This is a strange blog post, so please bear with me until I get going.

RAW2010, brain child of Mike Perls, the man known simply as “Perls of Wisdom” or the man who would bare all for a publicity stunt, or simply the CEO of MC2, was interested in adding few more speakers of my choice to his celebrity A-list to be heard by the North West’s top 350 entrepreneurs on 20th January 2010.

Further to my ramblings on Twitter today, I thought of blogging my top 10 choices. Before that, here is a brief about the event.

20 January 2010 will change the face of business in the North West forever. RAW 2010 will bring together the region’s top 350 entrepreneurs with 15 of the world’s best speakers. Open and frank discussion and debate will challenge received opinion on the issues that matter. The event marks the beginning of an ambitious and bold concept to create the most powerful entrepreneurial community in the UK to grow together over the following 12 months. RAW has already garnered the support of a number of key speakers including Theo Paphitis, Kanya King, Doug Richards, Shaa Wasmund and Imran Hakim. RAW is about a change in thinking, there will be no professional advisers, no hidden agenda and no tired opinions. The event will be held on 20 January 2010 at the Lowry, Salford Quays from 9:00am.

Here goes (not in any particular order, and locals and confirmed speakers excluded):

1. Michael Birch – Michael knows the ups and downs of tech entrepreneurship and I was inspired by his knowledge and experience gained through setting up and selling Bebo. Michael spent 8 hours with us at Tech Mission London 09 I organised in June 2009 and is the brain child behind ProFounders Capital.
2. Brent Hoberman – I am yet to meet Brent face to face, but have met regularly through twitter and emails. Brent is also an investment partner at ProFounders Capital and successfully exited from lastminute.com. ProFounders first investment is TweetDeck, a great product used by me and many thousands every day. Brent is well experienced in commercialisation of internet businesses and would be a valuable speaker to listen to.
3. Saul Klein – Saul has been instrumental in changing access to venture capital in the UK (and Europe). He has found the perfect filtration system through OpenCoffee and then through SeedCamp, which ensure that he has access to latest innovation without having to spend money looking for it. A clever guy indeed!
4. JP Rangaswami – As the head of BT Design, JP is well travelled and spoken at many key events and has accessed to latest innovation through BT Design.
5. Marc Benioff – Marc setup Salesforce.com and has driven it to become a key service platform for many technologies. Marc probably knows more than anyone else in commercialising Software-as-a-Service model right now.
6. John Chambers – As the CEO of Cisco, John is a well respected individual in Mergers & Acquisitions and have grown Cisco to become a commercial giant, touching everyone today through broadband revolution.
7. Larry Ellison – No one perhaps knows how better to crush the competition better than Larry. Founded and still leading Oracle to be No.1 in any market they operate is a mammoth achievment.
8. Biz Stone/Jack Dorsey – Founders of Twitter for creating a tool that makes a difference every day! The greatest internet product right now!
9. Reid Hoffman – As the founder of LinkedIn, Reid has created a product that break barriers in reaching executives of any organisation. Those who know, can find out emai addresses of anyone if they have a profile on LinkedIn. A great becoming bit fuzzy right now, but certainly will be there tomorrow forming part of the productivity suit.
10. Tony Blair – Irrespective of Gulf War, Tony was a great charismatic leader.

I am sure there are few others I would like to squeeze into the top 10. Do share who your top 10 is and let us know whether you plan to attend RAW2010

On behalf of Northern StartUp 2.0‘s StartUpOftheWeek programme, I caught up with Ben Hookway, CEO of Vidiactive to find out about his latest tech startup.

Manoj: What made you launch your company? Briefly, tell us about the company history and the management team.

Ben: EV Group (previously Enterprise Ventures) were already looking at the Vidiactive project before I came on board. EV had invested in Next Device, a company I had co-founded and sold to Mentor Graphics. I had kept in touch with EV and talked about a few ideas when Vidiactive came up. Having been primarily involved in the mobile industry, I saw the emerging trends in web TV as being an area of high potential – not unlike the mobile industry a few years ago. I felt that there was the opportunity to bring some innovative thinking into the space, while also being aware of the complexities of the value chain. Ken Tindell, the CTO, was already there as was Iolo Jones, the chairman. Ken and Iolo are both really strong talents in their space. Ken has founded and exited companies and brings great perspectives on opportunities. He never does things just because that’s the way the industry has always done it – he continually challenges assumptions and brings the best, freshest thinking to a problem. Iolo has been involved with the TV industry all his career and brings a wealth of contacts and a fast track to navigating the main players we encounter. He’s been instrumental in making sure we don’t solve the wrong problem really well! Having had a good experience with EV as an investor, and seeing the strength of the team and the potential of the space I made the decision to go all in with Vidiactive.

Manoj: What problem(s) do Vidiactive solve? Why do you think Vidiactive solve the problem better than others?

Ben: We solve 2 problems:

1. Wouldn’t it be great if you could browse for and find web video on your browser, but then watch it full screen on your TV in a full TV experience?  We allow you to watch almost any web video on your TV in a full screen viewing experience. Examples here are the obvious catch up services like iPlayer, 4OD, ITV viewer and so on. We also enable the large video sites like YouTube, but crucially we also easily enable more niche sites. So if you are into cycling tv, sailing tv, angling tv, or whatever, you can now watch it in a full screen experience on your TV rather than being hunched over the lap top. As an example, our development team watched the recent England game online – only they watched it in great quality on a 42″ plasma screen TV drinking beer and eating pizza, not huddled around a laptop.

2. Wouldn’t it be great if you could manage all your the web video on your own portal on your laptop or PC browser and have your preferences reflected on the TV screen automatically? There is a lot of video content available, and its growing fast. We allow people to watch all of this on TV, but we know that managing all of this with a TV remote is impossible. We link personal video management portals with TVs. This allows you to search, forward, mark, create playlists, receive recommendations, and so on using your browser. This is how people already behave – we don’t try and change that by getting them to do complex things with a TV. You manage from your browser and your choices appear on TV UI when you switch it on. For example, at work in your lunchtime you might come across 4 pieces of web video that you want to watch. You can mark them with the Vidiactive solution and when you get home and switch on your TV you have a notification that there are 4 new pieces of video for you to watch. You then use a simple remote to select the video and watch in full screen.

Manoj: Who are your key competitors? How do you differentiate from them?

Ben: We don’t believe there is anyone else implementing a solution like ours. There is however a lot of activity in the web video space. Most suffer from limitations. Many of them focus on a restricted set of video content creating a poor selection for users. The reasons for this vary, but we have unique web video playing technology which allows us to show just about anything in a proper TV format. So for example with competitive approaches, you might be able to see iPlayer, but not 4OD or YouTube or Hulu. With Vidiactive, you can see it all.  A lot of other solutions are focussed on cramming more and more interactivity and options onto the TV screen. My view is that this is the path of least resistance when you get 2 industries getting together. Internet + TV = desktop type experience on a TV screen. But this type of approach ignores 2 things;

a) The TV is a lean back experience. in the US, 50% of people who record programming on their DVR don’t skip the ads. TV is not inherently interactive.
b) TV screens are shared screens. When you share a screen you can’t a personal interaction experience

Its by understanding the above 2 points that we have come to what we believe is the most elegant solution.

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?

Ben: We’ve been going since the beginning of the year and are about to release the beta solution. We are in discussion with some major telecom and TV service suppliers about the solution, in addition to some very well known hardware companies.  We are also planning on co-exhibiting at CES in Las Vegas in January with a major technology company (to be announced!). Plans for the next 12 to 18 months are trial and then production roll-outs of the service. We are also looking at a further round of funding to accelerate the penetration into the market.

This week, I caught up with John Bickley to hear about the recent launch of Whamoosh! A new player in the personalisation business. Applying new technology to revolutionise an established market………

Manoj: What made you launch your company? Briefly, tell us about the company history and the management team

John: FaceTec (owned by me) has a patented facial recognition personalisation platform which enables a face in an uploaded image to be recognised & automatically (i) extracted and placed in another image (i.e. replacing the face of the character in the recipient image) & (ii) to add assets e.g. face paint, make-up, glasses etc to the donor image. FaceTec was approached by Moonpig 18 months ago and the two companies were close to signing a licensing deal for the platform, however my co-founder of Whamoosh! (Alan Oliver, who used to own his own greeting cards publishing company, Kamrok) and I decided a year last October that the market opportunity was good enough to launch our own web based online ‘print to demand’ personalised greeting card company. The business was launched 2 weeks ago.

The UK market is the largest in the world per capita (£1.5billion). Online personalised cards account for less than 1% of the market; Moonpig has c.90% of this market. The market does little consumer marketing, relying mainly on the vast no of distribution channels to drive sales. The market is mature, staid and ripe for innovation (especially in respect of the internet). Moonpig have validated the market opportunity and evangelised the personalising of greeting cards; they recently posted £20m t/o & £6.7m profit. Our own forecasts project this level of profitability.

My background started in the ‘80’s as managing director of CIC Video (a Paramount Pictures & Universal Studios JV) which I grew from £5>65m in 3 years. In the ‘90’s I came back North and joined the founders of Psygnosis a Liverpool based video games company which Sony bought for c£30m in 1993, the year after I joined. I went onto run the Worldwide publishing business with offices in eight countries and after backing the business into Sony PlayStation in the late ‘90’s became publishing exec for Sony PlayStation Europe. Since 2001 I have been involved in two University spin-outs, (i) Celoxica (Oxford University) where the management team raised £33million before it became an AIM listed company and (ii) in 2003 Genemation (The University of Manchester) where I raised £1.5 million. FaceTec acquired the IP and assets of Genemation in early 2008

Manoj: What problem(s) do your company solve? Why do you think your company solve the problem better than others?

John: It’s not so much a problem as an enabling solution. Like Moonpig we are giving customers the opportunity to personalise physical merchandise and deliver a service that supports and enhances that process. We have set out to make the Whamoosh! platform a superior customer experience than our competitors not only in terms of our USP but the way we deliver it and the service allied to it. Our USP is the Face-it! personalisation platform which we have licensed from FaceTec. It takes what Moonpig started to the next level i.e. the user who’s face is uploaded becomes the character in the greeting card. Moonpig are trying to emulate what we can do but frankly it’s very poor and I don’t think customers will be very impressed when they see what they can do with Face-it! cards. There are three patents behind the personalisation platform which in terms of the core algorithms and the platform itself have taken twelve years of University research and commercial development to evolve into what supports the Face-it! range. It means that there’s a very high barrier to entry.

Manoj: Who are your key competitors? How do you differentiate from them?

John: Moonpig; there are three others but they tend to be Moonpig-lite. Our main USP is the Face-it! platform, which we believe takes personalisation to the next level. We create our own designs; Moonpig relies heavily on licensing 3rd party designs. We have put a lot of effort in making user functionality and the user journey more intuitive and rewarding than our competitors e.g. users can access from within the site their images stored on Facebook & Flickr. Users can also store their favourite images on Whamoosh! and we have given the majority of our cards editable verses

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?

John:The web platform and print/fulfilment pipeline is live, so we already match what Moonpig and our other competitors can do as an end to end solution. We are focused on marketing; creating awareness and driving traffic to the site. We’re working with Weber Shandwick on PR and WebComms (a fellow Daresbury Science Park tenant) on SEO optimisation and PPC

As previously stated the focus is now on marketing the offer and driving traffic to the website; this will remain our major activity for the foreseeable future. As cash flow increases we’ll expand the art team and launch new greeting card ranges and product lines e.g. mugs, posters and calendars We may bring in investors in two stages, (i) early next year to pump prime the initial marketing push & (ii) in 18>24mths time to raise the investment in marketing & bring the printing/fulfilment pipeline in-house (probably based out of Guernsey) ready for a likely trade sale in 3>4 years. We believe Moonpig will be in play as an acquisition target within the next 18>24mths and that will trigger interest from any acquirer’s competitors in the sector and will then put Whamoosh! in play