Innovation in Software

Back in February I had a little rant about business models in the news industry. A couple of things have prompted me to come back to this story. I want to be more positive and less ranty this time.

First, let’s get the something out of the way. Before this continues one more stupid, misguided step, I want to address the “linking is theft” attack being supported by some newspapers. Even my brother-in-law is starting to get worried about this, and he rarely shows an interest in the inner politics of online business.

Richard Posner has stipulated that linking to copyright content without compensating the publisher who paid for the content to be created, is the culprit of newspapers failing.

At first read, his argument seems almost sound. Almost.

It roughly breaks down like this:

1. Newspapers have fixed costs (staff salaries) that must be reduced if advertising revenues fall
2. Online news websites (as well as general economic conditions), are taking a slice of advertising revenues, thereby harming newspaper revenues
3. These new-comers are only able to operate because they piggy-back on the newspapers content
4. Ultimately this means newspapers go out of business, and the online operators will rake in the cash as consumers have no other source

The flaws are subtle and hard to spot unless you understand a couple of key points:

1. Online, linking is the only currency that counts
2. Linking is currency. It’s like cash. It’s why we trade it.
3. Linking to somebody is like paying for their advertising
4. Currency, online? It’s called linking

I had never heard of Richard Posner before he posted his article. Many of you won’t have, either. Yet there’s a link to his website up there. If you click on the link – the link I gave him in my blog article, without permission and without charging him a penny for advertising his content – I am sharing my readership (you, my valued friend!), with him. He gains. You may choose to subscribe to his blog. He may offer to sell you a t-shirt with a witty motto on it that you buy. I have given him the first thing you need to succeed in business online: audience.

He may choose to ignore that opportunity, but that’s his right.

Handily, as he has a trackback URL, some of his audience might discover me as well. See how this works for everybody? Incidentally if you’re reading this after clicking a link on Posner’s blog, would you like to buy a t-shirt? No? OK, back to business models of newspapers then…

It’s reckoned that Google through its search and news operations drives between 30%-50% of traffic to online newspapers. Imagine what would happen if it switched that traffic off tomorrow, unable to find a way to pay the fees newspapers demand of it. Imagine if the only way you could enter the news industry online was to pay for advertising. Imagine if not one piece of your archive would be available through traditional search. Imagine if in addition to your staff costs, you now had to pay out a couple of hundred thousand a month in advertising on Google, on billboards, on TV, or wherever you could. How does a sharp increase in costs help a business facing sharp decline in revenues survive?

Well, it doesn’t, does it? Quite.

What is worrying is that according to the Guardian he is well respected on the legal scene, and somebody, somewhere, might think this is a good idea. I have a horrid feeling newspaper owners are amongst the crowd cheering him on. I sincerely hope they fail – not only would it kill off online news, it would kill off news, period. I am constantly left astonished at how bad the thinking behind major institutions is. These guys help form societal opinion on major issues? Time to step aside…

Imagine my pleasure then, when another story came along that suggests, somebody, somewhere has got a clue.

Chris Anderson – editor of Wired magazine – was cited as stating:

With newspapers debating their future, the argument has been pitched as free versus paid-for models, but Anderson argued the real decision was free versus “freemium” – not about whether to charge, but choosing carefully which specialised content people will pay for.

[...]

Instead of working on growing the audience more, he believes publishers will need to grow their offerings. Right now, Wired provides three pricing tiers: free content on the web, about $5 for a magazine and 80 cents for subscribers. In the future, he believes Wired will have many tiers.

Even so though, the linking-is-evil campaign was stalking around at the back of the room:

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger asked about Google’s role in this freemium world; 40% of the traffic to its sites comes from Google.

Anderson said: “I consider that a gift, but papers consider it theft.” Newspapers could exclude Google from indexing their sites or could band together and charge Google to index their content. But it might be a self-defeating move.

“Newspapers need to be part of the conversation” on the net, he said. In the end, Anderson thinks that the democratising effect of the internet is a good thing, which will lead to a richer society, but, he added: “I don’t deny that it will get messy.”

Messy? Sounds good to me. Revolutions that have lasting impact normally involve guillotines and blood. Sorry newspapers, but your middle management strata are starting to look a little like the French royal court sometime around 1789, and we peasant revolutionaries are eyeing up your Bastille.

So, freemium, what does that look like?

Well, to be frank it’s going to be a bit strange for newspapers to get used to. Getting rid of most of their ad sales team is going to hurt, and to those working there I am sorry, but the bubble has burst and it’s time to move on. Advertising might bring in some revenue over time, but it’s likely to be more cost-effective to outsource that sales component to an external agency dedicated to online ad sales.

They then need to start thinking about what content they can get away with charging for. Strong candidates include going deep on content, say something like a standard news story of 400 words is available free, the longer 1,500 word version is available to paying subscribers or on a per-story charge basis. Content people are genuine fans of like crosswords could bring in revenues too.

However, there’s more than just content, there are service limitations to lift too.

For example online software applications normally give a free option away with limitations and then offer to remove those limitations in return for cash. It may be a project management tool where you can – for free – have one project and 2 users, but if you want to move all your projects and team onto it, you stump up the cash.

If the future of online news is to become more interactive and newspaper business models become more like those of applications, the limitations are available to exploit all over the place. For example, plenty of people would pay a small charge just to guarantee they’re getting the latest content: delay it for an hour to free users and see what happens.

Online applications have been playing this game for years. If you’re a newspaper exec, go and take a close look at the adult film industry online: they’ve perfected making money in a world of competitive free content. Follow their lead, and you have a proven model. Yes, it might seem distasteful, but that sector are masters of exploiting the audience into paying money without playing tricks on them or insisting nobody ever links to them.

I’m amazed it’s taken so long for an industry insider to spot it. I thought it was obvious, but didn’t mention it because I assumed everybody else had realised that this was the way to go. Boy, do I feel dumb right now.

Perhaps I’m wrong, I’m biased: it is this freemium model that is the basis of the Kagtum business model

We’ll aggregate, link and provide the ability for you to add/edit stories for free. But there will be areas you want to go into a little deeper or tools we can provide to make your life easier that will be available for a small fee. We think you’ll be compelled to want to hand over some cash for those tools and content because of their quality, and then we become your news source, not our advertisers.

“Ah”, you say, “but Kagtum isn’t live yet, is it? Come on, Paul, when is it launching?”. My lips are sealed. Sooner than you might think, but not as soon as I want. Watch this space.

Vagueware is a Rails shop. I have written less than 1000 lines of code in languages other than Ruby (assuming you don’t count SQL as a programming language) in the last 3 years. That’s going to change sooner than expected (hello C my old nemesis), but obviously I have an interest in Rails and Merb and want to see what is happening. Because of workload, I’ve not been able to keep up to date as much as I’d liked, which I’m now redress.

This evening on Twitter Will Jessop pointed me to the “What to Expect in Rails 3.0″ at O’Reilly:

It’s not for the newbie – you need some knowledge of the inner workings of Rails to be able to understand what some of Yehuda Katz is talking about here, but in short, simple terms:

• In case you didn’t know, Merb and Rails are merging with what seems to be a goal of “best of both Worlds”
• Agnosticism in relation to several components, so if you don’t like ActiveRecord and you love jQuery than that becomes simpler
• Rack is the future to give all sorts of goodness you can read about over at the official website or even better this introduction blog article
• Lots of refactoring and performance increases (I didn’t realise quite how big an effect callbacks had on performance)
• What seems to me to be a much cleaner way of handling JavaScript in various parts of your app
• Better Extension support through an API

All good stuff, and the launch later in the year should result in some really interesting changes to some applications being possible.

There’s a reason why less than 10% of readers of this blog use Internet Explorer: it is not innovative, flexible or stable enough for Alpha Geeks. And this blog, if it’s for anybody, is for those of us in society who are constantly looking around the corner snatching a view of the Next Big Thing in software.

The trend-setter in the browser industry over the last few years has been Firefox, with some notable thinking coming out of Safari and Opera. Firefox though is where the really clever stuff seems to happen first, and it’s gaining pace. Everybody is obviously raving about Firefox 3.5 that was released yesterday, but yesterday’s release is of no interest to us.

I was rather piqued instead by Firefox.next (aka “Namaroka” or possibly Firefox 3.6), that Mashable.com pointed out to me. From the wiki:

Namoroka will focus on the following areas:

Performance

Observable improvements in user-perceptible performance metrics such as startup, time to open a new tab, and responsiveness when interacting with the user interface. Common user tasks should feel faster and more responsive.

Personalization & Customization

Simplify the development, discovery, installation and management of browser customization and functional extension. Where possible, provide a custom fit user experience based on a user’s interaction history. Act in the user’s interests, leveraging existing knowledge about their identity and browsing habits.

Task Based Navigation

Allow users to organize their tabs, history, downloaded files, and other resources according to the task they were attempting to accomplish. Provide support for executing common web-based tasks, mash-up style, without having to visit a website.

Web Application Support

Blur the distinction between web and desktop applications, providing web developers with the tools required to create rich application experiences for a user who is connected or disconnected from the Internet. Act as the intermediary between web applications and the user’s OS desktop.

System Integration

Integrate with the look and feel of the host operating system, including data-level interactions with existing system services such as dictionaries.

That’s a pretty lofty set of goals for what is meant to be an incremental release. I’m liking the focus on performance with some pretty solid goals set out in the priority list:

• [P1] achieve dramatic, human-perceivable (>50ms) speed increases on common user tasks
  • opening a new tab
  • loading a bookmarked page
  • autocompleting a location in the Awesomebar
  • play rich media content

Wow. To be honest, I hadn’t noticed it takes more than 50ms to do those things right now but a quick test shows it does take a little longer than I’d thought. Firefox.next is going to be quick for most people then.

What most people are really going to notice though is the UI changes in relation to personalisation, customisation (how cool does “provide a custom fit user experience based on a user’s interaction history” sound?), and the task-based navigation. The ability to see what a user is doing in software and respond to it is something I have spent a lot of time tinkering with in the Vagueware labs, and I’m loving the look of their jumping off point, the new “about:me” page:

Pretty. Of course, this means that for real utility to occur, managing what you delete out of a browser history is going to be important – many users might not want certain sites showing up in here, but will not want to nuke their entire activity if it means the browser has to learn from scratch how they work, and where they work.

Lastly, of course 2010 is going to be the year web applications become mainstream. You thought they were already? Nowhere near. Very few people in B2C or B2B environments right now are developing desktop software, everybody from CIOs to users want the application to live on the web. The drawback through is that not everybody is connected all of the time, so however Firefox.next deals with that issue it needs to do it better than good: it needs to fly.

So what about 4.0? Nobody seems to be talking about that yet, but if you have ideas, that comment form below just loves your attention…

Well, actually, that’s a little premature, but it’s hit news wires and is shaping up to being an interesting story:

According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

Well, that’s surprising and rather intriguing. More so given it’s not the only acquisition that they’re after according to EuroInvestor:

GGF has entered into an agreement to acquire the shares in Peerialism AB. Peerialism AB is a software technology company with its origin in KTH Royal Institute of Technology and SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science and which presently is owned by the employees. The owners as well as the employees will continue to work for the company. Peerialism develops solutions for data distribution and distributed storage based on new p2p- technology. The access to the technology is secured by the acquisition. The consideration amounts to in aggregate MSEK 100 [$13 million] consisting of at least MSEK 50 [$6.5 million] in cash and up to the equivalent of MSEK 50 in newly issued shares in GGF (according to valuation during a period of ten days after the announcement). The share part of the purchase price should not exceed five percent of the total number of shares in GGF after the transaction. In addition GGF has undertaken to make initial investments of MSEK 25 [$3.25 million] in the acquired business.

There is however, a catch. Isn’t there always?

Completion of the acquisitions are primarily subject to GGF obtaining financing for the acquisition, that any necessary resolutions are adopted by a General Meeting of GGF, and that GGF and the Board of Directors consider that the acquired assets can be used in a legally and appropriate way. GGF intends to issue new shares in order to obtain the necessary financing for the acquisition. The acquisition is deemed to be completed in August 2009.

Well, what does it all mean? Quite simply that The Pirate Bay, is no longer going to be quite so Pirate-y. In fact, so worried are some people that TPB had to respond to make sure people calmed down a little:

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.

The old crew is still around in different ways. We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internets – quite the opposite. Now we’re fueling up for going into the next gear. TPB will have economical muscles to let people evolve it. It will team up with great technicians to evolve the protocols. And we, the people interested in more than just technology, will have the time to focus on that. It’s win-win-win.

The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don’t worry – be happy!

In the final mix then, here are what seems to be the takeaway points:

1. GGF is buying up two new properties through issuing new shares. It’s not a given this will work, but they’re confident
2. If the finance is available they are going to take the technology from Peerialism AB that has some “new” P2P technology in its kit bag and ramp it up commercially
3. They’re also going to buy one of the most visited web sites on the planet and promise to “compensate rights holders” which it doesn’t at the moment
4. The Pirate Bay guys insist this isn’t in any way going to interfere with the site built on the premise that rights holders can go to hell
5. TPB insist in fact this is the start of a socialist utopia and will allow them to persue their political ambitions in the name of the users
6. The Pirate Bay users are already calling foul and looking to abandon them and go and create a new site somewhere else

I can’t see this working for GGF. They’ve walked into a political quagmire in the hope that there is some revenue in it. It seems the gambit they are taking is that Peerialism’s PeerTV product is going to fly when combined with TPB’s user base. However, it has several drawbacks including the need for a P2P CDN to be scattered across the globe at broadband operator’s expense (for which GGF is promising to compensate them), and for the TPB users to give up their insatiable desire to burn material to disc (perhaps to sell down the pub for £5 a DVD), and avoid incurring any charges or being interrupted with advertising. Doesn’t seem plausible to me.

This suggests then that the TPB users who already are screaming the words “betrayal” and “capitalists” from the roof tops in response, are going to move on somewhere else. This is a perfect example of how an innovative change in technology can produce the possibility of a new business model that the users do not want, but the investors don’t care and will plug on regardless.

However, it does create a new business model, with a new user base, that technologically and commercially is interesting. Watch this space.

One of the problems with modern journalism is that some of the barriers taken for granted have broken down, and that can mean new ethical dilemmas being created every day.

Take the story of David Rohde’s kidnapping. Who he? You might very well ask. A reporter for the New York Times, he was kidnapped around seven months ago by the Taliban. You didn’t read about it in the papers? Well, no. Despite it being picked up by an Afghan news agency and being reported in some UGC news websites, the New York Times conducted a cover-up operation over the last seven months.

The only people who didn’t play ball the NYTimes were worried about were a couple (perhaps only one) of the Wikipedia editors who spent a reasonable amount of effort trying to insert one single reference to the kidnapping in Rohde’s Wikipedia article.

The Wikipedia team conspired to remove the edit and temporarily block the page from time to time. The New York Time have decided to point out how tricky dealing with this was by way of a free puff piece for Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales.

It’s an interesting case in how truth takes a back seat for a while, and raises some interesting questions for me about how exactly news organisations are meant to behave in a new era of constant information flow.

First, their reasoning for suppressing this information:

Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times.

Well, that doesn’t seem very sound logic. Yes, if it had been splashed across CNN for a couple of news cycles because there wasn’t much going on that weekend, you’d have a problem. However, that wouldn’t happen. Even the original news stories that were published intimated journalists being kidnapped were not big news, and part of daily life in that part of the World.

In fact, the story not getting sympathetic coverage could well have caused more damage – why feed and keep a man who is worthless to you and his fellow journalists? If no ransom is possible,  wouldn’t it be simpler to just kill him?

Then there is their attempt to change history that irks a little:

Two days after the kidnapping, a Wikipedia user altered the entry on Mr. Rohde to emphasize his work that could be seen as sympathetic to Muslims, like his reporting on Guantánamo, and his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims. Mr. Rohde won a Pulitzer Prize for his Bosnia coverage in 1996, when he worked for The Christian Science Monitor.The Wikipedia editor in that case was Michael Moss, an investigative reporter at The Times and friend of Mr. Rohde who has written extensively about groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Like many Wikipedia editors, he adopted a user name that hid his true identity.

“I knew from my jihad reporting that the captors would be very quick to get online and assess who he was and what he’d done, what his value to them might be,” he said. “I’d never edited a Wikipedia page before.”

With his editors’ blessing, Mr. Moss had already made similar changes to Mr. Rohde’s “topic page” on The Times’s Web site, and in both cases he omitted the name of Mr. Rohde’s former employer, because it contained the word Christian.

Woah, there! That’s some pretty hefty editing going on there. First, Michael Moss edits the page to make Rohde look more sympathetic to Muslims, under a pseudonym. Then he edits up the NYTimes.com topic pages, all the while trying to get rid of the mention of his previous employer.

I have to ask, why? The most prominent article on Rohde found through Google before the story of his escape and this cover-up broke over the weekend, points out quite clearly who his previous employer was. This was, in essence, a futile exercise that did not take or remove any information away from the Internet that was already out there, and simply made the NY Times look like they were practising their Stalinist air-brushing techniques.

I’m disappointed in all involved. I don’t think Rohde would have been killed if things had been left as they were. I don’t think a short mention on the evening news would even have happened. A couple of small pieces in competing papers pointing out his work in highlighting issues Muslims around the World faced might actually have helped him gain an earlier release. Either way, if he was still alive after seven months, there was little chance he would be killed at any point by his captors.

Wikipedia might be the biggest boy in town when it comes to UGC news content, but it won’t be for long. You won’t be able to suppress stories in future that are based in fact, and the final line of the NYTimes pieces:

…the idea of a pure openness, a pure democracy, is a naïve one.”

Harks of naïveness in itself: journalists are no longer gate-keepers to truth. Yes, lives are involved and everybody is glad that Rohde managed to escape over the last couple of days. However the guys sat in news rooms – foreign correspondents whose lives are on the line, even more so – are going to have to accept this behaviour just isn’t going to be possible a few years from now. The real question then is should it be?

There’s a lot of interesting things happening out there right now. HTML 5 is about to make a whole suite of new applications possible thanks to:

• Much better rendering of graphics on the fly
• Client-side storage of application data
• Drag-and-drop interfaces that make web apps feel more desktop-like

But there has to be something we are missing out on that is niggling us all at the back of our collective group-think mind. Perhaps watching the Google Wave introduction got you psyched about something that suddenly became possible. Perhaps the very way the web inherently works bothers you, and you envisage a new platform.

I’m interested in hearing about it now the comments are getting a little bit of love across articles. Go crazy. Throw them in there…

Development is a creative pursuit. Whilst many think of it as a purely technical challenge, it requires a level of lateral thinking about the World that is a cross between doing a crossword puzzle, composing a symphony and having an argument with people who don’t exist. It’s not surprising some of us are a little eccentric.

It reminds me of the writing process a lot. You sit down at a blank screen after having conducted your research and you have to just dig in and find some way of making progress. Many a developer struggles with a blank IDE screen much in the same way many a writer struggles to find influence. When I was learning how to write properly, I was told that “a professional writer can not be like the poet who spends a morning taking out a comma, and the afternoon putting it back in”. We need to work hard. Same with code. A block then is a real problem.

Slashdot this weekend asked How to Get Out of Developer’s Block?, or rather a user asked:

I have spent the past six months working on a software project, and while I can come up with ideas, I just can’t seem to sit down in front of the computer to code. I sit there and I just can’t concentrate. I don’t know whether this is akin to writer’s block, but it feels like it. Have any other Slashdotters run into this and if so how did you get out of it? It is bothering me since the project has ground to a halt and I really want to get started again. I am the sole developer on the project, if that makes a difference.

The comments that follow in the thread that range from the sensible to the bizarre. I have a bunch of tricks I use when I’m struggling, so thought I’d put them together

1. Get enough sleep – you have no idea how sleep deprivation can mess you up when you’re trying to concentrate. When I’m working on code, I take a minimum of 10 hours sleep a night. Anything less, and I’m not going to be able to think in purely abstract terms for 8 hours straight during the day.
2. Exercise – and whilst those of you who know me might laugh, it’s important. I actually do get regular exercise when I’m coding full-time. Just a long walk at the start or end of the day can be enough. Something that gets the hear rate up helps though (perhaps explaining why I always code better the day after… errr… private stuff that gets my heart rate up!).
3. Don’t drink alcohol – this was something I got when I was trying to sort out my pilot’s license. When you’re going flying, I don’t drink for 24 hours before getting into the plane. I found my workload was easier, my writing got more fluid and my code went up a gear. On big client projects I don’t drink at all on school nights. If I’m drinking in the evenings whilst on a project, it’s because the project isn’t challenging me and I’m bored.
4. Clear your environment out – I’m currently sat at a desk with perhaps 150 items of paperwork on it. In this environment, I can not focus on code. My mental processes are cluttered because my physical processes are. Tidying up might seem like a stupid way to get out of a block, but I genuinely find that a clear working environment leads to much clearer mental processes. I don’t know how or why, it fascinates me, but just get your physical environment fixed up and suddenly your mental environment starts to fire a little better than before.
5. Write a trivial test – this is the code version of “free-writing” that I sometimes use to unblock on writing an article. Basically write a small test (or spec if you’re BDD) for something almost trivial and then get it to pass. Repeat. Now you’re back in the game.
6. Work on the design – it’s amazing how bad we collectively are at really thinking through a problem. Go and work on some wireframes or develop some sketches of the underlying schemas and try and simplify them. Reduce things down, and suddenly you’ll see areas you can work on right away outside of the problem you’re blocked on. If you’re not able to delve into design or architecture because of the nature of the project, quite frankly you need another bunch of guys to work with.
7. Try and find it done already – I once spent a lot of time trying to work out how to solve a particular problem. The answer was non-trivial to implement in my mind. I kept putting it off. I was scared of how bad I could end up making my solution. In a fit of procrastination I spent an hour digging around the problem area and eventually found an open-source tool that did exactly what I needed, out of the box. Well, that solves that problem…
8. Are you scared of success? It might sound like a stupid question because success is good, right? But when we succeed at something, we conquer some barrier we have worked to overcome for a period, things change. Suddenly people might look at you differently. Perhaps you end up having to work on a less interesting project. You might want your current project to be a success for other reasons. Ask yourself whether you really want this project to succeed. And then realise there’s no getting out of it: failing, or staying where you are is just as bad an outcome and harms you, your self-confidence and your reputation.
9. Find a SCRUM meeting somewhere – one of the very best things about daily stand-up meetings in SCRUM projects is that the meeting only has three topics of conversation: outcomes from stuff you agreed to do in the last meeting; what you plan to do today to further the project, if anything; and obstacles in your way. Not everybody has a team (and sole development is the hardest form there is, trust me), so find a SCRUM somewhere else. Use Twitter, your blog, a group of friends down the pub, anything. Just talk about what’s stopping you and see if anybody can help you in any way, or offer suggestions. Obviously asking a friend about a tricky problem relating to class inheritance isn’t going to yield results if they don’t know what you’re on about, but ask around more liberally than you have done to date.
10. Work on something else – we all have other projects on the go. If the above isn’t working, just go and get on with something else. Your subconscious is dealing with the problem and will come up with a solution. Just make sure you hit your deliverables schedule if you have one!

Now comments are back up, I look forward to hearing of any other tips people might have.

It’s now become a little bit more common knowledge that Vagueware is growing. Quickly. That has come as a bit of a surprise, but I’m embracing it fully as I see the opportunity to grow a great company and do some amazing things over the years to come. And I know I can’t do it alone.

The reality is that by 2Q2010 I might need a staff roster into the double digits. Given that the Vagueware Christmas party has to date consisted of me having a quiet drink on my own for the last three years, this is a big shift.

So, what gives? I’ve always been open about business development, even when I’ve later changed my mind, and I think some of you reading this will be impacted by the changes I’m seeing in the industry and thought I’d share. There’s more than enough to go around.

First, some background:

How the Manchester web development industry has worked so far

Manchester has until the last year or so basically been defined as a services-orientated new-media provider. What that means is that if you are a high street chain or building a brand you will go to the “boutiques” across the Northern Quarter, look at portfolios and appoint one of them to develop a website. Client choices are generally driven by a mixture of aesthetic, price and experience.

Then the agency will realise that there is some hard programming going on under the bonnet somewhere and will either have programmers in-house to handle it, or they might out-source it to a friendly coder who can help them out.

This means that a £50,000-£100,000 new media build might result in about £5,000-£10,000 of development work being commissioned.

The other part of the industry is the “pure code” sector. That’s where Vagueware has traditionally been – rich, highly interactive logic-focused applications that need design laying over it. Sometimes Vagueware has just overseen development to make sure the developers aren’t pulling anything over the eyes of the client. This generally results in about a 50/50 split between code and “media” work, but there has not been much of it around in the past and often some of us team up to work together.

This has worked very well until recently, and has produced some amazing output. High street brands send their work to Manchester, and the richness of the design community here is massively under-rated. The Big Chip Awards do something to offset that, but it causes a few issues:

• Developers are stuck at the bottom of the food chain causing growth and sustainability issues
• We struggle to build product-based companies in the city meaning the national media get sniffy with our efforts
• Those of us who aren’t designers are off the radar for funding streams and more positive media promotion

However, this is not going to be the case for ever more:

How the Manchester scene is changing

Quite simply, developers are getting more important. Part of this is down to people wanting to be more sophisticated about what they want to achieve. It’s no longer good enough to have a website with some ActionScript doing something funky-looking in Flash. Clients are seeking clones of YouTube or Facebook, iPhone applications, rich complicated services that need to sit on cloud infrastructures.

In short: they need propeller heads to make their dreams come true.

That means instead of being approached by an agency to take on a slice of a pie, developers are starting to get commissioned work directly and then seeking designers to take a slice of the pie.

It clicked for me a few weeks ago when I realised that the projects on the book at the moment were turning Vagueware into an agency, but not one dominated by new media but by big, complicated infrastructure requirements. Deep “Information Architecture” planning, behaviour-driven development with bags of specs, deploying onto clouds because clients want to scale to millions of users when they get traction, and so on. You get the idea.

“Oh, and can you find somebody to make it look nice?”. Sure we can!

I’m not saying this is the death of the traditional new media agency, but there *is* something going on here. People are using complex web and iPhone applications more often and are being inspired to commission their own ideas. Experience of off-shoring has meant fewer are likely to take it out to the cheapest bid – they want a great partner they trust and can discuss ideas with over a coffee.

By going to a “software development agency” as I am now referring to them, they not only get a quicker time to market but often they pay less too: Vagueware’s current rate can be doubled when handled via a middle man, and when you’re talking about a 40-day build plan, that adds up.

Designers are critical, and I can’t wait to work with more of them: some guys out there leave me astounded and wishing I had a more visually creative mind. However, I think their grip on the power base of this industry is slipping a little as more people want to build functional products.

And that means change. And wherever there is change, there is opportunity, which leads me onto:

How Vagueware is changing

Vagueware is going to ultimately have two revenue streams: products and services. Simple.

Products the things like Conveyor Belt (more on that next week), Kagtum and a few other tricks up various (rolled-up) sleeves at Vagueware HQ. We don’t expect these to monetise quickly, but they give us skin in the game in a couple of key areas that help us understand how parts of the industry work in a way just being a service provider can’t.

Services are what Vagueware does right now, but as a software development agency. Got a cool idea but have no idea how to implement it or even if it’s possible? You could go to a traditional new media agency but they might just call us. You could go to a design agency like Ideo but they might call us too. You know what you could do? Just call us. We’ll help make it happen and if it needs strong design, we’ll handle that and make it all dance beautifully in front of your very eyes.

Then there is the additional stuff I’m looking at developing over time: training, research and analysis, reports and other things I can’t talk about right now.

There is one other difference about what comes next too: we’re not limiting ourselves to the local market. In the next two months we’re going to be hitting London quite hard and by the year end I expect to be getting clients onto the books from North America (I’ve traditionally always had one or two in the US but will be growing that), and hopefully – albeit rather scarily – continental Europe.

In other words, I’m going for it. It’s scary, but the opportunity is ripe and the skills are available. The only reason I’ve not done this before is because it was hard to get commissions for rich, complex bespoke web app development. No longer.

Of course, I might have got it all wrong and it could all blow up in my face, but you never know until you try and there is always the ability to adapt if further down the line it becomes clear a bad decision has been made.

For the last three years, this blog was using the Mephisto blogging platform – a Ruby on Rails application that I intended to expand myself in all sorts of ways.

To be frank, the code base for Mephisto suffers a little from bit-rot, and it seems to me that the original authors have almost given up on supporting the system. Hey, it’s still not made a 1.0 release, so I’m sure it’s just a lack of time, we’re all busy, etc. but I need something with a more active developer community (and I know I’m part of the problem by not diving in myself).

Handily, in the time that has elapsed, Wordpress has gone from being a rather annoying and slightly odd PHP blogging platform into a really slick CMS with tons of widgets, themes and plugins. So I’ve switched.

And at the same time, I’ve also decided that comments need to be opened up on articles. Right now, all articles published from 1st June 2009 have comments open so if you saw something you liked (or hated), feel free to make a comment now.

P.S. thanks to Jason Morris for the script modification that helped me move 3 years of blog posts in about 15 minutes, itself based on a script by David Murphy

It seems I’m not the only person slightly bemused by the reaction to Steve Jobs’ revelation he had a liver transplant.

Other people’s reactions include:

• He owes me more work because I’m a fan of his work
• My share portfolio is at risk because of this
• I want more shiny plastic things from Apple. This worries me they won’t be as shiny.
• He didn’t tell us something personal that we deserve to know

My reaction:

• You just had a fricking liver transplant? Wow, get well soon and don’t listen to those guys baying for your attention, you need rest, ‘k?

This isn’t about shares or gadgets or what he owes you. It’s about somebody who is seriously ill taking some time out to make sure they can live a little longer. You know “life”, that thing you take for granted? The thing that isn’t really about accumulating possessions but being able to breathe, eat, love, dream? The mob doesn’t get that – perhaps because it isn’t available to download in the App Store or listed on the Nasdaq…

And yet, somehow, this reaction is predictable. Much in the same way that sexism is alive and well in the industry, selfishness – in particular consumerist self-absorption – is rife. We are the pinnacle of consumerism. We thrive on early adopters, so we grow them. And what we grow, we reap – this is another problem we need to think about.

As a collective the consumers seem no longer to see the humanity behind technology, choosing instead to become voyeuristic onanists viewing technology almost in the form of a fetish they are addicted to. In fact, porn is a good metaphor for where we are right now: dehumanise and objectify humanity to serve a selfish need. It doesn’t matter if the lens the fetish is viewed through is that of a camera or the blogosphere, providing it’s possible to sit at screens satisfying our cravings in private.

Maybe that’s just the Catholic in me talking. The Agnostic in me thinks we can do better too, though.

Some will argue this is just the fruit of modern capitalism. All advertising in a capitalist free-market society relies on a principle of false idolatry, designed to invoke a sense of inferiority in our subconsciousness. Apple does it better than anybody else on Earth, taking their marketing cues from designer label brands.

I think we might have gone a step too far. We might need to dial it back a notch or three and re-imagine what we’re here to do. There is something pure about what we do that is beyond the gadget and the price tag, the plastic or the electronics. As Dijkstra said (and is quoted as saying on my business cards): Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Yet here we are complaining about the telescope manufacturer needing a liver transplant because all we want is more telescopes. Good. Grief.

We should be grateful for the genius behind every design decision that comes out of our great technology companies, and they should rightly be rewarded with praise – they advance society one little increment at a time. But when somebody takes time out to have a life-saving operation, there is something distasteful about a swarm of self-interested parties demanding to know where their share of the grief is going to come from.

I don’t know the answer, I don’t have the solution. All I know is that I don’t want to be part of the problem.

P.S. writing this story I was reminded of the most human thing I ever read by Jobs’: his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005 which I highly recommend taking the time to read.