Skip to content

Two days in London – Meeting Henry + Mashup* Demo + FOWA 07

Meeting Henry and Sid

Finally, I had the opportunity to meet Henry Ijams, CEO of Paystream Advisors in person at IoD Pall Mall. Henry also brought his friend, Sid Vasilli who recently exited from Bottomline Technologies, about 2 years after his company HSML was acquired by Bottomline for $9.9 million in stock and cash. Sid has immense experience of the purchase-to-payment market and a great person to get to know. In addition to undertaking individual assignments, Sid is currently exploring investment opportunities. So if you are a budding entrepreneur with new EIPP startup or early stage business looking to expand your team with additional capital, now is the time to speak to Sid.

Mashup* Demo

edocr is taking a step by step approach with it’s service offer. We made edocr alpha available on 7th September, but Mashup* Demo on 2nd October was the first time we spoke of edocr in public, in addition to speaking briefly during Jeff Barr’s visit to Daresbury Innovation Centre last month.

After overcoming an unexpected administrative decision, I had my three minutes of fame at CC-Club at Piccadilly Circus. I had a mixture of responses. Here are the stories from blogsphere:

It’s pity that both Blognation and TechCrunch failed to cover the event. Once the presentations were completed, the audience had the opportunity to interact with the 15 companies who presented. I had great feeback in addition to two conversations with Google and British Telecom, which I plan to pursue further. Most feedback was on functionality and feature requests.

Blognation Launch Party

Sam Sethi, Founder and CEO of Blognation had his launch party post Mashup* Demo, which was attended by a number of his team. I was the last to shut down my laptop at 9pm, when most of the other presenters had given up demoing for cool beer  a lot earlier. This allowed me to further clarify how edocr might be able to work with Google. It was also good to see attendance of Northerners such as Lee Strafford of Project Sahara, Andy Mitchell of meecard, Stewart Townsend of Sun Microsystems, Norman Lewis of Orange fame and Philip Hempstead of Yuuguu.

Future of Web Applications (FOWA)

An excellent event put together by Ryan Carson and his team. North was once again represented by Yuuguu and meecard with Sun Microsystems. It was good to meet the rest of the team behind Yuuguu. They had an excellent reception. In terms of edocr, there are number of collaborative opportunities with respect to various technology companies that exhibited. I also had the opportunity to speak to Adobe, Microsoft and AOL – All I can say is watch the space. It’s a matter of prioritising and resource allocation. As you can expect, people always want more functionality.

Anish Kapoor

Daniel Whitehouse from 3i gave an excellent speech on the future of funding. Robert Kalin spoke about etsy, setting up an online market place for handmade products. Also heard how Kevin Rose launched three companies in three years.

Very interesting but tiring two days! ah! almost forgot – Dennis Howlett, who introduced me to blogging was in town, attending all the three events above. It was good to meet Dennis and share some of the industry news including our common friends Ariba.

And waiting in my inbox were two requests from Ariba and Orbian, among 300 or so e-mails. Finding innovative ways to manage ever increasing number of e-mails is becoming an art itself. I have experimented with putting e-mails into relevant folders by company, by the subject matter, and by interest within Outlook, but these days, most e-mails are stored under folders I create for individuals. The realisation that one does not deal with companies but individuals is having a profound impact on my outlook folder structure. This become trickier for larger companies.

 

 

 

Published inOther