Meeting: Open Coffee Coleraine meeting.

I've finally got the first of my Open Coffee Coleraine meetings sorted out. It will be held at Starbucks, Coleraine on Wednesday 22nd July 2009.

The Open Coffee meetings are informal get togethers for businesses, startups and creatives to network, have a coffee and even perhaps generate some new ideas.

Starbucks have kindly offered us their cafe after hours, the event will run from 7pm - 9pm, plus free filter coffee and tea if you are prepared to give a donation to their chosen charity (if you want a quad shot skinny latte then you'll have to pay :) ).

Last bonus is that from 1st July if you are a Starbucks card holder then you get Wifi for free.

The blog is at http://www.opencoffeecoleraine.com and there's also a Twitter page as well.

Open Coffee Club in Derry

Open Coffee Clubs are meetups for programmers, designers, hackers and entreprenuers to meet up and discuss new ideas, emerging technologies.

Mark Nagurski has created one for Derry. The first meeting will run at Starbucks at Crescent Link (so you know the coffee will be great straight away) on 30th April at 6pm. Could be a very interesting way to see what's happening in the startup world.

You can follow updates on Twitter.

I for one will be there.

BBC News run a little story on Limavady

Now that unemployment is now at 6.1% in Limavady (or as they like to put it, the highest in Northern Ireland).

The report does play heavily on the Seagate closure but fails to mention that from the 900 made redundant, not all of them were from Limavady. Some were from Derry, some Coleraine, some commuted in from Donegal. Seagate is not single handedly responsible for Limavady's track record.

Construction was a key area and as farming declined construction blossomed. The knock on effect was felt as tilers, estate agents and other related industries gained. Then it stopped and then knock on went into reverse. The subsequent knock on from that, shops went into decline and started to close. Trading was down.

The BBC stats don't paint a pretty picture:

• 22,000 people of a working age in the borough.
• 6.1% unemployed.
• 23.6% of redundancies were in Limavady (but does not say how many of that 23.6% are resident in the borough).
• 1,348 are currently looking for work compared to 611 a year ago.
  

For eagle eyed readers of this blog you'll know from this morning that there are 12 jobs listed for Limavady. Paul Beattie does make a good point that Limavady is a good place for doing business, because it is. There is a very good training background in Limavady that does a very good job in providing quality training for the essential skills required.

I have a love/hate with this article. It does highlight the positives about Limavady but that's outweighed by the "isn't ever so slightly crap at the moment" attitude of the reporter.

Currently the unemployed need some sense of honour and sense of worth (I know exactly what it's like because I've been there twice over the last three years). Biggest failing in all of this I see is the reliance on the job market to pick up, some experts are not expecting this until a potential peak at the end of 2010. The initiative has to come from you, yourself.

If you have an idea then go for it. Whether it be an online venture or what, a shop, a home based business. Big investment coming in takes time. Putting time aside to help rural startups is something that's never addressed. Rest assured that Invest NI will not give you money for the Start A Business Programme but you might get valuable support.

If you are stuck for an idea, well there's over 1000 listed on OneForTen. It was the very reason I put the site together in the first place. I can't do every idea that's listed so it makes sense to distribute them to people who can. You have nothing to lose, go have a look :)

For the full BBC article, that's online here.

Google gets into VC funding.

Now this could be interesting. Eager to grow new and emerging companies Google has set up Google Ventures.

Google Ventures seeks to discover and grow great companies - we believe in the power of entrepreneurs to do amazing things. We're studying a broad range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech and health care. We invest anywhere from seed to mezzanine stage and embrace the challenge of helping young companies grow from the garage to global relevance.

Could be an interesting proposition. More details from the website.

Starting a business: the simple rules.

Just a few odds and ends but for some reason they tend to get over looked or over complicated.

1. If you are going self employed you have to tell the Inland Revenue.
2. If your turnover is £67,000 or over then you will have to register for VAT.
3. To see if it's all worth it you can try out the basic equation.

Number of potential customers x Profit per customer = potential road to riches.

So I have 200 customers buying my kitchen gadget spending £5 each per month.

200 x 5 x 12 = 12000 (minimum wage job at 37.5 hours a week will bring in £10314).

No business plans, no rural grants, no long amounts of paperwork. All you need is a good idea, find some clients and a calculator.

What to charge for freelance rates.

A nice article from the FreelanceFolder.

In general, setting your freelance rate should be based on three factors:

1. What you need
2. What your competition charges
3. What the market will bear

Interesting stuff, could be useful to quite a few people.

Philips creates 30 new graduate jobs thanks to Invest NI

Have a guess where they are, go one, just one guess.... Belfast.

If anymore ICT jobs go to Belfast I think the island will tip over. Invest NI have put up £420,000 to aid in the creation of 30 new graduate posts. I suppose it's how you look at it and perhaps my cynical view gets in the way sometimes.

420000 divided by 30 is 14000. So that's the wages paid for.... So without any risk Philips can take on 30 grads and essentially have Invest NI pay their wages. Now the press release does say that it will bring £1m of salaries into the local economy.

To be fair the jobs were always going to be in Belfast because that's where Tomcat Clinical Systems setup originally before being acquired by Philips. Hats off to them in the medical work that the systems do.

So, we need to have some seriously good start ups in the North West (Limavady, Coleraine, Dungiven or Londonderry I don't really mind now).

The Next Big Thing - NISP Presentation Video

The Northern Ireland Science Park had a big meet and videoed the whole thing.

Out of all I watched there was only one real spark, "people don't technology, they want benefits". The old cynic in me says, "I've heard all this before" and to put all hopes in what comes out of Silicon Valley is not a good model to go on. I've worked out there, some of them are as clueless as the rest of us. Blaine Cook doesn't seem easily swayed by any of the conversations (that's just an observation), at least there's one sane person in the asylum.

Still worth watching, don't get me wrong.

FSB Calls for local banks to hold the strings on lending

Interesting article from Management Today

It go back to something I was saying in an earlier blog post: The Startup Dilemma, funding and where to get it.

Reid Hoffman - “Every Individual Is Now An Entrepreneur.”

An interesting interview that I'm still wading my way through, the video is about an half an hour long. It's an interesting watch and listen, the social network roadmap for the next few years. Good stuff.

REID HOFFMAN: I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not. . . . Average job length is two to four years. That makes you a small business. . . . You are the entrepreneur of your own small business. How do you get to your next gig? How do you do your career progression? All these things now fall on the individual shoulders. And so, they’re essentially an entrepreneur. . . . They’re entrepreneurs in terms of the business of themselves and how they drive that. So it’s how they get, like, their next job opportunity, how they get a promotion. All of that stuff comes from how they manage the network around them. Which is, by the way, what gave me the idea for LinkedIn.

Watch, digest and learn :) Full Techcrunch post here.

Setting up your own virtual office.

Working from home usually puts the fear of God up most employees. If you are fortunate to work from home here's real quick rundown of the essentials.

1. Talking to folk: most people use Skype in one wave shape or form. When you hook it up to a webcam you can watch them talk too.

2. You'll need a good email account, most of the search engines do their own. I've used Gmail for years and will never move from it. I liked Hotmail until it got taken over by Microsoft. With a Google account though you have more strings to your bow in terms of editing spreadsheets and Word documents online with their Software as a Service, "Google Documents".

3. For full conferencing for free I'm looking at Adobe ConnectNow which lets you invite users to your meeting place and conduct meetings online, show presentations, have webcam support and upload files.

Best thing about all of the above, they are free. Don't cost a penny. You can pick up a decent webcam for £15 (even Tesco has them for just over a fiver). If the thought of being watched doesn't appeal then you can get headsets just as cheap as well.

Any hitech company starting up right now would do no harm in preserving cash by letting folk work at home. Though some of the commercial rates are dropping if you are bootstrapping an business then you don't want to be spending any cash.

Awakening Creative Entrepreneurship Conference

Something interesting if you are a hitech sort of person and want to see where how the landscape is going to pan out. The Awakening Creative Entrepreneurship conference is being held in Londonderry from 25th-27th March, best of all the registration is free.

In sum: (or the blurb as I'd like to call it).

The Awakening Creative Entrepreneurism UnConference sets itself apart from the conventional conference with a facilitated participant-driven format. It combines peer-to-peer expertise sharing, networking, hands-on bootcamp learning, and demonstration labs, all underpinned with world class panels setting topics and angles to stew over before sessions begin. ACE condenses those activity threads and intensifies instruction by focusing sessions on creative business opportunity creation, and emphasizing interactivity by making it easy for people to participate through facilitation.

Unconferences may not have a set agenda, but they still posess a defined structure that provides attendees with a set of tools to navigate the events. And because everyone at the unconference participates in some fashion, networking and the exchange of ideas is a given. The biggest challenge is that unconferences can be unpolished and raw, because participants speak about topics they're passionate about, not ones they are necessarily experts in. The secret sauce of the ACE unconference is its coupling with instructional expert panels, which provide themes to guide the happenings of the day.

Awakening Creative Entrepreneurism is also hands-on learning opportunity bootcamps, demonstration labs, and PitchStop platforms for startups to develop and promote their businesses. World class speakers in creative and innovating industries promise timely insights for attendees navigating challenging economic waters. Virtual conference platforms, real-time streaming, online access and collaboration facilities deepen the participation levels, and extend creative audience reach nationally and internationally. Those unable to attend physically will be served virtually online through streams to the virtual conference platform, and encouraged to participate.

In his book The Rise of the Creative Class, sociologist Richard Florida describes the evolution of occupations such as designers, programmers, and creatives that drive the economy. According to Florida, the Creative Class is not only the catalyst for economic activity in the information age, but is actually reshaping the way our society is organized. The nature of work is changing: Creative occupations require longer hours, but also feature perks such as flexible schedules and increased mobility. This means that we require and demand a different set of support systems. The ACE unconference seems an obvious step in that direction.

This is all looks good, but to be brutally honest is three years late. I'm booked in already :)

The Northern Ireland Technology Map

Nitechblog tracks and reports on technology goings on in Northern Ireland. Not a bad blog it is either. The site also has map so you can see where everyone is.

What's the first thing you notice?

BBC: Opportunity in Recession.

Just stumbled across this piece from late January. It's based around the Portrush trading area but it's still a good insight to what can be done. Interesting note about the number of enquiries regarding startups to the Causeway Enterprise Agency, a two fold increase.

You can view the video here.

Free bookkeeping software for startups

So you've got your idea, you've done some work on it. Now it's time to keep up with the paperwork. You can now do most of basic record keeping yourself and for most it doesn't take that long.

Startups.co.uk through TAS Software are offering TASBooks Basic for free as long as you register and download it (it's just under 46Mb). I don't know how limited it is, chances are there'll be no VAT returns so keep that in mind. For supplier invoices in and customer invoices out it'll be fine I'm sure.