Month: April 2007

Vinod Khosla                Eckart Wintzen        Jeremy Leggett    Richard Barrington It was only yesterday I was speaking to David at OpenCoffee Manchester about setting up a business to track "carbon neutrality companies", etc. Look what I found in my inbox this morning: It has not escaped the notice of many in the venture world that cleantech has become something of a phenomenon. Virtually unknown as a concept three or four years ago, it is now the mot du jour. It is more than just talk though – a lot of venture capital is heading in the direction of cleantech. The average European…

According to Master blogger, Dennis Howlett, CedarOpenAccounts has acquired Version One. Dennis has got the information first hand from Mark Lane, leader of CedarOpenAccounts‘ M&A team. Here is a link to the story.  It was not too long ago that I spoke to Tony Bray of Version One about cashing in his investment. But this news came as a bit of a surprise as I thought Sage would be the likely acquirer. Version One is a well run company, a family company, whose businesses has been built through re-investment of profits. Here is the press release: April 2nd, 2007 –…

I was expecting 4 attendees this morning for the second OpenCoffee Manchester event but only 3 turned up at the end. Here is the list of attendees: David Hawdale (Hawdale Associates) Manoj Ranaweera (moi!) Paul Robinson (Vagueware) David had some interesting ideas around "green" and "free style" themes. We spoke about how these can be further developed and commercialised. Hopefully, David walked away with more thoughts than he came in! Paul spoke about a "localised news aggregator" idea he has been thinking of, and why he thinks Google’s Adsense/Adwords model is under threat. We also spoke about the big game…