I joined TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs when it was first launched in Manchester about two years ago. TiE differentiates with other organisations by concentrating on providing mentoring services for entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, just like many organisations, it tends to attract more service providers than entrepreneurs these days. This has resulted in less attendance by me over the last year, as I value learning from fellow entrepreneurs and not necessarily interested in meeting with service providers. However, I appreciate the value it provides and continued my membership for another year, just now. I also plan to attend their Christmas Cheer on 15th December 08. The membership is £30 per annum and events are typically priced at £10 for members. If you have not attended an event before, I suggest you try them out.

In my opinion, TiE lacks volume of entrepreneurs in the North West. Northern StartUp 2.0 lacks mentors but is not short of digital entrepreneurs. I see this as a great opportunity for a partnership.

According to TiE's website, it has 135 charter members (128 listed online) and 568 members. Charter Members includes Chris Allen (Laterooms) and Imran Hakin (iTeddy). Quite a number of North West members are also members of Northern StartUp 2.0 and falls in to the category of Service Providers.

Perhaps I ought to restart my discussion about a partnership.

Tags: TiE, Northern StartUp 2.0, Laterooms, iTeddy

This is quite an old pitch and StoryCode.com is alive with both UK and US operations, but they have not updated the blog since the pitch in 2006.

Here is the transcript of the pitch taken from the blog

Richard (focuses on Richard Farleigh), imagine you have read all the books by that author, have run out of reliable recommendations and are flummoxed by the choice available. StoryCode is going to help you. "I've read all the Dan Brown books; What else have you got like The Da Vinci Code?" you say. In my role as shop assistant, with complete confidence, and despite knowing nothing about these books, I can answer with: "You should try State of Fear by Michael Crichton or Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson."

Dragons seem to have switched off after hearing that most of the money will go to finance the founders. Very sensitive issue, as any entrepreneur knows.

The picture video of the last event held at KPMG Manchester.

We are looking for supporters going into 2009. Now is the time to ensure your company is at heart of Northern StartUp 2.0.

In 2009, we will explore alternative investment to VC, given the current credit crunch.

Simon and Tony ran a session on Enterprise 2.0 mid-year and I thought this would be a great video to watch given our forthcoming event on 18th Nov 08 in Manchester.

What do you think?

Bill Morrow is the founder of Angels Den, which is now the largest online meeting place for entrepreneurs and small business in the UK. Not a good time to be thinking about becoming a business angel, you may think and you would be forgiven for that. Not so, says Bill, and there are many who would agree...

Recently PhoneFromHere.com were presented with the opportunity to attend next years Internet World as part of the Innovation Pavilion. As many of you will know PhoneFromHere.com are a NorthWest based Web/Telco startup, offering Web-based voice communications for Web users and online communities. We are active participants of regional, national and international tech and startup communities, having evolved from the long established and respected software consultancy Westhawk Ltd. As a local business PhoneFromHere.com were thrilled to win the Big Chip International Innovation Award earlier this year and to be recognized as a global web business. Attending Internet World 2009 would provide an ideal platform for us to build upon our previous successes and support our activities promoting and selling the PhoneFromHere.com service to the international web industry.

PhoneFromHere.com have been working hard over the past few months to secure financial investment to support marketing and promotional opportunities that would effectively grow our business more rapidly than would otherwise be possible. Budget to attend the Internet World 2009 had been ear-marked particularly due to the exhibition’s reputation as the leading event for the Internet business and the digital marketing sector, but also because of its proven ability to attract some 13,000 top decision makers from leading brands. The attendees profile is the Marketing, Media and/or e-Commerce Managers/Directors, 89% of whom are responsible for purchasing. They come to this show looking to for technology solutions, to make key business partnerships and to spend their budgets. 73% of visitors to the expo expected to buy from an exhibitor met at Internet World within 12 months, PhoneFromhere.com need to gain visibility with this, our target market and the Innovation Pavilion would provide a great opportunity to do just that. However, a few weeks ago to our surprise and disappointment our Investor, who had already issued PhoneFromHere.com with a term sheet pulled out, explaining that the fund had effectively run dry before our application could be processed.

Frustrated as we are by the situation we are now working to implement as much of our business plan as possible without the funding, which means cutting back in many areas, but also begging, borrowing and blagging whatever support and assistance we can. So here it the punch line… we are looking for a sponsor who would like to be associated with PhoneFromHere.com, an award winning, innovative startup, from the NorthWest but with global potential. We are looking to pitch our presence at the Internet World 2009 event in conjunction with our partner, showcasing their offering alongside our own.

If you have any ideas about how we might finance our presence at Internet World or have some suggestions about whom we might approach for help, we would greatly appreciate your input. I will be appealing LIVE at the Northern Startup event on the 28th of October at the KPMG offices; I look forward to hearing your thoughts then.

Georgia Brown
PhoneFromHere.com
+44 (0) 161 288 4242

On 24th September 2008, Northern StartUp 2.0 community welcomed Tom Watson, Minister for Cabinet Office and his private secretary Sarah Gouldbourne to Manchester.  This was the first time we welcomed a Government Minister. Since my first meeting with Tom, I have changed my viewpoints about Government Ministers. I always had the thought that Government Ministers are untouchable and quite full of themselves. Tom is quite the opposite. A down to earth individual. In fact he is an exceptional individual. 

Tom has been in Manchester for number of days with his young family, the latest addition been only five months old. Having ended the 2008 Labour party conference, he should have gone home straight given how tired he and his family were. Yet he turned up as promised to meet a bunch of Northern Stars and their friends. What a guy! On behalf of the Northern StartUp 2.0 community, thank you Tom. And special thanks to your family for putting up with a bunch of Northerners. And thanks Sarah for helping me to organise the event.

Tom is the first to accept that the Government has a long way to go in adopting new technologies. Yet he has been blogging for longer than I have known what blogging was about. He is an avid Twitterer and an outspoken individual, taking the remit to transform the government in terms of communication internally, engagement with the citizens and residents of the UK and use of technology to aid improve productivity. He is also on a mission to publicise and make available government data and information.

Tom Watson, without a doubt is a champion for digital technologies.

Without further embarassing Tom, here is the video I put together. Do enjoy and leave comments as you wish. Copy was also available on Facebook. You can download few pictures from Flickr. 

What you think of Nathan Smith's smile? Priceless!

The event kickstarted with my banter about how and why Northern StartUp 2.0 was setup almost two years ago. We then had the privileage to listen to Roy Shelton about his investment in to and running Next2Friends. Roy's slide pack can be accessed by clicking the thumbnail.

We then had the opportunity to showcase 12 Northern Stars, these being Tiyga, CompetitiveUrge, Yuuguu, Treasuremytext, BeLocal, PressRoom, Ideas-For-My-Council, phonefromhere, S3CRM, Talent on View and Sanoodi. So was it a good night? Was it value for money and time? Here is what some of the comments from the attendees.

Paul Fabretti (KMP) - Just a quick note of thanks for helping get us sorted for last night. I had a great time and it was a truly inspiring event. I think it did Tom (and you) a lot of credit that we were there and were testimony to what he is trying to do for digital. It gives proof that perhaps, government is changing.

Mark Strefford (Entrepreneur) - Thank you for an excellent NWStartups 2.0 meeting last night!

Lisa Scales (Entepreneur) - I just wanted to say thank you very much for last night – really good experience and made some really interesting connections.

Steven Livingston (Service Provider) - Congratulations on another fine evening! Apologies for not staying for the duration.

A great view on Manchesters Digital Divide, showing the power of communities that help support each other and bring like minded people together, showing that a community is an enabler to push business and technology with a broad diverse range of skillsets. Obviously Im biased as Im from Manchester and when I get time, meetup and partake at some of the events looking to help support the North West, but I love the aspect that this shows the power of the community so well, and thus how we can all help and support each other.

I have been thinking a lot lately, I know that sounds daft in this online world, but having spent the last 8 months talking to Startups and listening to their perceptions of Sun and who we are, but also what do they need or are looking for to help support them Scale. Thus the conclusion is to help them save money now, but also to make sure they think about the future as well.

Thus Ive looked at essentially the core element of running a web 2.0 startup or a small SME, is the initial cost of hardware to get them started or that enables them to run the OS of choice and deployment stack. This seems a simple decision to me, but in my little world it would so I thought I would reveal some facts that I take for granted but to the outside world, may not be ever so visible.

Sun Sellls the GREATEST x86 (AMD/Intel) servers on the planet.....

There Ive said it, yes I feel better for that, and do you know why? Because its true, our servers are designed by engineers to work in an Enterprise environment and made to Scale, Perform and all at a low cost.  Backed by a service organisation that when you call them are a bunch of engineers who can solve problems not just ask mundane questions, but really know the product inside out, to me thats the most crucial element is the after service care.

Sun x86 servers support Linux, Windows, Solaris.

So you have your nice shiny box and want to virtualise it, run multiple OSs on there, do wonderful things ? Well yes you can, we can support you 24/7 globally. That means, one throat to choke, one number to call, one person to talk to, to resolve issues that are critical to your business NOW not in two days time, but also across multiple OS, yes our servers run most flavours of OS

Sun knows how to make stuff Scale, Reliable and Performance beyound measure.

So as a company for over 25 years we have been reknowned for Scaleable, Reliable systesm that can offer more performance due to our innovative $2bn investment in RD every year, we design and build our own OS updwards to hardware to do all of this, its in the blood and the mantra of the company, thats why the Top companies in the world run on Sun, its that simple this is what we do.

So how can we save you money ?

Via Startup Essentials, you gain access to Sun, its that simple, we can help you Build, Scale, and inject Reliability into your business  helping you increase performance through our knowledge and network. You are engaging with more than a IT vendor, you become part of Sun,  we are there to support you as a business, thats how Sun was born as a startup in the West Coast all those years ago.

 An example of beatiful LOW cost to you, Engineering

 X4150 Intel based Sun Server - Runs Solaris, Windows and Linux

1RU high - Less Density in a rackspace

64 gig of memory max - most machines in this area take 32gig only thus for a memory intensive application, you have to buy another machine and take extra hosting space and power, whilst with the Sun machine you dont. :-)

8 Internal Discs - lots of storage resouces available, meaning lots of speed as storage closer to the memory increasing performance, most of the competitors machines have less storage internally, up to half

4 GigE ports twice that of its competition, and if you are using this for virtualisation, the more network ports, the better for scaling.

Less power consumption, and as Dcentres charge on power as well now, this is key, each Sun Fire X4150's PSU is rated at 650W max!
…though it comes with built-in eLOM, more HDs, more PCI-e slots and more GigE ports!

Remote access built in, not an added feature these machines have been designed for Enterprise so rack and forget, dont physically touch them again and dont have to pay extra for the privelige.

So what does this mean in terms of saving money ?

Anything you do now, affects your future , any decision you make has an impact and thus if you are purchasing a server to host your companies crown jewels on, you want to make sure its Reliable, Scaleable, consumes as little power as possible and has performance and upgradeability out the box. Why ? otherwise as you grow most of your Capex will go on server upgrades and more hosting costs due to having to purchase an unnecessary box for more storage or memory, this is not music to the ears of your investor who is looking to keep costs minimal. Investors like to see a strong future business costs and how they will scale as the organisation scales, the more you reduce your capex on that, the more you get back.

Simple answer is WORK with Sun, this is what we do, we dont just sell stuff, we talk about it, design it, engineer it and help our customers do the same, so they can Build a Scaleable Optimised service to their customers and if there is a problem, they know that a global 24/7 Service team will fly into help resolve it.

Will I have to sell my house ?

Sun sells servers in the Startup Essential programme to Startups at a discounted rate to help them in those early days, the prices start from £400 for an entry level server, BUT more importantly you are buying something that is designed not to break, that will scale, if something goes wrong a team will fix it and make certain your business is back online ASAP, we understand time critical and mission critical...Work with Sun and grow into your dream today.