FreshNetworks Blog

Our last two days on Web Mission 09 ended with a visit to Web2.0 Expo and a couple of great parties (or networking events as I prefer to call them when talking to my wife).

Web2.0 Expo was definitely quiter than I had imagined and the feedback from people who’d been before was that it failed to live up to previous years. Having said that, despite the recession they still managed to get 8,000 Web-heads along.

Some of the best talks included:

1. Content Strategy, What’s real, what’s relevant - a good reminder that content strategy is an important part of any site, from a blog to a fully-blown enterprise social network or community. By Kristina Halvorsen
2. Effective Twitter for Communication and Product integration – including how companies are incorporating Twitter into their products
3. Designing Social Websites, Christina Wodkte – a few tips on how to plan for and design an online comunity or social website
4. What Would the Community Manager do? – Anyone who helps educate around the importance of professional community management is good in my book.

On thursday night the Web Mission crew was lucky enough to be invited to Michael and Xochi Birch’s fantastic new house [founders of Bebo]. If you ever wondered what life’s like after you sell a company for $850M, then you should have been there. It was an amazing place with fantastic views over the bay.

It was a relatively small gathering, yet among a crowd that included Craigslist’s CEO Jim Buckmaster and other notable Valley entrepreneurs, I happened to bump into two FreshMinds One’s to Watch. In case you don’t know, our sister business runs a recruitment programme every year in the UK to uncover the country’s most proimising young talent. We interview thousands of graduates across 10 universities to identify a small list of Ones to Watch. Often they are picked out by their peers as being special because they have done something truely exceptional at university. So it is perhaps not by coincidence that two of them (who quite seperately moved to SF to launch start-ups) happened to be at the party.

For our final night on tour we were invited to the British Consule General’s house in San Francisco. This was yet another excellent opportunity to network organised by UK Trade and Investment. Attendees ranged from successful entrepreneurs (e.g. Max Levchin, founder of Slide) to VCs, press and Silicon Valley “connectors”. I think we all felt that we’d made a few more connections that will help propel our companies forward.

Conclusion and Thanks
The Web Mission was a fantastic way to get under the skin of Silicon Valley in a short-time, to make some very useful connections and to share experiences with other UK entrepreneurs. Thank you to everyone who was involved in making it happen. In particular:

• Oli Barratt
• James Lawn, Polecat
• Orrick, an excellent law firm for helping UK firms do business in America
• Dilhani Palehepitiya, Oracle
• UK Trade and Investment
• Susan Best, of Best PR
• Michael and Xochi Birch
• Alex van Someren

After spending yesterday morning at Plug and Play, the Web Mission 09 team spent the afternoon meeting with some Silicon Valley investors. Each firm had a five-minute slot in which to pitch their idea. It certainly felt rather dragon’s-den like, with the key difference being the entrepreneurs on Web Mission 09 tend to be running businesses which are already successful and have clients, products and traction in their market.

The highlight of the pitching came from Simon Campbell of ViaPost. He went for a full-on re-enactment of Steve Ballmer’s famous “I love this company” speech and it certainly got some attention.

That evening we had a night off from formal events. I managed to get tickets to see Gavin DeGraw play the Great American Music Hall. It’s a lovely venue and proved to be a great night out. Oh and if you’re a DeGraw fan, you can hear his new album early on Spotify, the web’s best music service.

This morning was one of the most discussed sessions of the week: a full day at Oracle getting an insider’s view on their Enterprise2.0 developments and plans. Highlights included finding out about Beehive, Oracle’s Collaborative Enterprise Platform, an insight into their Social CRM offering and one-to-one meetings with the Global head of M&A.

Beehive is a central plank in Oracle’s social and collaboration strategy. It provides enterprise customers with team collaboration tools (blogs, discussions, tags and wikis) and tools for synchronous collaboration (conferencing, presence, instant chat and voice chat). They are pitching it against a host of Microsoft tools and claimed that a deployment for a 5,000 person firm would save a company 54% on hardware costs and 70% on software if buying Microsoft.

I had to rush back early to San Fran. I’d left it a little late and decided that rather then wait for a cab I should walk to the train station. Crossing over yet another 5-lane dual carriage-way I noticed a sign to San Fran and decided, for the first time in 15 years, to see what would happen if I tried to hitch a lift back to the city. Within ten seconds a car stopped for me.

By co-incidence it was driven by a software developer who built the Imbee, a Social Network for kids with strong parental supervision capabilities. Even more of a co-incidence, Imbee, like our own community platform, is based on Drupal, the open-source modular framework and content management system. So we spent a happy 35 minutes discussing the 100,000 strong Drupal developer community. He even dropped me off at my door. Thank you.

Read all of Charlie’s WebMission 09 blog posts here.

I’m four days into my visit to the Web Mission 09 conference, and things just keep getting better! Today we went to ‘Plug and Play’ – a business incubator based in Silicon Valley. For those of you that haven’t heard of business incubators, they’re basically offices that host and nurture young start ups. There is nothing like it in the UK, and seeing one in action was a great opportunity for those of us based in Europe. Plug and Play has three locations in California; we visited the main site in Silicon Valley, which hosts up to 50 start ups. I can say without any hesitation that for those starting-up this seems to be the perfect way to fast track your development, raise funds, make connections, and ultimately create a successful business.

Being based in The Valley obviously increases your chances of succeeding, and Plug and Play provides loads of services and support to those who have come here. We were talked through these offerings by Saeed Amini, the larger-than-life President of Plug and Play, who before Plug and Play built up ALPS into a $150M water bottling business. Having found his own success, he founded Plug and Play to help other aspiring entrepreneurs and start-ups track their success. Judging from what I saw, he’s created a great facility that will do just that.

If you’re wondering how to get involved – it’s pretty straight forward. For 3 months rent at the facility, you get:

• Loads of business connections
• Up to 30 meetings in that time
• 2 networking events a week
• Licensing, partnerships or M&A with the corporate partners
• Introductions to VCs
• Advice from entrepreneurs in residence
• Data
• IT consulting

Plug and Play is reaching out to European companies at the moment to provide them with a greater chance of succeeding in the US. Europeans can come over on a work visa for one or two years, or on a business development tour for a few months as long as you’re not getting paid. Alternatively, once you have a company established in the UK for 12 months, you can get an L1 to work here.

Still hesitating? Just think about the community of 220 start-ups that did and increased their chance of success three times over; and don’t’ forget the $700M that has been raised so far. Sixteen of the firms have also been invested in by Saeed himself. On average, 5 start ups are funded a month, there are 60 own investments and over 100 individual angel start ups – so you’d be in good company.

With that bit of inspiration behind me i’m gearing up to head to the Web 2.0 Expo tomorrow where it’ll be social media and more social media. Can’t wait to chat to more people about the FreshNetworks take on the many benefits of online communities. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Read all of Charlie’s WebMission 09 blog posts here.

I’m just dashing between events, but want to keep everyone up to speed on my Web Mission 09 adventures out here in California.

Today we enjoyed a fantastic brunch at the penthouse apartment of Susan Best. With great views accross the city, this was an excellent place to mingle with San Francisco journalists and investors. My photo doesn’t quite capture the view – but at least you get a sense of the event.

Susan runs Best PR. They represent a range of great clients – the most exciting for our purposes being craiglist, a great example of social media.

I also got the opportunity to sit down with francis zadan from Corebridge. Francis runs a business that’s perfect for these cost cutting days. By providing a link between corporate telecom and IT systems his business provides a few neat telco features to clients and also cut costs – in particular for overseas calls. It’s a bit like an international phone card that routes calls in a more efficient manner. And that’s what i love about the business model. In addition to a ‘we can add functionality that will increase the value of your work’ there is a very clear ROI cost saving message that he can take to clients: ‘you’ll have paid for the system in 3 months’. Its a great message and something we’ve also worked hard at.

Whilst we think the most valuable benefit of an online community is in long-term engaement and brand building, it can be hard to predict exact outcomes for each brand. As a result, some clients who believe in the potential of a community, often buy  based on the ROI case of a solid benefit. For us that can be reduced support costs from user-to-user engagement or replacement savings of a real-world focus group when using a community for research. Food for thought…

That’s all from me for now – more tomorrow!

Read all of Charlie’s WebMission 09 blog posts here.

The Web Mission 09 kicked off last night with a party hosted by GPBullhound and TechCrunch. It was a good opportunity to meet some of the other firms on the trip. And also an opportunity to meet the local UK Trade and Investments team (UKTI) in San Francisco.

One of the firms that came last year, Huddle, is here again and I caught up with Alastair Mitchell the CEO last night. For him, the highlight of last years WebMission 2008 was a meeting with Linkedin. The meeting led directly to Huddle becoming one of only nine partners to launch on the Linkedin Application Network.

Huddle is a team collaboration and project management application. It’s a great way to coordinate a remote team, track progress on a project and share ideas and files. Email sucks when it comes to managing a group and sharing ideas. Huddle is a simple platform for collaboratig on projects and Alastiar is hoping it will see off email usage for these sorts of tasks.

It’s a UK web start-up that’s really gaining some traction and clearly one of the success stories of WebMission. I especially like it because the use of the web as a driver of collaboration and working with Social Media tools to bring people together is also exactly what we at FreshNetworks care about.

Off now to our second event, brunch hosted by Susan Best.

Read all of Charlie’s WebMission 09 blog posts here.

I’m really looking forward to tomorrow’s trip to San Francisco as part of Web Mission 09. We’ve just been sent the itinerary and a great agenda has been organised by UKTI.

We start tomorrow with an early morning VIP reception at Virgin Atlantic’s Heathrow Lounge before hopping aboard the flight.

On arrival, TechCrunch and GPBullHound are hosting us for the first of a series of drinks receptions.

Sunday is a full day of relaxing into the SanFran way of life with a little networking thrown in.

On Monday we’re heading over to the GooglePlex and then on to Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Headquarters.

Tuesday is a day of meeting and pitching to VCs and on Wednesday we’re spending the day at Oracle’s Headquarters. Thursday is our day at Web2.0 Expo followed by a reception hosted by the British Consul General in SF.

And amidst all this we also have a load of other meetings arranged, dinners booked and parties to attend. I suspect sleeping on the flight home will be a breeze.

Before embarking on this sort of trip, it’s never clear exactly what one might get out of it. But I think I’m hoping to learn a lot from what’s going on in The Valley, to develop some new ideas for our business and to make some great connections.

Most of all I am looking forward to spending a week with other entrepreneurs. I always find that time spent among entrepreneurs is incredibly valuable. It invariably raises my personal level of ambition, leaving me inspired to achieve more in less time.

I’ll be trying to blog on a daily basis throughout the trip and you can read all of our WebMission 09 blog posts here.

The exciting news at FreshNetworks today is that we’ve been selected to be part of Web Mission 09, a delegation of 20 of the best Web 2.0 companies in the UK and Ireland meeting the many inspiring people and supportive Web 2.0 networks which exist in Silicon Valley. It’s a great endeavour and a great opportunity for us and the other companies selected as part of the Mission.

For the team at FreshNetworks, this is just one of the trips we’re making to the US and across Europe this Spring. Innovation and sharing and learning with others is important in digital marketing and in social media. Things are moving so fast and in so many ways that it’s good to take time out, see what others a re doing and share our own experiences.

Charlie, our CEO, will be out in San Francisco for us from March 28th to April 3rd, and is looking forward to talking online communities and social media day in and day out. He’s also going to be blogging about Web Mission 2009, his experiences, the people he meets and what he learns. So we can all gain a little bit from what he discovers while he’s out there. Look out for our Web Mission 09 series, and Charlie’s posts form the March 28th to April 3rd.

Follow Charlie’s trip: Web Mission 09

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Some more reading

• Webmission 09 – Is it a year since webmission 08 already. Apply now (blogs.sun.com)
• We are on a Mission (internet-biz.blogspot.com)
• Our (Kwiqq) experience of Web Mission (kwiqq.com)
• WebMission Now Includes Irish Start-Ups (web2ireland.org)