Firestarters, funded and hosted by Google, curated by Neil Perkin, continues to deliver inspiration in spades. Or buckets, actually. A bucket holds more than a spade.

Tonight’s event was about entrepreneurship, and featured David Hieatt (of Howies, The Do Lectures, and now Hiut Jeans), that Toby Barnes (of Mudlark, Playful, Chromaroma), and that Adil Abrar (of Sidekick Studios, The Amazings, and Buddy).

I’ve just noticed, they’ve all got three things… it must MEAN something…

They were all fantastically inspiring, and as always inspiring speakers like that make me itch that I’m not doing enough. But back to that in a moment.

Now, if you’d asked beforehand what I thought would be the theme of the evening, it wouldn’t have been love. But it very, very clearly was…

these are approximate quotes… I wish there was a punctuation mark for “I think they said something like this”…

“You’ve got to love your product, and you’ve got to love your customers… Start something that you love, that’s how others will love what you do” – David Hieatt

“Design something for an audience of one, and make it great so they love it… the quality and love it’s made with will attract others” – Toby Barnes

“Do something you love with the people you love” – Adil Abrar

Two thoughts are rumbling up as a result on the train home. Both based on particular words.

The first is bootstrapping. Used in all sorts of forms around startups, Minimum Viable Product, lean startups, pretotyping. Basically to make a business work without massive injection of funds at the beginning. And that’s fine.

I do wonder if there’s another word that goes alongside it, which works better as a term than ‘lifestyle business’ – the temporal equivalent to bootstrapping is lifestrapping: to make a business work without massive injection of time.

Back to my point before: when you’re a “one-man studio” (a German magazine called PAGE called Smithery that, and I am flattered and grateful and will STEAL IT), there’s no point getting itchy about wanting to ‘do more’. You just have to ‘do better’.

Maybe it’s time to get round to reading (on the irony) things like The Four Hour Work Week? Alternative & additional suggestions welcome.

Second point: the very fact I was surprised about the word love being used so much makes me think the word entrepreneur has taken a bit of a battering in my head. My perceptions of it have been shifted.

Maybe it’s partially to do with ‘Silicon Roundabout’ up there in Shoreditch; yes there are people who love what they do, and invest love and commitment in making a great thing.

But there are also a lot of people who just love ‘being an entrepreneur‘. They don’t care what they do, just as long as some VCs come along and give them money for it. That doesn’t strike me as way to build a business or an economy to last.

Then there’s pivot, a word that has troubled me a little in the context of all of this too. Sure, improve, tweak, change direction. How does a business pivot away from doing the thing it loves?

But perhaps tonight Adil got close to an answer to that, with his idea that whilst “the vision changes, the values remain the same”.

So really, as a synopsis of all three speakers, make sure that the thing you love is the problem you’re trying to solve for the people you love.

Or something.

It’s been a bit quiet on here of late.  Apart from awesome work projects, and a trip to The Story, my brother Andrew and I have been writing a paper on The Future of Planning in 2020, for the Admap 2012 Prize.

It’s been a lot of fun, and reminded me of the pressures and joys of writing pieces for the IPA Excellence Diploma.

It reminded Helen of that too, as she spent hours on sunday proofreading and suggestion a shift in emphasis… “never again…” were the last words she said on the matter.

Anyway, I won’t give the highlights away, but save to say we’ve talked about the shift from Make People Want Things to Make Things People Want, how that can be underpinned by robots taking on a much greater share of what ‘planning’ is currently, and therefore changing the potential of what planners themselves are freed up to achieve.

A lot of it is grounded in Stephen King’s 1989 paper ‘The Anatomy of Account Planning”, in particular this idea…

“I believe in fact that the most fundamental scale on which to judge account planners is one that runs from Grand Strategists to Advert Tweakers.  And that nowadays there are rather too many agencies whose planners’ skills are much too near the advert-tweaking end of the scale”

Stephen King

I’ll share the paper here in full when I can.

In the meantime though, Andrew and I are running a little experiment alongside the essay.

We’re using one of Philter Phactory’s Weavrs to discover what the future of planning might be…

Weavrs, if you’ve not come across them before, are “personality based social-web robots”.  Basically, you can create characters based on various inputs that blog and tweet about where they go, what they experience, and what’s interesting them.

(I’ve been running one called Autosmithery for a while now, and it comes back with a bizarre mix of things, some of which are really on-brief and interesting, and other stuff that is just weird…)

Given the idea behind our paper, we couldn’t resist creating a robot to answer the question ‘What Is The Future Of Planning?’.

He’s called ‘Stephen K’.

We worked with David Bausola at Weavrs to use the contents of King’s paper and ours as a basic infusion for the Weavr, and then linked it up to some tasty delicious RSS, to see where it goes and what it finds.

A little scarily, amongst the first things it did were choose a refresh colour scheme for the blog called “Corporate Strategy”, find an analysis of the use of multilingual social media, and it found itself an iPhone on eBay… tooling up for the future, clearly.

Anyway, you can follow his progress on twitter…

https://twitter.com/#!/IamStephenK

…or of course on his blog…

http://iamstephenk.weavrs.info

It might be useless, it might be amazing, it’ll probably be somewhere in the middle, but at the very least it’ll be very interesting to see what happens.

Thank you everyone else who helped us form and shape the paper: Toby Barnes, Paul Dyson, Mark Earls, Ross Farquhar, Nick Kendall, Karl Weaver… and sorry to anyone I’ve forgotten… :-/

The Shins are one of my favourite bands.  But they haven’t released anything in five years.  James Mercer went off and did the whole Broken Bells thing with Dangermouse.  Which was great.  But wasn’t The Shins.

Isn’t it nice when bands come back after ages?

Here’s the first song I’ve heard from it…

Anyway, they’ve clearly been paying a no attention to the New Aesthetic, because there has never been such a skeuomorph-laden experience.  Ever.  I know some folk who will hate it relentlessly for that very reason.

For instance, this is the site to launch that first single off the album (not that it is a single, because who releases singles now… it’s just a song that escaped).

Yes, you have to click that wee play button.  Yes, the other buttons work.

And yes… the rewind play plays the song backwards.

And then… there’s this video for a B-side…

The Shins: “September” (b-side of “Simple Song” 7”) from Record Store Day on Vimeo.

Anyway, I’m glad they’re back.  The songs are excellent.

But the theme is just a bit achingly pleased with itself.

Oh, they’re from Portland, you say…?

This grabbed my attention the other day, from this article on the New York Times Dealbook site (via Ana Andjelic)

“Facebook counts as “active” users who go to its Web site or its mobile site. But it also counts an entire other category of people who don’t click on facebook.com as “active users.” According to the company, a user is considered active if he or she “took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party Web site that is integrated with Facebook.”

Come again?

In other words, every time you press the “Like” button on NFL.com, for example, you’re an “active user” of Facebook. Perhaps you share a Twitter message on your Facebook account? That would make you an active Facebook user, too. Have you ever shared music on Spotify with a friend? You’re an active Facebook user. If you’ve logged into Huffington Post using your Facebook account and left a comment on the site — and your comment was automatically shared on Facebook — you, too, are an “active user” even though you’ve never actually spent any time on facebook.com.”

Which made me wonder if it’s an unintentional Ponzi scheme?

An Attention Ponzi.

A traditional Ponzi scheme is one that “pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation“.

If every investor asks for their money back, there’s not nearly enough in the pot to cover it, and the scheme is exposed, and collapses.

Now, if Facebook really does calculate “active daily users” as suggested in the NYT article above, it’s an attention Ponzi.

The currency is attention. Facebook shows ‘investors’ that they have a large pot of attention. But that includes attention they themselves contributed, or it’s the attention provided by past ‘investors’.

By showing companies the tremendous “active daily users” figures, they fan the flames of interest – ‘they have cornered the market in attention’, thinks the company, ‘so we’ve got to be on there, in amongst it, getting some of it’.

They do this through advertising, or through social projects of their own.

If you are running social projects on Facebook, it’s common practice to put a like button everywhere on your own site, linked to your own Facebook page.

So people are logged in to Facebook when they are on your site, but they then count as being “active daily users” if they send an action back to Facebook.

The ‘attention pot’ gets bigger, the next company are attracted in the same way, and you are convinced that it’s becoming a more important site, because the “active daily users” figures keep going up and up.

Now, by and large every tech firm is guilty of manipulating their figures to look better. It’s how the market works, it seems.

What matters specifically in the case of Facebook is what proportion of “active daily users” actually visit Facebook, and can be advertised to, or are in ‘circulation’ enough on the site to be useful to companies undertaking social projects there.

It matters for investors in the forthcoming IPO, as they should know how Facebook plans to make money from the users, and it matters for companies using Facebook, as it would give them a sense of how important Facebook really is for a given audience they’re looking to connect with.

It’s certainly an area that will continue to get a lot of attention. Wherever it’s counted.

It’s been a bit quiet on Plumpton Mornings of late.  Lots of excellent projects keeping me busy.  But whilst I regather thoughts and executions after December’s test auction, here’s an interim work…

…there’s a charity raffle in Plumpton this weekend, so I decided to donate something.

With Charlie’s expert graphic design help (he’s another Plumpton Green’er), this is what we’ve done.  Name for the piece as yet to be decided.

We might do a limited series of prints on a similar theme, but additionally pulling on some other interesting data sources to sit alongside the pictures.

These wouldn’t be auction pieces, but just to buy and raise money for 50/50 good‘s East Africa Famine Appeal.

If you think you (or your company or agency or whatever) might want to buy one, then just leave your details here.  I’ll send out a note to the people on that list first about how to buy them.