Archive for the ‘business’ Category

How much has IDA spent on Web Summit?

Thursday, January 22nd, 2015

FOI Request to IDA has generated this:

2012: €80,000 ex VAT
2013: €140,000 ex VAT
2014: €100,000 ex VAT

The below is for a press conference and networking event at the 2014 Summit. From IDA “Our networking event in the National Museum which had over 200 clients and potential investors present. We also had a press announcement with national and international media in the building to coincide with the event.”
IDAWebSummit2014

2010 and 2011 payments to Web Summit.

How much has Enterprise Ireland spent on Web Summit?

Thursday, January 22nd, 2015

TLDR: €265k in 2014, €175k in 2013, €144k in 2012 : €584k over three years

I did an FOI request in December:
1) Grants, fees, payments made to the Web Summit / Founders
2) Web Summit/Founders costs paid by EI such as speaker fees, travel costs (if any)
3) Costs for the EI for stands, marketing and running events around Web Summit / Founders

This is what I got back:
EiWebummitCosts

The Income column is money EI made from subletting their stand at the 2014 Web Summit.
The column on the right includes travel and accommodation costs for overseas buyers, investors and media.

2010 and 2011 payments to Web Summit.

Accounts for the company behind Web Summit, Manders Terrace Limited. Please note these are from Duedil so may not be fully up to date.

Manders Terrace Limited | DueDil

Pulling things together

Monday, December 29th, 2014

You know the way when you do a proper tidy of an office, bedroom or whole house, you rip everything out, pile it up and then find a way of re-ordering? While doing so you find things you forgot about and you might decide to dump them or find a use for them again?

You then reorganise things in patterns comfortable to you. Adding some new bits to an existing pattern/pile or removing some, merging others and of course then there’s the detritus the remains and you shove that away somewhere in a box labeled Misc, misc boxes are drafts on this blog. Some drafts are 9 years old now.

When you’re done, all is tidy once again but you know that it isn’t 100% perfect but pretty good. The tidying, acquiring, moving is how I see myself putting proper long form blog posts together. Here are some lovely insights on how to distill ideas and find new ones:

These are all kind of linked. Reading the tea leaves, pulling things together.

Shane Parrish’s piece on how he reads and takes notes. Superb quote:

“I’m trying to engage in a conversation with the author.”

And from him again, a collated set of quotes on ways we can gain insights.

Kazuo Ishiguro: how I wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks. 4 weeks of hell where it seemed he was almost hallucinating at the end. He does point out 1) He had done a tonne of reading before he started off on this journey and was satisfied with the amount he researched 2) After the 4 weeks he had the raw material for the book, not in any way a finished book.

I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on.

Time is the Secret Ingredient to Writing Great Articles. Thomas Baekdal. Genius. He suggests gathering your data, writing it up, putting some thoughts together and … wait.

By allowing yourself time to reflect on your story, you see things that you hadn’t realized initially. You form connections you hadn’t recognized, and you identify the patterns that you couldn’t see before. And, more to the point, you let the story simmer for as long as it needs to.

30 minutes of Jeff Bezos’ time and he’s silent.

Sunday, December 28th, 2014

Amazon, for meetings, gets into the idea of being considered. Their very high level meetings start with a 6 page properly written talking points memo being handed out and everyone reading it in silence. 30 minutes of silence at the start of a meeting. Jeff Bezos:

“Full sentences are harder to write,” Bezos explained. “They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”

30 minutes of Jeff Bezos’s time is fairly expensive but there you go.

The wisdom of Charlie Munger

Saturday, September 20th, 2014






From here.

12 lines from Munger is worth more than 5 of your business books, Horatio.

There isn’t one novel thought in all of how Berkshire is run. It’s all about what [Mr. Munger’s friend] Peter [Kaufman] calls ‘exploiting unrecognized simplicities.’ We [Messrs. Buffett and Munger, their shareholders and the companies they have acquired] have selected one another. It’s a community of like-minded people, and that makes most decisions into no-brainers. Warren and I aren’t prodigies. We can’t play chess blindfolded or be concert pianists. But the results are prodigious, because we have a temperamental advantage that more than compensates for a lack of IQ points.

Nobody has a zero incidence of bad news coming to them too late, but that’s really low at Berkshire. Warren likes to say, ‘Just tell us the bad news, the good news can wait.’ So people trust us in that, and that helps prevent mistakes from escalating into disasters. When you’re not managing for quarterly earnings and you’re managing only for the long pull, you don’t give a damn what the next quarter’s earnings look like.

Future of media bla-de-bla

Tuesday, August 26th, 2014

Actually, this is interesting enough.

So Buzzfeed gets $50 from Andreessen Horowitz, decides it will create a movie studio.

Post this, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz talk “software will destroy the world” and more in this podcast.

Meanwhile one of the other Bens talks on a podcast about why Buzzfeed is a very interesting investment. Supporting blog post from him. The way they do “native” advertising could be one future of media. Advertiser picks a topic/area and Buzzfeed does a Buzzfeed on interesting content with the advertiser marked as a sponsor.

Re/Code are now doing it too. What’s interesting there is their journalists DO NOT write this content but do we really look at who write pieces? Well actually, I do as you can easily spot biases depending on the writer. For example you can see who is in bed with what tech company in the broadsheets quite easily. Metaphorically.

And 2013 content and traffic starlet Upworthy are getting hit by traffic decreases which they blame on training their new staff. New one on me that one. How long does it take to train these staff and does not say something about the structure that bringing new staff on board causes dips in traffic for months?

Upworthy, Buzzfeed and even most Irish media websites are over dependent on Facebook right now. And now Facebook at last have said they’re going to combat click bait articles. Interesting to me is they’re using a lot og techniques Google uses to measure if a site is good content or not e.g. how quickly they click back to FB, the faster = less quality.

These few tips on how to increase or sustain reach on Facebook may be of use.

Now look at this switch too. MLB TV streams are moving away from desktops to devices. They’ll also move from traditional TV stations to streams too. Goodbye TV stations maybe, definitely “channels”.

So this is why Twitch which was meant to be bought by YouTube is being bought by Amazon now for nearly $1 Bn in cash. Twitch is 3 years old. 3! Retaining their independence with Amazon seems to be the message. Remaining independent is the hot new thing. Twitch is where gamers stream their games and millions of people watch them every month. It’s huge and it seems nobody in “traditional’ media saw it coming. This is going to happen more and more.

In January, Twitch reported that 58 percent of its viewers spent more than 20 hours per week on the site.

20 hours!

The future of PR – Robots

Wednesday, August 6th, 2014

Stay with me on this. See the recent BBC news piece about a Korean baseball team adding in robots to the crowd so it appears the team is followed more than they are? Sure, people have been buying followers for years in the virtual spaces but now it’s physical spaces.

And at the same time we have these scientific studies showing how humans will mimic the facial expressions of robots. Silly humans.

The spontaneous mimicry of others’ emotional facial expressions constitutes a rudimentary form of empathy and facilitates social understanding

This mimicry occurs even though these participants find the android unsettling and are fully aware that it lacks intentionality

Now the study does say when the android is videoed instead of being in person, less mimicry occurs. They can fix that I bet. See the issue here is we mistrust someone as we can read their face and even the best trained PR people do actually find it hard to physically hide their lies despite what comes out of their mouth. But with with robots you can perfectly program the facial expressions and we’ll smile back to the “genuine” smile. A physiological study shows that when people give their driverless cars names, they are more forgiving when the vehicle has an error.

So another oil spill and this time BP whips out the robo-spokesperson who like Johnny-Cab, tells you with a face full of contrition that they are sorry and it wasn’t their fault. Suckers.

And this from a few years ago when two bots argue with each other

Don’t Wait – Ira Glass Quote

Tuesday, July 29th, 2014

Ira Glass, from a Lifehacker interview.

Don’t wait for permission to make something that’s interesting or amusing to you. Just do it now. Don’t wait. Find a story idea, start making it, give yourself a deadline, show it to people who’ll give you notes to make it better. Don’t wait till you’re older, or in some better job than you have now. Don’t wait for anything. Don’t wait till some magical story idea drops into your lap. That’s not where ideas come from. Go looking for an idea and it’ll show up. Begin now. Be a fucking soldier about it and be tough.

Culture Shock Notes

Monday, July 7th, 2014

Culture shock notes

I bought Will McInnes’ Culture Shock book a good while back and finally had enough time off to read it. As I said to Will, I dog eared the shit out of it and these are the notes from those dog eared pages. Makes sense to me, maybe not to you. I think a lot has happened and sadly a lot HAS NOT happened since it came out so the book is worth a read for anyone in a company/organisation that wants to make changes. Like all books in a new area it had to mix the cheerleading and bringing you over the line part with the “and here’s how to do it part”. I do think even in 2014 that this still needs to happen but for not as many people so one wonders could there be a sister book for the “doing” part and maybe with more exercises. So Will, another book please!

A word of warning: The book however in size looks like it’s going to be nice and easy but the work involved is going to take a lot to do but this will help you plan it all out. This book is a “put downable book” because you are dog earing or taking notes. A very personal feeling is a different shape to the book might have helped with some of the exercises/flows so they’re all on one page or spread over two matching pages. Bigger in terms of being wider. Slimmer but wider.

There’s probably a niche for another book in this area too for people like me, “lone wolf” business people. So Will, a third book!

So, some of my notes, copy, paste and Google, I might be unlazy and add links to these later.
Pg 9 “In ultra competitive business landscape, our organisations need a higher purpose. a story of meaning”

Pg 24 CTI – Coaches Training Institute
“what’s your purpose?” – Richard Jacobs
Check four audiobook too

Pg 47 HCL Technologies.
“employees first, customers second” – Vincent Nagar
Namasté Solar

Pg 57 Worldblu. List of most democratic companies. The Worldblu Scorecard.

Pg 58 Ready. Fire. Aim.

Pg 81 Namasté Solar – F.O.H. Frank Open Honest comms.

Pg 87 Gore.
Associates not employees. Sponsor not manager.
Max 200 in a unit/plant
CEO Terri Kelly – MIT Talk
Nixon McInnes – Church of Fail

Pg 105,106 Conscious Leadership
1. Leading Yourself
2. Style
3. Trust and Ethics
4. Transparency
5. Rewards
6. Comms – Realtime
7. support

Pg 108 – Questions to ask yourself

Pg 118 “Every soldier is a sensor. Every citizen is a contributor. Every resident a reporter.” – Brian Humphrey

Pg 137 Euan Semple “Banning social sites at work is for wimps, real managers have conversations with their time wasters about wasting time”

Pg 142 Crowdsourcing site “Innocentive” – Yury Bodrov

Pg 147 Hackdays – Social Innovation Camps

Pg 162 Andy Grove – “high tech runs three times faster than normal businesses. government runs three times slower than normal businesses”

Pg 173 Ben Fletcher, Karen Pine – Do something different programme

Pg 177 Train company PR guy – “We have twenty seconds before the world knows more about the crisis than we do”

Pg 179 OODA
Observe – What’s going on here?
Orient – What’s my place? Where am I in relation to this?
Decide – What will I do?
Act – Do it
Quick loops, moving and iterating
“The best decision right now”

Pg 240 Global Guerrilla blog – John Robb
Vinay Gupta writings
Are you financially resilient? How can you improve this.

It’s all about execution. What is your “Brand”?

Tuesday, June 24th, 2014

Forbes interview with Matti Leshem. Some nice quotes worth sticking up here.

I thought Barry Diller hired me for my creativity where in fact he was interested in my ability to execute. Barry taught me everything I know about business and that your creativity is only as good as your ability to execute against it.

it’s causing people to pursue a career trying to work for themselves when they would be much happier just working for someone else.

The Protagonist credo is that brand is meaning. When you come in contact with a brand, an emotional shift takes place in the consumer and the person perceiving that brand immediately knows what it means to them. The brilliant thing about branding is it doesn’t have to mean the same thing to all people. When you see someone wearing a Nike logo or a Nike jacket, you immediately have an emotional and visceral connection of that brand because of the connection they have made on you over time. Building those connections with people is an incredibly difficult thing to do.