After a lengthy period of due diligence and assorted financial wrangling, me and 27,000 of my closest friends have just become the first online social network in history to purchase a controlling stake in a professional sports team. MyFootballClub, based in the UK, is an extremely unique venture where the 27,000 owners of the team are literally calling the shots by voting on team line-ups, formations, player transfers, contract negotiations and all the other nitty-gritty aspects that come along with day to day management in the lower leagues of English football. We own the club. We pick the team. Not bad for 35 pounds each. Just to save you some time, 35 pounds multiplied by 27,000 is the equivalent to $1,884,173.00 Canadian. That buys a lot of soccer team. You can still get in on the ownership action as we are currently accepting new members.

This past week, following several months of negotiations and paperwork the MyFC members officially ratified our agreement to purchase Kent County's Ebbsfleet United, currently sitting 7^th in the Bluesquare Premier League, by a 95% margin. Thanks to our purchase, virtually all of the club's debt has been cleared and the long-term future of the club has been ironed out. The club is now effectively the richest in the Bluesquare Premier League, formerly known as the English Conference National, and it is likely the only one with a such a diverse and deep international following.

While members are primarily UK-based, but several dozen Canadians are on board, hundreds of Americans, Swedes, Colombians, Danes, Brazilians, and Chinese. Imagine, a sports team where the owners sitting in the 47^th floor of a condo in Dubai carry just as much weight as the guy who lives in the roughest council flat in Brixton. Members don't actually profit from owning the club, we all have a voting share, but no opportunity for financial gain. This helps ensure that our collective decisions are made with the club in mind and not our own bankrolls.

While our team's players may not be banking millions of pounds a year like top English Premier League players, our squad are still 100% professional and play exclusively for us. One of the exciting parts of English soccer is the fact that teams progress up and down through divisions based on their finishing position at the end of the season. Over the course of several years, it is not uncommon to see obscure clubs rocket through the league based on a steady stream of good results. In contrast, once mighty Leeds United (who in the year 2000 were playing at the top level in the Champions League semi-final) are now plying their trade in League 1, which is (confusingly) the 3^rd rung of English soccer.

The MyFootballClub website has videos, member forums, and contains a wealth of information about the club. 24 hours a day, members are interacting with each other and engaging in the latest and greatest way to enjoy the international male language of soccer. There is a central management structure to the MyFootballClub community with several paid staff members keeping the gears running smoothly behind the scenes. It is a social network with collective spending power and it could very well be just enough power to shake English football to its very foundations.

For example, Ebbsfleet's players had been using relatively worn out soccer balls during their training matches and their portable nets were in a shoddy state of disrepair. Even before MyFootballClub had sorted out the Ebbsfleet purchase, the team put out the call to MyFC members to help raise money for new balls and nets. The team raised the requisite 1600 pounds in a mere six hours.

This is the first example of a crowd-powered business where several thousand people came together to form a multi-million dollar entity that has now officially become a for-real venture with peoples livelihoods at stake. The history of our team and its role in the community is also on the line and there is a real collective responsibility amongst MyFC members not to screw this whole thing up.

There is talk of transferring MyFootballClub's ownership model into other sports. Imagine owning a piece of an AHL hockey team and getting to vote on the different lines, call-ups and player signings. Is a fan-run team in the CFL really that far-fetched an idea? Is this the next great evolution in professional sports? Is a few thousand people with credit cards and internet access really that powerful of a force if we all put our heads together? As I see it, the answers are no, maybe, and I certainly hope so.

We just won a 2-1 thriller against Burton Albion and Ebbsfleet is a mere 3 points out of the playoffs, which could see the club enter the upper-echelons of English soccer for the first time in its history. As a proud co-owner of an obscure sports team from a small town in a country I've never been to, I can still say it loud and say it proud- “Up the Fleet!”

Andrew Rideout

At the LG-sponsored Chocolate Fashion show at the Telus World Ski & Snowboard Festival, I found myself in a fascinating conversation with Frank Lee, a manager with LG Electronics Canada. We chatted about everything from HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, to LG's internet appliance line, and I even got the inside scoop on some unbelievably cool products that LG is currently working on.

LG's presence at the TWSSF is extremely logical. Telus is the platinum sponsor for the event, and conviniently Telus happens to be the first Canadian cell provider to carry LG's popular chocolate cell phone - the Chocolate Flip 8600.

Frank was extremely positive about just how significant the Canadian market is for LG. "In the past few years, we've realized just how important the Canadian market really is. In terms of feedback, you can't get much better, it's almost like one giant focus group because you get so many different opinions. There's so much diversity." I asked him about a specific instance that he could think of, "our line of Digital Internet Appliances, definitely, is one of the first that comes to mind. Ultimately, those have been a real success for us, but in other cases we've even pulled certain products because we got feedback from Candians that we thought were so incisive, it resulted in us retooling the products."  

I also wanted to get Frank's opinion on the HD format wars. It turns out that LG already has a leg-up on the competition, "it's all about offering consumers a choice. We figured what better way to give them the maximum amount of choice than to allow both formats to work on the same player. That's what the Super blu HD Player is all about."

We talked a bit about some of LG's new phones and it was fairly clear that LG is really pursuing the Chocolate phone as a fashion statement (the outdoor fashion show was my first clue). I asked him about new phones we could expect from LG this year and he obviously couldn't reveal too many specifics, but he was definitely excited about it. "We have an innovative new phone coming out in Q4 that is going to be massive. We're pushing boundaries in the mobile market and we definitely think this phone is going to create a sensation."

I figured that since we were on the topic of LG's upcoming products, I asked him what product he thinks consumers will be most excited about that they may not have heard about yet. I got quite a response. "We've got 7 R&D centers worldwide, and they put together some incredible products. One that I think consumers will really be excited about is the new 3D plasma screen we're putting the finishing touches on. It's going to be a new manifestation in plasma television. I saw the prototype and I was speechless. It's that good."

A 3D plasma screen? I tried to get pricing and release details, but Frank insisted that we're going to have to stay tuned to find out.

To think that this was only the first day of the Telus World Ski & Snowboard Festival. An incredible 13 day extravaganza bringing together Skiing, snowboarding, music, art, and most importantly some of the most cutting edge tech you'll find anywhere.

Andrew Rideout

Regular Backbone contributor Ian Harvey had a very interesting article published in the Globe and Mail Small Business Section titled "Is it real, or is it video conference?" about some of the recent breakthroughs in videoconferencing from two notable companies, HP's Halo and industry stalwart Cisco. Having not followed the videoconferencing industry closely, I was taken aback by the fact that in 2005 the overall industry was valued at 1.15 billion globally and is expected to grow to 3.1 billion by 2010.  Research firm Gartner Inc. sees even further value in videoconferencing, as an industry, and estimates that the sector will be worth over 12.1 billion by 2011, alone.

If you ask me, the real beauty part is that all of the breakthroughs in the industry ultimately lead towards one thing specifically- a price reduction. More money being spent on videoconferencing will ultimately make the technology more widespread and therefore, more affordable.

Large-scale videoconferencing is a truly enterprise-level solution. Ian quotes Guy Welty's description of how videoconferencing saves his company, W.R Grace (a global chemical supplier with annual sales valued at 2.5 billion) "Sending two high-level executives to Asia is two days each of downtime with the travelling. This is much more effective."

Increasingly, videoconferencing is being marketed towards the SMBs as a way to increase productivity and collaboration. Methinks that the internet's growing reliance on collaborative media leads us to an obvious conclusion- videoconferencing will soon be built into our every day internet applications once the technology becomes cheap enough. In fact, videoconferencing solutions for Joe Average can cost anywhere from 50-200 bucks.

You can also have a look at Ian's article in our Top 300 issue titled "Why CEOs Should Blog."

Andrew Rideout

In the January/February issue of Backbone, we ran an article called Turning over the Dark Side of the Internet which brought into focus some of the netherregions of the online world. After reading Danny Bradbury's article, it becomes increasingly clear that while the internet is, by its nature, a largely self-policed place, there is still room for organized codes of conduct, especially in the world of blogging.

The Blogger Code of Conduct seeks to clean up the quality of online discourse while by-and-large serving to keep the conversations not necessarily friendly, but a bit more civil. The Blogger Code of Conduct is the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, creator of wikipedia and Tim O'Reilly a conference promoter and blogger who is widely credited with coining the term Web 2.0. On O'Reilly's blog, he states “[It] gives us an opportunity to change the level of expectations that people have about what’s acceptable online,” he is also quick to add "The aim of the code is not to homogenize the Web, but to make clearer the informal rules that are already in place anyway." Think of it as a Robert's Rules of Order for the blogosphere.

While the idea of the Blogger Code of Conduct has been thrown around in certain circles for a while, the impetus is largely due to some very specific death threats received by influential tech blogger Kathy Sierra after she got involved in a dispute over whether it was acceptable to delete potentially liabelous or inflammatory comments left on ones personal website. Sierra was so alarmed by the threats that she cancelled a keynote appearance at a trade show and called the police, who are now investigating.

The Blogger Code of Conduct will most likely exist in many different forms with different types of rules pertaining to different types of blogs. While the Code of Conduct will not necessarily be adopted by all bloggers, having different sets of rules (mostly having to due with self-moderation and comment-censoring) could let readers know, in advance, what is expected of them when they participate in a particular blog.

The Internet can be a pretty wild place, and bloggers are an opinionated and sensitive bunch. If you want to know more, have a look here.

Andrew Rideout

The Candian Private Copying Collective has proposed a new tariff on MP3 players and memory sticks that could see the price of a 30 GB iPod kicked up an additional $75. It's not a tax, folks, it's a levy. It will already be tacked on to the price at the retail level—and that's the genius part. Future Shop is going to have to pay for it themselves, and then pass the bill on to you. That's because you're going to take that MP3 player and fill it up with all kinds of illegal, pirated music that is somehow going to put both Tom Cochrane and Nickelback into the poorhouse. Aren't you?

The CPCC is an association of composers, recording artists, publishers, and record labels. I wonder who holds most of the power out of those four? If you have lots of time on your hands, go ahead and read their proposal in its entirety right here and immerse yourself in as much legaleze as you can handle. But if you're a busy person and want to know the gist of it, just have a look at the pricing scheme.

So, after having assumed that you've read the links and know what you're talking about, I invite you to add to my list of questions that I am going to personally attempt to pose to David Baaskin, the guy they quote in the Globe and Mail article that initially tipped me off about the whole story.

So, (deep breath), here goes:

* If the levy on a CD-R is 29 cents and a CD-R contains approximately 700MB of storage space and my $40 MP3 player only holds 1 GB, why am I forced to pay $5? I could use that $5 to fill up 17 full CD-Rs with pirated music for a grand total of 11,900MB of pirated music. By that logic, a 30 GB iPod should only cost me about 13 bucks extra. Apparently, 30 GBs of pirated music on an iPod is worth $75 but 30 GBs worth of CD-Rs is tantamount to $13.

* What happens if I buy an MP3 player at a pawn shop? Am I forced to pay again?

* All of the wording in your legal documents refers to blank media. What happens if an iPod is sold with songs preloaded by the manufacturer? It is no longer a blank disc and could be used solely for promotional purposes. U2 and Apple have released an iPod pre-loaded with their own music. This is no longer a blank storage medium and is therefore not subject to the levy. Right?

* If your concern is really about the artists being compensated for their music, and all we're concerned about here is the artists, is it okay for me to just send a $75 cheque to Bryan Adams? I'll even include a picture of me listening to my brand spankin' new 30 GB iPod while rocking out to “Cuts like a knife.” Seriously, if you are as genuinely concerned with the artists as you claim to be, why can't I just cut out the middle man and send them the money directly. That's not going to happen, because the CPCC is going to want to keep a big chunk of however much is collected. Then, it's probably safe to say that the record labels themselves are going to keep another piece of it to improve the bottom line for the shareholders, after all, they lost out too. I can't mail a cheque to Oscar Peterson because the CPCC couldn't care less about Oscar Peterson, they care about their financial backers—the people who own record labels. Here's something I've known since I was nine years old and read an interview with MC Hammer on the pages of Disney Adventures: if you're a musician and you sell a CD for $25, you get to see about a dollar by the time everybody is done taking a little slice for themselves.

* If we are committing a crime not by sharing files per se, but merely by purchasing a device that can be used to play these types of files (along with many others) how is it legal to sell those items in a store? Is an agreement to pay this levy an admission of guilt? By paying the levy, has a consumer admitted culpability to file sharing? If some of the files he copies and shares wind up in Japan or Sweden or Saudi Arabia, has he broken a law? Furthermore, has the levy exonerated him from prosecution? If by paying the $75 on his 30 GB iPod, is that person entitled to 30 GB worth of pirated software, because he can safely assume that all artists have been appropriately compensated or is he entitled to as much pirated software as he can handle?

* Have you even asked yourself what Apple is going to think about this? That $75 could have been spent at the iTunes store on legitimate, legal MP3s.

* What happens if an MP3 player is given as a gift? Why should I be made to pay for what my irresponsible uncle Jim is going to download? Why should I foot the bill when he only uploads recordings of himself and his one-string bass?

* Do you not think you will feel retailer's wrath on this one?

* What happens if the phone I'm buying plays MP3s? What happens if the phone is subsidized on a contract plan? Who pays the levy?

*Your levy only seems to pertain to Digital Audio Recorders. What happens if somebody is using a portable player that doesn't record anything and merely streams audio from a nearby (or networked) computer through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth? This technology already exists. Since nothing is being recorded, apparently no levy is necessary.

* Correct me if I'm wrong, but since distributing or illegally downloading copy-written material is a crime, how can you add a supposed levy or tax onto something that is illegal?  

Those are just questions that came off the top of my head. Do you have any other questions you would like cleared up about the proposed levy? Do you think the levy is a good idea? Post a comment and let's see where the discussion goes.

Andrew Rideout

The Roslin Biocentre of Edinburgh, Scotland (of Dolly The Sheep fame) recently announced that it has created genetically modified chickens that produce very high levels of cancer-fighting proteins naturally within their egg whites.

Frankly, I find this incredibly exciting. Want to read the technical details? Your best bet is probably to go here and have a look for yourself. You'll get to read an assortment of details on miR24 monoclonal antibodies, human interferon b-1a, and a veritable slew of other biologyspeak that I can't make any sense of whatsoever. But that's beside the point—we have cancer-fighting chickens, people.

This is great news, and it enhances the status and profile of the biotech industry. This is what biotech is all about—using modern science to make our food and lives better and safer. Unfortunately, the mainstream media has been relatively mute on this subject, which leaves me wondering: if cancer-fighting chickens can't get some play on the 6 o'clock news then what does it take?

Do these chickens have to start firing iPhones out of their bodies for anybody to start paying attention?
We get wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump vs. Rosie O'Donnell, but nobody mentions the cancer-fighting chickens. We may have a living, breathing tool in the fight against cancer, that can be maintained with run of the mill chicken feed.

Could disease-fighting animals be the start of an entirely new industry? There has been much public distrust of genetically modified food (especially in Europe) and this could be one of the ways to get nay-sayers on board. What if genetically modifying food wasn't about increasing yields and product uniformity, but about improving the health and safety of everybody involved? Can we take a cow, and make its milk fight heart disease? Can we take a goat and make it produce antibodies that fight malaria?

Can you think of a better way to get people to buy your product than to make it combat deadly diseases? Sounds like added value to me.

I guess this is a microcosm for the entire world of commerce. Business today is a lot like a bunch of people picking up every chicken in every coop and looking for that one golden egg that makes everybody rich. Somebody, somewhere, is financing the research on these cancer-fighting chickens and that person is going to be very, very wealthy if this all pans out. Cancer-fighting proteins growing naturally in chickens...

Sounds like a golden egg to me.

Andrew Rideout

One of the greatest things about the technology industry is that it can generate an absolutely obscene amount of money for the right person with the right idea at the right time. We all remember the heady days of the original tech bubble in the late 1990s (some of us painfully so), but only now are we really able to see some of the end results.

My case in point on this one is the handful of people who got rich off the '90s tech boom. I mean really rich, like the "I make your annual salary while I'm sitting on the can for a minute and a half" type of rich. I think one of the greatest by-products from the old tech bubble has been the massive injection of money and free time it has given to a few people. The best example out there? If you ask me, it's Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and his newest project -- taking you to outer space and back.

Project Blue Origin is the code name for Bezos' entry into one of the most ambitious and incredible projects undertaken by modern science -- the commercialization of space flight. You may have already seen the Spaceship I concept that actually won the $10 million prize for the first commercial space vehicle to actually work, but Bezos' concept is so creative and so distinctly out of this world that it definitely warranted a blog post this afternoon.

As Bezos puts it "Our first objective is developing New Shepard, a vertical take-off, vertical-landing vehicle designed to take a small number of astronauts on a sub-orbital journey into space." How great does that sound? And wait until you see the actual New Shepard space vehicle! It looks straight out of a 1950s Ed Wood movie, except that there is no visible string dangling from the top of the screen -- this baby works!

Skip on over to their Web site and have a look at some of the pictures and streaming videos that Bezos himself was kind enough to post. Watching that thing take off, hover, and then set down like it's nothing sends chills down my spine. We're close, people. We are very very close to what seemed like science fiction only years ago. Since governments have taken their foot off the gas in the space race, it is now up to the private sector to step up and turn fantasy into a reality.

I guess that is part and parcel of the technology world. We take stuff out of people's dreams and fantasies and make it a reality. I remember as a kid thinking that video phones were the definition of the future and I was only born in 1982. Now we're not only talking on video cell phones, we're downloading "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas and using it as a ringtone to irritate the living hell out of the general populace. That isn't even useful, but people will pay for it, and if people are going to pay for it, somebody's going to provide it. Is a 20 minute trip to outer space useful? Not really. But people will pay for it. Whether it's a trip to space or a 99 cent ringtone of a terrible song, the tech industry will keep pushing things forward because it simply doesn't know how to stop.

The tech industry is kind of like a great white shark. When it comes close to the people, everybody takes notice, It's got plenty of suckers clinging onto the bottom and if the shark stops moving, it dies. Just like the tech industry will die if it stops moving forward. If the commercial space race is the next niche industry where money will be made, simple market economics will make sure that it happens. That's what it all boils down to -- market economics. Just ask the Black Eyed Peas.

Or Jeff Bezos, for that matter.

Andrew Rideout 

2006 was the first year since 1999 that file-sharing jumped into the media spotlight in a big way. But gone are those days of Shawn Fanning’s Napster and its Metallica-induced malaise. If you paid attention to CNN, Time and the recording industry in 1999 you would think that after seven years of file-sharing record stores would be a thing of the past and all of the Internet’s bandwidth would be wasted downloading Britney Spears songs—scary stuff, indeed.

Flash forward to 2006 and you have youtube. You have Myspace. You have iTunes. You have podcasting. You have Flickr. You have del.cio.us. You have RSS feeds. You have user-generated content that gives people exactly what they want, right when they want it.

How can we expect TV to compete with that?

Something different happened this time. It wasn’t music, it was video. It was blogs. It was pictures. It was profiles. It wasn’t about you downloading a Rolling Stones song. It was your co-workers videotaping you singing “Sympathy for the devil” at the office party you wish you could forget.

User-generated content gave us some incredible images over the past year. But more importantly, it has changed the dynamics of media so that CNN now counts on an army of unpaid people with cellphone cameras for the latest breaking news. When something eventful happens, bet money that faster than you can say “Macaca” the video is online.

Andrew Rideout