Day: September 26, 2007

I attended the Project Sahara kick off meeting held at Sheffield Halam University last Saturday.    The concept was put together by Lee Strafford, Founder and ex-CEO of plus.net with the support from his fellow team mate Marco Potesta and Ian Spence, who Lee has worked with in the past. Having sold Plus.Net to BT and then getting the sack, Lee had plenty of time to think of what to do next. He also realised how stressed he has been in nurturing and growing plus.net since its incorporation, dealing with various stakeholders including Sarbanes Oxley compliance. As Lee said it, he does not…

OpenCoffee Manchester 6th event took place yesterday at the usual venue. Here are three stories: Paul Robinson of Vagueware – Paul has been developing Vagueware for number of months (feel like years) whilst competition is getting products out to the market. After much debate, I hope I convinced Paul to release Vagueware, which will now be available from 1st October 2007. It’s an idea bank without the strict conditions attached to many such services. It’s free – it’s fluid – it’s simple – it’s no brainer. In fact, can be used as a brain dump and allow the social network to interact…

I attended the Second Chance Tuesday run by Judith Clegg and Michael Smith at Royal College of Physicians last night in London. A superb networking event except for poor catering. Then again, I set the bar high with NW StartUp 2.0, which any event organiser will find hard to beat. Northerners are much better at hospitality than Londerners, but Londerners continue to pull the crowd putting Northerners (especially me) to shame. Enough of comparisons, let’s get back to the story.. It was an exceptional opportunity to hear the story of two classic web 2.0 entrepreneurs Felix Miller and Martin Stiksel,…

The news of acquisition of Digital Vision Technologies by BasWare was broken to me at the ExPP Summit. Apologies for taking so long to write about it. Better late than never though. Digital Vision based in Northwich, Cheshire is a system integrator who specialises in accounts payable automation. Its solutions are based on Kofax’s Ascent, a data capture product that scans invoices and other purchase-to-payment documents. Through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), Ascent converts data from paper to electronic data which can then be automatically fed in to an accounts payable system. As you very well know, this…