September 2006
Guest Speaker
James Barnham - Nova-FloJames has been one of our best business pitch presenters this year and in August he appeared on the BBC television series Dragons Den.
"It was very daunting as you don't get to see the Den or meet the Dragons until it is your turn to be filmed, although you are briefed on the type of questions to expect. Also with the studio crew watching and the studio lighting it was a surreal environment, almost like walking into your television set, as well as being very hot in there! Once you climb the steps and enter the room, your throat goes dry, you start to perspire and you forget your lines! Luckily for me I took a couple of deep breaths and it all came back to me."
James recounted his experiences in front of the Dragons and why he walked away from their offers of investment.
Search has become the dominant mode of online information access. However, people very often find that even leading search services such as Google fail to provide relevant and personalised search results for anything but simple searches. This is largely because while these services give the impression of understanding peoples natural language queries, they actually just reduce each query to a set of keywords that they match against similar keywords found in web pages.
i-together has identified an opportunity for monetising, through in-site and blog-hosted advertising, a "collaborative" search service that provides excellent levels of precision and personalisation. It would achieve this by enabling users to both search and categorise web pages in a way that is much closer than current search services to our natural language - in other words, in a rich-structured, yet also flexible and intuitive manner.
Ian Sillett, - Solion Ltd *** Best business pitch ***
Solion is a young, rapidly growing design and innovation led company specialising in developing and installing innovative solar mounting systems for buildings.
Our nearest star, the sun, radiates energy every year to the earth equivalent to about 1500 times the amount of energy expenditure of the whole world. The photovoltaic (PV) process converts this abundant sunlight energy directly into electricity. It can be used anywhere from supplying lighting systems in Africa to being integrated with the grid utilities on buildings in the UK.
One of the most underutilized spaces on most commercial buildings is probably the roof. This unused space can generate significant amounts of electricity to satisfy sizeable proportion of our electricity demand at work. Excess electricity can be fed into the local electrical grid to be sold on the open market. The fastest growing application for PV in the UK is on buildings connected to the mains electricity grid.
Solion provides a complete service for clients installing solar power to provide electricity. Our engineers will assess your site and provide you with a quotation. If you decide to proceed, we are able to take care of the entire process from the design of the system, submitting the application for a government grant; to supplying all the necessary equipment and the grid connected installation.
Stephen Danelutti, - netoCiety
- Bloggers are exerting a "disproportionately large influence" on society/business - Jupiter Research
- Blogs, Wikis and Forums sway consumer opinion, separate research from Jupiter also shows and manufacturers are studying the growing phenomenon of consumer-generated reviews and other types of content, trying to find ways to use this trend to their advantage.
- Wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009, from a virtually non-existent base currently - Gartner Group
netoCiety acts as a trusted agent on behalf of clients, facilitating adoption of social software tools by:
- Sorting through the growing array of technology options (packaged solutions from vendors through custom-built, open solutions) to support informed decision making, aiding implementation and providing training and assistance
- Introducing resources that matter based on a deep understanding of customer interests and needs