Thoughts on technology start-ups in Scotland
June 29, 2011 1 Comment
Finding the right target markets and segments quicky is vital for commercial success.
How do you find the right people to sell you product? There are lots of different roles and job titles including sales, marketing and business development, but what do they actually mean?
June 24, 2011 Leave a comment
Joe Tree is the founder of the Edinburgh daily photo blogging company Blipfoto.com, where I have been keeping a photo journal for 1286 consecutive days now!
Joe also keeps a business blog at http://blog.joetree.com/ whis is very much worth a read if you have any interest in social media business (his blipfoto journal is at http://blipfoto.com/joe). There’s are only three entries so far, but I think it more than makes up for that with quality! I was moved to make this my friday link this week as I think anyone considering a social media startup should find something interesting in the latest post, Online business models: value vs. values .
P.S… If anyone reading this has a blipfoto journal, why not share a link in the comments?
June 17, 2011 Leave a comment
Unusual chimney out the back of MBM Commercial captured for my BlipFoto Journal
Another really good TechLaw4Startups event!
The premise for this event was that companies are formed by people who are “the best of friends” but that you still need to consider what happens if things don’t go well or you fall out…
June 15, 2011 Leave a comment
Reading the Economist the other day, I came across an article on putting carbon footprint number on packaging. Walkers did this for their Cheese’n’Onion crisps, and in doing so discovered something very interesting about their supply chain.
Walkers were buying their potatoes by gross weight, which meant that farmers kept them in humidified stores to ensure the potatoes didn’t dry (getting lighter as they did) and they got the best price from Walkers for their crop. Walkers were then frying the potatoes, eliminating most of the water to make crisps. The humidification process was costly in energy and equipment, and meant that Walkers spent 7% more on energy for fryers to eliminate the additional water, compared with potatoes that weren’t kept in a humidified environment.
The simple act of switching to buying potatoes by dry weight eliminated the costs of humidification and reduced the cost of frying. It also reduced the carbon footprint of a bag of crisps by 7%.
It makes me wonder how many other businesses could use carbon accounting to uncover inefficiency in their supply chains?
I have been a bit cynical about the benefits of carbon auditing as it can be an extremely complex business and consumers don’t seem to pay much attention to labelling, but this sort of result could help to change my mind…
June 10, 2011 Leave a comment
Inc Magazine is all about entrepreneurial businesses, and the entrepreneurs behind them. It’s a US publication, and I don’t see it often in the UK – I’m not sure if there is a UK edition or just a few retailers with the import – but the website has a lot of great content.
June 8, 2011 Leave a comment
One of my colleagues at a client company drew my attention to this excellent blog post – if accountants have always baffled you but you have a mind for computer science (or really any technical/engineering discipline) then this might be just what you need.
http://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-computer-scientists.html
June 2, 2011 1 Comment
Ruth Stevenson, Associate Consultant at Salient Point
My two main interests outside of work are photography (hence I usually illustrate my blogs with a tenuously related photograph) and scuba diving. Diving is a very safe passtime as long as you stick to some fairly simple rules, and most things that can go wrong underwater are easily dealt with as long as you have air to breathe.
It struck me on a diving trip this weekend that breathing air for divers is very similar to cash for startups…
