Bubble 2.0?

Somewhat outside the education networking zone, I spent last Monday evening surrounded by entrepreneurs, CTOs and investors at a Mobile Monday London event. All discussing the imminent (or otherwise) collapse of the web technology bubble. There’s a review on Tom Hume’s site and full podcast soon to arrive.

Coming from the BETT show last week it was a bit of a culture shock. I was about to post on the dearth of mobile technologies at BETT. Apart from us and Handheld Learning (oh and lots of laptops around Tomorrow’s Learners Today with Prof Heppell) it was all about bolting computers down and point’n'click teaching solutions (whatever that means it doesn’t sound like facilitating enquiring learners).

Back at Momo London, Sam Sethi got the prize for the first mention during the evening of Web3.0 and an audience member cited MySpace as a marketing strategy. My personal take-home was a recurring theme around skills and ambition.

The expressed view of the evening’s panel was that a rounded team (preferably with previous experience) was much better than a really cool idea and flash business plan but no experience. It is also notable that although the panel comprised several successful entrepreneurs and investors, it was their failures and subsequent bounce-back that was valued in discussion. Where in our formal school system do we encourage failure, and how to handle it, as a learning process?

Outside my formal activities with Futurelab I’m an adviser to a Young Enterprise group. They’re discovering the hard way that running a small start up business is incredibly hard work (they’ve just discovered VAT and Corporation Tax)! They’re also having great fun making their products, advertising them on their company website, selling to anyone who goes near their stall at trade events, and working as a team. They’ve imported raw materials from overseas, dabbled with e-commerce, balanced the quantity vs. quality problem and are making money. They’ve even had to consider investor relations as they’ve been selling ordinary shares in their company to teachers and parents. What a preparation for being an entrepreneur!

Azeem Azhar (Reuters), Madhuban Kumar (Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures) and Sam Sethi (Vecosys) all talked about the falling cost of starting up a profitable new business. Open Source and the many software tools that now exist mean you can build a virtual product very quickly and cheaply, but of course so can everyone else. Unless you’re investing in deep technology innovation then the loose consensus was that real revenue (cash flow, not Adsense or hoping to get bought by Google) and a ’sorted consumer experience’ (to paraphrase Jan Kuczynski, Wireless World Forum) could deliver an experienced team significant business opportunity without the huge investments of the VC community (leaving more or all of the equity for the founders).

Well no one’s forcing people to buy stock from AccessorMe (they’ve quickly saturated the sibling, parent and teacher market), so they’ve got a consumer experience that’s delivering positive revenue. They’re beginning to come up against problems around scalability and sustainability but they’ve lasted longer than many businesses.

Although I and the other business advisers are on hand to guide them out of danger (e-commerce and Paypal is a recurring issue), we don’t give them ’solutions’ or tell them what to do next. They own the company, they’re deciding what to do next and identifying what know they don’t know, we’re really there to help with the bits they don’t know they don’t know (to borrow from D Rumsfeld - found on wikiquote).

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