Collider12 at Digital Shoreditch, come and say hello!

Posted on May 17, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Digi Shoreditch

The Collider12 team and startups will be out in full force at this year’s Digital Shoreditch. This year the week long show is set to be bigger and better then ever before! We’d love to see you there, so make sure you come and say hello.

Wednesday 22nd May, Future Brands Day

Five of the Collider12 startups will be giving a two minute pitch and then taking questions from the audience. The startups are:

  1. Avocarrot
  2. Beem
  3. HitMeUp
  4. Miappi
  5. Seeker

Where : Mayor’s Parlour, Shoreditch Town Hall - http://www.shoreditchtownhall.org.uk

When: 3:45pm–4:45pm

More info: Check out Lanyrd

Immediately following our session, The Bakery will present a panel of brands and agencies (including Stephen Maher form Maher Bird Associates) on how startups, brands and agencies can work together to get to market quicker.

Thursday 23rd May, Capital and Growth Day

This day is dedicated to discussing how to raise capital, grow your business and earn more profit. You can expect deep insights for real success, told by remarkable entrepreneurs and funders who have been and done it.

Rose Lewis, one of our co-founders, will be speaking at 2pm about fundraising in these interesting times. Rose believes that:

So come and hear Rose share a few useful hints while will improve the chances of your startup raising finance successfully.

Where : Shoreditch Town Hall - http://www.shoreditchtownhall.org.uk

When: From 2pm

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An All Male Panel at the BIMA startup seminar in Google Campus

Posted on May 16, 2013 by | Leave a comment

On Tuesday I went to the BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) startup seminar hosted at Google Campus, in collaboration with Rackspace. The panel was a great mix of large companies and startups, who all have experience relevant to those starting up today. The panel of speakers included John Webb from Rackspace, Benjamin Southworth, deputy CEO of Tech City, Joe Stepniewski founder of Skimlinks, Damian Routley the CEO of Glow, Jean-Michel Deligny of Go4Venture, Alex Wood, the editor or Tech City News, Drew Benvie founder of new comms agency Battenhall, and the chair Justin Pearse of Bite.

However, it was rather hard to ignore that all eight members of the panel were male, and indeed, so was everyone who spoke on stage, including the welcome speech from BIMA and the closing remarks from Rackspace. This was picked up on Twitter Candace Kuss and Karen Barber, and then mentioned at the very end of the session by Craig Le Grice, the Executive Committee Member of BIMA. 

I got in touch with Craig who said that “Benjamin Southworth and Joe Stepniewski were fantastic additions to our panel – but both were in place of their respective female CEOs (Joanna Shields, CEO at TCIO and Alicia Navarro, CEO at Skimlinks) who were invited first but unfortunately could not attend due to diary commitments.” 

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Craig went on to say that “Speaking personally, I’m a huge advocate of – and fighter for – equality in our industry. I work with a number of startups Continue reading →

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Locomizer joins San Francisco Accelerator ‘Momentum’

Posted on May 15, 2013 by | Leave a comment
One of our startups, Locomizer, has just been accepted to the startup program Momentum, based in San Francisco. Alex Polyakov, Locomizer’s Co-Founder, says “We are very excited to have this opportunity to get access to the Silicon Valley’s network of mentors and potential investors.”
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Duncan Logan, the Founder & CEO of Rocket Space, said ”Here at RocketSpace, we love meeting the top startups from all over the world, so it was only natural that we’d open our doors to great startups in London. The environment, networking opportunities and changes of scene will all help Locomizer continue the excellent work started at Collider12 to achieve their goals.”
Momentum startups will benefit from RocketSpace’s startup services and access to their corporate innovation program, as well as spending 12 weeks at RocketSpace’s highly coveted San Francisco campus. They will be joining four other startups who have also been accepted into the program, which are:

The 12-week program provides the class with weekly workshops, networking dinners, and an enviable mentor list of Silicon Valley’s top 50 mobile executives. The program team consists of Mario Tapia (AT&T, Disney, Yahoo!), Arte Merritt (Motally,Yahoo!), and Mike Rowehl (Admob, Chomp, Metaresolver, Skyfire).

The Momentum program is more of a graduate level program, geared to help accelerate businesses in the mobile space, as opposed to teaching startup basics, making it perfect for Locomizer, who are more than ready to take on Silicon Valley.

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A New Report on Startups from Lord Young

Posted on May 13, 2013 by | Leave a comment

In his second report to the Prime Minister, Growing your Business: A report on Growing Micro Businesses, Lord Young highlights the increasing importance that micro businesses (those which have less than 10 employees) have on the success of the economy. You can read the first report here, which focuses on the first steps to starting your own business. 

Making up 95% of all businesses, Lord Young identifies that by helping startups develop their confidence and capability to grow, this also helps the UK to get ahead in the global race by supporting all the technological talent here.

Lord Young,  the Prime Minister’s enterprise adviser, said: “We have one of the best environments in the world for the creation of new firms. What this report endeavours to do is to help and encourage all those new firms to now take on their first employees and grow.

“Growing our smallest businesses would transform our economy — they are the vital 95%. If just half of the UK’s micro businesses took on an additional member of staff, unemployment would be reduced to almost zero. Continue reading →

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Competitions Can Help You Grow

Posted on May 8, 2013 by | Leave a comment

WhichSocial, the software which allows you to measure and improve ROI from social media marketing, have a wide range of customers.  Their clients have a broad spectrum of social media activity, ranging from large brands with 75,000 Facebook followers, to small boutiques with a more select following.

One of their more exclusive customers, Me+Em, have been using WhichSocial to measure their competitions on Facebook.

meandem
meandem

Let’s take a look at a recent competition they ran on Facebook called ‘Share to Wear’. It encouraged users who have already liked the page to join in, creating a community, and by sharing the page allows potential clients to see the shop too. Using WhichSocial, Me+Em can also track how many clicks to the site this competition generated, which products were sold from these clicks, and which shared post generated the most interest.

Armed with this information, Me+Em have learnt enough to judge how, where, and when to run future competitions. They have data they need, but more importantly, they know exactly what to do with this data.

me&em

After they spoke at The Big Data Show, WhichSocial have been going from strength to strength, and are currently in conversation with even more brands. Keep checking the blog to see what they are up to!

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HitMeUp Host Photography Competition

Posted on May 8, 2013 by | Leave a comment

HitMeUp recently collaborated with the Red Gallery to help host their #R3D carnival in London. They took along the HitMeUp pin to see what mischief the revelers could create with it, and ran a competition for the best photo taken. There were some amusing entries, a few of which you can see below. To find out who won, check out the HitMeUp blog here.

hitmeup

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A few more gems from Rory

Posted on May 3, 2013 by | Leave a comment
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After our group session with Rory earlier in the week, our heads were reeling with book recommendations, poignant questions, and telling quotations. Here are a few of my favourites.

1. Queuing for a nightclub is a good thing, queuing at the airport check-in is a terrible thing.

Continue reading →

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Are Product Days Productive?

Posted on May 3, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Sometimes you just need to knuckle down and get some work done. But what’s the best way to do this? And what about all the other stuff you need to do before you can even start?

Well, yesterday Seeker had a Product Day, and so I decided to catch up with the Founder and CEO, Daniel Wilson, to see how (and whether) it works.

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1.       What is a product day ?

A product day is a full day when we step out of our regular roles to understand what we’ve got in the product, where we are as a business, and what we want to do over the next 3-6 months.  It gives us a chance to think about our tech and our customers at a higher level.

2.       Why did you arrange it?

The main point was to stop any silos of purpose and knowledge building up, as we’re all working semi-independently because there aren’t many of us.  We need to all be working on the same plan, or we won’t make the right sort of progress.

seeker

3.       What did you want to achieve from it ? Continue reading →

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Colliding with Rory Sutherland

Posted on May 2, 2013 by | 1 Comment

Yesterday Rory Sutherland paid our startups a visit to share his wisdom, experience, and humorous (yet informative) stories. We decided to turn what would have been a private session into a very public, and live, Google Hangout. Rory spoke about a wide range of topics, including a $300 million online button and why airports compel us to buy Toblerones. You can watch the whole 2 hour session here, and as this was such a successful experiment, we will definitely be hosting more Hangouts (with even better recording equipment). 

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Check back tomorrow for some of Rory’s key topics, book recommendations, and tips for startups.

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Collide With Rory

Posted on April 30, 2013 by | Leave a comment
Collider_logo_03
c12Tomorrow, Collider12 and the startups are having a group session with Rory Sutherland at Ingenious Media.

What makes this session a little different is that you’ll be able to join in too, as we’re hosting a Google Hangout. From 11am on May 1st, you’ll be able to put your questions to @Rory with the hashtag #CollideWithRory, or by joining the hangout at 11.30am. It will be broadcasted on Google+ and YouTube. This is a pretty special opportunity, so get thinking and get asking.

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