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PR opportunity for North West tech start ups
Posted by Fourth Day PR on Thursday 26th of April 2012 | 0 Comment(s)
Calling all North West tech start-ups!
If you haven’t already seen it, check out The Kernel www.kernelmag.com, a new, high-quality magazine focused on technology from a European perspective. The online mag launched last December and had more than 100,000 unique visitors last month. The audience is made up of other tech start-ups and the European VC community.
They have recently launched a start-up review section, where each day they analyse one European tech start-up, looking at the market, the team, the technology and traction of the company. See here for examples: http://www.kernelmag.com/section/reviews/startup-review/
They are always looking for companies to review so now’s your chance to put yourselves forward!
Initial details they need are:
- Company
- Founders
- When the company launched
- Background on the company / why it’s interesting
Email the editor Jason Hesse, hesse@kernelmag.com or drop Nikki at Fourth Day PR a note for more info: Nikki@fourthday.co.uk
AIDA Technology pitching at the Big Society ehealth event, London
Posted by AngelSalazar on Thursday 19th of April 2012 | 0 Comment(s)
A special e-health event, to be held at Somerset House on the evening of 19th April 2012 6-8pm, London
*E-health is not only a technical development, but also a state-of-mind, a way of thinking, an attitude, and a commitment for networked, global
thinking, to improve health care locally, regionally, and worldwide by using information and communication technology.*
*Gunther Eysenbach, Researcher on ehealth*
Some of our Nexters
Beginnings, Buddy, AIDA Technology and Mindapples.
*Best Beginnings*
dedicated to ending child health inequalities in the UK. We are committed to giving every baby the healthiest possible start in life. use innovative approaches to ensure families have the information and support
they need to protect their children’s health.
*Buddy*
AIDA Technology's *Fused Health*
*Mindapples*
We provide engagement and training services to large businesses like Goldman Sachs and channel the profits back into our work in healthcare, education and local communities around the UK.
We very much look forward to seeing you there.
*
*
*Please follow the eventbrite link to sign up: **
nexterspresentehealth.eventbrite.com*
Advantages of Internet Companies Over Offline Companies
Posted by petercruz on Wednesday 18th of April 2012 | 0 Comment(s)
Human life has been revolutionized ever since the launching of the Internet into cyberspace. The Internet connects people from all over the world. It is possible for us to know about the latest information and news from any place around the world in just a few minutes of online access.
Nowadays, a lot of individuals are looking to start their Internet companies instead of looking for a good job. What is attracting these people into creating one online business to another?
Below are some advantages that can be found with starting up an online business compared to others.
It Saves You Money
Whenever starting a new business is the topic, the first thing that comes into mind is the question: “How much money will I need to spend to start a new business?”
Unlike offline businesses, it is possible for a person to start their own online business with just a single personal computer and an Internet connection at home.
In starting offline businesses, the person will need to do advertising for the products or services that they have to offer. Concerns such as the cost for advertising on TV and sending out brochures to promote the business will deter people from starting right away. The Internet provides all of these at the convenience of the person. With emailing capabilities and online advertisements in social networks, a person will not have to pay for the materials and personnel needed in order to print brochures as well as distribute them.
It Saves Time
It takes time to promote your business physically. For example, sending out brochures from house to house will probably take at least a few hours to do and a half day if you want to make it as effective as possible. But by using the Internet, a person can send out a load of emails in just a few minutes.
It Saves Manpower
For start up Internet companies, software and computers can cut down on the need for additional manpower. Programs today can automate some tasks that could have had another company hire for extra personnel.
It Saves on Effort
After you have set up your website in the Internet and it has already been hosted, it is going to start working for you 24 hours a day and 7 days a week nonstop. If you are working for your online business, you will have to meet each customer and client one by one and most of the time you get rejected.
On the other hand, if you are able to meet a bunch of customers at the same time, this saves you a lot of effort than to go and meet each one of them. People from all over the world can visit your website at any time and any place.
In overall conclusion, a business set up through the Internet can give people quite a few advantages that offline businesses do not. The risk in starting up a small business is also not that great as minimal capital is only needed to setup an online company.
Northern Tech Awards 2012 - celebrating tech entrepreneurship in style
Posted by superuser on Friday 30th of March 2012 | 0 Comment(s)
21 companies competing for 9 awards
Posted by superuser on Tuesday 27th of March 2012 | 0 Comment(s)
Consumer Use of Health Care Applications (Apps) On Mobile Devices -- Identification of Enablers and Barriers To Success
Posted by Digitalmc2 on Friday 16th of March 2012 | 0 Comment(s)So Please, I need 5 - 10 minutes of your time to complete a UK wide survey on 'Use of Health Care Application (Apps) on Mobile Devices. You need to be living in the UK or have recently lived here for some time & aged between 16-75+ years. All responses anonymous. Please complete the survey using the link below and share this with your friends/family/colleagues on email, FB, Twitter. 1,000 completed surveys are required and the deadline is 2nd April 2012. Share this with everyone you know that meets the criteria.
http://svy.mk/digitalmc2mbhealthapps
What Do We Hope To Gain From The Project?
·Reasons for personal use and non-use of mobile device(s)
·Consumer readiness for download/use of mobile health care applications (apps)
·Understanding of the role of consumer trust in relation to management of their health care and its impact on the download/use of health care apps
·Understanding the importance of consumer privacy and control over health care data
·Key adoption enablers and barriers to consumer download and use of health care apps
If you add your email at the end of the survey, you will also be included in the draw for £30 worth of Amazon or iTune vouchers! (The winner will be notified by 15 April 2012.
Many thanks in advance!
Carey Cameron
Digitalmc2.com
Calling all Entrepreneurs
If you’re an entrepreneurial company working in the technology sector and are looking to gain some recognition for your hard work as well as meet other people in the industry, you’ll be happy to know that the deadline for the Northern Tech Awards 2012 has been extended until Friday 16th March. Last year’s event was a huge success and we’re hoping that this year will be even better. We have added three new categories and are opening the competition up to businesses across the UK, so even more companies can now get involved!
Judging Panel Finalised
We are welcoming back last year’s judge Jon Bradford, founder of Difference Engine, Springboard and Ignite 100 as well as a host of other serial tech entrepreneurs. Judging panel also includes Chris Allen, co-founder and ex-CEO of Laterooms, founder and ex-CEO of Dabs.com and Kevin Farrar of IBM.
Jon Bradford, the King of Startup Accelerators in Europe will deliver the keynote speech this year on birth and growth of Startup Accelerators, what made him introduce the TechStars model to the UK, and what could be in store for Manchester and the North West.
Sponsors
The event has attracted great sponsors such as top 20 accountancy firm Crowe Clarke Whitehill, Aaron and Partners, Manchester Investment Development Agency Services, European Regional Development Fund and Forth Day PR. Get in touch if you like to sponsor the event.
Tickets
There is a problem with Paypal script clashing with Wordpress template. Please let me know the number of tickets you need and I will invoice you for immediate payment.
This is a great opportunity for growing businesses to get their name out and promises to be an enjoyable night too!
If you haven’t entered yet, you can apply and book your place at the dinner at http://northerntechawards.com/awards/
Good luck!
Manoj
This is a discussion taken from Answers.Onstartups.com written by Joel Spolsky.
The most important principle: Fairness, and the perception of fairness, is much more valuable than owning a large stake. Almost everything that can go wrong in a startup will go wrong, and one of the biggest things that can go wrong is huge, angry, shouting matches between the founders as to who worked harder, who owns more, whose idea was it anyway, etc. That is why I would always rather split a new company 50-50 with a friend than insist on owning 60% because "it was my idea," or because "I was more experienced" or anything else. Why? Because if I split the company 60-40, the company is going to fail when we argue ourselves to death. And if you just say, "to heck with it, we can NEVER figure out what the correct split is, so let's just be pals and go 50-50," you'll stay friends and the company will survive.
Thus, I present you with Joel's Totally Fair Method to Divide Up The Ownership of Any Startup.
For simplicity sake, I'm going to start by assuming that you are not going to raise venture capital and you are not going to have outside investors. Later, I'll explain how to deal with venture capital, but for now assume no investors.
Also for simplicity sake, let's temporarily assume that the founders all quit their jobs and start working on the new company full time at the same time. Later, I'll explain how to deal with founders who do not start at the same time.
Here's the principle. As your company grows, you tend to add people in "layers".
The top layer is the first founder or founders. There may be 1, 2, 3, or more of you, but you all start working about the same time, and you all take the same risk... quitting your jobs to go work for a new and unproven company.
The second layer is the first real employees. By the time you hire this layer, you've got cash coming in from somewhere (investors or customers--doesn't matter). These people didn't take as much risk because they got a salary from day one, and honestly, they didn't start the company, they joined it as a job.
The third layer are later employees. By the time they joined the company, it was going pretty well.
For many companies, each "layer" will be approximately one year long. By the time your company is big enough to sell to Google or go public or whatever, you probably have about 6 layers: the founders and roughly five layers of employees. Each successive layer is larger. There might be two founders, five early employees in layer 2, 25 employees in layer 3, and 200 employees in layer 4. The later layers took less risk.
OK, now here's how you use that information:
The founders should end up with about 50% of the company, total. Each of the next five layers should end up with about 10% of the company, split equally among everyone in the layer.
Example:
Two founders start the company. They each take 2500 shares. There are 5000 shares outstanding, so each founder owns half.
They hire four employees in year one. These four employees each take 250 shares. There are 6000 shares outstanding.
They hire another 20 employees in year two. Each one takes 50 shares. They get fewer shares because they took less risk, and they get 50 shares because we're giving each layer 1000 shares to divide up.
By the time the company has six layers, you have given out 10,000 shares. Each founder ends up owning 25%. Each employee layer owns 10% collectively. The earliest employees who took the most risk own the most shares.
Make sense? You don't have to follow this exact formula but the basic idea is that you set up "stripes" of seniority, where the top stripe took the most risk and the bottom stripe took the least, and each "stripe" shares an equal number of shares, which magically gives employees more shares for joining early.
A slightly different way to use the stripes is for seniority. Your top stripe is the founders, below that you reserve a whole stripe for the fancy CEO that you recruited who insisted on owning 10%, the stripe below that is for the early employees and also the top managers, etc. However you organize the stripes, it should be simple and clear and easy to understand and not prone to arguments.
Now that we have a fair system set out, there is one important principle. You must have vesting. Preferably 4 or 5 years. Nobody earns their shares until they've stayed with the company for a year. A good vesting schedule is 25% in the first year, 2% each additional month. Otherwise your co-founder is going to quit after three weeks and show up, 7 years later, claiming he owns 25% of the company. It never makes sense to give anyone equity without vesting. This is an extremely common mistake and it's terrible when it happens. You have these companies where 3 cofounders have been working day and night for five years, and then you discover there's some jerk that quit after two weeks and he still thinks he owns 25% of the company for his two weeks of work.
Now, let me clear up some little things that often complicate the picture.
What happens if you raise an investment? The investment can come from anywhere... an angel, a VC, or someone's dad. Basically, the answer is simple: the investment just dilutes everyone.
Using the example from above... we're two founders, we gave ourselves 2500 shares each, so we each own 50%, and now we go to a VC and he offers to give us a million dollars in exchange for 1/3rd of the company.
1/3rd of the company is 2500 shares. So you make another 2500 shares and give them to the VC. He owns 1/3rd and you each own 1/3rd. That's all there is to it.
What happens if not all the early employees need to take a salary? A lot of times you have one founder who has a little bit of money saved up, so she decides to go without a salary for a while, while the other founder, who needs the money, takes a salary. It is tempting just to give the founder who went without pay more shares to make up for it. The trouble is that you can never figure out the right amount of shares to give. This is just going to cause conflicts. Don't resolve these problems with shares. Instead, just keep a ledger of how much you paid each of the founders, and if someone goes without salary, give them an IOU. Later, when you have money, you'll pay them back in cash. In a few years when the money comes rolling in, or even after the first VC investment, you can pay back each founder so that each founder has taken exactly the same amount of salary from the company.
Shouldn't I get more equity because it was my idea? No. Ideas are pretty much worthless. It is not worth the arguments it would cause to pay someone in equity for an idea. If one of you had the idea but you both quit your jobs and started working at the same time, you should both get the same amount of equity. Working on the company is what causes value, not thinking up some crazy invention in the shower.
What if one of the founders doesn't work full time on the company? Then they're not a founder. In my book nobody who is not working full time counts as a founder. Anyone who holds on to their day job gets a salary or IOUs, but not equity. If they hang onto that day job until the VC puts in funding and then comes to work for the company full time, they didn't take nearly as much risk and they deserve to receive equity along with the first layer of employees.
"What if someone contributes equipment or other valuable goods (patents, domain names, etc) to the company? Great. Pay for that in cash or IOUs, not shares. Figure out the right price for that computer they brought with them, or their clever word-processing patent, and give them an IOU to be paid off when you're doing well. Trying to buy things with equity at this early stage just creates inequality, arguments, and unfairness.
How much should the investors own vs. the founders and employees? That depends on market conditions. Realistically, if the investors end up owning more than 50%, the founders are going to feel like sharecroppers and lose motivation, so good investors don't get greedy that way. If the company can bootstrap without investors, the founders and employees might end up owning 100% of the company. Interestingly enough, the pressure is pretty strong to keep things balanced between investors and founders/employees; an old rule of thumb was that at IPO time (when you had hired all the employees and raised as much money as you were going to raise) the investors would have 50% and the founders/employees would have 50%, but with hot Internet companies in 2011, investors may end up owning a lot less than 50%.
Conclusion
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem, but anything you can do to make it simple, transparent, straightforward, and, above-all, fair, will make your company much more likely to be successful.
My views of Tech Ecosystem in the North West
Posted by superuser on Thursday 9th of February 2012 | 0 Comment(s)Feel free to disagree..
Today, I decided to resign from CRMthis.com, another startup idea by me. We had a team. We built the API and the back-end very quickly for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), but the front-end never arrived. We were targeting to beat Buffer's 7-week product to revenue milestone. And we could have done it! We had two partners on board. But it only takes one team member in a startup team to kill it. And this is the second time it happened to me. First time, I managed to keep it going for 18 months before I found a way forward. I was not prepared to do the same this time round.
StartUp Team Dynamics
A startup needs a driver. At early stage, its about driving, rather than leading. And I was that person. You also need a team of one or more who could build the product, initially the MVP, but have the capability to continue developing. We had two developers (in fact 3!). The back-end developer was a well seasoned tech entrepreneur with two successful exits. He knew his stuff! He brought one of his employees and together they built the API and back-end using latest technologies in record time. Yeap, we have node.js, backbone.js, Riak (NoSQL) and all the other sexy technologies.
We had a Rookie for the front-end, who struggled to keep up. Weeks went by without progress, and then turned into months. We had great team dialogue at the beginning. Things started to really slow down, where team members stopped responding to emails, and time was not spent on developing. Signs of a dead startup started to appear many months ago!
I could have fired the Rookie and found a replacement. But the whole idea of trying to find another front-end developer became too daunting. So I finally decided enough is enough and resigned today.
Startup Equity
This is a very controversial subject. We agreed not to discuss equity split until the product was launched, and we understood how much time each of us would commit to continue. We trusted each other. Trust is a real vital component for the startup team. Just to give some idea about team backgrounds:
1. Me - already had two companies running, but was fully capable of taking the third one on, as it complemented edocr.com
2. Back-end Developer - He also ran a very early stage techstartup
3. Front-end Developer - Was employed full time
There were no salaries involved and we did not need any funding. Backend Developer paid the bills for AWS services, which was kept at a bare minimum.
What was the idea behind CRMthis.com?
We were trying to address few issues, mainly:
1. edocr.com captures document leads. We have integrated with salesforce.com to export leads, but was not keen to integrate with every CRM on the planet.
2. CRMthis.com would have integrated with edocr.com and CRMs, so that leads from edocr.com could be exported to any CRM via CRMthis.com
3. It will also integrate with other social networks from the famous four (facebook, linkedin, twitter and google plus) to minor ones, so that contacts can be exported to CRM seamlessly.
4. It will allow your contacts to be sorted before exporting to CRMs. It gave you the ability to segregate personal and business contacts, so that business contacts can be exported.
5. It would also integrate with Non CRMs such as Zendesk.
6. It would integrate with your address books, and sync your contacts across all your apps.
In a nutshell, we were developing Plaxo 2.0. The main focus being, "manage your lists once and for all, and stay in sync". It had the opportunity to grow fast as a SaaS product, and would have been very attractive to investors.
So what now?
In my email of resignation, I gave unconditional rights to my team members to continue, except with holding the rights to the domain name. Whilst I have not heard from them, I doubt they will continue. Remember, you need a driver. My team members were not as passionate as me with CRMthis. Whilst they saw it as a good opportunity to be involved and did not want to miss the opportunity, they were never going to take part without a driver.
edocr.com would be keen to develop a less functionality rich CRMthis some point in time.
I was fortune enough to meet Martin and Shaf yesterday and discuss about their new startup. I saw the passion in them. We never had that level of passion in CRMthis. I knew we will continue to struggle, even if I manage to get to MVP. It was something I knew for a long time, but refused to acknowledge, until yesterday. So it was time to say sayonara!
