First, the early commitments we received mostly came from people who already had some connection with Trampoline. This included customers, friends of shareholders and friends of analysts who’d written about us. These people were only one or two or steps away in Trampoline’s network so there were direct personal experiences and trust relationships. This provided the foundation for them to commit quickly and take advantage of the “early bird” share price.

Second, whilst we were planning the crowdfunding process I spoke to several established technology entrepreneurs for advice. As well as giving me their feedback and suggestions these people introduced me to other figures in the technology and entrepreneurial world, who in turn made further introductions. This cascade process, which was unanticipated, has proven to be immensely valuable. Not only am I learning from people who have created hugely successful businesses, several of them also want to invest or play a strategic role in Trampoline’s development. Having even one of these people involved in the company could be transformational.

Third, since we launched the initiative there’s been a steady stream of high net worth individuals certifying on the website and approaching us to find out more. I would estimate that something like two thirds of these people are professional angel investors, who have invested in multiple growth businesses and know exactly what they’re looking for. The remaining third are wealthy individuals who don’t have a long track-record of venture investing but they heard about what Trampoline was doing and were intrigued about the opportunity. These people, both the experienced angels and the first-time investors, have no previous connection to Trampoline either directly or through their network. Consequently there is a different pace to discussion as trust is established and information gathered. Access to due diligence materials is particularly important for these investors.

Fourth, and somewhat to my surprise, we’ve been approached by several venture capital funds who are interested in participating in the crowdfunding offer. I expected the model would be unattractive to VCs because we’re offering ordinary shares without the preference rights VCs usually demand. However I suppose it’s a good way for a fund to make a small bet alongside others, with minimal management overhead. But it remains to be seen whether  these funds will actually come through and invest.

Those are my observations to date. It’s been wonderful to see so many people discussing what we’re doing. Right now I suspect opinion is split with a lot of people still sceptical that crowdfunding can work for a business like Trampoline. On current evidence I’m optimistic we’re going to dispel that scepticism.

There are several reasons Trampoline decided to take this step. First and foremost, the financial crisis has severely restricted the availability of conventional finance for businesses at Trampoline’s stage of growth. To maintain the company’s momentum we needed to find a different route. Secondly, we think entrepreneurs should have more choices about how they finance their businesses. We wanted to prove that the internet makes new alternatives available which can function at a reasonably large scale. Thirdly, innovation is a core part of Trampoline’s DNA. We’re always looking for new solutions that are more efficient than the conventional ways of doing things. We’ve spent the last month working with our advisors and shareholders designing the process and ensuring it fits with FSA (Financial Services Authority) regulations. Today we opened the doors.

Some of the greatest changes the internet has brought have involved mobilising large communities of people in new ways, whether that’s Wikipedia, Facebook or Ebay. Crowdfunding is the equivalent for the corporate finance world. Crowdfunding isn’t going to replace venture capital, private equity, debt finance or stock-markets. These traditional models will continue to provide the most efficient solution for certain financing needs. But I think crowdfunding could establish itself as the best solution for many early and mid-stage ventures. In many ways it’s an evolution of “friends and family” and “angel” models, just operating with greater transparency and on a larger scale. Crowdfunding grows organically from peer to peer networks of trust, experience and influence that can help a venture to secure the resources it requires and achieve success.

I hope the the initiative Trampoline’s announced today will spark a discussion in the start-up and venture finance worlds. I’d love to hear what you think. We invite you to add your comments on our discussion page.

One thing that’s surprised me is the number of senior executives who ask whether i think large corporations will exist in fifty years’ time, or whether they will be eclipsed by new types of economic player. This isn’t such a wild-eyed question as it might appear and I find it encouraging that people have the confidence to ask it. The modern public corporation only appeared at the end of the nineteenth century and secured its position as the dominant global actor during the first half of the twentieth century, displacing the private family-run business. Through history the baton has passed from one model to another reflecting changes in markets and technologies.

There are huge forces at work that threaten the corporation’s position. In the world of software highly distributed open-source development models have proven their ability to compete with concentrated proprietary approaches. The web has enabled collaborations that are significantly more agile and responsive than corporate structures. Meanwhile the web has also changed the relationship between producers and consumers to enable smaller providers to access large markets that would previously have been inconceivable. However I think it’s premature to write the corporation’s obituary just yet. It has evolved continuously over the past century and it may yet adapt sufficiently to prosper in the new world. The interesting question is whether it will be able to adapt fast enough.

I believe the twenty-first century’s most characteristic organisational structure will be a fluid and loosely-coupled federation of small groups and individuals. Functional coalitions will form around opportunities and evolve as circumstances shift. At any moment an actor is likely to be involved in multiple coalitions and the balance will constantly shift in line with demands. Entities of this kind will have the edge over corporations because they will be able to deploy resources much faster and more efficiently around new opportunities and changes in the trading ecology.

Such loosely-coupled organisations will only come into being once the financial, operational and legal mechanisms that currently involve manual document-based processes are transferred to being automated and electronic. Examples include legal structures, inter-agent contracts and remuneration systems. The kind of analytics which Trampoline provides will be essential infrastructure for the management and coordination of such complex trading communities. I’m also involved with an open source project called One Click Orgs which is starting to chip away at some of the legal structure and governance aspects.

As these new automated mechanisms become available forward-thinking corporations are going to start adopting them to increase agility. I think we will see some large corporations evolving to become more decentralised and operating in a way that’s increasingly similar to the loosely-coupled model i’ve described. Such corporations will gain some of the benefits of increased agility and responsiveness of the loosely-coupled organisations, whilst they will continue to possess the power of “diktat” over large-scale resources that the loosely-coupled orgs lack. This process of evolution will not be straightforward however. It will require some deep-seated cultural and strategic changes, not just the implementation of new technology. But I am sure some corporations will succeed in transforming themselves in this way.

In conclusion I do not believe the large corporation as we see it today will exist in fifty years’ time. But we will see a convergence with some corporations becoming more fluid and decentralised on the one hand, whilst networks of small businesses become more structured and economically significant on the other.

I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this if you feel like writing a comment.

This was my second time at the Roundtable, the first having been Autumn 2006. It was striking how the event had changed in the intervening two years. For a start there were a lot more people there, with executives from a hundred and fifty large corporations and federal agencies. But more interesting to me was the change in focus.

Two years ago discussion was mainly focused on the practicalities of how to conduct an ONA survey. This time people were talking about a wide range of different business issues they were addressing. Specific working groups had been formed around talent management, organisation change, external relationships and innovation. Meanwhile the exclusive focus on survey-based ONA had broadened to embrace other network analysis techniques, with particular interest in “passive” analysis based on mining corporate data (like we do).

It seemed to me these changes reflected the coming of age of social network analysis as an everyday business technique. During my panel session I made a prediction that within a few years it would be taken for granted that an enterprise’s information system would generate organisational diagnostics as a matter of course. A discernable buzz went through the room at this suggestion. But whereas people would have regarded this as improbable a couple of years ago, this time it was received as a credible prediction.

Over the past three months it’s become clear that something specific is happening in connection with the economic downturn. Across industries and geographies businesses are going through a wave of mergers, restructuring and leadership changes. During and after processes of this kind decision-makers urgently need to understand the situation in their organisation to rebuild competitiveness and operational effectiveness. Previously businesses have relied on anecdotal information to identify critical experts, poorly-integrated functional units, at-risk customer relationships and so forth. But such information is partial, inaccurate and often distorted by internal politics. With SONAR we are able to provide decision-makers with detailed, factual diagnostics.

Customers in this situation require diagnostic information as quickly as possible. Yesterday we launched SONAR Diagnostic to meet this specific need. Rather than installing SONAR on a customer’s corporate network and integrating it with their internal systems, we provide SONAR as a managed service. The customer just needs to provide 1-3 months of archived email and contact data for the areas of the business they’re interested in and we do the rest. After a week or two of processing we deliver a detailed report highlighting the priority factors impacting performance. Our consulting partners are available to advise on interventions to resolve any issues that are highlighted.

If a business wants to monitor the situation following the initial diagnostic they can proceed to a full SONAR installation. But the crucial thing is to deliver the initial report quickly. Now we’re able to do that.

The current downturn may prove to be the event that cements the role of social network analysis in the corporation. At times like this businesses are willing to consider significant innovations that would meet strong resistance at other times. The companies that take advantage the best available tools to respond to the challenges they face now will be in the strongest position to grow as the economy recovers.

: c :

Some camps which I would consider very much community based, such as barcampcork are actually quite large (over 100 people), whereas others are much smaller (such as barcampnortheast with around 30 attendees), and yet both maintain a strong community feeling. On the other hand, barcamplondon 3 and 4 (neither of which were attended by significantly more than 100 people), didn’t come close to exuding that sense of community. How ironic that I live in London, and that’s where my local community is. I’m not knocking the London camps for not having that community feeling, I’m not even sure that it is something that organisers can even control, but is drawn out from the people that attend. And in reality, the types of people drawn to barcamplondon and quite different from the people drawn to barcampcork. Almost every attendee at Cork, with the notable exception of myself, has a vested interest in the Cork and wider Ireland geek community, whereas the London attendees either seemed somewhat blasé about the whole barcamp thing (are we that spoilt over here…?), or were in town for the barcamp.

We can also consider super-sized camps such as barcampberlin which I attended a few weeks ago, which was due to be attended by 600 people, and drew somewhere around the 450 mark (my guesstimate). It’s actually quite hard for me to make a comparison with berlin because of the nature of my attendance at the event. I travelled to berlin with a few friends, and very quickly we started hanging out with other Londoners at the event. I don’t believe I spoke to more than 5 local, or even Germany based, attendees throughout the entire event. This came down to the fact that I was very comfortable knowing my 10 friends, and knowing all of their friends, who happened, mostly, to be my friends too, and there was no need to break out from our group. Additionally none of the sessions were in any way discussion group oriented, and so there was no permission to engage with total strangers about mutually interesting topics. This makes it very hard to meet people.

Maybe it all comes down to my social networks at these various events, but I do have a strong suspicion, that this is influenced by the style of event, the type of people attracted to it, and the pre existing connections you go with.  Could Berlin have been made as warm and welcoming at Cork? Probably not, but simply because the logistics of making an event that large work on a small community scale are virtually impossible. What about London? I think engaging the community in organisation would have been a big win. There was a feeling of isolation between the organisation of the camp and it’s attendees, which somewhat undermines some of the core principles. Ultimately I think any barcamp has the potential to feel “just right,” but the parameters for this kind of success don’t always lend themselves to “popular” destination such as Berlin and London.

All that said, I’d love to organise a community based barcamplondon. Who want’s to join me?

Tapping the Mainline: Designing for Learned and Evolved Responses
We love stories, recognise patterns in fractions of a second and have a set of highly developed social behaviours. In this talk Mike will be running through a collection of these hard-wired influence points and exploring how they can be used in the design of products, interfaces and experiences.
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1144

And while I’m about it I might as well have a bit of a poke at the process…

The Panel Picker seems like a good way to engage with the conference audience but I can’t help thinking that the execution is lacking. There are currently some 1,273 proposals in the mix. That’s an awful lot of reading for anyone wishing to participate. With that sort of volume I really wish they’d put more thought into the desired outcome: unbiased participation, which will involve discovery, weighing and rating in volume.

My main problem with the Panel Picker interface is the clunky tabular layout. The addition of keyboard shortcuts is a fantastic addition but I need to read the title, summary and maybe name to reach any sort of informed rating decision. There just isn’t enough horizontal real-estate available for all that in a single row. Why not have a Hot-or-Not style view? Let me focus on one thing at a time and make it as painless as possible to contribute? Or just break the title and summary onto separate lines?

I also feel that the 1-5 scoring system is unnecessarily complex. How can I judge the quality of a proposal to that sort of accuracy from 50 words? A yardstick of interest is all that’s required and with 1,000+ proposals to get through speed and ease should be the highest priority. I’d go with a simple thumbs up/thumbs down widget.

Anyway, them’s the breaks! Tapping the Mainline is version 2 of the Ego to Ergo talk I gave (and thoroughly enjoyed) at SkillSwap last month.  If you’d like to hear it, go give me a rating.

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A few people asked for the links I listed at the end so here they are in full:

• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
• The Hardest Working Presidential Candidate Logo
• The Werther Effect
• Copycat suicide
• Social Proof: Herd it Through the Grapevine
• Fundamental human needs
• Shafted: 41 hours in an elevator
• The Tao of Twitter
• Ego psychology
• The Usability of Urinals
• Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics
• You’re Kidding Yourself If You Think Those Things Don’t Matter
• The Wheres and Whens of Users’ Expectations
• Eyetracking Study, June 2005 (PDF)
• Cues, The Golden Retriever
• Evolution of a Header
• What Dictionaries and Optical Illusions Say About Our Brains
• The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
• Dunbar’s number
• The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes

Do people currently feel so proprietary about their professional connections that they feel their connections must remain confidential to remain professionally competitive?

In the fairly recent past some have certainly felt this way, but the interent is radically changing that. Search, social networks and the massive increase of data available online to anyone makes it much easier to find people and things. This is causing our understanding and appreciation of relationships to change back to the way things were much longer ago…

It’s 1500, somewhere in Europe. Everyone in town knows the blacksmith; so what? The interesting questions were much more complex and contextual - eg who would the blacksmith let slide on payments? Who does the blacksmith socialize with? Is the farrier in town profesionally cooperative with the blacksmith, or is she a competitor?

Preserving knowledge of the existence of nodes in a social network as if they are proprietary IP and must remain obfuscated is an “old school” modern business behavior. It implies that the node on the other end would be happy to deal in the same manner with anyone, and as such it devalues the relationship to such a great extent that you have to wonder if there’s a relationship there at all.

Economies based on this kind of artificial scarcity are excessively vulnerable in a modern age of search and the internet.

Back when I ran a paintball field, and long before the interwebz had search, I found a source for the smoke grenades that most of us sold at our fields in WA state. It was hard to find this guy; he was in the Midwest somewhere and it took about 3 or 4 people hops and lots of phone chatting to get to him.

Once I did find him I was able to buy the grenades in fairly small numbers - say a case at a time - and sell them at a significant mark-up while still under-cutting my local competition. In essence I became a regional distributor. It was a good deal for me and for the other guy.

However he owed me nothing and he just wanted to move product, and so ANYONE who found him could get the same deal I got. Eventually someone did, which cut my regional advantage down to nothing. I still got a good price, but ultimately what happened was the regional price re-set so that we all got close to the same markup of a buck or so a grenade.

These days, that kind of advantage is tremendously fleeting. What matters is relationships themselves, and how they are nurtured over time. If just know who I talk to makes you directly competitive with me, then I am not doing my job.

I understand that sales relationships can be different animals than other kinds of relationships, and that sales people can feel very proprietary about their network. Inside Trampoline we’ve been very fortunate in that Adrian and the rest of the sales team treat our sales relationships as long-term investments which aren’t prone to being under-mined by other people simply knowing about them.

This happens to align nicely with our overall view of relationships - it’s not only who you know but also how you know them that matters.

I’ve travelled in Japan in the past but this was my first visit in a business context. The amazing etiquette involved in exchanging business cards was the first thing that struck me. In an unstructured setting like a drinks reception in the West cards are typically swapped at the end of a conversation if there’s a likely relevance for future contact. In Japan cards are exchanged at the start of a conversation with no filter for relevance. This means you get through a lot of cards and your pockets rapidly end up bulging with other people’s.

Cards must be offered horizontally with the text in the correct orientation for the recipient, held at the corners in both hands. When you receive a card you must hold it similarly in both hands and give it your full attention for a second or two before looking up or continuing conversation. You must hold the card in front of you throughout the conversation. It’s insulting to put it in your pocket, scribble a note on it or (worst of all) hand someone a crumpled or disfigured card. If you’re sitting around a table with people the correct thing to do is lay everyone’s cards out in front of you in a neat row matching their positions around the table.

What interested me most, however, was the cultural alignment of Japanese enterprises with social computing solutions. Previously I’d assumed that Japanese business culture would be intrinsically hostile to technologies that make informal groupings and networks visible, or which lead to information being shared in new ways, since there is sensitive etiquette surrounding these processes. However my experiences in Sapporo completely changed my view of this.

The connection I’d failed to make previously is that Japanese corporations have historically placed a much higher value on the informal networks amongst their employees than their Western counterparts. Within the “shushin koyo” model of life-long relationships between employer and employee, many aspects of the individual’s social life were organised and supported by the corporation. This was seen to build organisational strength and forge links outside the formal structure (both of which are also notable drivers for social networking tools in the enterprise). During the long recession in the 1990s a lot of these extra-curricular activities were cut, but a management culture persisted in which informal networks were highly valued. On the face of it enterprise social computing tools are perfectly placed to fill this gap.

In many cases products developed for a Western market will need to be modified significantly before they are suitable for Japanese customers. This won’t simply be a case of changing language in the user interface. Behaviours around privacy management and authorisation will almost certainly need to be modified to fit different cultural nuances. But contrary to my initial assumption, Japanese corporations may prove to be early and well-informed adopters of social computing technologies.

I’m indebted to Shuji Honjo for drawing my attention to the possible like between social computing and corporate involvement in extra-curricular activities.