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HashBang.TV Episode 9 “Get the knowledge on Hailo Cab”
Russ and Gary join the boys to tell the Hailo Hollywood script style story – learn how three cabbies came up with the idea in a Covent Garden coffee shop, launched and spread the word amongst the London Black Cab community, and went on to raise one of the largest A rounds in recent European startup history.
Listen to the Podcast from my Podcast page or iTunes to get the extended interview, including talk of a “Hailo Fest” meetup, and the Dragon’s Den application.
My lastest iPhone Photo Infographic
It's been a while since I last wrote about PhotoStats, the cool iPhone app that crunches all the data about your photos into a neat infographic.
Here's my updated stats:
You can get the app here.
Write up of MUSIC Tech Pitch 4.5
Last night I had the pleasure of being asked to sit on the judging panel for MUSIC Tech Pitch 4.5 held at EMI’s London office. This was the second music focused pitching event organised by 2Pears.
The evening was opened by Andria Vidler, CEO of EMI Music UK & Ireland. Andria linked hosting the event to EMI’s innovation history, citing unsung tech hero Alan Blumlein who invented stereo sound, and contributed to the development of radar and television, and all before he had turned 40, as he was tragically killed at 38 in a plane crash in 1942. Seeing a list of achievements like that makes you ponder what you have personally managed to achieve with your life!
Moving into the pitching section of the evening, we saw eight music related start ups present for 3 minutes, with an additional 2 – 3 minutes of questioning from the panel.
In alphabetical order:
Live concert streaming over the web. Heavy focus on in stream interactivity and monitisation of ticket and merchandise sales.
To me it felt that they had a significant business development challenge to build brand awareness of the service with labels and artists, as there are many more established video streaming services out there that can offer a ready made audience, and infrastructure at scale.
A really simple idea, but the best often are. Distribute a single song via text messaging. e.g. Text emi to 60444 – this returns a link to download an MP3 track. The track can be free or chargable. Simple, fast, and uses a ubicoictious technology. Perfect for fast response like promoting a track as people leave a gig.
By far the most intriguing demo of the night. Nu desine is a new electronic musical instrument. Seeing Adam playing the “thing” was pretty amazing, it was well described on Twitter as a techno powered disco ball!
There was some concern from the panel on the money needed to scale a hardware business, and compete head to head with companies like Yamaha and Roland. To me I think the biggest challenge is for Adam to pick a single market proposition and focus 100% on that. At the moment he seems torn between positioning it as a serious instrument targeted at artists, and as a consumer oriented gadget / you akin to Guitar Hero or DJ Hero. These are very different markets, and by trying to appeal to both simultaneously it may struggle. For example at the moment it may be dismissed by musicians as a novelty product, whilst at £250 - £500 per unit it is too expensive for the home entertainment market.
Its certainly one to watch though.
This is a gig social network on stay on top of events, and connect with friends. I think the panel struggled to see how this was any different or better than the mirrad of ways people can currently get this kind of information and social networking – Songkick, Facebook, Last.FM all spring to mind.
To compel the lack of product USP they were working on deals with music venues on a venue by venue basis, so it felt like it wouldn’t deliver on the promise of being THE live music social network as Pepper wouldn’t have 100% coverage of live music listing in the UK for some time, if at all.
The idea behind PSONAR is track sharing and play back for 1p / 1c per track. Targeted at the youth market. Tracks are streamed. The business model innovation was well received by the panel.
My feedback on PSONAR was if they are targeting a cash poor audience like teens with their cheap business model, would using mobile streaming to deliver the content be an issue? The cost of mobile streaming over 3G may be cost prohibitive, and when questioned it seemed the product did not force streaming over Wi-Fi.
This was a cloud solution to provide a DJs with a web radio station through a browser, removing all the complexity and cost associated with “traditional” radio station streaming.
This is an area I don’t have much experience with, but it seemed to be a noisy market with a lot of companies operating in the space, although Radiojar claim none of them are as feature rich as them. I guess it will boil down to their marketing plan to cut through the noise and win customers.
This was a well-presented idea, apparently first developed with the BBC. It produces alternative music charts based on social media buzz. The idea being that traditional unit sales charts are felt to be misrepresentative of what is actually hot.
It certainly ticks some big topical buttons like big data, and montitising analytical information. My only issue was a potential mismatch between the premise of the idea and the execution. If the problem that The Sound Index is trying to solve is that the traditional charts are not credible in the age of social media, it seems strange their business strategy is to partner with brands and TV broadcasters. These kinds of companies are always seeking mass market adoption, therefore will want to promote the acts that dominate the traditional charts, which seems at odds with the original idea.
Olly who was presenting did stress there were a ton of personalisation options which allow you to data mine until your heart is content, so all in all pretty impressive.
My way to describe this is a browser based music creation app, that aims to compete head to head with more established desktop software music creation.
Assuming it has all the features to compete head to head with shrink wrapped competitors (in 3 minutes its hard to get into the nitty gritty) then Soundation looks to have potential to disrupt the market by offering easy distribution and a freemuim business model.
Like a couple of the ideas, I think success will be predicated on the commercial and business developer execution.
Results
The winner of the audience vote was Sound Index, and the judges voted for Text2Music. Congratulations to all the pitching companies, and the winners.
For the record my top three were:
1. Text2Music
2. Sound Index
3. Psonar
Popcorn Horror App Aims To Change Way Movies Are Made
The idea of short form video content on mobile has been around for about a decade, but the secret to success content business is always the quality of the content, an audience, and a business model.
A new start up from Glasgow may have cracked the model.
Popcorn Horror is the brainchild of Felix Gilfedder. Felix is a life long filmmaker himself. With 10 independent short films and a few film awards under his belt he has blended his love of films, the horror genre, and technology to create Popcorn Horror.
Available on Android, iPhone and iPad, the app delivers a bite sized horror cinema experience in the palm of your hand, through a beautifully crafted UI.
The secret sauce of Popcorn Horror is the fact that it is much more than just a consumer facing content delivery platform, Felix has created a two-sided ecosystem. He has independent filmmakers from all over the world sending him films every week for distribution on the platform. This is where Felix's filmmaker credentials and contacts give him the edge.
I sat down with Felix to ask him a few questions:
1. When did Popcorn Horror launch, and can you share any details on how things are going?
Popcorn Horror launched Halloween 2011. With zero marketing budget, we got around 100 downloads and around 800 sessions a day. By the end of this month we expect to double downloads and reach 1,000 sessions a day. Our goal for the first six months is 400 -500 downloads a day with between 4,000 - 8,000 sessions a day. Once we hit that milestone we will look to translate our app for a foreign market, ble these figures and grow from there.
Needless to say there have been plenty of bumps in the road and we decided to launch the app as a Beta and debug as we go. Only now are we starting to get a more settled and rounded experience between loading times, user interface and content.
2. How many films are you receiving each day?
We receive around 4 -6 films a day.
3. What is the business model?
The business model works in two stages. First I want to grow the app while we cover our costs. At the moment all the content is free but you can become a premium user and life member for a one off fee of £3.99.
We will experiment with the model by locking the back catalogue (when the archive becomes big enough). People will be able to watch a selection of films and all new films moving forward, but if they want to watch something from the back catalogue they can unlock it by buying a premium pass. We also sell merchandise.
4. What's next for Popcorn Horror?
I would like to explore foreign markets and we have big plans for our web channel, but I can't say anything more about that at the moment.
For more information visit http://www.popcornhorror.com/
My latest piece for IT Pro Portal.
App Circus London Write Up #appcircus #apps #mobile #yam cc @appcircus @techhub
Last night I had the pleasure of sitting on the judging panel for App Circus London, hosted in TechHub.
Here is a quick run down of the results and a few of the notes I made about each pitch.
WINNER: EchoEcho
This is a social location app which solves a practical problem of guiding you to the location of a friend near by. You can send your location to a friend so they can come directly to you, or pick a venue close by for you to rendezvous at. It was a clear and concise pitch, articulately demonstrating how the app removes the need for a multiple text message exchange to zero in on someones location. There was also a nice build in member get member feature as sending your location to a friend encourages the download of the app. They already have users in 165 countries even though they only launched in September, and also expose an API.
RUNNER UP: Siine Writer
A 3rd party keyboard for Android devices I have seen before, but what struck me about Siine Writer was the use of icon buttons to enter long strings of text into the device. This I've not seen before, and can be fully customised by the user by adding their own buttons, and even uploading their own images to label those buttons. I think there is a huge accessibility opportunity for technology like this, and also really interested mobile health application.
HONOURABLE MENTION: Runtastic
Yes the a 10 a penny health and fitness tracking apps in the various app stores, but this was an accomplished pitch, with a beautifully designed UI. They have already generated over 4 million downloads of their apps, and they are extending the utility and accuracy of the app by supporting external sensors. When I challenged on what set them apart from the competition, they have a nice feature where friends can track a race live and give you on the spot encouragement to squeeze every last second out of your performance.
Social location network for iPhone. Its a photo driven event app where you create events or "eeves" and share live photo streams with friends. You can also go back and browse historical eeves to reminisce about all those awesome parties you go to. The app is currently only available for iPhone, so it we be good in future pitches if they could clarify how friends on other platforms can participate in the fun (e.g. mobile web site) or if they are excluded.
I liked this one. Tracking app for the food you eat. Turns the confusing concept of calories into "bits" which is their virtual measurement. Some nice gamification to encourage repeat use by unlocking badges and challenges. The UI looked intuitive and engaging, and localisation of the food database was a nice touch. Some pretty stiff competition is out there so it will be interesting to see if they can carve a niche for Foodszy.
A personal shopping app, the pitch was saving you the time and hassle of comparative shopping on the web and asking friends for their opinion via social media. Via the app you have access to "experts" who can make you personalised recommendations. The part that left the panel unconvinced was these experts are supplied by retailers. This immediately brought into question the impartiality of these "experts". They did say there was a rating and recommendation system build in to govern the experts, but I think future pitches need to focus on reassuring that recommendations are really legit independent.
An App generator focused on the publishing industry, allowing a publisher to deliver HTML that is then turned into beautiful and functional tablet based apps using a hybrid mix of native and web capabilities. Think The Times iPad edition without all the production hassle. It looked great and the demo I saw in the networking was impressive. Because it wasn't a consumer facing app it was a little specialised to stand out to the panel, and a 3 minute pitch wasn't really enough time to do something a little different to the average app justice. If it is as powerful as claimed, I'm sure they will tie up some interesting deals.
A home brew Interactive ebook aimed at young children, focusing on learning through touch, sight, sound. You have options to let the child explore the story themselves or let the app read the story to them.
A story telling app with photos, kind of like a photo blog. Allows you to add text to photos to tell your story. They had a concept of matching brands with users as a business plan, but I think the panel needed more detail on how this could work, and how they would cope with competition from all the existing photo services out there today.
Congratulations to all, it was a fun and positive evening with a high standard for the apps on show.
And Apple announce… a major anti climax... #apple #iphone #yam
So the whole worlds tech press (and a lot of its consumer press as well to be fair) were gazing towards Cupertino for the latest Apple product announcement. No one does geek showbiz like Apple. Facebook's recent #F8 was testament to that.
The blogosphere has been alight with rumours of iPhone 5, but ultimately the fanboi's were left disappointed.
Instead the company announced it was giving away the iPhone 3GS on two year carrier contracts. Only Apple can make "news" from discounting obsolete product. Kudos!
The already announced iOS5 including iCloud will be available for download from October 12th.
From the hardware perspective, iPhone 4S was announced. Highlights vs. iPhone 4 include:
- Apple A5 chip
- 1 GB of RAM.
- First iPhone with a dual-core processor and dual-core graphics.
- It is “up to seven times faster” than the previous iPhone
- New antenna system that allows it to switch between two antennas for better sound quality and download speeds.
- New 8-megapixel camera that can take 3264×2448 images, an increase of 60% from the iPhone 4. It is capable of taking in 73% more light than the iPhone 4 and is 33% faster.
- 8 hours of 3G talk time, 10 hours of video
A selection of coverage from the event can be found here:
Mobile Entertainment Twitter Feed
Other notable news...
500,000 apps on the App Store, with 140,000 are iPad specific. 18 billion apps downloaded total so far, at a rate of 1 billion per month. Apple paid more than $3 billion to developers so far.
iOS app called Cards. You can make your own cards right on your phone, and Apple will print it out and send to you. If you mail it in the U.S. you’ll get a push notification to your phone when it arrives at the destination. $2.99 to mail in the U.S., and $4.99 internationally. After hearing Touchnote declare it was hard making money this morning in London, tonight they must be shitting themselves.
A side show from the announcement was the fact the Apple.com has seemingly been hacked. I grabbed this screen shot.
Sneak peak of Windows 8 App Store
From Silicon Alley Insider, shots of the upcoming Windows 8 app store. From the design it looks like it will work across desktop and mobile. Its an edgy design, could be a risk it dates quickly, although the individual app catalogue page entries are a little more vanilla.
Part 2 of my Unsocial piece is live on @ITProPortal #developer #apps #yam #mobile
Part 2 of my piece on Unsocial is now live on ITProPortal, featuring an interview with Kiran Modak, EVP of Product. Go here to read it.
