Given the number of times that people/startups ask me for insights about team-building (and the fact I’m building upon them with Icebreaker One under lockdown conditions) I thought I’d try and build up some writing on the subject.

For context, I’ve created and co-created dozens of businesses. I covered some areas of ODI processes in my Nesta report  (Can Government stop losing its mind?) The ODI experience itself built on a long history of trial and error (mostly the latter) — ODI was where I felt we had the greatest scope (an open institute), time (5-years guaranteed funding) and the right size of budget (£2m/y) to help people fully explore different ideas, embracing the vast array of new tools, data, and shifts in cultural norms at play.

The right combination of scope, time, and budget was fundamental to the ODI’s success.

Sir Jeremy Heywood, Gavin Starks, Sir Nigel Shadbolt at the ODI in 2016

To maximise team alignment, I recommend investing a huge amount in communications — both internal and external. At the ODI we invested more (in total) in communications than in R&D.

The ODI example, illustrated in the chart above, included:

• Daily standups (mandatory for everyone, even if remote), max 15 minutes, everyone says one thing: this scaled to over 70 people. We made a ‘robot’ with a screen at head-height so that people dialling in were at the right height as well as passing around a laptop so people could see each other.
• Weekly 1:1’s with the startup team, evolving to direct line reports at scale. Shared Gdoc notes with each individual, confidential to just the two of you (30-60 min)
• Weekly delivery/programme/function meetings (30-60 min).
• Fortnightly whole-team meeting (2 hours, no pre-set agenda). Let people bring or unpack the things we’re missing, then go for lunch as a team.
• Six-weekly board meetings: not monthly (too rapid), not quarterly (to slow).
• Quarterly offsites: everyone for 2 days. Day 1 reflect, work out what you want to stop doing. Day 2, plan for the next 12 weeks only. Codify plan.
• Biannual review: refactor budgets and targets based on facts
• Annual budget: set targets for the next 12 months.

Yes, you can do a standup with over 70 people in under 15 minutes (note the robot’s screen on the left in front of the curved meeting room)

Plan for 12 weeks – is that all?

Very few people can make a 12-month plan and stick to it in most areas. Setting an annual target and thinking in 12-week sprints is much easier. It doesn’t mean ‘start-stop’ juddering every 12-weeks, but one critical outcome is you can create the opportunity to formally stop (or pause) doing something that isn’t getting traction. Halting conditions are as important to delivery as driving to hit targets.

Without exception, prior to any company offsite, many people would complain that they “didn’t have the time” to take 2 days out, and—uniformly—afterwards reflect that “that was so valuable” to help reflect, prioritise and reconnect.

As part of our Offsite Day 2, we’d use a tool (Trello cards) to codify deliverables, breakdown to tasks, assign teams, define dates.  One rule was every card had to have a title containing a verb.

My observation (over ~20 years of running companies) is that team alignment has a half-life — about 12-weeks is all it takes for people to find, dig and dig-in to silos. A 12-week plan help create an intervention in that cycle.

Using the Trello API, and titles with verbs, we could be really succinct and clear about what people were doing and their targets.

Below is a copy of what was a public web page detailing everything the organisation was working on and its progress completed. We also had screens (ODI TV) around the office with key project summaries, project data — and messages to visiting delegations — updated on a rolling basis.

This is the snapshot after the end of the year and you can see many things didn’t get done, were ‘halted’ or missed. We didn’t hide this, we featured it. You can see in the data below that the % of things everyone thought they would do went down by about 10% between Q1 (83%) and Q4 (72%). This is not because we became ‘less good’ but … the size of the team doubled.

My interpretation and observations were that with a larger team, people’s perception of what they could achieve went up, but that increasing team size is non-linear to delivery capacity. The year prior, with a smaller team, the year before, delivery was over 90%.

Publishing what you are doing in the open can seem terrifying, but done well it can be adrenalising and motivating to the entire organisation. In the ODI’s case, it let to exponential growth.

We also published our progress against our targets openly, for example

If you are developing your own organisation, start with a question: what is the right combination of scope, time, and budget?

After an 18-month industry consultation, we opened Icebreaker One at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York.

–> More information here on the new IcebreakerOne.org website

Between this and Open Banking/Finance, we’re going to be quite busy at Dgen HQ.

John Lewis Partnership has announced a collaboration with London startup CupClub, (disclosure: I’m a non-exec director), which will see the subscription service trialled within the business.

CupClub was selected from more than 100 applications to John Lewis Partnership’s JLab retail innovation programme, which in this iteration is dedicated to reducing plastic waste.

Provenance raises $800K to launch groundbreaking service for transparency in the food and drinks industry

British tech startup Provenance, a digital platform enabling brands and retailers to bring integrity and transparency to their supply chains, has raised funding from strategic investors to revolutionise consumer trust.

2017-07-11 LONDON – Following a successful international pilot tracking tuna through Southeast Asian supply chains, and a pilot project with the world’s largest consumer cooperative to track fresh produce from origin to supermarket, Provenance has secured $800K (£650K) in private investment to complement ongoing grant funding, and enable a market launch in the UK and beyond.

Provenance was one of the early leaders to track products along a supply chain on the blockchain – an exciting new technology bringing a new layer of trust to the web. The company will use its funding to launch a new standard for consumer trust in the food sector with its blockchain-backed solution, aiming to bring transparency to over 1000 food and drinks businesses by 2025.

“Our mission at Provenance is to improve the lives and well-being of the people behind consumer products by bringing trusted, accessible information to commerce.” says Jessi Baker, CEO of Provenance. “This funding will help us develop our tools to meet the business need for more trustworthy supply chains whilst empowering shoppers to make a positive impact.”

Funding has been secured from an impact investing initiative of Humanity United, a foundation that is part of the Omidyar Group which represents the philanthropic, personal, and professional interests of the Omidyar family. Humanity United is joined by Merian Ventures founder Alexsis de Raadt-St. James, leading blockchain investors Digital Currency Group (DCG), startup accelerator Plug and Play Tech Center, as well as a selection of handpicked UK angel investors including the Angel Academe, and John Taysom, founder of Reuters Venture Capital (RVC) and Board Observer of Yahoo and Infoseek.

“Legislation and consumer demand are driving an ever greater number of companies to ensure that their supply chains represent their values,” says Dan Viederman, who co-leads impact investing as Managing Director at Humanity United. “Provenance technology helps make local and global supply chains transparent so that retailers, suppliers, farmers and workers can all benefit.”

In addition to a group of strategic investors, Provenance has assembled a board and advisory group of business leaders and sustainability champions including Brian Fitzpatrick, who helped sell Adap.tv to AOL, Gavin Starks, founding CEO of the Open Data Institute, and Lily Cole, British supermodel and founder of social businesses, including impossible.com.

Barry Silbert, CEO of Digital Currency Group, says “We are excited to have Provenance join our network of over 100 bitcoin and blockchain companies across 27 countries. Transparency and trust are critical to ensuring the integrity of supply chains, and Provenance fills a critical gap in the current supply chain technology landscape.”

Provenance is launching the first 100 transparent products in October, following a pre-launch of organic products in partnership with the Soil Association for Organic September. UK food and drinks businesses can apply to be a founding Provenance member by signing up at provenance.org

ENDS

Press Kit

Access images of the Provenance app and pilots here.

Provenance: helping businesses build trusted relationships with their customers

With consumer trust in business at a record low, and regular reports of food fraud, Provenance offers businesses a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to addressing supply-chain risk. Powered by mobile, blockchain technology and open data, the Provenance service sets a new standard for supply chain integrity and transparency for over 200 brands in food, drinks and lifestyle goods today.

The startup’s blockchain-backed software gathers product information, including proven claims, and tracks product journeys in a way that is secure, trustworthy and accessible. With Provenance, every product can gain a digital passport enabling shoppers to trust the claims on the label, and discover the journey of people, places and materials behind it. We live in the world we buy into.

With blockchain venture capital funding currently at $496 million (£396 million) globally, Provenance is excited be a 2017 UKBAA Angel Investment Awardee, poised to help lead the application of this growing technology for advancing supply chain transparency.

The Provenance Team

Provenance, with headquarters at King’s Cross in London, comprises a multi-disciplinary team of developers, designers and commercial specialists, led by CEO Jessi Baker who has a hybrid background in design and engineering, as well as extensive digital product design experience for brands including British Airways and The Guggenheim Museum. An expert on blockchain’s application to supply chains, she provides knowledge and insight on the subject for reputable publishers and broadcasters including BBC News. CTO Ian Kynnersley manages the Provenance product team, with a background in web and mobile development, as well as experience helping businesses such as Barclaycard, Vodafone and Cancer Research UK launch digital products and services.

About the blockchain

The blockchain is an information system that is shared between many computers, and in which new information cannot be removed or changed after it has been written. According to Forbes, blockchain “creates a transparent paper trail that anyone can access, but no one can alter.” Further details on the technology and its benefits for business, society and the environment can be found on Blockchain: the solution for transparency in product supply chains, a whitepaper published by Provenance.

About the Provenance board and advisory group

To aid its growth, Provenance has formed a board and advisory group which includes Brian Fitzpatrick, serial investor and part of Adap.tv which exited to AOL over $405 million in 2013, Gavin Starks, founding Chief Executive of the Open Data Institute, theODI.org, and environmental data company, AMEE.com, and Lily Cole, British supermodel and founder of social businesses, including impossible.com. Gavin Starks, non-executive director, says “Provenance are demonstrating a real-world business application for blockchain technology and open data: to help deliver timely, relevant data for both risk analysis and consumer transparency. Their solution is highly scalable and the results from its early pilots show that they are adept at meeting user needs.”

About Humanity United

Humanity United is a foundation dedicated to bringing new approaches to global problems that have long been considered intractable. We build, lead, and support efforts to change the systems that contribute to problems like human trafficking, mass atrocities, and violent conflict. HU is part of the Omidyar Group, which represents the philanthropic, personal, and professional interests of the Omidyar family.

About Digital Currency Group

Digital Currency Group (DCG) is the largest early stage strategic investor in blockchain companies worldwide, and the DCG network now includes over 100 companies across 27 countries. DCG recently launched DCG Connect – a blockchain business ecosystem focused on accelerating enterprise adoption with membership from the world’s leading corporations and blockchain innovators.

About Merian Ventures and Alexsis de Raadt-St. James

Alexsis de Raadt-St. James is an experienced business executive, investor and entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in the industry. She is the founder and managing partner of Merian Ventures and The Althea Foundation, a social impact fund. Alexsis says “We are delighted to support Jessi and her team as they further develop their platform and bring transparency to more supply chains in the food and beverage sectors.”

About Angel Academe

An award-winning angel investment group set up to encourage more women to become angel investors and support tech startups with female founders. The investment was led by experienced investor and finance executive Francesca Tondi. Other notable angels include business development professional Marianne Costigan, University of Oxford’s Eugene Duff, and Angel Academe founder Sarah Turner.

About Plug and Play Tech Center

Plug and Play is a global innovation platform connecting startups to corporations, and investing in over 100 companies every year. The centre has 22 locations worldwide, with success stories that include PayPal, Dropbox, SoundHound, and Lending Club. George Damouny, Principal from Plug and Play Ventures, notes “transparency, efficiency, and traceability in the supply chain is becoming an increasingly relevant topic and Provenance plays right into that thesis. By connecting physical goods to the digital world, Provenance is reimagining the future of supply chains.”

In 2005, I was working with climate change charity Global Cool and global hedge fund Man Group (in my spare time) to try and create a global movement around climate change awareness and action.

While chairing the working group that created the “Global Cool Tonne” (which became one of the first UK Government’s Gold Standard offset mechanisms) I became very concerned about the transparency and credibility of the information being used in the market. As a result of this I started to pull together ideas about how to solve that problem.

To create long-term, scalable change I believe you need credible, transparent information. We have all witnessed that the Carbon markets have suffered greatly from a lack of such credibility.

Andrew Conway and I studied astrophysics together at Glasgow University, and have been friends for over 20 years. Diggory Briercliffe and I worked together to to design and build Virgin Net’s web systems, and have been friends for over 15 years.

The genesis of AMEE (in 2006) was the combination of three events: (1) a conversation with Diggory to discuss the potential of representing emissions data and a computational and transactional engine, in a web-service API. (2) a conversation with Andrew to discuss the potential of codifying Government and environmental standards in such an open platform, and (3) a presentation I gave to Climate Change Capital presenting my ideas for treating carbon as a global currency – with CO2e values mapped against every line-item on financial statements.

I funded the initial development through Dgen and, via various friends and colleagues, we were noticed by Bryony Worthington from Defra, who was lead author on the Climate Change Act. The Friday before Christmas in 2006 I was called into Defra to explain what our plans were for helping to open up Government data (the bedrock of the calculations used in carbon footprinting). At the end of that meeting I was asked to write a white paper for UK Secretary of State, David Miliband, to go in his briefcase on the Monday so he could digest it over Christmas.

We began working directly with Defra on 2nd Jan 2007. Six months later, the Secretary of State went on national television to launch the project, “Act on CO2”.

There were many “firsts” that came from this project:

• The first Government standard for domestic footprinting in the world
• The first national climate change campaign in the world
• The first Government-backed open data initiative around carbon footprinting data
• The world’s largest survey of domestic energy and carbon consumption (1.8 million homes)
• Proper separation of data of personal identity from underlying profile data from a data protection perspective

AMEE was also one of the first commercial companies to pioneer access to open Government data using a web-service API, and to address privacy issues by anonymising citizen information as the default setting within our solution. As a result AMEE was held as an exemplar by both Government and industry leaders, such as the Open Knowledge Foundation, and referred to as “the magical machine behind most carbon calculators”. 

This “founding team” of AMEE included Anna Clayton, Andrew Conway, Diggory Briercliffe, Marcus Bointon, and Chris John.

While they remained an integral part of the project for some time, Diggory, Chris and Marcus chose to continue running their own companies, while Andrew chose to continue to run his own venture and join AMEE. Anna continued as project and account manager.

After DECC’s official launch, AMEE adoption grew exponentially – over 1.8M end-user profiles through Act on CO2, Google, Morgan Stanley, Radiohead, The Energy Savings Trust, Dopplr, EEDA, The RSA, and many others signing up and pioneering use of the service.

After presenting at the 2008 O’Reilly conference, ETech, I met with Mark from OATV. On the strength of this and meeting with the AMEE team, OATV led (within 3 weeks) our $2m Series A investment with Union Square Ventures, and catapulted us on our journey to provide Environmental Intelligence — Everywhere.

After our investment, we added Bryony Worthington (now Baroness Worthington), Jamie Andrews, James Smith, Calum Alexander, Dickon Ausden, and James Hetherington to the startup team, shaping the core of the AMEE platform and its content.

Part two to follow….

Well, it’s been a while since I posted here (Twitter still winning), but here’s a long overdue synopsis of some of the things my first startup, Tornado, created. I’ll be adding to this from time-to-time as I get in touch with some of the old team.

During the Olympics Opening Ceremony, the creator of the web tweeted “This is for everyone” to millions of people around the world.

Decades since their invention, we are still discovering and unlocking value from the innovations catalysed by the open web, open internet, and open source. The Open Data Institute‘s mission is to demonstrate and unlock the value in Open Data.

Today, I am joining Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt at the ODI, as its CEO.

The ODI is a new institute – the first of its kind in the world dedicated to open data value. We have ambitious plans, and aim to have a substantial and positive impact for many, many people.

• Incubate and catalyse innovative new companies
• Help large and small companies develop and derive value from open data
• Provide the right environment to inspire, train, and develop world-class talent
• Enable organisations publish high-quality open data
• Help shape standards in this emerging space

We have had fantastic support across the political spectrum, from academia, from the private sector, and from individuals.

Open Data creates the potential for anyone to innovate. The web was created using, and exists because of, open source and open data. I want to explore how we can best deliver;

• data presented in a structured, “machine-readable” form so that data can be used by and between services (for example, using Apps)
• data that is addressable via the internet and can therefore be linked together

I believe that

“information causes change, otherwise it’s not information”
James Burke, dconstruct 2012

There are massive benefits of getting this right. Governments, businesses, and individuals around the world are gradually coming to understand the power of data. The World Economic Forum has now categorised Personal Data as a new “Asset Class”:

“Personal data is the new oil of the Internet
and the new currency of the digital world.”
Meglena Kuneva, European Consumer Commissioner

And this is just the beginning: there is an emerging shift in our collective understanding of the power of connected, addressable information.

The ODI will help us reveal this power, guide us towards best practices, fair usage, and empower a new generation of innovators to create value – and in this definition I include economic, environmental, and social value.

What is Data?

This may seem like an obvious question, and to help anchor our language I want to be clear what this means. We live in an age where almost everything is, or will be, digitised. We are familiar with government spending data, health statistics, company financial reports, school assessments, and our own personal records. We are less familiar with data that is collected when we (as governments, businesses, or individuals) use the web, or devices that generate new data (such as location data from your mobile phone, or using Facebook).

I see two trends here: one is a growing set of opportunities for innovation – creating new services that improve our lives, the other is a growing sense of anxiety – that we are monitored and not in control of our information. I want to address both these areas.

What is Open Data?

Firstly Open Data does not mean “all data”, or that it’s a free-for-all. For example, your personal health data is extremely private. There are benefits, for example aggregated anonymous statistical analysis can help us make better decisions. There are also risks – we know that companies, governments, and individuals are not always as well equipped to handle information as we may want.

Examples (please send me more – I am keen to learn!)
– Public data released around MRSA has contributed to reducing death rates
– Company data released around environmental data has helped to catalyse the transition to  more energy efficient operations
– And even remarkable stories involving individual data could help to find new cures…

NB: I will remain on the board of AMEE.

Tim O’Reilly: “Instrumenting the World”

Sun, Nov 2, 2008

Tim O’Reilly has outlined some of the world’s big problems in his talks, and urged technologists to “work on stuff that matters.” I was one of O’Reilly’s listeners at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC (see my post here).

But, I found out at the Head Conference in London, recently, that O’Reilly is doing more than just talking about solving the world’s problems. The O’Reilly VC company is investing in technologies that tackle these big problems, for example, a very interesting startup, AMEE.

AMEE is a new company with a VERY big, world changing idea – “to create a neutral technology platform to aggregate all the energy consumption data in world ” – “to be the world’s energy meter.”

I was fortunate, when I was in London, to get an opportunity to chat with Tim O’Reilly about AMEE, Web 2.0, and the role of virtual worlds in positive global development. Also, I met the CEO of AMEE, Gavin Starks.

We are still, just, in the pre “Internet of Things” era. But, soon, as Bruce Sterling puts it, we will be able to “Google our shoes” or find out which super market shelves are out of sandwiches at any particular point in time! But for now, it can still be very hard to find a sandwich, even in central London. So, I had plenty of time to talk to Tim O’Reilly whilst searching for a hand held bite to eat.

We journeyed past several sandwichless restaurants (Tim picked up the Financial Times under his arm in the picture above in one of them), and super markets with shelves stripped bare except for some end of the day sushi (it looked scary so we passed on that).

Finally, McDonalds came through for us with the sandwich in the top left corner of the photo above. The full interview is later in this post.

First, more about AMEE.

Tim O’Reilly says he doesn’t like predicting the future. But the future comes to Tim O’Reilly in very powerful ways. And AMEE asks us to play a new proactive role in our own future. AMEE’s call to action is:

“If all the energy data in the world were accessible, what would you build?”

AMEE, to me, is a quintessential example of an effort to harness the key paradigm shifts of Web 2.0 (see O’Reilly, “What is Web 2.0?“) to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.

AMEE’s mission is to be a neutral technology platform, using open source and standards, and an architecture of participation, to address the need to standardize measurement, encourage collaborative development, and create a market place for energy data.

AMEE’s goal is to enable us to understand energy consumption from the level of the individual to the scale of whole countries.

This would address the need O’Reilly notes here his son-in-law Saul Griffith argued at Emerging Technology Conference earlier this year: “to pick a target CO2 concentration and work backwards to get to an energy policy, rather than guessing at an energy policy with fingers crossed, hoping for a climate outcome that is tolerable.” AMEE is also involved in Saul’s Wattzon initiative.

Gavin Starks, CEO, AMEE, (pictured above standing under the Head Conference banner – a recording of his talk is here), explained:

AMEE’s vision is to aggregate all the energy data on Earth. By energy I include electricity, gas and all types of fuel, water, waste, you name it: everything we do is energy consumption, which means really building towards our sustainability footprint rather than just our carbon footprint. The initial thing we’ve focused on is Carbon and CO2, because that’s the most pressing issue we have to face: but it’s quite a thin layer on top of the whole sustainability question.

AMEE is not building the front-end applications to harness this energy data. Gavin noted:

We’re aggregating all the standards. This is a massively complex area, so we’ve got a science team whose job is to harvest all the scientific research and methodologies. That’s not something developers tend to want to go anywhere near: it unpacks itself into enormous amounts of complexity very quickly (e.g. building methodologies that have 700 data points). Our Chief Scientific Officer, Dr Andrew Conway, is ex-NASA and has worked on massive scientific data analysis.

We aggregate government standards and other international standards, so that you know when you’re integrating with us, that you’re working to those standards. But much more than that we actually publish those standards on an open Wiki (the Wiki and the API actually talk to each other). As these standards emerge and evolve, we’ll be tracking them, ensuring that we are up to date, and granularity is added as needed.

We were very fortunate that one of our first clients was Defra which UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Defra is currently restructuring into DEC – the Department for Energy and Climate Change. So in the UK they’re actually fusing Energy and Climate Change into a single government department. I think this is quite remarkable: a giant step forward.

We were contracted by them because they were building a national campaign to raise the awareness of every citizen’s personal and household footprint, and they were looking for an Open Source solution – which AMEE is. Defra/DEC now use AMEE for two purposes: they make their standards available through the AMEE platform, so that everybody else can use them, and as the back-end solution to their national campaign, “Act on CO2“.

AMEE is SaaS – a web-service API – we’re not trying to compete with anyone on the front-end development and delivery. Because we aggregate two moving targets: standards and consumption, we enable those integrated with us to be current at all times.

Who Owns the Data?

But, if AMEE hopes to harness global network effects as a neutral aggregator of energy consumption data from individuals, businesses, and governments, one of the key questions that AMEE must answer (also a key question for Web 2.0 in general) is: Who owns the data? I have delved into this question before on Ugotrade. See David Levine’s conversation with Eben Moglen on privacy here.

Gavin told me that this is a question AMEE has given a lot of thought to.

How AMEE answers this question, Who owns the data?, will probably determine the success of their mission as an ethical endeavor, and their ability to scale and leverage the network effects of the internet as a platform while still allowing ” a very granular level of energy activity to be tracked.”

Gavin explained where AMEE is going re their approach to this issue. And, how this relates to AMEE’s business model – software as a service (SaaS).

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to approach this, from both a commercial perspective and an ethical perspective.

We’re in a position where we’re aggregating vast amounts of personal and business information, on an ongoing basis. If we were to integrate with your credit cards, your smart meter, your supermarket, and your vehicles: we actually know everything about your life. Aside from the Data Protection issues we felt, “How could we protect everybody around ‘excessive’ exploitation of that data and ensure the user has long-term control?

As the saying goes, “we don’t know what we don’t know”: when it comes to predicting what our privacy issues will be, and as the data around our physical lives becomes digitally available, we wanted to err on the side of caution. Danny O’Brien, the EFF and MySociety have certainly helped to shape our thinking in this respect.

So if you’re a Google user and you go into the Google and you kick off a calculation, all your answers to the questions are stored in AMEE – but we don’t know who you are. We’ve got an anonymous key, Google’s got the anonymous key. Google will have your user name and so on and so forth. In AMEE we’ve got the aggregate of the responses to the questions. It’s up to Google’s Privacy Policy to determine what they and their user’s can do.

However, this doesn’t preclude us from enabling data-portability on behalf of the user. The anonymous key is not dissimilar to an OpenID, but applied to a specific data set. We are heading towards allowing you to control your data’s portability, as an individual.

It’s a fragile space. We want to give you the opportunity to glue together your AMEE IDs with your OpenID, or whatever login you choose, so that you’re in control. We aim to enable this to be both cloud and edge-based, which while fragile, is in the interest of the user. The more value we can provide, we believe, the stronger the value of our proposition.

But, because were dealing with a range of different massive organizations: imagine credit card companies sharing data with energy companies sharing data with petrol companies, sharing data with airlines etc. That’s a massive challenge from a business and political perspective – almost impossible to navigate.

We can enable people to collaborate, by making it opt-in all the way through the chain. We don’t undermine peoples existing databases: we can actually add value to them, or we aim to add value to them. We think this has got a huge amount of potential to stimulate new business for our clients.

It’s very “web” in its execution: we are part of an ecosystem. Part of our imperative is to be commercially enabling to everybody else. If we’re not being commercially enabling to other people, we’re not going to get the kind of scale of change that we need.

This was another design feature. We felt, “how could we create something which other people could build businesses or platforms on top of” And, how could that scale incredibly quickly? If we’d gone beyond our boundaries as an API, we would have been competing with people we want to work with.

While many services have taken similar strategic approaches, most seem to start with a form of lock-in, or evolve quickly to the point of lock-in, which satisfies a current trend in their valuations. We believe this trend will change and adapt to a more “privacy-based” intelligence, which has substantial value.

Tim O’Reilly in The Magic Circle

The motto of The Magic Circle where the Head Conference was held, “Indocilis Privata Loqui,” can be roughly translated as “not apt to disclose secrets.” One of the wonderful displays of memorabila there was Robert Houdin’s Mystery Clock (picture below). Luckily, for me, I was was treated to a full explanation of the “Mystery Clock” by another attendee during the Head Conference cocktail party.

As Tim O’Reilly pointed out, in his interview with Aral Balkan, he felt it was a privilege to be talking in this theater and center of magic. Capturing the magic, spreading the magic, and sharing the magic is at the heart of what he has spent his career doing. He explained:

I guess this is kind of a root idea for O’Reilly…… When I look back on my career….What did we really do? Find cool people who were doing cool shit. They didn’t really need any help from us. But then there were a bunch of people who were saying, “How did they do that”? Those are the people we help.

We find the people who are doing what appears to be magic. The Arthur C. Clarke kind of magic you know. We document – we teach people how to do it.

It is such a great privilege to be here in a theater devoted to magic – The Magic Circle. This is really what we try to do. We try to capture the magic, spread the magic, share it with other people.

Interview With Tim O’Reilly

Tish Shute: I was interested in your comment on Chris Brogan’s blog post the other day.

Tim O’Reilly: Actually it wasn’t Chris Brogan’s post. Dennis Howlett was a guest blogger. I was reacting to him saying there is nothing new in Web 2.0. My reaction was: “Well gosh it’s very easy to make a straw man out of Web 2.0 and say, ‘What’s new?’”

Howlett was specifically reacting to the Web 2.0 start ups that are superficial and not really what the trend is all about. For me, Web 2.0 is about the internet becoming a platform. Does he think that is over?

And, it is about understanding that the rules of business change when the internet is a platform. I think a lot of people do that with Web 2.0 [make it a straw man].

They don’t like the term Web 2.0 and they attach ideas to it that reflect the most superficial elements. And then, they say these aren’t interesting. And, what he was saying was that there is a lot of superficial social media stuff – consumer apps, and what really matters is what will bring ROI to business.

I just said that he is totally missing the point because learning how to use the network as a platform matters very much to business. The same rules that apply to everyone else apply to businesses.

So, for example, I have made the point in my talk in New York, just a few months ago, that in many ways you can think of Walmart as a Web 2.0 company. They are infused with IP – they are taking the data that the users give them by buying things and making themselves a more responsive organization by using that data.

That is the heart of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Not, do they use social media or not, or the social media buzz words.

Tish Shute: I am going to do an interview with Gavin Starks, CEO of AMEE. Could you tell me about your role in this project?

Tim O’Reilly: My role is as an investor. Our venture firm, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, has just finished closing on investment in AMEE. We think global warming is a really important issue to come to grips with. And, a big part of it is actually keeping track of all the carbon we’re emitting. AMEE helps with that problem.

Tish Shute: What is the potential, now we are beginning to break virtual world technologies down into basic open source building blocks, to create useful mashups with sensor technology, Web 2.0 and Virtual Worlds? Could Virtual Worlds play a key role in this work of instrumenting the world?

Tim O’Reilly: First of all, I don’t think that Virtual Worlds in the Second Life style will have this role …while I like the concept of Second Life, in that we have a Second Life in a virtual world, I am not sure that 3D avatars are [the way to go]…. at least they are certainly not my Second Life. My Second Life is in other types of media.

But, when I look at this idea of instrumenting the world, one of the things that is very, very clear is that we are turning all the millions of consumer cameras into sensors.

For example, Microsoft’s Photosynth demonstrates how these consumer sensors can be used to build 3D models. We are starting to build a 3D representation of the real world, not a separate virtual world. And, we are all going to be part of that world. So I think that the real Second Life will be ………..well I think the first layer is going to be….to get the 3D models of the world as it is, and then we will have doorways into additional rooms and additional spaces.

That’s when its going to take off because people are going to get used to it through navigating the real physical world with maps – with 3D imagery of buildings and spaces.

And, another piece of this… I talked recently with Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk……and he was talking about how much even the Autodesk workflow is shifting to scanning things first.

He was describing how they have built this new demo center in an old building. The first thing they did was photographs and measure it exactly. Then they go and make stuff that fits in the exact space.

Also, he was talking about how in his own hobbyist work, he found this shark’s jaw and he loved the curve of it. So he scanned it and made it into the arms of a chair.

Tish Shute: I think the two important pieces that might come out of virtual worlds technology are the real time interactions where people can view the same application or context as and when you do, and the rapid prototyping.

Tim O’Reilly: Yes rapid prototyping, no question. But, as I said, the idea of moving an avatar around isn’t very compelling to be quite honest.

Tish Shute: But the web doesn’t do real time interaction very well does it?

Tim O’Reilly: Well Twitter is doing a pretty good job!

Tish Shute: Yes I love Twitter. But, in terms of if you want to get a 10,000 foot view and gather around and interact with data with other people…..what about that?

Tim O’Reilly: Well that’s true. I am using that example of the Squeak based virtual world that Fidelity is using. And, that is exactly what they are using it for – business interaction.

Tish Shute: What about the role Virtual Worlds might play, for example, in instrumenting the world through facilities management?

Tim O’Reilly: Yes, SAP did a very interesting project on property management – and that is interesting.

Tish Shute: Yes, on my way back to New York City tomorrow, I am going to stop off in Zurich and visit Oliver Goh who worked with Denis Browne, SAP, on that project. In fact you showed a picture of Oliver’s Goh’s avatar demoing the virtual counterpart to his instrumented Playmobile house in Second Life in your post, “SAP as a Web 2.0 Company?” (see the picture below).

Tim O’Reilly: I make no attempt at predicting the future. So you could well be right that Virtual Worlds will be a very powerful tool. But, I think with the pace that other technologies are progressing, we will get there with photorealism and video, etc. I think the fundamental problem in most virtual world stuff is the idea of the avatar.

Tish Shute: Why do you say that?

Tim O’Reilly: Well just imagine if when interacting with people in the real world you had to look at yourself interacting with someone else. First person point of view is our fundamental experience. And, you are being forced to see yourself in the third person.

Tish Shute: I have always been more interested in avataring the world than in my avatar identity.

Tim O’Reilly: There is something very interesting in having an avatar that you don’t ever see.

[At this point there were less than ten minutes before Tim’s interview for the Head Conference, so it was time to concentrate on eating!]

This cash deal of £22m is based on just £2.5m revenues from Servecast. In 2003, Tornado’s turnover was about a quarter of that and I had substantial equity.

It’s been amazing to see the industry turn around and accelerate so quickly, and a pity sold when we did.

[added to list of almost-millionaire stories]

wow. we did it. we built and launched it on time. to the minute, as they walked off stage…

It finally (soft/beta) launched with a couple of “people of fame” (Orlando Bloom and Kate Bosworth). After years of planning, we ended up getting the funding “weeks” ago and built everything online in 4 weeks from scratch.

http://www.global-cool.com/

So, the 20 hour days will now cease and my time will now be occupied with marginally less (or more) busy days dealing with the ongoing development of the project.

A huge thanks to everyone on the web development team, who have proved (again) that we can actually achieve impossible tasks.

Special thank you to;

Diggory, Chris, Joel, Francis, Anna, Andy, Andrew, Peter, Enrico, AdrianP, Phil, LeeA, Joanna, Gage, LeeM, Rakesh, Matt, Dan, PaulH, PaulM, David, Richard, John, Athol, Steve, Ashley, Marc, Ben, Tom, Chris, Tara, Laura, Fahaad, AdrianH, Matt, MySociety.org (Pledgebank.com), VTR, Jerelang, Makeni, Counting Thoughts.

I’m absolutely delighted that we’ve been able to implement Creative Commons and GPL licensing as a core part of the project, integrate with Pledgebank (which is superb!)

I’ve got the responsibility of being “head of internet” which seems to translate into more and more every time, so if you have any ideas about what you think we should add, tell me.

I want to build this into The Place where you manage your carbon lifestyle and make a difference to the world.

I’ll write up some more about *how the hell we did that* soon … but first, sleep….

Oh, but did I mention we launched in English and Japanese?