Stopgaps

Transcript

Aral:

Wow, that was quite a segment; in fact I'll take this as well, here we go. Hi Jeremy!

Started with Jeremy, started with IndieWeb, what people are doing around the web today, and then we went on to see a number of stopgaps; not necessarily just technical ones either. What can we do today. Whether it's to address the mainstream, because we need to be doing that; whether it's supporting people who are working in organisations for change today; whether it's self-defence or whether it's creating products, or whether it's creating new ways of looking at journalism, so I think we've covered such a gamut here, that maybe the best thing to do is to start with questions. What do you guys think, because you've been listening for a while; I'd love to hear you guys talk a bit as well, so what are your questions to our huge panel. We might be breaking a record here. Yeah, we have one off the side there…no, no, use the microphone.

Q:

Hi. What do you think is the most likely business model or models that are going to carry all of these products forward?

Who wants to take it. Ben. Go Ben. So, Ben has a product himself called Cozy Cloud. So if you want to just very quickly introduce that, he's going to be doing a demonstration as well.

Ben:

I will let the demonstration speak by itself.

Aral:

Perfect, OK.

Ben:

But I want to answer because we finished our fundraising one month ago, so I had to answer precisely this question about business models and I think there's a huge opportunity for Indie technologies and that's what I would like to deploy to explain a little bit. Today, the digital economy is dominated by a few; by Californian companies, but it means that if they are dominating the world, it means that other companies are dominated and if you bring them a solution, an alternative model which is sustainable for them which makes them in the position to struggle against the gaffers, the Google and companies, then you are in a good position to expand your business model, and this is really the opportunity of alternative models to help companies defeated by the gaffers to struggle, for instance, and what is very important is that they are aware of threatened.

Nokia was too big to fail. Blackberry was too big to fail. Who is today selling a video or music online. Not TV channels nor radios. Who has recently acquired the status of a Bank. Facebook. So today, all the big companies are threatened, they are aware of this threat and they are looking for alternatives, so if you bring them an alternative, you have a very good opportunity and this is what we manage.

Aral:

Cool, that's a good answer to that question. Do we have any other questions for the panel. We have several, let's just take them one at a time.

Sam:

It was a question for, I can't remember your name, the Citizen app…Jamie, that was it, and I guess…and the Momentum stuff really, but it was one of the questions that Aral asked early on and I thought we should almost ask everybody that's pitching a product, but what is your business model then. How do you eat?

Aral:

Very important question.

Jamie:

At the moment we're self-funded, and the idea is we're working with… .we're trying to get…

Aral:

Could you use your microphone?

Jamie:

Yes, sorry. Back on…freaking out a little bit. Can you hear me OK. There's kind of something in my peripheral vision. We're self-funded at the moment; we're looking to get grants and applications. We've got various projects with Cambridge University, with Sheffield University, trying to get grant applications using through these guys as well, and I think we're self-funded for a short period of time but I think that we're going to have to assess that relatively soon. But yeah, at the moment, it's just self-funded.

Aral:

That's an interesting one, because I would love to see where that goes, because at some point it then morphs into, well I guess we're going to have to do something with the data.

Jamie:

Yeah!

Aral:

OK. Right. You're off the panel. Yep, we have a question in the front…sorry?

StJohn:

The business model for me is…

Aral:

Do you have a microphone there, sorry. We are filming this, and people behind you can't year you.

StJohn:

So I'm StJohn with Citizenme.

Aral:

Hi StJohn.

StJohn:

Jamie's the designer who's come up with the design vision for the product. The model we have is, we'll start providing lots of detailed insight on the app, so no one else sees that insight; it's only visible to you, and then at some stage if you want to, you can share that data anonymously through an exchange we're building with third parties, and that could be altruistically with medical research, to any free me data, some elements of your DNA profile, etc, or it could be to advertisers or to brands that you trust or whatever else. The critical point is that you have complete control of the data and you choose what you want to share. Everything's opt-in. If you don't want to share anything, then there's a small subscription fee of under ten quid a year which enables you to get the insights.

Aral:

Excellent, so there is a business model.

StJohn:

There's no undermining of…

Aral:

All right, that's good to hear. We have more hands going up. We have one very eager hand going up, but you're going to need a microphone.

Doug:

I have a microphone.

Aral:

Sorry, there's one here. Yes, there we go. Doug's got a microphone. Doug's gonna go.

Doug:

And I can offer to use it. So, I forgot the name of the email thing that Edward Snowden…

Aral:

Schnail Mail. Sorry, no, what?

Doug:

That Edward Snowden used. I don't think he used Schnail Mail.

Aral:

Lavabit.

Doug:

Right, so Lavabit closed down rather than reveal information, and that's because of the personal integrity of the founder of that company. We're talking at the break about community interest companies in the UK which basically have an asset lock, so you can't give assets from that company to anybody else, so the business model we've heard is of crowd-funding, which is great, but Oculus Rift was crowd-funded and then sold to Facebook, so what's stopping any of you doing that?

Aral:

That is an awesome, awesome question, and I can answer that for IndiePhone. We are going to be doing exactly the same thing, so part of what we're designing is the business structure around it, so some form of asset lock that says that this cannot be sold, because exits are the problem, right. They really are, and part of the lie is saying come join us, come help build value, help build value and then…sorry, we're done, it's an exciting time for us, we're moving on, ha-ha-ha, and we need to design the business, so that's where the real design decisions take place, or else you lose control of what you've built as well.

Jeremy:

I just want to chip in on this. Basically hearing variations of the same question which is, what's your business model. One thing that's really good that that question's being asked, like someone presents a business or a product and your first question is, what's you business model. That's really good. However, still thinking in terms of just businesses is in itself not that long-term. No business, as you point out, is too big to fail. GeoCities was once the third most visited site on the web; everything dies eventually. There's a Wikipedia page of long lived businesses, and most of them related to distilling and brewing, so that's a good …seriously, and the hospitality industry. But businesses themselves, it seems, are just something structurally about them, just do not survive; they're very unlike things like cities and other kinds of networks that are very hard to kill. But there are other models, and that's where I find it really interesting and I'm fascinated by things like the Wikimedia Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation and that you're starting a foundation for Indie and you're stepping away in a sense from the idea that there needs to be a business at all, but something it's more about something that's sustainable without necessarily being tied into this idea of transactions and money changing hands. Just throwing that out; there's more to it than just businesses.

James Ball:

None of this has to be new though, I mean The Guardian…I don't know if my mic's on, I'm sorry…

Aral:

It is.

James Ball:

I'm fairly loud anyway. The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust, which is actually a company with an asset lock rather than a foundation but it has been since the 1930s. But that gives us the issue of yes, we can sell subsidiaries and we do and that helps fund the core mission, but also it doesn't give you automatic independence from the business model. We employ, just on editorial in the main bit of The Guardian, we employ four hundred and fifty, five hundred journalists. We need to do that to do the work and that means they've got to be paid for, and so if you need the business model to work out the independence, one part of that is actually a diversity of models. This idea that one model has to win I don't really understand. We have advertising revenue. I honestly couldn't tell you our top ten advertisers and that's the way we want it. I write about who I want to write about; I have no idea if we get money off them. We get money, you know, we like it when people have memberships. We sell newspapers; we sell subscriptions to online stuff, that's great too. We sell products, we want people to be more involved with The Guardian and maybe sort of contribute to it on that basis and then we have things like the design agency or Contributoria, which is actually trying to build an entirely new model for funding journalists more than journalism, but both things; you know, you can have a diversity of things and actually experiment even within one organisation, but yes, no one is ever going to make money exiting The Guardian. Our mission is to continue The Guardian, but, you know, the business model question and the, what are you doing it for, the purpose question, actually I think are separate.

Matt:

One of the things that…

Aral:

I was going to say, Pernille wanted to add something.

Matt:

Oh, sorry.

Pernille:

I just want to say, the business model if you want privacy, is paid for. We are all going to pay for it sooner or later, and we are also paying today, the 'free' products we're paying with our personal data. We just don't know what the price is and why don't Facebook, for example, have a price. Why can't I buy a Facebook account. Because they make more money on me as a 'free' customer than a paid for customer, so I'd rather pay ten pounds than pay with my data, not knowing the price.

Q:

I've got the mic, Aral…

Aral:

Sorry, I can't see where you are. Yeah, I think Matt just had a response and then we'll take your question.

Matt:

All I was going to add is that I think the business model question is hugely important, especially in early stages, for technologies and businesses, because that is what ends up shaping the thing that either exits or doesn't or becomes a community or whatever it is, but where I think a lot of mistakes are made are when technology platforms are established with no concept of what a future model might be; it's just built because, isn't it great?

Aral:

Maybe they do. I mean, whenever I hear, we don't know, I do hear, we're going to sell you out at some point, so maybe we don't know is just a euphamism.

James:

We don't know is about three-quarters of Silicon Valley, including ones that have IPA'd. Companies worth eighteen billion who have, oh I don't know, something to do with data and we'll make some money later maybe.

Aral:

And I don't think some of the companies that are starting, some of the people starting these companies, actually understand what they're losing by going the venture capital route and the equity route in terms of control over what they do, and that's important, and maybe we'll ask Ben as well because you guys have taken equity investment, right. All right, so let's take this question and then we'll get back to that.

Q:

So, just a question following what this man over here said from Citizenme, but also it links to The Guardian. So there's the model whereby you say, you don't want to sell your data on, you can pay a subscription. But what if they do agree to sell the data on, why don't you go the step further and let the end user have a share. And it's also true for The Guardian which has Guardian Witness, I think it's called, where you can take photographs and send them to The Guardian. Now, if they get published, why doesn't the end user get paid for that photograph. So it's a question about actually taking this business model all the way to the end user and giving them a bit more control as well.

Aral:

OK, would you guys like to answer then you can also…

James:

I’ll try and just chip something in, in passing, on The Guardian side of that and it's as much as we regard a lot of our journalism as a public service, and a lot of our journalism does not fund itself. The Guardian is a large company. A lot of the bits that are relatively easy to do make money; the stuff that's hard to do doesn't earn, so the question is, is there particularly money to share on a photo gallery or on something like that. It's not our serious investigative journalism that makes us our money, but that's what makes us The Guardian, and so I think we try and think about this stuff as a conversation. We put out a lot of our stuff for free on other platforms, in other areas; we try and have that. I think what Matthew's doing now is actually trying to move towards looking for actually, if you're doing this as a professional, if you're doing this looking for an income, can that be made to work, whether it's The Guardian paying you, whether it's crowd funding, whether it's a backer, I think certainly we're trying to experiment with that, but I think with things like Witness, it's actually, do you have something you want to share. Do you have something you want to say. Can we help you tell it, and that, I think, you know, it's driven by this editorial idea, and often it's as much of a cost as a benefit, and we all have to think about the purpose for doing it as well. I don't think anyone at The Guardian is getting rich off UGC, but we're very, very grateful to everyone who sends it to us.

Matt:

I have one super-quick point. We have paid people when we've been able to sell content that's been submitted via Witness, and we've been able to license that out, we have paid people.

Aral:

OK, cool, and a quick, very quick retort…

StJohn:

Sorry, just to answer…

Aral:

Citizenme.

StJohn:

The whole idea is that you basically take the money. You take ninety per cent of the money that is earned through the exchange, and we take a transaction fee which pays for the service, so there's about two billion a year currently made on our data, and the idea is that we should be taking that back. It's our data.

Aral:

And it's not an easy thing. It's not an easy valuation as well. As an individual, how do you value your own data. An individual data point is hard enough. What is your name worth. What is your marital status worth. What is the name of the person you last had sex with worth. What is your certain medical condition worth. So we're getting increasingly into more difficult data points.

James:

Would you like to do an auction, Aral?

Aral:

Sorry?

James:

Would you like to do an auction, Aral?

Aral:

Exactly. But then, what is it worth when these things start being combined. What happens when the ramifications of those could actually have adverse effects for you. We can't even value our own data points well, I don't think, today and we are in some ways thinking, well we can get people to sell their data if they want to. I think we're trying to run before we can walk a little bit there. So, more…

Thomas:

Can I react to that?

Aral:

Yes, and then we'll take Jan and his…

Thomas:

You point out something quite fundamental that there's been a large piece of discussion over the last year and a half.

Aral:

At Philips.

Thomas:

At Philips. As a healthcare company, we're moving into a space where we're, in order to add value and create services that really help people in their recover from surgery or recovery from their disease, it's all about monitoring and it's about monitoring either their heart, their blood pressure, it's about their body stats, their quantified self if you will, which goes beyond let's say your profile information, who you are, how old are you, those type of information. We've made a very difficult, it was hard to make, a lot of stakeholders to convince, but we made a bold decision to say that out of all the raw signal that we're able to monitor, is that we don't store any raw signal, and we only store the metadata that we get out of the raw signal, so to explain that, if we're monitoring a heart, right, we can actually store the actual sound and the actual waves that come in. Instead of doing that, what we store is just saying at that time of day, this was the heart rate, this was the speed, and that's what we store. We don't store the actual raw data.

Aral:

So that it can't be used for different purposes later on?

Thomas:

Exactly. The reason why we've made that decision to not do it is because today, we don't know what you can learn from that raw data in ten years' time, and the thing that has been let's say freaking the people out that are concerned about this stuff is really the amount of raw data that today we're going, it's pretty harmless and the people in the management team are people for good and they trust that we will use it for good, but we don't know what's going to happen in ten years; we don't know…

Aral:

And about your next management team, which is also true for governments; what about the next government. Today it might be fine for your sexual preference to be known, but what if the next government decides that you need to be put in jail for that?

Jeremy:

I'm not sure there is a distinction between data and metadata and I think Edward Snowden and the NSA have shown that. You may think you're just storing metadata, but again, future use of that metadata can be as damning as …what we're describing as data. It's a very…

Thomas:

It's a grey area, but at least not storing the actual raw data does not provide that source for if there is analytics and computational algorithms that are able to extract information that today…

Georgia:

Metadata is already extracted information: It's easier to index metadata.

Thomas:

Oh, indexing is fine, but you cannot go back to the raw data to extract something that you weren't able to extract before.

Aral:

That maybe you didn't have consent to extract, possibly, but yeah I can hear that about metadata as well.

Thomas:

Technically you weren't able to.

Aral:

I guess the solution would be for like you to own your own data and then…and to go from there, but yeah, that's where we need to get into distributed solutions.

Jeremy:

Jan's got the mic.

Aral:

Jan's got the mic. Jan's also got the last question or else you guys are not having lunch!

Jan:

I have two quick points. The one is back to business models; I think we have a deep cultural problem that come up in the tech industry like doing a start-up and either just being in a start-up and being burned out basically by people who get rich off your work, or doing it yourself. It's just that one story that everybody gets told. In this room, we all know that there are alternatives, we're working on them, but in the general tech scene, that's the thing you do when we have, we need the media to help tell the alternative stories and get that into, at least in our industry, in the mainstream, that we have more smart young, ambitious people experiment with different business models that we can then all steal.

Aral:

I totally agree with that. You know, we do really need that guys, I'm looking at you over there, because as much as yes, when you write a story about Apple it gets X amount of readers, if nobody writes a story about the alternatives, and they can be written in an interesting way; some of us are really quite interesting. But you know you do have to also take a risk, I think, on us. And you know what. Everyone's going to be around for lunch; I know you have more questions, but let's keep to the schedule so that you can also eat and lunch is going to be from one thirty to two thirty to give you that time to talk; it's being catered here, so we have finger food and sandwiches and a light lunch, but so you can stay here and you can talk and continue the conversation, and we will all see you at two thirty, and thank you all for your contributions.

(applause)