CandidCapital offers comment and advice about venture capital, angel investment and raising finance for growth businesses. The site also has articles, resources and the complete text of "Raising Finance - A Handbook for Managers" a guide to how to plan and succeed in raising capital for your business. The blogs section has views and comment from CandidCapital's editorial team and readers.
User loginSubscribe |
blogsNESTA's 'Atlantic Drift' - Only Part of The StoryNESTA, the lottery endowment fund charged with raising entrepreneurial activity in the UK, recently published a report comparing the UK and US VC industries.
Tech Syndrome - The Cambridge and/or European Disease?Why is it that Cambridge, and even Europe as a whole, still doesn't really get the idea of market-led innovation? Psonar, the cloud music service of which I'm co-founder, was lucky enough to be selected for the Discovering Start-ups event run in Cambridge last week. The panel of judges was impressive with a cross-section of Europe's VC, telecoms and tech cluster elite. The 22 businesses showcased were of varying degrees of maturity across a range of technologies. It was a well-run event and we had three approaches from potential investors. Gamekeeper to Poacher RevisitedWe've come a long way with Psonar since I last blogged about it in 2009 and I recently pitched the business to the angel panel at the Cambridge Meerkats & Avatars event in September. Glass Half EmptyWhy is it so much harder for UK web start-ups to get massive attention from the media & blogosphere than start-ups in Silicon Valley? Rory Cellan-Jones' blog post yesterday about the challenges that UK tech start-ups face getting attention, relative to those in Silicon Valley, got me thinking about the differences between the UK and US. How To Look Good As A VC...Re-posted from Tom Foremski in Silicon Valley Watcher: Georges van Hoegaerden from The Venture Company pokes some fun at venture capitalists trying to look good while industry tackles some hard truths... The following extracts are from: VC roast; how to take Venture for a ride: - You give speeches to the world about free-markets from atop a comfortable perch of the most closed, dark, unregulated, in-transparent and proprietary market mechanism in the financial industry. UK Music - In The Trough of Despair?The music industry needs innovative business and service models to meet the needs of consumers who are fickle, demanding and, unfortunately, used to content that's free - including digital music. Shouldn't the industry be speaking with one voice as legislators tussle over the Digital Economy Bill?
All music free?Do UK VCs Value Design-led Businesses?David Sainsbury, the former Science & Innovation Minister, visited the Design Council earlier this month to attend a seminar looking at the impact of design on technology businesses. Blimp considers the lessons that Lord Sainsbury might take away from the seminar.
MIDEM - Music Industry Suffers The BluesI was lucky to spend five days last week at MIDEM, the international music conference held in Cannes.
Apparently, the state of the conference reflected that of the industry - 8,000 delegates this year compared 12,000 last. The overriding concerns expressed in all the keynotes and panel sessions were:
Why Doesn't UK Venture Capital Work? Part 1 - The Lingering Death of ICFC (aka 3i).UK venture capital investment activity - investment in early-stage companies - fell in 2008 to its lowest level for three years. Despite the Government's announcement of the £150M UK Innovation Fund in June this year, it is the culmination of a process in which investors have become increasingly disillusioned with UK venture investment. This three part post seeks to expose the factors that have led to this disillusionment and to ask whether there is a credible future for commercial, early-stage venture investment or is it destined to remain a public sector activity. Part 1 looks at the role and legacy of 3i in UK venture capital. From the Foundation of ICFC to Present Day 3iWalking the Talk and a TightropeIt's a nerve-wracking business; waiting to see whether a new web service can grow virally! We started to open up the Psonar website to users from the wild last week (perhaps not-so-wild, since most had come via mailing to our own and friends' Facebook contacts). Nonetheless, the majority are users whom we don't know directly and who haven't been aware of Psonar previously. We've been letting them in in batches, typically 50 at a time, to make sure that we don't overwhelm the system and can identify and rectify any problems without a catastrophic loss of service. The data looks encouraging:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence. |
SearchFunding TechnologyBritain Forty Years On |
Technorati Tags: 
