Category: design-and-ideas

So I've been checking out the project Verse for a while now but kept it kind of quiet for the longest time. Today I broke my silence and gave a presentation at Social Media Cafe Manchester (#smc_mcr) along side other open source software. The problem with verse is its so big (jokes about the universe stand). There's a lot going on in the uni-verse, but lets get back to basics. So what is it?

Our goal is to create an open source Internet platform for multi-user, interactive, distributed, high-quality 3D graphics and audio for home, public and personal use. The platform will support high-quality 3D-graphics as well as high-quality 3D-audio and acoustic simulation.

The foundation of the platform is “Verse”, a lightweight, low latency, general-purpose network protocol for 3D data, which lets multiple applications act together as one large system by sharing data over the network.

Someone called it Google wave for 3D objects and scenes at SMC_MCR and in actually fact their not far wrong. Its not like Second Life because its very open and the client/server setup is trivial. Ok so there's no Federation but I can't even really imagine how that would work if there was. Anyway diving straight in, we have many components to verse. You have the actual protocol which makes everything work then you. One of the founers Eskil Steenberg has created many things on top of that protocol.

Love – Love is alpha game where up to 200 players cooperatively attack a connected city. The game is freely downloadable and only cost 5-10 euros a year to cover the cost of the server load. It recently was on Coop show and theres screenshots on the pages. Another reason why its worth starting with Love, is that Love is the first full implementation of the Verse for public use. Its a stunning game going by the alpha and its videos. Instead of going for super sharp edges Eskil has gone for super soft shading using some custom filters which portray a foggy landscape and steaming summers. I think the game will do well in some circles but don't get me wrong its super impressive what one guy has some up with but what excites me about Verse isn't Love but instead all the other tools Eskil built to support building Love

Quelsolaar – Eskil, cleverly built this render to make Love, Quel Solaar which is a

real time 3D engine designed to take advantage of the Verse networking protocol. It is fully dynamic and requires no pre-processing of data. It has been designed to be used for any application demanding high quality real time visuals, such as games, simulation, visualization, education and social activities. The main difference from other engines is that Quel Solaar is designed to be fully networked. This means that all data visualized in the engine comes from a Verse server and that any part of the scene can be changed at any time. This makes it ideal for collaboration and an array of new applications. For instance, in a game designed with the Verse architecture the game designers can alter the world appearance in any way while players are in the game. You can also allow the players themselves to have the ability to change the game environment.

Loq Ariou is next up which is a 3D modeler that works like a sketch pad if you have a 3 button mouse. I've actually found it almost impossible to use till recently playing with it and following the Manual and videos which explain it better. The interface is puzzling but once you get it strangely natural to use.

The last one is Co On a schematic verse scene viewer and editor.

In Co On you can inspect your data and edit it. Co On includes a curve editor and a material editor with raytraced rendering previews. Co On is the perfect tool for creating and destroying layers, methods, tags and nodes. It lets you edit and keep track over how the data is represented in the verse server format. I've not personally played too much with this yet but its pretty powerful an I love the way everything is hooked together like a semantic diagram. Funny enough, once you get over the control system, the rest seems to get a lot clearer.

Another aspect of verse outside Eskil's influence theres a number of attempts to add verse support to well known and used applications like Blender 3D, 3D Studio Max, Gimp, and many others. One of the most interesting places Verse is showing up in python.

Software well ahead of its curve I think you have to agree? I'm sure there will be more blog posts about aspects of verse in the near future.

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Episode 3 of R&DTV has finally been released. Well the the short version of Episode 3 of R&DTV has been for now. The official R&DTV site has also been updated with the new version, but no long version yet.

The assets for the video are online too as full edited talks from the TEDxManchester event. See the list below…

• Matthew Postgate: What is Broadcasting?
• Phil Griffin: The Architecture of Manchester
• Sarah Hartley: Journalism going forward
• Dr Mariann Hardey: Etiquette & social media 2.0
• Marc Goodchild: Learned knowledge from working with Children
• Ben Light: How we perceive ourselves
• Hugh Garry: The mobile film and mystery box concept
• Paul Coulton: Mobile games as social information appliances or meme generators

You can also subscribe to the whole lot via RSS or Itunes if you would like to keep a copy of all the videos for yourself. Remember all these videos are under a creative commons licence (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0) , so your welcome to share them with the world and create your own remixes of the videos. The short version we edited together is under a slightly different licence which does not allow you to remix due to some musicial copyright from Chicane – Strong in Love isco Citizens Mix) and Kevin Shields – Ikebana.

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Its been a while in coming but finally TEDxManchester happened last Friday (2nd October) at my new current work place BBC Manchester. When I first planned the event it was going to a lot smaller but slowly it grew and got more complex. But the end result was certainly special and brought a nice end to the TEDxNorth collaboration. And I'd certainly like to give a tip to the hat to the other TEDx's including TEDxLiverpool and TEDxLeeds which I both attended.

On the run up to TEDxManchester we hit a few snags here and there but one of the most tricky things was getting the totally tapeless multiple camera setup going smoothly. Luckily the engineers from R&D's Ingex project came up with almost everything to get it all going. From my understanding we shot across 3 Sony EX3 cameras on to 2 separate PC machines running Ingex software in HDV 1080p at a bitrate of 100 megabits per second. There was a 4th camera shooting to SD cards too. So all this means we should have all the video of the presentations and more up within 2-3 weeks maximum. Nothing worst that having to digitise all those video off a multiple tapes.

The day started for me at 4am with me doing tweaks to the main presentation and changing a couple other things on our basecamp site. I didn't get much sleep but to be honest I've not had much sleep most of the week. By 7am me, andy and angas were moving stuff around making the space for everything to be setup. Before long it was 9am and most things were well on there way. The wireless was worrying me but after a quick switch around of routers it all came together. Everything else was moving along smoothly and before long cameras, lighting and AV was coming together. After tons of running around we started letting people in and I believe started about 5mins late.

Now its hard to go through all the talks because being backstage there's so much more going on. After Herb and Drew introduced the afternoon and Chris Anderson from TED said hi via video we were into the first video which we had choosen as the JJ Abrams magic box talk. There was a problem with the sound which almost deafen most people. Later Rowan and Tony found out the problem was the cable we were using was unbalanced and so any sound which wasn't centralsed would come out very loud. Due to this worry, the sound was kept slightly lower that it would normally. After the first three speakers it was solved.

So the first live talk was Matthew Postgate head of BBC R&D. After his talk, he left quite a nice lot of time for questions from the audience. And the questions came with a political streak. Matthew did a good job covering the questions which would have been very difficult to answer but some people did feel the answers were as expected quite stiff. The talk was on broadcasting and although good, talking to people afterwards they said he needed to just ground some of his thinking so people outside the BBC know where he's coming from.

Next speaker was Phil Griffin who gave a great talk about architecture in and around Manchester and Salford. For a lot of people they don't realise how influential Manchester has been in the field of architecture so Phil really went to town with many shots of the city and a off the cuff talk about them. It really went down well, I'm so glad Phil was able to give the talk.

Sarah Hartly talked about journalism and the need for more participation within the field. I think she was going for something post-citizen-journalist.

After a break and a change of audio cable, we kicked off again with a video from Alain de Boton on redefining success at TED Oxford. It actually got a clap at the end which is strange for watching a video. Following that difficult act was Dr Mariann Hardey a Social Scientist who talked about the behaviour of people using social networks and creating social media. Another good talk but not everyone was convinced. Reading Twitter, there was lots of comments sniffing at the notion of a social scientist which I thought was a real shame.

Marc Goodchild followed with lots of interesting facts and figures about children growing up in this economy and society of ours. Marc for ages had been asking me what he should talk about but I left him in the dark deliberately because I know he'd work it out and come up with something worth listening to. Thankfully I think it worked out right. A interesting talk full of perspective and knowledge.

Ben Light gave a very surprising talk about Niche Social networks and how they influence our perspective on ourselves. He was a little worried about the amount of younger people in the audience but dived in to his talk which centred around a popular gay site called Gaydar.com. I along with others found it very interesting. I had given a similar but no where near as deep talk about OkCupid.com (which is dating site for all) at a BarCamp last year. Someone tweeted that its good thing Marc and Ben didn't get there talks mixed up. Can't wait to see the video of this one.

After the final break which we reduced to catch up some time, we changed up the last video for something shorter and sweeter. So instead Herb talked about a video they had shown at TEDxNewcastle only 2 days earlier. So with some persuasion I decided to use that over the Susan Blackmore video. I love Susan Blackmore but I did agree that her 20min video might be a slow burn at this point in the afternoon plus we were already falling behind on time.

Rosie Allimonos was due to talk but called in ill a few days earlier so the magical Hugh Garry stepped in and gave I think one of the most popular talks of the day. A real power to the people talk about what happened when he gave mobile phones with good cameras to different people then asked for them back and eddied the into one. The results were highly watchable and engaging on a level which makes me smile. Well done Hugh, another video I'm hoping to watch soon.

The last speaker was Paul Coulton from Lancaster University. I had first met Paul at Over the Air last year. Paul's talk started around games and the mobile and ended somewhere over solving some of the worlds biggest problems. Impressive talk and it seems another audience favourite.

After the event, everyone headed to the Hotel Bar in the Palace for a free drink and lots of networking.

So what do others think of the event? Well I'll save that for a follow on post.

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Tim Brown says the design profession is preoccupied with creating nifty, fashionable objects — even as pressing questions like clean water access show it has a bigger role to play. He calls for a shift to local, collaborative, participatory “design thinking.”

Also worth mentioning Clive Grinyer on the Democratisation Of Design which was recorded at TEDxLeeds but the videos are not available yet.

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I know what Umair Haque is getting at in his Awesomeness Manifesto. Innovation is over used and most of the time treasured over all else but I'm concerned about some of Umair's examples to tell the truth.

Innovation often isn't. Innovation means, naively, what is commercially novel. Yet, as the financial crisis proves, what is “innovative” is often value destructive and socially harmful. Financial “innovation” turned out to be unnovative: it has destroyed trillions in value – here are some staggering estimates from the IMF.

It's time to ask: have the costs of innovation exceeded the benefits?

A better concept, one built for a radically interdependent 21st century, is awesomeness. Here are the four pillars of awesomeness:

Ethical production. Innovation turns a blind eye to ethics — or, worse, actively denies ethics. That's a natural result of putting entrepreneurship above all. Buy low, sell high, create value. That's so 20th century. Awesome stuff is produced ethically — in fact, without an ethical component, awesomeness isn't possible. Starbucks is shifting to Fair Trade coffee beans, for example. Why? Starbucks isn't just trying to innovate yet another flavour of sugar-water: it's trying to gain awesomeness.

Insanely great stuff. What is innovative often fails to delight, inspire, and enlighten — because, as we've discussed, innovation is less concerned with raw creativity. Awesomeness puts creativity front and center. Awesome stuff evokes an emotive reaction because it's fundamentally new, unexpected, and 1000x better. Just ask Steve Jobs. The iPhone and iPod were pooh-poohed by analysts, who questioned how innovative they really were — but the Steve has turned multiple industries upside down through the power of awesomeness.

Love. You know what's funny about walking into an Apple Store? The people working there care. They don't just “work at the Apple store” — they love Apple. Contrast that with the alienating, soul-crushing experience of trying to buy something at Best Buy — where salespeople attack you out of greed. (Or, as editor extraordinaire Sarah Green put it, “where you wander around for a full half-hour unable to find anyone to help you before you finally get the attention of some blue-shirted 12-year old who turns out to know nothing about the products she sells and ultimately end up committing hara-kiri with a Wii controller”). Their goal is to sell; the goal of Apple Store employees is simply to show off their awesomeness, and let you share it. Love for what we do is the basis of all real value creation.

Thick value. It's the most hackneyed phrase in the corporate lexicon: adding value. Let's face it: most value is an illusion. Nokia, Motorola, and Sony tried for a decade to “add value” to their phones — yet not a single feature did. Food producers and pharmaceutical companies claim they're “adding value,” but mostly they're just mega-marketing.

The vast majority of companies — in my research, greater than 95% — can only create what I have termed thin value. Thick value is real, meaningful, and sustainable. It happens by making people authentically better off — not merely by adding more bells and whistles that your boss might like, but that cause customers to roll their eyes.

I personally think the Apple store example is a mistake, they are there to sell and you'd be a fool to think otherwise. Yes its very different from the experience of going into Best buy but is it any different from going into Nike Town, Lush or most places? Awesomeness its not, actually I'd put Ikea in the position of Awesomeness. They lay the stuff out and you go around pick what you want, no pressure, no sale assistance just a warehouse of stuff with some gentle hints here and there. Now thats a awesome retail experience when it was unleashed on the public over 10 years ago.

Let's summarize. What is awesomeness? Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That's a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics.

I've talked to many boardrooms about awesomeness. Beancounters feel challenged and threatened by it, because it feels fuzzy and imprecise. Yet, it's anything but. Gen M knows “awesomeness” when we see it — that's why its part of our vernacular. It's a precise concept, with meaning, depth, and resonance.

What makes some stuff awesome and other stuff merely (yawn) innovative? I've outlined my answers, but they're far from the best, or even the only ones — so add your own thoughts in the comments.

You might be innovative — but are you awesome? For most, the answer is: no. Game over: in the 21st century, if you're merely innovative, prepare to be disrupted by awesomeness.

So awesomeness sounds a lot like wuffie or social capital. All of them make beancounters feel challenged and threatened natrually because of the lack of solid metric? I wonder if in the same way you can claim to be doing awesomeness. Instead other people tell you your doing awesome work? Oh by the way Awesome photo by the way Kulafire.

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TEDxLeeds happened this week at the Rosebowl in Leeds city centre. Like TEDxLiverpool, the whole event was on a day with plenty of sunshine, Imran Ali had planned a event starting from 5pm – 9pm, as maybe not to interfer with those leaving work or wanting to enjoy the last throws of summer. Anyway, about 120-150 people turned up to enjoy the evening. And enjoy the evening we did.

After the begals and coffee, we entered the lecture theatre with short legroom and the event was under way. A slightly nervous and softly spoken Imran Ali kicked off the event with the talk from Chris Anderson welcoming everyone to TEDx. I wasn't sure if he was actually nervous or conserving his energy for later. The now famous Herb Kim joined the introduction and before you knew it we were into the excellent TEDtalk from Kevin Kelly on next 5000 days of the web.. Although a long talk, it was funny and entertaining enough to keep everyone on track.

The first live talk was the fantastic Dr Norman Lewis, who made the point that all research and development labs are deeply lacking in ambition and innovation. Very hard and cutting stuff but actually he was right. We went to moon 40 years ago but where have we been since? Where's our ambition to truly solve the worlds problems?

After break and a short emoticon TEDtalk video, Charles Cecil talked about rebuilding the relationship with the games buying market. The take away was that a lot of the lessons we'd learned in the web world can and should be applied the world of games and play. After another break and a another good TEDtalk video choice about how design can up the circulation of newspapers.

On came Clive Grinyer on the Democratisation Of Design. A very thought provoking talk and to be honest did get me going at points. There was a section about superstar designers which had me almost spitting blood. Can't stand the idea of superstar designers. This is why I found objectified so ummmm frustrating in parts. But then he talked about design as function and process, and showed a example of a redesigned prison to encourage people not to reoffend. In the end, the point of Clive's talk was all about design being too important for it to be left with designers. Or as he puts it nothing is too small to be designed.

After the event we all headed over to Ha Ha bar for social drinks (thanks Herb and Marrisa). TEDxLeeds had some great speakers and it all went pretty smoothly, good work imran, ntileeds and codeworks. I'm going to miss out on the next two TEDxNorth's (sheffield and Newcastle) due to work on TEDxManchester which is looking to be a big event to end the TEDxNorth 2009 season.

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I love these internet manifesto meme's specially when they come from collaborations with people you know/met. This one is from a bunch of German bloggers commenting on how journalism has changed, a couple of the bloggers I've met at Next09, Web2.0 and BarCampBerlin's. Its been translated from German by Jenna and of course there's lot more reason on the main site.

1. The Internet is different.
2. The Internet is a pocket-sized media empire.
3. The Internet is our society is the Internet.
4. The freedom of the Internet is inviolable.
5. The Internet is the victory of information.
6. The Internet changes improves journalism.
7. The net requires networking.
8. Links reward, citations adorn.
9. The Internet is the new venue for political discourse.
10. Today’s freedom of the press means freedom of opinion.
11. More is more – there is no such thing as too much information.
12. Tradition is not a business model.
13. Copyright becomes a civic duty on the Internet.
14. The Internet has many currencies.
15. What’s on the net stays on the net.
16. Quality remains the most important quality.
17. All for all.

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Everything I'd experienced and guessed about motivating people around out of the box problems is sumed up perfectly in this delightful talk by Dan Pink at TED Global. Its stunning to hear how much of no brainer this all is, but how the disconnect still challenges most companies.

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.

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I didn't blog Twitter's Ten Rules for Radical Innovators (found via @adew), because I think it was about the time of my blog being down. Umair Haque describes across 10 points why Twitter is changing the way we not only communicate but also innovate. Following the last blog post its good to point out that this is another reason why its critical that one company isn't going to rule this field no matter what their indentations may be at the time.

Interestingly the rules are actually good enough almost by themselves to create all types of dialogue around. We actually have a copy printed out on our wall in work. The Video above is Jeff Jarvis and Umair Haque at the Next09 conference, where they talk about the money side of all this.

1. Ideals beat strategies
2. Open beats closed
3. Connection beats transaction
4. Simplicity beats complexity
5. Neighborhoods beat networks
6. Circuits beat channels
7. Laziness beats business
8. Public beats private
9. Messy beats clean
10. Good beats evil

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TEDx Liverpool happened yesterday (Aug 7th) at Liverpool's ICDC. Being the first one of five is no mean feat but the TEDx Liverpool team pulled it off nicely. The line up included Steve Clayton from Microsoft, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino from Tinker.it and Alison Gow from Liverpool's Daily Post. The concept of TEDx is that there are live speakers crossed with pre-recorded talks from the real TED events. The choice of videos was good and mixed well with the live speakers, I did wonder if it would work as smoothly but it did. I would say there was about 100+ people at the event, but a lot of people did drop out for one reason or another. So anyway the friendly challenge of one upping each other is off to a great start. I took some nice pictures of the event.

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Everyone is loving Prezi, people are totally raving about it. But I have serious problems with the technology behind Prezi.

As far as I can tell Prezi generates a huge flash file which is bad enough but on top of that is it seems to suck everything into it and nothing much seems to come out. So for example it can injest pdf file, images, text, movies, etc. But can you export to a presentation file which people can take away? Can you export to a printable for format? Can you export to a movie? It doesn't seem very clear from any of the information I have seen. In actual fact you can only export to a format which requires another Prezi player, to play it back! The business model is also worth mentioning, 119 dollars a month for version which includes offline editing but not much else. All the payment grades are tied to there online storage too, which is very expensive for what you get. For example how would you pay for 2gig of storage? Certainly no where up from 30 dollars, which still assumes the offline editor is worth 90 dollars. From a Data Portability angle this is like the spawn of satan surely? And I'm sure from a open source and free software angle, this has got to have Tim Oreilly and Richard Stallman in chills at night? Lastly, what on earth are TED thinking sponsoring this stuff?

I have been thinking maybe some enterprising group of people could take the SVG specification and build a tool which generates these exact same presentations. So first up you can use scripts on every element including the viewpoint attribute. There seems to be a load of things you can do with the Canvas coordinate system. SVG 1.1 has the ability to embed certain multimedia but SVG Foreign Object could be used to place a browser or a complete video within a SVG.

You could imagine a specially made tool which worked like Prezi but wouldn't need to be propitery and locked in. They could even create and sell a player and editor backed with its online space, so the business model isn't totally shattered. Even if a rival tried to create the same, OpenPrezi as I'm coining it would be first to the market and have a wealth of knowledge of what works and what doesn't. Even a track record might go down well. So in my mind, there's no way I will be using Prezi till its a lot more open. I'm sure even I could with a bit of time construct something using the SVG methods I mentioned. I'm not questioning the method or even the concept, it actually reminds me of mood boards. Its the implementation which winds me up.

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TEDx North has gone live, and if your playing catch up its a combination of 5 different TEDx (x being independently run) events.

• TEDxLiverpool – 7th August 2009
• TEDxLeeds – 10th September 2009
• TEDxSheffield – 16th September 2009
• TEDxNewcastle – 30th September 2009
• TEDxManchester – 2nd October 2009

Each event will have excellent live speakers and previous TEDtalks. They promise to bring you a taste of TED without the huge cost and long waiting list.

I’m happy to say the BBC’s famous Studio 7 will also host TEDxManchester on the 2nd October. We have room for 100’s of people, so it should be one of the biggest events and a great end to the series of collaborative events. We've teamed up with FutureEverything and

There are upcoming TEDx's in the south, midlands, scotland and of course the rest of the world too.

Unlike others I don't have a real relationship with TED, I actually experienced Pop!Tech before TED because they would put there shows on IT Conversations.com for anyone to download and listen to. Then Pop!Tech started streaming there conference to the world. I remember getting it working on my XBMC xbox at one point. Pop!tech never felt as elitist as TED and Thinking Digital was doing great things for the UK but none of them were of them quite moved into the exciting decentralised mode of barcamp. I had noticed a small break away conference called BIL which I had considered putting on in the UK, because it was more fitting with the barcamp philosophy. But Herb Kim asked me if I'd like to run TEDxManchester pretty soon after the recent Thinking Digital. So after a look into TEDx, I agreed and the rest is history as they say.

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I have already given the Windows Mobile App Store the thumbs down and put the boot into the Apple App store. So its clear I believe there a fad and other factors will take over very soon.

What's reassuring is that Google also see the problems with App stores and in this interview with FT.com found via Jyri, they describe the problem. Boiled down to a sentence, the web is the platform.

Apple customers may have downloaded 1.5bn applications from its AppStore in the past year for their iPhones and iPod touches, but the service does not represent the future for the mobile industry, according to Google.

Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering vice president and developer evangelist, (pictured centre) told the Mobilebeat conference in San Francisco on Thursday that the web had won and users of mobile phones would get their information and entertainment from browsers in future.

“We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”

Mr Gundotra won some support from the rest of the panel. Michael Abbott, head of application software for Palm, said advances in the browser being introduced through HTML5 standards meant that web applications could tap features of particular phones such as their accelerometers.

Once again I need to give some credit to Chris Messina for waking me up to the fact that the web has won. Google and Palm have also put out products and services which operate on this fact. And today at a presentation from Aza Ruskin, I quized him about Ubiquity and the notion of browser vs the OS. I didn't push hard or even mention Google Chrome OS but he came back to me with a lot of interesting thoughts about barriers around personal content rather that a barrier between online and offline content. Would have liked to have explored but it was clear that Aza Ruskin was also talking like the web had won.

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Matt Mason gave pretty much the same talk at Thinking Digital and I've been wanting to link or post the video ever since. I love that classic quote, Pirates are the most innovate people.

Here's the main takeaway headlines from Matt's talk,

1. If you want to beat pirates, copy them.
2. Good business is the best art.
3. Don't let legal ruin a good remix without talking to marketing first.
4. Abudance is better that advertising
5. Some good experiences will always be scarce.
6. In an economy based on abundance, your business model needs to be a virtuous circle.

And I'd like to add I just paid for a digital download of Matt's book The Pirates Dilemma. I bought it for about 3 pounds which seems fair to me. About the same price as a expensive coffee or decent sandwich at lunch time. As Matt, Cory and Tim Oreilly has put it before, The problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. Well hopefully the video and this blog post might have helped Matt become less obscure.

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