Now, more than ever, you need excellent vision to spot the opportunities in the market places.

   more »

Oxford Venturefest, held at the Kassam Stadium provides the regional focus for start ups and VC investment, as well as providing a forum for VC information exchange, mentoring and learning. Over 1,100 registered attendees, dozens of little presentation booths and some large (but jam packed filled) seminar and lecture theatres made for a busy schedule from 7am to the evening dinner session. By way of context, it appears to me that the local start-up community draws heavily from engineering (motor business has concentrated design and metals engineering in the area), biomedicine (spawned from the University and the local hospitals), energy tech (with Didcot, Harwell, Culham and Aldermaston all nearby). On top of that, we have at last begun to see the rise of local internet based companies. Oxford’s innovation cluster is coming into the C21st. From this event, I’ve concentrated on two sessions that I think were at the heart of what was on offer: one for entrepreneurs wanting to sharpen their skills, and one on investors trying to get to grips with the success factors for current investment.   more »

When I left school in 1982 to up to Oxford, I wrote myself a note and put in inside a book that I was sure not to lose. That note was a list of names of people that I should not forget. So I had a look to see what ...   more »

If you think your investor is one of these, then either you or they are not suited to the relationship. It might even be both of you. You need to work out who it is, and be honest about it, quickly. The good news for you is that there are other investors if you have the time and network to go find them. The good news for them is that there are other investee companies that will better fit their investment needs.

Ecosystems need vultures, but you do not have to volunteer to be dinner for one.

   more »

I had no idea how location awareness could change how I interact with technology until I installed Instamapper on my BlackBerry Curve 8900.

It runs seamlessly in the background, seems to have  a small impact on battery life and really works (see widget on side of this blog).

Now I ...   more »

There is no straight path to success.

   more »

Merlin, Lord Errol really bought a smile to my face by asking us to google "home office bollocks" in his speach on digital identity and personal identity footprints in the digital arena. A clear and plain language summary of the issues involved in the Government operating in areas of digital identity. As an aside, I am open to offers for back issues of Keble College's paper based newspaper, The Brick, c. 1980 to 1987 which I helped publish and archive, as it may just be that Ed Balls, and Lord Adonis have forgotten what they did while at college. They were lucky enough to live there vulnerable teenage lives protected from CCTV and digital personas. How will this generation of up-coming young people now at college fare in 25 years? I suggest we adopt the principle of data prudency and "digital forgetting" as soon as possible. We all say things we regret online, and we all allow secrets to leak (for instance, in the location EXIF data on our photos), and we need to be properly educated as to the likely consequences and protected from the more dangerous predators. Yet the education and tools do not exist, and there is almost no one to help us do it.   more »

Tony Fish runs Mashup, which has quickly grown to be a solid addition to the technology travelling circus in the UK. Being Digital is a flagship for them.

You could trawl the Twitter feeds for #BDE as a hashtag, but it is a jumble... Charles Cohen of Probability Plc gave us a quick “don’t do list” for start ups: Don’t go public as it means you can’t ever tell jokes, make things up or speak ‘off script’ in public again. Being public means losing entrepreneurial control to a large extent, and agreeing to play by the market’s rules. Don’t do a ‘Barney deal’, which has lots of PR song and dance routines but never delivers and is never followed up. The clues are press releases, the word “synergy” and a lack of clear delivery timetables in the information. Don’t do deals to get investment. Deals should be for the business, investment for the investment. Mixing the two is almost always fatal, and you should have known that your investors know nothing about entrepreneurship. Don’t do commercial deals with huge companies when you are small, unless you are 100% certain that you have 200% of the resources needed to deliver to them. Large companies will suck you dry, taking 6 months to sign a deal and then demanding endless services and meetings (which satisfy their internal needs and give nothing to your startup) The right answer is to start small, deal small, deal ‘stupid’ and get the business tested and working before reaching higher. Raise small money first, test and refine and then look for investment. Even established news carriers are shying away from content or editorial policy: they are allowing it all to flow through (facts checked, we hope) and allowing the technology to give prominence to the stories which customers are actually asking to see. Again, the public decide what they want, and are not being told what they should see. (There is a really good business here in having a system that feeds up ‘requests’ from a mass audience for news on specific subjects, and then tailoring that news feed - drawn from hundreds of sources - to each recipient. You can have that idea for free. If you make it, you can buy me a beer or two.) I quite like my new internal model of social media as 200 million ropes dropped into a dark room until you feel someone pulling, then dropping down to join the party. Social media is made of strings that pull, not sticks that push. What the world has not yet got to grips with is the impact of the huge crowd of experts who can genuinely contribute value to reportage and editorial. I personally struggle with the problem that, when I read a story about a subject in which I am an expert, I realise that most journalists are rushed and – at best – partially accurate and partially informed. If that is true on subjects where I know things, surely all the other topics, on which I previously trusted the newspaper to inform me, are equally inaccurate? Would a crowdsourced reportage and editorial help us? Would it be no better (or worse) than Wikipedia? How would we get people to give the right amount of expertise at the time it was needed? Ultimately, crowds are moving in, and technology is helping them. How the traditional print media, broadcasters, and advertisers react to that is up to them. The game is not yet played out, and the solutions are not yet here, and may never stop evolving.   more »

   more »

   more »

This is the best bit about exploring as an entrepreneur: finding a new beach after years of lonely prospecting and realising that you can make it available to paying customers

   more »

I've been pitching to a lot of smaller investors, angels and funds over the last couple of years, so I thought it worth boiling down what I have learned about the process of "pitching on the day" to audiences of investors at events like SIME, ETRE, Essential MediaTech, London Business Angels, South West Business Angels, Cambridge Angels, and through Silicon Valley. I don't claim it is all 100% original (some of the core ideas were liberated from a course run by Chris Padfield at London Business Angels), but it has been tested to destruction by me personally and updated and simplified for the benefit of time stressed business owners and managers. Enjoy - and feel free to comment, adapt and amend with your own war stories of pitches that worked or were #epicfails. :-) A downloadable PDF is here ...   more »

fresh rain, new start

   more »

This is the "20ft Salmon" outside Bucks of Woodside in Silicon Valley. A cafe which the UK entrepreneur and VC community desperately needs to emulate.

Fishing for ideas.

Fish where the fish are.

etc ....

   more »

In step one, here, I spoke about the benefits of exposing ideas to potential investors as a way of gaining information and confidence at an early stage. This is not the same as approaching potential investors and asking for investment. But are quite different processes and should have quite different outputs, and for that reason alone should be kept quite separate. You may approach some of the same people, or you may approach completely different people, but it is absolutely certain that the time you go out asking for money you will need to be far better equipped, are better prepared, and armed with a very focused message. I've cobbled together another little table to help myself in this, and you may find it useful.   more »

One of the big divide is that you find in the management teams of start-up companies is between those who have ideas, those who assess ideas, and those who implement ideas. We could bore each other now for weeks talking about psychological profiles, Belbin tests, and the like. I don’t propose to do that here, as I am one of the people who spends more of their time having ideas, and finds it very tough to assess those ideas and put them into practice. Indeed, the times at which I’ve had the most success, have been those times where I have worked with people who are far better than I am at the other two stages. So, I have worked out a matrix of decisions that helps me to cull out good and bad ideas, making bad ideas better and good ideas commercial as it goes along. I've given an example in the piece that follows:   more »

For those of you following me on Twitter @davidjwbailey the fact I was just in California will come as no surprise. I thought it worth summarising what I learned, in general terms. I had the chance to speak to half a dozen seriously connected and insightful people in the Sililcon Valley community, and it all came down to 'C' Words:   more »

I am an Explorer Scout Leader in Scouting in the UK. Once you get over the crypto-paramilitary uniform issue, and the perfectly understandable questions from friends about one's sanity and motives for giving up 42 days a year to helping other people's teenage children learn leadership and personal skills, it ...   more »

Good businesses should have a lot in common with trees. I’m not just saying this because I happen to have a couple of degrees in forestry, I’m saying it because in our current credit crunch times, trees are model that I strongly feel business should strive to emulate.


OK, I ...   more »

I am going to readopt this word, having banned it from my Entrepreneur vocabulary a few years ago.

On mature reflection, somethings really can't be done now, or within available resources, or for other good reasons.

What is important is that every ...   more »

I've been taught, recently, and in no uncertain terms, that many of my past business plans could reasonably be summed up by this image: good idea, bad execution.

It is all very well to find a consumer need and ...   more »

Dear Web, when one of your applications is as essential, nourishing, widely available, demanded and with half the utility of a loaf of fresh bread, then, and only then, can you claim to have a mass market product. Until then: STFU   more »

I missed the whole of March. Lots of good things happened, and one of them was my birthday. 45. Wow. I've been hitting the "reset" button on my life since January 30th, and, as my Twitter Feed will have told you, you have to hold that button down for about ...   more »

I posted a new photo to DavidsFlickrPointer.
Read more there about how this photo got me stopped and interrogated as a jobsworthy fool decided to interpret one of the UK's sillier new laws created in the race to overhype the fear of 'terrorism'    more »

Government. I really want to like it. I just can't. I've come to the decision that modern government is a parasite that exists for its own purposes and does little or nothing to serve society any more. I see it like parasites that alter the behaviour of their host in ...   more »

I've been wandering about today in sort of a "credit crunch" mentality. Being made redundant has, as with many people, made me incredibly careful with money. This has led to me taking longer and longer to decide on relatively simple purchases. So far, so rational.

The irrational part has been ...   more »

A great, short and very pithy post by Broadstuff has really cheered me up, in that they have gathered empirical data on the viral uptake rate and the decay of that rate in a real 'viral meme' (the "25 things" meme on Facebook). The more of this we get, the better we will be able to tune Andrew Chen's excellent little formula, probably using some of the techniques I went through in six parts before (here). Nice to see marketing catching up with biology.   more »

I was following this little thread down to a blog posting called 'the movie storm' and I came across the Wordle tool, so I threw my blog into it, and got this. (click on it to get the big version) Wordle: DavidJWBaileyFeb2009Blog Which I think is rather cool. It certainly makes clear what is important. Oddly, on reading my own posts, it is not obvious that these things leap out, but then Wordle thinks they do.    more »

Short amateur video creation. An interesting concept. You make a short video, say 30 to 90 seconds long, and people watch it, then they tell their friends to watch it, and suddenly you are famous and can give up the day job. Why does that not happen more? The only metric that ultimately matters to the consumer is "was that the best use of the 60 seconds I devoted to it?" if someone has made something that is "better"(*) to watch then they get the attention, and that drives the onward recommendation engine and before you know it, that "better" video has 6m hits and you have 600 (from your 1st and 2nd circle friends only, usually). What is the solution?    more »

As one falls, so do they all. A metaphor stretched too far, sometimes. ...   more »

Casual Video Tools - the natural partners to Social Media, and the antidote to frustration and irrelevance. Casual video is simple and deep. Casual video is browser based, but not slow to respond. Casual video is fun, but not trite or overly stylised to the point of silliness. Casual video is drag and drop, but it helps educate and illuminate. Casual video empowers self-realisation, and never seeks to "reprogramme the user". Now, having staked a claim on the title of Casual Video Tools (c) me, 2009, I need to go do something else for a while.   more »

Wanted: intros to best exec recruitment people in UK, EU, US, Mid East. Must have techmedia focus, must deal at ...   more »

Digital Britain is a report to the UK Government from a Steering Committee of the usual suspects and television presenters. ...Full of promise, but no means to deliver? No, sadly they get it "wronger" than that, as you will see...Would it not be easier to just do the sums, as TIGA did some years back, and put some cash behind one of our most vibrant and export generative industries, just once? My vote: FAIL.   more »