Over The Counter Culture

Spectre’s put together a great set of articles about Surrey Satellite Technology ltd. (SSTL). Get this, from a 2005 article: “A company formed by a small team of boffins in Guildford yesterday launched the first Galileo satellite, beating a rival consortium of three of Europe’s technology giants [Alcatel, EADS and Thales].

“SSTL expects to have a turnover of £30m this year, with pre-tax profits of  around £1.5m. The company has grown by 25pc a year since it was spun out of Surrey University in 1985. The consortium, Galileo Industries, originally tendered at five times the price quoted by SSTL, but their satellite is still in testing and not expected to launch until mid-2006.”

“We specifically make low-cost and quick satellites,” he said. Giove-A, which weighs 600kg, has gone
from drawing board to launch in 30 months. “We take these components out of iPods and so on, and work out whether we can fly them in our spacecraft.” Sir Martin said conventional components can take up to 15 years to test, by which time they may be obsolete. “Imagine if you bought a PC that was 15 years old.”

The best thing about this: Surrey University owns 80% of the company (the rest is owned by the employees, and by Elon Musk, a name that should be familiar to anyone in the dotcom scene). So they held 80% of a very profitable company growing 20-25% y/y that makes its living stripping bits out of your gadgets to make ultra cheap, ultralight satellites - in a country with no real culture or history of space exploitation/exploration - in fact, SSTL was formed just when Maggie Thatcher nabbed the entire UK space budget! Surrey University really cashed recently when it sold SSTL to EADS earlier this year.

I don’t think we in the UK realise just how much potential we have locked up in our universities, waiting to be exploited and to take on commercial giants from way out leftfield.

Stanford owns the patent to Google’s search engine technology. Would tuition fees faced by students be so onerous if UK universities were doing the same with their bright stars?

Microphilanthropy is the Next Big Thing. It’ll be a child of the Age of Choice - the same way humans no longer tune into a channel an Watch What Is On, but instead flick through the hundreds of channels the AoC has made available to them (or, pushing it to an AoC extreme, go to Youtube and search for their entertainment - i.e. micro-personalises his/her experience). No longer will mass campaigns, focused at the head of the curve, be the dominant force in philanthropy - the Long Tail phenomenon that has revolutionised industries like bookselling, electronics retailing, publishing, music, the arts, TV, etc, will also hit charity.

We will see a move from charities and foundations as monolithic armies of street teams and envelope lickers on the donor side, and reasonably large and static deployments of Western expat “missionary” forces on the ground, receiver side - to an entirely new model for charitable institutions, much more like a telephone exchange of old - operators, there to connect you to the ground level, to the cause you care passionately about - even though nobody else in your social circle, neighbourhood or even city cares about it. The Internet will bring enough ‘freaks’ like you together to make the world move in that specific, totally unique way that resonates so strongly with you). The ground level will need to be mobile and flexible and able to react to spontaneous coming-together of interest groups - taken to an extreme, that is a concept I call ’smartmob philanthropy’ and to be totally flexible and responsive on the ground level, it’s going to need Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the markets. But that’s not my focus today. I’m looking donor-side.

Future charities will need to make themselves as transparent and connective as they possibly can - a no bullshit, no interruptions, constant connection with your cause. Keep the pipeline up, and they can get more dollars flowing from your bank account than a mass media, totally untargeted mailout, TV spot or street ‘attack’ could ever have. You, as a donor, have so much more than just money to offer, if you can be connected with causes you care about. You can become its greatest advocate in your social circle, far more persuasive and actionable than some well-meaning spotty teenager in a fluorescent bib with a clipboard and a nametag could ever be. You can also be a source of inspiration, networking and innovation to those on the ground level receiving your passionate support.

The Internet is the key technology. My generation, unlike that of my parents, has grown up totally native and accustomed to the Age of Choice - we go to iTunes and we download the music that resonates intimately with us - mainstream radio bores us. The AoC is an unstoppable force - every message, every experience - marketing, entertainment, retail, google ads - trend towards becoming ever more tailored, customised. Charity can’t stick to standard, mass broadcast modes. With the internet, it has infinite gallery space and a rich framework for recommendation tools - old charity is stuck in the mentality of mailing out 3 page pamphlets in which it can only hold one story, aimed at tugging the heartstrings of an entire population - and FORCING the message through with the spotty clipboard brigade or other rude and aggressive moves like including a pen with the mailed-out  pamphlet.

Time for a change.

[I suppose the only reason philanthropy is so far behind every other Internet-revolutionised industry is the lack of market forces - it's damn hard enough getting a dollar out of you, let alone competing for it against other charities. That'll change.]

Impressive track (Rolling Stone) from unknown Glasto bit-part, Eliza Doolittle. Should be a hit; hopefully the nasty ad men won’t spoil it by tacking a crappy TV advert to it! Her EP’s out soon. The first half is great: distinctive, retro soul with a distinctive London bite. But it creeps too close to gym cafe music with Don’t Say No though, you might want to give that track a miss. Bang Back, the final track, is supposedly just a demo (wondering what it’s doing on an EP), and is just plain irritating Mariah Carey shite. ED’s a name worth watching out for, assuming she can avoid the poppy crap (which may be a label demand, to be fair to her).

Download “Eliza Doolittle - Rolling Stone”

(disclosure: she’s a fellow Arsenal FC fan, and this may or may not be the reason why of all the good music I’ve recently discovered very recently, I chose to share this!)

I hate echoing big ‘Web 2.0′ stories on this blog as they inevitably get overprocessed everywhere else - I use Twitter for my 2 cents on these types of stories if I have to, but Twitter’s down right now

Read/WriteWeb anoints FriendFeed king of the future web - using it to centralise all the conversations sparked by their posts - and nails Disqus and Twitter in one fell swoop. If other sites follow suit - and this is indeed quite a compelling course of action - this is pretty unfortunate news for Fred Wilson and the other good folk at Union Square Ventures, who have put a fair bit of money into the latter two.