Category Archives: Techcelerate

3 Day Conference in Manchester Showcasing local and international software companies?

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Just an idea at this stage, but have approached a group of early stage companies in the USA to sound it out.

The objectives:

  1. Promote companies and products – an exhibition
  2. Build partnerships with startups from Manchester (edocr.com, JavelinCRM, others), London and rest of the UK
  3. API Explosion – Get the tech community involved
  4. Tour of local tech hubs for those thinking of setting base in the NW
  5. Get the public sector involve, so that we can explore incentives for setting up

Perhaps a three day event:

  1. Day 0 – Check-in to hotels
  2. Day 1: Registration, local tours, Dinner
  3. Day 2: Exhibition and Conference, Dinner with VCs
  4. Day 3: Catch-up, discussions with public sector, etc etc etc
  5. Day 4: Return flights

I think Sep/Oct would be better to give me time to plan properly. If you think there is merit in doing this, let’s start talking.

Key Objectives for 2010

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2009 is fast becoming history. The two week period I wanted to use for thinking seem to be evaporating fast. Blogging is a great way to put you mark on the calendar. Twitter is fine, but you do not control it. I can see more and more people coming back to blog in 2010 whilst using twitter as a mechanism to drive traffic.

So here are my key objectives for 2010 (business and not personal – bit of a blur there!).

1. Grow my ego whilst learning to be humble – Ok! should have said, personal brand.
2. Grow edocr.com – we may be looking for our first round of external capital in 2010 to speed up growth – this would be to finance number of key positions plus spend on product development
3. Grow Northern StartUp 2.0 to be the organisation that binds all other regional tech, investment and entrepreneurship activities, whilst fostering more tech startups to be establised and helping those committed to achieve growth

Then there are peripheral activities such as:

4. Foresight North – time to deliver or shutup. I am not the driver here, just the facilitator
5. Next Gen – UKIBC – Board Member for NW

2010 year is the year we all need to prove ourselves as the markets start recovering! A great opportunity if we position ourselves to tap into the hungry corporates, ready to do business and exercise spend.

First UK Microsoft Innovation Academy Workshop

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Jyoti Banerjee and Manoj Ranaweera of edocr-

The first ever UK Microsoft Innovation Academy Workshop took place on the 10th Dec 09 at Daresbury Innovation Centre. It was delivered by Jyoti Banerjee. I tweeted the full workshop, a two-day event squeezed into one-day, and my tweets are captured on the following report, which you can read on-line or download.

Microsoft Innovation Academy - 10th Dec 09
Whilst I had reservations about the value of the workshop prior to participation, I was proven wrong during the afternoon session. As far as I was concerned, it was a day well spent getting a valuable insight into developing the right business model for edocr.com.

Few quotes from fellow participants:

“Interseting day, very useful, covered strategic issues that will have a big impact on our approach to the market”, Aldo de Leonibus, Director of Inventya.

“Useful and timely overview covering a variety of issues around the value chain and approaching new markets”, Katrina Delargy, Managing Director, Aventura.

I sincerely hope Microsoft will continue to offer these workshops to high growth businesses across the country.

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!