The BBC reports that the ball tracking firm Hawke-Eye has been bought by Sony for an undisclosed amount. Founded by Paul Hawkins the company made £1.1million profits last year. The report mentions that the firm had a number of investors including a member of the Getty dynasty. Sounds like lots of angels.No mention of price but I hope that inventor Paul Hawkins had a good business plan resource and all the investors did well. Hopefully Sony will take it into the football world and reduce the number of errors!!
The Cambridge Evening News reports that BioWisdom is sold for under £1m after investors put in millions of pounds since 2000.Wonder why they decided to sell? Who are the big losers? Did they use a business plan resource?
BioWisdom sold for under £1m
BioWisdom, the drug discovery information provider at Harston, has been bought by Instem Life Science Systems for £900,000, with the possibility of this going up to £1.5m depending on performance.
Founded in September 2000, BioWisdom set out to become the leading source for drug discovery information online and has raised millions of pounds over the years, including from Sir Chris Evans’ Merlin VCF.
All 13 BioWisdom employees, 12 in the UK and one in the US, keep their jobs at the current locations. Instem is based at Stone in Staffordshire.
Austin Reid offered a £30 free scarf in the Daily Telegraph if you turned up and filled in your form with contact details. By the Monday, all the scarfs had gone and the promotion was over.
However if you want to put your brand in front of the punters and know that they are up market punters, why not try an app? And especially an app promoted by MagicSolver’s Advent Calendar. With over 1.1 million downloads in the first few days of Christmas, the punters are signing up for a month of ideas.Even better when the apps include geolocation. So if you want to sell beds, launch an app which bleeps when the punter is passing a bed shop with details of all your latest offers.
So the old ways means lots of stock and a busy weekend and the offer is over. The app means more fun for the punter and you can keep changing your offer and keep the marketing alive.
Of course to create an app to match a Meerkat takes some great skills.
In 9 days: 1st to 9th December, Christmas Advent Calendar 2010 for iPhone, iPad got over 1.1 million downloads including 400,000 in the UK only http://bit.ly/Advent2010. Christmas Advent Calendar 2010 for Android got 20,000 downloads.The App was number one on the App Store (best selling app) in 10 countries including the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, etc…
Have a quiet moment and time to reflect, then there are two videos to watch:
– Steve Jobs presenting the iPad2. Wonderful to hear the ovation at the start
– Wadah Kanfar, Director General of Al Jazeera talking at TED. How social networks help to change the world.
And do not forget my interview with Robert Scoble on the business plan resource. It is down at present but should be up on HTML5 for all to watch again on Monday. Thanks David.
Interesting article in the Daily Telegraph about Sleeperz Hotels which runs well designed budget hotels near city centre railway stations.
Barry Munn opened the first Sleeperz at Cambridge Railway Station and I was one of the people who helped make the beds for the opening night. One highlight was sitting outside his hotel eating fish and chips and watching all the commuters return from a long day in London.
Barry had the vision to take Sleeperz national and build a chain. Barry negotiated a deal with Network Rail to build hotels on “difficult” sites near railway stations. The second Sleeperz was in Cardiff. Not sure of the details but I think that there were cost over runs and delays and the investors lost patience and bought in new management.
The hotel at the railway station is now called Cityroomz and I have no idea if Barry is the owner.
These things happen when you have a big dream and investors get involved. Guess you need a business plan resource.
Fred Wilson runs a guest post today about the glories of bootstrapping.
David Geller makes it clear that it is all about me as he relates how much more of a company you have to build to get the same financial reward if you raise funds and set up option pools as opposed to bootstrapping.. So true. But good dilution leads to great, and just, rewards to staff and investors.
But how much better to use Facebook as a model where 30% of the company is owned by staff and very early angels. Do read the Guardian article by Jemima Kiss: Facebook tears up the rulebook. It would make a great business plan resource.
In my experience it is the people who talk loudly about the importance of teams who never offer equity. Put you money where your mouth is!!
Great comments in the post. Interestingly they seem to have sold out to a VC backed company. In the comments David Geller makes it clear that there was no option pool for staff so the winnings were only divided by two. Selfish entrepreneurs?
However the comments also make it clear how many people want to build a business and respect those who have achieved it. Good to be part of the club even if only once!
Prof Gail Dines writes an interesting article in The Guardian titled: All authentic desire is rendered plastic by this multi billion-dollar industry.
“It is no accident that the International Consumer Electronics Show takes place in Las Vegas at the exact same time as the expo. Porn has helped drive the technologies that expand its own market. According to Jonathan Coopersmith, a historian of technology, porn has proven to be a reliable, highly profitable market segment that has accelerated the development of media technologies, from VCRs and DVDs to file-sharing networks, video on demand for cable, streamed video over the internet for PCs, and, most recently, video for mobile phones. Video uses vast quantities of data, and the demand for porn has driven the development of core cross-platform technologies for data compression, search, transmission and micro-payments. File-sharing networks such as Kazaa, Gnutella and Limewire are better known for music, but are widely used for porn video files too.”
But just like at CES, it is money that drives the industry. Guess it was ever thus. But never once have I heard any mention of the porno industry in the Cambridge Cluster. And long may that remain so.
Fred Wilson picks up on a post by Michael Mace on Blackberry maker RIM. The debate on the future of RIM is great but the approach Mike uses would be a great teaching tool and applies to lots of other companies and industries. I wonder if he were able to obtain the exact figures from RIM if it would make any difference.
Picking up a point made at Leweb Paris 2010, I wonder what percentage of the wealth of the two founders of RIM is still in RIM stock? That might concentrate their minds. But from a learning perspective, is it better that they have 100% or 0%? Somewhere in the middle but where? What would you do as the founder? As an investor?
The lesson is that technology keeps moving along and you cannot blame the academics behind most start-ups in the Cambridge Cluster for selling out early. The only critics are the people who have never started anything. But if the significant shareholders of a company, as in the Cambridge Cluster, are academics, their main drive it to climb the academic pole and a few million made on the side gives them cudos and something to talk about at the High Table!
It is better not to be the rabbit caught in the headlights, but if you are, which way do you jump and how far? Or just turn tail and keep running?
The Cambridge Evening News reports that Hypertag has gone down with a creditors meeting arranged. Hypertage made posters interactive but with geolocation and smart phones, the world is interactive not just posters. Nice people buy Hypertag never got much traction. A loss for NESTA who provided the funding. Just reminds you that not all Cambridge companies are bought by Apple and Google. It is tough being an entrepreneur(s).
Google takes over Cambridge, UK, company Phonetic Arts and as seems usual with a company connected to Cambridge University (a founder is a professor) there are not financial details. There is no indication if Cambridge Enterprise is involved so presumably there were no patents. Funding came from Max Bautin of IQ Capital. Great to have return to Cambridge, UK, investors.
Phonetic Arts allows sound to change in a similar way to graphics. This is an idea we had for Tonemaker nearly ten years ago but did not execute.The price will come out in Cambridge and look forward to hearing it on the grapevine at a Christmas party. Wonder if all 14 people will be moving to Silicon Valley or whether they will be the nucleus of Google Research in Cambridge, UK? See below, guess they will be moving to London.
From IQ Capital:Mike Cohen, the manager of speech technology at Google, said “…Phonetic Arts’ team of researchers and engineers work at the cutting edge of speech synthesis, delivering technology that generates natural computer speech from small samples of recorded voice. There’s a particular focus right now in the U.K. on technology and innovation, and we’re delighted to be deepening our investment in the country with this acquisition. We already have a strong engineering center in London and look forward to welcoming Phonetic Arts to the team. We are excited about their technology, and while we don’t have plans to share yet, we’re confident that together we’ll move a little faster towards that Star Trek future”.
Max Bautin, Managing Partner of IQ Capital and a Phonetic Arts board member, worked with Phonetic Arts on the exit. He added “We’re delighted with this exit, which follows the sale of ImSense earlier this year. While IQ Capital Fund is continuing to actively invest and plans to make two to four further investments in the next 12 months, we are very pleased with these early successes, proving our investment model. I’d like to thank all the team of Phonetic, and especially founder CEO Paul Taylor, for their very hard work over the last two and a half years, as well as Stephen Young and David Braben, the two ‘IQ Angels’ who were of tremendous help to both us and the company since initial investment.”
Hope that the two angels did very well!!
Hat tip: Paul Hughes on Twitter
