Monthly Archives: November 2009

Lead Capture – Your ideas for edocr.com

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On Monday, our development team will start developing sales lead capture functionality. In a nutshell, lead capture is about capturing who looked at a particular document, and with the consent of the edocr community member, pass his or her information to the publisher of the document.

This only works if more and more people registers with edocr.com than simply consume documents without registering. First task is for us to encourage more visitors to register. Second part includes obtaining the consent with final parts on developing tool kits that the publisher could use.

We will also be attempting to use Google Chart API to represent traffic graphically.

We would very much like your thoughts on the followings:

- Any concerns you might have on release of data. Remember, we need your consent to release your email address.
- If you have experience in implementing Google Chart API, is there anything we should be aware of other than the documents provided by Google?
- What tools would you like to extract the leads?

Your participation on this vital development is much appreciated.

Microsoft Sponsored Innovation Academy Workshop For Start-Up Software Businesses

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As you are probably be aware, Northern StartUp 2.0 has been a Microsoft BizSpark Network Partner since we launched the programme at Cloud Computing event held in April 2009 when Bindi Karia visited us.


For the first time in the UK, Microsoft is running an Innovation Academy Workshop For Start-Up Software Businesses on the 10th of Dec 2009, and I am honoured to inform you that this event will be run out of Daresbury Innovation Centre, where both of my companies are head quartered.

The course takes the form of one-day interactive instructor-led workshop covering:

- Introduction to the software industry: How it’s the same, why it’s different
- The Market Environment and its Analysis: Managing change and ambiguity
- Building Customer Value and Loyalty: Which Software Business Model?
- Solutions Selling and Managing the Complex Sale
- Software Operations: Introduction Application Life Cycle Management

This  free  workshop is designed to provide executives and managers of independent software application vendors with the business tools and knowledge required to determine their competitive advantage in their targeted value chain, bring software products to market and plan for international marketing and channel promotion.

The programme will be delivered by Agitavi Research.

The software development industry contributes in the region of £20 billion per year to the UK economy. Microsoft is committed to supporting a thriving software development industry in the UK through their partner programmes and through the BizSpark programme for software startups.

The event is co-hosted by Northern StartUp 2.0, Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus and the Northwest Regional Development Agency.

If you wish to attend this event, please contact me in the first instance. Please note that Microsoft is expecting to deliver this programme to about 20 startups, with preference given to those who have already signed up to the BizSpark programme. The sooner you apply the better chance you have of securing a place.

Startup of the Week 3 – TheWeddingVine.com – Make you arrange your wedding easily

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wv_logo

This week, I caught up with Mark Strefford, CEO of TheWeddingVine.com he runs with his wife, Vicki. I remember the days when Mark was thinking of how to take the first step of developing the site. I pushed him towards Drupal. TheWeddingVine.com has come a long way since then.

Manoj: What made you launch your company? Tell us about the company history and the management team. Given that your wife, Vicky is also involved in the day-to-day operations, do you consider your business as a family business, life-style business or high growth business?

Wedding Vine style sheet 25_09_Page_1

Mark: This may sound like a story you’ve heard on many other wedding websites, but we came up with the idea for TheWeddingVine.com after planning our own wedding back in 2006. Victoria is a professional Wedding Co-ordinator and has run a successful wedding planning business since 2002, but even for professionals there are limited available online resources.  Although this is a family business, we see huge potential to revolutionise the way weddings are planned using the internet and see a potential for significant growth in our business.

Manoj: What problem(s) do your company solve? Why do you think your company solve the problem better than others? What have you learn from similar businesses set-up during the dot.com era?

Mark: Our company aims to give couples the resources that professional wedding planners have at their finger tips through an easy to use, feature-rich website.  The site will provide inspiration, ideas, and the ability to find wedding suppliers based on the couple’s own exacting criteria.  Victoria’s network includes a number of the inspirational wedding industry experts, and this gives our users inside access to information on upcoming trends and fashions.  In our research, we see that many of the leading UK wedding websites tend to follow a very simple and static approach for finding ideas, suppliers, etc., and although some of the US sites are starting to move in the right direction, we still see that there is a significant gap between these leading US sites and the capabilities available in other industries.  However, we’re conscious of the fact that lots of great functionality doesn’t necessarily pay the bills, so we’re constantly challenging our ideas for their commercial viability.

Manoj: Describe your products and services. What benefits do they bring? Given that weddings are rarely repeated more than once in one’s life time, how do you retain customer loyalty, or is this not important?

Wedding Vine style sheet 25_09_Page_2Mark: The latest release of the beta site provides the ability for couples to find suppliers through a number of ways.  We’re the first internet wedding website to offer a free-form tag based search for suppliers  and also the ability to search for specific products or services.  For example, if you were looking for a venue, you may want to find specific features such as a specific venue type, the ability to host a certain number of guests with on-site accommodation that you will have exclusive use of.  As the paint dries on the new site, the big drive is on now to populate this detailed information.  What’s great with our site is that we can use our community to maintain information on wedding suppliers, and provide useful feedback and reviews to help future couples find their ideal suppliers.

We see customer retention in two ways.  We aim to keep suppliers engaged with us for many years to come, and as these are currently our main source of revenue, we’re looking to build long and mutually profitable partnerships across the industry.  Although we see that most people only marry once, they are likely to recommend services that worked for them to their family and friends, and sometimes they do marry twice!  We’ll also know when their anniversaries are, and have the opportunity to partner with appropriate companies around this.

Manoj: Who are your key competitors? How do you differentiate from them? How are you currently marketing your products and services other than through your website? Is social media helping you achieve traction?

Mark: In the UK, we see our largest competitors as hitched.co.uk, confetti.co.uk brides.co.uk and yourandyourwedding.co.uk.  As you can see from these domain names, they are firmly focused on the UK market.  We see that hitched.co.uk and confetti.co.uk are mainly focused on product sales (ie. table decorations and wedding favours). Brides.co.uk and youandyourwedding.co.uk are front end website for their respective magazines.  We’re the first company to approach the market solely with the user experience in mind, rather than as a route to sell more offline products.  Based on the fact that we’re entirely an online company, all of our marketing is through low cost and no-cost channels and we’re currently making use of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

Manoj: What stage are you in, in terms of execution of your plans? What are your plans for the next 12 to 18 months? What are the key challenges you are facing right now? What help do you need if any, especially from Northern StartUp 2.0? By the way, congratulations in closing first debt finance round. Please share your experience.

Wedding Vine style sheet 25_09_Page_3Mark: We’ve just secured financing through our bank, with some great help from the NWDA, and this has coincided well with the launching of the new beta site.  Our experience has shown that raising money through the banks is significantly slower than the banks initially suggest, and in the end we managed to get the buy-in from a senior regional director who had faith in our vision and backed us all the way!  This was significantly helped by having a thorough and exhaustive business plan (with expert assistance from Roy Shelton), a compelling message and persistent and expert help from the NWDA. We’ve got a lot of things to do over the next 12 months in terms of adding functionality to the site, making sure that we stay ahead of the curve, and keeping our competitors firmly playing catch-up!  We foresee a need to raise extra capital as we go into 2010, so would be looking to develop our contacts and partners through the NWDA and Northern StartUp 2.0.  The key challenges we are facing right now is juggling our family (complete with new baby and a 10 year old), Mark’s day job and the many demands of running a start-up.  We’re also facing the challenge common to many new businesses in getting people to have faith in you when you are not an established name YET!

How to join edocr Exclusive

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If you are a customer of edocr.com, you can now join edocrExclusive Private Group on Twitter.

home

How To Join This Group

Go to edocrExclusive and click on the “send request” button. We must approve new members before they are permitted to post or receive messages from the Group. Please note this service is only for paying customers and not for those who use edocr Free service.

How To Post

At the beginning of your Tweet type “d edocrExclusive”. This will send a private message to the group, which Twitter4Groups will then forward to everyone else who is following. Do not use @, this makes the message public to everyone.

Use Case
We hope this will allow our customers to communicate easily with each other improving trading and perhaps extend the goodwill by offering discounts to other customers where it makes sense.

New flyer for edocr.com highlighting our focus on sales leads generation

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As part of our preparations for exhibiting at Technology World 2009 on 23rd and 24th November 2009 at Coventry, UK, we have produced a new leaflet highlighting our current focus on sales lead generation through documents and the priced options we currently promote.

edocr Flyer - Generating Sales Leads from your Documents 2009 Apr - edocr Flyer - Claim your company now edocr Flyer

Embedded above is the new flyer on the left hand side followed by previous flyers. The middle one was prepared for Internet World held in April 2009 in London. Below is the full document, A5 size in terms of print.

Why should you consider edocr.com?

This section highlights 5 benefits we provide:

1. Maximised Exposure – We can bring significant traffic to your documents by simply being published on edocr.com.

2. Distribution – Your documents can be bookmarked to 198 largest websites in the world from Facebook and LinkedIn to Twitter. In addition, the documents can be emailed to mail lists. This can be done by you or anyone else who come across document.

3. Free SEO – Indexed by Google, Bing and other search engines, documents are easily found through search engine listings, increasing the traffic to your documents.

4. Prospect Power – Anyone who finds your documents of interest can contact you direct without waiting for approval or knowing the corresponding contact details.

5. Sales leads capture – You will soon be able to run campaigns based on sales leads captured.

What I realised by producing this flyer is that messaging on edocr.com home page and associated pages need to be updated. It seems work never stops

Your picture size correction at edocr.com

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For an unknown reason, the image sizing module within edocr.com have malfunctioned over the last few weeks. As a result, your picture would not have re-sized to suit your account page or your document pages. This has only affected accounts created recently.

If your picture is displayed without resizing, it will look like the following image, in terms of giant size.

In this case, please upload your picture again, and it should re-size automatically.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you come across any problems with this process or any aspects of edocr.com.

Is the environment right for venture capital in the north west?

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Michael Taylor, the Editor of the Insider Magazine, just ran another successful Deal Makers 2009 Award ceremony, which  clashed with my own, Managing Growth – Tech Entrepreneur Series held at eOffice on 12th November 2009.

Michael in his weekly column argues that private equity needs to get back to its venture capital roots. The Good news is that LDC is making a change in their investment criteria by wanting to invest into early stage businesses. So Michael thinks this is a good ground for celebration, especially as LDC won one of the awards he gave them.

Disclaimer 1: I am jealous as I could not attend the event. So you know why I am taking this attitude!

In my view, just like any industry, you see companies changing their strategy from time to time. Whilst LDC is speaking about lowering their investment criteria with the hope of netting the next Google (why is it that they all pick Google as the one to beat?), which is great news for Northern StartUp 2.0 community, there are others who have got tired of early stage investment, and changing their strategy by targeting companies with stable revenues and profits, but could do with an injection of new ideas to revive growth. In fact, just over the last two months, I have spoken to two tier-1 VC houses from London on the same topic.

So whilst we should be jubilant on one hand of LDC’s decision, we should be less happy on the other hand with my friends from London! In essence, we have equilibrium, one going down and two going up, well almost!

Disclaimer 2: As I cannot be a friend of Roger Cashman (he is way too cool and hangout with only the A-list), I decided to be friends with Michael, as Michael is the second best thing to Roger!

Extract from Michael’s article on his website

“Eales told Insider that although LDC only makes investments below £5m on an exceptional basis, he was keen to see technology developed in the UK and not lost abroad. “I am considering plans to set up part of LDC to invest in special situations,” he said. “I would like to develop LDC downward. We could still do all the things we are already doing but could also do SME investments.”

As if to dampen our enthusiasm, Eales cautioned that plans for the shift were in the embryonic stages, but as he outlined further ideas of how it would work, it rather suggested progress was being made. “The level of due diligence we carry out on our current investments – between £5m and £50m – would not be appropriate,” he said. “We would need individuals with specialist industry knowledge to explore the business for us.”

I can only say, bring it on! as we, the Northern StartUp 2.0 community got the experience and know-how and the odd failures (1 under my belt) to help LDC reduce its risk exposure! But more than anything, it would be a blessing to add another brand to the community. Whilst the EV Group and Liverpool Ventures (now gone!) invested in to early stage tech businesses in the past, we have seen our new friends, A2E Venture Catalyst investing into another NS20 tech startup and making two more offers. Sorry, I cannot reveal the names here!

Whilst Northern StartUp 2.0 has engaged with Aquarius Equity Partners, I do not believe they have invested into any startups from the NS20 community. In fact, I believe their interest lies in heavy research based (IP rich) companies than software startups.

EV Group and YFM Private Equity have always been supporters of Northern StartUp 2.0. However, it seems I have annoyed EV Group with my last newsletter, so I now need to rebuild our relationship! All I want to say about this issue is, whilst I may have jumped the gun a bit (my analyst days coming back), we cannot just talk about the upside! We must talk about failures and learn lessons, if not, how can we ever learn?

Of course, Michael is operating at a level much higher than me, rubbing shoulders with the top elite of corporate financiers delivering news whilst trying to entertain the not-so-entertainable chaps such as me!

Disclaimer 3: As far as I know, I appeared at least 3 times on Michael’s flagship product, the North West Insider

Just to conclude, it is great news to hear that LDC’s new strategy. EV Group has also geared up with recruiting two staff from now closed Liverpool Ventures. In addition, they now have offices in Preston, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham.

Disclaimer 4: Given my big mouth and Michael’s charming network, don’t you think it makes sense for us to work on a project together?

From my side, I would love to see lot more entrants in the market, from single investment partner to multiple. We need to create competition within the venture capital market place. We need to change our attitudes, and see technology businesses are worthy of the news as well as investment. Just to close this, you all should be attending Northern StartUp 2.0 events and supporting my efforts in building the ecosystem (shameful plug!).

edocr Launches “edocr Exclusive” an exclusive club for our customers

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edocr.com will continue to evolve and grow thanks to our valued customers. We want to help them beyond the growing capability of edocr.com by developing an exclusive club for CxOs of our customers, where edocr Ltd will take an active involvement in introducing parties where we believe new revenue relationships can be established. We know this may become a challenge to manage as we grow from our current customer base today to many thousands tomorrow. Whilst we cannot predict the future in how this exclusive group will evolve, we will do our best to build a powerful ecosystem around edocr.com by getting our hands dirty.

Let me introduce some of our customers demonstrating the diversity and potential for trade between each other:

1. First Hosted Ltd – NetSuite VAR
2. Horwath Clark Whitehill – Top20 Accountancy Service
3. Latitude Group – SEO specialist
4. Northern StartUp 2.0 – Ecosystem for early stage tech companies
5. Aaron & Partners – legal services
6. ThinSpace – ThinClient solutions
7. Calon Associates – Lighting controls
8. Accountis – e-invoicing and payment solutions

We will explore how this could be setup on-line through edocr so that we can improve communications.

We need to have many thousands of customers going forward. If you like what we are trying to achieve, please make recommendations to your customers, suppliers and friends, so that we can build our business, and continue to help you grow yours.

Crowdsourcing development – Document Replacement

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Some of edocr.com customers have requested the ability to replace an existing document with a new document. We would like your help in firming up the specification. Lets take the following document as an example:

edocr Customer Manual

Our thoughts on the matter:

1. The flash document URL shall remain the same. This is important from SEO point of view, as for “customer manual”, this document page appears on Google.com’s first page
2. If the document is linked (including bookmarked), the URL shall remain the same for the link to work.
3. If the document is embedded (which we may or may not know), then the embedding codes should not change.
4. On edocr.com, for each document, there is a specific, .jpg, .swf and .pdf files, so with (3) in mind, the new document must replace the existing .jpg, .swf and .pdf files
5. If replaced, is there a need to maintain the old document file? If so, the .jpg, .swf and .pdf have to be renamed, which I believe is not easy within Amazon S3 environment, where edocr.com document store is based at.
6. If old files are maintained, what purpose would they serve? The reason the document is updated is to ensure public has access to the most up to date information. Retaining old files will only bring confusion to the reader.
7. The traffic information including stats must be retained.
8. Tags, document category, document rating and any comments must be retained.
9. Is there a need to add a statement to document description to highlight that the document was replaced on a particular date and time?
10. Of course, you can manually change tags, document category and document description
11. The document title shall retain the same as this is reflected in the URL

Are there any other requirements we missed out? You thoughts are very much appreciated.

Insider Dealmakers Awards 2009

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Last night (12th Nov 2009), Manchester hosted the Insider Dealmakers Awards 2009, which I could not attend due to clashing with Northern StartUp 2.0 – Managing Growth event I hosted. Below is a list of the winners taken from Insidernews without any amendment.

Daisy scoops Deal of the Year
The reverse takeover and AIM flotation of Nelson-based Daisy Communications was last night named Deal of the Year at the Insider Dealmakers Awards 2009 held at Manchester Central. The Lancashire company also took home the AIM Deal of the Year award for the £204m reverse takeover of Freedom4 Group in July. Corporate development director Steve Smith said the deal has enabled it to continue to eat into BT’s share of the telecoms market. “This award has been given for the float; but that has enabled us to go on and do four more deals, which have really enabled us to establish a platform and move ahead of the competition,” he said. “There is room for someone to become a competitor of BT and I think that’s us.” Also shortlisted for the Deal of the Year award was the management buyout of Air Energi; the sale of Garic to Bibby; Inflexion’s exit of Viking Moorings; and the management buyout of Formation Group. The award was sponsored by The Co-operative Bank.

Dealmaker of the Year
Winner Jonathan Boyers, KPMG
Shortlisted Jonathan Boyers, KPMG; Nick Davenport, Turner Parkinson; Paul Stringer, Cowgill Holloway; Andy Westbrook, Deloitte
The highly-coveted Dealmaker of the Year award is given to the corporate finance professional that has made the biggest impression on the community over the past year. Boyers has acted on number of deals, including the disposal of Pilkington France SAS and Pilkington (Schweiz) AG by Japanese giant Nippon Sheet Glass. He also advised the vendor on the sale of Lancashire-based security business Legion Group to AIM-quoted rival SectorGuard for £1.
Sponsored by Watson Moore
 
Turnaround Deal of the Year
Winner Styles & Wood – refinancing
Shortlisted Styles & Wood – refinancing; Focus DIY – company voluntary arrangement; Canterbury – acquired by JD Sports
Styles and Wood announced the bold plans in May, which involved raising £34.91m through share placings and debt for equity swaps. Chief executive Ivan McKeever said the move would provide the company with the funds to secure its position.
Sponsored by KBC Business Capital
 
New Technology Deal of the Year
Winner DXS – sale to Qiagen
Shortlisted Ascribe – public to private deal; Nanoco – reverse takeover; DXS – sale to Qiagen
Insider is always excited about technology deals and new technologies that can change how we live and work. This deal saw Manchester pharmaceuticals business DxS sold to European buyer Qiagen. The investment syndicate led by NVM Private Equity achieved a record return from the sale.
Sponsored by Citypress
 
Fund of the Year
Winner YFM Group – North West Business Investment Scheme
Shortlisted YFM Group – North West Business Investment Scheme; Enterprise Ventures – for Rising Stars Technology Fund; Alliance Fund Managers – Merseyside Special Investment Fund
The winning fund was launched in April 2003 to meet a need identified by the North West Regional Development Agency for a flexible fund to invest in high-growth businesses across the North West. It has had an exceptionally good year, achieving good returns for businesses like DxS.
Sponsored by North West Regional Development Agency
 
AIM Deal of the Year
Winner Daisy Communications
Shortlisted Formation Group – acquisition of divisions by Gresham; Nanoco – reverse takeover to achieve listing; Daisy Communications – flotation; Ascribe Software – public to private
Insider expected a quiet year for AIM deals, but there have been companies leaving the market as well as floating. Daisy’s audacious move to consolidate the telecoms reseller market marks an incredible run by the Nelson-based company.
Sponsored by WH Ireland
 
Small Deal of the Year
Winner Terraconsult
Shortlisted Individual Restaurant Company – fundraising; The Hut – acquisition of the assets of Zavvi; Terraconsult – management buyout
This deal, brokered by Nick Hulme Corporate Finance, had some complex issues to resolve despite being at the smaller end of the market. It saw a young quartet of shareholders to take over this Warrington-based environmental consultancy.
Sponsored by Handlesbanken
 
Private Equity Team of the Year
Winner LDC
Shortlisted LDC, Endless, ECI Partners, Gresham Private Equity, Inflexion Private Equity, Zeus Private Equity
Despite the tough market, LDC has continued buying, selling and backing businesses. In the North West, it has worked on the £20m management buyout (MBO) of Ansa Holdings and Independent Inspection Holdings from parent company Mavinwood, and backed the £5.9m MBO of Manchester-based retailer Modelzone.
Sponsored by Cobbetts
 
Banking Team of the Year
Winner Yorkshire Bank
Shortlisted The Co-operative Bank, Yorkshire Bank, Lloyds TSB, The Royal Bank of Scotland
It’s been easy to knock the banks, but this award recognises the solid teams of bankers and deal doers that exist in the region. Yorkshire Bank has backed such buyouts as ANSA Holdings, provided funding for marine services provider James Fisher and Sons, and arranged the debt for the buyout of health software group Ascribe.
Sponsored by MC2
 
Corporate Finance Advisory Team of the Year
Winner Cowgill Holloway
Shortlisted Clearwater Corporate Finance, KPMG, Deloitte, Rickitt Mitchell, Cowgill Holloway
Cowgill Holloway was one of the big winners at Insider’s Lancashire Dealamakers Awards and has continued that success at the North West ceremony. The firm really caught the eye with its work on the sale of Bury construction services business Garic to Liverpool-based Bibby Line Group.
Sponsored by Venture Finance
 
Corporate Law Firm of the Year
Winner Turner Parkinson
Shortlisted Addleshaw Goddard, DLA Piper, Cobbetts, Turner Parkinson, Eversheds
Nick Davenport’s team at Turner Parkinson have quietly built a reputation as fleet of foot players in the legal market and have also done well to launch a new online service called TP Deals, a weekly email update detailing new opportunities, which is sent to more than 4,000 business owners and professionals.
Sponsored by Merrill DataSite
 
Asset-Based Lender of the Year
Winner KBC Business Capital
Shortlisted Barclays, Lloyds TSB Commercial Finance, KBC Business Capital, Venture Finance
At a time when banks are demanding the toughest of guarantees, KBC regional director Mark Shackleton and his team have been active in the market this year. The firm provided an £8.8m asset finance line to North Wales firelighter and barbeque ignition product manufacturer Tiger Tim Products, and a £3.5m facility to Manchester-based distributor of kitchens and white goods Appliance 365.
Sponsored by Manchester Central
 
Transaction Services Team of the Year
Winner Deloitte
Shortlisted PKF, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG
Richard Bell’s 14-strong transaction services team at Deloitte has completed 11 transactions in the past 12 months, with a total deal value of £2.1bn. Completed transactions include the £10m acquisition of NGSS by NCC Group, and the £1.6bn acquisition of Somerfield by the Co-operative Group.
Sponsored by Centric Commercial Finance