ItsDevelopmental - content + technology + people

Developing a new business proposition

It has been a week since I posted which is lazy of me as it has been a really busy week in which I learnt a lot of new things.

For three days lst week I attended a corporate dragons' den in which three teams had to develop new business propositions and present them to a venture board on the last day.

Mine was a team that worked well together and through long, hard days developed an idea which was good enough to get some seed funding - we can take the idea to the next stage, which in our case is a period of testing out some of the assumptions that underpin the proposition.

This is what I learned:

• Big companies have hugely talented people in them - they may be overseas, they may be in your building but they are there. How to make the most of them is the challenge.

• You need to go through a rigorous and creative divergence in order to converge on the plan. And then you need to keep refining, refining and refining. 

• The team must have focus so that it keeps to time, is creative and progresses.

• The emotional impact of such work needs to be at least mentioned - ie it is a rollercoaster and you need to be able to go with it. Time pressure does funny things to people.

• Make sure you have a numbers person and interrogate your financial assumptions. and make sure they know how to use formulae in Excel.

• Research so you have facts on the competitive landscape.

• Have an elevator pitch you can say simply and explain simply.

• Work on your presentation and make sure you have a graphics/Powerpoint genius. Three days' work into a 20 minute presentation is a challenge.

And once you get the money - and our case we are in alarge corporate - work out how to manage the project.  Expertise across the business is a huge challenge - how do you bring people together who are already busy and who may work in a different country with big time differences.

Video: Time Berners-Lee talks linked data

Pulling all your feeds together

Had a great Elevenses session yesterday with some top tips from @karlschneider on how journalists can track a beat.

The advice was useful to anyone using RSS feeds to follow what's going on the/their world.

My main action will be to use Twitterfeed to pull RSS feeds from Google Reader into a dummy Twitter profile. I can then follow that Twitter account to get updates from my RSS feeds - neat.

And by creating a dummy Twitter account I will not be subjecting my followers to updates from my RSS feeds.

I want to pull feeds into Twitter because since I started using Twitter my use of Google Reader and email has decreased.

The challenge of ageing populations

Thanks to Dick Stroud for highlighting the the 2009 Ageing report [PDF].

Many interesting points come out of the report. This caught my eye - there will be a doubling of the old-age dependency ratio in the EU.

As a result of these different trends among age-groups, the old-age dependency ratio (people
aged 65 or above relative to the working-age population aged 15-64) is projected to increase
from 25.4% to 53.5% in the EU over the projection period. The largest increase will occur
during the period 2015-35, when year-on-year increases of over 2 p.p. are projected. Hence,
the dependency ratio is projected to more than double by 2060. This means that the EU would
move from having 4 working-age people for every person aged over 65 to a ratio of 2 to 1.
The increase in the total dependency ratio (people aged 14 and below and aged 65 and above
relative to the population aged 15-64) is projected to be even larger, rising by nearly 30
percentage points.

The impact on the working population will be significant, especially as more workers will be responsible for looking after older people (let alone a smaller workforce providing taxes to support the care of older people).

Useful links

Age discrimination Q&A from Personnel Today.

Google news RSS feed on UK age discrimination

 

How much longer for old world B2B publishing rivalries?

Read with interest John Welsh's comments on social media. Talking about opening up social networks, he said:

Instead of being secretive; we're open. Things will come to you that never came before.

Everyone, he said, had the chance to be a 'micro-celebrity' or 'the Stephen Fry of the B2B sector', citing the popularity of the editor of one of his group's travel titles as an example.

 

I think it is interesting to note that in the B2B space where there are head to head media rivals, that things aren't quite as open as we might think. In terms of content, the rivalry DNA has been and seems to continue to drive competition amongst each other rather than openness and engagement with the audience. Clearly the commercial rivalry remains acute. 

 

In many ways the brands act as they always have done - driven by a desire to scoop the other - and still in print (a hark back to 80s red tops). Take for example, today's leader comment in TTG by editor Lucy Huxley.

You may have read in another travel trade publication [this is what we said about our strategy at TW to which Huxley is referring] last week that weekly print magazines 'can no longer deliver breaking news' [her direct quote marks but not sure of the source].

 

It is the kind of comment you might make if you're regularly beaten to the scoops - but it was news to us here at TTG.

 

We're conscious of how the internet has changed the media landscape, but we consistently

break news in our print edition that gets delivered to your doors.

Aside from being a negative response to TW's plans and refresh of the print product Huxley is tapping into this highly competitive, head to head way of being – the old world rivalry DNA. Will the audience care about how we cover things when and where? Not as long as they get what they need - and metrics tell us that.

Fraud prevention service CIFAS slips up on member details

This afternoon I received two emails from CIFAS the UK's fraud prevention service entitled 'Your personal data held by CIFAS'. In the emails I found the name and contact details of a CIFAS member.

Oops.

I then received this email from CIFAS head of communications Kate Beddington-Brown . . .

I am writing to apologise that a mailing error has caused emails to be sent to you with another individual’s work contact details within the body of the text.  If you have recently received an email from CIFAS with the subject line “Your personal data held by CIFAS”, then please delete it from your system.

The work contact details that were included in error in these emails were limited to three individuals who were on our mailing list.  These three individuals have been contacted and we have taken the necessary steps to rectify the situation.

I can categorically state that your details have not been shared or compromised and confirm that your own work contact details have not been sent to anyone.

Please accept our sincere apologies for this situation which we are taking very seriously.

I tried to call Kate to ask what had happened and how many people received the emails in error. Got the answerphone and no one is in until tomorrow.

I await the response, but of all the organisations to  send out such an email . . .

Video: Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger on future of journalism

Alan Rusbridger on the Future of Journalism from Carta on Vimeo.

Really interesting video from The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger as part of an interview (in German) 

Don't judge success on what you did yesterday

Was reading this piece on regional theatre last night and was delighted to find out how good the theatre scene is supposed to be in Bristol as it is just down the road from where I live.

Aside from developments on stage, I was struck by this quote from Bristol Old Vic's new executive director Emma Stenning on how theatres are reinventing themselves.

Stenning says that too many theatres believe planning a business means "deciding today what they are going to do tomorrow. Theatres are then encouraged to judge their success or failure on whether they actually did what had been decided. A more useful way to plan is to build an organisation that has the flexibility to respond to good ideas. The trick is to keep the organisation very nimble. We will run every project as if it is its own small business".

It's a very important point about how organisations judge their success. And how they stay 'nimble'.

Video: 40 inspirational speeches in 2 minutes

Thanks to @Emmamaier for pointing me in the direction of this site. I like the video cut by Matthew Belinkie at overthinkingit.com. Lots of men delivering speeches . . .

The death of local journalism debate

Interesting discussion sparked by Henry Winter. Lots of good comments. Seriously, how great are local papers?