Rock and a hard place
You’ve got to feel sorry for Peter Horrocks, Head of BBC newsroom, having to apologise for a citizen journalism gaff:
Last night the BBC broadcast a still which we said showed dozens of bodies lying in the waterfront of the Irrawaddy delta. We have since discovered that the picture was actually taken in Aceh, Sumatra following the tsunami of 2004.
Ouch. Naturally, the BBC has pulled the pic and fessing up like this is creditable.
Unlike CNN’s iReport and similar ‘unedited’ CJ projects, where hoaxes are part of the deal, I understand that the Beeb takes great care to vet all user-generated content that it uses. And rightly so. In this case, Horrocks explains that “there were many bodies in the water a week after the cyclone”. In other words, the picture looked genuine and passed the basic hurdle of a journalistic sanity check. But that’s not enough.
It was a problem that haunted me in the early days of Scoopt. I was convinced that we’d be bombarded with fake pictures and hoax stories, and I was accutely aware that we’d be putting the reputation of the agency behind every picture that we punted on the open market. So we erred on the side of caution, always.
But in fact, the feared flood never materialised - largely, I suspect, because there was little real point in sending Scoopt a fake. If we sold it, we’d need your details to pay you, which meant that we could and would come after you if an image turned out to be dodgy. Plus we published very little on Scoopt itself, which means there was little incentive to try to hoodwink us.
With the BBC and other mainstream outlets, it’s a very different story.
- Membership/ID is generally not required, so there’s no barrier there
- Payment is generally not made, so there’s no need to provide true contact details
- Your pic, if it passes editorial control, will potentially reach an audience of millions - and that’s a pretty fine incentive for any halfwit with a view to a hoax
The BBC is well aware of this - and still it got stuffed. So what do you do to verify UGC? More journalistic rigour, for sure, but technology has to play a part here too. For instance, at Scoopt we always checked the EXIF metadata on images. This is information written into the image file by the camera. It typically tells you the make and model of the camera and, crucially, the date on which the image was shot. Now, you can fake this if you know how, and many cameras are set up with the incorrect date, and EXIF metadata can be stripped out of images if the file format is changed, and some cameraphone don’t write EXIF at all… and so on. But it’s still a safety check, and a useful one. If an image came to Scoopt either without EXIF or with EXIF that didn’t match the alleged story, we were suspicious.
I wonder if the BBC’s UGC hub checks EXIF routinely?
@demotix
Good spot from Noodlepie - it looks like we’ll soon be seeing the launch of Demotix, a company name I guarantee you’ll forget as soon as click away from here (go on, try it):
Remember those pictures of Burma, the Tsunami, the London bombings? They were all take by people like you. You are the future of news, and DEMOTIX is where that future is happening.
Hang on, didn’t I say that in 2005?
Whatever. As a mate wittily quipped, one of the team is ex-lastminute.com so they’ll doubtless be looking for a trade sale (and the founder is apparently in stealth mode).
Meanwhile, I’ve helpfully registered @demotix for them on Twitter - a pretty obvious pre-requisite these days, wouldn’t you think? So… maybe a £50,000 for a transfer? After all, musn’t be greedy.
Does it addiply up?
You’ve gotta hand it to Rick Waghorn - taking on Google AdSense isn’t necessarily the sanest smartest easiest way to spend a summer but that’s just what Rick seems intent on doing with Addiply, his new web advertising network. Here’s how it works (do correct me if I’m wrong, Rick):
- Let’s say you run a local business in Hometown.
- To attract fresh trade, you have an advertising budget of £xx.
- One obvious place to spend £xx is in the Hometown Gazette.
- But the Hometown Gazette, like most local newspapers, is
fuckedstruggling with circulation. It’s also relatively expensive for advertisers (it has to be expensive in order to survive). But it reaches local eyeballs, and that’s cool. - However, you have a business website so why not (also) advertise on the web?
- Trouble is, if you send your money to Google, your little ad disappears into the amorphous soup of the Google AdSense network. Sure, your ad will appear… somewhere - but you can’t control this. And for a local Hometown business selling, say, a shirt ironing service, there’s precious little point in having your ad appear on a website selling shirts, despite the obvious contextual link. You want your ad to be eyeballed by the shirt-wearing punters of Hometown. Nobody else.
- Google can’t help you.
- Addiply can. How? Because you choose which sites your ad appears on. So if there’s a local website that caters for office workers, or busy people, of affluent people, or men… well, that’s where you want to advertise. You want to advertise to people who might use your service, and now you can.
- Equally, if you run a site with a clearly defined target audience, you have a vested interest in carrying ads that have real relevance to that audience. Why? Because a) ads can, when useful, enhance the user experience; and b) you’ll make more money because the advertiser will see a healthy return on investment and come back for more business.
Simple as that?
The challenge here, I think, will be connecting the dots - plugging the right advertisers into the right websites. Google doesn’t have to worry about that because you pays your money and takes your chances. Your ad will appear in roughly the right context. You have no control over this but it doesn’t (seem to) matter because you only pay when somebody clicks on your ad. So Google can plaster it all over its massive network and eventually get the hits it needs to bill you. You might feel this is a good deal.
On the other hand, if there’s a local website with a niche audience that’s just perfect for your ad, you probably can’t advertise on there. That’s deeply frustrating, and ultimately just daft. It’s too hard for the site owner to accomodate your ad on an ad hoc basis without having a payment and tracking platform to manage it, and neither you nor the site owner can tell Google AdSense where to place your ad. So the opportunity goes a-begging.
- Aside 1: right now, my lame dog blog, an attention-deficit billboard, is carrying two Google ads: one for a poop scoop (a hit that anybody reading a dog blog might be interested in exploring) and one for cheap Weimaraner puppies on eBay (a definite miss that I’d rather wasn’t on the blog at all). Neither I nor that advertisers have any meaningful say over these placements.
- Aside 2: I once experiementd with a blog for a month called Carbon Sheep which took the piss out of cynical activities designed to fleece folk feeling guilty about carbon offsetting: “Tracking the carbon footprint of scaremongering marketing. Or how to make a million from global warming.” Inevitably, and gratifyingly, my AdSense spots carried ads for the very products and schemes I was satirising .
Now, Addiply does have to worry about connecting the dots. An Addiply ad should only be published on a site where it’s likely to reach a receptive audience; and site owners should only carry ads likely to appeal to its readers. There are no Google contextual analysis algorithms at work here, plonking ads in roughly the right place and playing a mass numbers game. Rather, Rick is relying upon advertisers and content producers giving it some thought (remember thinking?) and figuring out how to play together to mutual advantage.
Will it work? Well, it will likely require a great deal of legwork at the local level to connect the dots and ’sell’ the benefits of advertising to local businesses that have never looked beyond the Hometown Gazette. That’s definitely doable in principle, but whether revenues and subsequent commissions will make it attractive for door-knockers to actually get out there and do it is an open question.
But as Rick points out, the Addiply platform can extend beyond hyper-local laundry services:
[it] ought to be equally applicable to any other passionate, niche market…
And that’s the key. Prove the concept at the local level by bringing fresh advertising cash to relevant websites, with both parties having control and a shared interest in success, then roll out the model across niche markets everywhere.
The obvious riposte is that Google (or Yahoo) can do the same, if it wants to. All it has to do is throw choice and control into its network. It might not go knocking real, physical doors at the local level but it could make more meaningful connections between niche content producers and advertisers. Figuring out how to compete in that market is a tough one.
San Francisco dreaming…
Sitting here in Glasgow wishing I was in San Francisco. Why? Because that’s where WebMission 2008 is currently taking place:
Web Mission 2008 will see 20 UK Web 2.0 companies travel to San Francisco to explore new opportunities for growth with key people in Silicon Valley. This event will showcase innovative UK web talent, seek meaningful assistance for companies ready for expansion, and provide a platform for those involved to gain valuable media and business exposure.
Great opp. Mind, there’s bee a bit of a fuss over the value of the trip, sparked by Ryan Carson here
If we’re ever going to create a healthy start-up culture in Europe, we need to stop running cap-in-hand to American entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Why couldn’t we have spent the thousands of Pounds that it’ll take to run Web Mission and do something exciting in London?
…and answered by TechCruch UK’s Mike Butcher, who is at the centre of the trip, here:
The vast majority [of WebMission companies] are simply here to research the market, take meetings with potential partners or investors or perhaps look at establishing a small office here. They are also here to LEARN, and take back anything useful to the UK, to make the startup scene and their own businesses more vibrant - something Ryan wants to I believe. I question his view that there is NOTHING to be learned from this exercise and everything we need is need the UK. That seems nonsensical.
Too right. When you’re in startup mode, you have to surround yourself with people who have been through the grinder, particularly if they’re prepared to help you - as so many are. Not all of these people are in California but a hell of a lot of them are.
Closer to home, the Edinburgh-Stanford Link brings Silicon Vallley entreneurs and investors to Scotland for the benefit of small businesses. I went to as many of these events as possible - still do - and benefitted enormously from talks by the likes of Kevin Hartz (Eventbrite), Sean Foote (Labrador Ventures) and Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist). Nothing like an hour or two with Jim to make you rethink… well, everything.
So good luck to the 20 companies over in SF. Mike Butcher’s a top guy to have on-side, despite his dodgy obsession with celebrities. If I was a betting man, I’d wager that every one of these companies comes back smarter, better connected and more likely to succeed. Hopefully they’ll all be able to do it here.
Big buys little, forgets why…
There’s a cracking feature in last Saturday’s Times newspaper about David and Claire Hieatt, founders of an eco-conscious clothing company called Howies. They launched it seven years ago and sold it to US giant retailer Timberland.
You could call it “Pret A Manger syndrome” - idealistic entrepreneurs set up an ethical company, pour in all their time, cash and energy, but ultimately need the funds and backing of big business. Can they sustain the ethical dream or does it turn into a nightmare? Is it selling out or selling in?
It turns out that David and Claire are refreshingly honest bout their current position - indeed, surprisingly honest given that they’re still working with or for Timberland:
But today the Hieatts seem conflicted about their decision and frustrated that Timberland isn’t investing as much money in the business as they would like. The truth is, David says, nobody loves Howies like they do… the couple I meet look serious and slightly stressed… The only problem appears to be Timberland’s financial situation. Last year it bought a number of brands, including the American skate shoe company I-Path. The implication is that this has left the company overstretched. “Timberland is having a hard time right now,” says David. “My challenge to Timberland has been that if you have bought the car, you have to be prepared to put petrol in it.” It strikes me that they are both uneasy about selling out, although neither will admit it.
It’s such a familiar problem. As a successful entrepreneur phrased it to me recently, reflecting on personal experience:
Big company buys little company for a bunch of good reasons… then instantly forgets what they were.
Result = frustration, every time. And when the original founders are a) pissed off about the lack of reosurces and support coming their way, and b) still in a position of running the company under new ownership, that’s an unhappy marriage. Happens all the time.
So, why sell? Often, as in the David and Claire’s case, the small company has no real option other than to sell. At a certain point, you either scale or fail. Some businesses can do this with an injection of capital (usually at a horrible price) but others needs a major-league partner.
Once sold, the future seems simple. All big company has to do is pump in sufficient resources to allow little company to do all the stuff it always wanted to do - all the stuff that made it an attractive purchase in the first place. But then big company goes and spends a lot of money elsewhere, or is adversely affected by market conditions, or screws up its core business, or whatever. Pumping even limited resources into little company becomes a speculative risk, and this is no time for speculation. So little company gets forgotten about, and fails to realise its ambitions. But at least big company doesn’t have to worry about the competition any more…
Somebody somewhere wrote about the difference between being bought and being sold. Being sold is when the owner of the little company calls some of the shots and is able to negotiate as an equal partner, more or less, in the terms of acquisition. A sensible outcome here includes a binding commitment from the big company to a) resource the little company according to agreed parameters, and b) butt out.
Being bought, on the other hand, is a situation where the buyer rolls out the barrel and makes you bend over it with your trousers at your ankles. It calls all the shots because your options are frankly limited non-existent.
Of course, I’m making big assumptions about how Howies and its founders are really faring under Timberland, based on one article. Maybe it’s all roses. I hope so. But I do know how hard it is to continue to care about something you no longer own. Deciding not to care is not always an option, easier though that would be.
Loving it really
I was having a drink with a mate last night and he reminded me of a similar boozy session a couple of years ago. I was about to board sleeper train to London for a due diligence session with a c-list VC that I was sure wouldn’t see the deal through (they didn’t). I was bemoaning how ‘fundamentally shit’ my life was at that moment.
He told me to shut up.
You love it really. And when you come out of Scoopt, you’ll do it all again.
He was right but I was in no mood to agree. So I immediately scribbled, possibly in blood, a firm and binding contract on a scrap a paper. He has it to this day.
I hereby swear that if I make a million pounds from Scoopt I will never start another business. If I do, I’ll give you £10,000 cash
Impetuous, perhaps, but I know a safe bet when I see one.
More random magic moments
Media whore
January 2nd, 2007. It’s public holiday in Scotland and I’m tired with a cold and a hangover. I’m also nervous about the imminent due diligence process with Getty Images, which has just agreed to acquire the business. Last thing I need right now is a live spot on CNN telly. All I can do is drop the ball. But when the call came I didn’t hesitate. Such a tart.
First I had to upload a bunch of Scoopt pictures to CNN, and then dashed in a taxi with Jill to Scottish Television’s Glasgow studio. There we found one - one - hacked off producer clearly wishing he was somewhere else. As he sat me in front of a green screen and wired me for sound, I’m thinking Green Mile thoughts, wondering why I had volunteered for the electric chair.
I could see myself looking shit in three monitors but the producer informed me that there would be no video link to the CNN studio. All I’d have is my earpiece. Oops. Wished I could remember which photos I’d sent them.
Then on comes Jonathan Mann to quiz me about pictures I could neither see nor remember terribly well. Truly one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life. Here, judge for yourself - but do please remember that Mann had the benefit of a monitor. And make-up and lighting. And years of experience, professionalism… etc.
(sorry, having trouble embedding)
Finally!
By early September, we had 2,000 members in 60+ countries sending us interesting pictures. But we hadn’t made a single sale. So one hand I’m doing endless press and TV interviews, desperately talking up the potential; on the other, I’m genuinely concerned that Scoopt will prove to be vaporware.
Then Steve Bell, bless his heart, shot a picture that we could sell to a local newspaper. The Inquirer reported it thus:
Scoopt sells first major cameraphone shot
IMAGINE TURNING half the nation into snapperazzi. Well, that’s exactly what Scoopt aims to do. It’s a British photo agency acting as the intermediary between ordinary cameraphone users and the national media. According to a report in the Press Gazette, Scoopt has just managed to sell an amateur’s cameraphone snapshot to the Bristol Evening Post for what the agency described as a “two-figure sum”. Hopefully, both weren’t zeros. It’s the agency’s first major breakthrough in this sector. Anyway, the shot in question was from one Stephen Bell who captured the aftermath of a stolen car that had crashed following a police chase in the Bristol area. Scoopt has effectively obtained a fee - which it shares 50:50 with the photographer - for a shot which would otherwise have remained unused.
Ah, happy day. The real figure was £50, which sounds pathetic but is actually verging on the generous for a local paper. This gave us a press release and moved Scoopt from cool-idea-with-potential into serious proof-of-concept phase. Now all we had to do was sell more pictures. Lots of them.
It also turned Steve into something of an unsuspecting cause celebre for citizern journalism. Soon he was being interviewed by the UK press and filmed for Japanese television. As he wrote in October 2005:
Let me be honest - all this attention is great fun and yes, I’m doing my best to promote Scoopt - an organisation started by people I believe to be honest and ethical, and who have a genuinely sound idea. Frankly though, I can’t say I deserve it. When I snapped that picture and sent it to Scoopt it was with no idea it would turn out to be an historic event! All this is however highly enjoyable while it lasts and at least I can say I was in at the start of what could turn out to be a genuine revolution in the way we receive at least some of our news coverage.
I’ll forever be truly grateful to Steve for the way he agreed to be interviewed time and time again about Scoopt.
Dirty business
What do you do when a private Royal Family home video lands in your lap? Send it back or sell it to the highest bidder?
This was a tricky one. Ok, perhaps it shouldn’t be a tricky one, but remember that we were in the news and entertainment business. This ain’t the moral high ground, and a potential scoop like this is always going to demand attention.
Even now I’m going to be circumspect about the story but essentially a DVD of a young Royal’s life had been left in broadcast equipment rented to the family for a private event. From there via a rather circuitous route it ended up with Scoopt.
The first thing I did was speak to our lawyers. They said send it back, quick, so that was no help 
Then I spoke with one of our advisors, an ex-Fleet St photographer and editor who knows the picture desk business like nobody else. He suggested that if we were going to go for a sale, which was dangerous, we should be extremely cautious.
So I made a few nervy calls and let some tabloid people view a low-resolution version of the video. I spoke about the outcome here (and immediately wished I hadn’t):
Scoopt.com, a new agency which sells amateur-taken photographs to newspapers and magazines, decided that the invasion of privacy involved was too severe and the legal risks too great to justify using the video, which it returned to the person who offered it to the company.
“It involved the Royal Family, a video of the Royal Family. Essentially it was private pictures and videos of the Royal Family taken for a particular event that through some bizarre sequence of events ended up with somebody who sent it to us,” Kyle MacRae, the founder of Scoopt, told OUT-LAW Radio, the weekly technology law podcast.
“My initial instinct was that this is private. We then considered it commercially and thought actually this could be pretty valuable,” he said. “But you have got all sorts of issues involved. We don’t own the copyright nor do we have any legitimate licence to that copyright, nor does the Scoopt member who sent it to us. Do we have an over-riding public interest story? Is it worth it? Is this going to change the nature of the Monarchy in Britain?”
“If any of that is true then, yes, we put it out to market, if it shows some kind of blatant hypocrisy on the part of the Royal Family then great, we’ve got a news story. In this case it was just completely harmless, it was innocuous, it was nice,” said MacRae. “We weighed all that up and 24 hours later we just decided we weren’t going to handle this.”
So we returned the DVD to the sender and cautioned him appropriately. A couple of weeks later, he was completely shafted by a Sunday tabloid which promised him £5,000 but wrote him up as a sordid rat and returned the disc to the Royals. They came out of it shining; he was badly bruised.
Ah, journalism.
Pain killer
I was interviewed yesterday by Chris Vallance for his Pods and Blogs show on BBC Radio 5 Live, during which I was asked to reflect on the Scoopt story [UPDATE: podcast is here]. This got me thinking about conviction.There’s a lot you can fake in startup life - indeed, much that you have to! - but you have to be honest about why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Bill Joos uses a medical analogy in his pitching masterclass. Steroids used to get funded, he says, but no longer. Now only pain killers get funded. If your business is a genuine pain killer, it stands and deserves a good chance of success.
But a pain killer is only a response to a pain, usually a very specific pain that affects not everybody. Whose specific, defined pain will your business kill? For which problem do you have a solution?
We’re talking value proposition. Nothing else matters. A cool technology that lacks applications may be fine for a research grant but don’t sell your house to build a business around it.
It’s a truism to say that most business ideas are solutions looking for problems (or if it’s not, it should be). But stepping back or taking off for a helicopter view of your business is enormously rewarding. You should must be able to define the problem/pain and your solution/pain killer in a single sentence, phrased in just those terms.
So, for example:
Scoopt helps people who have newsworthy picture sell them to otherwise inaccessible media outlets.
The pain and solution are clear - it’s hard for punters to sell pics to the papers so Scoopt makes it easy. (Phrased like this, it’s also all too clear where the threat lies: when media becomes less inaccessible, Scoopt has a problem.)
Commonly, entrepreneurs will pitch a business as a bit of one thing and a bit of another, to which the natural conclusion is that it’s neither one thing nor the other. It’s symptomatic of the solution looking for a problem: oh, cool, we can do this - now what shall we do with it? It’s arse about face. Always focus on the pain.
Which brings us back to conviction. When you can state your value proposition in pain/killer terms, you’d better believe in it. I mean really believe in it. There’s zero point fooling yourself about a value proposition and precious little chance of fooling anybody else. Only then, when you believe you’ve found a solution to a pressing problem, need you bother with all the other business stuff… like how to develop the solution.. and how to attack the market… and if the solution is going to cost £1m to develop and, um, sell for 10p, whether it’s really smart to quit the day job.
The interview with Chris reminded me that I used to have this conviction. More importantly, it was a reminder that I need to have the same conviction in the next project.
This should be a spoof…
…but apparently it’s not.
Seminal moments
It’s been a funny old day. This morning, I was trying to get a business project off the ground from scratch. It started with an idea on Sunday and an urgent need to find a development partner to build it. Thanks for the connections, Mike, if you’re reading this. Will it come to anything? Honestly don’t know right now, but I’m hopeful.
So then I got thinking about some seminal moments during my startup life. Here are four, two uppers and two downers. More when I think of them.
“It’s Sony Ericsson on the phone!”
This must have been late July 2005, perhaps 3 weeks after Scoopt’s aborted launch. A visionary (no less!) by the name of Peter Wald had picked up what we were doing through, I imagine, some early blog buzz. Now here he was calling me in France – this was before we relocated home to Scotland – asking, in as many words, if we’d like Scoopt to be on the next generation of Sony Ericsson mobile phones. This was the CyberShot range that I’m proud to say did indeed launch with Scoopt onboard.
Well, yeah, ok, I thought.
No I didn’t. I thought: fuck me, there just might be something in this crazy business after all! It made selling our house to fund Scoopt (which we’d already done) somewhat more bearable.
Google broke my foot
Well, very nearly. I had a call set up with Erick from Google Mobile about indexing Scoopt content and doing some other funky stuff together. When he rang, I was upstairs at home and reception on the wireless handset was dreadful. So Erick said he’d call me straight back and I bolted down the stairs to get to the wired phone… but slipped on the second bottom step… twisted my ankle very badly indeed… and screamed like a deadpool shareholder.
Jill, my wife, came running, assuming I’d finally fallen on my sword as I so often threatened, but by this time I’d hopped to the phone, slumped on the couch and was panting my way through the call. Bless her, she understood from my frantic, silent mouthings that this was a Very Important Call that wouldn’t stand a raincheck, so she raised my leg onto a cushioned chair and gently packed my rapidly swelling ankle with packs of frozen peas and sweetcorn. I was in agony, sweating profusely, white from shock, and slipping close to unconsciousness (I’m not making this up).
But somehow I got through the call. Couldn’t walk properly for weeks. Couldn’t much remember what we’d talked about either.
“I swear I’ll swallow the SIM…!”
Oh, these were dark days, somewhere around late 2006. Jill and I had promised that we’d never let the business come between us or damage family life but we were waaaaay beyond this point by now. I appreciate that we’d only launched the business in mid-2005 but so much had happened so quickly, with every day an 18-hour maelstrom of manic activity, that a good deal of damage had already been done. You startup guys know what I mean.
So there we were one night in the Frontline Club in London, drinking heavily (well, I was anyway). At some ill-timed point, probably when Jill was telling me for the umpteenth time that a) the boys – aged 5 and 9 – kept talking about leaving home, and b) Scoopt was never going to get funded, I must have glanced at my BlackBerry. She’d about had it with my BB addiction by this point, and I’d about had it with her constant reminders of what this business was doing to our lives. Ugh, such a stressful time. But I swore then and there on the life of my next beer that I’d stick to our promise and close the business in the morning. It was over, I declared, and to prove the point I ripped the SIM from my BlackBerry and put it in my mouth.
But I didn’t swallow. Why, I know not. Possibly a moment of maturity overtook my petulance. Maybe I was just too excited by the prospect of the email I was expecting from Flickr announcing a deal (or any of 100 other calls/emails that might be coming tomorrow). Probably I just gagged.
In any case, we decided to tough it out a while longer. There were good reasons to carry on.
Stop. Just stop.
Driving home from the office on evening, I arrived the junction at the top of our road. Turn right and I’d be home. But I couldn’t. I froze at the wheel. Staring at the moon and the sky, I just froze. Every ounce of energy drained from me and, for once, the tension, too. I must have sat there for five minutes or more, staring, frozen. Stop, I said. Just stop. It’s the right thing to do.
The next morning I sent the email that led to the sale of the company.
