Local reviews startup TrustedPlaces has partnered with Northcliffe Media to power the regional newspaper publisher’s experimental hyperlocal web strategy. News of the deal comes six months after its founders stepped back from speculative sales talks to focus on building revenue and cash flow.

LocalPeople beta-launched 20 community sites targeted at small towns and neighbourhoods across south-west England yesterday, with a further 30 planned for rollout in the next month.

The sites focus on communities of between 10,000 and 50,000 users, and blend Northcliffe’s local news and traditional media assets like classifieds and job ads with TrustedPlaces’ local business directories and social media elements, to create an ad-funded community publishing platform.

Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO and co-founder of TrustedPlaces told me the partnership is big news for the three-year old startup, and takes it a big step closer to profitability. Additionally, with Northcliffe’s established sales channels to rely on for market penetration in regions outside TrustedPlaces’ usual big city stomping grounds, the company is free to focus on the technology and product development.

As per the existing TrustedPlaces experience, users can discover, review and recommend businesses in their area, while the value to businesses is a ready-made way to engage with communities around them. There’s a user-generated content aspect to the deal as well, as LocalPeople users will be free to publish stories about their communities - for more on this angle, check out paidContent’s interview with Northcliffe’s director of digital media, Mike Rowley.

Following the success of AudioBoo, 4iP has unveiled another investment with the potential to completely change the face of mainstream media - though this time, it’s all about print. Newspaper Club is a tool to help people make their own newspapers using online content. The site’s in private beta, with a public launch planned for late summer.

Newspaper Club will let users tag online content, collect and curate the content they want and turn it into a really good-looking printed product. The team behind it, Russell Davies, Ben Terret and Tom Taylor, started development earlier this month, and are charting their progress in their hilariously frank Newspaper Club blog.

The idea is that any group of people with a shared interest can use rights-cleared content from the web and print it in a basic full colour newspaper format. 4iP’s Daniel Heaf says the ideal audience could be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a printed product rounding up the best of the internet. Ben Terret was instrumental in this last project, which could be considered as a prototype for the Newspaper Club concept.

The business model is based on taking a cut off the printing price as well as selling bespoke solutions to corporate clients such as the internal newsletter it produced for its first customer, the BBC. 4iP is also keen to combine Newspaper Club with its other initiatives such as Talk About Local to give communities a more effective voice both online and offline.

It looks like 4iP’s onto another winner with this model, which combines the collaborative lifting power of digital with the accessibility of a non-threatening tangible product. It also means that online content could find newer audiences among the 30% of people in the UK who don’t yet have access to the web, or the multitudes more who live by their RSS feeds but still take pleasure in handling printed paper.

Content junkies who live to bookmark, tag, annotate and share might see this as a retrogressive step — but until we have networked electronic paper as standard, Newspaper Club seems like the next best thing.

If Ariadne Capital is backing virtual worlds, you’ve got to know they’re a safe bet for the future. The well known broker of investment deals has announced it’s adding two UK virtual world companies to its portfolio - NearGlobal and RealLife.

Ariadne has in the past advised Skype, Espotting, voice-to-content leader Spinvox, P2P lending and borrowing startup Zopa, and mobile banking and payments service provider, Monitise, which lends confidence in these virtual reality sites being worth a look.

NearGlobal builds high fidelity 3D replicas of real cities which form an atmospheric backdrop for shopping, entertainment, social networking and education.

As part of the deal, Marc Worth, co-founder of fashion information channel WGSN.com, joins NearGlobal as investor and non-executive chairman. Worth and his brother Julian founded WGSN.com in 1999 using funding secured by Julie Meyer. They sold the company to publishing group Emap for £140m in 2005.

Worth sees in NearGlobal a virtual world that looks great, works effortlessly and offers a clear proposition to business, making it easier for fashion and entertainment industries to take it seriously. The first NearGlobal city will be NearLondon, scheduled for a pre-Christmas launch.

RealLife is a social networking application which gives school and college leavers a virtual world in which to experiment with possible careers while linking them to recruiters. At launch, users can expect a 3D avatar-driven MMOG also centred on a virtual London.

Paul Flanagan, an executive-in-residence at Ariadne Capital since 2004, is launching a private beta of RealLife on Facebook soon, with a full launch scheduled for July.

The first career option will be trading, with brokers able to deal on the major global markets via gnuTrade. Successful traders can purchase a range of virtual goods such as villas on the Riviera, fast cars or great clothes to enhance their virtual lifestyles.

Julie Meyer, Ariadne’s CEO says the company wasn’t convinced that virtual worlds were an attractive investment opportunity until the emergence of what she terms “Virtual Worlds 2.0″ – where the user experience has a purpose and is driven by a robust business model.

This is the fifth funding round that Ariadne Capital has advised on or introduced new investors to successfully in the last six months.

The BBC is getting into truly real-time interactive web apps with a new open source framework called Hemlock, developed by London-based Mint Digital, and available as of today.

The Beeb’s Children’s Department has licensed the technology to develop a peer-to-peer card trading game based on its hugely popular mixed reality show BAMZOOKi, which is sort of like Robot Wars meets Knightmare. This (slightly dated) video should elucidate:

Adam Khwaja, a producer working across BBC interactive and multiplatform projects with a particular interest in user experience, says the appeal comes from the casual approach to gameplay that Hemlock allows; being able to dive straight into a realtime multiplayer game without having to register or face a steep learning curve. The kids love it, apparently.

Mint developed Hemlock to solve a problem they had in developing Football3s, an interactive fantasy football game designed to be played in real-time alongside actual football matches. The problem is that most real-time interactive web experiences are not real-time at all. It’s all simulated, with the front-end site constantly polling the back-end database for changes to the data. Or as one of the Mint team says on the Hemlock blog, “the web’s current top notch technology is like an impatient and really annoying child“.

For apps that attract thousands of users, all this interaction becomes very processor-heavy and the application itself is subject to high latency, which  the user experiences as a sluggish or unresponsive app. Hemlock’s approach is to combine Flash and XMPP, the protocol that powers presence notification and real-time communication.

It works in a similar way to push email; Hemlock registers a client with the server to receive messages. The server then notifies the client when there is a new message — no polling required. It also means that multiple users can interact with the same data in real-time.

The framework paves the way for web applications of a different calibre, making it easier for developers to get started on building cool apps without having to worry about the low-level foundation stuff. Hemlock was soft-launched last week and received with excitement by the web development community.

The potential for commercial applications is vast. Game play is obviously a winner; think how much fun Lexulous or any other Facebook app could be if you were playing in real-time, rather than taking asynchronous turns. There’s also a market in educational software, with the potential for collaborative canvases to get students working together. I’m pretty sure the digital marketing agencies will pick up on it as well, as the next level of viral marketing.

Wonga.com, the startup that has started to change the face of short-term lending in the UK, has closed a $22.25m round of funding led by Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, with the support of its existing investor, Balderton Capital.

Founded by Errol Damelin and Jonty Hurwitz, Wonga provides cash advances to UK consumers, helping solve occasional cash flow problems. It’s provided nearly 100,000 flexible cash advances of up to 30 days since it launched eleven months ago.

The killer USP is that Wonga is the first consumer finance company to fully automate the lending process, providing a completely online credit solution around the clock. Via a Web interface applicants select exactly how much cash they need, up to £750. They can then determine their own price by then selecting how many days they want the money for. The company’s risk and decision technology means applicants receive an instant answer, and if they’re successful, Wonga deposits cash into their bank account within an hour, at any time of day or night. However, it’s not cheap. Interest on a £100 loan for 10 days costs £1 a day. So including fees, a £100 loan for 10 days would have to be repaid at £115.91. APR is generally more than 2,000pc. The maximum loan is £750 and the maximum term is 30 days.

Damelin attributes Wonga’s rapid profitability to its technical innovation and desire to “amaze” its customers. He says Wonga has been built to scale, and plans to expand very rapidly now that the funding is in place.

Accel has a track record of backing some of the fastest growth companies of the last two decades, Facebook included, while Greylock Partners is a long-term investor. Between these approaches, we can expect to see rapid development of the service offering, and expansion into global markets.

Given the global economic situation and the need for a collective rebooting of the lending models that make the world turn, it’s good to see VCs supporting a disruptive lender that makes no bones about focusing on responsible lending and a sustainable business model.

You’d think that with the futuristic and gravity defying creations they spawn, architects would be leading the vanguard of efficient working practices. It turns out they’re still stuck in the 90s, where sharing files and collaborating with partners and clients is done via CD and bike messenger, or – shock! horror! – even printouts sent by post.

Tech startup Woobius is trying to solve this problem with its collaboration tool for architects and engineers, built to suit the specialised workflows of the construction industry.

To set the scene: your typical building project involves hundreds if not thousands of drawings, depending on the size of the project. Each drawing has multiple revisions and comments from consultants on the project. Multiply this by 15-20 companies involved in a typical building project, and it makes for a pretty big collaboration headache.

Woobius is taking on existing tools in this space, such as BIW, Asite and 4projects, which have been criticised for being slow, expensive, hard to use and often introduced only in the construction stages of a project, rather than starting from the design process.

The service is centred on two tools: the dropbox, a light-weight inter-company file sharing tool, and the vault, which includes document control functionality. It’s been in beta for a year and has evolved in response to feedback from architects using it on live projects in that time.

The business model is a straightforward freemium one; projects are free up to 200MB, and £10/GB/month thereafter. The privately funded startup was founded in 2007 by architect Bob Leung, who designed the product, and technology lead Daniel Tenner.

They plan to officially launch and market Woobius now that proof of concept is in place. Given the site’s reported growth through word of mouth alone – from 15 initial users to over 2500 registered users across 100 construction projects in 27 countries – I’d say they’re on to a winner.

ITV.com is leaping aboard the social media bandwagon to encourage realtime interaction around this afternoon’s FA Cup final between Everton and Chelsea FCs. The broadcaster has integrated updates from Twitter and our old friends AudioBoo in an FA Cup Buzz microsite.

The site uses Twitterfall to keep track of tweets about the match, with an added enhancement; a tool developed by thruSITES will track which of the players are generating the most chatter on Twitter at any given moment, with sliders for each player showing who’s the most talked about.

Fans will also be able to share their armchair commentary (and really bad jokes) using AudioBoo, a service which is rapidly becoming a darling of the mainstream media for making it so easy to transform an audience from passive consumers to active participants.

After the match, fans will be able to scrub along a timeline in the thruSITES buzz tracker to see which players caused most response at crucial moments – a sort of crowdsourced, visual post-match highlights package which, from the other perspective, will give the clubs a direct tap into public sentiment around their players.

A viewers’ backchannel is not a new thing – just watch the hashtags trend when Britain’s Got Talent or The Apprentice is on. However, this is possibly the first time a British broadcaster has attempted to integrate the backchannel into its online coverage. It’ll be interesting to see if any cross-channel promotion will be in place, i.e. if the TV commentators will direct viewers to contribute to the FA Cup Buzz site.

Dominic Cameron, MD of ITV.com, says that if the FA Cup Buzz experiment is a success, the broadcaster will be looking for more “new and interesting ways” to engage football fans.

Meanwhile, if all this engagement isn’t enough to slake your ADD-driven thirst for social media sports apps to distract you from the match, you can play along with Football3s, a realtime fantasy football game developed by Mint Digital, which also integrates with Twitter, Facebook and Chatzy.

Enjoy the match!

UK startup Imagini has launched the private beta version of its VisualDNA Shops widget to help monetise blogs and websites through a unique take on affiliate sales. The widget adds personalised product recommendations to any site, and immediately starts generating detailed demographic, psychographic and behavioural analytics of its visitors.

It does this using the company’s VisualDNA concept; working out people’s personality types based on the pictures they choose. Imagini draws the data from its consumer facing personality test site, Youniverse, which has profiled more than 15 million people since 2006.

VisualDNA Shop presents visitors with a few visual questions, and delivers real-time product recommendations from Amazon.com based on their responses. At the moment this means visitors can choose from mobile phones, digital cameras and gadgets. The company plans to include a broader range of products from sites like eBay and Shopping.com in the near future.

Imagini secured $13.5m in funding in February this year, a chunk of which no doubt went to getting Stephen Fry to explain the VisualDNA concept (doing a rather succinct job, too):

Anyone can try the concept with a free, limited VisualDNA Shop. There’s a Pro version for $2.99 a month which comes with  advanced analytics that tell site owners what their audience is like — coining titles like ‘funster’, ‘gamer’ and ‘active adventurer’ — and what appeals to them.

With the Pro version, site owners can make their own suggestions for new products to be advertised to different types of shopper, and show visitors other sites visited by people with similar preferences.

If you want to try it out, TechCrunch Europe has 50 access codes to give away using the invitation code ‘techcruncheuropevisualdnashop’.

Mobile content provider AQA 63336 (whose name makes me think of that new emergency services number) has launched AQA2U, a commercial micro-publishing platform which lets UK users micro-blog for money.

It works like this: you sign up as a publisher via the AQA website. Once approved, you set up topics ending in 2U which your ‘fans and followers’ subscribe to by texting that topic to 63336, at the cost of 98p.

Thereafter, any time you feel like you have something of value to share, you publish it from your phone or online, and your subscribers receive it as a text — at cost to them of 25p per aphorism, observation or other nugget of information. The maximum a user will be charged is £3.50 per month.

Picli.com, the photo sharing community site which relaunched in March, has just launched a free service to allow users to share photos and video with their Twitter friends. Of course, it’s called Twicli.

The service can handle photos, videos, sets and offers a sweet little user experience touch which ’synchronises’ with the colours and background of your Twitter account – mainly because Picli founders Sam Street and Sean Miller want users to have a seemingly seamless transition from one site to the other.

It supports OAuth, an authentication platform which Twitter is encouraging developers to migrate to when developing apps that integrate with the service, as it lets users approve applications acting on their behalf without having to share their password.

The Twicli frontpage features the most recent content uploaded by Twitter users. It has its own trending topics view, which is specific to photos and videos, rather than the overall Twitter trends. Users can upload, tag and comment on photos and videos up to 50MB in size. In TwitPic stylee, comments are then broadcast on twitter via the means of @replies. Twitter’s changes to the way users can view @replies will affect this sharing, but Street says Twicli user feedback will determine how they adapt the service to account for this change.

Twicli offers a number of refinements around the burgeoning concept of sharing media over Twitter. For example, it supports sets which can mix pics and video, and then send just one tweet sharing the whole set, rather than flooding your tweet stream with individual images.

It resizes user photos as they’re uploaded but retains the full resolution version is always available. The service ostensibly targets this feature at bloggers, suggesting that being able to see what image sizes are available makes it easier for them to grab a smaller size if needed — users can assign usage rights for their images or video at the time of uploading.

The site was developed over a two week period and still has that new code smell and missing FAQ pages. Minor issues like this aside, Twicli joins the likes of Audioboo as services that encourage immediate multimedia microblogging, without having to return to a computer. The founders hopes Twicli will help mainstream media find relevant user-generated content in a much shorter timeframe — citing the example of the delay of days before the footage of a police officer pushing Ian Tomlinson surfaced.

Planned features for future versions of the service include an iPhone app, Google Maps integration, video thumbnails and an API.

Now here’s something amazing. French telecoms startup Manifone has launched a service that lets you call Skype contacts directly, from any fixed line or mobile phone, with no Skype account, additional software, PC or handset required. They claim their Mani-Sky VoIP service is a first in the telecommunications industry, and by golly, I think they may be right.

Mani-Sky assigns alias telephone numbers, which they call ‘direct numbers’, to Skype contacts; these can be saved to your phone memory and called the usual way, at the price of a local call.   The catch is that it’s only the first three minutes of the call that are free.

Beyond that, the company’s business model kicks in; anyone wishing to place longer calls can opt for a six-month subscription that offers unlimited calls to Skype for $10. The company makes its money on the parts of the calls that are switched between fixed line and IP networks. Manifone is offering Mani-Sky free to all users in the 11 supported countries in Europe and North America for a promotional period.

On the face of it, the service is not all that different from SkypeIn or Jajah.Direct - the primary differentiator is that it opens up Skype, which, let’s face it, is still the market-leading VoIP service, in a way that Skype itself has yet to achieve.

Yahoo’s Open Hack Day London happened this weekend, encouraging the European developer community to get down and dirty with the company’s open strategy platforms.

Making use of Yahoo’s now considerable amount of APIs (beautifully rendered in Tube map stylee), the 250+ developers gathered at Congress Centre in Covent Garden and hacked away on a range of projects that ran the gamut from ‘fun but pointless’ to ‘fun and amazingly helpful’ to ‘fun and potentially world-changing’, calling at all stops in between.

The judging panel comprised a handful of internet worthies; Yahoo co-founder David Filo, Spotify founder Daniel Ek, Matt Biddulph, CTO of Dopplr; Mozilla Labs’ Pascal Finette; and Tim O’Donoghue, VP engineering at Yahoo Europe and Sophie Major, who heads up Yahoo’s international developer network.

Taking a look at the winning hacks, you can get a feel for what these shapers think the internet of the future will look like: as a fundamental principle, it’s open; it’s social, it’s centred around search and it helps the everyday user make sense of their community, their government, their environment and engage in meaningful ways with their friends, neighbours and world around them.

A prime example is OpenFreecycle, which won the popular vote as well as the judges’ ‘best of show’ award.

Developed by Premasagar Rose and Tom Leitch, it uses the information in the Freecycle network, which operates via a series of closed, private Yahoo Groups, to represent more clearly what’s offered or wanted in a particular area. The prototype works for the Leeds group only, but the guys plan to extend it to include other groups, as well as adding alert notifications for particular items, and a Greasemonkey script for shopping sites like eBay or Amazon to let users know when an item similar to the one they’re thinking of buying is available for free in their local community.

Here are the winning hacks, all the submitted hacks, plus loads of related video and pics via TweetMeme.

[Mike Butcher writes]: Yahoo’s David Filo and senior product management director Cody Simms were also at the event drumming up support for their Open Strategy, announced in April last year. I had a brief chat with Filo at the Friday press conference:

Yahoo’s strategy is all about increasing user engagement across the network, so creating the Y!OS works notionally as an idea, since it creates the underlying platform which will help to link Yahoo’s disparate services.

Of course, ultimately this is something of a last throw of the dice for Yahoo and comes about four years too late. CEO Carol Bartz has already said Yahoo must look at slimming its portfolio of sites, so whether they are linked or not will probably be a footnote when the history of Yahoo is written. More important is its survival against Google’s search advertising monster, and for that it will probably have to look to a search deal with Microsoft for the answers - a story which changes daily.

Yahoo also says it’s Open Strategy has nothing to do with its recent 5% staff cut. Personally I don’t think the two are related - but aren’t all these free, third party developers building even more new services handy…

At least Yahoo is commendably committed to opening up the login platform via OpenID and Open Auth.

It looks like the guys at Spoonfed have stolen a march on Time Out and other event guides with the release of their iPhone app, the Spoonfed Events Radar, available free from the App Store as of today.

The launch is the first step of the startup company’s mobile strategy which extends the Spoonfed events listings database to the mobile platform, making it easier for Londoners to find interesting things to do while already on the move. It also puts paid to one of our major criticisms of the Spoonfed service when it officially launched in January this year, when the mobile strategy was one of many planned but as yet unrealised features.

Using your location as a point of reference, the Event Radar scans the surrounding area for events happening that day. Found events are represented as blips on the radar dial, and users can then tap each of the blips to find out more information about cost, artists, genres, time, distance and what to expect from the event itself.

The radius scanned expands or contracts dynamically depending on how many events it finds in your vicinity, and results are usually limited to between three and 10 events from which to choose. Each event listing integrates with Google Maps, so you can find your way to the venue without a hassle.

You can see a screencast of the navigation, which is among the smoothest I’ve experienced using an iPhone app, here:

Events Radar was developed in conjunction with mobile apps agency Ubinow and is the frontrunner to the next stage of mobile development, which will bring the same functionality to other handsets.

Another recent addition to the site’s functionality is integration with venues’ Twitter feeds, so that Spoonfed users who aren’t on Twitter don’t miss any of the last minute cancellations, news of secret gigs and other announcements venues such as the Science Museum or Koko make via their Twitter feeds.

Spoonfed’s revenue model includes ticket sales and outsourced advertising as well as event marketing services targeted at venues and promoters. Being able to drive the website and brand over mobile will no doubt make the company’s offering more appealing to a corporate client base.

Alexander Will, who co-founded the company with Henry Erskine Crum after they met studying at London School of Economics says all the planned mobile products are about differentiating Spoonfed from their competition.

Given a recent comment posted by a employee freelancer for TimeOut on the Mobile Geeks of London Facebook group looking for an iPhone developer to work “on spec” to help pitch the idea of a mobile phone application to an editor “too busy to hunt for developers or business plans”, it seems the kids Spoonfed are on the right track.

UPDATE: We’re happy to point out that the person on Facebook who appeared to be speaking for Time Out was in fact an over-enthusiastic freelancer and not someone acting in an authorised, official capacity.

Live Blog: Think through the business model early on - startups often make the mistake that this means tinkering with a spreadsheet for months.

There are lots of ways to sell valuable services - find the ‘best fit’ for your company and your customers. How and what are they willing to pay for the services?

It’s all about the details - the devil is in the details and the execution. Talk to other startups, do your homework. Try to learn from each other, share your experiences to help your fellow startups along.

It’s starting to get pretty noisy in the online world, so don’t rely solely on advertising; rates are falling so you have to pedal twice as fast to go the same distance. If you are going to advertise, look beyond ad words into lead generation, affiliate programmes, blend complementary business models. Example: Zoombu looking at a lead gen model, Zemanta using Amazon affiliate.

Freemium - there are more and more startups looking at this model. But you have to be extremely careful about deploying, because it’s about the numbers. Fred Wilson writes great posts about this. There has to be enough of a feature set in your product to allow you to charge a premium for truly advanced features, and balance this out against your internal resource requirements so that the premium sales actually make you some money.Eg. Basekit, Box.net, Zemanta.

Marketplaces - if you build a great marketplace, they will come - myBuilder has done a fantastic job of building a marketplace that connects homeowners with builders; myBuilder gets a share of the completed rate.

Virtual goods are relevant to specific markets, such as gaming and virtual worlds such Second Life and Habbo Hotel.

Reshma’s a believer in the concept of graduated business models - citing the example of myBuilder going from percentage of transaction to subscription to advertising/lead-generation. Amazon went from ecommerce to hosting to affiliate advertising.
BIO: Reshma Sohoni runs Seedcamp on a day-to-day basis as its CEO. She joined Seedcamp from the Venture team at 3i. Prior to 3i, Reshma spent over 3 years at Vodafone in their Commercial Strategy team, working across the Europe and Japan footprints in marketing strategy and pricing functions. Reshma started her career in the US in investment banking (Broadview) and venture capital (Softbank).

Video:

Bankrobber - To VC or not to VC? That Is The Question

Fred Destin, Atlas Ventures
Fred Destin joined Atlas in 2004 and is a Partner in the technology group. He focuses on software and technology-enabled services and digital media infrastructure and applications. He previously co-managed OM Technology Investments, an IP Services and FinTech focused fund backed by Allianz/Dresdner. He served on the board of a number of companies including SGI-spinoff Kasenna, Xerox PARC-spinoff Inxight, Capital IQ (acquired by S&P) and Rainfinity (acquired by EMC). Previously he was a Venture Manager with Speed Ventures, a seed stage fund backed by Permira and Soros Partners. He was also an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs and has further experience with Zurich Capital Markets and J.P. Morgan. Fred authors a widely read blog at www.freddestin.com, commenting on European innovation and the digital media space. He currently serves on the boards of Atlas portfolio companies Dailymotion, Inspirational Stores, KDS International, NTRglobal, PriceMinister, RealEyes3D, Seatwave, Sporever and Zoopla. He also serves on the board of Seedcamp, which provides mentoring and seed funding to European start-ups. Fred holds a Masters in Financial Engineering from the University of Brussels (Solvay). He is on the Boards of: Dailymotion, Inspirational Stores, KDS International, PriceMinister, RealEyes3D, Seatwave, Sporever, Zoopla

Fred describes himself as being on the dark side of the force - way to get the geeks on side. Here follow’s Fred’s frankly excellent advice for European entrepreneurs looking for VCs.

Remember, VCs are human too! When you go to a networking event, don’t drop your business card straight away - have a chat, build a relationship. Once I see you’re a credible person, you’re intellectually a joy to deal with, that’s the first step.

The second step is, how to get a meeting? Statistically the chances of getting to the finish line are not high, but it doesn’t matter; I do this job because I like entrepreneurs, and I like helping businesses achieve their goals.

The realistic view of my priorities as a VC is the following: my family, my partners in the firm, my existing companies, my personal brand, managing my deal flow - that business priority at number 5 often comes in at number 1, because we’re obsessive about what we do. Every week we reassess what’s in the pipeline - generally about 30 deals a week.

The objective of the first pitch is not to tell me everyting about the business, it’s to impart to me the core elements that would excite me about the business within about 40 minutes. Get me hooked. It’s like show business - you’re setting a stage and you need to turn the story into an exciting story.

When I meet a company, within 3 minutes you know whether you like them, within 5 minutes you know wehther you want to fund them. In other words, I will have an urge to give you money. But because I’m a good VC, I’ll rationalise this urge asking questions that I know I’ll need when I’m selling the business to my partners.

Beware of pitch decay. What I need from you is the 4 or 5 bullet points that explain why this is a good opportunity.

Europeans are very bad at following up on pitches and meetings. It’s a sales job, and you have to keep yourself up in the mindshare of the VC. Even a short 15-minute call is sufficient - it helps get me comfortable with the startup you’re trying to sell.

At some point the tables turn and you start to feel that we’re hungry and hooked, we want your business. We’re going to start shooting questions back to you for more detail. And I find that people are very unprepared to answer what I think are just basic questions. I find that people haven’t done the work thinking about the next steps and so they start scrambling a bit.

You need to focus on the right things - the saying that ideas are cheap and execuition is king is really true.

If we fast forward to the partnership presentation - we don’t need 5 people and the banker in the room. People pay relatively little attention to this - arrive 15 minutes early, make sure your technology is working, and your pitch is prepared with the investor in mind.

Until you have money in the bank, you’re creating risk. Deals fall through, timing is everything, get the money while you can, you never know what’s going to happen. Be paranoid while you’re in the process about managing it well.

Afterwards, managing the relationship. We want to be partners, building a business is long and painful, it consumes your life. The key is that you have to think your VC is nothing more than a financing opportunity at heart - it’s the best tool that the market invented to fund startups, but it is still just a tool - they’re not going to build your business for you.

In a way, entrepreneurs and VCs share in a suspension of disbelief - we wouldn’t do what we do otherwise. But you need the emotional maturity to know when it’s time for the company to evolve, and when there is a need for founders to bring in the talent and manage their way down from the CEO position.

Questions from the floor:

Q. How do European entrepreneurs compare in aggressiveness with those from elsewhere?

A. Israelis, Chinese and Indians, West Coast Americans - these are all more aggressive than European entrepreneurs.

Q. How comfortable are you with single-person companies?

A. Extremely uncomfortable. The hardest hurdle is starting the company, then finding people to share the vision and work for free, and then to find funding. The perception that people have of their own value to the business is always out of whack. Companies work as a collective organism.

Send me an Angel - Funding and How to Handle Angels

Nick says: Finding an angel is like finding an invisible man - they don’t tend to broadcast their presence but they network to find likely opportunities, and they also know each other. They’ll group together by region so they can do larger investments as well. There are plenty of companies out there who say they can get you into networks, and will charge you a percentage fee of any money you raise - which can mean a 10% hit to your funds before you even spend anything. Steer clear of anyone who promises an instant solution of raising money - get out there and go to the events. Blog, get on Twitter, do whatever else you need to do for people to find you.

Key things to remember:

• Build a plan of how to find your angel
• Get on with your angel
• Valuation is what you make it
• Get a good lawyer

BIO: Nick Halstead is the CEO & Founder favorit Ltd, which runs http://fav.or.it, http://www.tweetmeme.com and http://www.feedbroker.net. Fav.or.it at launch generated a frenzy of tech-media coverage for its approach to bringing a more mainstream view of the social web to consumers and to businesses. Nick has been in development for over 15 years running multi-million budget projects for some of the biggest development studios in the UK. An active participant in the London Tech scene who likes to evangelise the use of Twitter, data portability and the use of the social web for businesses.

American Idiot - Launching Your Startup In the US - when you’re actually in Scotland

LesleyEccles, co-founder of  Hubdub, a news prediction game drops the 411 on how to successfully launch a startup in a region  you don’t actually live in.

The site launched in November last year and got about 500k web users, mentioned across about 100 media outlets, considered to be quite a successful launch. By way of introduction, the company is based in Edinburgh, its founders are Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English… and 70% of the audience is US-based. Why did they choose to launch in the US? Echoing a point Inma Martinez made earlier, Lesley says, if you want some of the pie, make sure it’s a big one. They focused on the US and only the US (again, very similar to Leisa Reichelt’s point about picking your audience when designing your user experience).

Lesley’s advice:

• Use conferences to launch your product, hire a PR agency. It was very expensive, Hubdub spent about a third of their seed money on the launch - but it worked. They travelled once a month or so to keep in touch with customers and advisors, and to meet potential investors.
• Advisors - choose advisors in the region you’re launching. Work out who can add value, and find people who are helpful - when people offer, they genuinely mean it so take them up on it — but don’t abuse it.
• Network, network, network.
• Be nice to your users - citing Paul Graham from Y Combinator who says people are so used to having poor service that you’ll stand out from your competition just by being nice.
• Identify your superusers - these are the people spending more time on your site than you are. Hubdub identified their superusers and then hired from among them. There are also a few people who work for free as moderators, because they love the product so much. They’ll evangelise for you, offer advice and Hubdub uses them as a sounding panel. They try to meet as many of their superusers in person when the opportunity arises.
• Sweat the small stuff - like, getting a US phone number. People are much more likely to trust you if they recognise your dialling code!
• Steep yourself in the culture - calls it the Indian call centre mentality. They watch US tv shows, sports games, game shows, etc. Be careful of humour, most times it just does not travel well.

Ian Hogarth, co-founder and CEO of music startup Songkick.com reckons the best way for a startup to focus on what they do best is to find third party tech tools to do the non-core heavy lifting. To this end, he’s started a wiki collection of startup tools, contributed by Songkick, Playfire, TinyCoupon, Habit Industries, Poll Everywhere, GroupSpaces and Huddle.

“One of the most important lessons we learned is the importance of focus - that’s what you should do but how you do it is the hard part. That’s where tools come in.”

Ian’s advice: Talk to other startups and advisors to try to find the right tools for your business. Investors can help by getting you face-time with the ops directors of the startups you want to emulate. Twitter helps too as does Facebook.

He also announced the creatiion of the amazing Startup Tools Wiki

Leisa Reichelt, freelance user experience consultant, talking about what startups most often get wrong about UX and what they should do about it.

Step 1: Find your audience.
It’s amazing how few startups actually know who their audience is. There is no such thing as ‘the general public.

Copyright @Basti

Step 2: Know your audience
This is the step that a lot of companies just seem to ignore. Once you know who your audience is, invite some of them over for a beta testing focus group where you watch them use your app/product, and talk to them. Ask them questions about it - can you tell what it’s for? What can you do with it? How do you do it? You’ll end up with so much info you won’t know what to with it all. A product like AdobeConnect will allow for screensharing so you can be there as a virtual participant if you can’t meet your beta testers face to face.

Step 3 - Design for your audience
Consider using personas - make up an imaginary person based on the research you’ve done, include them in the design process when you’re deciding how the product’s going to work and what it’s going to do - instead of asking broad and useless questions, you can frame it in the context of your persona. Much more useful! Hire the best designer you can find as soon as you can - get them to design the styleguide that’s then used across the application/product.

Step 4. Think big and small
UX made up of a layer cake of processes; proposition, concept, structure, information, interaction.

Video:

UPDATE:
Leisa has now posted her slides and a detailed explanation behind her presentation: GeeknRolla - You Can’t NOT Afford Good User Experience

Balancing Tech Culture: Getting more women involved in tech startups

A panel discussion featuring

Cate Sevilla, founding editor at BitchBuzz
Sophie Cox, co-founder of Worldeka.com
Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson, head of marketing communications at Huddle.net
Leisa Reichelt, User experience consultant at Disambiguity
Nacera Benfedda, director of product, Viadeo

Video:

LIVE BLOG: Cate asks, does the game need changing? Is it possible that the reason we see less women than men at tech conferences because there are simply fewer women who want to be in tech?

Sophie: It’s more systemic than just wondering about just this tech conference - we need to look at education, and marketing, disseminating information. We have more women at Geeknrolla than you usually see at events, though it’s not 50/50, shows that it is to do with how conferences are sold/pitched.

Zuzanna: Did some research, asked a few hundred people in tech. It comes down to one thing - choice. Women don’t get involved because they simply don’t want to. Hardly anyone blames education - but there’s more to the choice. It always comes down to the ultimate choice - do I want a career or do I want a family? Tech startups often require very long working days, can I balance it all? When it comes to hiring/recruitment, you come up against the existing stereotypes of men being more aggressive, then there’s the issue of the old boys’ hiring network, and they’re hiring in their image. Which is why there are always more men than women in the industry.

Sophie: It’s ironic, because that data doesn’t reflect the liberal, inclusive values of the tech startup scene. It’s not as aggressive as the City, there’s the benefit of the flexibility; Worldeka’s chief developer (a man) goes home early to eat dinner with his kids and put them to bed before carrying on work.

Cate asks what’s driven Sophie to work in a tech startup.

Sophie: Love risk, hate working for other people.

Zuz: If men could get pregnant and share the burden of child-bearing with women, we’d instantly see more women in tech, business, government, etc.

Leisa: It’s a problem of identification and definition. Cites the example of PRs who even though they work mainly in technology PR, still wouldn’t go to an event that was plugged as tech - because they see themselves as being in the PR industry.

Sophie: Girls in schools often say they don’t want to go into tech because they want to do something more creative — that’s bad PR for the tech industry because there’s so much creativity involved in creating software. “There’s something really fucking sexy about it.”

Nacera: Women don’t say they’re ‘computer scientists’, they say they’re in computing. Men immediately identify themselves as computer scientists. The main problem is a lack of knowledge about the tech sector. The challenge for everyone here today is to talk more about the tech startup scene.
[At this point Daily Telegraph blogger Milo Yiannopoulos takes it upon himself to fill the absent Paul Walsh's shoes.]

Milo: Finds this discussion patronising to women. There are reasons which have nothing to do with prejudice why women are not more involved in the tech scene. Do we need to change the game? Good god, no! We shouldn’t be apologising for having fewer women in a sector in which men naturally perform better (did he just say that?). We need a serious, systematic study that looks at the actual reason why women are not in tech, rather than tiptoeing around each other with anecdotal evidence.

Sophie: The research you’re describing would be more about the difference between men and women, rather than the reason that there are fewer women into the tech sector.

Comment from the floor: Setting up a tech company is the same as setting up any business - Leisa made a very important point: if you don’t count yourself as being in teh tech sector, how are you going to be visible? Many men in tech startups don’t have a tech background - they have strategy and leadership.

Leisa to Milo: I think you’re implying that the reason there are more men in tech demonstrates that they’re the best people for the job. What about people who are as talented but can’t make the same commitment because of family commitments?

Milo: It’s not fair to suggest that men don’t make sacrifices when they choose to work 20-hour days.

Comment from the floor: From The Next Web - there are more women than men starting up companies in the UK and the US; the difference is that women are not going after high growth industry and don’t get the VC funds that the tech scene does.

Comment from the floor: We did some research that shows there are more women on social networks, but the coding is done by men.  Wonder how the product would change if we had more women coding - would it make the product more useful to a female audience?

Sophie: On the issue of positive discrimination: I don’t think anyone wants fewer men starting up tech companies, it’s more about a cultural shift - how do we make it more obvious to other women that the tech startup scene is a cool place to be?

Comment from the floor: A woman in tech with two kids chooses to be in this industry because it’s more accepting and more flexible. It’s about explaining to younger women that it’s an interesting industry, and about women believing they can raise money, etc - I think women often hold themselves back more than men do.

Comment from the floor: A father with a son and daughter who both have good maths skills is concerned; the environment around his 9 year old daughter isn’t supportive of her natural abilities; her school is good but still doesn’t actively encourage achievement in the more masculine perceived subjects.

Comment from the floor: Hermione Way says tech still has a very uncool stigma in schools; we need to show girls what cool/fun/exciting things can be achieved when you work in this industry.

Comment from the floor: An Indian man says the IT sector has boomed there, but you wouldn’t be having this discussion there today. The teams are generally always 50/50 split, thanks to education placing a strong focus on sciences.

Comment from the floor: Startups seems to be hiring more women in the round 2 stage of hiring. It’s a real testosterone-fuelled team that gets the companies up and then when more balance is required, that’s when women are hired.

Comment from the floor: Bindi Karia from Microsoft reckons its down to the women in the tech startup industry actively mentoring the younger generation.

Comment from the floor: We’re in the tech startup scene, we’re disruptive, we make the rules - so why don’t we just do it? Why don’t we just hire more women?

Hardly anyone knows how to spell it, fewer people still know how to do it. But thanks to Joe Stepniewski, co-founder of Skimlinks, you too can learn the secrets of the dark arts of monetisation.

Basically, stick to affiliate marketing rather than advertising; Joe showed some stats demonstrating CPM return slowdown; its dropped consistently over the last few quarters and doesn’t guarantee conversion because it can be poorly targeted. If you have to advertise, do it directly; try to arrange monthly advertising tenancies with targeted sponsors; look for themed sponsorship opportunities with brands/companies you’re passionate about so that you can really get behind them.

Affiliate marketing is your friend; there are low barriers to entry, it’s quick to get going, it works with lower traffic volumes and it’s a level playing field; smaller sites get exactly the same deals as larger sites. Joe showed stats indicating affiliate marketing has experience 13% growth this year vs. 9% overall online ad growth.

[Video]:

Text links are the favourite form of monetisation because they convert the best and avoid the need for ad space. They allow for more creativity and tighter integration, and can make great use of tools such as voucher codes and APIs.

Social media platforms and user-generated content are also good, they convert very well. So well that in the US the Federal Trade Commission requires that testimonials driving word-of-mouth marketing have got to be provably real.

Affiliate links to retailers from forums and blogs can return up to 10% conversion rate; Twitter and IM even more, but you need to be very considerate of users; disclose, disclose, disclose. Joe’s kindly offered to send the presentation to anyone who asks. shared his slides below.

Andy McLoughlin, CEO at Huddle talks really fast about hiring a team of peers - illustrating the point with a slide full of pictures of Piers Morgan. Oh, the trauma.

Other than that, this is great advice. When recruiting people, meeting the perfect candidate is like falling in love. You’ve got to be able to imagine yourself spending all day, every day with that person. He also suggests that when you’re hiring, make it a peer review exercise, so in effect, everyone hires everyone else.

Eat together regularly (like the guys at Fog Creek Software do). Andy’s reasoning here is that if you make your company like a family, your staff are less likely to fsck you over. (He has a nice family, apparently.)

[Video]:

He also suggests providing games in a break-out space for ‘axe sharpening’ - this is an excellent point, not enough companies pay sufficient respect to the notion of problemsolving without having to look at a computer screen.

pic copyright @gitfinger

Inma Martinez at Stradbroke Advisors is one of the world’s leading digital media strategists, described by FORTUNE and TIME as one of Europe’s top talents in Human Factors and Social Engagement through technology.

Her advice for European startups: move to the US. The US market is where the ripple effect of the internet takes place. It can be hard, but you should still try, despite sticking out in your strange clothes and your funny accent - look at @loic (French founder of Seesmic), she says. “Ride it and own it”.

Inma’s advice to startups:

• When they form a company, most people tend to form it with friends, but that’s the wrong approach - go out with the cool people for beers if you must, but we’re here to make money so bring the right people on board.
• Don’t spend ages in R&D, creating bigger IP — get busy selling product!
• Respect the suits. Startups need suits; they can fight the boardroom fights. Work with them, learn from them, and they’ll be there to fight your corner when you need them to, while you’re free to focus on your product.