Bristol companies demo to packed room

Change of venue and format brought out the regulars and new faces for this morning’s OpenCoffee Club meeting. Mariama Njie welcomed us all with fresh coffee, tea and chocolate cookies to UWE Ventures’ new business incubation space in Bush House right on the harbourside in Bristol. There was plenty of time for folk to have a good look around and catch up with each other before squeezing into the main Board Room for the company demo’s.

Test and Verification Solutions

First up was Michael Bartley from Test & Verification Solutions. Michael introduced us to software testing and code validation. His expertise was in providing clients with access to reduced cost and flexible resources at this specific point in their software development cycle. Michael works closely between clients and partners (mainly in India) to build find the right out source partner (rather than a body-shop as Sam Machin described it). The right partner was one that understood the application domain as well as the technology and could provide a high quality of service with good knowledge management.

After software testing, Ed Ross introduced his solution to oversized email attachments and overwhelming spam. Tonsho provides both services in a single subscription. Attachments of up to 100MB are handled through normal SMTP from your email to the Tonsho servers, the recipient receives a friendly email with a link to the file that they download (again through SMTP).  Whilst all this is going on, Tonsho also offers a “challenge – response” solution to spam. Email that fails a spam filter triggers a challenge to solve a capatcha, if successful the email is automatically moved to the inbox and the sender added to the users white list. Ed was using Adsense and limited additional marketing, some good write-ups on About.com and word of mouth from existing users to grow the service. Basic accounts are free, added storage and features are available from Pro, and Enterprise accounts. Ed also offers a “Photographers” version that includes a photo gallery with watermarking.

Last up, but certainly not least, was Nigel Legg with a live demo of his latest enterprise Katugas  Social Media Monitoring. Building on his experience coding and analysing free text responses on market surveys, Nigel is now delivering detailed analysis of a companies social media profile. Using software from Radian6 in Canada, Nigel pulled up a series of queries for Open Coffee and topics that might be talked about. Turns out the iPhone is very popular with nearly 500k mentions in the last 30 days. The interesting part was when Nigel pulled up individual mentions, and began grading them for sentiment (positive to negative on 5 point scale). He then pulled up the key influencers based on number of articles, comments, links, etc. A really powerful analysis of a business’s online presence and valuable tool for monitoring brand perception. With the ability to report daily, weekly and monthly this is a fantastic addition to Bristol’s business environment.

After the semi-formal presentations folks carried on discussions until gone 10am. Mariama did an excellent job supplying coffee throughout and lots of new connections were started.

Thanks again to the presenters, attendees and UWE Ventures.

The next OpenCoffee Bristol will be on 10 March at Starbucks on Park St. The next demo session will be in a month or two (drop me an email or comment if you’d like to present).

February 24, 2009 | Filed Under opencoffee | 4 Comments 

UWE Ventures confirmed

Sorry for late post and any confusion.

Tomorrow’s OpenCoffee Bristol will be at UWE Ventures (Floor 4, Bush House).

There will be a couple of demo’s from local companies on their business innovation & a chance to have a sneak preview of the latest managed office space in Bristol.

To help give UWE some idea on numbers there’s a sign-up sheet on Eventbrite (I’ll be emailing it tomorrow morning so there’s still time).

http://opencoffeebristol24feb2009.eventbrite.com/

February 23, 2009 | Filed Under opencoffee | Comments Off 

Iced coffee anyone?

Uploaded on December 12, 2006 by masochismtango

Uploaded on December 12, 2006 by masochismtango

I’ve been putting in place some changes that will reflect your comments over the last month or so on what you’d like from OpenCoffee Bristol.

The fortnightly meetings will continue, from 8.30am in Starbucks on Park St; the next one being on Tues, 10 Feb.

I’m hoping that the following OpenCoffee Bristol, Tues 24 Feb, will be in a different location to allow companies a space to demo their innovations and generate some additional buzz and conversation. I’m just waiting for confirmation but this will also give us a preview of some new incubation and company growth support that will be coming on-stream in Bristol shortly.

Hopefully this will develop into a semi-regular change of setting and style with a demo / mini-pitch opportunity that will add to the entrepreneurial activity.

I’m then going to take my lead from your suggestions and try to coordinate speakers / themes for OpenCoffee at Starbucks so that each session has a bit of a starter-for-10, followed by the usual coffee, discussions and development.

February 3, 2009 | Filed Under opencoffee | Comments Off 

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