Overall the show wasn’t great, but it did have some great bits, including a good point from Bill Cullen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmJNL1BmukU

The reaction the his points have been somewhat mixed and if you watch the clip you can see it in the audience. Half the people applaud him when he says “Get out there and work,” “make your own success,” but the other half get very defensive when he calls their (i.e. my) generation ‘Molly-Coddled’.

The Bad

Personally, I loved the advice he was giving, but I’ll start with what I disliked. Besides the obvious condescending tone and the hilarious “in my bare feet” remarks, what he didn’t acknowledge was their right to complain. If they feel their elected representatives are doing a poor job or if they think the system of government should change then they have the right to voice their opinion and suggest alternatives.

The Good

But on everything else he was spot on. He made the point later in the show that economic cycles like this “happen in the same way every couple of decades, it repeats in cycles just like the weather.” He also made the point that voting won’t get you a job, especially when all our politicians are the same.

It may sound pessimistic and gloomy, but it’s great advice. If you want to change the system then by all means engage yourself in those matters, but if you want to change your own situation – i.e. get a job – then blaming other people will get you nowhere. Shouting at politicians and “taking to the streets” will only leave you with a false sense of accomplishment and zero steps closer to earning a living.

Creative Industries, Listen Up

The reason I’m posting this here is because I’ve seen the same debate many times before in business. It’s a crippling argument because both sides feel opposed to one another, but both are often right.

I’ve had many conversations with musicians, photographers and writers in which I’ve felt like Bill Cullen in that clip.

The conversation mostly starts when we talk about the internet, with the artist hurt that people are downloading their music illegally, or copying their photos or articles without permission. Much like the students on front line, their arguments are always moral and ethical ones:

There should be stricter regulation on file sharing. The Government are bailing out the banks but not me. Copyright law should be enforced better. The Government should do more to create jobs. People shouldn’t steal my music!

Those are all fair points, so I rarely say that they’re wrong. In fact I try to avoid getting into a discussion on what should or shouldn’t be the case, what is or isn’t morally correct or if file sharing is “technically” theft. I try to concentrate on what is the case, what concrete concrete actions they can take by themselves to make their own situation better.

I will always end up saying something along the lines of this:

Take the current situation as default. People will download your music for free. That’s the new ’square one’, now how do we build a business model around this fact.

In just the same way, Bill’s core point was that you should assume that the Government are going to be useless, nobody is going to help you and that complaining will get you nowhere. Take this as square one and ask yourself “How do I move forward from here?”

That’s what I do in business, help musicians come up with creative ways to “Compete with Free” and that’s the advice Bill was giving to the young people in the audience – get creative, learn lessons from history and work hard.

With that attitude it doesn’t matter if the government lets you down, you’ll do just fine without them. If, by some miracle they manage to turn the country around, all the better.

Amp Communications is my new business. I’ve been working with a handful of Irish musicians for the last year or so helping them navigate the world of online and get their music heard. It’s been going so well that I decided to make it my full time job.

The business models of the recording industry have been shattered by the internet, but I firmly believe that the opportunities it provides for the future far outweigh the negatives. Tools like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter will be at the heart of many new business models that hope to replace the old. It’s imperative that musicians and labels learn to make the most of all that “social media” has to offer.

With Amp I hope to be at the heart of this next step in the industry (in Ireland at least) and to help the many creative talents in this country earn the living they deserve.

The ultimate tragedy in Haiti isn’t the earthquake; it’s that country’s lack of economic freedom.  The earthquake simply but catastrophically revealed the inhuman consequences of this fact.

Since the disaster many people have been urging world governments to “drop the debt” that Haiti owes. Indeed many governments already have.

The real tragedy is that if half the effort we’re devoting to the rescue and salvation operations were applied to preventative measures, many more lives could have been saved.

Haiti has, for a long time, been enslaved by debt. As was noted by many before the quake, “Debt costs lives,” and few places in the world was this more evident than Haiti.

At it’s peak Haiti owed $1.8 billion, almost all of which was borrowed and squandered by past dictators. In the first half of this decade they spent more money each year repaying the debt than they did on healthcare, education or agriculture.

Last May an article from The Times – “Haiti: the land where children eat mud” – has one particularly disturbing insight into the effects of crippling debt and poverty on a society:

“Parents in Carrefour Feuilles are happy when their son joins a gang,” one Haitian woman, who runs an anti-violence project, tells me. “They are also happy when their daughters become child prostitutes. It means the family can afford to eat.”

And yet some will argue that Haiti needed better government, stricter planning rules or more access to information so that it could have prevented the huge loss of life in January, but as anti-dismal points out:

You may argue that stricter building codes are a major reason why the 1989 Bay Area quake killed far fewer people than did this week’s Haiti quake. But stricter building codes increase the cost of building and if you are poor and cannot afford expensive buildings you build cheap, less safe, ones. So you can have all the building codes you like, but people have to be wealthy enough to be able to afford to obey them, for them to work. Also buildings will get safer, even without building codes, as people get wealthier. The more wealth you have the more you have to protect and thus the more you are willing and able to spend on protecting it.

That Haiti gave almost $1oom to rich countries last year instead of investing it in infrastructure is a tragedy, but worse again still is that many other developing countries around the world are being forced to pay off such odious debts. This will ultimately leave them in the same state as Haiti was when the earthquake hit – when each day is a battle to survive there is no room for the luxury of planning for tomorrow.

This rule doesn’t just apply to natural disasters like the Haitian earthquake. Increased GDP per capita (through free-er markets and more capitalism) can lift developing nations from all sorts of poverty-related problems, including famine, war, slavery and crime (albeit indirectly.)

In fact, emotions and humanity aside, there could be a very strong business case for dropping the international debt. The cost of dropping the debt to Haiti entirely was roughly equivalent to the amount that has been donated since January 12th, not to mention the amount that will be spent in years to come.

(There are some obvious flaws in the numbers here, dropping the debt doesn’t automatically lead to a developed nation with top quality infrastructure, but it’s certainly a start. The other obvious issue is that the people donating are not those who were owed the debt.)

But in the long run, even if world leaders take a cold-hearted approach to the issue, dropping the third world debt (paying it on their behalf) could be their most cost effective strategy.

When talking to global leaders Bono, Geldof and company could try appeal to the strings of their purses, rather than hearts.

I Could Get Hit By A Bus Tomorrow

In many ways this first part needs very little explanation. One day I’ll die. Between now and that day I have a finite amount of living to do, so I had best fill it with the things I love doing. I don’t want to labour this point because plenty of people have said it much better than I can.

I will, however, share one video that made a stronger impact on me than all the rest – Steve Jobs’ speech on how to live before you die. If you haven’t already watched it it’s well worth the 15 mins (or you can read the transcript here.)

I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

75 More Years Of Blogging

The second major philosophy that underpinned my thinking was also inspired by a great video. Dan Buettner’s Ted Talk “How to Live to be 100+” is another worthwhile investment of 15 minutes.

There are lots of great little tips in this video from cultures that live longer and healthier lives than our own – eat less meat, eat small meals, incorporate regular, low intensity, physical activity into your lifestyle etc.

More important than the specifics of how to live longer and healthier is the fact that you plan to. This is the lifestyle equivalent of Warren Buffett’s approach to investing (one of my favourite Buffet quotes is “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”)

This attitude isn’t easy to maintain because it’s a constant inner struggle. There is a part of your brain – often called the Lizard Brain (see diagram) – that controls what many people would call instinct. It controls some of your most powerful emotions and it’s only concerned with the present. It makes you crave the taste of a cigarette, but it can’t make you feel the devastation of hearing you have lung cancer. It feels the fear of leaving a stable job tomorrow but can’t imagine the elation of having lived a life doing what you love. Emotions feel much weaker in the future tense.

That’s what you and I are up against and that’s why I’ve made the big move. Just because I could die tomorrow doesn’t mean I need to achieve all my goals today, but it does mean each day should be a step in the right direction.

So I quit yesterday, I start working for myself today and I intend to still be here blogging come 2085!

Once you look past the unnecessary (and unfunny) humour that they include in these videos, this really is a nice little series. They’re well made and very educational videos.

Here are the videos they’ve uploaded so far, I’d definitely recommend checking them out:

• Making Water Smarter
• Smart Grid
• Micro-forecasting

The Dashboard

As you can see from the screenshot (click for full size) the new dashboard will have a much better layout than the existing list format. Links to the dashboard will sit on the left side of your home page and when clicked will replace your news feed with the new dashboard – like switching between live feed and news feed.

Facebook hope to encourage “discovery and re-engagement with games and other applications” and this is definitely a step in the right direction.

With a little luck it might also help clear up the news feed which can often become clogged with torrents of game notifications.

Applications vs. Games

This is one area in which Facebook seem to be leapfrogging Apple. The iTunes App Store has Games as just another category of apps (the most heavily promoted category) but Facebook is going one step further and dividing it’s applications directory in half, with users now having an Applications Dashboard and a Games Dashboard.

This is a great move by Facebook. Although there’s no technical difference between the two (a Game is just another type of app) from the average user’s point of view the distinction is useful. It also allows the Games Dashboard to include more game-specific features such as high scores and leader boards.

Integrating Social

This is where Facebook’s new dashboards should move into a league of their own. For the initial launch the social integration isn’t anything we haven’t seen before but it’s still a great demonstration of how any simple service can be greatly enhanced by integrating a social web. Here’s Facebook’s list of features they expect in the new dashboards from day 1:

• Recently used applications and games
• News items: Examples given by Facebook include “It’s your turn in a game against Jared” or “The leader board was reset 6 hours ago, come play!”
• Your Friends’ Recent Activity
• Your Friends Play
• Directory, Including an “Applications You May Like” section
• Suggestions/Sponsored on the right hand side, based on a combination of paid placement and the applications they and their friends are using.
• Counters and home page placement: Bookmarked applications will also have prominence on the home page, and can be accompanied by Counters that you can set to let users know there are actions for them to take within your applications.

It’s A Numbers Game

The motivations behind this move are pretty obvious once you understand the numbers behind app usage. Apple should have an advantage in this area because applications sit on the home screen of iPhones and are harder to ignore, yet some figures show that as little as 20% of all iPhone applications are ever used more than once. Data for Facebook apps appears to be quite similar, with the Top 100 apps having only 10%-20% of users being “active” in any given month.

Try Them Out

Before the official launch you can test them out to see what your dashboards will look like using these demo links:

• Games Dashboard
• Applications Dashboard

What do you think? Will this help you get the most out of Facebook Applications or is just more intrusions into your home page? Will it make Facebook games an even more lucrative industry?

Try this – If your business has a marketing budget to spend ask yourself two questions:

1. What do I want to achieve by spending this money? Earning more revenue? Keeping customers? Getting new customers?

2. Where in my business do bottlenecks occur that stop me from achieving these goals?

Imagine your budget in a pile of single euro coins on a table. Slide each euro across the table one by one and place it in one of several pots, with a pot for each activity you’ll spend it on. As you lift each euro ask yourself some more questions:

If you want to earn more revenue what is the most effective use of that euro right now? Taking care of existing customers? Could it be spent developing new products or services they’d like to buy from you? Or improving customer experience?

If you need more customers you could spend the euro on making your sign-up process easier, or converting more casual visitors into paying users. You could make it easier for customers to tell their friends about you or improve your service so that they’ll want to tell their friends about you.

If you get to the end of that thought process and have no money in the advertising pot it’s not a bad thing!

If you can’t see any room for improvement in these other areas then it might make more sense to advertise. Only when you have your sign up process running smoothly does it make sense to spend money getting people to visit your site.

The problem is that many businesses decide on an advertising budget at the start of the year and then wonder how they can effectively spend it. A better approach is to ask how effectively they can use their marketing budget, realising that advertising is only one of the many possible answers.

Or am I being too hard on advertising?

Online video more popular than blogging and social networking

Video Marketing Tops Search Marketing as a #1 Priority for Brands and Agencies in 2010?

A lot of stories like this pop up around the web and although they can be quite interesting to read, the underlying trend is nothing new. An offline equivalent might have a headline like:

Watching a documentary is quicker and easier than reading a book

In this hyper-connected world we’re all starting to realise the power of interactivity (or it’s evilness), but let’s not underestimate the power of the lazy person inside all of us that just wants to sit back, relax and passively consume.

This Just in: Watching stuff is easier than reading stuff! A couch potato is lazier than a book worm!

Leave a comment…. if you could be bothered typing

“Ecology is a fascinating and complicated science. But if you mix it with the fascinating and complicated science of economics, you end up giving value to the things our world does for us.

Those things, in ecological lingo, are “ecosystem services” and you can actually put price tags on them.”

It’s an interesting video and a great introduction to an area of economics that I had never really considered before: