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Workshop on Partnering for Innovation and Growing in a Global Recession
Posted by superuser on Thursday 5th of March 2009 | 0 Comment(s)Partnering for Innovation & Growing in a Global Recession has been put together in direct response to the feedback gained at InfoLab21's December 16th event and is a combined InfoLab21, Digital Communications KTN and North West Vision and Media event delivered in association with The Technology Strategy Board. The event focuses on the practical steps to accessing collaborative R&D funding.
Slides of Feb 09 Event - Beyond Mobile 2.0
Posted by superuser on Wednesday 4th of March 2009 | 0 Comment(s)Videos of Feb 09 Event - Beyond Mobile 2.0
Posted by superuser on Wednesday 4th of March 2009 | 0 Comment(s)We discussed the growth of iPhone, Android and other technologies as platforms for creation of new products and services and their relevance to both consumers and businesses alike. As we are approaching a new phase of mobile Internet, innovative companies are creating mashups incorporating 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, video and location based services. In this environment, it is crucial to understand the strategic and tactical steps that executives, entrepreneurs and investors should take to ensure that they are not left behind with the mobile Internet revolution. Those who develop strategies to improve customer, supplier, employee and management communications using mobile Internet are bound to gain significant competitive advantage.
Dave Verwer, CTO, Shiny Development
Since Apple released the iTunes application store in July last year over 10,000 applications have been released and total application download numbers top 300 million so it is safe to say that the application store has been a success, but what makes a compelling iPhone application? The iPhone offers a fantastic array of hardware and software features but using these features effectively on a 3.5" mobile phone screen can be a challenge. This session will take a high level look at the features of the phone that application designers have access to and look at some guidelines for making a killer iPhone application.
Katie Lips, Mobile Strategist at Appostles
Katie Lips is author of "The Amazing iPhone Report", a Guide to the platform for business owners. Katie will offer an overview of what makes the iPhone platform special and how both iPhone and Android offer supportive environments for developers and entrepreneurs. "New Mobile" is no longer a walled garden, but as developers are fast creating thousands of new apps, the ecosystem (the iPhone App Store at least) is fast becoming a crowded space. How can mobile 2.0 developers make sure their apps stand out? Katie will outline some trending strategies in "new mobile marketing" and share some lessons learnt from Kisky's recent launch of iPhone application Coffee Buzz
Rhys Jones, CEO - Sanoodi
Rhys returns to #NS20 to discuss the success Sanoodi (and pet project Locly) has made by building robust and versatile mobility solutions to complement their online presence. His discussions will focus on iPhone, Nokia, Blackberry, etc. Rhys is a serial entrepreneur with two successful exists (Secure Trading and Accountis).
Robert Wakeling, CEO - Wadaro
Robert Wakeling, currently CEO of Wadaro, has in the past held senior management positions in companies such as Openwave and Magic4. Openwave had their own terminal platform and Magic4 integrated their 3rd party messaging Clients into various manufacturers platforms. Having experienced the practicalities around developing software products for terminals, Robert can explain how vendors have traditionally implemented their devices and how they have or tried to move to a platform based offering and why.
Ben Hookway
Summary of Mobile World Congress that took place last week in Barcelona. Ben founded and exited from Next Device, which was funded by Rising Stars
StartUp4Slaughter - Ash Mokhberi - DistinctID
Since the launch of the internet users have had to repeatedly submit registration information to websites and create multiple usernames and passwords. With the launch of social networking sites and sites such as ebay, we have all started to build profiles of our identity on the internet. Whether it be a profile of personality and life experience or a profile used to identify credibility and trust among others. To this day the profiles or identity’s we build about ourselves online are restricted to their website of origin, forcing us as users to rebuild the same identity from scratch when we use a new website.
Our mission is to create an open and transportable online identity management system that allows users to have a single entry point to access internet services, along with backend open integration for web developers to utilise current services and develop new services to meet their own requirements. Allowing users to manage share and distribute online credentials to any source they wish. While at the same time allowing web developers to take advantage of this information to develop converged internet services and marketing.
Questions for audience
1. Where do the audience see the importance of online identity in the delivery of cloud computing and mobile applications including location based services?
2. How do they feel is the best way to attract the critical mass (in terms of users), required to provide mass web proliferation of such a service?
3. Web based tech start-ups view on open id, decentralised identity and control of users information, As an importance to their business and why??
Vision, Mission and Strategy for Northern StartUp 2.0
Posted by superuser on Wednesday 4th of March 2009 | 0 Comment(s)In Feb 09, Phil Tapsell of TechVenture Solutions Ltd and Tom Cheesewright of The Lever Ltd joined Manoj on voluntary basis to steer NS20 forward, especially with respect to marketing and business development activities respectively. As you would have expected, one of the first activities of the team was to refine the vision, mission and strategy of Northern StartUp 2.0. Your comments and thoughts are most welcomed.
Our Vision
A thriving community of technology startups in Northern England, with access to all of the knowledge, services and capital that they need to grow rapidly. National and international recognition of the North as one of the most creative and supportive environments for technology business development.
Our Mission
To create the right ecosystem for entrepreneurship and business growth in the technology sector in Northern England, assembling all of the key stakeholders in an active community where knowledge is shared and deals are done. Stakeholders include entrepreneurs and startups, investors and financiers, technologists, service providers, and enablers from the public and private sectors, including government agencies and educational establishments.
Our Strategy
To build a programme of offline events to enable startups to learn, stakeholders to connect, and partnerships to form. To support this with a dedicated online community that leverages the latest in social and media technology to streamline access to valuable knowledge and best practice.
You do not need to buy A Silicon Valley? A response to Paul Graham
Posted by superuser on Monday 2nd of March 2009 | 0 Comment(s)Imran Ali just pointed me to a blog post by Paul Graham of Y-Combinator titled "Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe". Even before I finished reading the second paragraph I knew I had to respond to it. So here I am reading and responding to Paul Graham. If you agree or disagree with what is written below, please do not hesitate to leave a comment.
I do not buy Paul's argument that having a first-rate university in a place where rich people want to live will create a Silicon Valley. If you take Manchester (UK) as an example, University of Manchester is a first-rate university (23 Nobel Laureates) and there are plenty of rich people living in the suburbs of Greater Manchester and Cheshire. As far as I am concerned, Silicon Valley is a one-off, and whilst we all aspire to create Silicon Valleys, what is important is to create ecosystems for sustainable economic activities through innovation and enterprise. This is exactly the vision of Northern StartUp 2.0 (NS20).
Y-Combinator's equivalent in Europe is SeedCamp founded by Saul Klein of Index Ventures. It concentrated on UK startups in the first year, but second year saw significantly higher proportion of European startups participating in the competition. In the UK, the hotspot for tech startups continues to be London, especially for internet and mobile related startups. If you compare London vs. key regions of the UK, you will find that most startups in regions are funded by regional VCs whose capital originates from European and UK Government funds channelled through the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs). This is not true with respect to London, due to a large number of private equity and venture capital firms based there. How do you draw London based private equity and venture capital firms to places like Manchester? The answer is through NS20, which has so far brought Internet Capital from NYC, and DFJ Esprit, SeedCamp and Advent Ventures from London. We are showcasing the best of northern talent through Dragon's Lair events, the next one scheduled for 26th March 09.
Paul argues that the only way to retain best startups in a city is to ensure sufficient funding for number of rounds. The regional funds in the UK are reliant on conditions such that the funds have to be invested in 3 years. In addition, most funds are run by very conservative investment managers resulting in startups seeking funding from London and elsewhere. Therefore, I can only conclude that no single city outside London and perhaps the exception of Cambridge and Oxford have sufficient funds to retain quality startups. A number of Oxford startups have moved to Silicon Valley looking for warmer pastures in terms of funding. Two such companies are YouNoodle and Auctomatic. I had the privileage to meet founders of both companies whilst taking part in Webmission08. These companies prove the point Graham was making.
We do not see Silicon Valley as a competitor unlike perhaps Oxford. If we see a competitive city, it would have to be London. One of the issues I am trying to address is to allow local startups to meet locally instead of meeting in London through events organised in London, which happened before the birth of NS20. Lot more greater awareness is needed to multiply local activities.
Graham speaks about self-sustaining chain reaction. I call this developing an ecosystem, and this has become the mission of NS20. I did not start NS20 to develop an ecosystem for tech startups. The first event in Nov 06 was organised with few aims in mind:
- Find few fellow tech entrepreneurs I could speak to for knowledge share
- Find few stories outside London for TechCrunch UK to blog about
From humble beginnings, NS20 grew to be a community of more than 1400 people today. Until last week, it was a one man's mission. Both Phil Tapsell of TechVenture Solutions and Tom Cheesewright of The-Lever are volunteering to help me drive NS20 forward.
NS20 activities directly help Manchester more than any other city, yet there is no public sector support to help fund its activities. NS20 can deliver a much improved service to accelerate the growth of the ecosystem, but to achieve this, it is fundamental it has either public sector funding or significant sponsorship from the private sector. However, I am glad to confirm that lack of funding will not result in the death of NS20 - it will only slow down its ability to infulence.
Buying startups as Paul suggests might work for another US city, but I doubt it will ever work in the UK, nor any UK city will ever dream of it. Eventhough that NS20 is over two years old, it is only since Jan 09 that I have decided to treat it as a business instead of just a hobby. With the help of Phil and Tom, I am hoping to draw a strategic plan of how we could help startups in a better way than I have done in the past two years. Some of the work I have initiated since the start of 2009 includes:
- Introducing funding through Non Executive Directors - The partnership with First Flight Placements is helping to achieve this. A number of NS20 startups are going through this process as we speak
- Introducing a top 20 services such as accountancy and audit services at a heavily discounted price. We will soon be in a position to announce this through Horwath Clark Whitehill. I am hoping that it will extend to other essential services such as legal, etc
Graham also mentions about startups doing disreputable things, especially around pronography. I think he is speaking about one of his greatest Y-Cominator funded startups called Scribd which used pornography to drive initial traffic and then ban pornography once it achieved critical mass. A strategy I would not be interested in associating with, but it worked for Scribd, and I personally have no issue about it.
What above also shows is that ecosystems also need brilliant marketers. In Manchester, the RDA take pride in supporting new media businesses. At present, other than funding innovation centres, the RDA does not seem to have a strategy of supporting tech startups. This is creating even a greater need for NS20 to deliver support for tech startups. In addition, NS20 also intends to glue the various public sector providers and innovation centres including key universities in order to fulfill it's self-impose remit of building an ecosystem. The Dragon's Lair series of events is seen as a catalyst for this activity.
To conclude, I do not believe we need to build a Silicon Valley, but do have a need to create a sustainable ecosystem, where not just the knowledge transfers take place, but proven entrepreneurs such as founders of Plus.net, Freeserve, Late Rooms and Moneysupermaket.com et al continue to invest locally. In terms of NS20, the work has only just begun. It is your duty to be part of this community if you wish to bring economic sucess to North.
Tags: NS20, Northern StartUp 2.0, Paul Graham, Y-Combinator
Whose Cloud Is It Anyway? Marc Benioff at TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable
Posted by superuser on Sunday 1st of March 2009 | 0 Comment(s)
A video highlight from Whose Cloud Is It Anyway? TechCrunch's cloud computing roundtable that was moderated by TechCrunch Co-Editor Erick Schonfeld and TechCrunchIT Editor Steve Gillmor. The event took place on February 27, 2009.
In this video Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff talks about how the paradigm of computing has changed and what we are seeing today is the emergence of cloud computing, which is no software, no hardware, don't hire anyone, and instead sign up for cloud platforms and pick the flavor (services) that's most appropriate for your needs. Benioff says he sees cloud computing has two components: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). He says it's the biggest shift in computing in two decades, and it's the most exciting thing going on in the tech industry today.
It all started with sub-prime mortgages followed by prestigious banks going under worldwide resulting in low liquidity and economic contraction. Large companies are cutting down costs and headcounts with significant hits on R&D. In most cases all R&D spend has been frozen or cancelled. This is a great time for tech startups to innovate, prove concepts and be there strong when the economy recovers.
Whilst the last three years so the emergence of web 2.0 startups with no clear focus on revenue generation, the current economic climate is forcing these startups to think otherwise. The startups with the right strategy will emerge, grow and have the opportunity to acquire struggling startups.
Mike Butcher, Editor, TechCrunch UK and Ireland
Mike addressed the changing economic landscape for tech startups in the UK and Europe. Having travelled extensively within Europe over the last six months, speaking to tech startups from many countries as well as regularly blogging about the market, Mike was in unique position to spot trends, and he shared some of his thoughts about the future with Northern Startup 2.0 community.
Ed French, Venture Capitalist, Enterprise Ventures
Ed addressed the changes in approach to funding in the post-credit crunch world for early stage technology companies, providing some specific pointers to changes to the approach to investors that the new climate.
James Brocket, Managing Partner, CalibreOne
James spoke of the issues associated with recruiting and retaining talented Executives in these challenging times, and also with paving the way to being able to hire these people when the time is right to do so. Great companies are built in challenging times - and great people build great companies.
Dr. Zoe Lock, Technology Strategy Board
Zoe provided an overview of the aims and priorities of the Technology Strategy Board in the area of Information and Communication Technology.
Panel Discussion
First ever StartUp4Slaughter - Lisa Scales from Talent On View
Posted by superuser on Saturday 21st of February 2009 | 0 Comment(s)Here is when brave Lisa from Talent On View faced the audience who were more than keen to help her resolve the key issue faced by Talent On View.
On web business models, profitablity and scale
Posted by NicBrisbourne on Monday 2nd of February 2009 | 0 Comment(s)
Story taken from The Equity Kicker without editing
Fred Wilson wrote a great post over the weekend which was largely dedicated to making the point that in the final analysis profitability is what makes a business attractive, and that being small or medium sized and highly profitable is often a better idea than being large and loss making. I couldn’t agree more, moreover, one of the unfortunate side effects of the venture industry’s need to produce home runs is that some companies are over-encouraged to pursue scale and end up on the wrong side of this equation.
As Fred says, the fundamentals of corporate finance are that a business is worth the discounted value of it’s future cash flows, and no matter how big a company is if those cashflows add up to a negative number the business isn’t worth anything. Full stop.
When markets are a bit heady companies, and even stock markets, sometimes allow themselves to forget this reality (or more often allow themselves to put wild assumptions in their models) but when times get tough people get back to focusing on fundamentals. In many ways Fred’s post is a call to do just that.
I welcome this renewed focus on fundamentals and profitability and the disappearance of some of the more excessive ‘build it to flip’ thinking that has been in circulation in recent years. But, having said that, much of what we in the startup ecosystem are doing remains the same., and there are some tenets of VC/startup strategy which in my opinion shouldn’t be casualties of the current climate. I have two I want to highlight here.
1. The credit crunch doesn’t necessarily change the trade-off between pursuing traffic growth or revenues in the early days of a company. If the average life time value for a customer of your service is only ever going to be low, and you are therefore going to need a lot of them, I still think it often makes sense to prioritise growing the customer base over revenues in the early days. This is not a naive ‘build it to flip’ proposition though, and there are some important caveats - this only applies for companies that genuinely have the potential to be very large, have a customer acquisition cost of very close to £0, can still maintain cost discipline, and are sure finance will be available (in the current climate one needs to think carefully about future funding and milestones for valuation growth - I will post on this later in the week). A number of companies in Fred’s portfolio pursue this ‘traffic growth first’ strategy, including Twitter, which if you think about it has all the elements I describe above, indeed Fred notes in his post that they only have around 20 employees.
2. For VC funded businesses scale still matters, and whilst small and profitable is certainly a safe place to be right now, over the medium term I would hate to see any lessening of the ambition to build genuinely world changing companies - and I say that both personally and professionally. To focus on the world of DFJ Esprit for a second - if you are going to raise VC (and this should be a big ‘if’ - venture capital is only appropriate for a small percentage of companies - i.e. those that can grow to be very valuable AND need a few £million to get there) then you need to have profit potential measuring in the tens of millions of pounds. You might not get to that point before you float or sell your company but the potential needs to be there to achieve the valuation and implied cash return that is going to make a difference to any reasonably sized VC fund. The reason VCs are obsessed with addressable market is that without a big one this scale of profits is unlikely to be possible.
So I think these two things haven’t really changed much. There are, of course, many more things that have changed, most concerning short term tactics for surviving the next couple of years (e.g sell something because venture and advertising dollars will be harder to come by) and some concerning inconvenient truths that can no longer be ignored (e.g. banner ads don’t perform well, particularly on social media sites) - but I don’t think we should be ripping up the rulebook entirely. As I’ve said before, at the end of the day this is only a cycle.
As an aside Chris Anderson has an interesting WSJ article this weekend making a similar ’some things are different whilst other things stay the same’ argument. In it he argues whilst the downturn changes the short term tactics for businesses the inexorable shift towards ‘free’ as a business model continues.
