In what could be a defining milestone in Indian entrepreneurial development domain – GrowVC, the ‘Virtual Silicon Valley’ software platform and world’s first-ever ‘Crowd-Funding’ and interaction platform for startups announced the launch of a local funding network in India, in association with Springboard Ventures – an ensemble of experts dedicated to promoting start-ups. Based around the same model as the existing global funding network Grow VC offers, the Indian local funding network will be the first of many “local” networks the company looks to launch within its wider global network in the coming months. Grow VC’s community platform for entrepreneurs who are looking to grow their early stage startups through the “crowd-funding” has already gathered considerable interest with hundreds of new sign-ups each month and active participation of  investors, startup service providers, advisors and entrepreneurs within the online community. Satish Kataria – Managing Director at Springboard Ventures, is quoted as saying,

It would be the first ever single platform to bring together the various entities which revolve around the creation and growth of start-ups while allowing them all to interact and work together with each-other. Besides uniting angel investors and entrepreneurs, this platform offers a first-time opportunity to various experts and consultancies to now come forward and offer their services to start-up community through innovations such as ‘Service Investments’.

More on GrowVC (here)

Lets just sprinkle the words, community, advocacy, time-shifting, curated consumption, word of mouth, trust, authenticity, in here, as a few reflexsives.

Its not a broadcast ecology, its a network ecology. Now we need to work out how play a role in that network.

In a Pull World, when the avalanche of information is so great, we have no option but to curate our consumption. And anything helps us do that is always welcome. And it may be your curation tools and services of choice will be different to mine.

I think some 60 people turned up, and in evolved into quite a fascinating discussion. My point, that we are on a journey that challenges the fixed orthodoxies of what is business in a networked context, some of the points covered…

[1] What makes you so special as a business – what enabling thing to you bring into this world?  [2] What are the assets available inside an organisation – where does sales stop and start – I used the example of Zappos streaming internal meetings – greater insight into an organisation = more trust?   [3] Is your audience hyper-local or super-global?   [4] How does co-creation, co-innovation, and even co-determination enable a company to be more commercially successful? Indeed – do you have a). consumers, b). customers, c). an audience or d). a passionate community that plays a key role in advocating your business? I used Lego as a case history here  [5] Data and open api’s were also discussed – how even from being open with IP – technology and data or harnessing the data flows of others could that bring greater leverage – I used the example of GrowVC and a few others, such as Local Motors (here).   [6] Business engineering for speed, reduction of cash burn, reach and attraction of the people with whom you would like to engage is also a part of this paradigm   [7] revenue models which incentives’ real engagement, and commitment to deliver the best creativity – such as Threadless.

My point being that this thing, that many like to call social media – is a bigger more important story (here), (here), (here).

In the Q&A – I was asked a question concerning a recent CBI report on the days that are lost by business because so many people have their faces stuck into all that nonsense called social media. My response which ended up being quite impassioned was yes, this report is typical, when in fact for many people they would say modern life is literally killing them. What is the nature of work in the networked society? But the Anglo-Saxon has a cold glinty heart. I made the point that the above 7 points could deliver an entirely different process of enabling Britain to deal with its crushing debt, and build a faster, leaner, smarter, more competitive Britain at the same time.

I asked Alan the question as what he thought the deeper forces were that drive this quiet revolution towards mutuality. As in many ways, the presentation was a more mechanical description/observation on how this all worked. You can’t win – but I had to ask the question, as I believe that for many, the reasons we are in transition from one type of economy/society to another is central to understanding what comes next, and how to get there.

Which led onto other questions from the floor like, why would I buy your paper when I can get it for free online? and I feel uncomfortable that you are working with “non-expert journalists” surely this dissolves your authority and value? Or, I am canceling my Guardian subscription Rupert Murdoch has got to be right? Fascinating, because of the linear/industrial assumption of status conferred by title, authority assumed by some and taken away from others (all very hierarchical) – whereas Alan Rusbridger argued that the true skill of his journalists is in curation, aggregating and interpreting – and I think that is right. On the topic of co-evolved consumers as Kevin Kelly called them, I would prefer to think that citizen journalism in some ways relates to Richard Sennett’s idea about Craftsmanship. But I did get the sense that quite a few people in that room were at the early stages of the journey of understanding the full consequences of living and working in the network society. As Clay Shirkey wrote, Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. This open platform approach to journalism and newsbrands that relates to the Guardian one can (read more here). And there was a very relevant question raised about data, its uses and implications form an ethical and legal perspective.

In Currency of information: the future of newspapers, I quoted Alan who wrote The future of newspapers is a bit like climate change: there are now far fewer ‘old-media’ deniers. Indeed, as its only when companies start to hemorrhage cash quarterly, and when the FO has done all cutting, in some instance through the bone that they say, OK what is it I need to do? I truly admire the Guardian, as they have consistently worked at evolving what it means to be a valued newsbrand in the networked society, and I equally admire Alan Rusbridger as editor of that newspaper, as under his stewardship the Guardian has responded to the challenges that were apparent some time ago. He did point out the journey for the Guardian has not been all plain sailing (reading between the lines here) but through dialogue internally and engaging in the debate – progress has been made, and continues to do so.

The project for Excellence in Journalism report stated

If older media sectors focus on profit-taking and stock price, they may do so at the expense of building the new technologies that are vital to the future. There are signs that that may be occurring.

what do we take from the old to combine with the new?

The only way to save journalism is to develop a new model that finds profit in truth, vigilance, and social responsibility,” Phil Meyer said.

That dull phrase, “new model,” includes stuff that is not dull at all. Like a different kind of company to work for, a better sense of how journalists can create value on the Web, a new and deeper commitment to interactivity with users as a way to do more kick-ass reporting.

My view is this, its not that the decline of the mass media (here) businesses could be completely averted, however, these companies could have been in a far better position to face a market place defined by what I call networked economics. Instead, these boards have attempted to squeeze more efficiency from the thinning value of their current business models. Though it would be a brave CEO to stand up and say, we are fucked, lets rethink our business model, for the simple reason that she or he – the CEO must talk up his or her business to the media, shareholders and analysts, and harvest the cash-flow for the quarterly numbers. The whole-scale tragedy is eventually failure to act in a timely fashion means that the road crash at the end is that more; final and ugly – for everyone. Lost jobs, lost lives, and a big black-hole for institutional investors wondering how they will ever get their pension funds back. The research findings from Communities Dominate Brands published in 2005 lead us to conclude that it is about: Connectivity, Culture, Community and Commerce. You can’t separate these anymore, without failing commercially.

The key points are in my humble opinion that:

[1] We live in a Read & Write culture

[2] We live in a participatory culture

[3] We live in a search economy and a semantic universe and refined data transforms how brands and people can find each other in more meaningful ways

[4] We live in the networked society Which also encompasses the glittering allure of the mobile society

This transformation Yochai Benkler argued is structural – challenging how businesses and markets will co-evolve over the oncoming decades.

[5] The networked society and the Read & Write culture dramatically alter the power relationships between society the media, and organisations.

“In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomised  but connected ‘up’ to Big Media, but not, across to each other, and now that authority is eroding”, says Journalism Professor Jay Rosen

[6] That communication technology is political

Communication power, says Manuel Castells is at the heart of the structure and dynamics of society. By which he means, who has and who wields that power, can transform society. Communication technology is at the very heart of this current transformation of society – because we are seeking meaningful communication with each other, something that traditional media has failed to grasp, or crassly deployed it via Pop Idol and the X-Factor. The reality is that there there are consequences to this evolution.

[7] That interruptive, display, and image advertising is the junk mail of the 21st Century.

[8] There is no online and offline, there is no analogue vs. digital there is only blended reality – the crisis comes when there is no connectivity. Business models must reflect that fact. This also has implications for how organisations construct themselves.

[9] The language and therefore the literacy that defines this networked society is different to the straight line, siloed, industrial mass media, mass consumer language and literacy.

[10] Business value is defined by (a) being: life-enabling, life-simplifying and navigational (help me navigate through the complexity of my life), (b) business models are hybrid, (c) the 4C’s: commerce, culture, community, connectivity.

SMLXL archives on newspapers, newsbrands

Last year I sat with one of the anointed Glitterati of the US Digerati who was extolling the virtues of “social meeedijaa”, but only from the context of online. In the end I could not take it any more and I pointed out that surely mobile has an incy wincy part to play in all this social malarky – non? Especially when we see mobile penetration rates going through the roof some countries stand at 140%+

Au contraire, this particular geek looked at me and claimed that, whenever social  meeeedijaa was mentioned, naturally mobile as concept and reality was included within that context – you know based upon the last 2 hours of conversation I had listened to I did not agree. Yet our man was and is not the only one.

And this perplexes me – when the UK has 120%+ mobile penetration, yet at the same time there is a significant number of the British population that cannot even get online, you begin to wonder whether media and marketing companies have taken leave of their senses, by not taking mobile marketing communications more seriously?

Apparently only 7 media companies in London take a serious approach to mobile in their media planning. Yet it is the only media platform, that has over, once again, a 120%+ penetration.

And it more than that; mobile is our remote control for life and will increasingly will become so. And that is why the Social Media and Mobile: my remote control for life bootcamp is worth a day of your time. This is a one day interactive bootcamp that will help you understand why ignoring mobile, or thinking that mobile marketing is either sms push marketing (a numbers game mate), or an iPhone app is plain silly.

And why is that, well because we are still faced with the same challenges: how do we find our customers, how do we make our customers sticky, how can we increase trade with our customers and serve those customers whilst at the same time, reducing the cost to serve?

In a world which is not awash with cash, right now I reckon answering those questions  makes an enormous amount of sense.

I will run the day and we will use case histories to help all attendees reflect on your current marketing and business challenges and where you can begin to identify new opportunities and possibilities.

The case histories are wide and diverse, and are a means by which we can collectively work through new solutions for all attendees. I promise it will be a fun day. And whether you know a little or a lot – you are all welcome. And remember when mobile does a play a role in marketing and you get it right a 29% response rate is not unusual.

Don’t expect to be passive.

More information here

This is what you will get out of the day

1. Achieve a comprehensive understanding of how to drive business success – through using the mobile as a remote control that can sell car tyres, or become an extension of a retailer that delivered €83m in one year, and repeatedly delivers a 29%+ response rate.

2. Open up your collective minds towards the possibilities of mobile marketing and, in particular, help to develop solutions on what relevant mobile marketing looks like.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21829813@N05/4209204594

This of course is something that Tomi Ahonen has discussed for many years @ Communities Dominate Brands.

For me also there is a connection in Nathans work and that of Local Motors and also Company Command where the business, organisational and marketing process is designed from a participatory networked context vs an linear industrial context.

Read The Glittering Allure of the Mobile Society (download here)

Arjan from Freedom Lab linked to this fascinating story about Amazon. For me in fact, it seems every single business model, built around controlled distribution by a toll road approach to content, knowledge and information that is done in a linear context is – done for.

Few will survive.

http://www.richardross.net/

The crux of the matter,

Amazon will pay authors and publishers a royalty of 70% of the list price of Kindle books, which is a far higher per-copy royalty than most authors receive on physical book sales (including the standard Kindle book royalties).

Recently I was down to some short strokes with a publisher, but the entire conversation handled over email – was – WHAT are YOU going to do for US? HOW are YOU going to market the book, how many books will YOU sell etc.? There was NO conversation about their editorial approach, etc.,

Why would I even bother continuing such a painful conversation? Communities Dominate Brands – the first book I published was marketed purely through blogging and speaking engagements. And yes Tomi we would have sold many more copies had we made a paperback version, and an audio version and a free version. Which would have = more other work$$$ not from publishing – but that is an aside.

The networked society and the economics of that society is underpinned by [1] velocity, [2] reach and [3] penetration of ideas that others find; attractive, compelling and useful. Good work, good ideas in the end – succeed. Although the Victor Meldrews of this world moan about the crap spewed forth by twitter and blogs and everything 2.0, one can’t find much room for maneuver with publishing that outputs a staggering amount of material per year in the hope that somewhere in all of that is, a blockbuster. Good work gets destroyed in the vain hope of commercial glory, and the entire reason why individuals exercise their minds and often, a great deal of time to; tell a story, deliver insight, value, knowledge, joy is forgotten by the over riding desire for Harry Potter scale profits.

Whereas the Amazon offer is about velocity, reach and the penetration/adoption of good ideas that plug into immediate and available translation technologies like say: Slavic, Portuguese, Russian, German, Japanese and Mandarin, and then we are off to the races. `but if your work is rubbish it fails then you have no-one but yourself to blame. Forests have not been felled needlesly for epic failures and we could save that precious carbon. But if you hit the WE REALLY LIKE IT BUTTON. Then its G&T’s all the way to the bank. This is how it works,

* The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99. This is designed to force a big difference between the physical-book price and the Kindle price, which traditional publishers are currently desperate to avoid (good luck).

* This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book. Ditto.

* The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights. This gets around the typical regional royalty deals, putting pressure on publishers worldwide.

* Books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices. This one is aimed at other e-readers, a slew of which have recently hit the market.

Kindle does scare me in many ways, because of the issues around data, and because of privacy but it also is a potential leveler of good vs poor and helps me make the decision that the £26.50 price tag that lingers next to the ISBN number that promises value is not worth the money.

This does not stop me with my limited edition book printed in cold metal and the mp3 version. What it does stop is others meddling with your creativity and your product.

Writes the New York Times

It is powerful stuff

He blames the Web’s tradition of “drive-by anonymity” for fostering vicious pack behavior on blogs, forums and social networks. He acknowledges the examples of generous collaboration, like Wikipedia, but argues that the mantras of “open culture” and “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract.

“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

This is a very thoughtful and insightful. The pendulum always swings equally in two directions. Personally I still believe that we are renegotiating the power relationships between ourselves, organisations, either commercial or political as we have rejected and now have the tools to effectively do so an industrial top down, managerial approach to how we live our lives.

Laniers point is based upon ethics and literacy, there must always be rules of engagement. Transitition is always difficult, protracted, great resistance is met with great energy to change.

The FUCK YOU Brigade meeting up with the FUCK OFF MY LAND incumbents will always result in collateral damage. Innocent bystanders get hurt, whilst others will always unscrupulously take advantage of the misfortune others. Look at loan sharks in poverty stricken areas, because banks will not give loans to certain sectors of society – Great White sharks feed off those on the breadline. And so, in the same way the networked society just scales differently.

So has it all gone Pete Tong? My view is no and I guess it depends on how Utopian you were in the first place?

Lanier does make some interesting points,

In the book Mr. Lanier offers some general proposals for helping content providers, like the establishment of a universal system for micropayments administered by the government. He’d be glad to see the system run privately, he told me, but there are obstacles to PayPal or anyone else establishing a universal system, so it needs to be a government function akin to maintaining paper currency. All of which raises some more questions for you to consider:

1. If there were a simple system of micropayments, would you be willing to pay a little to read the New York Times online? (You can explain what “a little” means to you.)

2. Should such a system of micropayments be run by the government?

3. Would newspaper readers be better off in the long run if newspapers charged online readers directly instead of relying so heavily on advertising revenues?

There is a something relevant here, micropayments for culture and information – as someone once said to me, ‘when civilisations die the only thing left is art,’ so we better work hard at working out what next looks like. In the same way that the sheet ice that scraped and shaped our planet into what it is today, networked and converged communication technologies are doing the same thing to our industrial world, releasing humanity from the frozen wastes of the toxic tail end of the industrial revolution. Pointing us towards a life better lived.

Negotiating the path towards that new place is always a bit dicey – but what I see, if one cares to look hard enough is that there are entirely new ways which are; faster, cheaper, more effective, and, more egalitarian that what had gone before.

Over exuberance is a natural state of affairs when you get a new train set especially when we a migrating to a more participatory, cooperative, reciprocal model of what our society might look like.

The topic is Straight Line Thinking Stops Here, something that I covered at The Do Lectures (watch the video) last year and is culminating in a course, book and research project. Howard Rheingold, writes of the project

“Economic transactions and markets have warped perceptions to such a degree that most people fail to see what is important in life, even when it’s right in front of them. Alan Moore’s “No Straight Lines” offers a vision that is at once more humane, more forward-thinking, and more realistic”

“I needs we, to truly be I,” wrote Carl Jung, and that is why we as a species are on a quest to rediscover our role in society. Humanity, deconstructed, over the last 50 years, to the point of deconstruction is now deploying communication technologies of cooperation to regain its true identity. The rise of the networked society is no accident, and a new philosophy is needed to help us with our quest.

What I am interested in particularly is what comes next? And how do we get there? What constitutes business when it is once again blended back into our daily lives in more meaningful ways? What does education and healthcare look like? As Alvin Toffler said the futures already here it’s just not evenly distributed at the moment. Standing in the freezing reality of a systemic failure of a linear world, we need to get to those answers as quickly as we can. We are post digital, where we need to take a more even handed overview of what makes us who we are as a species, and how that should affect everything we do.

The core areas are these:

1. System breakdown: We are witness to a structural and transformational change in society.
2. The wholesale pursuit of material wealth has in fact come at a terrible cost for society
3. Threat: the current unsustainability of humanity
4. The true nature of humans and the technology of man: their intimate relationship
5. Liberation Day: We need to examine the various solutions and tools that can enable us to thrive and survive, to take back that which makes us whole as people, individually and collectively. (THIS IS NOT SOCIAL MEDIA)
6. Simplexity: The digital and highly networked world seems to have created a more complex way of living. We need to learn to deal with this complexity, by understanding how it works.
7. Deschoolling: Our imperative is to de-school ourselves in a philosophy that has driven us into a cultural, ideological and economic cul-de-sac.
8. New Philosophy: We need a new language to help us understand the deep context of the change we are in
9. The no straight line universe: We need to explore its shape we need to feel it; physically, intellectually, and emotionally

So why not come along to sxsw, I spoke there last year on the issues surrounding data

War of the Worlds?

We blogged this years ago and Christian brought it up in context of recent development at google. So what are the business models of the 21st Century? SMLXL archives on data + marketing intelligence.