it. It was also quite possibly the speaker’s company’s USP so full marks for divulging that one.

Games

If we do get metrics, can they be gamed? As soon as people know what they are, could we not just hire bazillions of people in India or China to push the right buttons?

Quite possibly, but only for a short while, and when you’re found out you will be in deep doo-doo. You only have to look at the very recent Guardian blog situation to see that the truth will out, sometimes astonishingly quickly.

Remarkable, Watson

If you want your product/brand/service/company to stand out, you need to make it remarkable.

I really like this term. It’s more than ‘buzzworthy’ or ‘notable’. It means quite literally ’such that people remark on it.’

This is the goal of copywriting too. If you can craft your piece such that people will chat about it in the pub, you’ve won. It’s probably the goal of any communications initiative. And, even better than that, the only way you can be remarkable is in the eyes of your audience.

So, clearly there is a benefit in metric systems, but could it be that those who know aren't telling, asked Liberate?

One hypothesis for the night had been the notion of establishing industry-wide agreement on measurement standards. This wasn’t discussed in great depth, but there seemed to be a reluctance to address the concept and debate how it could work. This underlined my major disappointment with the evening - that being that everyone was talking from their own individual agendas. While social media is inherently about honesty and openness, the data experts were keeping their cards very close to their chests, and not so willing to reach conscensus on anything. While I appreciate this was a discussion, it would have been nice to see more willingness for collaboration, from an industry operating at the heart of social media.

Daljit Burji noted that measurement may be use specific rather than standardised

In my mind Social Media techniques need to be employed to address specific marketing and business challenges and to reach out to specific audiences. The objectives and desired outcomes of a campaign whether it’s to directly drive sales, mitigate a crisis, reshape a reputation or whatever are going to be so particular to the client concerned that developing a one-size-fits-all set of metrics really misses the point.

Ultimately, with Social Media as with so much else, it’s not measuring it that counts but what you do with it!

Chris Hambly noted that:

It sounds simple when you look at it in print, but not one person mentioned that very important fact, in fact the very cornerstone of Social Media. Now regarding how to derive a metric from your community, I’m not sure about. Perhaps a call to action on a vote, an act, will in fact yield a metric. For example if 25% of my Social Media community act on a call to action, I do in fact have a metric, numbers, something for the CEO to consider. I know that’s not measuring engagement, connection, depth of experience, blah blah … but it is a number which CEOs “get”.

Net net, the one hypothesis I have had proved is I'm not the only one struggling with this stuff. I'll sum up the evening with a comment via Robin Grant but slightly out of context - we'll do this because:

“it’s opportunity for us to do things that no one else has done.”

(thanks too to @jennybee for pointing me at all the blogs)

This morning I've been listening to the radio about Northern Rock, and the nationalisation thereof, with an increasing sense of incredulity.

For non UK readers, Northern Rock is a large UK mortgage lender that followed - and was allowed to follow by the banking regulator - the strategy of lending money on long term loans (mortgages) while borrowing short term money in the markets. This was fine while there was an inversion in rates, but when they went back to long term averages the inevitable happened, and they would have gone bust. The Banking industry and the bank and its shareholders wailed to the Gov't to bail them out, and it did - with £33bn ($66bn) of taxpayers money, and set out to find a buyer. No decent deal could be done (due in no small part to major shareholders) and so this week HM Gov moved to nationalise the bank...at a cost of c £100bn all in all to the Taxpayer

Well.....

On the radio this morning there has been a steady stream of worthies trying to get snouts in the public trough. The other banks want to sue the Gov't for now creating a subsidised competitor, the shereholders want to sue the Gov't for valuing their shares too lowly (despite the only reason the shares had a value being public backing - this was a bust bank remember), and HM Loyal opposition are basically criticizing everything the government does, no matter what it does. Needless to say no heads have rolled apart from a few sacrificial lambs at the bank

What a bloody carry on....Politics as usual, I hear you say. No wonder no-one bother to vote for these people.

But follow the money - thats £100 BILLION. Where did I get to vote for (lessee, £100 billion / c 15m taxpaying households) = c £7,000 of my money going to bail out all the slaexzeballs who got us into the situation in the first place.

If I had my way I'd withdraw support - with £33bn in it, "We the People" would be the biggest debtholder so we get first dibs on the bust business, the shareholders are wiped out, the Bankesr get to see where the problem really is - ie in their house - and we get the bank at Rock bottom price.

OK, so my proposal may not be sound (sounds better than many though imho) but my point is, I didn't get a choice.

If anything has convinced me that Government 2.0 needs to appear its this (Apart from The War that is) - ie finding ways to get the "wisdom of crowds" participating in major decisions that have to do with Our Money and How It is Spent.

Watching the to-do on two blogs I follow (Techcrunch and A VC) on the concept of Journobloggers (those creatures who are journos who blog as their main raison d'etre) made me realise that the media is becoming ever more nuanced.

In essence the discussion goes as follows. Fred Wilson (A VC) noted that:

When I started blogging four and a half years ago, there was a clear delineation between bloggers and journalists. But that's all changed and now we have this new category, the journablogger.

The journablogger has his or her own blog or works in a blog network like paid content, techcrunch, gigaom, alley insider, read write web, mashable, venturebeat, etc, etc. Just look at the top of techmeme's leader board and you'll see them right next to the traditional journalists like New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNET, etc.

These journabloggers got their start as bloggers who operated outside of the traditional world of journalism where doing your homework and getting the story straight are requirements for the job. That was good. It allowed them to be quick, get the story out, and fill the blog with opinion.

Problem was, he fingered two TechCrunch journo-bloggers for a bit of sloppiness, and this drew the TC F(ire)

So what this really comes down to is this. Wilson didn’t like the coverage. But instead of simply disagreeing with and rebutting the points made in the posts, he went after the reputation of the writers themselves. That would be inappropriate even if he was right. But the fact that he was both conflicted and wrong makes it inexcusable.

Wilson failed to uphold the very standards of integrity that he demands from others. He failed to contact Erick or Matt before writing, and didn’t seem to have the facts to back up his argument. In a twitter exchange between us on this issue, he defended his sloppiness on the fact that he’s a blogger, saying “if you are a blogger you can say what you think, once you become a journalist, you have a different standard.”

Now, frankly, I’m confused. Bloggers can say what they think, but journalists can’t? I think what he’s trying to say is that Erick and Matt are no longer bloggers and now need to hold themselves to a higher standard - one that Wilson explicitly doesn’t hold himself to. That sounds like hypocrisy 101 to me.

Also, in a comment to his original post, he says “Erick didn’t get it wrong…but i think he missed the opportunity to get it right.”

Now, Fred later recalled the term "Journobloggers", but whether its called a spadeblogger or a journoshovel, there is a key New Media point being made here, ie there is a totally new continuum of journalism emerging, and where once the Olde Media "journalist" was on the wavefront of fast, topical news you now have the "perpetual beta" of the Blogworld usurping that role - and also injecting a lot of the Op-Ed into the vacuum where more serious (ie time lagged) journalists fail to tread their wares.

Is some of this instant op-ed scurrilous and inaccurate - absolutely! Will there be spats between the various blogs and bloggers - totally! It is (as others have noted before) merely the re-emergence of broadsides etc, those scurrilous, inflamatory "micro-media" of days gone by. And just as some of those metamorphosed into "proper" media, so it will happen again. And again.

At real issue here, in 2008, is attention - and money. The "Journoblogs" are now sucking quite a bit of attention from the "Trad" Cottage Blogger industry (as the increasing wails of Olde A Listers will testify), and increasingly sucking money away from the MSM. As they are (New)MSM in all but name, one could argue that this is merely the process of re-setting expectations of what these mid-stream media companies will be doing to differentiate themselves from Cottage Bloggers (because they are companies now in all but name, not individual bloggers) - riding the perpetual blogging beta or inclining to the older codes of journalism.

Endgame - there will be a form of on line, rapid turnaround media company - call it Journoblogging or Midstream Media or Online OpEd or whatever, which is not as fact-checked as MSM but is far quicker to the fore, is updated by commentators as well as writers, and where it is more important to watch the "conversation" than any one organ.

In that way its maybe less efficient - ie takes more reading time - but it is more immediate, and we - the newsvores - will learn to parse it along with the the existing dailies, weeklies, journals etc as we go about gathering the information we like, when we want it etc.

This an interesting article in the New York Times, about a small startup that has got a lot of high powered funding to predict the success of startups. As the NYT notes in its article:

The idea of a start-up predictor has drawn skepticism. Some venture capitalists say that the idea of using formulas or historical data from past deals to predict how other start-ups will do in the future has been tried many times in vain.

Paul S. Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and the author of the Infectious Greed blog, said that his industry was indeed inefficient at picking winners; typically, 90 percent of venture investments are not home runs. But he does not particularly trust a company that professes to be able to do better than venture capitalists.

“If their tool did such a good job, they’d raise a fund themselves and beat the tar out of us,” Mr. Kedrosky said. “It’s hard to imagine what they’re mathematical combination of factors is.”

On that point, the founders of YouNoodle.com are not forthcoming. They say their algorithm uses sophisticated modeling pertaining to how social capital and networks can affect an organization’s performance.

It would appear to be a play on the magic of the de jure darling, social networks etc (the "who you know" aspect) in driving success. I would be fascinated to know how they will measure Social Capital, its a very interesting area and we also are of the opinion that its a major determinant of success, but its metrics are currently very new.

Good luck to them anyway, we've done quite a bit of work in predicting market success for various technologies and startups over the last few years (at better rates than 10%, Mr Kedrosky ), but found that it is decidedly non-linear (ie is prone to tipping points, black swan effects, "unkonwn unknowns" and other elements of complex system behaviour. After all our experience, I think the best approach is probably what is emerging as a fairly well proven approach - Prediction Markets (we've written on these before).

Last word to the NYT:

So the question arises: Has YouNoodle used the predictor to determine if it will itself succeed?

“So far, we haven’t run ourselves through it,” Mr. Goodson said, adding that the results could prove baffling. “If it says we’ll fail, and it’s right, that’s something of a paradox.”

Fascinating graph in the New York Times on the rate of uptake of various consumer products over time, showing acceleration of adoption. (Its the second graph, the first one is the spending splits by income decile.



The thing that is most interesting is at what % penetration they start to slow down...I suspect one could create a correlation between point of slowdown and price as % of disposable income by decile as a predictor.

...Following on from the previous post of blogger Kathy Sierra on video, here's Umair Haque on video on how the new economy is more about a conversation with users and between users.

Whats interesting to me is not the discussion per se (its about the impact of reducing transaction costs changing the role of branding*), but the fact that its being done as Web TV rather than a blog post.

And its only 1min 37 seconds, though it looks like its been cut off?.

Video material will increase hugely over 2008, the issue emerging that Videoblogging will have to grapple with is how the story is told, and how long it should take to tell it - the "signal to noise-time" ratio.

Anyone who has watched unscripted Seesmic stuff will know how dire free-form video can be...but unlike a crap blog post, or a banal Twittter post, it goes on for a long time, trying to grab a large piece of your attention....and I don't think this medium sustains that

For example, I didn't watch either as videos, but played them as audio while doing something else - because I can.

* resonates with VRM thinking as well, in that with the information/conversation capability today "branding" - and thus advertising - is less useful to the consumer/user.

.....at the TOC Conference - I'm a fan of her blog work, so its a pity she felt she had to give up.

Quote of quotes..they "reverse engineered" passion (no sniggering at the back...) and found that:

People are passionate about things they kick ass at......not stuff they suck at

Which comes from getting into something, and getting feedback - "cognitive seduction".

From the Pumping Irony Dept:

Just read on Nick Carr's blogabout the Amazin' Amazon S3 crash. Given that Nick is a great fan (and author of) the Software-as-A-Utility-Like Electricty schtick, it is of course interesting to see how he deals with this piquant petard

As someone who believes in the growth of the utility mode of computing, I feel compelled to point out the inevitable glitches that are going to happen along the way. How the supplier responds - in keeping customers apprised of the situation and explaining precisely what went wrong and how the source of the problem is being addressed - is crucial to building the trust of current and would-be users. When Salesforce.com suffered a big outage two years ago, it was justly criticized for an incomplete explanation; the company subsequently became much more forthright about the status of its services and the reasons behind outages.

I would put it more simply.....don't switch off the server in the backroom just yet, nor go for the pure Webservice model, no matter what the Enterprise 2.0 theorists may tell you. Their risk of getting it wrong is a "why we weren't right - yet" blog post - yours is a collapsed business.

To be fair, medium term I agree with Nick - its just this was far too good a post to resist

Found this post via Ars. Tech - Users' love affair with iPhone stumps Mobile World panel!

Typical - we noted last year on more than one occasion that Planet Mobile are unable to see the blindingly obvious sometimes.....anyway, the story goes that at Barcelona 3GSM:

A blue-ribbon panel of human behavior and technology experts at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain agreed that the best recent advance in the mobile telecommunications user space came not from a mobile telecom company but from Apple Inc. — the iPhone.

Astounding insight there......but the devils in detail are even more revealing:

The panel, whose title was It's the User Experience, Stupid agreed that iPhone represents a model for mobile operators to follow, but they reached little agreement on how to follow.

One direction, advocated by Lucia Predolin, international marketing and communications director for Buongirono S.p.A. of Milan, Italy, is to manipulate users by identifying their "need states" — including such compulsions as "killing time," and "making the most of it" — and fulfilling them subliminally.

Adobe's Murarka proposed a more technological approach to improving the user experience, satisfying the mobile phone subscriber through better interface design. Sarah Lipman, co-founder and R&D director for Power2B, suggested an almost mystical solution, somehow tapping into users' "neural networks" to navigate a mobile phone interface "using touch and pre-touch input."

In other words...we don't like the message, we can't shoot a messenger, so lets massage the message instead. But sadly, this ploy was pithily nailed by the TI Guy.

Panelist Mike Yonker, general manager of worldwide strategy and operations for Texas Instruments' wireless terminals business unit, said that the way for the user to get the rich content now available on a mobile handset is through the "search" function. But this isn't so easy. He compared the limitations of a mobile handset to a full personal computer screen.

Searching on a computer, he said, is like going to a store, where the customers sees every product displayed, and can make comparisons, touch the products, even try things on for size. Doing the same search on a mobile, he said, but like trying to shop in the same store but "through a drive-up window." No matter how much stuff is in the store, you can only find out through the cashier at the drive-up window.

Sheer Brilliance

Read the post, also the comments - I thought this one from one of the commentators was very insightful:

....the competition always looks at the ipod or iphone and breaks it down into parts. Then they assume they can boost the specs on features at a lower price and have a winner. Apple surpasses the competition based on the sum of its parts, which in turn is a large part of the experience. Add a really well thought out yet simple human interface and you have something that everyone can get into. My father-in-law and parents, all technophobes, now text me and keep digital schedules because the technology in the iphone is accessible. Apple also knows how to throw features away. Don't give the user too many options because in the end it is less productive.

Its very interesting - when the iPhone came out we wondered if the mobile handset makers would rush out to copy it...and as yet, the answer is no! The comment above explains why very well.

Or could it be that, despite the critical acclaim, its just a tad overpriced