Kickstarting a San Fran Bay school science rap promotion

Posted on March 28, 2013 by

You obviously can’t keep a science rapper down.

Tom McFadden, a Californian and Stanford biology lecturer among other things, completed a Masters in Science Communication at Otago University last year.

Under a Fullbright Scholarship and the moniker ‘Rhymebsome’ he toured a number of NZ schools promoting science and science education. The original sticK story is here.

Part of his Otago study was to:
1. Test the efficacy or effectiveness of a music-based video (for science)
2. Authorship, and the question of whether it is better to watch or make your own hip-hop song

Obviously there was enough proof of the value of communicating science through rap that McFadden’s launched a small Kickstarter project to fund five professional music videos by Middle Schools in the San Francisco Bay area.

McFadden’s also obviously a pretty competent utiliser of social media, because he contacted sticK to promote what he’s up to.

So here’s a plug for his Battle RAp Histories of Epic Science (or Brahe’s Battles). Brahe was also a 16th century astronomer who helped prove that Aristotle’s view of unchanging heavens was wrong (as McFadden comments in his Kickstarter ‘sale’ video.

As he says on the Kickstarter page: “Combining science, history, music and video is a powerful educational experience. When students are given the tools to create a video that is viewed around the world, it can be life-changing.”

The song/videos made by the five schools will explore important moments in science history, and once complete will be available to students and teachers to enliven science education around the world.

All sounds good for the comparatively low requested sum of US$11,865, which needs to be pledged by Tuesday April 16 to be kickstarted.

Go hard Tom. Anything that helps demystify science and make it cool(er) deserves a good rap.

Posted in Early stage science, education, Innovation, SciBlogs, Science, technology | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Callaghan Innovation – building the plane while they fly it

Posted on March 26, 2013 by

There’s a term that’s particularly loved by IT-oriented start-ups, ‘building the plane while you’re flying it’.

The business case put forward for and by Callaghan Innovation doesn’t use the term.

However, that’s what I interpret from the ‘Purpose of this document’ comment on its fourth page. (It follows an earlier sentence – Callaghan Innovation’s role does not currently exist in the New Zealand innovation system, and it is in effect a “start-up” organisation. [CI’s quotation marks]).

A bit of a pre-amble later, the document goes on to state:

Recognising these uncertainties, the draft business case submitted to Ministers on 13 December 2012 provided a development path with high levels of optionality and choices in the short to medium term, Callaghan Innovation’s investment in new tools and instruments being made in line with progress in this discovery process, and demonstrated results from pilot and service testing.

Now, perhaps unfairly, this can be interpreted as ‘we’re making it up as we go along’.

But, given:

1. The stealth-like, non-consultative manner an originally proposed Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) morphed into an all-singing, all-dancing CI
2. The fact that the CI establishment board chair (Sue Suckling) reported only and directly to minister-of-everything Steven Joyce, and
3. The lack of any (even loose) overseas model on which CI might be seen to be based,

Then there’s very little other conclusion that can be drawn.

I’m sure too that in his private-sector dealings, Steven Joyce would’ve never okayed the setting up of a new business venture before a business plan/case had been developed, but that’s what’s happening with the allocation of $166 million to be spent by CI over the next four years.

For all that, no one is going to be anti CI’s strapline ‘we accelerate commercialisation of New Zealand’s innovation’.

It is just that for all its 65 pages of business case proposal, we’re not that much wiser.

In fact, you have to wonder if recently announced chief executive Dr Mary Quin quite knows what she’s letting herself in for in taking up the new role.

In the absence of an actual nationally integrated science and innovation plan, the danger is that there’s no coherent sense of direction for our country.

At least (with a background as an engineer in materials science), Mary Quin isn’t an academic or professional manager.

Her recent experience in managing the 2,800 person USA support services company NANA Management Services, jointly owned by Alaska’s indigenous Inupiat people will no doubt serve her well in her new role.

From NZ Inc’s point of view, how and to what, she moulds an extremely amorphous Callaghan Innovation will be crucial for our country’s future.

Equally, managing relationships between CI’s chair, minister, stakeholders, researchers and the industry it is supposed to be serving will be no insignificant feat.

So, in welcoming you to the new role Dr Quin, you could do much worse that reviewing the ATI blueprints put forward by the now extinct Industrial Research Ltd.

At least those blueprints provide some idea of how to keep the CI plane in the air.

P.S. As a number of readers pointed out, Dr Michael J Kelly (ex-pat Kiwi now at Cambridge University, and former undergraduate colleague of the late Prof Sir Paul Callaghan) was interviewed by National Radio’s Kathryn Ryan on Nine to Noon on March 13. (CI chair Sue Suckling was also interviewed at the same time). One of Kelly’s main points is that there’s been no debate about how to structure the new organisation……and an inherent danger it becomes a mere broker of technical knowledge. The podcast can be found here.

Posted in Development, Early stage science, education, Entrepreneur, high tech, Market validation, SciBlogs, Science, start-up | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Little school thinks bearly big

Posted on March 19, 2013 by

“And the prize for the best use of social media and punching well above its weight goes to,”….drum roll….”Koputoroa Primary School”.

This 170 pupil country school, seven kilometres north of Levin on the Kapiti Coast deserves heaps of praise, alongside its key organiser Suzie Valentine, for a fundraising effort that literally wins the hearts and minds and wallets of people all over New Zealand.

How?

By organising a ‘send your Teddy Bear on holiday’ event, where (obviously much-loved) bears are sent to the school and photographed enjoying a holiday.

Promoted through social media such as Facebook, each bear has its own special passport. This year’s theme is to enjoy classic and vintage cars (and naturally have their photo taken in them), as several of the bears have been around for more than half a century.

As both a way of connecting with a wider audience, and demonstrating that distance is no longer an inhibitor in a highly connected world, the novelty and fund-raising concept is truly innovative.

Over 100 Teddy Bears are going on this year’s holiday, and the approximately $3000 raised will go to IT equipment for students.

A clever, innovative, first-mover idea that ticks so many of the right boxes….surely there’s a Hollywood movie angle there!

Posted in education, Entrepreneur, high tech, Innovation, IT, SciBlogs, Science, technology | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Creating a deep infrastructure tool and asset for Christchurch – a (relatively) cheap idea well worth NZ Inc considering

Posted on March 12, 2013 by

Here’s an idea, so time topical it deserves much more thinking about by Christchurch, government and NZ Inc.

The Cement & Concrete Association of NZ’s (CCANZ) education and development manager Joe Gamman spoke at the recent Multicore World 2013 conference in Wellington. He’s been working alongside Callaghan Innovation on a potential ‘big data’ project for the past few months, and MW13 was, comparatively speaking, its first public airing. (Here’s the publicly available ‘Smart Idea’ project that received funding)

The general topic of his talk was around ‘Networked Infrastructure – Connecting Christchurch to the World’.

Dr Gamman’s pitch is to use the rebuilding of Christchurch as the world’s first test validation site for a ubiquitous sensing of the built environment. (Some of his presentation can be found here).

In other words, with standalone sensors able to be placed in any number of structures, buildings, roads, underground infrastructure (well, just about anything really), and the data about stresses, uses, traffic, changes over time (anything you want to measure) being collected, why not make this data available to the world.

What Dr Gamman sees being created is a piece of knowledge infrastructure; which only grows more valuable over time, and helps other people design new cities and improve old ones based on the learnings gained by having abundant infrastructure sensors as part of Christchurch’s rebuild.

“We have the opportunity to be high-touch as well as high-tech,” Dr Gamman says. “Such a curated data set would itself become an asset. A networked-Christchurch project would create a city where people will want to come to see what cities of the future will look like.”

Dr Gamman says there are a number of issues to address – not the least the legal framework around the data, who and how it can be accessed, and how it is protected.

Now, data security will become increasingly important as we develop an ‘internet everywhere’ society.

But security is just one component of an extremely good idea that would take advantage of the opportunity that Christchurch’s rebuild now provides.

Dr Gamman (and a hat tip to CCANZ for giving him the means to explore this idea) is now stress-testing the proposal, looking for corporate and government backers, and generally running the idea up the flagpole to see who salutes.

It is an idea, which, if implemented will benefit everyone, everywhere.

It will especially benefit Christchurch and provide huge economic spillover benefits for the city and New Zealand.

Gerry Brownlee, this would seem like a low-cost, high-profile and high return project that would be a real focal point in Christchurch’s rebuild.

As a government, National plays free and loose with the word ‘innovation’ – well here’s one that deserves a boost.

Posted in cloud computing, Development, Early stage science, high tech, Innovation, open source, Prototyping, sustainability, technology | Leave a comment

A solution to our lack of shared purpose around a science-innovation strategy

Posted on March 5, 2013 by

OK, now we have Callaghan Innovation gestating its way into life – with no indication of how long the process will take, or even what it is we’re trying to bring to fruition.

At the same time we have the ‘Great New Zealand Science Project’ – a public wish list of all the wonderful things we could research – which a committee of the great and the good are now trying to make sense of.

Meanwhile MBIE is still responsible for allocating some of the research funding too.

What these three initiatives clearly indicate is we actually don’t know what we’re doing, or why, or how.

Now, it seems like long ago (but actual fact it is only 18 months) that the High Value Manufacturing Review, a.k.a ‘Powering Innovation’, came out with its recommendations.

A re-read of this document might be a useful exercise for minister-of-everything Steven Joyce.

Recommendation 1:

Develop a strategic and structured approach for connectivity between research and development providers and the high value manufacturing and services sector

Whether this is going to be fulfilled by CI, who knows? Beyond motherhood and apple pie type statements, the purpose (not a vision, not a mission both of which are meaningless) of Callaghan Innovation is still a mystery.

Rumbles from manufacturers, universities and CRIs about the lack of information, sense of shared direction, or a strategic intent (let’s call it a plan) during the whole CI creation process show a glaring omission from the ‘Powering Innovation’ document – and more than a hint that science minister Steven Joyce is playing free and loose in whatever definition of innovation he’s decided upon.

This brings me to the point – and possibly the only way for NZ Inc to strategically line up its science and innovation.

Among a number of excellent recommendations in ‘Powering Innovation’, was #13.

This also demonstrates, by inference, why our country’s currently on an unknown course to an unknown destination.

Recommendation 13:

Form a Science and Innovation Council, led from a very senior ministerial level in Government, with representatives from the university, public and private research organisations and from industry. Members should represent a wide range of science and technology themes, including the social sciences. The role of the Science and Innovation Council should be to establish a national innovation strategy and advise on science and innovation policy and priorities.

Now I realise that such an S&I Council would force us to actually have a shared plan; and that maybe that’s the last thing Minister Joyce wants.

But, until we, like Denmark, Singapore, Taiwan, Switzerland et al, have such a thing, then the person in the street, researchers or industry will have no sense of being part of a wider (game) plan.

Running around and doing science and innovation ‘stuff’ in the absence of a national plan is doomed to provide middling mediocrity. There will be plenty of peddling by all involved, but nobody will be quite sure who or what it is we’re trying to get over the finish (start) line before anyone else in the world.

What we desperately need is an integrated innovation system from the fundamental science through technology development to commercial exploitation of the results. We also need to ensure this integration includes research and commercialisation carried out by the Health Research Council.

Instead, what we have at the moment is a hodge-podge of barely connected elements, with nothing even remotely looking like a plan in place.

Until we begin to get all our R&D cum innovation cum shared strategy ducks in a row through something like a S&I Council, we have absolutely no show of emulating the exemplar countries that NZ Inc, through government officials, have visited dozens of times in the past 20 years.

Mind you, if we had a simple national science and innovation plan, then there would also be some corresponding accountability.

That’s probably the fly in the ointment!

Posted in Development, Early stage science, Entrepreneur, high tech, Innovation, SciBlogs, Science, Science policy, start-up | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Getting to grips with multicore’s hugely disruptive technology – an opportunity for NZ Inc

Posted on February 28, 2013 by

There was some serious brainpower assembled at the recent Multicore World 2013 conference in Wellington.

Some of the subject matter was way-beyond the once over lightly understanding that I have of computers and computing. But the clear message was that there’s currently a big gap between what multicore computers (many cores on one chip) are capable of, and the programs to run them.

As an analogy, it is as if a car engine has eight cylinders, but there’s only fuel getting through to one or two of them – vastly decreasing its possible performance.

Put another way, multicore hardware is way, way ahead of multicore software. (When you consider that 64+ cores on a chip are now being manufactured, it is obvious, as has often been stated, that hardware capability is no longer an issue). How this clear gap is resolved is very much a problem in search of an answer.

It would’ve been good to see a heavier concentration of government and corporate IT heavyweights at the two-day conference held at the Wellington Town Hall.

The line-up of speakers would grace any northern hemisphere conference (and no doubt pull in hundreds of attendees), looking over the horizon at where the actual bits and bytes of computing is heading.

In other words, as opposed to the frothy apps and gee-whiz retail end of things, this conference was about where all the hard work of computers, memory, transactions and data crunching takes place.

One of the underlying themes of the conference put together by Oamaru-based Nicolas Erdody (Open Parallel) is that NZ Inc has an opportunity as the world grapples with how to utilise the huge amount of power available, but not yet being accessed.

The (parallel) programming required to take advantage of multicore, where the instructions to and from each core has to inform and be informed by every other core, is not easy.

As Poul-Henning Kamp, a Danish software writer and inventor of ‘Varnish’ commented; “parallelism is hard…..really, really hard.”

And one thing that hasn’t been decided is what computer language is best suited for writing parallel programming is still unclear – and indeed numbers of languages could evolve.

New Zealand has the opportunity to be a niche operator and software supplier in this emerging world – providing answers where others find it too difficult.

Ex-patriot Kiwi Dr Ian Foster (originally from Wellington, and these days among other roles the Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago) helped frame some of the already apparent and emerging possibilities capable through multicore in his keynote address.

(His, and the other presenters talks can be found here).

He described the exponentialism that multicores potentially provide as offering new paradigms that “can bring about huge transformations”.

Where he sees the grunt of multicore having near-future effects are:

-          Digital visual effects

-          Digital fabrication (additive manufacturing)

-          Industrial internet (heavy industrial internet)

-          Data analytics (big data)

Foster says multicore is a hugely disruptive technology – New Zealand has an opportunity to ride its wave, or (especially if the country doesn’t build a second fibre optic cable linking us to the rest of the world) be left behind.

Disclaimer:

I helped write some of the publicity and press releases around Multicore World 2013. The thoughts above are mine alone however.

 

 

Posted in cloud computing, Entrepreneur, high tech, Innovation, IT, open source, SciBlogs, technology | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Wellington Startup Weekend well pitched

Posted on February 26, 2013 by

According to John Holt, the brainchild behind the San Francisco located Kiwi Landing Pad, the final pitch presentations at the Wellington Startup Weekend were better than 75% of those he’s seen in the USA.

Given that those State-side entrepreneurs are pitching for real money for ideas they’ve been working on for months, the former director of Sonar 6 reckons the fledgling companies in Wellington did a fantastic job of getting their ideas across.

The WSW attendees only had 54 hours to prepare their pitches, from an absolute standing start.

Unfortunately, I missed the first and winning startup presentation by WagonShare, a web-oriented means for mobile home owners to make a bit of money by renting out their vehicle. In New Zealand, as in the USA, these campervans and caravans are usually sitting around unused – but would be perfect for rental.

Apparently WagonShare were the unanimous winners – evident in that the judges didn’t need to spend too much time deciding their favourite new business.

The other 11 pitches showed varying degrees of market validation or ways of assessing whether there is a market for their perceived product or service. A couple of the teams pivoted their business on the basis of such market assessment during the two and a half days of intense development – something that could and should happen during the creation of any new venture.

The pitches that took my fancy were:

mySmartGrid

  • App/web-based way and tool for consumers to make better informed electricity use decisions
  • A bit of gamification, a bit of compare yourself with other individuals and interest groups
  • Apparently, PowerShop and other electricity retailers expressed interest in being part of such an offering

eMammogram

  • A means/way to standardise the images from mammograms taken across years to see change/difference in breast tissue
  • Could sit alongside Matakina Technology (which converts any digital breast mammogram into quantitative numbers in which tissue properties are characterised and differentiated)

Arrangr

  • Indian-subcontinent oriented web-based matchmaking service based on Facebook’s friend recommendations

STVA (SmartTVart)

  • Marketplace for digital art images
  • A way to protect and make money for artists whose work is displayed on a screen

As a couple of WSW mentors both mentioned, the idea of the event isn’t necessarily to come up with a new idea or company that drives through to the market – though that’s not considered bad.

More, it is to inspire, educate and provide a template for entrepreneurs and would-be startups to have a go.

One thing Startup Weekends do really well is demonstrate, vividly, the value of a team and individuals’ skills within that environment.

As Melissa Clark-Reynolds said recently in a sticK blog, trying to do everything yourself in a fledgling company poised for growth just slows everything down and is easily sub-optimal.

In other words, teams work.

And, on a final note, a piece of WSW irony.

Even before the WSW started, the organisers felt that they were a bit light on the number of participants expected to turn up with developer skills (people who can computer code).

This was compounded (for the other teams at least), when – during the phase that the initial 12 winners have teams formed around them – many developers opted to join the 3Dmakersworld.com team.

You probably can’t call it the law of unintended consequences, but it is something similar!

Posted in Angel investment, Entrepreneur, Innovation, IT, Market validation, Prototyping, SciBlogs, technology | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Australian Gene Patent Held Valid: Patent is for Isolated Nucleic Acid, not for Information Per Se

Posted on February 21, 2013 by

By guest blogger Doug Calhoun

In a decision: delivered on 15 February 2013, nearly a year after the oral hearing, Federal Court of Australia Justice John Nicholas held that the Myriad Genetics patent for “An isolated nucleic acid coding for a mutant or polymorphic BRCA1 polypeptide … ” was an invention under Australian patent law.

The case was solely about whether or not the isolated nucleic acids claimed were “manners of manufacture” as required under the Australian Patents Act 1990. It was not about policy issues, such as access to medicines, or what the law ought to be in future. I discussed these issues in an earlier post:

The governing case on the interpretation of the words ”manner of manufacture” in Australia (and in New Zealand) is the 1959 decision of the High Court (Australia’s highest appeal court) in the case of National Research and Development Corporation v Commissioner of Patents (NRDC). NRDC was about a patent application that claimed a process for selectively eradicating weeds using a herbicide of known chemical composition.

In reaching its decision that the process claims were indeed patentable, the High Court took an innovative approach.

The words “manner of manufacture” originated in the 1623 English Statute of Monopolies.

The High Court observed that the intention of patent legislation is to protect inventions – and what would constitute an invention in 1959 was well beyond the imagination of the English Parliament of the 17th century. In order to interpret the words in a contemporary context they should not be given a literal meaning – rather they should be interpreted to ask the question: “is this an artificially created state of affairs in an economic field?”

Justice Nicholas reviewed the NRDC decision and then considered how it should be applied in this case:

86 There are three important points that emerge from these passages. First, the Court identified the question that must be addressed for the purpose of determining whether or not subject matter is patentable, viz. “[i]s this a proper subject of letters patent according to the principles which have been developed for the application of s. 6 of the Statute of Monopolies?” Secondly, this question involves a conceptual inquiry as opposed to a consideration of the etymology of the expression “manner of manufacture”. Thirdly, the concept of manner of manufacture has a “broad sweep” intended to encourage developments that are by their nature often unpredictable.

 

88 It is apparent from this passage that a product that consists of an artificially created state of affairs which has economic significance will constitute a “manner of manufacture”.

103 There are two further points to be made concerning NRDC. First, it is important to note that NRDC does not require the Court to ask whether a composition of matter is a “product of nature” for the purpose of deciding whether or not it constitutes patentable subject matter. NRDC recognises that it may be unhelpful to approach the problem in this way. I think this is especially so in the field of biotechnology in which micro-organisms play a critical role in the development, manufacture and use of diagnostic and therapeutic products and techniques. And second, NRDC does not require the Court to ask whether a micro-organism is “markedly different” to something that already exists in nature for the purpose of deciding whether it constitutes patentable subject matter (cf. Chakrabarty at 310).


Justice Nicholas observed what the claims did not cover, in spite of the submissions of Cancer Voices to the contrary:

76 First, the disputed claims are not to genetic information per se. They claim tangible materials. Much emphasis was placed by the applicants [Cancer voices] upon the informational character of DNA as a storehouse of genetic information. But the disputed claims are not to information as such. They could never be infringed by someone who merely reproduced a DNA sequence in written or digitised form.

77 Secondly, because each of the claims is to an isolated chemical composition, naturally occurring DNA and RNA as they exist in cells are not within the scope of any of the disputed claims and could never, at least not until they had been isolated, result in the infringement of any such claim.

The substance of the decision is set out in four paragraphs:

106 Accordingly, the issue in this case turns upon whether an isolated nucleic acid, which may be assumed to have precisely the same chemical composition and structure as that found in the cells of some human beings, constitutes an artificial state of affairs in the sense those words should be understood in the present context. There are three considerations which lead me to think that it does.

107 First, in explaining the concept of manner of manufacture as one involving the creation of an artificial state of affairs, it is apparent that the High Court in NRDC was deliberate in its use of very expansive language. Not only did the High Court emphasise the “broad sweep” of the concept involved, it also made clear that metaphorical analysis may not be helpful in determining whether or not something constitutes patentable subject matter.

108 Secondly, in the absence of human intervention, naturally occurring nucleic acid does not exist outside the cell, and “isolated” nucleic acid does not exist inside the cell. Isolated nucleic acid is the product of human intervention involving the extraction and purification of the nucleic acid found in the cell. Extraction of nucleic acid requires human intervention that necessarily results in the rupture of the cell membrane and the physical destruction of the cell itself. And purification of the extracted nucleic acid requires human intervention that results in the removal of other materials which were also originally present in the cell. It is only after both these steps are performed that the extracted and purified product may be properly described as “isolated” in the sense that word is used in the disputed claims.

109 Thirdly, as Dann’s Patent demonstrates, the isolation of a particular microorganism may require immense research and intellectual effort. In that case, it was only as a result of an intensive research effort that the isolated micro-organism in question could be made available for use in the manufacture of the new antibiotic.It was fortuitous for the patentee that it was its employees who were first to isolate the new micro-organism and first to deploy it in the manufacture of the new drug. That will not always be so. It would lead to very odd results if a person whose skill and effort culminated in the isolation of a micro-organism (a fortiori, an isolated DNA sequence) could not be independently rewarded by the grant of a patent because the isolated micro-organism, no matter how practically useful or economically significant, was held to be inherently non-patentable. In my view it would be a mistake, and inconsistent with the purposes of the Act, not to give full effect in such situations to the broad language used by the High Court in NRDC.


Justice Nicholas, after completing the reasons for his decision also referred to the various reviews conducted in Australia and the enquiry and bill not passed in the Australian Senate. He pointed out that none of these had any bearing on his decision – he had to interpret patent law as it now existed.

The applicants who sought to revoke the Myriad Australian patent have 21 days to appeal the decision.

Justice Nicholas also commented upon the US cases considering the validity of the US patents equivalent to the one he was considering:

134 On 30 November 2012, the US Supreme Court announced that it would hear an appeal in the Myriad case. The US law in relation to the patentability is therefore not likely to be settled until the Supreme Court reaches it own decision on the issue.

135 In any event, it seems to me that the Myriad decision does not provide any direct assistance to either side in the present case. I say this for two reasons. First, the law in Australia is different. I must apply the law as explained in NRDC. It must also be recognised, especially as the Myriad case heads to the US Supreme Court, that the constitutional setting in which patent legislation operates in the US is quite different to that in which patent legislation operates in this country: Grain Pool of Western Australia v Commonwealth of Australia (2000) 202 CLR 479 at paras [28]-[32]. Secondly, the evidence in the Myriad case was not the same as the evidence in the present case. And at least in relation to the matter of covalent bonds, I have taken a different view of the facts to that taken by Judge Lourie.

For more on the first and second US Federal Court of Appeal Cases see my earlier posts here and here:

The date set for the oral hearing before the US Supreme Court is 15 April 2013. A decision can be expected by the end of June 2013 when the court’s 2013 term ends.

And in an interesting twist, if the US Supreme Court says “no” to gene patents, will the Australian negotiators of the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement insist on a change to the IP chapter so that isolated nucleic acids are eligible for patents in the US?

Posted in Innovation, IT, Patent, SciBlogs, technology | Tagged , | Leave a comment

‘Foolproof’ writer to study difference between new business intent and reality

Posted on February 20, 2013 by

Jenny Douche is going back to 'school' to boost her entrepreneurial skills

Jenny Douche is going back to ‘school’ to boost her entrepreneurial skills

The writer of ‘Foolproof’ a tome about how to find and test great business opportunities through market validation is off writing books – at least for a while.

In a previous incarnation, Wellingtonian Jenny Douché put out a series of books under the ‘Smarter than Jack’ label.

These collections of stories, about smart animals, raised $440,000 for worldwide, animal-connected charities. The NZ SPCA earned about $120,000. Douché’s venture into publishing followed an initial (and one of the last) cadetship at Wellington Newspapers followed by her first entrepreneurial venture which was as a pet photographer.

“I quickly realised what I really liked about the business was the partnerships, the business side of it, it was not really the photography itself,” she says.

Douché developed the idea for Smarter than Jack during a four-year stint at Telecom as a marketing/communications specialist and while doing her MBA. “I wanted to create a scalable business that I was really passionate about, and one that would make a big difference to the animal community”.

She sold the Smarter than Jack label and concept in 2007, and after having her first child, had the opportunity to work for Grow Wellington and to manage its ‘Activate’ programme for up and coming startup businesses.

When that 12 month contract finished, she decided to write another book called ‘Baby Gone’. This was another compilation of stories about infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth and infant death.

“They were stories about the months after the actual event, life after it, coping,” she says. “The objective of creating the book was to help educate the medical community and to help families find solace in knowing that they are not alone on their unplanned and painful journeys.”

She got a sponsor onboard through Trilogy’s Catherine deGroot, and this contributed to the donation of over 3000 copies to people such as midwives, nurses, GPs and to support groups.

Following the arrival of a second child, and playing to her project-orientation strengths, saw her come up with the idea for Fool Proof.

As well as her own business/entrepreneurial experiences, Douché also had been helping put startups through the market validation process. Creating a resource for others seemed to her a useful exercise.

She’s self-published the book – but now has ‘orders’ from her husband not to write another until their current three-year-old daughter starts school.

So what’s she going to do to keep her creative juices flowing – a PhD!

Based on startup businesses that have a documented business model (from say an incubation process), “what is fascinating is how they change during the early growth period,” she says.

“What is it that people say and think they’re going to do, compared to what actually happens. What influences those things to happen? I want to understand why things turned out the way they did.”

Won’t be much writing there will there?

Posted in Angel investment, Development, education, Entrepreneur, Innovation, Market validation, Prototyping, SciBlogs | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Give up the total DIY for tech start-ups – Clark-Reynolds

Posted on February 13, 2013 by

The great Kiwi ‘traditional’ of do-it-yourself (DIY) has its downsides in many tech developments according to serial entrepreneur Melissa Clark-Reynolds.

Speaking as one of a panel at Unlimited Potential’s AGM, Clark-Reynolds says entrepreneurs and start-up founders need to, quickly, get over the idea that they can proficiently do every task themselves.

The founder of Minimonos, an online environment for children which currently has 90% of its 1.5 million followers in the U.K. says getting the right people with the right expertise in at the right time can save a heap of trouble and money. It can also mean the success (or failure) of a project getting off the ground she says.

“Perhaps it is the downside of our Number 8 wire mentality, and something it would be good at times for us to ditch,” she says.

Clark-Reynolds questioned whether the NZ gaming industry (those who make the PC and smart-phone oriented games) is as healthy as sometimes portrayed.

Most companies creating such games are doing so on a toll basis for others, “working for hire.”

She says there are exceptions such as Ninja Kiwi and Dave Frampton (whose CHOPPER – is his best seller. His Blockheads app has over 1.5 million downloads).

“We need to create and grow our own IP, not necessarily just do it for others,” says Clark-Reynolds.

The rapidly changing of the net, devices and how people access content is something everyone also needs to be aware of she says.

The Minimonos team has watched, “fascinated” by the growth of computer tablet use, and how it may impact on their online interactive world.

“For the last two quarters, the number of children playing on tablets exceeded the number playing on a PC,” she says.

“It is transforming the way we present our material, and means again we’re going to have to tweak our presentation.”

She also had a prediction of what will be ‘hot’ in the near future.

“There’s a massive education bubble going on, and all over the place we’re seeing pressure to reform it,” Clark-Reynolds says.

“Education’s not strong in the tech world, and when you look at things, there’s a real gap between what children use and experience at school, and what they have available at home.”

The hype, and hope, around education-oriented apps is difficult to appreciate from New Zealand she says.

She recently heard of one USA purchase of an education start-up.

“It has no business model, no revenue, and yet it raised $75 million,” she says.

“Something started up in that sector is going to flip really fast.”

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