Innovator are doing a few workshops on “Demand Led Innovation” around the country in the next few weeks.
Some details here.

This practical two day workshop using design thinking principles will guide you on looking at your company and markets in new ways and show you exercises on how to transform your business, allowing you to generate new revenue models for existing and new markets.

250 euros for two days, two staff can go along. More details.

Now they’ll be using the Civil Security sector (Travel security) as the industry used to develop new business ideas but the principles work for all industries. I’ve chatted to them about this and already have come up with some ideas around training and communications. Think about all the ways you can make it easier to get through airport security and less stressful, from training security staff to be more efficient and polite, to making signs that take the guesswork out of things, to iPhone Apps and even Twitter apps to pre-prep those who’ll be flying out. There’s a pretty big market for that. A lot of the time too it just iterating an existing product for a new customer or maket type.

Hoping to get to this myself.

Photo owned by MacWalsh (cc)

We go with Jerry as he goes back to basics, does 5 min stands, perfects them, goes a bit longer, gets to 20 minutes eventually and eventually goes for longer and longer stints. We see him bomb and stall, we see him hold his notes in his hand and use them as crib sheets. We see comedians stress with animation that you never EVER start with new material. Jerry works his ass off as he builds and builds and runs from club to club eventually doing as many gigs as he can in one night. His jokes change and get better over time, though they really are the same punchline, the delivery changes based on a live crowd.

All this reminds me of talks I do and how every talk is a chance to perfect your presentation, throw in something small and new, how different crowds will interact differently and you have to be ready for it all. I’ve gone from giving a talk in front of 600 people, to doing one in front of 11 the next day, to a few dozen the next. Each and every talk is worthwhile and makes the next one better. I accept as many offers as I can to do talks, paid and free if my schedule can fit with them.

I used to be an introvert, severely shy, never wanting to put my head and body into the public glare. I can now, without much butterflies stand in front of a crowd with or without notes or even prep and feel confident enough. That wasn’t the case when I started doing this though. Over time I learned what works with crowds, what doesn’t, when to move on from a point or dig deeper, all based on the feel of a crowd. It rang home when watching Seinfeld making himself better by just getting out there and doing it.

I’ve chatted to some people about public talking before and I guess my advice is, get up and speak. Do what Jerry does, 5 minutes, then 10 minutes and many times until you get that feel for the crowd. If it makes you feel better, you will suck the first few times but you will get better each time too. So why not bang through those first few times? The sooner you do them… Toastmasters and those clubs are great too. But. Comedians don’t perform for comedians, they need real crowds and so do you. Those clubs are good starts but you want out in the real public. The ratio too of time speaking to the crowd directly should be way way higher than looking at your notes or slides. How else can you get the feel of a crowd?

With my line of work though, the gold for me is questions, I absolutely, positively love it when people ask questions. I’m pretty disappointed if none are asked as I feel I’ve not made the crowd comfortable enough to ask or haven’t made their brains jump enough to shoot up a hand. While many questions will be repeated per talk, you’ll always get new ones, these are proper challenges, can you answer them on your feet? Will they make you think and re-evaluate a viewpoint? Hopefully.

And yes, smaller crowds, I try out new material or sometimes I’ll write something that’s been on my mind for a while and stick it on some paper 10 minutes beforehand and see how I go. Did that for the Press Ombudsman talk. For Open Coffee Galway, I decided (5 mins beforehand) to talk about how I do business, I didn’t know where I was going to end up with that talk but it was fun. Hope the crowd didn’t mind the experiment.

You have to get up and speak, you have to realise that it’s about iterating what you do. Do the circuits. The documentary shows super comedian Jerry go from being terrified in front of a small crowd to swaggering a few months later in front of a massive crowd and feeling on control. Lastly, be absolutely grateful to the crowd, be it two people or two hundred, if they’re paying or not, they’re your training partner really, without them you’re a gym bunny taking on a world boxing champion.

Love this app, very handy. Perhaps urban legend but Mary Robinson apparently carried a copy of the the Bunreacht around with her all the time. For the budding Marys, now it’s an app. (May not guarantee you become president one day) One thing I’d like though is for it to be copy and pastable. Edit: I just had fat fingers, copy and paste works. Rocking!

35 speakers, some of them lip-smackingly good (from a genuine content distribution perspective), two days, three streams. 50 quid. 50 quid for two days! There’s value for money and there’s this. Plus 200 geeky folks networking. G’wan, go, even for one day.

In the past few years many businesses didn’t consider what they did as a total act of survival. The Celtic Tiger made most people fat and comfortable (phsyically and mentally) and fed into a fantasty that doing nothing would still guarantee comfort. Yet even during the boom times people were still falling into complete poverty, people were homeless, pretty much lived a daily life of being starved and too many people were in constant survival mode.

Today if you walk around Dublin you’ll encounter junkies, beggars and homeless people every few minutes. They all want your money and there’s strong competition for it. Most people walk past them willfully ignoring them, pretending not to see them, some mightgive something and some will say they have no change. The style of the ask has changed over time, evolving to what works best/what will work for a while. It’s gone from aggressive demanding of money to politely asking for money for a cup of tea and thanking people no matter if they help or not (which makes some people stop and then give money as it ups the guilt perhaps.) I’ve noticed over time too that the “money for a cup of tea” ask has now changed to “money for a hostel”.

Photo owned by Jacobo Tarrío (cc)

Last week at iGap I told the story of a girl who came up to me at the Luas Green stop opposite Stephen’s Green shopping centre asking for money. She told me she wasn’t a junkie and rolled up her sleeves to show me, she told me how her boyfriend had just left her, how she was 2 months pregnant and how she has nowhere to live and asked me to help with money.

A cold cynical analysis of this: She hung around at the richer Luas stop, the first leg in the journey of people to get out of the grime of the city. People almost relieved to get out of dodge and so will be slightly more irrational when handing over money. She started to build trust by showing me she wasn’t a junkie. She triggered emotional reactions by telling me 3 facts that would put me at unease and then gave me the opportunity to try and right some of these. She got a tenner off me.

To be able to get money from people with strong competition, from an audience that’s already jaded, you are going to have to adapt to it and find out what will get and sustain attention. In the right location a sign alone might work and get you small amounts of money (hello Google Adwords) but as the streets fill with more people doing the same, you’re not going to make as much. (Still looking at you Google Adwords) Knowing your audience, knowing what will get them to think and react is becoming more and more important. Do you change your message and go after small amounts in large volumes or do you tell a deeper story to a different audience? Watching what others are doing and seeing does it work is also needed and knowing how to adapt again when your unique message gets copied is also important.

It might be worth it for some companies to volunteer time with the “professional” charities who are experts at extracting cash from people even when many of them don’t have a tangible product. What they’ll teach you more than anything is how to understand people. You can donate to the Simon Community here.

The Irish Times today has a story on Mobhaile, which was a website created so county councils and community groups could have an online presence. My first interaction with the site was via blogs that it hosted for a time. I was reminded of it a few years ago by a fellow blogger and then saw mention of it last year too, so in December 2009 I did an FOI about it after reading Dáil transcripts pointing out at least 2M was spent on it. In turned out to be 4 Million.

The expenses for this system are below. Was it a success? Well they spent 4 million quid and then shut it down and how did they measure success? Well they didn’t know the number of visitors or logged in users as they never enabled logging of this information. That’s right, the most basic form of measurement of a website was shut off.

And the excuse:

“To put in Webtrends licences on each of those sites was an expense that we couldn’t have borne,” he said.

Which kind of conflicts with:

He added that the project saved a significant amount of money by moving to open-source software during its development.

Where are the log files? These are records under FOI. No records I was told. It’s perverse that with 4M quid of taxpayer money being spent, money on stats is deemed too expensive.

A huge issue here for me is where was the oversight? 4 Million quid, boom times or not (great excuse that), this is a serious amount of money. That would fund a huge amount of startups that could build something that lasts more than 3 years. Also, despite the site being shut down, hosting is still happening and being billed for?

All this information was required via FOI. Here are the released docs as PDF Attachments 1, 2, 3. OCRd Word docs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Please do go through them and share your thoughts.

Expenditure: Mobhaile
LA Claims paid out-eChampions/elnclusion 629,129
Travel & Subsistence 25,318
Training & Conferences 19,908
Advertising 17,079
Development Costs 1,482,092
Computing Costs 1,275,878
Accommodation Costs 48,426
Administration Costs 11,298
Salaries 431,418
Hosting 2006 58,661
Hosting 2007 ¦ 75,119
Hosting 2008 86,940
Hosting 2009 70,583
Hosting for 4 years: 291,302
Grand Total: 4,231,848

I asked for stats:

Details of the usage of the system from launch including number of logged in users, number of accounts/websites/subsites created and website statistics (unique visitors, pageloads) yearly from inception to the present.

And got back:
Unfortunately, I cannot provide you with that information as the web-trending software wasn’t configured to provide statistics on Mobhaile sites

“Web-trending software not configured” is a bit different to: “To put in Webtrends licences on each of those sites was an expense that we couldn’t have borne”

I asked a technology bloke about the hosting and he said:

It’s all hosted by the LGCSB, who for some reason have their own AS number (which they do not need, but gives them 7000 IP addresses that I doubt are being used ). This is pretty darn expensive, since they end up having to peer with higher ISPs (they seem to be peering with C&W as a level 2 provider, which would not be cheap at all)

Here’s a Silicon Republic interview with Ray Rochford about it. Dial down the sensitivity of your bullshit meter.

Here’s where some of the money went.

Read through all the docs and see how this project changed numerous times. More costs. What I find amazingly interesting is the final document that was sent on, to me, reads like it’s explaining how 4 Million can be spent on something that’s now shut down and somehow was ahead of its time and opened the gate for iPhone and other buzzwords:

Finally, would the Mobhaile project be initiated again, if funds permitted? Yes, but in a different fashion. The toolsets available now for Communities are far easier to source, understand and maintain that they were even 3 years ago. The evolution of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and OpenID are three main areas of work that the Mobhaile team developed solutions for transitive Identity across all community sites and the idea of single sign on. In the current web2.0 environment where many of the toolsets provided by Mobhaile are now available for free (albeit with Advertising attached in some instances), I believe that there still is a role of co-ordination, training, understanding the different toolsets and harnessing the power of the internet for those who are less well off in the internet economy .The role (for someone) to help those less well off (in different terms) to learn, understand and harness the power of the internet-there still is a role to bring the disenfranchised in – or maybe to carry the franchise to them.

This is the Archive.org copy of Mobhaile.

Mobhaile, mo problems.

Update: Six years ago people were questioning this whole project.

The discount code is BFSDMULL which brings the ticket price down to €275+VAT @ 21%. So that’s 100 euros off. I’ll be availing of that myself. Some people I greatly respect and admire will be speaking.

Got this via a press release:

As the current financial crisis demonstrates, many people are bad at thinking about risk. Expert gamblers, however, seem to be an exception. They are less prone to the cognitive biases that affect most of us and as a result, they can think about risk more clearly.

In the next lecture of the 2010 College of Science, Engineering and Food Science (SEFS) Public Lecture Series at UCC, Dr Dylan Evans will present his initial findings from recent interviews conducted with expert gamblers and outline some ways for thinking more wisely about risky choices.

The lecture titled: “Risk Intelligence” – How expert gamblers can teach us all to make better decisions” will be delivered on Wednesday, February 10th at 8pm in Boole IV Lecture Theatre.

Dr Dylan Evans is Lecturer in Behavioural Science in the School of Medicine at UCC. He is the author of several popular science books, including Emotion: The Science of Sentiment (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Placebo: The Belief Effect (Harper Collins, 2003) and writes regularly for The Guardian. He is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association, and a Member of the British Fulbright Scholars Association.

I’m sure it’s killing those that want the web acessible only via oily machines and those that somehow “deserve” the web but tough. The majority of people don’t give a shit that you can’t modify the device or Jobs owns their functionality. The same way most people don’t add a big fuckoff exhaust and go faster stripes to their car. Apple’s obsessive paranoia about control gives us devices like the iPhone and the iPad and the proponents of openness give us … the Nexus Phone two years later and One Laptop Per Child. Out of the box, Apple devices work for the greatest number. That really must take the power away from those that are called upon by the family to sort a driver for some device.

A tweet that sums up the massive potential for the device is this:

I’ve been pretty vocal about my dislike towards the iPad but I still want one. Imagine – not having to carry anything to class but a slate!

iPhones and iPod Touches are already being bought en-masse by educational institutions. Bye bye school labs and awkward desk setups. Schoolbooks and courseware direct to the device. Art galleries use iPod Touches for multimedia tours. Tate Modern has a great one. Apple from feedback knew the screen on the touch was an issue for lots of further uses of the device so this new device will fill a gap. It will probably impact on the Touch. Apple has shifted 20 million iPod Touches so far.

So, democratisation of the web. Is it open platforms that need an engineer or is it easiest route to get to the web, even if in a “closed” device?

Oh yes and ChromeOS, I think you just got sunk.

Huge amount of Irish businesses in the past few minutes are doing just that by tagging their twitter messages with #biztweet

Example: