EIPP (e-invoicing) and StartUp World

Apologies for the lack of recent coverage on eipp/e-invoicing. Thought leadership cannot be provided without undertaking adequate research. Wouldn’t it be great if document/information search time can be reduced. This is one of the reasons why I founded edocr with Rhys, Mike and Chris. So please upload your press releases, white papers, case studies, product information, etc on EIPP/e-invoicing to edocr today. 

Let’s have a quick look at what some of the leading e-invoicing/EIPP providers have been up to recently, starting with OB10 and Accountis:

OB10

In April, OB10 reported that their clients have saved 1,123 trees in 2007, 223 trees more than in 2006. e-invoicing is clearly an environmentally friendly technology. OB10 has arrived its green totals by calculating number of sheets of paper saved via e-invoicing, and then using standard industry figures to arrive at a number of trees saved. OB10 also reports that e-invoicing has also saved 93 barrels of oil, 192 MWs of energy, 2,800 pounds of air pollutants and diversion of 156 cubic yards of paper from eventual landfill disposal. Other figures released by OB10 states that 10 percent of the trees cut globally attribute to paper invoices and production of paper invoices takes as much energy consumption as powering 20 million homes. Plus an year’s worth of invoices take up as much landfill space as 10 football fields. Startling! So what are we doing about it?

Carbon footprint is clearly a topic that is on everyone’s mind from corporate to consumer. e-invoicing clearly is a technology that could help reduce corporate carbon footprint. Whilst what OB10 reported should be congratulated, I just wonder whether they considered the followings in their calculations:

1. The number of buyers (accounts payable) who still demand a paper invoice in addition to e-invoicing.
2. The cost of energy used for operating computer systems both at client ends as well as by OB10 and others.

Whilst you cannot do much about item (2) other than to switch to low energy servers such as those supplied by Sun Microsystems and environmentally friendly data centres, you certainly can control item (1). In this respect, all of us should be playing our part to not print that invoice.

Jamie, I know you did not want to be the first mover with edocr, but please rethink of uploading your press releases, etc, so that I and others can provide additional coverage for your news! In addition, edocr is environmentally friendly, i.e:

1. No need to transfer large files and duplicate storage.
2. Read as many times as you like without printing.

Accountis

As you know very well, unlike OB10, Accountis is no longer an independent company. Accountis was acquired by FundTech, Inc early this year.

Ifor Williams, Sales Director at Accountis, has recently published a great article on EIPP titled "Extending Payments to the Full Cycle”, which can be accessed by clicking the thumbnail. It looks at the opportunity e-invoicing holds for banks and how they can take advantage of it. By combining billing services, specifically EIPP, with their existing transaction services, banks can deliver a unique and valuable end-to-end commercial service. The article was originally published on GTNews.

My understanding from Rhys Jones, Founder of Accountis is that Accountis will remain very much its own entity. Being part of FundTech, it allows Accountis to leverage much larger network of organisations and connectivity for rapid growth. However, we are yet to hear publicly about any new major wins. DHL continues to remain their key European client.

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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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