Monthly Archives: August 2009

Italy, London, Video

s a r d e g n a

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[ 02:24 tuesday 25 august – haggerston road, london ]

a couple of weeks ago i made a last-minute escape to sardegna with henry. it’s more than a decade since we last went traveling together so it was high time. we were only there four days but it felt like a couple of weeks. mostly we were far from civilisation scrambling around the rocky coastline, swimming in the clear water, or walking in the interior where few tourists tread.

rather than write about the journey i’ve put together a montage of film clips taken while we were traveling. this is a medium where i still feel like a child with little grasp of grammar or rhythm. but i shall only learn by making things. i welcome any comments.

: c :

London, Video

s c r u m p i n g

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[ 17:39 Friday 21 August – The Trampery, London ]

on wednesday evening sergio and i went out to scrump apples from several burgeoning trees in an islington square. people had already taken all the fruit from the lower branches so we needed a way to reach the higher ones. sergio proposed we should take a ladder but i suggested he use his jumping stilts. this worked a treat and we came home with seven kilograms of delicious crunchy pink-fleshed apples.

i filmed the whole escapade on my new video camera. last night i edited it and uploaded it. apologies for the rampant wind noise. it appears i need to obtain a baffle. i hope you enjoy the clip anyway. may it inspire you to harvest urban fruit!

: c :

London, Wanderer

c r o w d f u n d i n g

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[ 23:33 wednesday 19 august – haggerston road, london ]

when trampoline raised three million pounds in 2007 the business plan anticipated raising further investment at the start of 2009. i duly started speaking to venture capital firms this spring. trampoline is widely respected and the field of social analytics is gaining attention. but the financial crisis has led firms to cut back on investing, allocate more money to their existing portfolios and focus new investment on ventures that are either tiny or close to profitability. businesses like trampoline which have completed product development but are just starting commercialisation are finding it impossible to raise finance from conventional sources. one fund after another turned us away.

the realisation that we weren’t going to be able to raise more capital was terrifying. i’m responsible for a dozen people’s livelihoods and the trust that my friends placed in me when they invested at the beginning. it was particularly galling to think that six years’s effort would be thrown away just as we were on the cusp of seeing the payoff. the orthodox choices in this situation would be to sack most of the workforce or try to sell the business for anything we could get. i felt trapped at the centre of a dimishing set of choices.

then one evening, after dinner with my friend eric, i had a wild idea. i’d heard of a technique called “crowdfunding” where the internet is used to raise small sums (generally below a hundred thousand pounds) from thousands of people. it’s been used in the film and music industry, but never to finance a technology business. why shouldn’t trampoline be the first to do it?

the next morning i scribbled down a one-page outline describing my idea and sent it round the management team. i half expected people to tell me i was insane. but they didn’t. several days later, after thinking through the details, we assembled the whole company and told them we were setting out to raise one million pounds from up to a hundred investors with a minimum stake of ten thousand pounds.

i spent most of july with lawyers working out how to could operate the crowdfunding process within the regulations policed by britain’s financial services authority. a breach could result in criminal charges being brought against me and craig as directors so there was a strong incentive to get it right.

finally on the twenty-ninth of july we unveiled the scheme to the world and it immediately started attracting attention. the financial times wrote a feature when we made the announcement and quoted me in another article a few days later. the sunday telegraph published a feature examining the implications of what we were doing. last week the venture capital and start-up blog techcrunch posted a story about us which brought several thousand people to our website. most importantly we started to be contacted by people wanting to find out more about the company with a view to investing.

like any innovation it’s impossible to predict how the process will unfold. but we already have commitments for a third of the sum we’re seeking to raise. i’m hopeful we will be successful.

all the details of trampoline’s crowdfunding initiative are on the web at http://crowdfunding.trampolinesystems.com.

: c :

In transit, UK, Wanderer

r i v e r b o r n e

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[ 18:56 sunday 2 august – river stort, roydon, essex ]

sitting in the saloon of volker’s barge as the evening sun filters through the trees and sparkles on the river outside. it’s an old dutch barge to which a superstructure was added in the seventies. there’s lots of light and space. most of the time volker lives on a mooring at springfield marina on the river lea at clapton in east london. when he gets sick of london he just unties and takes the boat somewhere else for a week or two. in the nineteenth century railways were often built close to the routes of canals constucted in the eighteenth century. as a result it’s generally possible for volker to moor close to a station and commute back to london for his work lecturing at university college london. it’s an excellent way to accommodate elements of nomadism within the vicissitudes of urban life.

yesterday afternoon i took a train through the grimy north london suburbs and out to cheshunt in hertfordshire. from there a short bike ride brought me to the river and volker’s boat. we chugged upriver for the next few hours. the leaden sky became progressively heavier and heavier as we went. finally they opened and unleashed a downpour. volker sprang out on the foredeck and scrubbed it down in the rain, getting soaked in the process. i always loved to be by water in the rain.

near hoddesdon we turned onto the river stort which quickly became narrower and wilder. many of britain’s rivers were canalised in the late eighteenth century. in some cases the natural character of the river survives more or less intact. in others the imposition of man was more intense and the river feels like an artificial creation. we went a little way then moored under some trees. then we walked a little way to a secluded lake where we stripped and swam. it was bliss.

this morning we continued up to roydon in essex until a modern railway bridge thwarted us. the coach-house roof was just a couple of centimetres too high to pass beneath. we considered inviting some plump fellows from a pub to clamber aboard or opening the cocks and letting water into the bilge to lower the boat so we could pass beneath. but finally we admitted defeat, moored by the railway station and continued our exploration by bike. by this time the sky had cleared and the sun was shining so it was a pleasure to unhitch our bikes from the taffrail and set off across the fields.

we just returned to the boat and opened a couple of peronis. later this evening i’ll get the train back to london.

this trip marks my first outing with a new solid state video camera i had shipped from tokyo. it’s been interesting to use it in parallel with my stills camera. it will take a while for me to develop habits and style with it but already i find myself starting to parse subjects for still or moving capture. it will be interesting to see the results back in london.

: c :