Manoj Ranaweera Posts

This was an unusual week of meeting successful people. Third was none other than Ajaz Ahmed. A Dixons store manager, who came up with the idea to set-up Freeserve. Here is a bit about Ajaz from http://www.e-consultancy.com (his story is well covered) Ajaz Ahmed is the founder of Freeserve, the UK’s largest ISP, now owned by Wanadoo. His eureka moment came when he bought a PC at PC World in Leeds and nobody in the store could tell him how to get onto the Internet. After much persuasion by him, Dixons launched Freeserve in September 1998 and became the UK’s…

This week, I also had the privilege to meet another leader, Tom Bloxham of Urban Splash. Tom has done more than anyone else to regenerate Manchester and Liverpool over the last 15 years. He has won over 120 awards for architecture, regeneration and business success. It is amazing to see some of the regenerative work he has done – especially before and after effect. Some of his success is due to taking on projects that no one would touch and using young architects with new ideas to create magical transformations. His residential apartments usually get sold out within couple of…

I finally had the pleasure to meet Gary Turner, MD of Pegasus this week. His business has changed hands twice over the last few months, first with Extensity and then with Infor. He has not only survived, but has positioned his company well within Infor creating further opportunities for growth. We spoke business for two hours and then spent the next hour speaking about blogging, hype of SaaS and other interesting issues over lunch. He has been blogging for well over 5 years and have successfully managed to keep business out of his blog. A remarkable discipline. When it comes…

According to Sam Sethi of TechCrunch UK, there are many opportunities for Internet start-ups and VCs to get together and share ideas in London. I would love to find out of any similar events taking place in the North West. We have a monthly breakfast event at Daresbury Innovation Centre, but it is not dedicated to software. There is also a monthly Beermat Monday event taking place at Tiger Tiger, which mainly attracts consultants and life style businesses. N4B is similar. Sam reports… From the QnA session, the one thing I took away was the fact that VC’s are struggling…

I attended an IET event organised by the Manchester Branch on Automation Trends at Chancellors Hotel & Conference Centre this evening. It has been awhile since I attended an IEE event, and this was the first event I attended after IEE changed their name to IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) to reflect the importance of "Technology" in engineering. Catalyst for the name change was the merger of IEE with IIE on 31st March 2006. Unfortunately, I missed the first half of the seminar given by Duncan Botting, Head of Technology at ABB on "automation in the energy sector", and…

I have created a short movie clip to demonstrate Adding a New Job. Appreciate your feed back. The following steps (in sequence) must be followed to Add a new Job. These steps are only applicable to the on-line service (i.e. before integrating your system). Actual Steps (Sequence must be followed): Login to your User Account Select Jobs tab Select Add New button Add Name (batch number or suitable words to describe the Job) Select Trading Partner from list. Select Add. Above steps will add a new Job, which you can use once or more. It can only be used with the Trading…

I just read an excellent article by Stowe Boyd about going solo and making a success out of it. And blogging is at the core of his success story. He split his time equally into (yes 1/3rd for each): Doing the work Marketing and networking Prospecting, contracts and cash flow It makes sense, doesn’t it? Most of us do not fully appreciate the time and effort that goes to last two items. It makes one appreciate how little time is in fact spent on value creation (doing the work). What if we can somehow reduce the last two and increase…

It is well worth reading the article written by Matt Marshall of Venturebeat on the best time to raise Venture Capital (VC) funding. The article uses recent completion of $11m equity funding round by FreeWebs as a case study. The argument is that the ideal time for Series A or first round of VC funding is right before the company’s rising "adoption" curve meets the declining "risk" curve. The second graph makes this point clearer. However in this model, VC funding is used to achieve step changes from "seed" to "expansion". In the case of FreeWebs, they have held off…

Now imagine the followings: a place with a bigger economy than Denmark or Finland. has a population to be the 12th biggest state in USA. place where 75% of the UK’s top companies are based in place where over 100 of Fortune 500 companies are located produces 10.5% of UK GDP 8 universities 50,000 graduates a year You may asked, where could that be? This is the North West of England, where ebdex is proud to be based! Technorati Tags: NWDA