Nottingham University Student Venture Challenge

I had the pleasure last week of being invited to address the Nottingham University Student Venture Challenge awards.

My talk 'Being an Entrepreneur' took a fairly candid whizz through my story from graduating Nottingham University in 1997 to the success I now enjoy leading Esendex.

I included a few warts. My audience were just starting their entrepreneurlal journeys, hopefully some of my experiences and thoughts would be useful.

The evening was the culmination of many months of work by the student business teams, judges, mentors and the Nottingham University Business School team.

As I had arrived at the end of the process, I only got to hear the 3 minute elevator pitches from the 5 finalists. All sounded like promising propositions and I was left thinking that I wished I'd been involved in the judging, seen the full pitches and delved into the young entrepreneur's minds to learn more.

The winner was Andrew Webber with Sonix Media, his venture to provide a new software approach to learning a musical instrument. The other finalist that caught my eye was Alejandro Macedo with bGrantez a service to manage student placements in Spain.

What I liked about these in particular was not only were they both innovative, applying a new solution to an existing problem, but they were both obviously actually in progress.

Andrew had a working demo of his solution that demonstrated his unique approach. Alejandro was actually building the web site that was to be the hub of his service.

I've lost count of the number of people who I've met who have written a business plan about an idea and stopped their. Waiting for someone to confirm that it's a good idea by giving them the money they need to try it out.

So I wish Andrew, Alejandro and all the other finalists the best of luck with their ventures and thank Dan Edge and his team for the opportunity to speak.

I've included the slideshow below to give you a flavour of what I talked about.

Being An Entrepreneur

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Virtual Mobile Numbers - Out of Bundle?

I heard something rather worrying yesterday. It seems that some mobile network operators are taking SMS messages to virtual mobile numbers out of bundle.

This means that when someone sends an SMS to a virtual mobile number instead of being deducted from the SMS allowance that comes with their contract, the message is billed on top.

This is not the same as operators charging SMS messages to virtual mobile numbers that look like UK numbers but are actually hosted off-shore, like Tyn-Tec's Isle of Man number range. This is apparently happening to UK mainland numbers from Vodafone, Orange, etc.

This is crazy and very short-sighted, but unfortunately typical.

Over the years ay Esendex we have time and time again convinced our customers to use Virtual Mobile Numbers when communication with their customers via SMS.

Just broadcast to customers and you might as well be shouting at them. Give customers a reply path and you are interacting.

Where virtual mobile numbers differ from shortcodes is that as far as the recipient is concerned they are just like any other mobile number, and, importantly, SMS to them are billed liked any other mobile number.

This means there is very little resistance from the customers to interact. The messages are essentially free and more interaction occurs.

I don't understand why an operator would stand in the way of this.

Interaction = more engaged subscribers = more messages = plan upgrades = higher ARPU

Isn't that how it works?

I've had some brief interactions with operator interconnect teams and based on these experiences I suspect this is where this 'initiative' originated.

There is very much a sense of 'we're not doing it so we're going to do our damndest to spoil it for everyone else', like a petulant school child.

Am I wrong?

My Second Bike Race

Slightly more successful this week. Stayed with the leading bunch pretty much all the way.

Fast and furious at times. Cornering literally shoulder to shoulder with other riders at speed was a real buzz.

When I got to 10 laps to go I was confident that I would finish with the pack and really started to enjoy myself.

I experimented with different positions in the pack, different lines round corners and straights and was planning to be somewhere near the front when the final sprints kicked in. Not to join them, I hasten to add, just to get a view on what happened and how more experienced riders got themselves ready.

Unfortunately I was caught the wrong side of a crash on the final lap. Nasty one, we were travelling at around 35mph at the time. I ran out of road to navigate round it and my race was over.

Absolutely hooked, training hard now and maybe, just maybe I'll trouble the leaders in a few races time.

Found this picture of me in action http://www.veloriders.co.uk/gal/album60/IMG_0523

My First Bike Race

I took a step into the unknown this weekend and competed in my first bike race. A 22 lap criterium at Darley Moor Motor Racing Circuit, near Ashbourne, Derbs.

Armed with my new British Cycling race licence I joined over a 100 other cyclists all gunning for the top ten positions where national ranking points were available.

I didn't trouble the leaders.

I've posted about it on the Beeston Cycling Club web site: A Racing Education

BBC Weather, a mobile service I actually use

A link to this is on the front page of my iPhone. The weather for the next 24 hours in Nottingham from the BBC.

Being a cycle commuter, I'm probably a little obsessed by whether it looks like rain or not but this is dead useful.

Simple, clean access to the information I want when I'm on the move. That's what mobile services should be about.

Twitter - The Internet is Coming to Get You

We are at the dawn of a new technology era. Search is dead, arise the era of being found.

Twitter is big news at the moment, celebrities seem to be falling over themselves to establish a presence, national news agencies are running stories on the power of the medium, even my non-geek mates are signing up.

Much of the discussion centres around the usefulness or not of twitter. "Where's the ROI?" scream the business people and cynics, "it's just a fad", "it'll be dead by next year".

It's true that it can draw you in and you can suddenly find yourself one hour older and not necessarily wiser however the same can be said for the Internet in general.

I signed up for twitter in late 2007 but only really started actively using it in the summer of 2008. It took leaping in feet first to really understand the power of what I was tapping into.

I have been blown away by the useful connections that I and my colleagues at Esendex are making. For example:

Jonathan (@jbjon) and Darren (@darrenliddell) have been doing some R&D that led them to investigate some of the Google APIs. Jonathan tweeted about his experiences and was contacted by someone from Google pointing him in the direction of some new test APIs that would help.

The chances of Jonathan & Darren finding these APIs via searching were remote, not least because they didn't know they existed. The important difference with this new paradigm is that the information came and found them.

It's like walking into a library and the books knowing what you want to read about without your rummaging through the shelves.

Don't get me wrong, I like a good rummage and you still need to do the good old manual trawl through Google to find most things. What twitter brings is those serendipitous moments that enhance your life. Another example

I follow @charlesarthur, Technology Editor at the Guardian, as I'm interested in his take on the technology stories of the day. He tweeted about catching up on the The Wire, I'm doing the same and @ replied about a particular scene I thought was brilliant.

A small interchange ensued in which he suggested a book I should read by the writer David Simon. Now Charles actually got the title wrong, but no problem, Gary Marshall who also follows Charles saw this and tweeted me with the correct one.

Gary and I then had an exchange about David Peace books, he hadn't yet read The Damned Utd, so I was able to recommend it to him.

None of us are friends, despite what twitter says, but for the that moment we were able to share a common interest that enriched our lives.

This would not have happened otherwise.

Yes, technologically twitter is nothing new and since the early days of networks we've had ways to share snippets of information. Twitter however has captured the imaginations of enough people to make it useful.

How it's done this, through luck, celebrity endorsement, who knows. But whatever the magic sauce or confluence of factors it is enriching our lives and that should be applauded.

SpinVox, a day of woe - UPDATED

I like SpinVox, I think its core voice mail service is excellent and probably how excellent it is the reason why I find it so infuriating when I'm prevented from using it.

It seems to have developed this annoying habit of turning off conversion, ie just acting like a normal voice mail service. I didn't even know this was an option.

I've posted before about how infuriating I found their IVR interface, well it has improved but not enough for me to pay a monthly fee, as I do, to have my voice mails converted to text messages.

Today's tale of woe started with me forgetting my phone. Not a biggy as I was office based today so I could just wait for the messages to arrive as emails.

+44xxxxxxxxxx Just left you a voice message that you need to listen to and conversion is off.

Not again!

So I go to the web site to see about turning it back on and am greeted with the most astonishing home page 'upgrade' I've ever scene. 6MB of marketing masturbation culminating with an impenetrable home page that took me ages to discover where I needed to sign in.

Finally get there and discover that Firefox hasn't remembered my PIN from last time. Bit of a pain that I haven't got my phone but no problem I called home and clicked the forgotten PIN link as the phone was ringing.

It didn't work.

Not only didn't work it didn't tell me it didn't work it just did nothing. No feedback, nothing. So I hang up the phone, count to 10 and fire off an email to service@spinvox.com.

This was at 11:48, I've still not heard anything.

I was sharing my woes with the people of twitter and agreed with @whatelydude to be patient, but my patience has worn thin. Poor guy was earning his social media dollar today with the majority of twitterers coming out against the new SpinVox home page.

Finally I got home around half six to my phone and called the IVR service but apparently there were no new messages! Seems that the messages I'd been notified about had been marked as read and I would need to trawl through all my messages in order to get to the new ones.

Ridiculous.

I pay for this service.

It's just crazy that a company having raised $200M can have such an abysmal web interface to it's service. Let alone the random switching off of the functionality that makes it useful.

So SpinVox, the next time you get carried away with a funky new way to brand your service just syphon off a few of those dollars into the core service development team's budget.

Focus on making your service work and put the crayons away for a while.

UPDATE

Contact by a product manager instead of customer service who saw my twitter comments. Who arrange for customer service to call me.

Turns out that the switch off conversion is a billing issue. They're taking the money from my card but something's failing passing that to my account. They've given me a complimentary account for the moment until they can find what the problem is.

It's just a shame a Product Manager had to come to my aid rather than the customer service team who I emailed.

Are SpinVox drinking a bit too much social media kool-ade and not concentrating on the basics?