Pieter Peach

Advice from the many corners of the web seems to be polarised on how free you should feel to talk to people about your “big idea“.  Both sides make valid points and take an extreme position to prove a point. Is there a middle ground?

Share-widely camp.

1. Without the idea there is nothing, but execution is everything. There will be plenty of people in the world with the same idea, and success will come to those that have the passion, capacity, and persistence to execute on it. Also, beyond trying your smartest and hardest, much of a venture’s success will just be up to timing or dumb luck.

2.  You’re idea won’t develop without talking about it.  You need early validation, either from your customers (ideally), or peers (often not critical enough). You will reinforce internal biases if you keep on talking to nobody but yourself.

3. Don’t bother with non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Investors won’t sign them anyway.  They won’t take the liablity exposure by signing your NDA on the off-chance they’re already incubating the same idea with another one of their ventures.

Keep-it-to-yourself camp.

1. You’re idea is valuable and unique.  If it wasn’t, then why hasn’t it been executed on before now? The answer may be that it’s a dud idea, it may be that it’s servicing an only recently realised painpoint, or it may be that the market/technology has just evolved sufficiently for it to work.  Why risk letting someone else benefit from your ability to generate a good idea? Good ideas are not a dime a dozen.

2. Bother with NDAs.  An investor who knows enough about your idea to be interested (and probably enough to realise they’re not invested in a similar space) will bother signing. Anyone else is not interested or serious enough and you should look elsewhere. Here is an example of a VC that signs NDAs, and why.

Devil in the detail?

There is undoubtedly a middle ground as there are plenty of examples where protected ideas have contributed to sustainable competitive advantage, and examples of valuable companies built on branding, story, and customer/distribution networks alone.  Most straightforward web-startups with no novel technology to patent probably fit into the former category and are much better off just getting on with it and executing.

If its not a straightforward web-startup, get questions about protectable intellectual property (IP) answered quickly.  How protectable is it?  How much will it cost to protect? Are you better off just spending the money on getting your product out?  A brief chat to a patent attorney will likely help you get this answer (although consider their vested interest in the patent path).

Getting early advice from people more experienced doers that are currently doing in a related space will no doubt help you refine your idea. Should you lose faith if they don’t get it?  No, just work on your pitch. If they do get it, listen and incorporate their feedback as objectively as possible. You will likely sound like an idiot at the beginning.  Don’t care, you soon won’t.

As we’re repeatedly told, there is more to IP than patents, and there is more to a business’s value than IP.

The best advice nobody disagrees with? Just go out and do it already.

I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this.  Any experiences to share?

Twitter @ppeach

With social media gaining traction since SARS (2003) and Avian H5N1 (2006), it will be interesting to see what role it might now play as a media tool in the current pandemic du jour.  The benefits of social media are clear, namely speed of communication, and monitoring sentiment.  The cost in accuracy is not insignficant, and it will be simply a matter of how to best use it.  Can new micro media services like twitter add anything useful? Will good information float well enough above the bad to make it worthwhile keeping track of?

I don’t think the question is whether people should, its a question of how they should. Twitter is just an open conversation tool, and people will use it to talk about issues important to them, and if swineflu/H1N1 does take hold, it will become one of those issues.

Access and distribute reliable information. Thankfully, several streams of information are available from official government and international agencies. (WHO -website & twitter CDC – Website, Twitter, Email).  The higher the official signal to unofficial noise, the better.  You could argue that it is often slower and more deliberate than other sources, but they have significant cost/benefit analyses to make with each official release.  Partially uncertain information is occasionally communicated, but only after due consideration.

Focus on facts and confirmed cases. Real numbers are much less than that reported in the media. If somebody publishes something without a link to either official or reliable press (eg. AFP) sources and you’re still interested, try looking for a pattern of multiple first hand accounts rather than a chain of retweets. Specifically with the current H1N1 Swineflu outbreak, “suspected” cases can be very misleading.  Once an “area” (eg. often a city) has a single laboratory confirmed case, everybody who presents to the emergency department, or general practitioner, with at least two of 1) runny nose or nasal congestion, 2) sore throat, 3) cough, 4) fever or feverishness gets labelled as a “suspected case”. This is all in the CDC case definition here.  You can imagine the number of patients with otherwise innocuous colds that come through like this everyday, let alone when the population is on heightened alert.

The next bit of information of interest to most people will be a change in the global pandemic alert phase which can be found here. For Australians, the federal government has a website up at http://www.flupandemic.gov.au/ with some information on pandemic preparedness with links to each state health departments. Its not the best, but at least its something local for both clinicians and the public.

The best source of CONFIRMED US cases are to be found here http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/

Below is an unofficial map from http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com/ of human cases of H1N1 infection.

Know of any good, reliable sources of information people might find useful?

What a Saturday.  I had the chance to sit in on some interesting sessions at the inaugral Trampoline Melbourne, an unconference organised by Pat Allen, Melina Chan, and Steve Hopkins.  It was held at Donkeywheel, Melbourne’s newest social change projects venue.  100 people from various disciplines came together to speak about their biggest ideas.  I heard some interesting talks on complexity theory, persuasion psychology, trust systems as alternative economies, biomimicry, advertising and mass-collaboration, and missed out on hearing some apparently interesting talks on Zen IT and permaculture, personal prototyping, amongst others.  The format of an unconference is simple.  People turn up and the session agenda evolves as people put their hand up to speak.

I had a chance to present on future health, and explored the way technolology and open, accessible, data will have significant impacts on health outcomes when applied to the social determinants of health, namely, education, information equity, income, empowerment, and looked briefly at the potential of rapid learning systems to improve clinical processes and aid in clinical decision support.

Slides from my talk are below (it probably doesn’t make much sense as slides were only visual cues, but links to interesting sites are on slide 99), and video of the presentation here.

There will be another Trampoline in the future, so keep your ears out.

There’s a resurgence in an interest in Flow amongst the lively online community here in Melbourne.  Watching the ever-connected Ross Hill and Steve Hopkins at a roundtable discussion this morning reminded me of the most useful diagram I’ve come across in understanding the concept.  Its taken from Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi’s slide presentation at TED.

Humour detour.  @provoost just pointed me towards a peek at a future of less labour intensive aged care.

“…..as the cleansing bubbling action kicked in, Toshiko Shibahara, 89, settled back to enjoy the wash and soak cycle of her nursing home’s new human washing machine.”

I think it’s pretty self explanatory.  I think the manufacturers may have taken inspiration from Barbarella

This is effective.  The presentation. The message. If you could spend one dollar on a significant root cause of many of the world’s significant problems, consider this. The Girl Effect

Content is permanent, and search is maturing. Keep this in mind everytime you post a blog, send out a tweet, or fire off a traceable comment on a website. Nothing is deleted, and accessible data mining technologies are just beginning to come into their own (pipl.com, google.com). The exciting potential of open, online dialogue is not outweighed by the risks, by any means, but there are a few things worth keeping in mind.

1. Medical conditions. You mention a medical condition you forget to tell your health insurance company about, and the day you come to make a claim, any accidently withheld conditions might void it. Is the answer to never mention them? No, but make sure that anything you do mention, you have notified your insurance company about in advance of the claim. This includes depression. What you type now will be easily found my insurance companies in 30 years time.

2. Reputation. The aggregate of your public dialogue is your personal brand. For many people who make their living from social media, contoversy is nothing but an opportunity for expanding your brand awareness. As twitter turns the corner into the mainstream though, people relying on their professional careers, might find themselves hamstrung by things they have said. I’m not suggesting people live in fear, but it will take a while before the honest, open dialogue in social media is appreciated by every potential employer.

3. Legal implications. If content can be linked to you, consider any legal implications of your dialogue. Its early days yet, and legislation is yet to catch up with new forms of social media. Hopefully we will bear witness to a new frontier of free speech, but defamation laws may adapt in one form or another. Courts are already making a foray into the world of social networks (see Subpoena served by Facebook), recognising the relationship between an individual and their online presence.

As much as I hate to say it, if you’re new to social media, take it slow at the beginning. Consider the consequences of everything you type. I’m not meaning to throw a wet blanket over something we all know is phenomenally valuable, but its in your own best interest to take your time getting used to it. These are things you can never take back.

Does that mean the dialogue is less honest than it would otherwise would be? Yes, of course. We’re moving through an early phase of a single stream of open dialogue, to the next phase of permission-based online dialogue where information you share is only available to groups you nominate. Existing social networks don’t currently do this beyond classifying people as “friend” or “not friend”, but they will soon.

There will always be a thriving open dialogue, and hopefully, with this, a greater sense of openness about our personal thoughts and feelings. Information about you is valuable, and I’d encourage you to share with the world, in a thoughtful way. Its the many-to-many exchange of information that has made the web what it is, and it is yet to take us places we can’t imagine.

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Whilst my body is long gone, I’m happy to still have the opportunity to talk to you like this, in a way my great great grandparents unfortunately didn’t have to speak to me. Little did they envision the opportunities we now possess to have a permanent record of our every online conversation built into a relatively accurate personality construct that can speak to you in the way that I’m speaking to you now.

You might be accustomed to this transgenerational conversation, but let me tell you, we aren’t. Our parents are just getting comfortable with the idea of email, and our generation is just getting accustomed to the idea of public conversation on platforms such as blogs, microblogs, and open social networks. You will know more about our tastes in music, our interests, our passions, our foibles, and our lessons learnt than we ever knew about our ancestors.

I’m sitting here listening to a radio station based on a friend’s excellent taste in music. This is a small step, so I can’t even begin to imagine what will be possible in eighty years time. Eighty years is a long time, and if you’re reading this, its clear the human race has somehow figured out how to convince the machines not to eliminate us from this beautiful planet. Congratulations on a fine achievement, god knows how you did it.

If you’ve chosen to download my construct into your family pet robot, then thats alright by me. The only condition I’d place on this is that I get to go camping with you. I won’t mess up your car/hover vehicle/magic carpet or whatever it is you move around in. If I’m speaking to you in a virtual space, ask me to take you to the Abbotsford convent for a beer and some live Cuban music on a warm Friday evening in December 2008. You’ll love it, really.

If you’re a construct talking to me having already eliminated all the humans,
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Maybe its just that I’m relatively new to it, but it appears that the Melbourne web development/startup scene seems to have a lot to offer, and from others are saying, might be picking up speed with regular events such as Thehive.org.au, Melbourne Jelly and Pitchclub, The events are great for connecting entrepreneurs and developers and bringing new people onto the scene to inspire each other’s ideas and efforts.  This weekend saw Melbourne’s first Startup Camp.  3 startups in 48hrs from 3 teams.  Not even a glint in the eye of the team members as they arrived on Friday evening, the ideas manifested into fully fledged working products by lunchtime Sunday with business plans and pitches ready to launch.

Our team managed to get a bitofpluck.com up and running by the deadline.  Creating colorful, engaging connections between strangers with similar interests based on location data.  The frenzy of rapid development over the weekend makes for some frenzied learning.

Story cards
The 1. I am (user)….2. I want to (action)….3. So that (outcome) story cards really helped us frame the fundamental value proposition of the site, from both the business and the development side.  It helped us keep the feature set as simple as possible so that the developers had a realistic target to meet and had everyone moving in the same direction.  We were talking pretty big at the start and this really helped us pull our heads in.

Ideas abound
I can’t believe I ever thought there were not enough new ideas.  The process of getting together with people in that environment just seems to bring the creativity out.

There are some great people in Melbourne
Genuine, intelligent people just seem to be congregating and this is just one example.  Not just people who want to start a business, but people who seem to believe that a business has more to offer than just a revenue stream.

Its not the last we’re going to see of this kind of get together.  Thanks to Maxim Shklyar from Kisla Interactive for letting us use his fantastic studio, and Bart Jellema of Tjoos.com for bringing his Startup Camp expertise from Sydney, and Michael Specht from inspecht.com.au for food sponsorship and organisation.

Took this video of a hardened socialist protesting outside of Lehman Brothers the day it went down. With the element of truth to what he is saying about Wall St, people probably couldn’t help but wonder about the legitimacy of his tirades on international conflict. It’s the context of the current credit meltdown that now protects him from ridicule. Ride that wave mate.