Where's Wil?

So this morning, I went to my first OpenCoffee meetup. I had a blast.

For those not familiar with the concept, it's basically a coffee morning / networking event for web people. The concept was started by Saul Klein, of Index Ventures, here in London - and has now spread into a phenomenon across the world.

I really wasn't sure what to expect - how many people would be there, the ratio of entrepreneurs:employees:VCs, or even what kind of coffee there would be. But I was pleasantly surprised. There were at least 50 people around at different points, all with exciting projects, all interesting people that I fealt were good to talk to. I came away knowing a little about a lot more, and having made some great connections, too.

I bumped into Nic Brisbourne, a regular on the London web scene and one of the judges / participants in next week's SeedCamp. I'm a big fan of SeedCamp, another of Saul Klein's ventures, designed to take twenty companies from Europe and give them a week of intensive mentoring and help. I nominated ChannelFlip to take part not because we needed the money to startup (we don't), or even because we need mentoring (we don't, for the most part) but because, like attending OpenCoffee, I feel like just getting involved gives credibility and support to a great cause - supporting British entrepreneurship.

I can honestly tell you, from the sharp end, that starting a company over here is tough. The number of people that have told me to forget trying to do anything web-based here and move to the Valley is enormous. I don't believe that that always has to be the case. Supporting ventures like SeedCamp and OpenCoffee is a great way to support startups and bring kudos to the British start-up scene. Now if only we could get TechCrunch UK up and running again!

Don't get me wrong. I'm a good person. I go to the cinema (theater, for you Yanks) more than most people I know. I love movies. I mean, I love movies. But sometimes I just find the whole industry a despicable excuse for competence.

Here's my gripe. I went to see Bourne Ultimatum last week. Man, that is one amazing film. Seriously, if you haven't seen it already, stop what you're doing and go and watch it. Is it one of the best films ever? Quite possibly. But what my goat kicked in before the film even started - the anti-piracy advertising.

One of the trailers goes for a couple of minutes and features the rat, from Pixar's new Ratatouille, complaining about video piracy. Watching a pirated DVD, he says, is like eating trash - and as a gastronomic rat, trash is as bad as a poor picture, dodgy sound film to a cinephile. Which is fine. Except for a few things.



The most obvious being that Ratatouille was out MONTHS ago in the USA - and still hasn't been released here in England. Yes, that's right, US release date is 22 June and the UK release date is 12 October. I mean, what? What are they doing in between? Seriously, I mean, what? Why the four month gap? What are we, non-English speakers?

Simply, there is no excuse for a four month delay between a US and UK release. This point is further emphasised by the fact that the rat is being used to promote anti-piracy. Right now, on BitTorrent, there is a full DVD-quality, great picture, great sound release of the film available for download. Why not save myself the two month wait and just download the DVD? Far from being the terrible experience the anti-piracy trailer might have me believe, I'll have a nice evening in watching the TV - two months before I can even go to the cinema and watch it.

So as I said, it's not that I don't want to go to the cinema and pay money for films. It's just that when the industry insists on taking the piss like this, they don't exactly become their best ambassadors.

Here's my other example, and the one which prompted me to write this post. The bloody anti-piracy rat was trailing again yesterday when I went to see another film - Knocked Up. Dare I point that this film went on general release in the States on 1 June, and release here on Friday. Yes, last Friday - another three month wait, almost. Why? Goodness knows. There is a DVD rip available on BitTorrent as the film goes on release here. A more nefarious person than I might have saved the £7.50 (yes, that's $15 without popcorn) I paid to go see it.

The bottom line? It's a message to the movie industry. I'm fine being an honest movie-fan. But don't screw me because I am. Give me films when my American buddies get them and I won't screw you, either.

Twitted last night with a good crew - Ryan Block, Veronica Belmont, Robert Heron and, of course, Leo. The big story was obviously the iPhone unlock - Ryan's gottit, I wanttit. Dang. Look out for that late Sunday, it's a good'un.

So a few months ago, a friend of mine working at Intel was chatting with me, casually, about the problems that the company has conveying performance numbers for its processors. The issue is this, fundamentally: bold, single scores are easy to communicate but often don't tell the real story. For example, a 3DMark score is an easy, single number to compare two graphics cards with - 11,565 vs. 10,239 - but doesn't reveal anything about the 'real world' performance or the assumptions within the benchmark.

Without wanting to solve Intel's corporate comms issues single-handed, I decided to put my knowledge of 'business 2.0' to work and come up with a few ideas that might make a difference. Most of the ideas were pretty radical, and I haven't seen any of them implemented. But I stand by them as methods that would certainly get the job done - albeit with a degree of risk inherent in this kind of thing.

I thought I would present the document below for you guys to have a look at and pass comment on. I put it together along with illustrations from Hugh McLeod, of GapingVoid, who always manages to distill these trends and ideas down to fantastically simple drawings.

A quick caveat: none of this is intended to be AMD bashing - I love Athlons as much as the next guy. In fact, most of the document could be re-written with 'Intel' replaced with 'AMD' and the same would apply. It's as much a note on transparency in new methods of communciation as it is partisan. Hopefully you guys can respect that.



As a side note, isn't Scribd simply one of the most useful things on the internet these days? It's basically YouTube for documents - flash embed versions of Word of PDF. It makes posting things like this a cinch. I'm completely in love.

So the net is awash this morning with stories about YouTube's new advertising methods - overlaying messages on top of video in a kind of 'lower third' style.

Check the discussion over at TechMeme.

There's lots of debate over who came up with this, with lots of companies taking responsibility, including VideoEgg, which has been on to this for a while. Here's my thoughts.

One thing we do know is that 30 second pre-roll doesn't work. It's too long and it cheeses people off. Mid-roll clearly isn't going to work for anything shorter than 5 minutes, because you're breaking up too small a show - and it doesn't solve the main TV-esque problem of ad skipping. Overlay is great, but has the potential to interfere with the content visually. It also means that the only way of making money is through YouTube - negating putting the video out in any other formats.

My feeling is that sponsored content - and baked-in in ads - is the way to go. This is the approach taken by Leo on Twit and the Rev 3 guys on Diggnation et al. It provides advertising within the show that isn't strippable, and is actually entertaining and useful to the viewer/listener - the holy grail of advertising. Because it's baked in, you can put your show out in every format under the sun - ultimate convenience for the consumer - and still track stats accurately.

(John C. Dvorak is usually keen to point out to me that this actually goes back to 1950s style American radio broadcasting, and marks a full circle for advertising methodologies, given the 'turn off' of Generation Y to ads).

Here's the downside - once it's done, it's done, for the most part. There's no way to go and 'bake in' a new ad a month or six months down the line when your sponsors are different, meaning that anybody download back episodes gets irrelevant advertising that you're not getting paid for.

I find that CastFire is doing something interesting here, assembling media files on the fly with the option to split content into segments with the ability to rotate baked in ads - a sort of half-cooked dough, if you will. This seems like a great way to deal with the 'back episode' problem, although again restricts distribution to the CastFire player and the other centralised methods, rather than posting to everywhere under the sun.

All in all, I can't say overlays appeal to me, partly because I watch most of my videos downloaded, on the go, rather than on YouTube. But for the small segment of the video world that YouTube entertains - (I mean small as in class, not small as in audience) - it's clearly going to be a pretty god fit, regardless of who got there first.

So regular readers of the blog and my Pownce feed will know that I'm a big fan of Entourage. I make no bones about downloading the latest season off BitTorrent - having bought the first three seasons on DVD, and with nobody over here showing season 4, and without HBO putting it on iTunes for me to buy, it's that or not watch it. And screw that.

Every Monday morning, I fire up my torrent client, hit the Pirate Bay and find the latest Entourage upload, then go grab it. This is simple, but gets more complicated when you start adding more shows into the mix - for example, when 24, House etc start showing in the US, I need to grab those too.

I was compelled to check out a new Mac BitTorrent client called XTorrent, by the same folks that make Inquisitor, the great Safari search plugin. It includes support for 'Torrentcasting' - by which it means a feed of torrents over RSS.

So, I was chuffed when I found I could pipe in the Pirate Bay's RSS feed of newly uploaded TV shows, then just filter that in the client for 'Entourage' and bing, I could find the latest episodes of everything fairly easily.



Here's the downside: Xtorrent doesn't let you save filtered RSS searches, so there's no way to create a feed just of new Entourage episodes. So what happens when you need to alter someone's RSS feed? Why, Yahoo Pipes, of course.



Pipes looks a heck of a lot more complicated than it is. Within five minutes I made module that took the Pirate Bay RSS feed, did a search within it for Entourage in the Item Title, then piped that output to a new RSS feed - which I could then subscribe to in XTorrent. Bing! Instant Torrent feed for Entourage, or whatever other show I want to grab.

Thought I would share this on the off-chance it helps other TV junkies get their fix of those inexplicably hard to get shows.

What the heck is up with this weather? It's been raining here three days straight. Isn't this supposed to be summer? And isn't global warming supposed to make the climate hotter, not wetter and more muggy? If only I lived in on the American West Coast. I bet it's nice there right now.

EDIT: 27C and sunny in LA. Sigh.

We're currently in the process of setting up the hosting and server functionality for ChannelFlip. In the meantime, I stuck a redirect on the home page so that it points here, rather than to the GoDaddy parked page! At some point in the next couple of weeks, I'll be sticking up a proper holding page, and then the site will go live in the middle of September when we launch.

Until then, enjoy this little animation - it's a rough cut that we just got back from some guys we're working with on the idents for the show. I'm looking forward to seeing this tightened up and rolling out on the network.

So here's the debate - should I roll up to the Podcast and New Media Expo (nee Portable Media Expo) in Ontario this year, or the spanking new BlogWorld Expo in Vegas a month later?

NME has always been the traditional vlogger hangout - and this year's keynote includes the dude from Wallstrip, as well as Jim Louderback of Rev3 - but the rest of the sessions look pretty dull, with not many big names to see or network with. My suspicion is that not many bods from old media are going to bother making the trek out to Ontario, thus making this something of a preaching to the converted experience.

On the other hand, Blog World is newer, and less established, but has already got the endorsement of Leo Laporte and seems like its more likely to get bigger players in, given the size of the committment required to take a show to Vegas. It's more blogger-centric, but I wonder if that will mainstream-ise it a little more.

My key objective is to meet people and tell them all about ChannelFlip, strike some deals and make some money. Anybody got any experience at either they want to share?

I have nine of the blighters. Anybody need one? Comment (and leave your email addie, or email me, or have a viewable profile...) and ye shall receive...

I'm testing out cross posting from Pownce to Twitter. I'm hoping this will be the end of my micro-update nightmare. Which service? How often? Hopefully this will be the answer.

EDIT: Invites all gone. Hope you enjoy 'em guys!

Crikey, it's nice when a big-shot rag like Wired takes an interest in what you're doing. The boys over at the Epicenter blog have written up a little IMterview I did with them, which makes this officially the first piece of press about ChannelFlip. I feel like a proud father, or something.

Here's the piece.

The site is really coming together now. The various elements are starting to fall into place - we just got some of the video idents back from our animators, and they look awesome - I will post them as soon as we are finished for you to ogle. We also closed on some cool premises in which we're building our video studio, and we have all our content producers in place to start kicking it out. Now it's just a case of bringing everything together over the next few weeks. Phew.

You likey?

Bear with me while I fiddle with the new site layout. My HTML skills are super-weak ;)

Had a blast last night recording this week's show. Was up til half-midnight chatting with the guys, and ended up revealing rather more than I planned to about ChannelFlip. No worries - it's all good, I think, and hopefully it will generate just a little buzz around what we're doing. I have some big meetings and things this week to get done, but it looks like we're on to launch in the middle of September, which would be tremendously exciting.

So I promised on Friday I'd put up some funny pictures in honour of the six months fatblogging.

Here they are! It's a mini-timeline of my weight. Pic 1 is when I was in high school, about aged 14. Pic 2 is when I was in Sixth Form, about 17. Pic 3 is at uni, aged 19. Still no beard! Pic 4 is about 6 months post-uni, aged 21 - beard arrives and I look a little slimmer! P5 + 6 are recent pics taken in the last couple of months. Enjoy the laughs!

This article that I wrote on Friday made TechMeme over the weekend, and got picked up on ValleyWag, too. The basic thrust of the argument is this: big media has too much overhead, both fiscally and environ/mentally, to make it in the new media environment. Lean is mean, baby, and fat is splat. Or something.

I like writing these longer pieces. This one came together for me in about 2 hours on Friday whilst I was sat in Starbucks. I maintain that my quick writing comes from my essay writing days at Oxford, where I'd have to pen 2000 words for an essay in a couple of hours before a tutorial. Twice a week.

I have to say that I find it slightly aggravating that I've seen a couple of pieces of mine from The INQ make Techmeme recently, but I can't get them to pick up the good stuff I write here, on my own blog. Insert A-List blogger rant here. Kidding!

So today is the day that marks 6 months since I started fatblogging. I kicked off at the very beginning of February, and here I am, 6 months later, still kickin' it. I though you guys might appreciate a little by-the-numbers post to illustrate just how far I've managed to come, and I hope a few of the fatblogging readers do the same thing and give us a little statistical update on their progress.

First, a quick note: this stuff absolutely works. A massive thanks to the community, because without the readers of this blog across the world, I wouldn't have stuck to my programme of diet and exercise as well as I have done. The support of the community has been absolutely key, so kudos to all my buddies out there - but especially Jason Calacanis, who started this whole thing and heaped some nice praise on me when we met a month or so ago, and also to Alex Pham, at the LA Times, who wrote an article on this whole movement which I think gave everyone a bit of extra kick.

So here it is, the numbers:

Weight on February 1 / August 2: 247lb / 200lb
Waist size Feb 1 / Aug 2: 45" / 39"
Chest size Feb 1/ Aug 2:[ 46" / 42"

Distance/time run Feb 1 / Aug 2: 1.75miles, 25 minutes / 4.25miles, 39 minutes
Time exercising week of Feb 1 / Aug 2: 45 minutes (two sessions) / 3 hours (four sessions)
Calories consumed pre Feb 1 / Feb 1 / Aug 2: 2500 (avg/day), 1500, 1500.

All in all, I have lost 47lb, which is almost 1/5 of my total body weight when I started this, and amounts to almost 3.5 stones. That's pretty insane, I think. I look totally different in the mirror, now, which is bizarre. I'm potentially going to tip over to 199lb in the next few days, and that will be the first time I've seen 1xx on the scales since I was about 14, almost 10 years ago. That's a big deal for me.

I want to try and get down to 190, and then try and keep my weight between 185 and 195. I'm starting a full-time job again in September - albeit working for myself, but in an office with a bunch of other people - and that's going to cramp my style somewhat, I suspect, but I want to try and maintain the work that I've done. I'll be getting married either April or September next year, by the looks of things, and I want to look buff enough in the photos.

With 6 months down, I'm also getting into the exercise more than the weight loss. I'm signing up for a 10k race in October/November, and I just bought a Nike+ kit for my iPod to start taking my training seriously and measuring my pace, distance, stamina etc. I think focusing more on fit and healthy for the next 6 months rather than weight loss will help me get to where I want to be.

Stay tuned, I'll post some photos later that you might find amusing.