funding

Orange Different Business – win investment for your new idea (Sponsored Post)

March 7, 2012 By Dan Thornton

I don’t often write about competitions and promotions, but the fact that Orange is offering up to £200,000 of investment capital for a new business idea was worth sharing, particularly as it also comes with legal and business planning advice, plus mentoring and marketing consultancy.

They’re looking for creativity and innovation in your idea, and it could be a great chance to get a handy kickstart in pursuing something you’ve thought about for a while. Thinking about the last 18 months, it’s certainly assistance that might have made starting my own business a lot easier, rather than trying to slowly bootstrap my way up. And it’s also not a bad brand to be associated with given that Orange have always done things a little differently, including with some memorable advertising and promotions.

The examples of how to be different are interesting, as they cover everything from a revolutionary new product, improving an existing one, communicating or working in a different way, etc.

Aside from the fact you’ll need to be 18 or older and your business will need to be UK based, the criteria for entry is massively open. There’s a checklist to help hone your pitch on the Win Your Business website, along with a more detailed entry guide.

It could be particularly brilliant if you’re currently in a job but dreaming of doing your own thing. If you’ve got a mortgage or family commitments, it means a no risk way to get financial and business help to get started with slightly more of a safety net. Certainly it should help you avoid the kind of mistakes I’ve made, whether it’s getting your finances straight from the start. If nothing else it’s good practice for crafting a business pitch.

Being sneaky, there’s also another good way to benefit – if you’ve got a friend who is always coming up with unusual ideas, why not send them the link to Different Business. That way, they might either end up running a successful business which you could benefit from in the future (They’d at least owe you a nice meal or some drinks as a thank you!)

Sponsored Post

On newspapers, advertisers and social media

March 18, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Russell Davies has a great post on ‘newspapers and all that‘ which looks at the current debate on the future of newspapers and asks where the advertisers/media planners are hiding during the discussion.

As he outlines the reasons why they’re not particularly active in the debate, it echoed my own thoughts – not just on newspapers and magazines, but also about social media. Consumers have jumped all over social media/social networking (175 million+ on Facebook, 133 million+ blogs, Twitter growing fast, Wikipedia essential etc), and celebrities, direct sale companies and media businesses are all getting there pretty quickly – but it’s all being slowed by the reluctance of the majority of advertisers and media planners to adapt to new ways of working, new measurements and new metrics.

Which means the people that will spend money, and the routes to them are evolving quicker than the money which will fund it, and that situation is the slowest one to change.

Twitter is rich, even before monetisation

February 14, 2009 By Dan Thornton

There’s a lot of coverage of the new funding Twitter has received – despite not actively looking for more money.

For a sample of the coverage:

Venturebeat. Techcrunch. Mashable. ReadWriteWeb. Fred Wilson. Wired. Twitterati. Techcrunch again. Oh, and the official Twitter blog.

And those are just the some of the sources in my RSS feed! What echo chamber?

But does it affect anything?

Mark at Twitterati suggests Twitter could now fund its 20 employees at $100,000 a year for the next 15 years with current funding – that’s a healthy window!

Plus there are the options to fund new services, buy existing external services etc.

But the biggest implication may be that the team behind Twitter are unlikely to ever sell – after turning down an offer from Facebook, and Ev’s sale of Blogger to Google, I get the feeling this one is a keeper – perhaps showing a move from the almost traditional start-up route of planning around an exit strategy.

And with discussion around real time information perhaps becoming a threat to Google, it’s entirely possible the Twitter team might be aiming to evolve into a longterm internet property (playing with Google, Yahoo, Myspace, Facebook etc).

I’m really interested to see what comments and suggestions come out of this for possible innovation and acquisition – should Twitter buy Tweetdeck for example? Will this fund radical new services? Or is this just additional breathing space before the problems of monetisation might kick in?

Most importantly – is this more evidence to back up Ev’s statement that the current access and functionality of Twitter can remain free?

How much does it take to make a Twitter app?

January 2, 2009 By Dan Thornton

It’s a popular question today, after both Techcrunch and Mashable covered the launch of The New Platforms Fund, which will invest between $1000-$3000 in 10 ideas (plus human support), in exchange for a minor equity stake.

Techcrunch was pretty disparaging about the idea (headline: If you are really, really desperate for cash, these guys will give you $3k) Mashable’s take was a bit more open about the diea.

If you want to apply, the form is here.

But what is quite interesting is the debate in the TC comments around how much this could actually fund – obviously it’s not enough to pay for a team of developers for a year, but could it help 1 or 2-person start-ups just out of college to spend a month or two on one idea?

Or, given the current state of the economy and job market, could it be enough to make the mortgage payment for a month whilst you try something different? Or to get the services of a developer or designer for a week or two to make a simple concept into reality?

After all, Stocktwits got more funding after just two months.

But do you think $1-3k is enough to get something started? And is it worth giving up some equity in order to reach another round of funding?