After 2 weeks in sunny California, Dilan and I are back in the UK and are looking forward to the next 6 months of intense product development. As we’re going to be coding lots and I don’t want to neglect this blog I’m going to be posting highlights of our trip to SF (including random videos). Here’s the first video from the trip including our take on Start Up School. Enjoy!

To see all of Garry’s Start Up School photos check out his Posterous Blog.

Videos of all the speaker are also available on David Langer’s post and at Omnisio.com, I particularly recommend DHH’s very amusing talk on how to make money on the internet.

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I was going to post this last week but we hadn’t secured the domain name yet and then I forgot! Here it is nonetheless:

Dilan and I have been doing lots of brainstorming over the last couple of weeks and among the ideas we have looked at, one really stood out: The vision we have is to provide a microblogging platform for discovering, sharing and discussing events and news.

Ok, so that sounds like pretty blue sky thinking. What we want to do is provide an events aggregation website with the added feature of being able to microblog about a specific event you are attending. This idea spawned from all the Twittering that has been going on during SXSW. Our line of thought was that maybe there’s a better way to collect all the twitters about an event like the infamous key note by Zuckerberg, so everyone can join the discussion on a single thread. You can kind of do this on twitter, by using hashtags and tracking them, or setting up a user account for the event and @replying to that user, but twitter isn’t events focused, which is beauty of it - you can twitter about anything.

We came up with a working title - “Scoopler.com”:

With this new idea to work with, we did some more networking and threw it out to the usual OpenCoffee crowd in order to get some feedback…

So far so good - we did a bit of tweaking and everyone we have spoken to thinks the idea has some legs, including some potential investors. We even managed to (somewhat unintentionally) land our first pitch on Thursday, with Promethyan Labs, a seed fund that “has just recently been established to work with ambitious young entrepreneurs to help them build great companies” in the words of Rupesh, one of the partners. The pitch went very smoothly considering it was our first one!

–UPDATE–

I finished the first version of our Business Plan last week but it was a bit too long so we’re trying to boil it down to 10 pages. We also just submitted our application to Y Combinator, which is a seed fund that give startups the initial capital and guidance they need to turn an idea into a company. Auctomatic and Snaptalent are two UK companies who have gone through YC already and have been given some great opportunites as a result. In fact, last week, Auctomatic announced that they have been acquired by Live Current Media for $5M in cash and shares - Congrats to Kulveer, Harjeet and Patrick. It just goes to show there’s hope for us all!

Next up: Mini-seedcamp on Friday… I really need to start blogging more regularly again.

P.S. My twitter is @AJisThinking.

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This year’s IDEA IDOL promo video starring David Langer:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu1DHCyG8xE

IDEA IDOL is Oxford Entrepreneurs annual business ideas competition. Like Dragon’s Den, but for students, this is definitely an event worth checking out if you are interested in student enterprise and can make the trip down to Oxford on Tuesday 19th February.

Official Press Release:

The young entrepreneurs behind the six shortlisted ideas will have just two minutes to deliver an ‘elevator pitch’ and impress a formidable panel of judges, including Deborah Meaden from BBC’s Dragon’s Den, at the final of the Idea Idol competition to be held on Tuesday 19th February at Said Business School, University of Oxford. The shortlisted ideas:

Altitude Medical - a path-breaking invention to counter the spread of hospital acquired infections such as the MRSA superbug

Heat is Energy - an Einstein-patented process to use heat that is currently treated as waste in data centres thereby saving money, carbon and energy

Zoombu - the ultimate way to plan a trip between any two destinations, incorporating all available options of cost and speed

CivSpark - on open source philanthropy platform enabling everyone to fundraise for the causes that appeal to them most

NowIknow - a one-stop source of career information to help individuals find a path through the bewildering array of options

Open Source University - a website providing university level education free of charge and without the accompanying bureaucracy for those who just want to learn

Now in its 4th year, and open to all Oxford students, Idea Idol is a competition to identify the brightest entrepreneurial ideas and uncover the successful entrepreneurs of the future. So whether it was a Eureka! moment, scribbles on the back of an envelope or the result of long, hard planning, the competition may put budding entrepreneurs on the road to realising their dreams.

The final judges include:
- Deborah Meaden of Dragon’s Den fame
- Reshma Sohoni, CEO Seedcamp;
- Katherine Mathieson - Head of Future Innovators at NESTA
- Sebastian Grigg - MD of Investment banking at Credit Suisse

The total prize money is £10,000 with three prizes to be awarded at the judges’ discretion.

This year, the audience - made up of around 300 fellow students, local entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business angels, as well as representatives of the sponsoring organizations - will have the opportunity to participate in the action. £1000 in cash will be given away to those willing to stand up and give a one minute pitch. The four lucky enough to be selected by the audience will pitch side by side for the judges’ interest and face a group inquisition. With no judging criteria, he who dares wins in the ‘melee pitch’.

Last year £5,000 was given away in a dramatic final featuring Theo Paphitis, Shaa Wasmund and Dan Wagner. 2007 finalists Design the Time sidestepped the prize fund and received direct funding from Dan Wagner and Shaa Wasmund’s own venture capital boutique ‘Bright Station Ventures‘.

Idea Idol is the flagship event of Oxford Entrepreneurs, Oxford University’s student society for entrepreneurs which now has over 3000 student members within the University.

You can find out more info at www.ideaidol.com.

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My daily activities over the last few months have largely consisted of sitting at home, watching Scrubs, playing guitar and procrastinating on the Internet in between numerous job interviews and impromptu visits to Oxford! That is until this week, which came as a bit of shock to the body and mind, because for the first time since last summer I have actually become busy again. Tom and I are now working in 5th gear to revitalise his idea and get the project off the ground - there’s a lot to do. Having been out of the start up loop for a while I decided to do a bit of research first to get clued up on what’s going on. I found e-consultancy’s 25 top resources for internet startup founders particularly useful and it’s definitely worth a read if you are considering going down the web start up route and aren’t sure where to begin.

With an idea in hand, the important thing for us now is putting together a complete team. Vishal Kapadia, a fellow Oxford graduate and marketing psychology ace, has joined us this week as the third slice in the pie that is Faceyourcause. We’re relying on Vish to use jedi marketing mind tricks to make faceyourcause viral! This leaves us with one big gaping hole in our team: we still don’t have anyone to build the website. With 3 guys on the business side and no coders we can put together a kick ass business plan but that’s no good without a product so our priority is to get a lead developer on board, which means we have a lot of networking to do.

Using my wit, Tom’s blagging skills and Vish’s powers of persuasion, we were confident we could get a developer who would be willing to work for free in our non existent office and we’ve spent the last few days searching London’s start up community for our man (or woman). Our first port of call was the Facebook Developers Garage, on Wednesday night. This is a monthly gathering of London’s Facebook application developers, consultants and religious followers. After 2 hours of presentations and a shortage of free pizza we left without many leads and a serious case of Facebook fatigue! Thursday morning’s Open Coffee wasn’t much more promising but we did meet the guys at Intruders.tv who gave us some useful tips on how and where to find these elusive developers, who aren’t already working on a project and don’t mind taking equity rather than cash.

They say you can’t beat a founder’s passion but by Thursday evening I definitely felt like it had been beaten out of me! Remaining determined, the three of us headed to PizzaOnRails, a gathering organised by Cominded for London Rails developers. With pizzas in plentiful supply this time around, our luck did finally turn around and we managed to find some developers interested in what we were doing. We also had the privilege of witnessing the launch of yabb.com, which offers users the opportunity to talk to total strangers (on skype) about topics that they share an interest in. In the words of Paul Birch, yabb’s founder, the website is about re-inventing the ‘art’ of conversation, but like Paul, most of us couldn’t work out who would want to use it. One to keep an eye on I think.

Finally on to Minibar on Friday, which I attended on my own because my partners in crime were slacking off! Held every month in Shoreditch, this event had the most buzz out of the few that I had been to. With developers, designers and entrepreneurs in attendance, this was the best event of the week for anyone new to start ups. I accumulated a few more Moo cards and enjoyed some testing conversations and after the re-run of the yabb presentation, it was definitely my cue to leave.

With a few meetings lined up for next week and some really useful feedback, the last few days of networking were productive, despite the slow start. One thing I have noticed is that unlike the nightclubs which my social life had been revolving around, at start up networking events the alcohol is usually free and there’s always a queue outside the Gents.

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