EIPP (e-invoicing) and StartUp World

Just a quick additional note to introduce the speakers and panel for the event taking place on 14th May at KPMG Manchester. I am still awaiting for potentially 2 more speakers and panel members. They would be a bonus to the exceptional people speaking on the 14th. The event has two focus areas, these being: the relevance of Silicon Valley and Investment Readiness. Philip Hemstead, co-Founder of Yuuguu, Scott Leonard-Morgan, Partner at Heller Ehrman based in San Francisco and London and I will share our thoughts and experience on the relevance of Silicon Valley.

In addition to PhilipH and ScottLM, the panel discussions will be joined by Scott Fletcher, Founder and CEO of Plus market listed ANS Group, and Malcolm Stewart, Managing Director of Liverpool Ventures.

Click on each image to view the profile of each speaker and panel member:

Sign up today to avoid disappointment later.

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Next Northern StartUp 2.0 event is less than 2 weeks away. The focus is on:

Session 1 - Silicon Valley - why you must build Valley into your plans?
Session 2 - Investment Readiness - Is your startup ready for investment? a panel discussion with VCs, entrepreneurs and deal makers

The Session 1 is setup to celebrate the success and share the experience of one our own Northern StartUp 2.0 (edocr) companies visiting the Silicon Valley as one of the 20 most promising UK digital startups last week.

Is this event for you?

Northern StartUp 2.0 is North of England’s premier event for Digital Startups to meet, learn and share experience with like minded individuals made up of entrepreneurs, investors, deal makers and service providers, in an informal setting. Are you a startup or early stage digital technology company? Or have you got a killer idea with some early code you want to tell others about? Are you looking for seedcorn or second round of funding, team members, mentors, partners, and/or ideas to commercialise your product? Do you need help writing your business plan? Have you got loads of money and love to invest in startups? Do you provide support services (e.g. PR)? Are you a blogger or journalist looking for breaking news? Or do you just like to hang out with startups? Or do you want to know how to leverage technologies to achieve a competitive advantage? If so, this event is for you.

Programme:

18:15 to 19:00 Registration & Networking
19:00 to 19:45 Session 1: Silicon Valley
19:45 to 20:00 Break
20:00 to 21:00 Session 2: Panel discussion

Session 1

+ Manoj Ranaweera (Webmission08)
+ Scott Leonard-Morgan (Webmission08 + Operations in Silicon Valley)
+ other speakers to be notified

Session 2 - Moderated by Manoj

+ Scott Leonard-Morgan - Heller Ehrman (Webmission08 + Operations in Silicon Valley)
+ Steven Livingston - KPMG
+ other speakers to be notified

Speaker 1 - Manoj Ranaweera - Founder and CEO of edocr

Manoj will share his experiences of webmission08.

Speaker 2 - Scott Leonard-Morgan - Partner, Heller Ehrman

Heller Ehrman was a key sponsor of the webmission08 and also hosted VC pitching event and master classes for the 20 webmission08 companies. Scott accompanied the webmission08 companies and is based at London. Scott will share his thoughts on Silicon Valley funding.

Attendance Fees (inclusive of VAT):

£10 for students
£30 for all others

Note: Apologies for the delay in confirming the speaker line up. Hopefully, the remaining three speakers will be confirmed by middle of next week. If you have not registered, please do so right now. Event capacity is set at 50.

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This is almost a note to myself. Taking stock of what I am up to or not up to. I have three companies:

• edocr - well you know about this one! If not, shame on you! Are all your public facing documents available on edocr? If not, please act now…
• eveo - event management. Currently manages Northern StartUp 2.0 events, Digital Futures with Simon Grice in Manchester and potential e-invoicing seminar is July 08
• evigon - no transactions to date. My personal management consultancy firm for servicing opportunities as they arise

The future certainly is with edocr, which has a startup team comprising of Rhys Jones (Accountis, Sanoodi, etc), Mike Carter (Ixis IT), Chris Haslam (Ixis IT and footy247.co.uk) and Stuart Scott-Goldstone (Aaron and Partners) with PR support from Susan Tonge (SmithandSmithPR). This means responsibility and meeting expectations. On the other hand eveo and evigon are solely owned by me with no others involved except on project or event basis.

The Northern StartUp 2.0 complements what I am doing with edocr by providing a lever to leverage. This has already produced decent returns. Therefore, irrespective of what MikeB and others think, it will continue for the time being. It could also be a profitable enterprise.

On the other hand, evigon has been a disaster as I have not allowed any time. The original thinking was to provide e-invoicing (EIPP), supply chain finance and business advice services through edocr. And part of this was to monetise my blog. I almost made up my mind to stop talking about EIPP. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I just received two enquiries, one party is thinking about building an EIPP product, another is interested in leveraging my blog for publicity. In the past, I had many discussions with similar companies including Top 3 US based global bank, Top 3 spend management company, European EIPP providers, etc. In most cases, after many discussions, the projects did not proceed due to lack of available budgets or internal bureaucracy. So, the first thing I must establish now is:

• Is there a budget?
• Am I talking to the decision maker?

If not, however tempting the enquiry is, it’s a conversation that is not worth having. What do you think?

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Last year, I attended a number of sessions organised by Lee Strafford to learn and if possible engage with his project NetStart (previously called Project Sahara). Today, I learned that after much time investment in engaging with Regional Development Agencies, Universities, Developers and other like minded individuals, Lee has come to the conclusion, that no one is willing to look at the bigger picture of creating an ecosystem and radically change. Let’s take a step back. My understanding of Project Sahara was:

• Create an environment where multiple startups can thrive within an ecosystem.
• The ecosystem will include, entrepreneurs, investors, deal makers and service providers including mentors.
• There will be a fund set aside to invest in startups similar to Y-Combinator or Seedcamp
• NetStart will take a small shareholding as of the case with above two entities
• A web services platform will be developed to help startups overcome scalability and back-up issues.

I had a problem with above, as Lee’s strategy involved in changing the mindsets of RDAs, Universities, etc before working with startups. Too ambitious and cloudy in my mind. Lee also perhaps believed that having undergone the pain of starting up, growing and exiting, he understood the startup requirements. I cannot recall Lee ever asking what I need for edocr. Bit like Oracle saying how great they are without asking how Oracle can help edocr or anyone it is speaking to. This is something I discussed with StewartT from Sun Microsystems many times. SunM been an enterprising player, the programme was about selling to startups. Through dialogue Stewart changed his engagement to resolving problems startups have. By doing so, the community has accepted him and is engaging with SunM in a positive manner. edocr is no different to any other startup in the web 2.0 domain. So, if I am Lee, these would be the services that would make the most impact:

• Funding - provide seedcorn funding or work with the startup to secure seedcorn funding.
• Team - provide mentors, interim managers or staff to strengthen the senior team
• Product - provide a mechanism to validate and improve product
• Go-to-market strategy - help fine tune strategy as well as make vital first introductions

Last thing in my mind is a web services platform, which may relieve my back-office pains. If I can have expertise that help me generate revenues quicker and more, that would be where I would put my concentration. Yes, back-office functions are important, but startups can live with these problems until traction is achieved.

I also believe that Lee and other must have known that it is damn hard to change the RDAs and Universities. It would have been much easier to help number of startups achieve traction and then use them as case studies to lure RDAs and Universities. This is exactly what Lee hopes to do in the future. But I also felt from Day 1, this was all about building the web services platform. And guess what? This is exactly what Lee is working on! Do I need this platform? Perhaps not! Lee has telcos and other large players in mind as clients.

To conclude, NetStart is becoming a product company - quite a difference from the initial discussions. Lee has significant experience of taking a startup and building it to a UK brand. I wish Lee best wishes with NetStart, which is strangely enough another startup.

I hope above does not come out as criticism of Lee and NetStart. I like Lee and both of us love to see the region developing an ecosystem for digital startups. My contribution to this is through Northern StartUp 2.0, where incremental change is achieved. I have no vision of changing the region to become another Silicon Valley. All I am trying to do is get few people together once a month and allow them to talk to each other, so that great startups such as edocr can be born!

References:

• Project Sahara # 1 - Kick off meeting

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Apologies for taking so long to write about the fabulous webmission08 tour to San Francisco. Having completed, it feels like an event that occurred months ago. The premise of capturing a daily journal did not quite happen as planned except on Day 1, thanks to JimL, OliB and the team keeping all of us very active, day and night. People have asked me what I got out of the tour! Some were very critical of web mission as they thought it was waste of tax payers’ money. If you read the small print, each of us paid for our flight, accommodation and incidental expenses, and tax payers’ money was not part of the equation. More about this later. Others were curious to know and learn from my experience. Let’s first try to capture some of the action, and then perhaps you can make your own judgement about the value brought by such events:

Day 1 - 19th Saturday

Like most of the others, I joined web mission from London instead of taking a separate flight from Manchester to San Francisco. This allowed valuable networking time, especially with Ashley from Shiny Media and Edie from Spectator as we all sat next to each other. Stupidly, I mentioned web mission to US Immigration and they homed in on "mission", which meant that I was sent to secondary processing. Unfortunately undressing and a full body search was not part of the secondary processing. Few simple questions after, I managed to join the coach to Clift Hotel.

We arrived at around 3pm and after a quick shower StewartT and I head to a nearby Starbucks to meet none other than legendary blogger Om Malik. It just turned out that Om was putting final touches to a conference he plans to run in summer followed by an European Tour. We spoke about European Start Up scene, funding, edocr, etc (as you do!). His advice was: concentrate on European market.

Around 7:30 pm, the first of many parties started, held by TechCrunch at the Clift with Etelos, Inc. Etelos was represented by Jeff (CEO), Shel and Danny. Within 5 minutes of Jeff introducing his business proposition, Jeff and I shook hands to establish a partnership. Today, we are in the process of exchanging NDAs, with the hope of signing a Channel Partnership Agreement within weeks. Etelos will most likely become our first Channel Partner. I will write more about Etelos later on.

After more drinks thanks to Sun Microsystems, we continued networking till the early hours, which is crucial if you are on a trade mission such as this. All in a day’s work…

Another advice I got was from MikeB of TCUK: stop fxxxxxx about …events and get on with edocr. A valid point, but NS20 gives me a lever to leverage, which has already born fruit.

Day 2 - 20th Sunday

Day 2 started with youngsters (David of GroupSpaces, etc) participating in a local mini marathon, which I did not take part in. Then we took the coach to Jim Buckmaster’s house. Jim is a very tall guy and standing next to him, I felt even shorter than I was. Jim runs Craiglist, which is considered as a very successful web 1.0 business. Jim and his lovely companion Susan were kind enough to lay a fabulous brunch and drinks for us.

The Auctomatic guys who moved from Oxford to Silicon Valley two years ago to join Y-Combinator and having recently sold their business for several million dollars were there, as well as the family of Michael Birch, the founder of Bebo. Michael is in the process of selling his business to AOL for US$850 million, making him the most successful British Web 2.0 entrepreneur.  Michael’s brother Paul Birch also joined us as part of webmission08 with Paul Walsh from Segala. There was also a fringe group, which all together made the webmission08 participants to well over 50. Imagine 50 people networking together for a solid week, day and night. Such networking is bound to lead to great initiatives. Watch the press.

For some bizzare reason, we could not find a taxi, so Stewart, AndrewY and I ended up walking all the way to the Clift. With jet-lag kicking in and exhausted from the walk, I missed Brian Soli’s party (which was not part of the webmission08). Brian was a guy I wanted to meet, but perhaps on another time. Brian comes highly recommended by Yuuguu (AnishK) and ShareNow (DavidI). Brian also does PR for Docstoc (another player in document interactivity space). Strangely, Docstoc and its CEO, JasonN started following me on Twitter. Now they have access to my thought process. Jason announced recently of raising their second round of funding, a cool US$ 3.25 million.

Day 3 - 21st Monday

We took the coach to Oracle in the morning. Whilst various clever people spoke about the greatness of Oracle, two things continue to fill my mind, these being:

1. How can Oracle help me achieve our vision, e.g. generate revenues and profits? I call this sell-to and sell-through strategy (picked from BT).
2. How can Oracle help us differentiate and achieve sustainable competitive advantage? This is not simply saying how great Oracle database is.

Whilst listening to others, I started Twittering about my thoughts (as you do!). Few people picked my tweets including SAP and Oracle evangelists, which all together made interesting conversation. My Twitter followers started to increase, which is always a good sign. Later I learned from DavidR from Oracle who was part of webmission08 that they have noticed my thoughts. I met David last summer for the first time, and my first conversation with him went horribly wrong. I was hoping David would have forgotten it, but it was not meant to be. Talking about making lasting impressions! And in this case, it has made the wrong impression. Whatever I do, David will always measure me with his first impression. However, I noticed his attitude relaxing towards the end of the web mission, perhaps he was getting tired! Whether I will be able to do anything with David and Oracle, time will tell, as I believe time is a great heeler (not always though). David also felt that my continuing attachment to EIPP is causing confusion. Will talk about this later on.

Our next stop was Google. Having signed a NDA (supposed to be normal procedure), we were asked not to publicly speak about what was discussed. So I cannot talk about it other than say I did not learn any secrets. Two thoughts crossed my mind, but I refrained from speaking, one around edocr and the other to do with EIPP. Remember my Eureka moment on EIPP (Cracking the e-invoicing conundrum - finally!), which I blogged about before. If you are in the process of developing the next generation EIPP product, this is what I suggest you do with respect to Google.

Develop the product with Google and offer it free to smaller companies. Monetise it through ads by placing ads on the invoice and share the revenues with Google. This is the only way to dominate the market. You will never ever be able to achieve sufficient traction without a partner such as Google. Guys, please think outside the box. Having a great product along is not sufficient to achieve traction. If you want to know more about this, I could be hired on hourly rate through evigon Ltd (sorry no web site yet). Serious parties only, make sure you have a budget before engaging me. By the way, did anyone get a chance to read ebdex’s business plan, specification, etc through edocr yet?

You might be interested to know Oracle has its own internal social network, which has partially been opened. But Google claimed to be using mailing lists instead of social networks.

I also had a private meeting in Palo Alto with the luxury of traveling back by train. People say they are immune to the so called credit crunch (I certainly feel it, in permanent credit-crunch mode since starting ebdex in Nov 2004) due to San Francisco being a wealthy area. I bet they begin to feel it now with petrol prices rising up around the globe.

We took the coach in the afternoon to Second Chance Tuesday event sponsored by HSBC with fire side chat - Jim Buckmaster interviewing Michael Birch. It was perhaps the most comical yet serious interview I have ever witnessed. Michael turned the interview around and was having a laugh at Jim, vice versa. I assume Jim and Michael are good buddies. It was a great event. Came back to Clift followed by more drinks. We met June who used to present at Channel 4, but only realised this afterwards. Also met Peter Cashmore, CEO of Mashable. I have been complaining about lack of British startup coverage on Mashable. Pete promised to correct this (I am yet to see any results though). Pete and I hooked up through Facebook and Twitter.

This is getting too long, so I am going to split this into another blog post. Above is really meant as a reminder for me, hence going into lot of depth and including discussions perhaps you would not expect to read.  Will thank the organisers in the third post, and perhaps fourth post on outcomes for edocr (and me, if any!).

References:

• Webmission08 - Day 1: On flight to San Francisco
• San Francisco - here comes Manoj
• edocr getting ready for Webmission08 with Sun Microsystems and NTT Communications
• Webmission08 - edocr makes the final cut!

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This is written on flight but posted after landing as there isn’t a mechanism to post this any other way, eventhough my shiny new mac is picking up a "Free WiFi Signal". According to the list of attendees, I am accompanied by 19 exceptional individuals (so called entrepreneurs) and 27 supporters which include organisers to  media including Tom Watson, representing the UK Government. Some of them are already in the US (Stewart from Sun Microsystems, Jack Fairhall from Kwiqq, etc).

So here I am sitting next to two journalists, Ashley Noris, Founder of Shinymedia and Edie Lush of The Spectator magazine. We had a lot to speak as you do in long haul flights. Ashley is an entrepreneur who has raised venture capital funding for Shinymedia, and its a great pleasure to travel with a media startup. Whilst I cannot check his credentials and portfolio at present, I understand he has a similar product to gadgetspy run by Chris Haslam, who came on board to set-up edocr.

It was also good to catch up with Kristofer Mansson this morning, Founder of Silobreaker, whom I met at a large exhibition last year in London. We spoke about working together then and continued our discussion again today. Whilst we all have our own agendas, this mission also allows us to find ways of working with each other. And with that thought, I presented a challenge to Ashley: Write an article of how each company could work with each of the other 19 companies. Whilst we are of different sizes (some are post-funded whilst others are just thinking about it), collectively we can be larger than any one company. I am a great believer that we need to work at local level whilst nurturing global ambitions. Whilst I am at the start of the journey, I am almost thinking about the end, not just next Saturday, but in a years time and beyond. If statistics are to be believed, not all 20 companies may be live in 12 to 24 months time. But it would be great to look at the progress of the 20 companies in 12 months time, don’t you agree?

Here is the second challenge. Somebody need to take a profile of each of these 20 companies and then compare the progress each company has made in 12 months time. Who would rise to this challenge? Whilst all our profiles are on CrunchBase, a snap shot need to be taken. Would webmission08 be forgotten in 12 months time? Will there be a webmission09 next year? If so, who would represent the North next year? How would I like to see edocr in 12 months time? This is certainly a key date in edocr’s short life.

Ok. here are some targets for me to achieve by April 2009:

• Funded
• Full time team in place -
• edocr Version 3 launched (formally) - edocr has five stages: alpha, beta, launch, growth and dominate- funding will decide how quickly we can move from one stage to another.
• Revenues of GBP 75,000 (I know this is low - but remember we are web 2.0 - yes, I like to hit exponential curve in late 2009 as we enter launch and growth stages)
• Presence in Silicon Valley
• Brand equity - a well understood proposition. instant recognition.
• Traffic - not so worried - more interested in number of companies on board as customers (would edocr be hosting most of public-facing documents from HSBC? - at least lot more than we have today!)

If you are in San Francisco, I will be staying at the Clift Hotel till 25th morning. Do contact me if you are interested in:

• Building relationships with Northern UK technology startups (eveo Ltd)
• Want to know more about edocr (edocr Ltd)
• Want to know more about e-invoicing/EIPP/Supply Chain Finance in UK and Europe (evigon Ltd)
• Want to run an event in the North of England (eveo Ltd)
• Thinking about entering the UK market (evigon Ltd)

Just for clarity:

• edocr - YouTube/iTunes/Amazon/Google Search/Speed Dating for business pdfs
• eveo - one stop shop for event management (no website, but first brand is Northern StartUp 2.0)
• evigon - management consultancy and advisory services (no website yet - check this blog for competency and also my LinkedIn profile)

Lastly, this journey would have not been possible if it was not for:

• Sun Microsystems - the startups true friend (contact: Stewart Townsend)
• Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus- the only place for technology startups in the North (contact: Paul Treloar).

That will do for now! Catch you with the next post soon.

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My message posted on LinkedIn today…

As part of webmission08, I will be in San Francisco from 19th to 25th April representing www.edocr.com, as the Founder and CEO. I am free on:

• 19th Sat - 17:30 to 18:30
• 20th Sun – anytime after 14:30
• 21st Mon – 15:30 to 18:00
• 22nd Tues – 15:30 to 18:00

and appreciate meeting potential investors and users. Please let me know if you are interested in meeting or knows anyone else who might be interested.

edocr can be best described as:

• YouTube for Business Documents – document interactivity
• iTunes for Business Documents – monetise your content
• Amazon for Business Documents – monetise your old content
• Speed Dating for Business Documents – rapid Reader-Publisher collaboration
• Google Search for Business Documents – Intelligent document search

At present, edocr is self funded, but going forward, we are looking to raise about $1 million. edocr.com has been in operation since Sept 07 in public alpha mode and our focus is on enterprise and professional user. Our users include HSBC, Sun Microsystems, Crain’s Manchester Business, Ariba, Paystream Advisers, Crossgate, etc.

We are also looking for a Chairperson who could help us accelerate our growth.

Best regards and many thanks
Manoj

PS: Please take a moment to open a free account at www.edocr.com and upload your .pdfs and .docs if not done already. Also don’t forget to spread the word about edocr.

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Influenced by the inner circle, I finally ditched my laptop for a shiny Macbook Pro with 5GB of RAM and 186GB of hard disk. Since last Thursday, I have been moving files and applications from old laptop to the Mac. I also installed VMWare as I intend to use best of Mac and Windows applications. Among those I am retaining is Outlook 2002, which is vital for development of my social network as it is the only e-mail application (as far as my knowledge goes) that links with Plaxo and LinkedIn. When all three are used together, I can find the e-mail address of any executive, as long as they have a presence on either LinkedIn and/or plaxo. I am yet to explore the fun side of Mac. So far it has been a great experience.

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edocr has been on CrunchBase run by TechCrunch since we first appeared on TechCrunch UK and US in October 2007. Here is a snap shot our profile. Do leave a comment if you happen to visit our page on CrunchBase.

minimize

CrunchBase Information

edocr

edocr allows users to upload a .doc or .pdf document and then to download, share or embed it via a Flash interface on any website. No other forms of document are allowed. Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

TradeVibes goes beyond simply copying the information from your website, it provides interactivity, e.g. asking your feedback on bullishness or bearishness of the company. Here is the company profile:

http://www.edocr.com/

Edocr lets you upload your document and then allow people to download, share or embed it via a Flash interface on any website.

“edocr’s mission is to bring attention to business documents through…More»

Edocr lets you upload your document and then allow people to download, share or embed it via a Flash interface on any website.

“edocr’s mission is to bring attention to business documents through interactivity. At edocr, you can open a free account and upload your documents for sharing by the professional and business community. At the same time, you can interact with the documents uploaded by like minded professionals and businesses. Once uploaded, edocr generates a visually stunning thumbnail and flash document that you could embed on to your corporate website, blog, e-zine, etc. The social network wrapper around each flash document allows edocr community to interact with your documents through commenting, ranking, tagging, book marking, e-mailing friends and colleagues, e-mailing author/publisher without having to know their e-mail address, etc. The document can also be assigned to Special Interest Groups for extending the interactivity.”
(Source : http://www.edocr.com)«Less

edocr Company Profile

Powered by TradeVibes

Technorati Tags: TechCrunch, CrunchBase, edocr, TradeVibes

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Here is the latest e-invoicing quarterly from Bruno Koch of Billentis.

It’s almost customary for me to review Bruno’s e-invoicing quarterly, but have decided against it this time. However, I might pick couple of stories from e-invoicing quarterly and blog about them separately.

References:

• Billentis joins the growing edocr Community
• Review of Bruno’s latest e-invoicing Quarterly…
• Copy of Bruno’s e-invoicing Quarterly
• ExPP Summit #1 - Assembly of e-invoicing community
• ExPP Summit is almost upon us
• Bruno’s ExPP Summit in London - confirming my attendance
• ExPP Summit in London - major annual European e-invoicing/EIPP event
• e-invoicing projections from Billentis
• Bruno Koch - the man behind EXPP events

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I spent most of last Friday at the US Embassy and happy to report receipt of my passport back yesterday with a new shiny US Visa. I am looking forward to my first visit across the pond. To coincide with webmission08 readiness programme, I also ordered my first Apple computer today (Macbook Pro with 4GB memory). I am looking forward to been less frustrated with my computer from tomorrow onwards. Talking about firsts, today Smith&SmithPR issued our first press release to a selected number of journalists. You can find a copy below:

This is an old picture of the US Embassy in London I picked up from the Internet. If anyone has not applied for a US Business Visa before, but plans to from the UK, here is the process you will face:

1. Phone the Embassy and secure an interview and pay the fees. Premium rate call charges apply. There is no other way.
2. Fill on-line application plus supporting application if you are male.
3. Come 10 minutes before your appointment and join the queue. You cannot queue well in advance (silly me getting there over an hour before) - don’t forget to bring supporting documents - Your mobile can be left at security check-point, but please avoid bringing laptops and large bags
4. Get a number from the first desk and submit your application when called upon. Try not giving more information than asked on the web site. This will only lead to more checks (as perhaps was in my case).
5. After a while, you will be called upon for a very short interview.
6. Pay the secure delivery service for return of your passport. No you cannot collect it from the embassy.
7. If all above goes according to plan, you should receive your passport on due date with a shiny US visa stamp.

With respect to the US Visit, here are some of the edocr actions I need to progress before 18th:

1. Transfer all my data and applications to new mac (looking forward to this experience).
2. Complete business plan - quite a lot more work than I perceived - still at modelling stage
3. Fill remaining webmission08 free time slots - Looking forward to meeting Om Malik
4. Complete edocr Version 2 - the development started on the 7th April
5. Attend DrinkTank organised by Huddle boys - the last piss up before the flight
6. Get job profile done for edocr Community Manager - ideally find someone for this role

I also realised that I have not blogged recently about e-invoicing which need correcting.

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L to R: Paul Robinson and Simon Grice at Northern StartUp DEMO 2 on 19th March 08

I cannot exactly remember when I first met Paul Robinson, perhaps at the inaugural event of North West Digital Communities, which was organised by Manchester Digital Development Agency to bring event organisers together every other month or so for collaboration. Since then Paul and I have discussed many issues, but have not yet worked on a single project.

Paul recently published an article titled: The Vision Thing inviting comments from me and few others. Whilst I do not have the same extent of understanding of software engineering nor about computing, I thought of airing my views about Paul and the industry.

First of all, I am a strong believer that computers and software are here to help us improve our lives. They are not here to dictate how we should behave. However, the use of applications, especially those within government sectors have significantly influenced our lives, and in some instances have changed our behaviour. Whilst technology have significantly improved every day mundane processes, it has also created new processes which will not exist without computers. Going forward, more and more new processes will be added to our daily lives resulting in having less time for computer-free relaxation. It will become more difficult to achieve work-life balances.

Whilst most people in this industry have been involved with it for many years, my entry only occurred in 2005 with disastrous consequences. I am not a programmer and therefore do not enjoy the same pleasures as Paul and others. I see a great opportunity and perhaps not burnt out as some of the others. Yes, I lost significant amount of money and time due to appointing affno to develop ebdex Document Exchange, but I do not keep awake at night regretting what I have done. Yes, of course I could have done much better with hindsight, especially by not appointing affno.

But the truth of the matter is I cannot get enough of this industry. When I entered the digital startup world, I saw myself as an opportunist. I still see myself in the same light. I am no longer content with just doing one project. I am interested in doing multiple projects, but all must have some synergies with each other. edocr, eveo and evigon all go hand in hand.

So, what is Paul’s problem? Paul is immensely talented and never short of words. But I feel that he is trying to do too many things which are not interconnected. I believe he should learn to delegate and learn to build teams around him to get his ideas out as businesses. It is always good to learn new skills such as marketing, but not everyone can handle different disciplines, especially those that are alien to one’s beliefs. Paul is also trapped between two worlds, the commercial and freebie world.

In my case, I am only interested in commercial activities. And I also believe I can manage multiple disciplines simultaneously with ease, due to my past experiences with both startups and multinationals. I am not speaking here about civil engineering vs. bio technology, but of all aspects of businesses from opportunity analysis, product development, marketing, sales, operations, customer service, finance, business planning and leadership. I am definitely poor on human resource management. Whilst I included product development here, it is not the same as software development. It is more of defining the product and delegating the development process to someone such as Paul, in the case of software development.

You should not be in an industry you are fed up of. I was fed up of engineering and I moved on. Ok, the results are not so positive, but I believe I can turn things around. And in this process, I have learnt to spread risk by getting others involved. Just look at edocr for example:

• Built and run Alpha version under £500 (excl team time and my expenses) - to achieve this, I brought team on board on equity
• Hosting for exchange of ….
• PR for exchange of …
• Legal for exchange of …

Now edocr has achieved a status where others want to align themselves with the brand. How can this be possible? Well I build something else that I can exchange with and we got on board of webmission08, which brought new fortunes, higher expectations and more risk to manage. But we are partnering with the right organisations, e.g. Sun Microsystems, NTT Communications, Smith&SmithPR, Aaron&Partner, Amazon AWS. And all of these relationships go beyond edocr, and they are at a very personal level. Could Paul repeat this? Does he wants the same? Perhaps not. More importantly, does he know what he wants?

At the same token, it is highly dangerous to venture into a sector that you know nothing about (as I demonstrated). Paul, the best course of action is to work with a mentor who can provide critical analysis and recommendations. And you should agree with your mentor a firm action plan. And it is ok to have reservations from time to time. But having an action plan will help you get back to the plan once you defeat those short-lived reservations.

I am sorry, but I will not be tagging anyone, as above is slightly off from what you were trying to address.

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As part of our preparations for Webmission08, we have decided to migrate our back-end and the front-end to Sun Microsystems platform. We are a proud member of the Sun Microsystems’ StartUp Essential Programme and also a Sun Microsystems Advantage Partner. In fact, I have been evangelising the programme well before it was launched, working closely with Stewart Townsend, who manages the programme in the UK and Europe. The final details are yet to be worked out, but the hosting will be provided by NTT Communications. Both companies are fully supporting edocr’s virgin mission to San Francisco in April 08.

As part of the process, we first moved the back-end from North Wales to Ixis IT Offices at Daresbury Innovation Centre, at which point some of the team got bit carried away with celebrations, as you can see from following images. I must say, we are still looking for the front-end which is still somewhere in North Wales.

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This morning I shook hands with Nathan Smith, Managing Director of Smith & Smith PR, appointing them as PR Agency for promotion of edocr over the next 3 months. Smith & Smith PR will be responsible for PR within the European Union. As part of the discussions, they will also work closely with Northern StartUp 2.0. The actual details will be worked out over the next week or so.

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Today, I decided to publish key documents related to development of ebdex Document Exchange. You would need to log in to edocr to view these documents. Please note that these documents may not necessarily be the final release. Feel free to use any content as you see fit. Comments are welcome.

Mutual Confidentiality Agreement	Agreement for Preparation of Specification	Software Development Agreement	Confidentiality Agreement

Request for Proposal	User Requirement Specification	Software Design Description	Use Cases

User Acceptance Test Plan	Business Plan	Sales Channel Agreement

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