At the SSCL event the two contenders were Will Page, (right) chief economist for PRS  (his link is helpful as it will as it leads you to the Long Tail theory) and auto engineer, Niklas Ivarsson (left) content director of Spotify  where a new 'legal' music model  claims upgraded user number in the service is "in six figures."

In a curiously old fashioned approach (for music that is) Spotify has been the only company to have managed to convince all the major record labels to allow their music to be streamed for free and offers its streaming service in six countries (Sweden, Finland, Norway, France, Spain and the UK) then moving upmarket to offer a general monthly subscription download service, pitching to higher income group willing to pay £9.99/month.

This allows users to hear music without adverts being played between songs, quality digital recording and the use of applications such as the Spotify iPhone. Spotify claims to earn more than £1m/month from its premium subscribers and its overall earnings could top £72m a year. The company has spent €2,000 on marketing in the UK and believed to have spent just €30,000 on marketing in all of Europe.

Big Things: risks & models
Speaker at Scotland IS 10Big things were Kelly Dempski, director of research at Accenture's Research Labs in Sophia Antipolis, France, GordonThomson, (left) Cisco Systems' director world wide sales strategy and planning; Dell's Stephen Murdoch, with a wealth of experience of telecoms and infrastructure challenges; Gordon Lovell-Read, (top right) CEO of CIO Development Ltd, previously Group CIO of Siemens, with passionate views about tomorrow's leadership skills,and David Mitchell, (lower right) senior VP IT Research, Ovum who chaired the debate.

For some their mutual emphasis was a clarion call for technology firms to take more risks . To catch the eye of the next wave of overseas investors, who are looking for cluster "Cloud" data centres and according to Deloitte Research global trends annual study groundbreaking "only compelling tech developments - especially those with a green hue - will buck the market, and attract increasing amounts of funds."

But when Murdoch, (right) Dell's Europe, Middle East and Africa VP and GM (large enterprises), said that where capital is limited "to gain competitive advantage you must be first with an idea and be somewhat ruthless," his first advise was "Think carefully about your business model," then adding "and think about taking more risks. Other countries are quite relentless in their pursuit of success and you must become more like that. And be less concerned about failure."

Accenture's Kelly Dempski, (left) offered that tech enterprises have to "shift their thinking" away from purely the money, towards connecting more with customers' needs, an interestingly quite old fashioned approach to the business model with caveats but focused on customisation for making the ‘long tail’ available, easy to find and cheap to produce and store.

There are caveats as ever in customisation.  One tale the supermarket chain which primed their tellers be bright and conversational with customers, only to learn in a later survey that the its overwhelming shopper reaction was totally set against cheerful, chatty supermarket tellers!

Disruption models: the internet, telecoms, adapt, IP and nano
In the EU's Future Internet report, it was noted that the existing internet has catalysed innovation and favoured emergence of new disruptive business models citing as a prime example that in 2008, about 300m persons use free VoIP Skype.

Inesco lists as its disruptive models, intermittent connectivity networks (eg. DTNs), viral/self-spreading networks, advanced forwarding/routing paradigms and intelligent connectivity in multi-access networks.

While for the investment community itself, GrowVC's blog puts its finger on "new successful businesses are normally something disruptive in their own business area, but idea itself can come from another business; like for example, peer-to-peer lending and micro-lending are good examples for Grow VC."

An intriguing model to have emerged recently comes from Nokia  guarding its IP base in its suite against the iPhone which uses GSM and UMTS that Nokia developed as part of a global consortium of telecommunication companies. Nokia has been repeatedly asking Apple to license its patents and Apple has refused.

“Sometimes it can take years to figure out if a product infringes on a certain patent,” says Jerry A. Kaufman, president of Alexander Resources, specialising in telecommunications patents. Lawsuits, he said, are a common negotiating tactic and typically, the royalties for essential patent portfolios in cellphones make up 1 -2% of wholesale price. In some cases, as 5%.

Potential return to Nokia could be enormous. The wholesale cost to wireless carriers of the iPhone is estimated to average about $600. A 2% royalty would represent $12 for each phone sold. In just the most recent quarter, Apple sold 7.4m iPhones. It has sold more than 34m in total.

At the recent Scottish meeting for NanoYard  ARM's principal staff engineer Professor Ian Phillips made the  statement that ARM,  architect of much of our digital world and specialist embedded microprocessor IP technology, “doesn’t make anything” but through outsourcing IP with partnerships has managed to grow to employing 1,800 people with $500m profit and 32% increase in sales.

Business models are prime consideration as a very Big Thing indeed.