blur group's blog

b-uncut Launches the Artists Diary

Philip Letts — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:09:29 +0000

In 2007 a small group of emerging, contemporary artists led by Philip Letts, Innovation Artist and Abstract Photographer, set out to change the art world and founded b-uncut. They believed that the power of the Internet and the ensuing social media revolution afforded them the opportunity to redefine the equation between artist and gallerist, producer and middleman. They believed that if they could build a large enough network of talented artists from around the world, then one day, this network would be able to build its own art marketplace. One defined by the artist, one that rewards the creatives and that is both democratic and meritocratic. A marketplace that would be transparent for the art buyer and better value for all. A marketplace that avoided unnecessary middlemen and shady dealers and one that would provide a large and growing body of attractive and valuable work from all corners of the contemporary art world. And a Fair Trade for artists.

Today this network is one of the largest and most vibrant communities of quality artists from around the world. And on the 30th June they launch their art marketplace at b-uncut.com. A place where anyone can come and view their art and their produce, their online studios and their lively community. In advance of that they have together published a Diary. An Artists Diary. The Diary is an annual collection of the ambitious and talented works of the contemporary artists that make up b-uncut. It is an opportunity for them to share their art in the physical world and a mechanism by which to support and promote their community and cause; ‘A Fair Trade for Artists’.

‘The Artists Diary’ is available online and retails at $24.95. It is on sale throughout the world (and in other major currencies) at http://bit.ly/artistsdiary.

blur Group Launches Pioneering Web Service for Entrepreneurs

Philip Letts — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:24:23 +0000

blur Group today launched Innovatrs.com, a pioneering Website and online service for entrepreneurs and innovation officers. Innovatrs.com delivers Innovate (TM), the world’s first true innovation methodology and business build system, as an Internet service which helps entrepreneurs take ideas to market and through to exit better, faster and more cost effectively than before.

Innovate’s 7 Stages and 49 Phases, spanning the first critical 3-5 years of building a business, are encapsulated in a flexible and scalable online content system which is supported by video and content streaming, plus community features and online consultancy which equip entrepreneurs with a unique and unrivaled knowledge centre, start-up system and support and mentoring infrastructure. All for only £165/$250 per month.

Philip Letts, blur Group’s founder, stated “We have been developing Innovate for nearly ten years as a comprehensive Innovation methodology and start-up system and it has benefitted many fast growth businesses in that time. It is great that we can now cost effectively offer it to any entrepreneur, innovation officer or investor as an Internet service.”

With Innovatrs.com entrepreneurs can greatly improve their own and their ventures performance via Innovate’s comprehensive online solution which coaches and guides them through building a better business, day by day, while helping them make more informed decisions. At the same time Innovation officers in corporates now have a proven innovation methodology and system to better deliver corporate innovation projects and objectives. And venture investors have a powerful tool to support them, their investment management process and portfolio companies.

blur Group Launches Crowdsourcing Marketing Agency

Philip Letts — Fri, 15 May 2009 19:51:45 +0000

blur Marketing launches a pioneering Crowdsourcing marketing agency. Watch the video!

Innov@te Online

Philip Letts — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:39:27 +0000

We have just launched Innov@te Online. Check it out – click this link.

Innov@te (TM) is a start-up process and business build system designed so that innovators and entrepreneurs around the world can build ventures and their products/services better and faster than before – step by step. 48 phases over 5 years. An innovation first.

Innov@te Online is a place for us to share our methods, systems and thinking while showcasing innovations – innovative people, businesses and ideas.

Innov@te - change you life

blur Media Previews ‘Death in Girotondo’

Philip Letts — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:00:11 +0000

‘Death in Girotondo’, is about to be published by blur Media (blur Group’s next gen media division). The novel will be available in a couple of weeks but we wanted to give you a peek at the cover. ‘Death in Girotondo’ is Philip Letts’ debut novel.

blur Media’s publisher describes ‘Death in Girotondo’ as:

‘A fast-paced and provoking novel about a woman’s fight against a cruel husband and a chauvinist world.’

Digital Big Bang – Implications for Start-ups

Philip Letts — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:25:41 +0000

Following the digital big bang small businesses and start-ups will be able to compete with larger businesses as never before. And anyone will be able to afford to start a small business. Capital will no longer be the scarce resource – ideas, marketing and attitude will.

For anyone will be able to afford to start-up a knowledge-driven company. PC’s and laptops will cost hundreds of dollars. Software and bandwidth will be almost free. Basements will become radio stations, film studios or software companies. Consultancies, design and service businesses will spring from kitchen tables – not requiring more than a few hundred dollars to set up and NEVER requiring Venture Capitalists or external funding in the early stages.

Entrepreneurship will be fostered at school and become the most popular subject at college. New companies will be founded from college – not from a mid life crisis.

And product development will cost solely what an idea costs – nothing. Successful marketing will not require resources and cash – it will require the right idea at the right time, aimed lazer-like at the right audience. Digital marketing will be monetized based upon success. Companies will no longer need to take so much promotional risk – or pay in advance for marketing or advertising.

Successful small businesses will grow more rapidly into larger businesses, requiring increasingly less capital and in turn will have to master the new skills of the digital big bang corporation or big business.

And small businesses will crowd together in clouds of virtual networks with other small businesses to compete more effectively with large corporations across a portfolio of synergistic products and services.

The digital exchange organizers of tomorrow will bring together groups of relevant small businesses/start-ups that together will behave like large corporations and compete with them for customers, finance and projects.

The exchange leaders will provide customer relationships alongside digital big bang corporation core competencies and training around systems, flexibility, start-up processes, new organizational structures, venture capital style internal financing, corporate governance, leadership development, training and employee well being, brand, market facing product/service synergy and shareholder relations.

The small business/start-ups of tomorrow will sell ideas (Intellectual Property (IP)) directly to large companies and consumers as much as they will sell products and services. Entrepreneurs will not be obsessed with taking ideas to market and building companies, they will be obsessed with generating, packaging and selling their ideas (IP).

Vast online product/service exchanges will cost effectively and efficiently match product and service owner/creator with consumer. The next Ebay will be the Ebay of ideas and intellectual property (IP) and not that of tangible products. And its users will be able to buy or trade ideas and IP. An early example is i-revolution.org.

Entrepreneurs will study digital big bang innovation, entrepreneurship and its start-up process and become experts at that rather than management or finance or any single discipline per se.

Innovation and entrepreneurship will become the DNA of business, large and small, and anyone that wants to will be able to operate as an entrepreneur whether in a large or small business. But those who go out on their own will have the opportunity to amass the greatest wealth – and this time round with less capital risk. The only thing you will have to risk is your time, energy and reputation. Which is why education in entrepreneurship and innovation will become so vital.

Finally the sky will be the limit for small businesses/start-ups – and their creativity the only boundary! Capital will no longer be the constraint. And the digital big bang will democratize entrepreneurship – for the 21^st Century will unleash the mass-market entrepreneur!

Digital Big Bang – Implications for Big Business

Philip Letts — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:12:13 +0000

The digital big bang (see last post) starting 2010 will enable large businesses to get bigger, increasingly global and yet more nimble. Their employees will be perpetually connected by practically limitless bandwidth tethered to them via both fixed and wireless networks. Employees will exist as on-demand objects for their employers unless new management techniques and novel approaches to organizing people are applied.

Laptops, tablets, PDA’s, iPhones and smart phones will carry office and communications software that is standard today on hi-end PC’s. They will support email, messaging, Internet telephony, video-calling, multi media file sharing and business applications. These devices will track your workflow, your movements, your tasks, your admin and your hours. For they will be permanently on, forever working you and for you, and most importantly of all – they will always be with you.

Large organizations and corporations will be able to organize themselves in different ways and those that want to take best advantage of the digital big bang will re-organize around specific work groups rather than around old departmental lines. Workers will be disconnected from central locations and instead gather in places of like projects or disciplines. Their surroundings will match their tasks/projects and or roles.

Marketers will work in creative surroundings close to markets and suppliers rather than head offices. The intelligent walls will create a beach or a wave or a skateboard park – whatever gets their juices going the most.

Designers will huddle in tight groups around specific projects. They will choose their surroundings with creativity and productivity in mind. They will require greater attention and support since they will work longer hours and be ‘humans on-demand’.

Greater attention will get focused on employee education, health and well being as organizations thriving in the global knowledge economy recognize that they now require fewer employees but ever-greater output per employee. This will bring employers full circle back to valuing and generating loyalty more than any other corporate value.

With the tools and technologies that the digital big bang will make easily and cheaply available, large organizations will organize themselves like massive networks of small organizations (and small organizations will tether together virtually through independent networks to behave as and compete better with large organizations).

The typical work-team unit will have around 10 employees and behave like a small business/start-up of 10. The only difference will be that they will exist within a large corporation with unified customers, shareholders, training, brands, values and systems. Most employees will be attached to multiple work-teams, each with their own strategy, identity, culture, tools and leader(s).

Managers will think in terms of amoebic, fluid ‘special forces’ like teams and not departments or matrixes. Team leaders will be coaches and organizers and not autocrats. They will be lent team members – they will not own them. Leaders will own products/projects, processes, tools, objectives and outputs – not people.

Loyalty will be fostered through the fluid movement of employees from work group to work group as though you were moving from small company/start-up to small company/start-up.

Leading corporations will analyze and develop small company mentality and performance metrics. They will study, perfect and apply start-up processes and they will have work-teams compete with other corporate work-teams within, corporate work-teams without and independent start-ups.

Corporate leaders will select projects and work-teams to develop and invest in as Venture Capitalists select start-up companies to invest in and coach. Corporations will be more successful places to develop effective work-teams (start-ups) because they better understand how to manage, organize, train, tool and motivate employees whereas Venture Capitalists generally do not.

So the corporation of tomorrow will succeed by understanding and repeating the entire start-up process from idea right through to mass-market repetition. Not all of their start-up’s will go all the way to successful product or project launch and market leadership – but the leading corporations will be those that have the greatest track record of success.

For tomorrow’s corporations will be measured by operational excellence (for existing products/services and processes) as well as and most importantly for innovation.

Work-teams will be given full license to take their idea to market and beyond with no attempt to stifle or slow them. They will always be encouraged to take risks, challenge thinking and compete from within. The next Google should be built within Microsoft and not without.

Everything and anything can and will be outsourced. Greatest value will accrue to the creators, developers and marketers of ideas and customer relationships/understanding, and not their producer. Product production will become an outsourced commodity – not a core competency (except perhaps for extremely ‘heavy’/capital intensive industries or highly bespoke products).

Post digital big bang corporate leaders will hire experienced and successful start-up experts as consultants and team leaders. And their track record will be rewarded with bigger funds to invest and more cutting edge projects. Corporate leaders will care less about ‘going up the ladder’ and more about winning the most cutting edge and greatest potential projects.

Corporate strategists will be innovators and inventors more than number crunchers or researchers – they will have systems to support the latter. Each new product idea will be seen as a start-up company – not as a product development process. GM will not buy the next Hummer – they will invent it and build a start-up company around it.

Digital big bang corporations core competencies will be culture, systems, flexibility, start-up processes, new organization, venture capital style internal financing, corporate governance, leadership development, training and employee well being, brand, market facing product/service synergy and shareholder and customer relations.

Corporate CEO’s will be communicators, motivators, visionaries and entrepreneurs first and managers and politicians second. They will be more like Richard Branson than Dick Parsons.

The most desirable companies for employees to work at, customers to buy from and investors to invest in will be the most innovative organizations and not the most efficient. Efficiency and value creation will a given – not an end!

The Digital Big Bang

Philip Letts — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 14:56:15 +0000

As we look a couple of years out one tremor looks certain: the digital big bang. The point at which the very tipping nature of connected networks explodes us into a new dawn. Today there are 3.5 billion mobile phone users each connected to one network or another – in cities across the globe nearly all 3G. There are 2 billion TV viewers, waiting for the connected TV. There are 1.5 billion PC Internet users increasingly tethered via broadband. There are tens of millions of cars connected via GPS. Tens of millions of new generation games console addicts and over a hundred million iPod users glued to iTunes. You get the picture.

As broadband seeps across each of these connected points and connected devices a tipping point of interconnectivity will occur. Sometime between 2010 and 2012. Software will no long focus on device-centric or point-to-point applications, but instead focus on inter-connectivity, leveraging the combined intelligence of all of our devices.

Wi-Fi, power and media hubs will connect anything that comes into contact with the home network, your personal (mobile) network or transport network (car or plane). Software will finally run anywhere and everywhere. Google Apps and MobileMe are today’s raw pioneers. The breakthrough will come when the network and network based software predicts the information and applications that we will need and make them automatically appear on the nearest available screen. Tuscan recipe’s launched to my phone when I holiday in Italy. Tagged images squirted to my laptop as I blog on the move.

The combination of unlimited, universally available broadband, neural networks, data-driven network apps, GPS and totally connected devices will suddenly unleash the next generation of endlessly tethered systems – right out to wearable computing. In my glasses, my watch, purse, jacket pocket and beyond. Each enabling me to become that free-lance road warrior we have so long heard about.

The very nature of software development and packaging will finally alter. Software as a service will become software as atom, waiting to find its place in the digital, molecular minefield of mass-market, any-app-you-can-ever-imagine universe. Everything will integrate and large software vendors and universal software suites will get attacked from all sides by shoals of mini-apps combining seamlessly to take them down. Inter-locked like lego pieces. Find something new you prefer – just switch the old piece (app) out.

And once hundreds of millions of PC’s will truly inter-connect with hundreds of millions of iPhones, Android devices, Blackberry’s or Windows Mobile devices – then tens of millions of PC’s and phones will in turn connect to intelligent TV’s, games consoles or cars and the tipping point will be reached – by 2012. Altering the way we work, live, socialize and adapt.

Health checks will happen at terminals, not in a doctors surgery. Movies will be watched anywhere, paused and played from one device to another. Music will never leave your ear, always on demand. News will become the ultimate commodity – media companies only making money from its vital interpretation, never again its dissemination. Print will dry up.

People will meet online, network online, communicate online. Families will share Sunday video conference sessions not lunch. All content will mash together presented to you as you need it and not anyone else. The mobile phone will become the universal remote control for our lives. Music will appear from power sockets in our homes, not clunky speakers. All data will effortlessly converge to give us mash-ups of perfect information and media right when we need it – sometimes even before we thought we needed it.

Start-ups will require nothing other than good ideas, drive and great marketing. Capital costs for almost any new venture will be zero. Software, media, publishing, healthcare, energy, services and all intellectual property oriented businesses (which will be more than 80% of all future start-ups) will incubate in garages and kitchen tables – with set-up costs of a few hundred dollars. Democracy will finally come to the venture universe. Cash will drive growth again – not venture investors. Fund managers, bank, VC’s and private equity firms that do not provide considerable value add (way beyond what they imagine today) will become disintermediated. Stock exchanges, art auction houses and digital exchanges will gain greater power and serve the consumer more directly. Hedge Funds will become tomorrows investment banks.

The cost of developing businesses will implode as all marketing goes online and becomes increasingly intelligent and vastly more cost efficient. Ultimately marketing tools will only charge you when you win a customer or key customer behavior and never before. Micro-payments will be the currency of commerce throughout the globe and banks will have to learn service – for those worth backing. Technology will become simplified to the point where anyone will be able to write any software or service – no engineering skills whatsoever will be necessary – just design skills; designing the next concept, business, product, charity, service or lifestyle alternative.

Organizations will regroup – large organizations will regroup around cell based structures and small organizations will compete with large ones as massive shoals of tethered fish attacking the corporate sharks. Size will no longer matter in the connected universe. As such the world order will shift and the concept of super-power will no longer be relevant. Conglomerates of power will dictate – true conglomerates of work, trade, currency and politics. The EU will be the new model and one that will be replicated in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South America and beyond – leaving the US, China and Russia as rare, independent objects.

The design-driven revolution will take over product development and launch – even businesses as we know them, Fashion, media and the arts. The design-driven revolution will converge arts and media with fashion and architecture. The employee of tomorrow will be designer more than anything else. By 2020 one third of the worlds work force will be designers. Content will finally be king and the original content creator king maker. Artists will find their true worth – if they can lift their game to become creator and marketer. And knowledge will be everything.

Analogue will go the way of the dinosaur and culture will be digital. Digital in creation, consumption and dissemination. Government will follow people and people will have power. Every facet of our lives will change and society will forever be marked by pre and post digital big bang – the ultimate line in the sand. A universe altered for ever. The Internet our single new reality. Change the only mantra.

The blur Philosophy

Philip Letts — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:16:08 +0000

What is ‘blur’?

‘blur’ is a way of looking at things differently. It is a philosophy and reflection of contemporary times and the future that beckons or betrays. ‘blur’ is the most modern world.

The term ‘blur’ was coined by Philip Letts in 2006 to describe his philosophy because it best reflected its essence. For this millennium is about speed, chaos, confusion and ‘always on’. Last millennium trends lasted decades. This millenniums will last a few years – then a few months.

‘blur’ best describes the nature of everything to be and that is. Lines are blurred. Borders are blurred. Languages, writing, mathematics ‘blur’. Society is blurred. The planet is blurring with the sun’s renewed heat. Cultural divides are blurred thanks to globalization, media and technology. Technology is blurring and all things electrical are converging.

‘blur’ best describes a new world flooded by fleeting moments. Fleeting relationships discovered or disbanded on MySpace or Facebook. Moments of fame that last but fifteen minutes or days. One hit wonders staging endless comebacks. Attention span’s no longer than a butterfly’s flutter. Fleeting everything from travel to relationships, education, book-worming and capital raising. All of us darting through life like a child through a museum. The Blackberry in hand, the iPhone in mind and yesterday serially parked.

‘blur’ is about accepting this new reality and the altered world we live in while understanding that a new order is rapidly emerging and that each of us are and will be affected. 20th Century values, traditions, people and even landscapes are things of the past. The future will require all of us to change the way in which we eat, work, marry, bear children, educate, organize, survive and thrive. And as the individual is forced to reshape his and her very being, so too governments and workplaces will have to redefine themselves. Everything becomes untethered, ready to switch on a dime. Including the workplace.

Individuals ultimately gain power because the 21st Century will be the free-lance millennium, with the disruption of the workplace as we know it and the creation of cell based groups in work, in war, in life. Everything will go digital and the analogue culture will become an old relic. So much that we cherish will be miniature or intangible and the greatest turf war of this millennium will be between the individual and the 20th Century version of employer, government and life. Sadly, most organizations will try and control individuals even as they gain increased power. But those that overly constrain and police their citizens or employees will lose them.

The world order will adjust – countries will re-group to gain power. Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa will rise at the expense of the United States. Oil will become an almost priceless scarce resource soon to be replaced by solar, wind and other alternative energy sources. Commodities will be invaluable. Food supplies will not suffice and water will become a traded commodity.

The book as we know it will die and with it CD’s, DVD’s and all things analogue. But with the digital revolution comes a new form of migration and eco-conurbations. The Internet will be about individual empowerment, social interaction and Virtual Reality. Everything imaginable will be connected. Tomorrow’s professionals and free-lancers will own and rent multiple, wired condos around the world – no longer existing in one home, in one place. New style urban jungles in Dubai or Delhi will thrive as old style monsters decline.

Industry will shift from the production and throughput era to the information era to a design led revolution with art-in-product (TM).

The leading industries of tomorrow will look nothing like those of today. Innovation will be the driver and decider. Speed to the global market everything and intellectual property the prize asset. Content will be king and methods of creation democratic, while ‘Art’ in product will drive. Cultural lines will whither and ‘blur’ while art converges into design, fashion and industry – undermining the former while boosting the latter. History and reading will be discarded as relics of irrelevant waste. The ‘visual revolution’ will take over.

But the greatest revolution of all will be (the story of) how we adapt, as people, as society, as a planet and how we grow to accept that as every line becomes increasingly blurred so we do to. For ‘blur’ is the way of tomorrow – today.

What is blur Group

Philip Letts — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:06:16 +0000

blur Group is an Intellectual Property conglomerate. We care passionately about building blur branded businesses that think and behave differently. We utilize our pioneering crowdsourcing models and innovation system, Innov@te (TM), to rapidly scale a series of IP hubs and supporting services and product businesses.

blur Group utilizes its state of the art incubator, blur Labs, to develop new ideas and ventures internally within blur Group and we occasionally take great ideas in from the outside too.

blur Group is based out of London, UK, but its employees and crowds are international. We have a clear philosophy and vision of the future and we are passionate about our brand. Find out more about blur Group – visit blurgroup.com.