Bridgewater Hall Community Education Trust

The Bridgewater Hall

Today, I became a Trustee of The Bridgewater Hall Community Education Trust (BHCET).

The BHCET maximises the education potential of the Bridgewater Hall which is a world class concert hall in the centre of Manchester. The BHCET runs a wide range of projects, programmes and activities taking the building and its rich artistic life as a stimulus.

The Board of Trustees consists of many well known faces of Manchester and the North West, and how I would add value is yet to be worked out. I am hoping this may be in couple of areas:

1. Brand

2. Technology

3. Culture

These days, just like you, I am very careful about what activities I take on and how these align with my overall objectives in life. My daughters’ interest in music and drama paid a part in my decision to accept the position of Trustee. I would also be keen to explore how they could take part in activities as I learn more about the Trust.

In case you did not know, my other voluntary contribution is to help bilateral trade between India and the North West through UK India Business Council.

If you would like to find out more, please visit the website http://www.bridgewater-hall.co.uk and select Learning from the menu.

What are the 10 most used social web applications by you and what are the primary reasons for their usage?? In my case, in order of frequency, i.e. first being the most used and 10th being the least used out of the 10:

1. www.edocr.com – no surprise here!
2. www.twitter.com – instant broadcasting, traffic generator and on-line collaboration (plus tweetdeck + tweetie + cotweet)
3. www.facebook.com – access to 500 million user base with difficulty
4. www.Linkedin.com – verify email addresses of new contacts and learn about individuals
5. www.youtube.com – videos of our events
6. www.stumbleupon.com – traffic generation
7. www.digg.com – traffic generation
8. del.icio.us – traffic generation
9. www.slideshare.net – for slides of interest
10. www.flickr.com – pictures sharing and embedding

Do share your list! Many thanks

Hi Om,

I wrote a blog post several months ago about how to find a person’s email address, verify it and then use other services to enrich it. I never published it due to not being totally comfortable with what I have written. The process involves (where the email address is not known):

1. Guessing the email address (there are number of ways)
2. Verifying this using the largest professional network (and if needed the largest social network)
3. Once verified, add to web applications that could enrich the email address by finding out social profiles of the individual and then automatically capturing updates of her/his web activities.

In addition, there are many startups offering digital cards where individuals willingly add their profile data.

Given above, it is unclear who the bad guy in this case is, as we have provided the information willingly in the first place to various web applications. Selling our data to third parties was pioneered by people such as Experian, and it happens every day whether we like it or not.

Perhaps, there ought to be a set of best practices that reputable applications will adhere to. You can take it to another stage by allowing third party audits, etc. This could create an opportunity for a new market segment.

Not a simple issue…I am glad you raise it though..

Best regards
Manoj

Softworld is UK’s premier event for accounting software vendors. I was a regular attendee during the days of ebdex (my first tech startup), but have not attended the event during the last few years. Those days, the event was held in Birmingham and was seen as the annual showcase event for accountancy software. It was  at least 3 times bigger than the event I attended yesterday, and was buzzing with people. In contrast, yesterday’s event was not just small but it seems that the organisers forgot to invite buyers.

Access Accounting had the largest exhibiting area, and probably worked harder than anyone else to generate some interest. Sage and Intuit/Quickbooks were there, because they needed to show their face, but perhaps not looking hard for new business, as the brands are mature and well established. Version One, as usual were upbeat and well represented. COA rebranded as Advanced Business Solutions were there with First Lady (meeting her was perhaps the highlight for me!). SAP and their resellers with Sapphire were there with a bunch of other less known brands. Financialforce.com seem to have made a token attempt with a smaller stand with Aqilla perhaps being the only other SaaS provider to exhibit.

So where are the new boys, who plan to rule the next few decades? Xero, Kashflow and Free Agent were clearly missing as they do not believe in exhibiting where the returns are guaranteed to be almost nill, given the markets they operate in.

So, is the Softworld just an expo where brands exhibit just to let their competition know that they are still around?

The whole event raised number of interesting questions:

1. What is the expected ROI from such events, and what is this in form of? Its certainly cannot be direct revenues. Events can be useful to let stakeholders know that they are still around and perhaps use the opportunity to generate few press releases.

2. No major announcements – Both Access Accounting and Sage may have used the opportunity to brief or hint their forthcoming cloud strategies. I did not attend individual sessions to verify my suspicions.

3. Is Cloud relevant to these guys? I would say yes, so far it is not a major drive promoted by anyone exhibiting. Sage, QuickBooks/Intuit, Advance Business Solutions, all continuing to offer licensed software. Some have web enabled their products and referring to this as Cloud. Only SAP Business by Design, Aqilla and Financialforce.com seem to be offering cloud solutions.

4. Whilst they may not have implemented cloud solutions, most of them at least are acknowledging it as the future, at least their front end sales staff. I am not yet convinced whether their managements have the same view. Ironically, Iris (except one chap) did not know about (or pretended not to know) their white label Free Agent Central offered through accountants.

5. Is the industry trying their best to hang on to an outdated business model and milk as much as possible before it vanish into thin air?

6. Has SAP got a under rated winner in SAP Business by Design, trading at £97 for ERP? The more I discussed with them it became clearer that they have a winning proposition. But do they understand the market, especially how to sell to small companies, given that they seem to control the process 100%. They are looking for 10 seats upwards, but bundling in consultancy to make the revenue pot bigger and increase profit margins? Could they make profits if the product is developed to such an extent it does not require high consultancy fees? But of course, it is not in the interest of the vendors to do this, due to existing business models. Could SAP change perceptions – a system so complicated that you never finish projects!

7. I used Xero and Capsule CRM arguments many a time yesterday (Duncan/Gary – commission through paypal please!). Whilst Capsule is pouring all their profits into making the product better and simpler, one cannot think how it could be used by a high end smaller business without some help! The customers may not necessary have to the time or resources to streamline their processes to maximise benefit – hence the traditional argument for consultancy.

So in conclusion, the model may still require consultancy to be effective from the customer’s perspective, but the total costs ought to be a small fraction of the past, which undermines the value added reseller model seriously. Would this create a vaccumm that might be filled by a new segment such as value added virtual assistants?

Should Softworld reinvent themselves by bringing the buyers back? If so, what tactics are available to them? Have they not leveraged their existing relationships with folks from Accountancy Age, ICAEW, etc. Why was their large stand completely unoccupied? Was there a press centre? What happened to bloggers such as Dennis Howlett (one point, even I was a serious blogger sponsored by SAP!). What else can they do to make this event fly?

From a selfish stand, both Techcelerate and edocr.com could have helped reaching out, but I will not take this space to talk too much about how! Instead if Softworld is interested, we could help them the next time.

Lastly, I am looking to run a small accountancy event for 40 to 50 people with a session on accountancy for small businesses, say 1 to 25 staff teams, and showcase three accountancy software solutions, in Manchester or Daresbury Innovation Centre in the new year. If anyone is interested, please get in touch.

Disclaimer: I have not researched the Softworld website – all above are my personal views based on many discussions I had and not a reflection of edocr.com or techcelerate.org

Update 1

Here is the Twitter report capturing tweets on this annual event. As you can see, the conversation was some what limited.

My faithful MacBook Pro, which has been running every day since April 2008 suddenly stopped functioning yesterday morning, and I have been suffering from withdrawal symptoms ever since.

I debated on whether to buy a new laptop, the entry product with 4GB RAM would have been £500 more than the repair cost, but decided to replace the faulty motherboard instead, so that I would not need to go through the hassle of installing new software and moving large amount of data.

Strangely, you cannot order spare parts for Macs either on Sunday or Monday in the UK. Any hope of getting my MacBook Pro repaired quickly is not an option anymore.

In the mean time, Techcelerate Member, Thinspace came to the rescue with a thinclient. Unfortunately, this means I have to carry a monitor, keyboard and a mouse with me, which is not practical by any means.

I also forgot to get the thinclient configured for accepting flash and silverlight, which means I cannot read any documents on edocr.com, nor can address many applications such as graphs on xero.com or youtube videos.

I am a great believer of crisises leading to opportunities. I have been an avid evangelist of SaaS well before the mainstream, but never adopted it 100%, so I see this as my opportunity to finally move to the web as close to 100% as possible.

I will be keen to understand what tools you use if you have also adopted a similar strategy. Listed below are some of the tools I use:

• email: Google (personal + edocr + techcelerate with auto forward) – I love how iMail brought all of my emails to one user interface. Know of any email dashboard I could use? By the way, I am still not thrilled with google email user interface
• Spreadsheets: Google Docs and Microsoft Excel – Time to ditch Excel
• Wordprocessing: Google Docs and Microsoft Word – not sure Google Docs is advanced enough for reports – but appreciate its time to move on
• Presentations: Google Docs and Microsoft Powerpoint – Love powepoint – was not impressed with Google Docs – hard decision here
• To Do List – iGTD – trialling with tadalist.com – not impressed
• CRM – salesforce.com (edocr) and capsulecrm.com (techcelerate)
• Accounts – xero.com (edocr and techcelerate)
• Personal finance – spreadsheets – time to give mint.com a try
• Contacts – gist.com and plaxo.com but address book on Mac had over 7000 contacts (perhaps not transferrable online)
• Huddle.net – project collaboration

Of course, above is only some of the apps I use.

The Inspiration

Saul Klein has been a great inspiration for me since I came to know him in 2007, mostly through OpenCoffee, a great investment (sales) funnel to identify the hottest startups and tech entrepreneurs. Later, he introduced Seedcamp to add a second level of filtration and de-risk his investments as much as possible. Some of this learning has been applied by Imran Hakim and the team (perhaps not directly taking from Saul) in Manchester through Envestors and RAW2010, in terms of de-risking. But that’s another story for another day.

The Motivation (best to come clean upfront!)

At Techcelerate, we need to find a funnel for budding entrepreneurs, as well as find a low cost channel for Member products, where conversation will achieve sales, without selling. I have been toying with the idea of Techcelerate Coffee for a while, but I believe I managed to convince few people, which is enough for me to give it a damn good try.

What is TekCoffee (and why not TechCoffee)

Ok. TechCoffe has gone. Yes, that’s right, someone got the Twitter username, so I had to settle for TekCoffee. Personally, I dislike “k” in TekCoffee, but let’s go with it for the time being, eventhough I am big on brand identities.

TekCoffee would be very similar to OpenCoffee, except that it is not about a funnel for investment, but a funnel for sales and partnerships for our Member products and Techcelerate ecosystem.

Self-Management of TekCoffee

All events are local (initially around Stockport) and organised through private messaging on Twitter and PlanCast .

How To Join This Group: Go to http://www.twitter.com/TekCoffee and click on the “send request” button. We will approve new members before they are permitted to post or receive messages from the Group.

How To Post: At the beginning of your Tweet type “d TekCoffee”. This will send a private message to the group, which will be automatically forwarded to everyone else who is following.  If you use @ the message will be public to everyone. I need to test this out bit more to understand.

How to arrange a meeting: Some need to create the meeting on PlanCast first and then use the Twitter Group to invite others.

What is the format

1. One person from each local community create an event on PlanCast (we can create sub groups within Twitter later on) and send out an invite through twitter group and other available channels.

2. Those who wish to attend join the plancast event. Bring your laptops, so if no one turns up, you can still get two hours work done, so there is no real lost to your productivity.

3. Meet up for up to a maximum of 2 hours between 10:00 to 12:00pm or any other time slot as agreed, as long as it is restricted to 2 hours. Ideally these ought to be monthly meetings on regular intervals and arranged such that they do not clash with another TekCoffee event.

4. Organisers can change from month to month, and Techcelerate will provide as much support as possible

5. You can discuss any aspect of business, and we will try our best to expose new products to you through inviting tech CEOs from companies such as Yuuguu, edocr.com, CapsuleCRM, etc.

This is just a start and we can refine above as we go along. What’s left now is to prove the communication channels around the first event. Join the twitter group now to find out more.

Venture Capital Fundraising is up in the US

On 6th April, Dow Jones reported 41% increase in US venture capital fundraising, raising $4.1 billion across 34 funds in the first quarter of 2010. 

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers setup fund for iPad developers

The New York Times reported on 31st March 2010 (not quite last week!), Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who invested in Google and Amazon.com early on, has double its $100 million iFund set up in 2008 and managed by Matt Murphy for application development to $200 million to support iPad application development. The iFund has invested in 14 iPhone applications including

All my businesses follow a model where it is split into 10 categories (opportunity, product, market, sales, operations, service, finance, legal, HR and other). The thinking comes from Michael Porters Value Chain framework. Today, I have started to look at this from a slightly different angel with respect to edocr.com.

Financial Profit and Valuation

Whilst a business should not be an accounting exercise, without a true picture of your finances, you have no business. I would argue, that the point of finances is to generate a profit and increase the valuation of your business. If we expand the profit further, its about growing your revenues, whilst improving working capital and cost efficiencies. Control of cost is vital in achieving a competitive advantage in the long run. Working capital in one sense is making sure the business has sufficient cash to operate, which is either funded by the cash flow arising from revenues or external funding in the form of debt or equity finance. Let’s not get bogged down in other exotic finances such as invoice discounting, asset financing, etc.

Product vs. Market Fit

You could design the most beautiful product in the world, but if there is no readily available market, you will struggle to achieve a meaningful traction. Creating new market is not without casualties. Entering an established market with a killer proposition with an aggressive sales and marketing plan can achieve wonders instead of focusing on the first mover advantage.

Value Proposition

Value proposition is as good as the paper its written on (or the web page), as long as it is understood and there are sufficient number of people willing to pay a price above your cost point. Having a product that fits the market requirements improves your chances, but you need to be able to articulate in a manner that puts you ahead of the competition. It was only this evening I was speaking to an early stage technology business with an email marketing tool. They have decided that it is not worth competing for the end client head on due to the sheer number of well established brands in a crowded market place, instead they are attempting to sell to middlemen who could dress the product in their branding and take it to the market. In this case, the product not just has to be fit for the market, but it needs to be now fit for both the end client and the middle man. So getting your value proposition right is crucial. One company that adopted this strategy successfully is BT, sell-to and sell-through strategy.

Operational Efficiency

None of above can be achieved without adequate resources in place, both in terms of numbers and level of skills, experience and competency. In addition, you need to achieve higher efficiency of resources with continuous improvements to have a chance of beating your competition.

So how does edocr.com fares with above four crucial elements? In terms of financial profit and valuation, we have bootstrapped the company so far generating modest revenues. We have a product that works, which was achieved through hard work with low investment. We have an acceptable cost efficiency, but need external capital to make a bigger impact. I am dwelling on this, especially with respect to the forthcoming sales seminar co-sponsored by Microsoft next week

In terms of product fit vs. market, we and a bunch of other early stage companies have created a new market which is now about 3 years old, but I would argue that the market is not quite there yet. In terms of value proposition, we have bet on that the customer will soon demand real tangible benefits from their social media engagements. In this respect they will be looking for hard numbers, and the best anyone can offer is sales leads, and this is exactly where our focus is right now. In terms of operational efficiency, we are not faring well suffering significantly due to resource constraints. This has created three options for us, (1) grow at current pace reinvesting revenues back into business, which is not ideal by any means, (2) take external equity investment and dilute the shareholding, which is not a problem as far as curent investors are concerned, and (3), a compromise between (1) and (2) with minimum dilution. I will be going into the weekend thinking about which direction we ought to focus on. Your thoughts on a postcard please!

Image source: Problogger.net

This article is inspired by a private tweet I received just now, which simply said “Can’t see the value…” when I queried a prospective customer “What’s stopping you use edocr.com for your group and the subsidiaries?”.

I am the first to acknowledge that not everyone will buy a product irrespective of how good it is. But I like a challenge. Let me know by the end of this short article, whether you agree or disagree with me.

Value of Social Networking

Do you see the value of Twitter, Facebook and Youtube? I assume you do. Each of these channels allow you to collaborate in slightly different ways, but with the same end point in mind, i.e. spread knowledge, improve your products and services, and ultimately generate new business.

1. Twitter – short messages for real-time collaboration.
2. Facebook – conversations through multiple objects from messages to pictures and video, almost a final destination, aggregating conversations from elsewhere.
3. Youtube – conversations around video.

Of course, there are many other channels offering conversations around a different object, e.g. Flickr around images.

edocr.com is about conversations around documents/pdfs. We do not discrimate what type of documents you upload from brochures, case studies and whitepapers to operating manuals and annual reports. As long as they are not confidential, edocr.com is the place for document related conversations.

Document Distribution

You could get a document distributed through limited number of ways, irrespective of how hard you try:

1. Printed – post or hand over at meetings, exhibitions and seminars.
2. Email to a known list of recipients.
3. Make it available through your website.

We like to be the 4th way of distributing a document. Let’s take a look at a document on your website. This is most likely to be a link on a web page.

Lets say that you tweeted the url to the web page where the document link exists. Let’s track my actions (and most likely yours):

1. I saw the link
2. Clicked and visited the web page
3. Found the document link among others and down loaded the document

This is probably where a typical visit would end. Let’s explore the same scenario on edocr.com

1. I saw your tweet and the link
2. Clicked and visited the web page which has the document displayed prominently and no other documents or non related text.
3. I can now read on line (use full screen if I wished), download, book mark to over 200 social networks, email to a list of addresses, leave a comment, rate, add my own tags to make it easier to find next time, or simply drop a private message to you (the publisher).

Item (3) makes it much easier to distribute and have a conversation, all without leaving the link I clicked from Twitter. At the same time, search engines starts indexing your document, which means the document is now found through search engines, social networks and edocr.com through tags, document directory and business pages (the document can be listed against your company profile among all your other documents, fully categorised).

If you like us even more, you could simply use us as your main hosting provider for documents, and embed them on your website (thumbnail), blog or e-newsletters.

Beyond the Value of Exposure

In addition, we could provide leads of who actually look at the document. Email addresses will only be released with user consent. You can determine how you would like to expose your documents, e.g. top documents available only to those giving consent.

Ranking of documents on edocr.com is determined by the level of user interactivity. See how your document performs against your competitors. Let others know that they can track your new documents through RSS feeds.

Do you still think there is no value in our service? We are very happy to receive your constructive criticism.