Silicon Futures

Recently I posted an article on the Sponsorcraft blog regarding the problems with using equity as an instrument for crowd-funding. It has been generating quite a bit of interest and some good comments, so I thought I’d link it here.

This is going to sound very mean-spirited this time of year…

I received an absolute joke of an email message from my local MP this year. Here it is in full:

I would like to wish everyone in Bristol West a very happy Christmas. I

will be spending Christmas and New Year at home in St Andrews. It’s a

time of year when I can relax and enjoy all that Bristol has to offer.

Westminster is far away and there are few constituency duties. I even

get to enjoy the retail therapy on Gloucester Road, Park Street, Clifton

and Broadmead!

This year marks 400 years since the publication of the King James Bible

and there were several events in the city. William Tyndale, one of the original

translators of the Bible into English, preached in Bristol and you can see his

statue in Millennium Square.

I read from the Bible a few weeks ago when I joined the congregation at

All Saints Church on Pembroke Road for their traditional Advent service.

I will be attending Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, probably as in most

years at St Mary Redcliffe. But I know that my constituency is a place

of many religions and it’s also, according to the census, the most

secular part of Britain. But whatever our beliefs, Christmas is a time

for family and friends to enjoy time together and reflect on events.

In particular Christmas is a time when we should think of those less

fortunate than ourselves. December sees Human Rights Day

marked around the globe and I was pleased to join

members of Bristol’s branch of Amnesty International at one of their

regular letter writing sessions to prisoners of conscience.

All around the city hundreds of Bristolians will be supporting charities

over the Christmas holiday. I’ve been to see the preparations at Caring

at Christmas in St Paul’s, where homeless people will be fed, entertained

and given a warm bed to sleep in from Christmas Eve to New Years Day.

However you are marking Christmas I hope you have a peaceful and restful

break.

Yours sincerely,

Signature – Stephen Williams MP

Now, I’m sorry, but what? This is the kind of drivel our MPs are paid to come up? I have emailed him a reply… I expect to receive nothing back (like last time) but it’s not going to stop me trying.

Apologies for this rather mean-spirited rant in advance. Please read it.

This email was meaningless sentimental twaddle. It says:

1) Merry Christmas.

2) Some random fact that makes you sound like you know something about

Bristol but that one of your researchers probably just dug up off Wikipedia.

3) I’m a Christian. If you’re Christian vote for me, and if you’re not Christian

then vote for me because I like you too!

4) Lots of people give to charity this time of year. I also turn up occasionally

to appear to be supportive and score political points.

What is the purpose of this email? You are supposed to be representing your

constituents. Where is the content of this communication? Where are your

opinions on recent issues? Why should I vote for you next time (I voted for

you this time!).

I’m sorry, I like Christmas like everyone else, but whilst I can tolerate

receiving this kind of drivel on a corporate Christmas card from Barclays,

I find it deeply worrying that those who are paid to represent us can

think of nothing better to say.

Right, rant over. Will keep you posted.

You’ll forgive me for the provocative title.

Yesterday I went to the Lion’s Den Social Enterprise pitching session at Bristol University. I was going to see some of the new ideas and meet some people as their projects are no doubt relevant for Sponsorcraft! As the evening wore on, I had this nagging discomfort about what I was watching. It all stemmed from the definition of a “social enterprise”. Those pitching all seemed to take a different view to each other, and so did those on the panel of judges!

Contradictions

I think it’s vitally important to encourage a bit more debate and thought about what it means to be a “social enterprise”. At least one of the panel seemed to believe that irrespective of the social good that was being done by a company, that it could not call itself a social enterprise unless it basically didn’t make any profit (or reinvested all profits into more “social good”). And yet one of the questions from another panel member asked how a startup might defend their (small, charitable) idea against replication.

These two positions can’t coexist! If a small, stable, socially-beneficial startup was doing very well with their little social enterprise, why on earth would they want to prevent other people starting up replicas/copies of the business model? Surely that would represent a greater social good, in that it creates more value for everyone? The only reason they would want to do this would be in order to monopolize the market and make more profit…

But… what is the point in scaling something and monopolizing a market if – as another panelist believed – true social enterprises shouldn’t ever make any profit? It would then be better for everyone to have 100s or 1000s of micro-enterprises, each just about breaking even and doing social good in the process!

Highlight

This was highlighted with another company pitching. They clearly had an idea with potential which unquestionably does social good. Their entire website, product and business was a social good in itself. They were a social enterprise “by design”, because the only way they could ever make money was by doing something socially valuable. And yet one panelist grilled them afterwards on how they might change their model to make sure that any profits they make get reinvested into e.g. educational courses or some other socially-valuable thing.  It is disastrously bad advice to ask them to change their model so that they make less money. Money is needed to scale ideas, and ideas like theirs need scale.

Changing World

The reason I think this needs more debate is that the world is shifting. Even the Companies Act 2006 signifies a change from a focus on Shareholder Value to Stakeholder Value. In a world of dwindling natural resources – less the “unbounded savanna” and more the “fragile ark” – unless companies create real (and probably social) value, they will simply cease to exist as private companies as they perform no useful function. There’s more on this in Umair Haque’s New Capitalist Manifesto (well worth a read if you have time – if you don’t, just follow him on Twitter – @umairh).

Sponsorcraft

This is something we – at Sponsorcraft – feel passionate about as we have the same issue defining what we do. We are a venture-funded startup, and yet we consider ourselves a social enterprise. We provide a service which offers huge value to students and alumni. If students’ projects get funded, we take a commission; if they don’t, we take nothing (no fees to register/sign up/post projects etc). Therefore again – by design – we only make money when everyone – society included – wins. And yet, we are venture-funded, so private profits will be made if we are successful. To get us off the ground will end up taking significant cash investment – and attracting investment is impossible without providing some reward for that investment. Therefore it isn’t tenable to ask companies like us to plough any profits back into other socially-valuable things – or we would never be able to raise investment in the first place!

Conclusion

This space needs change, and we need to think about dropping the divisive monikers of the past.

I don’t see any real – and sustained – distinction between social enterprise and “normal” enterprise. Perhaps instead we should consider “social” enterprise the mainstream, and “normal” enterprise should be renamed “evil enterprise”.

TangibleFX – The long road.

It’s been a long, long time since the last post. Part of this is the incredibly hard work that is going into Sponsorcraft at the moment – a company I am proud to say I am running. It’s going very well… but more about that shortly.

This post is about TangibleFX, a company I helped set up and am now an advisor to. Over the past year I have watched – and I’d like to think helped – TangibleFX go from being basically a guy with a crazy idea to a company with a marketable product, a solid team, and a network of supportive individuals and organisations.

Check out the TangibleFX video here.

TangibleFX is raising money on IndieGoGo at present – please click through and support us on our journey, and get some wicked rewards.

The Beginning

I met Lee Arromba in late 2010. He played a guitar and wore a baseball cap that enabled him to manipulate all aspects of the guitar’s sound. It was like wearing an effects pedal on his head. Even though I am only a classically-trained musician, I could see that the concept had real potential.

It’s been a long road since then. The company has been renamed and re-branded. Dan Newton, an incredibly talented DJ AND music researcher (yes, seriously) joined the team in a leading role. The product has gone from something that was cool but niche to something that is cool and seriously marketable.

Persistence

The strange thing is that so many times, we all considered just throwing in the towel. Despite some encouraging introductions to investors, we were simply too early for most to look at. The product didn’t stick with everyone we met – some didn’t like the fact it was head-mounted. Some felt it lacked control (this is simply a bizarre perception – it has far greater control and sensitivity than almost any effects pedal) – we learned a lot about how we were going to have to market/target the product from some of these interactions.

However, one thing I can credit Lee and Dan for is their persistence. Persistence is a rare quality in young entrepreneurs, who too often flit from idea to idea and never settle or commit 100% to anything. I believe it is a quality that will ultimately mean TangibleFX will succeed.

Now

Now, over a year after I originally met Lee, TangibleFX has a new product. It is mounted on an intrument or on the body. It has straps to hold it on – you choose where it goes. Rather than using a bespoke software interface, it can talk to all of the major pieces of existing music software. It’s something that is designed to augment the existing equipment rather than compete with it (for now!).

This technology is going to be a big deal. The degree of control you can achieve over the music you create is extraordinary, and it is so natural that anyone can pick it up.

How you can help

TangibleFX is now live on IndieGoGo. We’re raising money to get the new product – the MIDI-Moov – into the hands of professional musicians and the general public. You can help by spreading the message, or donating yourself.

This is technology that could ultimately change music for the better – so be a part of it and help bring it to the world.

One of my companies – Foosball UK – has undergone massive growth in the past year. We’ve grown from nothing in March 2010 to probably the UK’s biggest dedicated table football operator. We have landed major operation contracts with UK pub chains (not achieved by anyone in the UK since the 1970s) and to cap it all off, less than 18 months after incorporation, we have just announced the acquisition of a South West company – Foos4Fun – to help drive our UK expansion forward.

The press release for this is on our website – so head on over there to check it out if you want more info.

There are a few key lessons we at FoosballUK have learned along the way so far that have made a massive difference:

• Put together a team of differences. This doesn’t mean people who will argue all the time – it means a team of people who see the same problem but from a totally different perspective. There’s nothing more valuable than getting a new perspective on an old problem.
• Listen to everyone who offers you advice and suggestions (regardless of their domain expertise), particularly if “the general public” is your customer: and learn what you can. I received a nugget of gold from a friend – Bill Earner – with no experience in foosball but a keen eye for business – we trialled his suggestion and it increased our average revenues by over 90%. Finally, if you are told something is impossible…
• Don’t be afraid to challenge “norms”. You will be told countless times that things are impossible – this usually means there is a big opportunity. If you start with a fresh perspective and you aren’t afraid to give it a shot, you can make almost anything happen. The nice thing about “impossible” is that it means most others have given up.

There are countless material successes I can point to that have led to the growth and success of this company so far, but the critical successes have ultimately been to do with a team dynamic that encourages listening, learning and flexibility.

Whilst this might come across as a bit vapid to those in web startups where this kind of environment is a must – these simple structures seem to permeate every successful business I have ever encountered – from multinationals through to sole traders/partnerships.

I was recently asked to guest blog post on XMOS at FutureChips. Just a quick note here to say – head over and have a read. FutureChips is a blog run by Dr Aater Suleman, who now works at Intel as an architect. I’d like to thank Aater for that opportunity and congratulate him on his blog. You can also follow FutureChips on Twitter.

In most open hardware, the “openness” often stops at the chip edge – sometimes it even stops at the protocols that communicate with the chips. The difference with XMOS is that you can write software that is fast enough to emulate hardware – and therefore opens up whole new areas of “open hardware”, pushing hard into that chip-edge wall. Obviously it has always been true that application software running on MCUs or RTL for FPGAs can be open-sourced, but often the I/O interfaces are completely closed or proprietary, or physically implemented in hardware! XMOS changes this.

XMOS could position itself as a leader by breaking new ground in open hardware, because no-one else has technology that enables you to implement hardware functions in software. The engagement needs to be direct – with both leadership and communities of the various movements, helping sponsor organisations, conferences, and grass roots development in more active ways. It will take time and effort – and possibly money.

OSHW advocates talk about “tangibles” as being a core differentiator from OSS. By this they basically (currently) mean things such as printed circuit boards. At a certain granularity, boards stop becoming open. Typically, the “closed” level consists of tools (FPGAs), peripheral blocks (FPGAs/MCUs), and the hardware itself (everything).

With XMOS, both peripherals and tools are open – XMOS moves the boundary. No-one else can do this. Eventually – of course – the logical implication is that the hardware itself will become open, whether this is done by XMOS or someone else.

It will be interesting to watch how XMOS engages with this community over the coming months.

As part of some work I’m doing on CSP architectures, I’ve put together a small emulator of a very early transputer design entirely in Python. It will run basic assembler – and at present is in a very primitive state. Technically this can be used for all sorts of things: anything you can run Python on you can now run code written in this instruction set – which is a great target for any CSP-based language.

You could even hack a little library for Python that uses this virtual processor to execute CSP-like higher-level constructs.

It’s mostly for experimental/learning reasons, but totally public/open on Github so feel free to use for any purpose. I take no responsibility and large parts are completely untested – whilst I think I have the channel and alternative semantics right, there’s a good chance there are bugs.

Feel free to add notes on anything you’d like to see fixed/improved.

Breaking News: XMOS, the world’s foremost Realtime Event Processor (REP) company, has returned to its roots and has acquired the INMOS brand as part of a major corporate rebranding exercise. As part of the scheme, XMOS will also begin marketing its series of 32-bit processors using the transputer brand made famous by Inmos in the 1980s.

Inmos

Inmos was a British Semiconductor company, founded by Iann Barron in 1978 and, like XMOS, was based in Bristol, UK. Inmos’s first products were static RAM devices, followed by dynamic RAMs and EEPROMs. Despite early production difficulties, Inmos eventually captured around 60% of the world SRAM market. However, Barron’s long-term aim was to produce an innovative microprocessor architecture intended for parallel processing, the transputer.

David May – now XMOS CTO – was recruited to design this processor, which eventually went into production in 1985 in the form of the T212 and T414 chips. Whilst eventually Inmos was acquired by first SGS-Thompson and later ST Microelectronics, the Inmos legacy lives on in the South West of the UK and has spawned one of Europe’s leading semiconductor clusters in Bristol.

XMOS

XMOS was founded in July 2005 by Ali Dixon (then final-year student at the University of Bristol), James Foster (former CEO of Oxford Semiconductor), Noel Hurley (formerly at ARM Holdings), David May (former chief architect of Inmos), and Hitesh Mehta (Acacia Capital Partners). The name XMOS is a loose reference to Inmos.

XMOS is the leader in real-time event processors (REPs) – which are high-performance, predictable processors and allow complete systems to be implemented in software using interface, DSP and control code.

Both the XMOS XS1 architecture and language – XC – borrow heavily from ideas developed inside Inmos. “It was only natural that we should formally recognise the long heritage of the company,” explained David May. “Inmos was many years ahead of its time and without its legacy – in terms of local skills and expertise here in Bristol – XMOS could never have been founded. Many of the ideas are strongly related and we are very proud to recognise this with our rebrand.”

Transputer

Enthusiasts will also be delighted to see the resurgence of the transputer brand. The transputer (the name deriving from transistor and computer) was the first general purpose microprocessor designed specifically to be used in parallel computing systems. The goal was to produce a family of chips ranging in power and cost that could be wired together to form a complete parallel computer. The name was selected to indicate the role the individual transputers would play: numbers of them would be used as basic building blocks, just as transistors had earlier.

The parallels with the XMOS XCore architecture are plain to see. “Amazingly, Inmos decided never to trademark the transputer brand, so the chip rebrand was an easier decision,” said David May. “The original Inmos intention was for the brand to become so recognised, we wouldn’t need the trademark. Whilst the transputer eventually sold in the hundreds of millions, it became a highly integrated part. Bringing the brand back was long overdue – and we’re the only ones with modern-day transputers!”

Rebrand Launch

XMOS – now Inmos – says the changes will take visible effect from April 2nd, 2011. “We’re very excited with the new website branding and positioning,” beamed David. We managed to grab a screenshot of the staging server whilst we were in the office – click here to view it.

Contact

For more information please contact press@xmos.com or call L. Oofa on +44 117-927-6004.

Sponsorcraft was a website I created with Enzhe Zhang from Cambridge in 2008, with the mission of building an online showcase of sponsorship opportunities for university campuses around the world, giving greater exposure to those seeking funding and helping businesses locate and evaluate interesting proposals.

We eventually graduated, and life took over – as it often does – and the time to promote and update Sponsorcraft dried up. Moreover, we didn’t ever figure out the business model, and successive attempts to pluck one out the air ended in frustration.

I have now decided to re-open Sponsorcraft along its original lines – as a means to help match up creative and motivated individuals get the sponsorship and funding they deserve to pursue their dreams. I have some exciting plans to develop Sponsorcraft along the lines of its greatest value – which I hope will be to the customer and user. A business model will evolve over time.

Sponsorcraft is now on Twitter, and will be blogging developments and a roadmap too. If anyone wants to get involved and help, the opportunity is very much open.

About Time

It was about time. Long-time reader, frequent retweeter and infrequent critic of Umair Haque, I finally picked up his book – The New Capitalist Manifesto – and gave it the attention it deserved. I have taken some time to write a considered response. This is not a review, but more a series of comments and queries. I hope where I have been critical I have also been constructive – that is, after all, the point.

The first thing I should say is that Umair’s book has been literally drowned in praise – to its detriment, I believe. However, buried in the mountains of transparent, sycophantic drivel, there are sufficient real reviews by people I respect that there is little effusive praise left to add! The book is great – the author is great – enough said. Now let’s get building…

Curious Discomfort

About 3/4 of the way through the book, I was hit by a profound sense of discomfort. It took me a while to realise what it was. It was the examples. Whole chapters of well-structured, inspiring and constructive concepts were brought home and exemplified with a series of thin and disappointing reference points.

But putting some thought behind it, this is something the author can do nothing about. The examples he chose were the best available to us. And so the inescapable conclusion is that this book, and the concept it boldly graffities across the landscape of Wall Street and globe-spanning multinationals, is ahead of its time. So far ahead in fact, that whilst the seeds of the revolution have been planted by flawed models of capital growth and fertilised by decades of global decay, we are seeing only the first tiny, fragile shoots breaking through the surface.

I am looking for the examples that will make it into the 10th anniversary edition. So should we all be…

Emotional Battery

The writing is raw. Superlatives and adjectives abound, and Umair Haque lays bare his disdain for “business as usual” and his passion for constructive change like a savage, emotional 21st century architect.

At times this is difficult to handle – it can be a one-sided rant; a bruising onslaught, forcing this reader – at least – to take regular breaks and reflect on the often brilliant message – the vaccine and not the needle.

Constructive Queries

I have three fundamental elements I think deserve more attention and exploration. Any responses here or elsewhere are gratefully received.

The first concerns the model of the 21st century economy as an “ark” – with limited resources and expanding needs – in contrast to the 20th century economy as a vast unexplored “game reserve” of almost unlimited resource and space. Whilst I agree with the conceptual framing, this interpretation of the global economy requires an analytical approach to its implications and a restructuring or reorganisation (or at the very least, reassessment) of the various competing theories of economic growth. In particular, the ark analogy at first glance appears best suited to an – apparently outdated – Neoclassical model of growth. Whilst I recognise it is a simple allegory designed to crystallise the author’s point, I would love to see some more rigorous analysis of an analytical theory of “smart growth” within the bounded environment of such an “ark”.

The second concerns a cost-benefit analysis of constructive capital spending at different stages of a company’s lifecycle. The reason this arises as an issue is that most corporate examples presented in the book are of multinationals with strong financial positions and a very low cost of capital as a result. In contrast, young companies – and particularly startups – have a very high cost of capital. And many of the constructive capital concepts suggested significantly raise the marginal cost of both supply and distribution (and the cycles thereof) and therefore lower the conventional “dumb” competitive advantage of the new, innovative impostor whilst increasing the constructive advantage. A very difficult question to answer I am sure, but is the constructive advantage per dollar spent really greater than the competitive advantage per dollar spent when companies are very young, as well as very old? Are there ways we can measure or justify this, and does it change over the life-time of a company?

The third concerns us all, and is an extremely simple question. Dumb growth is driven by the dumb consumer. Smarter growth appears to require a smarter customer, or user. Is it possible that the “dumb consumer, dumb growth” world is simply a co-operative stable state of the repetitive global game of life, that will perpetuate until an entire generation walks into the abyss of addictive consumption? The derailing of stable behavioural states historically requires social disintegration. Is this now an inevitable outcome of the failure of 20th century macroeconomics? Or is there hope of applying the brakes before it is too late?

Summary

You must read this book. Then you must go out there and build upon it, rewrite it, or exemplify it. We need companies to fill the 10th anniversary edition. Not one of them exists today, and there is no better chance than today to create one.

This text is copied to the XCore Forum – click here to view on the XCore discussion forum. Please post any discussion points/comments there!

XMOS should be applauded for its recent quiet launch of its “open source project”. Increasingly, it looks like this is an organisation embracing not just the words and the gestures but also one which lives and breathes by the open mentality.

Like any organisation exploring new areas, it’s likely that steps are tentative. Those who make decisions are answerable in commercial terms, not social, and at present those commercial judgements will hold some sway. Therefore it is up to us, as a community and society to take the first steps and show XMOS (and any other company opening the new door of open-ness) that the ground is not only relatively safe, but increasingly productive.

I’d like to propose that we organise – with XMOS’ support – an Open Source Open Forum – a physical gathering of people, to help communicate our shared goals, resolve problems and reassure every stakeholder (companies, customers, investors, academics, inventors, etc) that an open mentality is good for everyone.

I suggest something like the following:

1. An open invitation to anyone to attend
2. An invited panel of people – for example:
   • Leading Open Source (+ Open Hardware) Advocates
   • XMOS’ customers(!) – not just those on XCore but some of those volume customers who stand to gain from the improvements the community can make to both source and documentation
   • Leading XCore contributors/community members
   • An XMOS “Open-source Advocate” (someone within the company given a mandate by both XMOS and the community to work with the community and speak for the community within the company on open-source issues)
   • One or two key XMOS management/decision making e.g. CEO/CTO and possibly even an investor/board member
3. The “panel” be set up with a Q&A/discussion session, taking questions from anyone in attendance. It’s unlikely to get heated, but just in case it might be a good idea to get a moderator/chair involved for the discussion…?
4. The event live-streamed on something like ustream.tv or some similar thing, and questions being taken via Twitter/email as well as from the room

I’d also suggest this event being run regularly – e.g. once per quarter.

Clearly to bring together an event like this will require the support (mostly operational, but possibly some financial) of XMOS itself. But the benefits of getting together so many interested parties in the same place and reaching out to the rest of the world for views/comments/questions is probably well worth the effort. I’d be thrilled if we could make something like this happen.

Any views/comments/criticism very very welcome.

So, MIT Media Lab is pushing the boundaries again – which is great to hear. The latest trick is to create a coherent, but dynamic brand. The logo is a set of shapes and colours and an algorithm for arranging them – so each staff member has their own identity within the brand.

I think this is brilliant (conceptually, though I’m not such a fan of their actual implementation), but it raises some very interesting issues. Firstly, how does this work with trademarking?

The most immediate answer is – it doesn’t! Does MIT really need to register 40,000 trademarks? Maybe someone should just forget about the whole idea of trademarking it – or anything like it. This is the 21st century after all. Perhaps we should all just get along…

But the reality is that organisations rarely work like that – there’s going to be a bean counter somewhere worrying about what happens when some random member of the public starts using some variant of the logo without permission. Then what? MIT doesn’t have a trademark on that variant – so how can it enforce any claim against the individual? How can it “protect its brand” (assuming it wants to). I find it hard to envisage these issues haven’t been thoroughly discussed within the Media Lab… so it would be great to get a comment from them!

Algorithmic Trademarks

However, there is another way – the algorithmic trademark. Loosely defined as a collection of “data” and “algorithm”. The data is a (finite? countable?) collection of shapes, colours, letters, etc, and the algorithm describes a set of rules which can be followed to produce instances of the trademark to be protected. This is in effect, a meta-trademark, describing the process by which instances of a brand can be created, but without locking down that brand to any particular instance.

Now, there are many issues with this. I’d be intrigued to get the view of an IP/Trademark lawyer/attorney on whether this is likely to ever be possible, or whether new legislation would be required to introduce it.

The most interesting of the issues however revolves around what would constitute originality. Is it sufficient for the data-set to be the same but with a different algorithm? Or vice versa? More interestingly, would one have to prove that a new application could not produce a result that was already produced by an existing algorithmic trademark?

If so… trademark attorneys of the world, you’re going to need to brush up on your computability theory.

Many great ideas come and go. It takes more than an idea to create a company. It takes more than a company to turn a profit, and it takes more than profit to create value. Value can be loosely defined as something that, when all positive and negative effects are totalled up, results in a positive number.

Too often though, companies forget why they are successful. Too many managers were in the right place at the right time as their product sales shot through the roof, and humans are by their nature incredibly vain.

There is a small but growing generation of companies out there who have realised they need to put the ego aside. Sure, they are going to try to build the world’s best product, but they don’t mind being wrong. Some extremely expensive products fail, despite hype and marketing. And sometimes, side-projects or end-of-line items suddenly become a massive success. What makes these companies different is that they have shed the arrogance and vanity that is the manager’s curse, and embraced the recognition that their customer owns them in every way. The customer is smart and social, and represents not only those who buy the product, but all those who might buy it, or can be affected by it.

This theme can be traced over a few decades of insightful writing, but the pinnacles of this line of thought are The Cluetrain Manifesto and, very recently, Umair Haque’s The New Capitalist Manifesto. Now, new companies are being shaped in this mould, and many lumbering giants are trying to squeeze themselves into the jeans that will never fit. But this is the way the world is going.

From the general, to the local – I’d like now to turn to a very concrete example.

XMOS is a fabless semiconductor company, headquartered in Bristol in the UK. XMOS sells extremely flexible processors, which for many tasks give the performance of custom hardware, and can scale up or down in their power consumption with the application demands. Critically, these chips are entirely programmed and customised using software written in high-level languages.

This means that in order for the company to succeed, it needs a large base of software, representing example applications and components that can be used by anyone. As the company grows, the number of customers grows and so does the size of the largest customers. As the number of customers grow, the more diverse the markets are, and therefore the wider the codebase gets. As the size of the largest customers grows, the more demands there are placed on the software components they use. Keeping up with both expanding demands on the breadth of the software libraries, and expanding demands on the quality of these libraries, is an impossible task for any company, let alone one whose specialism is in processor design.

Therefore, XMOS is their customer. The only way for this company to succeed is to develop a community of customers – in every sense of the word – who can write, develop, comment, and document large bodies of high-quality code, and make it available back to the general public, so that other customers may benefit from it.

XMOS has no doubt realised this, to some extent. So they have created  a good community website, and have tried to create an open-source repository for their users on Github, and push some of their own code-lines to these repositories. However, there has been no press release and no email marketing. No XMOS customers spend much time in the community or seem to even be that aware of it. And no XMOS customers are contributing to the repositories. Build it and they will come is the biggest fallacy of all communities.

So what can they do?

It is my view that XMOS needs to take a look at the value of their 5 biggest customers contributing back their developed code, and instead of building frameworks, processes and friendly license agreements, focus on getting their major existing users – their customers – to realise the benefits of participating in a community versus remaining closed. For there is no doubt that by participating in the community, XMOS customers will benefit – from greater skills, experience, idea-sharing, recruitment and outsourcing opportunities, and others’ developed code, hardware and documentation. Not to mention, bugfixes.

This is something that is achievable. But it takes effort on several fronts.

1. To market and explain to customers the value of participating in and contributing to a community of users, consisting of both large companies and individual hobbyists.

2. To create a vehicle for customers – of all types and sizes – to explore and contribute code. This should be done through the establishment of an independent foundation, which democratically governs and curates submissions to it to ensure fairness to everyone.

3. To ensure that this foundation is empowered in its relationship with XMOS – and retains the right to both govern itself and influence the governing decisions of the technology upon which it has a co-evolutionary relationship. In practical terms, this means ensuring a formal channel by which this foundation can democratically vote for or against major XMOS decisions, in the same way XMOS can vote for or against the foundation’s decisions.

All three need to be done for a thriving, co-evolutionary process to be set in place. Without a coherent, connected network of customers, the technology will die. Without the technology, the customers will die. Both need to stay, and so both need a role in governing each other.

My proposal for 1 would be for XMOS to recruit someone with the desire to see this program through, single-handedly and full-time.

My proposal for 2 would be for XMOS and its customers, spearheaded by the individual recruited for Step 1 above, to identify a set of customers and individuals to write the constitution for, and found, an independent not-for-profit foundation.

And my proposal for 3 would be for XMOS and its investors and shareholders to allocate a board seat to the foundation, and sufficient voting equity that the foundation is a powerful, vocal and informed force.

This can only lead to good things – and at the end of the day, if it all proves successful, you have created not only thick value, but a not-for-profit foundation with significant cash reserves to help create the next – better – XMOS.

Inspired by Charlie Sheen’s breakdown (and subsequent cashing in on Twitter!), the Centre for Computing History has launched a major fundraising appeal on Twitter for its move to Cambridge and expansion of its fabulous museum collection.

Cambridge is ripe for a computer museum, and Britain is badly in need of a well-run, well-funded and well-curated collection. Whilst the museum itself cites such important individuals for the history of computing as Babbage and Turing, Cambridge’s history is yet richer, with names such as Augustus De Morgan left on the substitutes bench! And with vast collections of barely documented manuscripts by some of the luminaries of the last 60 years gathering dust in the Computer Laboratory library archives, there couldn’t be a better time to get a well-funded museum to pick up the ball and run with it.

So, whether this particular campaign raises the ambitious £1.5m goal or not, it deserves our support in both the short and long-run. The campaign has already received the support of ARM and Redgate, and will hopefully draw the attention of other tech companies and philanthropists in the region and discipline.

Congratulations to those involved and we wish you all the best – will follow with great interest.

There are some well-known cases where investors (banks, hedge funds, etc) have been driving up the price of essential foodstuffs through sheer speculation. This creates a climate where the price of goods is highly volatile and unrelated to real-world supply or demand.

This kind of trade needs to be banned for several reasons. Without going into detailed economics, it is bad for three reasons:

1) Price increases often take essential goods, for which there is no increase in real demand, out of the reach of those who actually consume those goods.

2) Those who are purchasing these commodities have no knowledge of the underlying asset they are purchasing nor derive any utility from it. As a basic premise this is a fundamentally-flawed investment model.

3) Price volatility destroys supply chain competition.

Points 1) and 2) have been argued before, but point 3) is something rammed home by today’s article in The Independent. Here, Per Harkjaer of United Coffee explains that the hedge funds’ contribution to the price volatility of coffee is a critical component of United Coffee’s long-term business strategy. Sorry, let’s get that clear… because there’s so much price volatility, smaller companies cannot compete as they operate with less working capital and tighter absolute cashflow situations. Therefore United Coffee’s strategy at the moment is to buy and kill any smaller competition.

This is an example of a fundamentally flawed market, where the incumbent – the only person in the market with a) a reason to be buying large amounts of coffee and b) the purchasing power to stabilise and lower prices – is actually incentivised to allow others (hedge funds, etc) to gamble with their raw materials, increasing the price volatility. Whilst United Coffee continues this acquisition strategy, further price increases and volatility suits them just fine – and therefore will lobby to continue to permit such gambling until such a time as they have gobbled up all the smaller competitors.

This is shameful and as a practice this needs to end before it wipes out competition in other markets. For coffee, it’s likely to be too late already.

OK, so I saw this a while back but it keeps popping back to me via Twitter and Facebook and various other sources: 3DTV via spinning mirrors. When I first saw it, the first thing I thought was to use it for football matches. I can bet you that there are enough people out there that would buy the first version for whatever it cost to be able to sit in their living room and peer down at real, live 3D players running around a box in front of them with their mates. And once you get the volume up everyone will be able to afford one. After all, the hardware is not *that* expensive to make.

Feel free to substitute your sport of choice. Funnily enough it’s probably the only way I’d ever bother watching F1 – being able to peer down at the track and see the cars whizzing around like little Scalextric.

2011 is the best year since 1930 to do real things, and probably the best opportunity most of us will live through to “change the world”. What has that meant for the decisions I have made?

I have closed down a series of interesting ideas that had the spark but not the momentum or the team to go forward. I have focused efforts narrowly onto areas that I believe are the future. However, I constantly generate ideas (new, often dubious) and I need an outlet to express them. In 2011 and beyond, those ideas will find their way here… Take them, use them, abuse them, they are public domain and if you can make them work or take them apart – great!

In the coming months I’ll be telling you where I am focusing in 2011 and beyond, and why.

So to start – two things. One is a serious focus. The other is a crazy, blogged idea that I’d love someone to take up or rip to shreds.

Firstly, one of the successes of 2010 – Foosball UK. A passion (I’m a Great Britain team player) and to some degree an accident – but in 2010, Foosball UK has grown from nothing to one of the UK’s biggest Foosball operators. This is a company I helped found and I am a Director and shareholder. We have a very strong team, solid revenues and a cracking growth plan – one to watch. Follow @FoosballUK for updates and I’ll post a few here.

And secondly, one of the “randoms” of 2011. I think it’s great. It’s Foosball again – this time, a new set of rules, Bristol Rules. This wasn’t even my idea (cheers) – I just wrote it down. Follow @BristolRules or just have a game or two, try it out and slam it.

I’m going to follow this format in 2011. An update on something serious, and an update on something random. And I know I’ve strayed a bit from electronics: don’t worry, just for one post. Read on…

XMOS recently published a white paper entitled A Programmable Revolution, setting out some differences between the XMOS and traditional FPGA approaches, in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of FPGA developers. It has followed that up with a couple more whitepapers called XC for Verilog Designers and Unified Design for Hardware and Software.

Problem

In the long run, XMOS could offer a replacement to many multi-technology systems involving FPGAs and microcontrollers. However, XMOS does not offer in a drop-in replacement for either. The problems with switching to XMOS from existing FPGA/FPGA+microcontroller or even other pure MCU systems are on several different fronts – technological and commercial. For example, the XMOS chip:

1. Will not run the same software as the MCUs out of the box – it will require quite a bit of modification
2. Clearly requires quite a bit of PCB design reworking – not only because of the new chip but also because of the new peripherals and some of the separation of PHYs that were previously integrated into the MCU packages
3. Often requires a different skillset to develop using it – FPGA designers cannot be expected to just pick up and XMOS chip and start using it in a commercial project, even with the help of the whitepapers!
4. Requires replacing or retraining a team of FPGA developers with a team of embedded software engineers to use XMOS chips. This is complicated and expensive. There is no “whole product” offering including (re)training courses and certification.

Solution

The XMOS idea of “replacing” low-end FPGAs and MCUs in the marketing and sales pitches is, I think, a bit misguided. Whilst it may be a great long-term vision, XMOS should focus on bridging the gap and making it easier for people to use the technology. I think XMOS should focus on how it can “talk to everything”, and how it can be a complementary technology, rather than a competitive technology.

How do you get an existing team of FPGA developers to start using XMOS?

Position it as a complementary technology, position it alongside other products, and gradually take over the development and production platforms from the inside out. The second whitepaper – giving a few code examples – is a very early and very tentative step towards this. But without a physical platform enabling developers to explore the benefits and costs of using both platforms side-by-side, you won’t persuade people to give up what they know so well and what their entire skillset and product is based on.

This means XMOS building simple demo/development boards that (for example) provide a high-speed interface between a low-end FPGA and an XMOS chip and getting these into the hands of the FPGA developers. Designers should be encouraged to experiment with mixed FPGA-XMOS platforms, using each device for what it is good for (both technologically and in terms of development effort and speed). XMOS-FPGA boards offer compelling development platforms, whilst also easing the technology transition.

Anyone want one?

I recently read a great article by Andrew Richards, CEO of Codeplay, which really highlighted some important points in the next phase of computer architecture development.

Know Your Market

The first thing it highlighted was the absolute necessity to know your market.

You can skip the games bits if you like, but at the end of the day, Intel’s paying for Larrabee with future sales to games players and visualization clients. So, no games, R&D bills don’t get paid: no Larrabee.

Andrew points out that despite there being a seeming mantra in non-game-developers that game graphics engines display data-parallelism, this is in fact nonsense, and that the parallelism they actually display is far more complex. Intel however had approached the GPU design with this data-parallel view, and because of this belief, a cache-coherent design was implemented. Read the article for more information – but basically, cache coherency algorithms do not scale unless data accesses are almost totally independent (ie data parallel). You can see now where the architectural decisions were influenced by not knowing the market well enough…

Understand Software!

The second big point here that I find particularly interesting is that using cache-coherent multi-threaded programming systems is hard. I hope Andrew doesn’t mind me quoting quite a large chunk which highlights this:

But, in fact, this style of multi-threaded programming is very hard, and instead game developers like using task-parallel systems with strictly-defined inputs and outputs, and asynchronous memory copies, because that is actually easier to program than traditional multithreaded programming [at least in games.] So, instead, other GPUs use systems of separate ["local"] memories. This means all inter-core communication has to be explicit, but it also means programmers have control over it.

Why is this particularly interesting? Well, because generations of computer scientists have been arguing for explicit concurrency, local memories and explicit communication between computational elements for decades – for ease of programming, code safety (and formal reasoning), timing guarantees, scalability and the ability to compose code with predictable outcomes. And look, Andrew goes on…

The biggest shock for Larrabee was the discovery that it takes longer to implement something in software on a multi-core CPU than custom hardware.

But why is this a shock? When one looks at the application and the customers, one sees a graphics pipeline with many complex stages that each exhibits substantially different behaviour. A single processor architecture therefore cannot easily cope with this. Some stages might exhibit strong data-parallel behaviour requiring minimal, well-defined local computation and a scatter-gather approach whereas some other stages might require concurrency at a far more coarse-grained level with larger blocks of inter-communication sequential processes.

That means that if you are trying to design a scalable architecture which can handle this in software, you need to create a very general-purpose architecture which can handle both coarse-grained and fine-grained parallelism (as well as middle-grained!), but therefore cannot possibly provide optimal performance for everything (or even, for anything!).

The truth is that if you build this single-unit plus communications bus “scalable architecture”, you’re going to get killed by people building custom hardware, which is carefully optimized for the application. The main reason for not building custom hardware is that it is expensive and time-consuming. But in the graphics world, the software is complex enough that it takes at least as much effort as the hardware, the market is big enough – and willing to pay enough – for the expense of developing that custom hardware.

Dead in the Water?

I don’t actually think that the software-programmed high-performance GPU is totally dead in the water, but I don’t believe it can be done using a single computational element and a communications network. I think you need to design a mixed-granularity architecture with some computational elements using long instruction-word formats that are optimised for graphics processing and others using a more general-purpose instruction set with support for coarse-grained concurrency. And I think one needs to forget entirely about cache coherency…

Lessons Learned? What about XMOS!?

Given the focus of this blog previously on the embedded market and in particular on the XMOS range of processors, I should draw some comparisons. The logic Intel adopted seems, at first, to be fairly similar to the logic of XMOS. Yes – Intel believed that it could overcome the obvious performance deficit of a software-controlled GPU versus custom hardware by offering other benefits – one is assuming these are time-to-market, re-usable portable code, the ability to rapidly adapt to changing specifications in the game engines.

We’re not a million miles away from the XMOS proposition here. What’s the core difference? XMOS is about the embedded market – the belief that a software flow will reduce time-to-market, specification vulnerability, and encourage code re-use and modularity, whilst delivering competitive performance and price.

Well, here’s some key differences. The point of XMOS is that it ought to be able to trounce custom hardware on price. Why? Because the unit volumes sum up over the total market for the entire XMOS sales. Which means that all customers get the benefit of the sales volume for all other customers. This is totally not the case for the GPU market – there is a single market and (virtually) a single application.

Another: code complexity. In the GPU we have highly-complex, performance-critical and large software. In the embedded space, we have mostly “glue” software – code that is used to tie together a couple of different interfaces, code to convert one format to another. Yes, there are performance critical pieces of software, but these are mostly timing-critical hardware interfaces. These can be carefully optimised once to meet the timing specification of that particular interface (take, e.g. USB 2.0) and then re-used by everyone else. There is no need to keep pushing this interface 5% faster, because the rest of the world only talks at the 100% speed (if that!).

Marginal Performance Scalability

This raises the critical point about the marginal performance scalability of the market. All markets constantly demand increased performance. But the question is always what form this takes. In some markets, this means that we must run the same software 5% faster. A great example here is operating systems on PCs. We don’t want the underlying software to change much – but we do want it to run faster.

At the other end of the scale you want to be able to run 5% more software, at the same speed. This is the embedded market – yes, your phone does voice calls, SMS, now we’d like that CPU to handle the camera too. Now the display. Now Bluetooth. Now USB 2.0.

Between the two extremes there is a continuum – but the GPU market is very much at the “operating system” end. This end is the end where we have few options but to throw increased clock speed, better caching, or basically, better custom hardware at the problem. The embedded market is in stark contrast. One doesn’t have to run existing software faster, one just needs to be able to run more software. And this can be solved very easily – by simply adding more “threads”, more “cores”, more concurrent processing resources.

Summary

Basically this comes back to the first point: know your market. The embedded market is ripe for consolidation under the banner of a general-purpose CPU implementing a wide range of hardware interfaces in software. The GPU market is not.

I exchanged a series of emails with Stephen Williams, my local MP. Stephen is the Liberal Democrat spokesman for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

It irritated me that he did not attend the Digital Economy vote, so I made it clear to him how I felt. I received some very strange arguments in reply – and a week ago, sent him the following – currently unanswered.

Dear Stephen,

This email has now been copied into my family – also residents of your ward – and have shown great interest in this series of emails. Please respect our email privacy and use these addresses solely for correspondence on this issue.

I quote from previous emails you sent to me:

“The vote was essentialy symbolic to show my party’s opposition to the Bill as it stood.  We knew we would lose as the Labour and Conservative front benches had already agreed with each other.”

“Because of the “wash up” process, I had no reason to be in Westminster on Wednesday, and so I was in Bristol West meeting constituents.  If I had returned to London at the last minute to vote, then the Bill would have had 48 rather than 47 opponents. But with both Labour and Conservative front benches giving their support to the Bill this would have been a futile journey.”

The Liberal Democrats win seats because voters choose to vote for them – even in the knowledge that they will not win the election.

They choose to vote for them because they take their right to vote seriously and wish to be heard.

You are undermining this principled position by explaining above why you no longer believe in it, or why you believe it does not apply to you.

We know the chances of the Liberal Democrats winning the 2010 election are at best slim (though congratulations to Nick Clegg for the debate), but if we wish to vote Liberal, we still turn out to have our voices heard. The party would currently not exist without the sentiment of those of us who believe in putting what is right above what is obvious.

I would like to understand how someone who appears to share such passion about parliamentary reform can have become so cynical about the processes preventing it. It is absolutely essential that our politicians do not forget the youthful, enthusiastic naivety with which they likely entered politics and allow it to be crushed by process, bureaucracy and experience.

It is only a willingness to believe that anything is possible that will inspire generational social and political change. I would like to believe that this belief – not its crushed skeletal remains – lies at the backbone of the Liberal party.

I think my email speaks for itself. I simply cannot understand this kind of argument coming from a Liberal Democrat. I hope I get a considered reply.

This recession has got us a bit stuck in the UK.

Big companies and chains dominate our way of life – perhaps not to the extent they do in the US, but probably more than any country outside of the US.

And let’s remember, the US is a hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurship. The US has Google, Apple, Facebook. The US has Silicon Valley. The US breeds the desire to change the world into its citizens.

The UK does not. Instead in the UK, high achievers, entrepreneurs and anyone who dares to be different is often ridiculed and mocked whilst they try and resented if and when they succeed. See an interesting post by Ewan MacLeod for more on this.

Reports

Sir James Dyson has recently put out a report – commissioned by the Conservative party – identifying mechanisms by which we can try to reinvigorate innovation in this country in an attempt to reconstruct our economy. The Royal Society also reported recently that we need to invest more in basic science and technology education. Hermann Hauser is shortly releasing a report commissioned by Peter Mandelson – which judging by a recent Financial Times article is likely to spell out more investment in educational and entrepreneurial institutions too.

The really, really bad news – from an economic point of view – is that these guys are right. Why is this bad news? Because the lesser-read paragraphs of the Royal Society report identify that this is a multi-decade return on investment and that there will be no short-term value derived from this investment. Investing in basic science will not – short term – make the UK more globally competitive. Encouraging entrepreneurship will not – short term – fix the generational attitude (described by Ewan) that persists today.

It’s bad news because it doesn’t provide any short-term solution to our current mess. It indicates we are so far off the right track we need to spend decades putting it right…

So – if the UK is educationally and culturally incapable of creating global competition in the short-term through free market forces, are there any other ways to stimulate our economy?

Solution

Well here’s a totally mad solution. Do I believe anyone has the courage to implement it? No. But I’m going to suggest it anyway. And I promise you, it’s far less mad than printing money.

We have far too many large, incumbent, (multi-)national chains which control (and stifle) much of our industry and economy. For the most part, business sectors are run by oligopolies and cartel behaviour is common and well-documented.

I suggest we simply break them up. Force them to separate into a whole host of smaller, competitive companies. Force them to survive without restrictive trade practices and collusive arrangements. This is the best way we currently have on the table to inspire innovation in businesses and in our economy. The market can’t generate it because of a lack of cultural and educational basis. It is time for the government to step in. When free markets can’t deliver – it is the role of the government to fix the economy.

A great place to start is the financial sector – but why stop there? Insurance, utilities, retail, transport, brewery chains, coffee shop chains, air travel, freight…

We need to stop this desperate attempt to reinflate a burst bubble with hot air. Let’s get on with doing something real instead.

I was sitting on another late, filthy train last night and it reminded me of an idea I had a while ago.

How many are furious about the appalling state of our public services in the UK – particularly those that have been privatized? I suspect it is a lot. I suspect there are people who would love to do something about it, but don’t feel empowered with any mechanism to do so.

Well I had a mad idea the other day. I’m going to apply it – conceptually – to the railway network. It could apply to others.

Start a not for profit company that sells train tickets – a bit like TheTrainline (but obviously, not for profit). These ticket reselling companies *make money* on each ticket sold – I’m not sure how much it is (someone look it up?) but it’s at least 2% of the net ticket price. Now, that adds up to a *lot of money* in its own right. We will also sell “membership” for £5 a year. Non-members will have the option to pay an extra £1 on the price of every ticket the buy. And we will accept additional donations.

But we’re not for profit, so how are we going to use that cash, and why do we need it? Well, we’re going to attempt to buy shares in the train operating companies. Controlling shares.

Clearly, our own structure then needs to be examined. A not for profit entity that controls one or more train operating companies needs clear, democratic governance by its members. Paid-up members will have the right, perhaps annually, to vote in new management committees. The management committees will exert controlling influence over the train operating companies – forcing them into line with passenger interests. Furthermore, any dividends paid out on train operating company shares will be reinvested in further train operating company acquisition.

This scheme, given sufficient public momentum, could get to the point where our customers – those who use the trains every day – would effectively own the railway network. This is exactly as it should be. And in a rather odd kind of way, this not for profit co-operative organisation now fills the role a government should with respect to the railway network. We have created a form of distributed microgovernance over public industries.

Do you think the mood is right to do something like this? I’m well aware the hurdles. It’s a critical mass kind of idea. Are we – as a population – unhappy enough to want to make a change?

Just a thought.

i recently critiqued an article by fred destin for its failure to address structural incentive problems with vc firms/funds. he rightly pulled me up and asked me to explain what i meant.

very briefly (since my blog was intended to focus on tech!) – creating the right vc investment vehicle is about creating a structure that aligns the incentives – and therefore the behaviour – of the venture investors, the venture firm, and the entrepreneurs.

percentage-based fund management fees break this model, because they incentivize the vc firm to raise larger funds than are necessary, and to minimize the size of the fund’s management team to maximize the fee return. this does not align with the firm’s investors or the entrepreneurs in which the firm is intended to invest.

then the size of the fund determines the investment upper – and more importantly lower – bounds. the lower bounds are currently set way too high. these bounds should not be set though by the venture firm – as these bounds are what determines the risk-reward tradeoff for the firm’s investor. these upper and lower bounds should instead be set by the venture investor, because it is their capital being used and therefore they who should choose the level of risk-reward.

furthermore, large funds managed by small teams means increased due diligence, more question-asking, more research (which all sound great from a “risk-management” perspective but actually incentivize herding in order to cover the vc’s asses. there are many, many examples of venture firm herding (where they all chase the same industry or company) in recent years – clean energy, nanotech, biotech etc. herding bloats the industry and reduces the returns possible by overvaluing weak investment propositions.

large funds mean that failure is not an option: if you only make a small number of large investments, you frequently cannot afford to let them fail. so you continue to back them way past their natural shelf-life. why do you get away with this? because timescales for funds are too generous – you get ten years of failure before “anyone calls bullshit” (as a vc put it to me recently). this is because the processes involved in vc decision making are too opaque for their own investors and for the companies they back.

finally, the 20% cut of “any profits made” is madness, when you look at the fees the investor is drawing. their late-stage, bloated, herding, ass-covering investments are unlikely to deliver more than a few % return on average – so why should they bother even going after this 20%. their fees cover them anyway.

recap: timescales are too long, investment process too opaque, fees cannot be percentage based (fixed?), incentive for success must be higher, firms must be larger (which would be fine with lower fixed fees – also known as salaries).

the structure of vc firms needs to shift radically, not the behaviour of the individuals involved. asking the current vcs to fix their industry is like asking rbs to fix the banks.