David J Rice

What a mouthful, it’s a worse name than techludd. It is actually the title of an event run by crea8ivity on Tuesday of this week. Now, if you’ve looked at their site you may see where I’m coming from when I say that the majority of the content is utter “Business Bullshit”. Which kind of gave me a correct view of what the event would mostly be like, mind you there were positive points too.

After some brief introductions Tom Loosemore took the stage to deliver a talk Welcome to the New Digital Era. From the start it wasn’t particularly interesting for someone that has seen the internet before, albeit I do think he’d just drawn the short straw on this one and quickly showed his smarts in the parts that strayed from the presentation topic. Especially the one about being more open about data services and apis, we can build more beautiful software, only if we become good web citizens. Rock on Tom.

From the BBC Emma Somerville talked to us about some of the different projects they were doing on the web and also some different strategies they had applied. That’s all well and good, but you are the BBC. Doug Richards would later point out that we all don’t have a radio and tv monopoly and can’t benefit from such free and available advertising. He had another beautiful thing to say that “The BBC should not be the monopoly producer of creative content it should be a monopoly consumer of content from outside bodies.” wow, wouldn’t that just shake up the industry in the UK.

We then got a talk about the New Digital Innovators from Northern Ireland from the project director of crea8ivity. This was to introduce one of the main reasons behind the evening which was the demo of a couple of companies that the crea8ivity initiative had funded. I believe they each got slices of a tasty £1 million pie and the rest was put into launching the crea8ivity project. Enough history. Here are the list of projects that were displayed on the night;

• Edcast Medical
• StreamOn.net
• Sonic Academy
• Awash on the Web
• Constant Comedy
• iGolfPro
• Dark Water Studios

Okay so one of the companies StreamOn, provide the systems for Edcast Medical, the Sonic Academy and Awash on the Web. They’ve done pretty well out of the initiative bagging all those projects, I just can’t get over the fact they’re selling “streaming video web solutions” when they are not offering streaming video solutions, it’s progressive download. There’s a big difference, please internet stop bastardising this definition. My other main gripe is their use of Microsoft Publisher which means wmv videos, if you can’t be bothered to deliver your content in universally acceptable formats (flv anyone?) then I and a lot of other users probably can’t be bothered to watch it (YES I CBA installing a wmv player!).

The three clients of StreamOn definitely need to discover the power of free, there’s no way I would sign up to any of those sites just based on first impressions. What I wanted to see on the front pages of each of them is a big freakin teaser video, then you might capture my attention enough to make me fill in the form. By requiring registration before a user can derive that there may be any potential benefit from a site you put up barriers to entry, you need to show them what they’re missing.

Check out Constant Comedy great site, great idea made me laugh. They may be going places.

Dark Water Studios fair play lads, how you managed to build a game development studio in Derry. Perhaps I will never know as you guys were swamped after the talks. Great to see.

There was this iGolfPro thing there as well, it seemed pretty cool technology but it really didn’t have anything to do with the web at all. Fail.

So that’s the new digital innovators from Northern Ireland not to be harsh but none of them are the next google, Constant Comedy and Dark Water Studios have a good chance of making it into prime time. I’d love to see the rest of them be successful too but they’ll need to change some things first.

Back to Doug, it was really a breath of fresh air to hear someone just go for it and say what they really think. I can’t even remember all of his keys to success but that’s not important, the important thing was to hear how passionately he talked about doing amazing things with the web. One girl asked a question, she basically wanted to find out how she could have some private time to give him a business pitch. I think she almost died when Doug made her stand up and give an elevator pitch to him in front of the entire assembly. Fair play to crea8ivity for getting such an interesting speaker to an event in Belfast.

So to round up it was great to see at least something happening locally in the web space even if it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to see… A lot of the event felt like being in high school during a sex education lecture by a teacher too old to be having never mind talking about sex without making those younger than them feel horribly uncomfortable. That’s what it was like hearing Crea8ivity talk about the web. Too many suits, too much back patting for a job well done and not enough really getting to know people. Crea8ivity you did a fair job putting this together but you have no hope in building successful online business in this new social web if you cannot create real world social networks. You need to drop the business bullshit and maybe next time you get such a large chunk of money you might consider investing in some of the more interesting grass roots entrepreneurship initiatives happening in Belfast that you don’t know about (I’m talking about OpenCoffee & The hopefully soon-to-make-it-to-Belfast Coworking).

I’ll be following up tomorrow with a couple of more positive points on how we can boost the web and creative industries in Northern Ireland.