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Got the Money?

We were at Mother all day yesterday hosting our Get The Money Day, a day of workshops around investment with 20 interesting start ups. The day was delivered by our friends from e-Synergy and Pembridge and supported through the Growth Accelerator Programme.

In the afternoon the companies delivered short pitches to a panel of investors and VCs. Many of them walked away awith follow up meetings with the investors so the day was a great success.

The winner on the day was Din Dins who focus on pet food and supplements. They had the first presentation at MiniBar yesterday evening and we are looking forward to hearing about how they go.

Launch of Drupal Public Sector Exchange – A Call for Participation

DPSE logo 1 2013 300x159 Drupal Public Sector Exchange   Open Councils event

Why DPSX? OS and Drupal save a lot of MONEY for Councils

There are 468 councils in the UK, who all have websites. Yet only two have started to use Open Source software – namely Drupal. Most of them still use outdated proprietary software platforms and pay not only millions of £££’s in licensing fees they also are locked into inefficient content management systems, which make it very costly to adapt to organizational changes. This coincides with enormous cost pressures on councils, who have to slash budgets drastically. Doh – doesn’t that strike you as gigantic waste of time and money?

Increase Drupal Adoption via P2P learning

This describes a in a nutshell why we launched the Drupal Public Sector Exchange (DPSX) with a focus on Open Councils at the Young Foundation to serve as a platform for peer learning to help create a community of Drupal users focussed on councils. So last week a 15 of us met for the first iteration of DPSX. We had a great mix of public minded Drupal developers as well as representatives from Lambeth Council, Government Digital Services and Steve Purkiss who has helped Bighton Council to move to Drupal.

Here the speakers:

Richard Pope – Government Digital Service
Steve Purkiss – Drop.coop
Robert Miller – Lambeth Council
Michael Lenahan – Lambeth Council
Paul Mackay  – NESTA

The first talk was given by Richard Pope from Government Digital Services, who had just published guidelines for the public sector, which specifically favor Open Source Solutions, because of their cost saving potential. It was great to hear that after more than a decade of advocacy central government finally gets it ;-)

Opportunity and Challenge: a public sector Drupal community

Then we heard from Steve Purkiss and Rob Miller and Michael Lenahan from Lambeth Council and they both had a very similar message, which summarized both the opportunity and the challenge: Drupal is a great solution for councils, its modular, flexible and has no licensing costs. It allows for the creation of customized modules – for lets say bin collection – which can then be shared with other councils who need similar solutions. This where really the strength of Drupal lies: a community that shares!

NO More 468 different Waste collection Systems

The beauty of OS software lies in its inherent ‘shareability’. A council that creates module for bin collection can share it with any other council – no more wasteful replication of work done by one council by another. It really strikes you as a strange thing that a solution that is very similar across the public sector – like a scheduling system for waste collection – has to be designed from the ground up 468 times over.

The Challenge – there is no Drupal Council Community

The messages from Brighton and Lambeth however were similar: there is at present no forum, no platform, no mechanism for councils and associated developers to share there experiences, challenges and solutions.

A Potential Solution

So here the plan: we will be holding more DPSX events. The next one will be on 24th of April (more details to follow) with the aim to invite more public minded Drupal developers, representatives from councils who are interested in learning more and hopefully to start building a mechanism which can document Drupal solutions across councils. It hasn’t been done, so let’s get on with it. Get in touch and come and join to build better councils for the future……

Thanks to Marc from Creative Coop, Pete from Code Positive and Kubair from Ikonami for co-organizing. And thanks to Richard, Steve, Rob Miller and Michael Lenahan for presenting. Also have a look at what Kubair writes.

In the Brain of Nick Black

Drive Measurable Foot Traffic to Retail with Zigi
– At Biscuit Building 22nd of March 12.30 pm to 2.00pm –

This session will feature Nick Black, founder of Cloudmade and Zigi.com, which is a complete re-think of mobile advertising.  The first ad medium designed specifically for mobile, Zigi lets retail and CPG brands run campaigns in the biggest mobile games, driving foot traffic to retail stores and paying only for results.

About Nick:
Nick is a product focussed entrepreneur with passion and experience spanning products, people and places. He has deep domain expertise in mobile location based services, mobile and location based advertising and location based communities.
Nick was a founder member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, graduated from the acclaimed Geomatic Engineering department at London’s UCL, has prototyped numerous location based advertising systems and was creating location based apps before phones had GPS. In 2006 he founded CloudMade – the location based developer tools company.
At Zigi, Nick leads a crack team of product thinkers, doers, designers and engineers whose products are changing the way people experience mobile games, creating new revenue opportunities for mobile game developers and creating transformative opportunities for retailers.
Produced by MiniBarLabs.com

MiniBar Austin Pix

Just back from Austin it’s still a bit hard to believe that we had over 200 people turning up for our MiniBar event in Austin – after all it’s not exactly around the corner from Hackney. Will post in more detail about what happened in Austin and how cool Hackney House was. Below a picture taken from stage when Benjamin was showing off his tiny Instagram projector.

MiniBar Austin – Launch of Hackney House

Over in Texas we are getting ready for MiniBar tonight. The great and somewhat unbelievable news is that we managed to get over 500 sign ups. Below are a few pictures from the opening of Hackney House. The guys from the council have done a splendid job in making it feel quite Hackneyish – a bit trashy, warehousey, yet charming in that East End way we all love. Just a shame it doesn’t smell of Bangladeshi curry…..

Below just a few pics – one is the mayor of Austin saying a a few words and the other one needs no explanation. I just love the trash can in the background.

GET THE MONEY – 22nd of March at Mother

 

Why?

For Start-Ups and small companies growth capital is what is often hard to come by. Venture and angel capital is often the right option, though many entrepreneurs find it hard to access.

This is why GrowthAccelerator, Mother and MiniBar have teamed up to create a one day series of workshops covering topics such as, ‘how to pitch your idea’, ‘an insight into the investment landscape’ and ‘the role creative branding plays in growing companies’.

 

What?

We are offering 20 companies the chance to attend a day of workshops and trial pitches at Mother HQ in Shoreditch. Over the course of the day you will meet a series of experienced VC’s, angels and successful entrepreneurs taking the workshops, then later during our trial pitches you can present your own idea in front of a group of judges comprising of investors and experienced entrepreneurs.

If you want to attend please email Katie Lewis – k.lewis@e-synergy.com – a one page executive summary, which must include your company name, registration number and telephone number. She will then inform you, if you have been selected to attend.

The top company, as selected by our panel of experts, will get to pitch again at a MiniBar Meetup that evening in front of 250 techies and digerati.

Program:

09.30   Welcome & Introduction

 

09.45   The Investment Landscape

Mike Bowman, Investment Director, E-Synergy

 

10.45  The Numbers: The Market, Business Model and Projections

Mike Bowman, Investment Director, E-Synergy

 

11.30   Management Team and Pitching to Investors:

Rose Lewis, Partner, Pembridge Partnership

 

12.30   Lunch – write your pitch!

 

13:30  Branding and its Importance

Strategist from Mother

 

14:30 Coffee

 

15:00 A Conversation with Entrepreneurs and Investors

 

16:00 Pitching Participants get 2 minutes to pitch to the panel of judges

 

18:00 MiniBar Starts

 

19:00 Winning Pitch at MiniBar

 

21:00 MiniBar Ends

 

MiniMBA #11 Slides

Here are Jonny Kaldor’s slides from yesterday evening for any of you who attended and want to review or for anyone who wants to see whats happening on our Tech Business MiniMBA. This was the last workshop of this series but we have another one beginning in April.

Jonny Kaldor, the creator of PugPig presented about mobile aps, what platforms to choose, how to create a content focussed ap and how to optimise the marketing for it.

This last section of the workshop series addressed the ways that business and revenue models online need to continuously adapt and innovate. In particular start ups will often need to change their business model and revenue delivery radically to find their optimal customer reach.

Thanks ICT KTN for your support- See you all for the next series!