The event has been organised by Angel News with the aim of putting experienced professionals directly in touch with exciting growing businesses. I suppose that in many ways I am well qualified to tell people about the transition from the corporate world to that of a new business start-up. What it’s like and how it’s different.

Preparing for the event has set me thinking about the major differences. Here is how I see it:

1. Culture. Status and career development are important at a large corporate, in a relatively low risk environment. This counts for nothing at a start-up, and why should it. An effective culture at a start-up is critical, and it’s not about introducing processes like performance management as teams are small, it’s about getting clarity of purpose and energy.

2. Focus. The biggest difference, I think. Corporates are about executing the business model, engineering effective processes, management and administration. The focus is very different at a start-up, it’s about identifying unfulfilled market and customer needs, creative / innovative solutions, hypotheses testing, business model testing, customer development and agile development. Instead of traditional accounting, it’s business metrics and instead of a regular paycheck it’s about effective cashflow management and fund raising. Once you have nailed the business idea you can scale the business, it’s then that you move toward the effective management of processes that large corporates focus on.

The positives of life in a start-up include:

• You get to create something new and different
• Every day is different – a totally different lifestyle
• Learn new skills and meet new people
• Opportunity to realise a capital gain
• Develop a new outlook on life

But it’s not for everyone, and life is very different for me these days. Probably the biggest factors are uncertainty / ambiguity and your attitude to risk. If this appeals, why not come along?

For the kids, Tutorhub combines the one-one attention of a home tutor with the speed and convenience of just looking it up on the internet. To start with, we’re focusing on maths tutoring, but we’ll be adding further subjects as we go.

What’s in it for you? Well, the bottom line is that for the pilot period of two months, your children will have immediate access to a whole bunch of maths tutors, for free. In a nutshell, they post their tricky question on Tutorhub, it’s picked up by one of our tutors who can best answer it and they can start a ‘chat’ session’ to get the problem solved. Once solved, the session ends and you can rate the tutor on how well they answered the question.

For your peace of mind, all of the tutors are CRB checked and all the sessions are recorded for review later. The kids will find the technology very familiar and it means you don’t have to answer those tricky questions they got for homework that night.

What do we want out of it? We want you to try it out and let us know what the kids think and hat you think. At the end, we’ll have three questions for you: what did you like about it, what did you dislike about it and what would you do differently.

If you feel that you would like to help, please email me on jon@jivatechnology.com or call me on 07917162584.

The Quiet Man

Many businesses are choosing to ignore social media in the same way that John Wayne ignored Red. If you ignore it, it might go away – or it’s a battle for another day.

Many businesses just have not woken up to how social media can help them do the most difficult thing today, in a world where services and products are seen as mere commodities, engage with their customers.

It provides low cost and high impact ways of reaching them. There are four main ways, I believe:

1. Product Research. Your customers are your best R&D tool. Collecting their feedback and engaging in a discussion with them can give you vital feedback on what’s good and bad about your offer. Simple searching on Twitter allows businesses to see what people are saying about them, and provides the potential for two way dialogue.
2. Community Building. Who doesn’t want a loyal group of customers? Grouping them together can allow them to share their interests. Facebook has over 300m users, and many businesses now have Fan Pages.
3. Customer Service. Without spending big bucks on marketing, businesses can engage with their customers on a new level, creating a contact channel for customers. Companies such as Zappos already have all of their employees using Twitter.
4. Marketing and Promotion. There are new routes to find customers. Channels such as Facebook and Twitter as well as well written company blogs can attract new customers. Facebook is also a marketing channel – one that I have used – which enables you to target small customer group niches.

Historically businesses broadcast their messages – technology now allows two-way customer dialogue. It surprises me that most businesses ignore it.

The key take-away is that what really matters is the increased accessibility of people online, not just the information online. We totally agree with this, and are working hard on delivering collaboration websites, and ways for people on a one to one basis – to communicate instantly.

I will take the liberty of quoting verbatim some of the key points from this article, as they explain it better than me:

Why is this important?

To understand this, consider the difference between Web Search and Social Search.

With Web Search, it’s possible to find countless long-hidden facts and figures which [a small minority of] internet users have at some point published on the web:  just type in a few keywords, and a Web Search engine will return the top results from among the billions of pages that constitute the web.  That’s great for queries about objective information that isn’t particularly timely, and which doesn’t need to be personally or contextually relevant.

With Social Search, it’s possible to find a person who has the information you are looking for: just type in your question in natural language, and a Social Search engine will connect you to someone with the right knowledge and experience to answer your question.  You get an answer in a few minutes, and can have a quick back-and-forth conversation with the answerer if there’s something you’d like to follow up on.  That’s just what is needed for queries that have a subjective element, or when you want information first-hand from someone you can trust.

The key point here is that often what you’re after isn’t static content — rather, it’s an interaction with someone who can help.  With the Social Search paradigm, online content is used as just an index of what its author knows about; the engine uses this index to find the person you should connect with for your question.  This becomes pretty compelling if we remember that the amount of information in peoples’ heads positively dwarfs the amount of authored information online:  just think what a small fraction of everything you know you have published on the web.  Yet everyone (not just those who blog a lot) have knowledge and experience that is valuable to share.  By using the web as an index of people, Social Search lets you tap into absolutely anything that anyone knows… in the theoretical limit.

How does this relate to the Real-Time Web?

There are three touch points for Social Search in the new real-time information landscape:

1. The index of people is always up-to-date
   
   What makes Social Search possible is the vast amount of profile and social graph data that people have online (since this is what the engine uses to figure out who would be a good match to answer a question).  With the real-time web, this information can stay up-to-date automatically, so that you can connect with other people to talk about your current experiences.

1. More people are online more often
   
   In the real-time web era, people are increasingly available online:  they are onIM, they are on Facebook, they are Twittering, they are using their iPhones.  This means that a Social Search service like Aardvark can easily see who might be available to answer a question in the moment and reach out to them… on any of these platforms.

   If you want to tap into your extended social network — tens of thousands of friends-of-friends, school and work connections, and such — we’ve found that it’s useful to have a service play the role of social intermediary here.

2. Filtered channels are high-value
   
   The flood of online and real-time data has quickly become overwhelming to most people.  If you broadcast a question out to your entire network, that’s a lot of spam you’re creating as you add to the din; and over time, as we waste peoples’ attention, they are less attentive to these noisy broadcast channels.

   The alternative is to submit your question to a Social Search engine:  it will choose the few people who are most likely to answer, and contact them directly; in essence, it provides a kind of filter for your network.  It’s clear in the feedback we’ve gotten from Aardvark users that people are grateful to have this more personalized filtered channel — and as a consequence, they are much more responsive and thoughtful when they do choose to answer a question.

Put all of this together, and the result is a completely different kind of experience than anything available before.  Real-time information hookups!  With people you trust! Satisfying for the asker, gratifying for the answerer!

And this isn’t some futuristic dream — it’s happening right now.  In the time it took you to read this piece, a huge variety of questions were answered on Aardvark, based on connections made from profile data.  People really like helping other people!

In sum, the Real-Time People Web is the way that the Real-Time Web becomes personal:  Because often you don’t just want to hear what people are saying — you want to hear what someone is saying to you.

So we have created three new Q&A websites to help:

- School children get help with their homework, from other children, tutors and teachers

- Prospective tutors can get advice on the business and issues surrounding tutoring.

We hope that everyone finds them useful. If you want to check them out, look at:

Stuckspace.com
Homeworkextra.com
Tutorhub.org

At Jiva we have a series of offers which adopt a freemium business model, whereby you offer some content free of charge but back this up with paid for services.

I find myself going back time and time again to the seminal article by Kevin Kelly “Better Than Free”. He describes what he terms the Eight Generatives Better Than Free. A generative thing is something that cannot be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time, and can be sold.

Confused? Well, lets look at what people pay for in turn:

1. Immediacy: getting something you want as soon as its available
2. Personalisation: something that is bespoke to our personal needs
3. Interpretation: explaining and making sense of complex things
4. Authenticity: so you know that its reliable and trustworthy
5. Accessibility: readily findable on the web
6. Embodiment: available online, or as a document or other physical form
7. Patronage: people want to pay creators, we have to make it easy for them to do so
8. Findability: no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen

Makes sense now, doesn’t it! Thank you Mr Kelly.