StartupCafe

Ever tried to pick a show at the Edinburgh Festivals? It’s kind of crappy reading through many different 
reviews, across a ton of review sites. How sensible would it be if someone 
could distill and organise all the relevant reviews, and then publish them to a single site? Stephen
 Sheppard, founder of Edinburgh startup SourceRail aims to do just that.

SourceRail is a new kind of media monitoring service that combines precision search with web publishing. The idea initially arose as a way to improve search for reviews of Festival shows, but has since grown much larger. Stephen says, “I wanted something 
very simple and straightforward that offered PR firms and companies all the media
 monitoring solutions they could want, while providing opportunities for everyone to 
use the media sourced far more effectively online.”

The result: SourceRail provides a way to efficiently monitor and republish media coverage of brands, products, events, individuals, phenomena, etc. For users, this means an easier way to find out what other people are saying about you, and a much easier way of distributing and promoting that information.

Besides Stephen, the team behind SourceRail includes:

• Graeme Mathieson, a senior software developer at Edinburgh online accounting startup FreeAgent, and a serial entrepreneur;
• 
 John Daniels, formerly of Daxtra
 Technologies, a leading company in the use of parsing and precision search in the recruitment industry; and
• Claudiu Cioba, a freelance interface designer.

SourceRail reports that they will launch a closed beta in April, and will be scouting for interested early users for the service soon.

To stay up to date with their progress, or be invited to beta, register your interest at www.sourcerail.com or follow
 @Sourcerail on Twitter.

Special thanks to David for contributing to this post.

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First of all, thank you. Seriously. I understand that you’re some of the busiest people around, and everyone on the StartupCafe team wants to say a big thanks for taking the time out to give us feedback. In return, we listened and held a mammoth three-hour feedback session about what we’re going to be doing in the next few months.

In the end, we had 57 responses. Here are the responses and we’ll also walk you through what we’re doing as a direct result. (more…)

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Just found a blog that covers pretty much every topic of interest to entrepreneurs. It touches on lead generation for B2B or B2C, equity and investments, the basics of compensation, prototyping, etc: Swombat. Here’s a sample re-post on how to pick the right idea for a new venture.

A good set of question, by Amir Khella, about how to probe a new startup idea:

• Which one excites you the most?
• Which one can you do something about right now?
• Which one can you get feedback about sooner?
• Which one can you get done with the least amount of outside help?
• Which one solves your own pain points?
• Which one aligns the most with your purpose?
• Which one would you like to work on for the next 10 years?
• Which one is likely to remain significant a few years from now?
• Which one do you not mind killing?

Do you really have to choose just one though? Pick several, and apply Hypothesis Driven Development to all of them at the same time, in parallel (a lot of the process is waiting time anyway). Whichever one gets to the point where it takes over your whole day first, is the one that wins.

Via Swombat

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