BarcampLeeds is taking place on 17th November 07, thanks to startup evangelists such as Imran Ali. North’s first Barcamp took place in Sheffield, which I could not attend. Manchester has not yet managed to pull off a Barcamp this year, even though it has been on the agenda and has been discussed many times by North West Digital Community. So what is a Barcamp?

According to the official Wiki:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. The name BarCamp was inspired as a complement to FooCamp.

The event has attracted more than 100 participants, but fire regulations have limited this to a maximum of 100. Here is a list of sessions identified on Wiki so far:

• Intelligent human-computer interfaces and their possibilities – Reinhold Behringer
• From start-up to £67m in 10 years – passing on the wisdom and hopefully not the pain – Lee Strafford
• From startup to £45m in 8 years (Learn from my mistakes)) or Launching BT BizBox a small business CRM solution in 5 weeks – Dean Sadler
• SEO Site Clinic – - Dominic Hodgson and Others
• Why big companies are missing a trick by ignoring social media – Ian Green
• Ladybank Company of Distillers – building a real co-creation business through the internet – Ian Green
• Unleashing social media and technology for the good of local communities – Stuart Bruce
• From Zero to Game in 30 Minutes – Tom Scott
• From a Mobile Telephone to a Computer – a Reality Dysfunction Ian Hay
• Paradigm shift in business document interactivity – Manoj Ranaweera
• Drupal – Isriya Paireepairit
• Conquering Time and Space – A survivors guide to distributed dev team management – Ian Pringle

By the way, there are also some simple rules to observe, these being:

• 1st Rule: You do talk about Bar Camp.
• 2nd Rule: You do blog about Bar Camp.
• 3rd Rule: If you want to present, you must write your topic and name in a presentation slot.
• 4th Rule: Only three word intros.
• 5th Rule: As many presentations at a time as facilities allow for.
• 6th Rule: No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists.
• 7th Rule: Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation slot.
• 8th Rule: If this is your first time at BarCamp, you HAVE to present. (Ok, you don’t really HAVE to, but try to find someone to present with, or at least ask questions and be an interactive participant.)

I am very much looking forward to my first Barcamp experience. Thanks Imran Ali, Tom Scott and others for making this a reality.

As we believe that everyone had a good time on the 18th October, Simon Grice and I with Stewart Townsend (and with thought leadership from Lee Strafford) have decided to fast forward the next Mashup event from Feb 08 to 6th December 2007. We are also making a significant change to the programme. There will be two events back-to-back:

1. Free Demo from 5pm to 6:15pm – free to attend, must be pre-registered
2. Conference from 6:30 pm to 10:00pm – ?25 to attend (?10 for students with valid student union card), must be pre-registered – Catered event

We brought the Free Demo to give an opportunity for those individuals who might have early stage prototype or an idea they want to demonstrate and/or share with other attendees – classic example, Rhys Jones’s web2os. Please bring your laptops and power supplies – There is no Wi-Fi at site, but Internet access points will be provided for your convenience. Those who have paid, could attend both events. Anyone who stays beyond 6:30 and have not paid in advance or at door, will be asked for payment or invoiced accordingly. There is also a possibility that a white knight (with or without shining armour) might step in to sponsor a number of individuals who may want to stay for the conference. If you would like to be considered, please let me know and I will point you to the white knight.

The conference will be similar to the inaugural event, i.e. two speakers and three presentations. The theme is on “Content 2.0″, here is the introduction, first cut-

Music, video, TV, documents, etc…The ways in which we all discover, access, watch and share content is fundamentally changing. In the birth place of modern music – Manchester – we will explore where these changes are leading us. With some very interesting recent acquisitions (Last.fm), the Radiohead album, the TV Links case and more.. We will bring together all of the North’s leading thinking in the digital sector for an evening debate and a party – after the success of the 1st Mashup* we’re opening up invites to everyone involved in the digital sectors, agencies, marketing firms, PR, etc. etc. etc. Come and join the debate – mashup* Manchester – ‘being digital’.

Being user driven, it makes sense to ask our attendees to help us organise the event. So here is what we need:

1. Suggest two speakers – you are welcome to propose your own names – in any case, please inform us why we need to consider you as a speaker or the suggested individuals as speakers
2. Three companies – preferably two from the North – would be great to have one from Manchester – again please inform us why you are suggesting these companies
3. Given Christmas is fast approaching by 6th, it would be great to have some Christmas goodies – Would anyone like to sponsor?

Please spread the word, and let us know your thoughts of how to make this event even more successful.

Mashup Manchester line

• Speaker 1 – Sam Sethi of Blognation
• Speaker 2 – waiting confirmation
• Company 1 – Yuuguu
• Company 2 – Sharenow
• Company 3 – will decide two weeks before based on entries to this blog post

NW StartUp 2.0 DEMO participants

• 3 companies presenting in the evening
• edocr
  
• NetRecords

Technorati Tags: mashup Manchester

We had a great Mashup Manchester inaugural gathering on 18th October at Sun Microsystems, Sale, Manchester. The session was started by none other than David Terrar, who is one of the three people who inspired me to start blogging in mid April 2006. David has become a familiar face at many networking events taking place in London as well as within the enterprise blogsphere. David spoke of BBC, SAP and Pfizer as three case studies, and how they have leveraged web and enterprise 2.0 products to give new life to collaboration both internally with employees and externally with stakeholders by these three organisations.

Simon Grice, another key figure in the London networking circle spoke of how watching TV and movies is changing rapidly. Simon spoke of his latest love, testcard.tv, which is an aggregator for TV and movies. His quest was that people are changing the way they watch digital content, may that be a movie, comedy or news. More and more prefer to watch whenever they want it from wherever they are – not tying themselves to a cable TV provider or traditional content provider. Through his aggregator service, Simon is making content accessible to the mass.

Unfortunately, two days after the event, Simon had to put his site under maintenance mode after CEO of TVLinks was arrested for breach of copyrights. This is clearly an area that require much debate. As far as I can see, Entrepreneurs such as Simon provide another revenue channel for content providers. Rather than shutting down services such as TVLinks, the content providers ought to engage in discussion to understand how extra revenue can be generated for their content through these new distribution channels, which will soon outstrip the traditional broadcasting methods. Those who embrace change and progress will be the great brands of tomorrow – those who decline to engage will become the brands of the past and soon be forgotten.

Lee Strafford spoke about Project Sahara, and how the concept has evolved over the last couple of months.

In the second half, three companies presented their solutions as case studies demonstrating application of user content to deliver value added services to improve our lives, both socially and professionally. You will also have the pleasure to meet some of these companies at the forthcoming BarcampLeeds. Will cover BarcampLeeds in a post later.

Here is a collection of photographs courtesy of Simon Grice. And below is a collection of what bloggers have written about first Mashup Manchester:

1. Paul Robinson of Vagueware: Manchester Mashup* - Paul has now taken the role of organising OpenCoffee Manchester
2. Stewart Townsend of Sun Microsystems – Manchester Mashup
3. Tom Cheesewright of Book of the future – Mashup: North West Tech Booming

If you have attended the event and blogged about it, please let me know the link to your post, so that it can be added to above list.

According to Justin Fogarty of Ariba:

“Ariba Consistently Outperforms ERP Providers in E-Procurement. When it comes to e-procurement, bigger is not necessarily better. According to the results of a new research brief from independent research firm Aberdeen Group, the flexible and focused offerings of Ariba, Inc. the leading spend management solutions provider, deliver greater value than the e-procurement offerings of large ERP providers. In the report, Aberdeen identified Ariba as the leading solution focused on supply management and noted that companies using Ariba?s solutions outperformed customers of SAP and Oracle in key areas required for e-procurement success. “

The report can be downloaded here. In the survey carried out by Aberdeen, the only area where SAP and Oracle scored ahead of Ariba was integration to other systems. I actually thought given the Ariba’s EIPP offering, they would be in a better position to integrate systems than SAP and Oracle put together. Perhaps further scrutiny is required to understand the definition of integration from Aberdeen’s point of view.

Top 10 success attributes for e-procurement, according to Aberdeen:

• Top challenges
• Supplier enabled
• Spend under management
• Requisition to PO cycle time
• Integration to other systems
• Actual and planned users
• Transaction volume
• Requisition to PO cycle cost
• Provider satisfaction
• Software functionality

Report is nearly one year old. Wonder whether Aberdeen Group intends to review the results and compare new results against this report!

It seems that Oracle has given an ultimatum to BEA to accept its offer of $6.7 billion for all stock by Sunday evening. BEA seems to be holding on until another bidder emerges with a higher offer. Potential bidders, SAP, IBM and HP have all declined to comment, suggesting that no other bidder is emerging. Oracle threatened to abandon the bid after its offer of $17 per share was rejected by BEA’s Board on Tuesday for the second time in less than two weeks. So who is bluffing whom? Is Oracle really desperate to own BEA given that it already has a middleware stack after a 3 year shopping spree of $25 billion? I do not see the synergy unless Oracle is simply buying into the customer base of BEA. Does it make sense to you?

References:

• Introduction to Oracle Fusion Middleware

Today, I had the pleasure to meet Steve Brauner, Editor of soon to be launched, Crain’s Manchester Business, a weekly tabloid aimed at business reader covering Greater Manchester. Steve is a veteran journalist, having previously edited North West Evening Mail, Barrow-in-Furness, Liverpool Daily Post and North West Business Insider. The new tabloid aims to capture a circulation of 15,000 with profitability by year 3.  According to Steve:

“The arrival of Crain city publications is the most exciting thing to happen to the UK regional media in my lifetime and I am thrilled to be part of it. Even better, it is happening in my home city of Manchester. Our goal is journalism which will enhance an already vibrant community and make Greater Manchester an even better place to do business.”

According to Publisher, Arthur Porter:

“We’re delighted to have Stephen join our team here. His knowledge of Greater Manchester and his business journalism background make him the ideal choice to lead our journalists.”

Great, but what does this means to StartUp community in Greater Manchester? I requested Steve to allocate half a page every month to cover the technology startup scene in Greater Manchester. I also requested him to compile Greater Manchester’s Top 25 Web 2.0 StartUp companies. Now this is a huge challenge, given that I can only count less than a handful. My list so far: Yuuguu, edocr, Meecard, Clipstar and now Vagueware. The problem is that only Yuuguu and Vagueware are based in Greater Manchester. In this respect, it perhaps need to be North’s Top 25 Web 2.0 Startups rather than concentrate on Greater Manchester.

I also plan to piggy back on startup news carried by the tabloid and I hope Steve will also pick up one or two stories from this blog.

Let me know any thoughts you may have of how to fill the half page on monthly basis.

Yes, it’s true, invest £50 million and Manchester Business School (MBS) could be renamed after you. Our new Dean, Professor Michael Luger wants to see a £35 million makeover of the School’s buildings including an up market hotel and conference facility plus new retail space. There is a history of rich individuals buying into business schools, some examples being:

1. University of Cambridge – Judge Institute of Management – Paul Judge – £8 million
2. Oxford Said Business School – Wafic Said – £20 million

MBS has 24,000 Alumni of which it is in contact with 16,000 of them. MBS has 240 faculty, 1,200 undergraduate majors, 700 postgraduate in master’s programmes, 215 full-time MBA students, 400 PhDs and 2700 to 2800 part-time MBAs worldwide.

So what are you waiting for, get your cheque book out and buy your Business School.

Today, we had our 7th event of OpenCoffee Manchester, at which I handed the running of this event series to Paul Robinson of Vagueware. I believe Paul is able to unite the Manchester geekup community and the entrepreneur community, especially given that Paul is both a geek and an entrepreneur. As part of the new leadership, there will be a dedicated site setup to promote OpenCoffee Manchester. I will continue to promote and attend the event.

Some of the new attendees we saw today included:

1. Birgit Arkesteijn of phonefromhere
2. Simon Jermy of The Conch, a social network for travel
3. Steve Brauner of Crain’s Manchester Business

References:

• OpenCoffee Manchester – 6th Event
• OpenCoffee Manchester – 5th Event
• OpenCoffee Manchester – 4th Event
• OpenCoffee Manchester is moving in the right direction
• OpenCoffee Manchester – 2nd Event
• First OpenCoffee Manchester

Sanjay Dalmia, CEO of CashTech Solutions, a Fundtech company has authored a new book, Financial Supply Chain, published by McGraw Hill. According to the press release, the book defines fundamental Financial Supply Chain concepts and practices and explains how financial institutions and their corporate customers adapt to changing technologies and market demands. The book also offers tangible guidelines for enabling and accelerating delivery of Financial Supply Chain service offerings. Dalmia states,

“While the industry is experiencing a growing focus on the Financial Supply Chain, many organizations continue to respond on a tactical basis and implement solutions in a non-integrated manner. There is a need to have a structured and documented compilation of information on Financial Supply Chain practices leading to a more strategic and integrated approach. My book addresses this need and delivers value to the professional and academic interests of the banking community.”

Do share your views if you happen to read Sanjay’s book?

As you probably know we have been developing edocr quietly over the last few months. Today, it was time for us to go public before my presentation at the inaugural Mashup* Manchester. So we issued the following introduction to selected number of bloggers:

So this is what some of the bloggers had said so far:

• Mike Butcher of TechCrunch (first to break the news):
  • edocr joins Scribd, Docstoc in document sharing
  • edocr aims to be YouTube of documents
  • edocr – Crunchbase
• KillerStartUp.com (as result of review by TechCrunch)
  • Edocr.com – Upload and Share Documents Socially
• Spendmatters:
  • Web 2.0 Meets Document Management

I will keep this post updated as we gain more coverage over the next few days.

References:

• edocr – a 3 minute presentation

Technorati Tags: edocr, techcrunch, document interactivity