Pure Play

Energy self sufficency

UPDATE 2: a concise summary of the report, 4 pages in pdf format Download Mini Hydro Power Report

UPDATE: This is a promotional video produced about this project - very very interesting. It was produced by Glasseye in Thomastown.

Original Post from iPhone:
With the Business Innovation Network which I have been involved with for over a year now. We decided to take on a project outside of our core interests and we are working on installing a water turbine setup into Kingsriver Community, an operation which combines producing timber furniture with employing peole with special needs.

This visit is to Bretts sawmill where over time they have installed 2 water turbines, renovated a water wheel and put in a wood chip burner. They are now self sufficent for energy and export enough electricity to power 70 houses. Rick (in yellow jacket) is the engineer involved and he also works on wind turbine farms.

Keith

 

Business networking - Loopthing

Late with this Tuesday push - the internet startup community in Ireland's bi-weekly shoutout for an Irish website or service. Yesterdays focused on LoopThing.com

This one has the "business networking" tagline - however when I get to their homepage I do not get a single clear message. On the left are 4 business benefits, on the right 4 consumer ones and in the middle a sign up form.

So a couple of things - my eye does not know where to settle - it is all over the place, there is no single strapline to give me a highlevel pitch and finally conversions of visitors to registered users are unlikely in an environment where the reasons for doing so are unclear. So the Get Started over the signup form might be a little presumptious.

Subtly presented on the home page is a link to the Loopthing profile - given as an example of how our business could be presented. And there we find the sales pitch:

We have designed a space where businesses can create their own profile page and upload all their media and descriptive content to provide their customers with a detailed image of their day-to-day businesses operations. All types of businesses are welcome to upload their content, with no limitation on industry type or geographical location.

So - it is a webpage for my business I guess. Why would I work with this instead of my own business internet presence? Are they in the IGoPeople space - facilitating online interactions?

Back to the home page to explore and I click on 2 of the 4 benefits presented to businesses. Which I expect to bring me to fleshed out explanations of those benefits. But instead I am presented with an account setup page. Big Fail there.

So this is beta and I know only too well the trauma of getting this stuff right. My humble suggestion is to pull back and focus on your one or two key messages.

keith

Managing the launch of a new online service

Picked up a great post today from Eric Ries entitled "Don't Launch".

Summary:

The concept of a launch usually encompasses two things:

1. Marketing Launch
2. Product Launch

2 different things and probably best to be at 2 different times.

Extract:

What a marketing launch can do for you;

a) Drive customers into your sales pipeline. Caveat - if you are not geared up to take full advantage of this then you will waste a one-off opportunity. This is clear from many Techcrunch blips where a large flood of site visitors makes no tangible difference to a new service because it is done too early.
b) Establish credibility with potential partners
c) Help you raise money

......there is loads more in the post - follow the link here to read it in full. This is really relevant to dbTwang.com as we make decisions on how to approach our service and marketing launches - trying hard to ensure that we combine managing expectations, raising the next round of finance and keeping pace with the inevitable feedback and demand for what we will offer.

keith

eBusiness Masterclass in Dublin on 28th April

From Enterprise Ireland - and only available to their clients - comes this event on 28th April:

"The Enterprise Ireland eBusiness Unit and HPSU Department are running an eBusiness Masterclass in East Point on the morning of the 28th of April.

Primarily aimed at client companies who operate in the online space, the Masterclass, entitled "Enabling eBusiness: Best Practice and Future Trends", will feature presentations on international best practice from leading industry figures on the following topics: Web 2.0 and the law; online advertising; virtualisation/cloud computing; and online payments.

The presentations will feature in-depth analysis of the current best practice in the topic areas, as well as outlining future trends and development"

The pdf with more detail is here: Download EBusiness_Masterclass

keith

Consciously building a twitter profile

I have a personal twitter account (@keithbohanna) and it just kinda happened. Followed a couple of people I knew, posted updates and over time it has evolved to where I follow 437 and am followed by 579 people.

I have done it differently with @dbTwang because it is more focused and has a point - to attract attention to the upcoming closed beta. That forced me to be more structured in the last week and this is what I did:

• Used google alerts for a number of relevant phrases as a source of potential posting materials
• When I had the time I used the Irish www.twission.com to watch real-time mentions of guitars and followed the users concerned
• I used www.twellow.com to search profiles for mention of the guitar word and had a look at the profiles of the users it highlighted. Most of those I followed as well.
• I followed back each of the twitters who followed me - unless they were from internet marketeers whose profile and tweets indicated that they have no direct interest in guitars
• I took the time to look at the twitter pages of some of my followers and with a couple of them looked through everyone they followed. One or two of them had really relevant listings of twitters
• I replied to every direct message and engaged in some responses to my twitter stream
• Although it is a business account I have tried to keep the tone more personal than some business twitter streams - making it clear that it is an individual writing it.

Thats it , 11 days later @dbtwang is following 388 and being followed by 106. I will keep working those steps and welcome any basic ones which I have missed?

keith

PS - the pain of working with multiple accounts brought me to Nambu - a native Mac application which (among other things) can nicely present feeds from multiple accounts. Best news today is an update I just downloaded lists an issue with sending DM's as one of it's fixes. That is good because I thought I was just being dumb in not being able to send them!

Wading through treacle

Working on the O2 dongle on the Dublin to Waterford train. If there are any businesses out there which expect a 3G dongle to connect u at fast speeds to anything please take your hope and bury it deep. 400m of the States non-existent cash is being spent to deliver a lousy, lousy Internet service to you (National Broadband Scheme)

Keith

Other peoples Business Plans are easier!

In the two weeks before San Fran I did some consulting work with a Scandanavian early stage business. They had two small to medium funding rounds under their belt and had written their draft of the plan which is being used for the next round.

I helped them do a couple of things:

• Refine the pitch
• Develop the flow
• Clarify the focus

I enjoyed it and they found it really helpful. It was so much easier to do this with them than for the dbTwang plan we prepared last year - working like this you can take a very detached view of the proposition. In fairness to them they were receptive to the feedback and suggestions and in the process agreed a number of changes to sections which they had already debated internally.

Watch and see the results now - meetings with potential investors start this week :-).

keith

Web2 Expo wrap up

The week in San Francisco last week was great. Despite only planning it at the last moment I had the time to use my contacts, and Linkedin, to line up meetings pretty much every day while I was there and I got to put faces to a number of people whose experience and knowledge I tapped into.

The networking was helped by the presence of 20 UK and Irish businesses there on the Web Mission - so I got to say hello again to Ger Hartnett from CoClarity in Limerick (his post on Webmission here) and Andy from GoodOnPaper (co-organiser of Barcamp and Bizcamp Belfast) and put a face to Kevin Traynor of Sonic Academy from Belfast.

I met for the first time Errol Maxwell from Property Pal, Alaistair from Huddle (which we used and liked for the organisation of Bizcamp Dublin) , Emma from Trampoline, one of the guys from Proof HQ, Paul from Complianceandrisk and organisers James Lawn from Polecat and Oli Barrett.

I finally got to meet with Vinny Glennon (co-founder of Echodio) whom I have been in email contact with for 3 years and also spent time with Niall Smart and Cormac Driver. Paul Keever and Paul McKay from Front were also around and spent time with those too.

Tuesday evening was swanky, the WebMission guys organised a get together in the home of Bebo founders Michael and Xobni Birch, they were very hospitable to us. Met wtih Clare Chang from lazyfeeds.com there and she nicely introduced me to Dave McClure (the Master of the 500hats). I managed to miss Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist CEO) who was there as well.

On Wednesday I took part in the 2 day Web Open conference which ran side by side with the main conference and did a Customer Pitch along with 4 other businesses. Got some great feedback and spoke afterwards to Nilofer Merchant and Rashmi Sinda from the panel (Rashmi is CEO of Slideshare). Others pitching were;

*CrowdVine, social networks for conferences
*Doodle, online scheduling magic
*Maestro Market, a Web 2.0 speakers’ bureau
* There was a late entry (service for music tutors to host their lessons online) whose name I cannot remember :-(

At an Enterprise Ireland lunch on Thursday I hooked up with Simone Boswell again (new MA in Silicon Valley) and also with Hilary Keane who is in the last 6 months of her time and who told us about the upcoming move to a new and bigger office. EI brought Jonathan Dillon to meet us - he used to run Yahoo's acquisition team and now consults with businesses on the M&A side. 

During the week I also met with Todd Sampson (ex MyWebLog and Yahoo), Scott Rafer (Mashery CEO and also ex MyWebLog) and Brian Connors from Formative - Silicon Valley VC's.

I have mixed feelings on the sessions I attended - mostly because I emphasised the meetings and networking over the formal learning side of things. I did enjoy the two 3 hour sessions on Tuesday. The first was from Nancy Duarte on presentation skills and storytelling and the second on VC fundraising and what changes there have been in the game.

What did I learn?

• 4 days of pitching and listening to pitches is amazing - it was wall to wall in San Francisco. 
• The conversations and brain picking I did helped to develop our thoughts on the dbTwang business model/revenue streams. Going to meet up with Kevin Traynor to explore a possible avenue with them.
• Get on with it - looking at a couple of ways of cutting back on our V1 release for the private beta
• dbTwang has extensive appeal - pretty much every single person I spoke to either had a guitar (or two) or knew of a partner, brother, friend who would be interested.
• I was reminded to engage with the dbTwang blog and twitter feeds - both of which I have been neglecting.
• 2 sleeping tablets and a small spend on a bigger seat got me 8 hours of sleep on the way home. It has made all the difference to my ability to get back into work Sunday and Monday

keith

Recommendations:

• The Orchard Hotel on Bush St, my second visit and great rates combined with a comfortable room and helpful staff were a killing combination
• Virgin Atlantic - booked them based on twitter chat and they were good.

Conversion is the new SEO, and here is 15k worth for free

For the last 2 years I have been learning about conversion and the metrics which measure it. Conversion is the process of taking visitors to a website and turning them into customers and it is a natural follow on from search engine optimisation.

Its an area in which everyone is learning, that much was clear after attending a conference on this topic in New York in May 2008. Here in Ireland Richard Hearn, who is one of Ireland's best respected SEO experts, has made a great offer to help 5 selected businesses increase their conversion rates and in the process he is going to generate casestudies for a new business of his.

More on the offer here (where Richard points out that he will be working with Jason Roe and James Larkin - what do you have to loose?

keith

Web2 Expo starts properly today

Yesterday was quiet enough - it was an optional workshop day which I guess a lot of people will not have attended.

I pulled from my initial morning one on Economics2.0 - got bored very quickly and moved into Nancy Duarte's session on storytelling and presentations. Damien Mulley came over to go to a workshop she presented in San Fran a couple of weeks ago and he was right - she is really good.

Afternoon session was on the VC game and I tweeted regularly from that - link here to those.

Variety of sessions today including the one I am pitching at. Twittering maybe light - in the great tradition of tech conferences everywhere the connection had got superslow by end of day yesterday as the place started to fill up a little so will be interesting to see how that works on Day1 proper.

keith