The usual excuse I’m using in recent years gets another outing. i just don’t have the time to meet as many people and read and keep up with what people are doing. So this list is, like others before it, one done with a very blinkered take as only what I see, can I view.

Des Traynor
Des of Contrast and Intercom.io has over the space of the past few years gone from the amazing user interface expert everyone was advised to talk to, to the guy that shares so much about building amazing web products. Des has a quiet confidence when sharing knowledge that’s sustained through the years and has now turned into wisdom, something that only time can do. Given the rapid appreciation of Intercom.io by people, it’s only a matter of time before investing in Des will give you a nice return on that investment.

Martha Rotter and Stewart Curry
Martha and Stewart are working on Idea magazine at the moment and I expect 2012 to see them fleshing their work on this out to more places. The idea of write only once, publishing to lots of places is ancient in terms of the web but the actualisation of this idea isn’t properly happening yet. Hopefully their collaborations on this will bring this more to life in 2012. Martha also featured before.

Dylan Collins
I know Dylan Collins a few years at this stage and he’s someone I respect and admire. Actually, a line like that is normally an excuse to initiate a personal attack on someone. When you talk to Dylan or just listen to him talk you realise that he has a way of viewing things that allows him to see patterns and movements in things that if he gets involved he can change and accentuate. A fascinating quality and one that has allowed him to have an obscenely successful track record. Dylan has been working with other companies in 2011 but for someone with his personality structure he’ll need to be working on his own projects in 2012.

Enda Crowley
I know Enda since he was a kid. So that’s like 3 months or something. Enda has wanted to be in a start-up for a long while like so many others but changing colleges, working with some gifted people and persistance might see 2012 being a good year for him and his very bright co-workers. There are plenty of people circling around young programmers hoping they can feed off them but if they keep their heads down, don’t resort to doing press to talk about how awesome they are and release a product, there’s great potential. Then they can do the celebrity young tech startup media circuit…

Willie White
I know Willie White via Project Arts. You need to sit down and have a cigarette after talking to Willie. Multi-layered, full deep conversations are the norm. A whole history of art and creativity in each sentence. With Alexia and Willie, we worked on the Dublin Tweasure Hunt which was a nice bit of fun. Willie is now the big kahuna burger for the Dublin Threatre Festival so I expect he’ll have even more people to reply to my emails with “As per the court order Mr. Mulley”. If the work he and his crew did to help new artists is anything to go by then the 2012 Theatre festival will be great. More tech involvement Willie!

Adrian Weckler
Adrian is now Digital Editor/Assistant Editor in the Sunday Business Post and piloted the new website, paywall and lots of digital conversion work in the past few months for the Business Post. The Sunday Business Post may well be the first Sunday to go digital-only if the rumours are to be believed. Adrian is going to be the head man for this change given he’s Mr. Internet in there. Maybe this is why he’s rocking a rockstar haircut these days?

Gina Bowes
I first met Gina via her work in eircom in the social media team there. In a world of corporate bullshit it was refreshing to hear someone directly call something bullshit and lots of other reality based words. Gina is already a star, a clever and hard worker who has moved on now to help other brands in the area of social media. 2012 should definitely be her year and let’s see what she can blow up/change.

David Scanlon
I could link to all the posts that show I’m not a fan of Enterprise Ireland but I’m sure we’re all sick of that bleating. EI has changed quite a bit in the past few years from the way they communicate to the way they are changing to what marketplaces want. The change from middleware or bust to cloud and games was in fact a screeching lurch more than a glacial pace but changes finally happened and lots of changes are still to come. EI are now actually a model for semi-state usage of social media and even they can whack their client companies on the head as they are walking the walk. One of the people in there doing this is David Scanlon and David and his colleagues are bringing people together, external and internal people and showing the positive outcomes of using online media. 2011 has been a year where EI got deserved attention for their work and i would think the efforts in 2011 will pay off even more in 2012.

The Journal won at the Web Awards last week. I saw one person asking was it the “Best Copy and Paste” Award they won at the Webs. Humour that has truth to it is a great weapon. The Journal is about a year old and is the most disruptive thing in the Irish Web right now. Have a look on Google Trends for a rough idea how they are dominating breaking news. It’s fascinating how this product launched with momentum and is still gaining it. There are plenty of critics of it and plenty of internal chatter from organisations with even legal people consulted about the way they work. The Journal though is a web service run by a new generation, totally immersed in web culture and the new way information moves. The stature of the Irish Times, RTÉ and other media organisations in a way is their detriment and I can’t see how they can successfully react to this without first pretty much destroying their own organisations. What The Journal will do though is get these organisations to either take risks or do really silly things which will do more harm. Such is the cycle of things though.

Enterprise Ireland announced a fund this week to encourage startups to move to Ireland and people were complaining about the money not being spent nurturing local talent. There are plenty of social welfare for startup funds out there if people looked though. Bringing startups in to Ireland is a very good idea once they are a benefit locally. Experience and even philosophies being brought in to disrupt an existing industry is a very good thing. Dublin Web Summits bring wisdom to people for a few hours, this EI fund will bring new ideas for a much longer time. It might bring enough people that a creative hub establishes which will bring more people along too. The gravity from these centre of talents isn’t strong enough just yet. I think Malcolm Gladwell pointed out that when Tiger came along, the game of golf adapted and everyone got better to match him. Maybe we’ll get the same with this fund?

Eugene from Tweekaboo (a client) went off to Silicon Valley and got inspired. I met up with him this week and a short visit over there left an impact. It made me think of when we organised Paddy’s Valley and of course vowing to never do it again. Myself and others kept telling Eugene he needs to get over there and see how the tech and investment world works there. Getting talent to inspire you locally is good, bringing long-term talent to Ireland is also a very good thing, bringing new blood into a stagnant industry is a good thing but also going to where there’s an ocean of talent (and money) is an important thing. There are some tech tours (UK Centric) that go over to the Valley now and then and it’s worth sending people over once they meet and greet and don’t shy away from networking and feeding on the brains of wonderful tech people. Though Zuckerberg seems to think Boston is it.

And cross-pollination is great and is important but a worry is that you are still only learning from a subset of clever and engaging people. Why not leave art and culture inspire you too? Cross training in sport works. I recall my idea of trying to intern in some companies before to gain experience. Maybe some of those tech hubs should have artists around too to hang around with.

Starlings create these amazing patterns when flying together. It seems they follow three simple rules and if you recreate them as a software model, you can get the same patterns. Fly at the same speed, always stay the same distance between you and your neighbours and if you see a predator, leg it.

Meanwhile a 13 year old uses the Fibonacci sequence to redesign solar panels to be more like trees and so more efficient.

That to me says there are opportunities as well as suggesting maybe with all this connectedness it could bring the quality way up for bands but they still need that 10k hours idea Gladwell came up with. Wait til they get the tech right for people to jam with each other properly around the world in real time. No more ‘bassist wanted’ flyers in guitar shops. It worked with Internet dating!

This of course ties into everything else not just music. When the web first came about, search engines allowed us to find/discover textual information and it worked well. The amount of information then for the basic web was tiny compared to now. With these more complicated media, more tech and more opportunities to sort out information were born. Now with the web we have services like Last.fm (liked this song, others who did liked this one), Netflix for movies, Amazon recommendation services (bit rough) and sites using your social media footprints are now aiding us into finding new things we might like. Counter to that though is the idea we are having too much hidden from us due to what we soley like. Serendipity gets stomped on. There’s a whole TED video on filters and this:

Anyway, Dylan Collins did a blog post on what people (I was included too) thought were opportunities for startups. A good range of people and a load of good ideas are over there. Importantly for me and maybe you is that these quick bursts of ideas get you to think and come up with other ideas and opportunities based on them. Even reading them and saying “this is bullshit because…” gets you to be creative and analytical and maybe share ideas and potential opportunities.

So loads of new ideas for everyone around the world that can be inspired by blog posts and what not. More ways to be inspired, cheaper tech and infrastructure to build your ideas and faster turnaround for the ideas. Increase in quantity, increase in quality too but also a lot of noise. Geography won’t matter as much (we’ll have no Valley is better than Roundabout stuff in the comments please) so an Irish startup could compete with a German one for example. Creativity and skill not previous history of the area become stronger factors for startups.

Is the startup world following what is happening in music? If yes, will the issues with the music industry become a lesson to be learned by startups too? So a bit like Inception, there seem to be opportunities inside opportunities as the opportunity to have an opportunity becomes easier.

Inspiration is just a matter of slowing things down and observing:

Adrian Weckler covered the pending launch of the new eircom mobile phone network this autumn.

A little digging and we see that they are kitting out new stores all around the country. The planning permission on a store on Patrick’s Street/Opera Lane in Cork states it’s for eircom. A quick search on Recruit Ireland finds the job listings. The perks pretty much tell you it’s eircom. What’s interesting is that the jobs start at the end of the month and you’ll get three weeks training. That would mean that the new staff are ready to go at the end of September.

The TIF conference (big telco industry back slapathon) is early October too. It would be good to have that launched at or before it and soak up the buzz.

The name didn’t fit right with me, so I dug more. Corporates already work with Eircom Mobile. EircomMobile.ie hasn’t been registered though. Lots of other ones are however.

Lots of playing on the CRO website for business names and we see that eMobile is a business name for eircom. eMobile.ie is owned by eircom but has been for a long while it seems. And then there’s the emobileie account on Twitter. But eircomMobile exists too.

So I think we’re on track for an October launch and a possible name is eMobile. Or maybe e-Mobile. But it could also be Eircom Mobile. I’d prefer eMobile.

• Provide a useful service – Blog about legal issues for example
• Do original analysis/reporting
• Provide great information/tutorials
• Blog from a creative niche
• Write code and open source it
• Live Blog
• Make lists
• Create controversy
• Network via your blog
• Start an event/conference

Here’s his 107min presentation:

Isn’t it sad that it’s 2010 and only now are papers doing something in this always-on multimedia world to up their game? Now we are told we’ll get some quality content after all the years of decline in quality and readership. Something is needed to bring back quality, maybe it’ll be the idea of paywalls that will bring it back and then maybe a different model to retain quality will happen. This recent presentation from Hal Varian from Google actually shows newspaper revenues have been under attack since the 50s.

Google has never been a threat. Terrible content has been. Looking at the media these days, you can’t tell which news site you’re on as every story is the same. Far too many pieces are just copied and pasted from press releases, especially the breaking news sections of sites.

It’s been a race to the bottom for years with newspapers cutting back on journalists and editors, relying too much on using news feeds that all other papers use and taking less and less risks to break stories. No longer have newspapers been setting the news agenda but covering it with a slight timeshift.

Paywalls won’t work if you are hiding the bland content that is also on so many other websites out there. The internet has been designed to route around “damage” or blockages so if you are blocking your content that’s based on a press release, it will be available elsewhere.

Initial reports from the Times are that there are “value adds” behind the paywall. More images, more insight, access to journalists etc. This is value and it is unique and I think people will pay for that.

Instead of charging for this content, other alternatives would be to sell historic data, to give free access to the main site but analysis type reports which can be used to enrich a company would be sold. Imagine having the Irish Times create a report on the state of technology in Ireland and opinions from their most experienced journalists on what are areas to punt on? Charge a few hundred euros for the report. Same for all the other industries they cover and tie it in with pass historical records from their archives.

There’s also way more money to be made from advertising if they made it more targeted and more automated. Instead of charging for banner impressions which makes both sides lazy, they should be working with advertisers on a cost per conversion model. Get direct custom from a newspaper site, pay more.

There are also sorts of additional streams too like business conferences, sport events with their pundits and the sports stars they know. Bands make less from album sales and more from touring these days apparently, a working business model, why not the same for newspapers? Too much hard work. I watched a documentary about UK dockers and in particular the Liverpool ones who resisted the cargo boxes for years and the shipping world passed them by. The print model worked for a while but it’s very odd that it really has not changed in decades despite all the warning signs being there.

Update: Paul McAvinchey’s thoughts on paywalls.