This weekend was an interesting one in Edinburgh. Firstly, I went to hear Joseph Stiglitz speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Secondly, there is a highly active climate change activist protest ongoing, focusing on targeting RBS (the Royal Bank of Scotland).
Joseph Stiglitz’s arguments were pretty much the same as you might hear from any [...]
We’re so keen to get into the investing of our profits into projects focused on creating social good, or starting/growing social enterprises. It will be amazing to sit and talk to people who have big dreams and a little bit of funding quickly deployed can make all the difference. We’re finding as we adventure into [...]
The most amazing story of the last 24 hours has been the rise to fame by James Cunningham, a 17 year old from Dundee in Scotland. He created an app for Twitter called Twifficiency that calculated basically how good a tweeter you were. It had one minor flaw – the results being automatically tweeted to [...]
Working long hours is something those who run a business are often accused of, and regularly advised not to do. The advice goes something like this – your problems will be there in the morning, it’s bad for your health, you make bad decisions when you are tired, it’s not sustainable, it’s not a good [...]
Having Seven Men as our name often means we can Google interesting stories including our title. Another one came up today with the BBC story of the sale of the most remote pub in the UK. Buried in the article is a story about 7 men who once tried to raid land. Now I’m not [...]
It’s Edinburgh Festival month and the city is flooded with hundreds of thousands of tourists. The main event is very institutionalised, but Edinburgh Fringe is a big attraction, with hundreds of shows around the city. How do these shows make people aware? Strangely enough, largely through flyer distribution. When you walk up the main street [...]
Having the role for Elixir of Investment Director, I get to source out deals and meet startups. It always raises the questions of what makes a good startup. Lots of people say “back the person, not the idea” and I think that’s true. To an extent.
It’s certainly true in the VC space and probably in [...]
A few links that have caught my attention over the last few days:
- Business Incubators and why they are interesting again. Plays in nicely to what we are doing with Elixir Incubation. Meanwhile, angels are feeling the strain.
- Governments seem to be wising up to using tech to raise revenues – e.g. India and Facebook [...]
One of our business startups, Expediens, which is our lifestyle management / personal outsourcing / small business outsourcing operation has had a great month.
We’ve been asked to complete each of these tasks – Expediens list of services Jul 2010
It’s the 18th month of operation (and probably 3-4 other months of coding/planning/pre-launch) and it has reached [...]
Since we started out we’ve been made aware of some of the many silly UK laws that are in place (that lots of businesses seem to just ignore):
If you have a limited company, you need to display at the entrance to the building the name of the company.
If you send emails you must put your [...]
Name: Duncan