To Uber or not to Uber - that is NOT the question.

Everyone has them. Moments when they realise they were / are wrong. Moments that form in the brain, when several synapses to their thing and shock us into a new thought / or a new realisation.

One of those happened to me this morning, just now, whilst I was reading a blog by Seth Godin about the future of self driving cars and in passing about what role Uber might play in this.

You see for a while I have been very much anti Uber (the American tech leviathan which will destroy the taxi industry - that we at Justaxi the Manchester taxi comparison app were trying to save.)

One of the reasons I was against them is ideologically and another political and very sensible.

The first - is that should we really be building tech which simply replaces industries so that someone somewhere can make more money.

The leveling of the market place being great for those that profit from it, giving them (but no one else) more and more money.

The second - is that Uber and many of their like i.e. massive billion pound corporations that use clever tech to make even more money, pay their shareholders millions, and ruin small parts of the

economy - do so without paying much (or any tax) to the places their are exploiting  i.e. Uber will take billions out of the UK economy and not pay as much tax here as many would like or see as fair like many others like Amazon etc.

As Amazon, bless it, over the last four years, Amazon has generated £23bn in British sales - how much does it pay in tax? Around £10m through corporation tax in a decade. 

According to the Guardian, the £4.2m Amazon paid in tax in 2013 is just 0.1% of Amazon's UK revenues in 2013. For the whole piece and more about figures - read here. 

The tax argument is therefore a good one. But the reason for my change of mind / heart is nothing to do with now or with tax but with the future and which version of it I would rather we got.

In Seth's Blog he puts it this way

"Like all innovations, the death of the non-autonomous vehicle is not all upside. The car industry gets mostly commodified, jobs are shifted and disruptions occur. Privacy for teenagers, ordinary citizens and bank-robbers-making-an-escape disappears. The suburbs become even less attractive to some people. But just as you can't imagine a city scene where just about everyone isn't looking at their smart phone and swarming in the virtual cloud, it's going to be a whole new cityscape once cars retreat from their spot at the top of the attention/command chain.
One way this might happen: Certain models will be labeled as Uber-compatible (or whatever network is in place). Buy that car and with a few clicks, the car starts earning its keep. When you're at work or asleep or otherwise engaged, it moonlights and drives other folks around. The combination of security cameras in your car and rider registration pretty much guarantees that your car isn't going to come back wrecked. It's not hard to imagine organizations building fleets to profit from this (a medallion replacement) but it also becomes economically irresistible to the individual as well."

Now suddenly the whole thing makes sense. The end game comes in sight. 

Which is one that I rather like. The idea that your car can make money for you, be shared by people, you can become the taxi company, you can make money yourself from the outlay of transporational expense. Now that end game seems a lot more social - almost socialist... i.e. the means of production is placed purely and surely in the hands of the worker (e.g. us.)

Whether or not it is Uber that runs the network or Google (who owns half of it by the by) is really not important.  

What is important is that I realise that the end game might have to be worth the problems of today.

Oh and thanks to Tom Auld, a good and old friend of mine, who started my realisation with a good old fashioned discussion over a beer or three last weekend. He started bending my thoughts with some solid reasoning. Seth just did the rest. Uber aint that bad after all - now if we could just get them to pay tax in the UK.  

Which is a decision that we all would take with the government. If they ever let us. 

Stop checking your phone and write a single sentence a day.... nice idea.... but does Greg miss the point with his article?

In a great article written by a smiley face author called Greg Mckeown (who I rate) he writes... 

"In a recent study reported in TIME magazine, people check their phone on average 110 times a day. Some people checked it as much as 900 times a day; that’s once every minute of every waking hour of the day." 

Now don't get me wrong - BUT if your job is to be on the phone i.e. a PR person or social media person or a marketing person or a sales person - then perhaps this is no bad thing. 

Also IF mobile phones have made your work easier or more aptly made you able to DO more things because you keep checking it - then actually the rest of this article might be a little silly. 

But I put it here to show something. I will also let Greg continue...(as he is right about many things.) 

"Given those extremes, I don’t believe it makes me a Luddite to suggest it may be more productive – and certainly more Essentialist - to reach for a pocket notebook or journal before your phone. 

Here are a few reasons why:

1. Checking your phone forces you to be reactive than pro-active; it creates pressure to respond to texts and emails when other people want you to, rather than when it’s convenient for you.

I SAY - Absolutely right and we all feel that especially when linked into work. 

Writing in your notebook puts you back in control of your communication; it gives you the chance to craft your reply instead of shooting it off reactively, and respond on your schedule, not someone else’s

2. Checking your phone fills you with that frenetic, compulsive feeling that you might be missing out.

I SAY - FOMO - noooo waayyyyy - errmmmm yes way - the all too modern phenomena. 

Writing in your notebook has a calming influence.

3. Checking your phone tricks you with the trivial; it fools you into thinking that news and updates from the virtual world are more important than what’s right in from of you in the actual world right now.

I SAY - OK

Writing in your notebook reminds you of what’s important right now.

4. Checking your phone fills every spare moment with noise.

I SAY - Define noise... 

Writing in your notebook provides you time to think and reflect.

"Of course, the benefits of writing in a notebook or journal go beyond the realm of productivity. One of my grandfathers died a few years ago. Upon going through his things, I was struck by what I found, or rather what I didn’t find: not a single journal or notebook or any kind of written record about the life he had lived. Contrast this with my other Grandfather in England who wrote a single line in his journal every couple of days for some fifty years."

I SAY - Why do you think I blog - and why is the paper (which can be damaged / lost or stolen better than digital which can be stored forever in the cloud of Google, cue angels singing...)  

"What I am saying is that if we want to leave a legacy to those who come after us one powerful way to do it is to write a journal. David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian has said if you want to become the voice of your generation, write a journal entry every day and then gift it to your local university library at the end of your life. Voice of your generation or not, I believe that a journal is one of the most precious gifts you can give to those you leave behind."

I SAY - Seriously I would doubt this - I think universities and libraries - let alone university libraries have more important things to house, to do and to think about than 1000 people a day giving their precious memories to them in leafy tomes of personal and perhaps therefore socially nonsensical sentences to them.  

Greg continues... 

"If journaling sounds too daunting a task for you, I suggest the following simple way to get started:

Write One Sentence Every Day. 

If you want to create this new Essentialist habit, use this counter- intuitive yet effective method: write less than you feel like writing. Typically, when people start to keep a journal they write pages the first day. Then by the second day the prospect of writing so much is daunting, and they procrastinate or abandon the exercise. 

So instead, even if you feel like writing more, force yourself to write no more than one sentence a day. Apply the disciplined pursuit of “less but better” to your journal."

Well...I SAY, I never.... now this IS something I can do and I like - The irony being, of course, I will do this on my iPhone. Now let's make an app for that. 

You see the point here is that bemoaning mobile phones and technology totally misses a key point. Technology enables. That's all. If people want noise they can turn on the radio, the TV, heck even their own minds and talk to others. People who want drama create dramas. 

This article by blaming the mobile phone misses how much the mobile phone could really help the idea that the article is promoting. 

For example, I now meditate more than ever thanks to the mobile app CALM. Which I love and suggest you get - even if you are reading this 50 years from now. Which reminds me.... 

Just did my five minutes - you can check out the best website ever on http://www.calm.com. 

My one sentence today is - "Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change."

Which I will tweet now - which is kinda like writing isn't it? 

Funny isn't it how it sometimes takes an "outsider" to make you realise something great about your home town.

A couple of days ago - a friend of a friend had some family from outside of the UK come and visit them.

So they did what you do. They took them on the "tourist" places are where they live. And they were amazed at how beautiful their town and the surrounding countryside really were.

This happens more than we think - and I believe that this same process (which I am sure has a clever psychological name) is what drives us to miss out on local opportunities and the potential of our young people (not just in this country but in the world...) i.e. we see them everyday and we take them for granted.

It's why we don't just book a taxi and go to a local hotel or tourist spot every weekend. However, "oustiders" not having this mental fatigue (which might be the term) they can see the opportunity and the brilliance that we miss every day.

The local dingy pub with weirdos in it, you always walk past, for someone from abroad might be an amazing cultural experience mixing with people telling stories and living the real British lives they read about in books.

Anyhoo, the point of this is not about cultures per se, it is more that a Swedish company (and I am rather proud that it is a Swedish company as I am genetically half Swede) has some to Manchester as, as their CEO puts is

"Manchester is a fast-growing, forward-looking city that has invested in developing its reputation as a global digital and creative hub."

This company  PlaygroundSquad, has come to Manchester and The Sharp Project, as "The UK is the centre of game development in Europe so moving our model over here is a natural step for us..... Manchester is
an exciting place to be and we are delighted to bring our specialist training to the city and reach out to the talented young people who live here. We want to mirror our success in Sweden and create jobs and employment in this growth sector here in the UK."

So the Swedes want to bring growth to the UK through teaching our young people how to make computer games isn't it amazing how it takes someone else to support the next generation of UK gaming creation.

By the by the gaming sector is one of the fastest growing sectors in the world, something that could help the UK economy and something I am rather passionate about.... so this is said for a reason.

All this is possible due to The Sharp Project director Sue Woodward OBE who is rather wonderful herself.

She is quoted in said: "It's fantastic to have persuaded Magnus to make Manchester the first overseas home for PlaygroundSquad. They were targeted as they are world leaders in gaming training. This is the final part of The Sharp Project jigsaw.

"Five years ago we planned to introduce a games facility to the building. It was always part of the plan, so it’s great to see it come to fruition. The Sharp Project is fast becoming a hub for gaming and skills associated with all kinds of creative digital content from network drama to forensics.

"Our talented tenants are producing material for a multi-platform world, a world that once was so fragmented but one we have created under one roof. That was the whole point of The Sharp Project - to shift the north from analogue content to converged media. Job done."

Job done indeed Sue, job done. It doesn't take an outsider to see that.

I wonder if they will be making mobile games? Now that is something Manchester needs to realise the potential of.... see a lovely blog about when I met Ian Livingston with Dojit games a year ago.

And perhaps more importantly what he is now doing since then.... spoiler alert he is starting a school.  

13 Things I will teach my daughter about the world...

A really lovely blog from Dharmesh Shah Founder and CTO at HubSpot - a company I love - and a chap who I met at SVCuk a couple of years ago.

I really nice chap to be honest with you.

Here he lists 12 things he wants to teach his 3 year old son. I add one in here as important to be. As 13 things I WILL teach my daughter (who is also only 3..) 

1. Gather knowledge… but also gather knowledgeable people.
You can't know everything. But you can know enough smart people that together collectively know most of what you need to know.
Work hard on getting smarter. Work harder on getting smart people on your side.
Together, you will be able to do almost anything.

2. The memory of work disappears like the memory of pain – all anyone remembers are results.
Experience is valuable – to you. Experience yields skill and skill helps you do things and get results. These results are what other people care really care about.
Focus on racking up achievements, not just years of service.

3. Take responsibility for outcomes.
Occasionally someone will intentionally try to screw you, but a lot more often you’ll do things to screw yourself. Learn to take responsibility when something doesn’t go well… and then to immediately start thinking of ways you will do better next time.

Hopefully she is sharing the achievement of this lesson.

4. Share credit for accomplishments.
Most of your great accomplishments will be the result of both your efforts and those of others. Learn to recognize this -- and share the credit.
You will also find that..

The more you are willing to share credit for great accomplishments, the more you will achieve great things.

5. Celebrate your achievements, then move on.
When you achieve something, it's important to take a moment, reflect — and even celebrate sometimes. But, don't bask too long in the glow of success. Be gracious, be appreciative, be thankful… but always feel you could do even better.

6. Don’t expect life to be fair. Life just is.
You will often think “That’s just not fair…” especially when you didn’t get your way or things didn’t turn out like you hoped.
You should always treat people fairly. You should expect to be treated fairly. But don’t be surprised when you aren’t treated fairly.
Never expect life to be fair. To paraphrase Yoda, “Do or not do. There is no fair.”
You may not always receive what you put in, but roughly speaking the more you put in the more you will receive. Which is fair enough.

7. See ‘boring’ as a springboard to success.
What appears to be the boring thing to do is almost always the responsible thing to do. What seems like drudgery actually builds the foundation for success. The people who achieve the most do a lot more of the boring stuff.
Routine, rigor, attention to detail, chugging away day after day... those are the path to eventual success. Elite athletes? They’ve put in thousands of hours working on fundamentals. Elite entertainers? They’ve put in thousands of hours of practice.
Successful businesspeople? They’ve put in thousands of hours of effort and hard, often tedious work.
Do the tedious, mundane, “ordinary” stuff better than anyone else – that’s what will make you great.

8. Don’t think you’ll always get a trophy.
Everyone doesn’t deserve recognition. Everyone doesn’t deserve praise. We don’t all deserve awards.
Think of it this way: Do you praise everyone you know?

If you want a trophy, earn a trophy.

You’ll enjoy it a lot more than any of those participation trophies you tossed in your closet.

9. Don’t expect someone else to boost your self esteem.
No one will automatically believe in you. Why should they if you haven’t done anything yet?
If you want to feel great about yourself, achieve something great. In the meantime, use any feelings of inadequacy to make you work harder. Instead of complaining, put your head down, work hard and prove everyone wrong.
Why do you think so many “outcasts” wind up being so successful? They have something to prove.
Go prove yourself – especially to yourself.

10. Understand that amazing overnight success is amazingly rare. And overrated.
As Mark Cuban says, everyone envies the overnight successes, but no one envies the five years in the garage that led to “overnight” success.
And even if you could strike gold in a few months, are you prepared to manage that gold? Early struggles, effort, and desperation forms a valuable foundation that gives you the skills to maintain long-term success – and gives you the fortitude to handle adversity.
Because there will always be adversity.

11. Know when to stand-out and when to fit in.
School was in part a journey of discovery and exploration. (That’s why you got to take electives.) School was designed to help you figure out who you are.
School’s out. No one will help you find yourself. They want to find out how you can help them.
Learn to be part of a team and to fit in when necessary. Once you do, the people around you will be more than happy for your individuality to start shining through.

12. Count yourself lucky to have 3 or 4 great friends.
Social networks are fun, but your real friends are the people who will take your calls at 4 in the morning. And actually listen to you.
And actually help you.
Work hard to find them. Work harder to keep them.

13. Do something amazing as we live in amazing times.
As Seth Godin beautifully put it - “How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?”

Now let's hope her Daddy, can do something remarkable with a geo location mobile app called JusTaxi which helps people book the right price taxi for them right now and hopefully adds a bit of value more into this thing called life. 

Is analytics and apps (especially gaming) where the money really is?

Should I really go into mobile games analytics?

Today I have been juggling a lot of things. One being my increasing work load and my increasingly frustrations.

One of them being about an idea about games analytics and the fact that many UK games developers don't use analytics tools enough.

Believe you me I know this from a 3 month stint in a UK mobile games company and getting to know the industry.

Another thing worries me about the mobile games industry - is the ecology of the ecosystem it is part of i.e. mobile apps.

So this infographic caught my eye and I want to remember it:

Who is making money with mobile games? infographic

I love this and then read something even more inticing.

Which might move me into the creative part of it all once more - a great article by Karsten Strauss,from Forbes.

ILKKA PAANANEN says the best way to make money in mobile gaming is to stop thinking about making money. Think about fun instead. Fighting a mild case of flu and jet lag from a San Francisco flight back home to Helsinki, Paananen says that companies that place revenue above fun (we’re talking to you, Zynga) will ultimately fail. “It really is that simple–just design something great, something that users love,” says the 34-year-old.

Paananen is CEO of Supercell, a startup that has had astonishing growth almost overnight. It has only two titles in Apple AAPL +0.57%‘s App Store–a tower defense game called Clash of Clans and a social-farming game called Hay Day–but it grossed $100 million last year and $179 million in the first quarter of 2013 alone. Supercell netted $104 million in the quarter, after expenses and Apple’s 30% cut.


The growth curve steepens: With daily revenue now at $2.4 million, Supercell is already at a run-rate of more than $800 million for 2013 and could reach $1 billion. That would make it more than twice the size of Electronic Arts’ mobile games division, which has 900-plus iOS apps. Supercell now attracts 8.5 million daily players who play an average of ten times per day.

These gaudy stats attracted a $130 million financing round in February led by Index Ventures, which invested $52.5 million, along with Institutional Venture Partners and Atomico. All shareholders, including Accel Partners (an earlier investor), sold 16.7% of their holdings to the newcomers, pegging the company value at $770 million. That much cash at once can flood the engine of a little company, and will make a VC-worthy return far more difficult. Paananen admits the round was not entirely necessary, more an opportunity to give shareholders a quick payout as both a “thank-you” for hard work and to shrug off any pressure to go public. At the very least, it will pay for much-needed space. There’s an ever growing pile of shoes defrosting near the front door.

Index’s Neil Rimer, whose firm scored with Skype and Dropbox, is convinced Supercell may be as big a deal as any he has seen: “Once in a while you get the opportunity to invest in a studio that has some kind of proprietary technology or alternative take on the market–like a Pixar or a DreamWorks–where they can apply a different methodology and generate a stream of hits over a period of time.”

Most game studios have an autocratic executive producer green-lighting the work of designers and programmers. Supercell’s developers work in autonomous groups of five to seven people. Each cell comes up with its own game ideas. They run their ideas by Paananen (he can’t remember ever nixing a proposal), then develop those into a game. If the team likes it, the rest of the employees get to play. If they like it, the game gets tested in Canada’s iTunes App store. If it’s a hit there it will be deemed ready for global release. This staged approach has killed off four games so far, with each dead project a cause for celebration. Employees crack open champagne to toast their failure. “We really want to celebrate maybe not the failure itself but the learning that comes out of the failure,” says Paananen.

Supercell is new but has a veteran executive team. Paananen and a Supercell cofounder, Mikko Kodisoja, sold their maiden startup Sumea in 2004 for $6 million in cash and another $12 million in stock to Digital Chocolate and stayed for six years before venturing out with three colleagues to start Supercell. “It felt that we had to build something from scratch again.”

Supercell secured $12 million in a 2011 venture round led by Accel at a $52.3 million valuation, then changed strategy, dropping all other game platforms to focus on tablets, namely the iPad. The company released Clash of Clans and Hay Day in the summer of 2012. By year’s end both games had held top-five positions in the App Store longer than any other game that year, and Clash of Clans was the biggest moneymaker more often than any other app to date.

One rabid Clans fan, a Finnish government official, organized a cruise to Stockholm for his 50 Clan friends. A relative of one of the company founders had his car break down and, while waiting for assistance, started playing Clans on his phone and used its chat feature to get a teammate to pick him up.

The games attract players because they’re simple to play and chock-full of immersive details such as bloated farm pigs that draw a chuckle, fish leaping up from a cartoon stream and Clash of Clans characters that resemble Hulk Hogan or Mr. T riding a warthog. “The game should feed the player some emotions,” said Kodisoja.

Players pay the game back with money, time or both. In Hay Day, you can spend to speed up production of eggs and milk, or upgrade silos and barns. In Clash of Clans, players can buy gems to speed the production of troops and convert them into gold or elixir to upgrade buildings, walls and troops.

What's a farm without chickens?

Paananen says the games are not designed to be “pay-to-win.” You can also obtain resources through committed gameplay. Some of the world’s leading players haven’t spent a dime, but Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter found himself on the losing end of most of his Clans battles until he began spending money. “The economy that they’ve built in the game is structured so that you never have quite enough,” says Pachter.

Paananen says Supercell’s plans over the next three years include Android games, Asian expansion, more global hits and “probably” an IPO. That could be a good thing for Supercell workers. In April the board voted to give stock options to all employees, not just to the senior folks. “We thought, ‘This is not in line with our values. We should give equity to everybody.”

Now this is the kind of company I would like to work for - or even build :)

So it sounds like mobile, mobile games and social mobile games might be where the money really is - even though I shouldnt think about it :)