On Internet Business

What the EC Digital Agenda means for online business

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

The European Commission’s recently announced Digital Agenda was negotiated against the background of the rise of the Celtic Tiger and Southern European ‘harmonisation’ but unveiled against the current economic situation – Greece and the Ireland in crisis and other countries battling their deficits. So what might the Agenda achieve and how will it support the growth of sustainable business online?

Burdens or Benefits?

First, there’s the legislative burden: 31 new laws across the EU, all aiming to increase the number of Europeans accessing online services and the range of resources they can use when they do. Key goals for business include the 2020 aim of half of all European households subscribing to 100 Mbps or above broadband services; steps to encourage electronic payments; removal of regulatory barriers and simplifying digital copyright management and licensing. It all sounds great, but it all needs to be paid for and there’s no detail on how such goals will be met. For example what’s the incentive for the goal that all citizens should be able to access basic broadband by 2013? The EU is full of rural areas where operators currently don’t find it economically viable to deliver services.

Then there’s the plan to have a rapid response system for cyber-attacks. In a UK currently scratching its head over the scrapping of identity cards, such over-arching structures, predicated on security and defensive measures, will be viewed with vast scepticism.

Business Focus

However, one area where rapid progress could be made is a key one for online retail, service provision and communications: by 2020, the EU aims to have 20% of EU citizens using cross-border online services – at present a bare 7% of online transactions made by European consumers are cross-border in nature.

Neelie Kroes, VP European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, made it clear how the Agenda needs to work, ‘Europe must maximise the potential of ICT in delivering economic growth… To fully realise the potential of Europe’s digital future we need the full commitment of Member States, the ICT sector and other vital economic players.’

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Entrepreneur’s resource: Smarta.com

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

Smarta.com describes itself as a ‘support platform’ which aims to provide a single location for business owners and entrepreneurs to connect, learn and do business. Founded by Shaa Wasmund, formerly a boxing promoter for Chris Eubank, who went on to work for Dyson and Bebo, it offers a range of services, all for free, that support the work of business leaders and active business people.

What makes Smarta special?

The fact that it was founded and is run by entrepreneurs makes it a smart social networking system for business leaders as well a non-stuffy way to learn, share and network.

What does it do best?

1. Smarta’s list of 100 most exciting businesses of the year is a great resource for what’s hot and what’s not, in the world of entrepreneurship.
2. Learning the way you like to is essential for time-limited business leaders: being able to choose from written bite-sized guides, short videos, wikis and online events allows everybody to find a swift chunk of business wisdom in the form that suits them best.
3. Being able to ask the whole Smarta community for an answer to a business question.

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Entrepreneur Resource: School for Startups

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources

Suppose you don’t want an MBA – suppose you want practical training in setting up your own business; finding investors; designing, marketing and delivering products and services; upscaling your successful startup and managing a growing business? Well School for Startups might be the answer you’re looking for.

Founded by Doug Richard, who is both a successful entrepreneur and an investor in startups, the school offers business training for entrepreneurs with a blend of face-to-face instruction and online workshops. In addition to the training component, there are business networking events designed to bring together small businesses in supportive, self-sustaining hubs.

The intent is to boost the number of innovative small businesses in the UK by giving them access to proven business advice to help them succeed. In 2008 – its first year of operation – the school worked with more than 1000 entrepreneurs in the making.

Doug Richard was an investor in the first two series of Dragons’ Den, and has a range of non-executive directorships around the world. In 2006, he received an honorary Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion.

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Company logos: crowdsource v traditional design

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources

One of the issues that preoccupies many new business owners is ‘image’. Along with ‘brand’ it’s the white-wall tyres of the start-up industry – the thing that every new business owner thinks they have to have to be cool! And they’re not entirely wrong – many businesses have foundered as much on failure to project a clear brand as on failure to offer a good product or service, while others, like Nike, are so utterly welded to the public consciousness by the nature of their branding that you only have to indicate their logo for everybody to know who you’re talking about.

So how does the small or new business owner go about establishing a company logo? Inc. has recently run an unscientific test to see how four services panned out for one small business owner.

Looking at their results, there’s quite a lot to think about before making a choice. While, for their small business owner, Hatchwise offered the service that delivered the logo he wanted, there are other ways of going about the process of finding a good logo.

Pros and Cons of Crowdsourcing

To begin with, there’s the question of time. While Logo Design Team offered a single contact point, the other services all require the buyer to communicate with multiple designers, which can be time-consuming in itself, without adding in the time needed to assess the draft designs adequately.

Then there’s the cost. While it can be as little as $99, what you get for that amount does seem to be very much a bargain bucket logo. As the cost increases, so does the quality of the design work, at least in this sample of one design brief. But then, at the top end of the price range, there’s a good chance that a recently qualified graphic designer would produce work of a similar calibre, and if you factor in the time cost of working with crowd-sourced ideas, you might find it’s cheaper that way.

Service is also an issue – once again Hatchwise came out on top in the article, both because it had the highest number of participants and because a comment made to one designer can be seen by all others, meaning that there isn’t the need for repetitive communication as there is with 99Designs. At Logosnap the burden is on the buyer to crawl through the designs that have been loaded onto the site, adding to the time/service burden and while both Logo Design Team and Hatchwise have found ways around the multiple communication issue, in neither case did it seem that the service received was notable enough for the business owner to comment favourably on it.

One positive aspect of crowdsourcing is price. In the end the buyer ended up spending less than $500 and was happy with his logo, but it took seven rounds of feedback to achieve it, and the chosen design actually bears very little relation to his original spec, suggesting that a lot of the iterations of the design might have been short-circuited if a single good designer had sat down for an hour with the client and swept away what he thought he wanted by suggesting what would work best!

But where does design end and branding begin? A downside of crowdsourcing a logo is that you don’t make any investment in research – so what you get is based on what you say you want and as this buyer found, sometimes what you want isn’t the best thing.

Conclusion
Crowdsourcing is a great way to get a logo design quickly and cheaply. So if brand image isn’t key to your success – perhaps because you’re at an early stage of business development and/or are trying out a range of ideas on the marketplace that you want to differentiate by brand at little cost – crowdsourcing may be right for you. After all, you can always amend/improve your logo later in the evolution of the business. However, once you’re past the start up stage and your brand is being seen by a large number of people, you need to differentiate your offer – at that point it is much more important to work with an experienced designer who understands your objectives and can contribute intelligent input to the designs for your corporate image.

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Entrepreneur Resources – the British Library

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources

You might not have the British Library at the top of your list as an entrepreneurial resource, but I’ve recently found that it has excellent materials and support for the entrepreneur, especially where intellectual property (IP) matters are involved.

Advice on business issues

One of the British Library’s key offerings is an hour-long advice session with an expert in business and intellectual property issues to talk through an entrepreneur’s business idea and to supply information and details of organisations that can help develop an idea into business fruition. To benefit, you need to have a very clear idea of what your business or product will be – and to be ready to turn it from idea to reality. Opportunities for this service are limited and competitive so when filling in you online application you need to provide lots of specifics to enable the Library to evaluate the potential of your concept.

Workshops and events

There are also a wide range of talks, workshops and events for entrepreneurs – ranging from the classic business subjects such as: Funding for Fast Growth, Business Planning Toolbox workshop and Knowing your Market through to more specialist and cutting edge topics like: A better pitch: raising money for green and ethical businesses, Social networking – an employer’s friend or foe? and key aspects of IP such as: A Beginner’s Guide to Intellectual Property and Introducing Registered Designs. Such workshops tend to get booked up very quickly, so it’s important to regularly scan the website for topics that are relevant to you, and book as soon as you can.

Databases and publications

The library also has a fantastic range of databases and information resources, as you might expect. Some of the most important to entrepreneurs and business leaders are:

• The business information section – contains databases and publications that help start and grow a business: general advice, funding sources, market research, company data and business news.
• IP information – which covers patents, trade marks, registered designs and copyright.
• Industry research – British Library experts have created guides to many of the most popular industries, listing the most useful databases, reports and websites.
• Free research offer – London-based entrepreneurs can apply for three hours free desk research from our expert Research Service.
• Business essentials wiki – this is a one-stop resource that offers useful business links on the web and allows you to add your own.

So if you’re London-based, or visit town regularly, why not make the British Library part of your business support service?

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NACUE in profile

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

The National Consortium of University Entrepreneurs may not be well known at present, but like the Ivy League colleges of the USA it might become the nursery in which Britain’s future business leaders are raised. This national organisation aims to support university enterprise societies and student entrepreneurs so that entrepreneurship grows across the UK

As a grassroots organisation it aims to encourage university students to focus on enterprise as part of their education and development. It’s a communication hub for enterprising graduates and a contact point for exciting early-stage start-ups in the UK.

By opening communication channels, facilitating the development of new societies, providing cutting-edge national programming and supporting enterprising students and early-stage start-ups engaged with university enterprise societies, NACUE fosters an enabling entrepreneurial ecosystem to stimulate the growth university entrepreneurship.

National recognition

Real Business Magazine has heralded NACUE as a ‘Champion of Entrepreneurial Britain’ and it was also the winner of the 2009 ‘SFEDI Enterprise Champion Award’,

Run by student entrepreneurs for student entrepreneurs

Back in 2008, Victoria Lennox created the concept of NACUE and established it at a meeting with twelve university enterprise society leaders including: Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, London Business School, Oxford Brookes and Kings College London. There are many programmes and projects that intend to support innovation and entrepreneurship in the UK’s brightest young people, but most of them are not student-led and therefore have a conceptual and age distance from the students they aim to influence. NACUE intends to remain grass-roots by ensuring that students themselves have a clear role in its organisation and direction, while senior and special advisors bring a greater range of perspective and experience to the body as a whole.

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Looking for business funding? What about going to Google ?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth

The Google Ventures experience appears to have been a positive one for the ten companies who got through the talent show process that has led to Google investment.

Google says, ‘each one of these companies has the potential to make a global impact’ and that the quality of the idea and the team behind it, were more important than the sector market or development stage of the idea itself. That seems to be true, as the selected companies are pretty diverse, from web based solutions like Corduro through to Adimab: a new form of yeast on which potential antibodies can be tested, and V-Vehicle, a new car company launching into the troubled waters of the American automotive industry.

Google’s Top Ten

1. Adimab – The first fully integrated, yeast-based antibody discovery platform
2. Corduro offers a range of payment services for Internet, mobile, and traditional retail transactions.
3. English Central is a language learning platform, which uses high quality Web content, like speeches from President Obama or clips from popular movies, to teach English.
4. OpenCandy exists to solve distribution, monetization and discovery problems in the consumer application space. OpenCandy’s first product is an ad network for consumer applications.
5. Founded in 2008, Pixazza, Inc. is a Web service that converts static images into interactive content by revealing the “products in the picture” across popular Web sites.
6. Recorded Future extracts time and event information from the Web. Recorded Future offers customers new ways to analyze the past, present and the predicted future.
7. SCVNGR is a geo-gaming platform that lets anyone (individual or institutional) build location-based mobile games, tours, and interactive experience that can be played by anyone on any mobile device.
8. Silver Spring Networks is a leading smart grid solutions provider. Its hardware, software, and services help utilities reduce carbon emissions, operate more efficiently, and empower their customers with new ways to monitor and manage their energy consumption
9. VigLink is a tool for publishers of all sizes to make monetization of their outbound links effortless, transparent and honest.
10. V-Vehicle is a new American car company that is introducing a safe, high-quality, fuel-efficient, and well-equipped car for the U.S. market.

I can only assume that each of these ten companies was not only superlatively well-presented at the choice stage, but that it had a brilliant longer-term strategy – given how tough it is to break into Google as an employee, it’s almost impossible to imagine how much tougher it must have been to beat off the competition to get one of these ten slots for funding and support.

Why The Google Advantage Matters

Of course, it’s equally true that if google want to invest in your idea, you have a pretty good idea – so that much make leveraging other forms of support from finance to expertise to networking considerably easier, a bit like being sent to one of those hothouse sports academies where you are training with the best in the world to become the best in the world.

What Is Google’s Stake?

And then there’s the big question. Google want to put their resources behind someone else’s ideas – which is a great concept that seems likely to roll out some of the Google magic to other sectors and other industries. But … what percentage of time will Google be turning over to developing other people’s ideas? And then, what share of the business do they want to own? And is that share financial, or intellectual capital or what?

While it’s only just over a year since Google Ventures launched, it’s fascinating to try and guess how Google’s own self-defined ‘entrepreneurial roots’ are working with venture funding to create ‘a financial return while supporting entrepreneurs who are creating transformative ventures.’ What does it mean to have Google bring its resources into your start up and how do you navigate that balance between your own good ideas and theirs?

Googlers Unite
Even more interestingly, exactly how will Google ‘perform thorough and careful due diligence with the help of the combined experience of more than 20,000 Googlers’ on the ideas that they’ve chosen. It’s mind-boggling, and could change the form of business investment as we know it.

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Hung parliament bad for business?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth

A range of pundits have weighed in on the issue of what a hung parliament would mean for Britain. Greece’s financial turmoil has muddied the waters around the subject of debt and fiscal stability, and yet investors seem relatively calm about the prospect of Britain ending up without a ‘strong leadership’ in a time of increasing deficit.

The fear takes two main forms – the first is that a government without a majority will not be able to make the budget cuts and tax increases necessary to get to grips with the spiralling budget deficit. The second is that the uncertainty over who has decision-making powers in a hung parliament could lead to an aura of instability and that could lead to a run on the pound.

At present the fear seems to be exaggerated: the pound has held firm against the Lib Dem surge, bonds are solid, and stock prices have moved only with the normal parameters of electoral nervousness in previous elections. However, there are a series of warnings from the business community that suggest there could be a plunge in confidence. Business Wings has a round-up of views that is largely negative while the British Chambers of Commerce, talking to the BBC, alleges that a hung parliament will ‘snuff out’ the minor signs of business improvement already existing. A mere 13% of respondents felt that a hung parliament could be good for UK trade.

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