All week we are bombarded with information. The newspapers we read, the conversations we have, the thoughts that fleetingly appear in our heads. Most of it filters through without much impact – after all, it’s just information – I could always go and find more on the web if I needed it. The aim of this blog is to filter what's genuinely interesting from the background noise...
On the playing-field of UK start-up businesses, one that I particularly admire is Hotel Chocolat. Started in 1993 by Angus Thirlwell and Peter Harris, it has grown to open 44 stores worldwide by providing a product of superb quality and developing a brand that is modern, decadent and personal. Their products are innovative (I particularly like the super-thick shelled Easter Eggs); their marketing is democratic (customers can submit ratings of each chocolate); and thanks to free samples and a friendly team of sales assistants the shopping experience at their stores is always a pleasure.
When it came time to raise finance, then, is was only natural that the Hotel Chocolat entrepreneurs would find a novel way to do it. Conventional options would include selling equity in the company, which would dilute the owners’ stakes, or taking out a long-term bank loan, which could have a high, variable rate of interest. Instead HC gave their customers a chance to invest in the business. In exchange for a lump sum of £2000 or £4000, the customers will receive “interest” paid in regular deliveries of boxes of chocolates.
A £4000 “chocolate bond” yields 13 boxes of chocolate each year, with a retail value of £18 a box, equating to £234 p.a., or 5.83% net interest (7.29% gross). For customers who are already paying cash for the monthly boxes of chocolates, this is a potentially attractive investment opportunity: to swap capital expense for reduced cash outflows in future. For HC they are locking in the value of those future sales as capital – which they can then earn a further return on.
Looking, for a moment, with a critical eye, I expect the transaction costs of this deal are fairly high (although partly offset by free publicity received). And there is no guarantee that the target customers will take up the offer. Furthermore, the investors are putting their capital at risk, as unsecured creditors, and would be left with a big loss if HC went into liquidation. So as with most forms of innovation, it comes with a certain set of hard-to-quantify risks.
Perhaps the most exciting message from the Chocolate Bonds project is that financial innovation is not dead. Financial innovation has taken a beating in recent years due to the mis-selling of complex mortgage instruments and derivatives, which allowed one party to exploit another. This looks like something refreshingly different: a genuine win-win scenario for HC and their customers.
I’m a big fan of the “80:20 Principle.” The principle basically suggests that a small proportion of causes are responsible for a large proportion of consequences; e.g. 80% of a company’s profits could be derived from 20% of its customers. In his book, Richard Koch writes about the 80:20 principle in both a business context and a lifestyle context, and encourages people to use the principle to maximise their effectiveness. He suggests that by concentrating on the few things that you are especially good at (where you fall into the top 20%) you can multiply your productivity (collectively the top 20% deliver 80% of the results, putting them a factor of 16 ahead of the rest).
When the topic came up in the book I am presently reading, it caught my attention. In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson writes about the growing importance of very niche forms of media. The Internet, due to sites like iTunes and YouTube, has become a platform for distributing media with zero marginal cost. This allows a much wider selection of books / songs / movies than is possible in conventional retail, so the “Long Tail” of the market demand curve can now be addressed.
As Anderson points out, this suddenly makes the 80% of books / songs / movies that would previously have been ignored by mainstream business channels really rather important. Entire livelihoods and subcultures have grown up around the niche content that can now be profitable. The global sharing of ideas has created new hybrid styles of art and music. Most importantly: the mass transfer of information is not acting as a homogenising force – rather it is allowing an immense level of diversity to flourish.
This weekend I went to the newly opened exhibition “Exposed” at the Tate Modern. The collection of images explores the invasion of privacy through photography – at what point does artistic licence decay into dangerous voyeurism? Is the viewer of a photograph implicated in the act of taking it?
Most of the exhibition looks at the invasion of privacy in a historical context, but it prompted me to think more deeply about the present (and the very imminent) technological advances that could take voyeurism to a whole new level.
For example, online photo sharing means that most of us are already leaving publicly available records of our movements through time. It is easy to imagine a scenario in which an organisation trawls the web for photographs, downloading them to an archive and running them through face-recognition software. With the time, date and location stored with each photograph they could create a searchable database that could re-produce the historical location, through time, of just about anybody, based on the photos that they appear in. It would not surprise me if national intelligence services already have such a system. Nor would it surprise me if a privately-run commercial system is available soon.
On the subject of digital voyeurism, Google managed to open up a new frontier when they recorded masses of data being passed over unsecured wi-fi networks. I, like millions of others, already entrust Google with my personal data (emails and search histories and such). As such, I think it is probably a good thing they were behind the data collection and not a company that might be tempted to exploit what they found.
But overall the pace of technological advancement seems to be outstripping the pace at which we adjust our behaviour, our laws and our cultural norms. The Tate Modern’s exhibition focuses on the extreme, but in doing so it acts as a useful prompt for us to re-think our concept of privacy for a digitally-connected world.
These weekend I went to the cinema not once, but twice (to see Robin Hood and Prince of Persia, both good films.) One thing that struck me was the number of adverts for 3D movies. It seems that after the success of Avatar, all the film studios want a piece of the 3D pie.
So far the investments in 3D seem to be paying off: not only can cinemas charge more for tickets but 3D cannot be replicated (yet) in a pirated version downloaded for free from the internet. Consumers can benefit from an improved movie experience and cinemas are doing better revenue-wise.
Having been extremely impressed by the visual effects in Avatar, I was recently very disappointed by the 3D effects in Clash of the Titans. From conversations with a friend in the film industry, I learned that Avatar was originally filmed stereoscopically, using two cameras to capture video, one for each eye. In contrast, Clash was not originally intended to be a 3D movie. It was shot with a single perspective, and the ‘depth’ effect was added later with a digital overlay. This created an unconvincing picture, it interfered with the other computer graphics, and generally made it a worse visual experience.
Unfortunately many of the “3D” films that I have seen advertised are apparently being made the same way. This is quite alarming to me: 3D technology has the potential to create a revolution throughout our visual media, but if it is implemented badly consumers will be put off. I hope that movie studios realise that by taking short cuts for fast money this year, they could lose out significantly in the longer term.
The UK’s budget deficit has received a lot of attention recently. However up to now, politicians have only spoken openly about what they will ring-fence, and not about what they will cut. The scale of the declines in public spending about to happen will probably take most of the country by surprise. The Financial Times has a superb budget balancing tool that brings home how difficult the decisions that have to be made really are.
In the run up to the election, the Labour party was right about one thing: the cuts will be a setback to the UK’s economic recovery. (They were wrong about something else: the cuts are not optional and cannot be put off.) The UK’s private sector has already had its recession: from 2008 to 2010 companies cut back on capital expenditure and stopped recruiting, causing a drop in the country’s output and a hike in unemployment (especially amongst the young). Throughout this period, though, the public sector kept spending and kept recruiting. Furthermore, a substantial chunk of the debt in the private sector was transferred to the public sector through the bank bailouts / nationalisations.
This action prevented a deeper recession. Unfortunately, the flip side is that we have a lot of pain to come. Rather than the “V shaped” recession we were hoping for, we are very much destined for a W-shaped one. Only this time round it will be the public sector that has to freeze its capital expenditure, and its new hiring, and, of course, its “unemployee” expenses.
May has been a busy month for news what with volcanic ash, the election, and the oil leak. But for me, one of the biggest stories has been overlooked by the mainstream media. For me, Facebook’s decision to link any Interests or Favourite things that we mention on our profile pages directly to “Community Pages” is a watershed moment. Not only is privacy being eroded - nothing new there – but this major change was undertaken without any consultation, without any choice to opt out and without any regard for the widespread criticism that has followed. In my opinion it could signal the beginning of the end for the Facebook phenomenon.
What’s so bad about the changes? For me, my profile feels like my personal space. What people see on my profile will shape their image of me, so I want to control what goes on there. In a similar way to clothes, hair styles and body language, our online presence is something that people see and make judgements about. This extends, in my opinion, to the things that we link to on our profile, in our status updates, and in wall posts. By forcing us to link our profiles to these bland and invasive ‘Community Pages,’ Facebook has put me off listing any Interests or Favourites*. Which removes one of the more interesting aspects of the social networking medium.
Why the dramatic talk of the ‘beginning of the end’ for Facebook? Because in order to sustain its dominance in social networking in the long term, Facebook will have to consistently make itself better. Judging by the outcry every time Facebook makes a change, a lot of people find that it is consistently getting worse. Facebook started out by being adopted by small but influential communities then spreading out more widely; there is no reason this success couldn’t be emulated if someone came out with a social networking platform that is a step change better.
* This also means the adverts now displayed to me are less relevant, which means I click on them less and Facebook loses advertising revenue
I like the Liberal Democrats. I don’t like all of their policies. Some of them are rubbish. But I like the fact that they care about civil liberties, that they are willing to consider an alternative to Trident and that their immigration policy is not idiotic. From my perspective, the more power they gain on Thursday May 6th, the better.
Which is why I have placed a bet against them. I have bet a relatively modest sum against a ‘hung parliament’ outcome in the election. With a Labour majority, I am £15 richer; with a Tory majority I am £15 richer. With a hung parliament, I am £10 poorer but feel a lot better about the future of the country. It may not be a perfect hedge – my feelings about the future of the country are probably stronger than that*. But at least I will have something to smile and feel smug about on Friday.
*For a ‘perfect hedge’ I would also have to factor in the net present value of the cash flows determined by the future government’s tax policy on my income, which could be an interesting project in its own right
This blog was started in March 2010. I write several times a year covering a range of topics but loosely focusing on: Business, Finance, Technology and Politics.
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