Posted in Events, Opinions, tagged Julian Evans, Launch48, sales on 15 November, 2010| 1 Comment »
“Businesses don’t fail because of lack of funding; they fail because of lack of hope. Your first few sales will give you hope” said Julian Lloyd Evans (Dennis Publishing) at the last London Launch48 Conference (themed Top Tips for Entrepreneurs).
His advice to aspiring entrepreneurs was that you should have in mind your first 20 sales when you start up your business. (more…)
Posted in Opinions, tagged Bindi Karia, corporate giants, Microsoft, startups on 9 November, 2010| 1 Comment »
What should you think about when you want your startup to work with a multi-national company? One of the afternoon speakers at the last London Launch48 Conference was Bindi Karia (dubbed Queen of Startups) who works for Microsoft as a VC/Emerging business lead in the UK. She offered some high level and generic points to startups who want to partner with giants! (more…)
Posted in Events, Opinions, tagged Entrepreneurship Education, MBA students, MBAs, Stanford REE Series, startup resources on 29 September, 2010| 4 Comments »
Response to the discussion at the SIE-hosted session on entrepreneurship at institutes for higher education.
Part of our Stanford REE Series from the Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education.
One of the great advantages of starting a company at university is the wealth of human resource at arm’s reach. Student-entrepreneurs are surrounded by designers, engineers, web developers, marketers, and technologists. One question raised at the Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education (REE) earlier this month was this: How can we manage this human resource to build more and better founder teams at universities? (more…)
Posted in Opinions, Sales on 24 September, 2010| 6 Comments »
I attended a short presentation this week about sales. It was given by a guy called Neilson Kite who wrote a book about Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
One of the things he talked about was the importance of using the right words. Kite shared his experience of the power of words when selling seminars.
A couple of examples:
Posted in Local News, Opinions, tagged anti street harassment, Dawn Foster, Hollaback, iphone, LASH, mapping, Vicky Simister on 23 September, 2010| 1 Comment »
A new iPhone app is being launched to help women deal with harassment in public spaces. The mobile phone app will be used to capture the user’s location and an image of the harasser. Once used, an email will be sent to the participant asking for an account of the experience. The application links to a dynamic mapping system so that photos and experiences submitted by participants can be pooled together to help paint a clearer picture of the scale of the problem of street harassment.
Hollaback (first launched in 2005 in New York City as a blog) is creating a unified reporting system via geo-mapping that can be scaled globally. The information (more…)
Posted in Guest Blogger, Opinions, tagged blogging, social media, twitter on 30 August, 2010| 2 Comments »
Our guest blog post today comes from Rachel Lane – currently a digital planner at Blonde. Rachel and I were talking about the challenges of managing Twitter, Blogging and general social media in a personal and business capacity whilst catching up last week. Comments below please!
Perhaps it has been the level of tactical detail bolted to social strategy commissions; perhaps it’s the vacuous social networking research which gets crowd-surfed around Twitter or perhaps it’s the pressure to maintain numerous social profiles, but I am so over social media.
It’s frustrating that a territory so fundamentally about people and human behaviours gets shrink-wrapped as a web technology. We haven’t changed how we communicate; we’ve just got more flexibility in communication channels. The flow of words may increase or decrease depending whether they travel by landline, mobile, call, text, instant message, tweet, Facebook message, email, letter … but the dialogue structure is pretty consistent.
Posted in Local News, Opinions, tagged festival, hansard society, hard to reach, politics, Tweetminster, UK Youth Climate Coalition on 20 August, 2010| 3 Comments »
With the Festival of Politics taking place in Edinburgh 17-21 Aug, it has got me wondering about the use of technology, especially online tools, to titillate, amuse, connect and converse – in an attempt to engage with ‘hard to reach’ audiences in Scotland and beyond. How are these tools being used to engage audiences that are conventionally difficult to attract via traditional means in politics?
Answer: They’re being used simply, creatively, humourously and cleverly. This makes sense when you think that those who don’t engage in the political process often find politics complicated and difficult to get to grips with or extremely dull and boring. So the key is to make things simple – i.e. make it easier to access information and to understand stuff. Or makes things a little more fun. (more…)
Posted in Opinions, tagged manners on 28 July, 2010| 4 Comments »
Actually, he doesn’t because he’s a dog. What I really want to say is this: the COURAGE of those who pick up incoming sales calls never fails to amuse me!
Even the most spineless, lily-livered fool with (more…)
Posted in Humour, Local News, Opinions on 8 July, 2010| 23 Comments »
Did any of you see the article in the Metro last month about light sabres?
A ‘light sabre’ device has been built by adapting blue lasers from home cinema projectors. Sound cool? Well it’s not…it’s hot…hot enough to quickly set your skin on fire and blind you instantly.
Yet this device, which the manufacturer says is (more…)
Posted in Events, Local News, Opinions on 13 June, 2010| 6 Comments »
Where are all the women? Let me paint the scene: it’s Wednesday evening and Edinburgh TechMeetup is in full swing. Because of a projector mishap, we all crowd into a small conference room to see the presentations. I suddenly notice I’m the only woman in the room. When the guy next to me ignores the ten other bodies crammed around him and asks me to hold his beer, I realise I’m in trouble.
In general, I don’t like to talk about gender issues. Highlighting disparities between the achievements of men and women feels unproductive, and like a cop-out. Why were there no other women at TechMeetup that week? Perhaps they just had more demanding social calendars than me and the 50 men who attended.
Then again, maybe there is something more perverse than the release of SATC2 at work. On Friday, Informatics Ventures hosted “New Approaches to Leadership for Aspiring Women Entrepreneurs, Managers & CEOs”, a workshop with an exclusively female guest list, headlined by three powerhouse women from the States.
Two things made this conference different from other “women in business/entrepreneurship/tech/science” events I’ve been to in the past. (more…)
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