BLN News – The BLNN

The BLNN brings you curated news about entrepreneurial business that you might find interesting.

Clicking on a headline takes you to alternative (and more indepth) source for the story.

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Biggest company to adopt cloud is former rat catching Rentokil

Adoption of SaaS and cloud across mainstream organisations takes step forward as Rentokil adopts Google Apps for reasons of simplicity and cost.

Some things are best FREE – like The Ashes. Yay!

On a night that England's footballers lost a meaningless match in the Ukraine that few people saw as it was only aired online via subscription comes news that the 2013 Ashes Series will be seen on free to air TV. The Daily Telegraph seems to suggest that this is partly a result of government ministers wanting to punish the evil Murdoch Empire for being commercial (actually for the Sun abandoning their support of Labour). That and it might win them some votes. Good news anyway.
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Big rich college buys more prime land. Hoorah!

Trinity College, Cambridge, rumoured to be the richest of the Cambridge Colleges has bought into the Millennium Dome project. Trinity College once owned key parts of the land that was needed to build the Channel Tunnel. It has an extraordinary portfolio of land and it has been suggested that you could walk from Cambridge to Oxford without stepping off Trinity ground. While you would want to is beyond me.
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Times thinks media’s walking wounded are fighting it out. Misses point.

The Times is confused this morning about the battle being fought around paid and free content. Dan Sabbagh points out that some papers are trying to make a go of it with FREE - The Evening Standard, Stylist and Shortlist amongst others. Meanwhile, other organisations, (News Corp included) are going down the route of PAID - through Pay Walls and Paid for one off content - the most obvious and visible example this week being the meaningless England Ukraine World Cup Qualifier. Apart from the absurdity of the notion of England's Football Fans gathering in pubs to watch on their lap tops, this argument, like many around this subject, seems to assume that you can only be one or another. Why we think this is confused thinking.
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News International rolls out member club

News International launches Times+ as a paid for (£50 per year) loyalty card for readers. A trial Culture+ card has gained 90,000 members in the first year. Katie Vanneck-Smith, MD of News International's Customer Direct said, "We are moving away from the traditional model of volume in favour of developing more direct relationships with our customers based on their interests and passions." More evidence that publishers understand their businesses a lot more than some commentators might think. http://bit.ly/ES0BgDl
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=44432&c=1&dsq=18555172#comment-18555172

Martin Sorrell backs pay walls. Why?

You got to be pretty confident that your content is actually worth paying or if you are going to charge for it. How will a newspaper differenetiate between something that is worth paying for and something that is just another recycled press release?

Dell ships laptops with Arm chips and Linux OS

Dell, the world's number 2 PC manufacturer is releasing the Latitude Z, a silly name for a machine that runs Windows 7 under most conditions but Linux on boot up so that users can use the machine instantly instead of waiting for Windows to boot. While good news for UK based Arm Holdings this is clearly bad news for the world's hot beverage companies who have been able to rely on the slow booting of PCs for consumers to make (and drink) an extra beverage. However, it may be good news for those fighting climate change as computers can now be switched off at night in the knowledge that they will start when you switch them on instead of 20 minutes later.
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Small minded bureaucrat of the week

Edward Atkin, who made £225 million for his family by selling baby feeding bottle company Avent wants to invest £20 million of his own money in an incubator to support innovative entrepreneurial businesses in south Cambridgeshire and rural Suffolk. This is not a part of the world that is exactly teeming with entrepreneurial support activities.

Gareth Jones, head of planning at South Cambridgeshire District Council doesn't think it would be a good idea to have too much entrepreneurial industry in such a rural area. So he has refused him permission.

Well done Gareth! Great work. You must be very proud of your mighty achievements in protecting those potato fields from the ravages of entrepreneurship.
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123 Systems, developers & makers of Lithium-Ion batteries, files for $175 million IPO

123 Systems looks like it is making a strong debut on NASDAQ this morning. 123 Systems was founded in 2001 and makes battery systems for electric vehicles. This is a proper technology IPO. Any company that is named after the Hamaker force constant - used to calculate the attractive and repulsive forces between particles at nano dimensions - is probably hard core tech... 123 Systems equation

The BLN Partners with The Guardian for their UK Cleantech Summit

The BLN is delighted to announce that it is partnering with The Guardian for their forthcoming UK Cleantech Summit on the 23rd November - see The Guardian UK Cleantech Summit for further details.
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Aquamarine Power closes £10 million funding on way to £50 million

Aquamarine Power announced it had closed a first round of £10 million funding from existing and new investors in UK and Ireland on the way to closing the £50 million it requires to get to commercialisation in 2014. In a previous (presumably seed) round, Scottish and Southern Energy and Sigma Capital invested a total of £7.8 million according to the company's press release. No new investors were identified by the company.

Tweetmeme catching Twitter up

London-based Tweetmeme is rapidly catching up with Twitter's users if this chart is to be believed. It shot from less than 10,000 unique viewers per month to 14.6 millionin the US alone in August. Don't believe everything you believe in the press though, Tweetmeme has not quite raised $650 million in funding - closer to two orders of magnitude less in fact.
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eCommera raises £5 million series A

Michael Ross, founder of online lingerie vendor Figleaves.com, has raised £5 million of Series A funding for his latest venture eCommera. The money comes from former cleantech investor Frog Capital and Tom Hunter's West Coast Capital. eCommera helps high street retailers including Asda, House of Fraser, Habitat and Hamleys to run their online presence. The company turned over £4 million last year. Mike will be sharing his experiences of fund raising at a forthcoming BLN CEO Tales event on the evening of 19th October. For more information: CEO Tales.

Hair straightener bid to boost PE

Could hair straighteners really solve the problems of Alchemy? Apparently not but if a council pays £800 for six sets of straighteners, perhaps there just might be some other ways to reduce public sector spending.

eBooks to make authors soulless

How could anything make Dan Brown more soulless? eBooks will have a go - apparently...

European CIO sentiment improves

Merrill Lynch's latest CIO survey reports that sentiment among European CIOs has improved since their previous March April survey. UK CIOs are reported to be the least pessimistic in Europe. There is however no great expectation that budgets will be unleashed in 2010. European CIO sentiment improves - Merrill Lynch Report

Displaylink raises $8 million from existing investors

Congratulations to Displaylink the second Cambridge, UK based hardware company to close a funding round in the past week or so. Displaylink makes cool USB widgets that allow you to plug more than one screen into your computer. Existing investors including Atlas Venture, Balderton, DFJ Esprit are believed to have invested the entire $8 million into the round. Displaylink has now received over $ 51 million in funding and is viewed by many as a prime acquistion target.

Nujira raises further £10 million from existing investors and Environmental Technologies Fund

The Environmental Technologies Fund joins existing investors (Amadeus, DFJ Esprit, Mitsubishi and Bank Invest) to put a further £10 million into ambitious power amplifier company, Nujira. Funds are for market expansion and bring the total raised by the company to £ 26 million. Tim Haynes, Nujira founder and CEO expects this to take the company to break even in a rapidly expanding market.
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Nobel Peace Prize winning father of Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, dies aged 95

"We still have a large number of miserable, hungry people and this contributes to world instability. Human misery is explosive, and you better not forget that". Norman Borlaug
Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1970 for his work on alleviating world hunger by developing high yielding dwarf strains of cereal.

Inventor of Segway targets clean water

Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, is aiming to tackle the problem of clean water across the globe. His Slingshot is billed as a low power system, but is hugely expensive to produce and needs a reliable supply of electricity to work. This is a huge global problem that will require several solutions. Michael Pritchard's Lifesaver system takes an even simpler, self powered approach to the problem. At least users of the Slingshot system will look less ridiculous than Segway users.
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Carrier pigeon quicker than broadband in South Africa

A carrier pigeon beat Telkom's broadband service to transfer 4Gb of data over a distance of 60 miles.

Guardian Cleantech 100 shows little change in UK Cleantech

The Guardian published their take on the Global Cleantech 100 companies today in association with Cleantech. 13 UK companies made it onto the list:
  • ACAL Energy
  • Alertme
  • Arvia Technology
  • CamSemi
  • Exosect
  • G24i
  • Marine Current Turbines
  • Metalysis
  • Nujira
  • Pelamis Wave Power
  • QuantaSol
  • ResponsiveLoad (RLTech)
  • Solarcentury
Congratulations to all, this is a wide ranging and well researched list. However, this is a worry for the venture capital industry given the huge amount of funding committed to the sector over the past five years. With few exceptions, (and the odd business that has rebadged itself as 'cleantech'), this same list could have been written two or even four years ago. We have always said that there is a fundamental issue with venture investment in the space as VC investors typically want to exit a business within 5 years. The energy industry itself has much longer adoption cycles so it is not surprising that much of the 'cleantech' funds are focused on investing in companies like Nujira who, whilst being a fantastic business, is hardly going to make a dent in the world's CO2 emissions. It is adopted by customers because it saves the money and is a more effective solution to an existing problem. The planet should worry if it is relying on investors in taking risks to sort out these problems.
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Old people (over 40s), found the most successful companies

Contrary to popular belief in the venture capital community, experienced and wiser heads are the most effective company founders.

Moon landings faked. Don’t believe everything you read in the news…

So much for the concepts of fact checking and generating your own stories. Two Bangladeshi newspapers rerun Onion's story about Neil Armstrong confessing that moon landings were fake. Oh dear. In press we trust.

Jon Moulton walks out of Alchemy.

Jon Moulton, one of most experienced, sarcastic, insightful and effective VCs in Europe walks out of Alchemy. No! No! No! Please don't go. You made money, told it how it is and were one of the few real characters in the business.