Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

I’m not sure why, but TechCrunch thought this blog post was worthy enough to make it as a guest post. Azeem Azhar, the author, who I don’t know, complains about the necessity of filling in tax and VAT returns. My response is, get a bookkeeper and an accountant and focus on your business, instead of spending the time writing about not having time to perform such important tasks when running a business. To summarise, get on with it and stop complaining.

Most businesses go bust as a result of not managing cash-flow. My advice is to stay on top of your balance sheet and pay attention to tax returns to ensure you have enough in the kitty at the end of your financial year.

Here’s a blog post I wrote on the subject - the title says it all Entrepreneurs are not entitled to anything

Entrepreneurs in the slums of India don’t think they’re entitled to anything. They just get on with it.

You may or may not know this, but an events company called Net.works is amongst my tiny portfolio of small companies.

Net.works is a networking events company. We connect people who are serious about doing business by staging informal, fun events in relaxed surroundings.

Here are some of the events that are coming up…

OpenSoho

There’s a buzz around town following the 2008 launch of these monthly informal meet-ups for talented entrepreneurs working in the tech and media industries. OpenSoho has helped create a community of like-minded followers through its Facebook group and Twitter page, causing a clamber for tickets each time they’re made available. With a sponsored bar and late-night dancefloor, OpenSoho is a highly acclaimed night on the tiles for those currently causing waves and shaping the future of the UK digital, media and advertising scene. These folk work hard and play harder, come join in the fun.

Upcoming events for January, February and March 2010 - grab your ticket.

• January 20th
• February 23rd
• March 23rd

Digital Dinners

Up to twelve guests, each month are matched according to their business interests. We then ensure both the wine and the chat keep on flowing throughout a three-course meal in lavish surroundings. Topics are discussed, issues debated and contacts are made in a relaxed, fun and non-pressured environment. Dinner are held two to four times per month. Inspiring dinner party conversation often depends on who’s sitting next to you.

With the Digital Dinners format, there’s no need to sneak in beforehand and move the place-names around (although, we guess you can if you really want to). How you then choose to develop the contacts you’ll make after being wined and dined by us, is entirely up to you. Here who’s coming to our first dinner this month. Sign up to our mailing list and provide a short bio to receive your invitation to the next one (January 26th).

• Andy Hinder, Managing Partner, Steel
• Nicky Applegarth, Commercial Director, Steel
• Tom Bradley, Principal, DN Capital
• Bill Morrow, Founder, Angels Den
• Clare McDonald, Executive Creative Director    Sky TV
• Richard Daish, Digital Product Manager, Nike
• Abigail Harrison, Managing Director, thebluedoor
• Ben Tompkins, General Partner, Eden Ventures
• John Straw, CEO, Linkdex
• Paul Walsh, Founder, Net.works & Segala

Business Retreats

A focused exclusive business retreat abroad where a selected 24 success-driven entrepreneurs come together in a luxury environment to achieve the very best for themselves and their business. Pair this with 3 planned days of fun and strategy, and the rest is up to you.

We organise three-day business retreats in some stunning locations across Europe. Imagine, aligning your brand alongside 23 focused entrepreneurs staying in a 17th Century five-star French chateau and striving for success in inspiring surroundings.

Over the course of the three days, guests will find time to relax, indulge, have fun, build strong relationships and do a spot of work in the sunshine. As sponsor, you’ll be there to help, inspire and discuss how your brand can help with the day-to-day issues entrepreneurs face.

Each evening, themed dinners and entertainment will take the stress out of striving for business success. And on guest’s return to the UK, we’ll ensure they receive additional help and guidance from two carefully selected mentors on any of the business issues raised on the retreat. As sponsor, one of these mentors may be you. Check out our first retreat.

We have a cool retreat coming up in the next couple of months so sign up now to ensure you find out about it.

Check out the last one we did!

Sign up to the mailing list now and receive updates and invitations to special events and gatherings.

For those of you who don’t know, Wubud is my latest startup - which has attracted attention recently from some early adopters and bloggers. I was going to provide an update anyway, so this post isn’t in response to TechCrunch or any other blog. It’s a result of people asking for an update on Twitter.

It’s late. No. It’s very late. But all with good reason - I’m happy with our decision to hold off on ‘going ugly early’ for the sake of getting something out there.

Why we haven’t launched yet

We decided to outsource the entire development of our mobile application (not the design) to a company based in Hong Kong. For numerous reasons, it didn’t work out. In mid 2009 we had an application that worked well on a Nokia N95, but when we had the code reviewed by independent experts we realized it wasn’t easily portable to all other devices. It’s important to have our application work on more than 80% of all devices to help with mass adoption, so this reason alone was good enough to scrap everything and start from scratch. Some of our competitors have compelling iPhone applications, but that’s a small segment of the overall potential market.

We now have a team working hard on building a scalable product that is easily ported to all devices and it’s easily internationalized/localized to help with mass adoption globally. Localising a product is more than changing the language – it’s about providing local benefits and content.

As more location based social networks came to the market over the past 12 months, we continued to learn from what they do well, what they don’t do well and what they don’t do at all. Thanks to new companies coming to market, our knowledge about the benefits people look for has improved and as a result, we recently modified some of the product design and integrated more benefits.

Am I happy that we’re late to the game? Absolutely YES! We’re better placed than ever before as it’s still very early to market with location based services and the market continues to be educated by our competitors and other providers in this space. We’d rather be good second-movers than a failed pioneer.

When can you get your hands on Wubud?

I say this with bated breath, but we hope to have an alpha version by the end of January 2010. We’ll invite a small number of users to help us identify improvements so we can improve it further for our beta release (hopefully in February 2010).

What is go ugly early?

Go ugly early is a term used to describe an early product launch, even though it’s not designed exactly how you would like. The idea is to get ‘something’ out to the market in order to solicit early feedback, following up with small iterations to further improve the product based on customer feedback.

We’ve decided to go fashionably late - so fingers crossed…

Eden Brown, one of James Caan’s companies, was hit with a fine by the Office of Fair Trading today. Five other agencies were fined for acting as a cartel so they could price fix. The companies were also accused of a collective boycott of another agency in the supply of candidates to the construction industry. Hays Recruitment was hit with the biggest fine of £30m.

This is just one of many reasons why I NEVER use recruitment agencies. I really don’t like them (I’m being very diplomatic with my wording here!!)

More on the Sky News Web site.

I’m sitting in Le Pain Quotidien cafe wondering what I can work on until my cinema date at 8pm arrives and a wonderful tweet comes in from my good friend Jackie Danicki, inspiring this wee blog post. It’s obviously in response to someone complaining about how some people protect their twitter updates. Below is what Jackie said (because they’re protected, I asked if it was ok to quote her).

Astonished at how entitled some people feel to see others’ Twitter updates. I use Twitter for my uses; you use it for yours.

Protected updates mean I can converse with a small, intimate, trustworthy group. Would you crash a private conversation in a pub or home?

Just very puzzled as to why some people are so concerned with how others use Twitter. It’s none of your business. Move on.

This reminds me when I tweeted back in the early days that twitter was turning into a conversational tool. To which some replied ‘I think that’s stupid’. Why? Probably because they used it as one-way communication messages at the time (i.e different to how I used it).

I can understand why Jackie protects her updates, she’s a private person and only wants to communicate with people she knows and trusts. What’s wrong with that?

After leaving a comment on my buddy’s blog (the fantastic Pat Phelan), I thought it was worth posting it here as I feel quite strongly about this subject. In short, the debate is about the lack of support from the Irish Government when it comes to supporting startups’ attendance to industry conferences.

Read Pat’s blog post here

My thoughts

I agree governments (not just the Irish one, but others too as they’re all the same wherever you go) should do more to help small businesses - especially during the troubled times.

However, I think too many entrepreneurs feel ‘entitled’ to hand-outs in the form of grants and conference subsidies. It would be nice to be on the receiving end but there are so many conferences around the world it’s impossible to send everyone to every conference that ‘they’ feel is appropriate. I also think too many of them feel entitled to investment. Out of interest, I’d like to know how many entrepreneurs closed deals on the basis of partnerships and clients that will generate revenue, or investment. Setting aside the usual helpful networking and rubbing shoulders…

My advice, for what it’s worth, is to focus on generating revenue and use that to pay for events such as TC50 if they are that important. Personally I think most conferences are of limited benefit to startups. I’ve been to TC50 on a freebie thanks to the organizers and I really enjoyed hanging out with the usual suspects – but I didn’t close anything that generated more revenue for any of my businesses. That’s not to say it’s the same for everyone – but I bet the percentage of those who really benefited is/will be tiny.

Have you really got value for money from industry conferences?

Applications for the UK Young Interactive Entrepreneur award 2009 (UKYXE 09) close on 7 September!

This is a good opportunity to take part in a tour of the interactive industry in India and to join the British Council’s growing network of creative entrepreneurs.

Their definition of ‘interactive’ includes digital and interactive multimedia, leisure software publishers, developers and marketing specialists; entertainment developers for the internet, digital television, radio and mobile phones, internet and web design and experimental media.

To be eligible you must be aged 25-35, resident in the UK and with at least three years professional experience. For further information please visit their Web site.

Microsoft photoshopped a stock image to appeal to its Polish customers by replacing the face of a black man with that of a white. Visitors to the site in the US were presented 3 diverse business people. Polish visitors saw the black man replaced with a white man. The image wasn’t even professionally doctored. Perhaps they should have employed someone fom Adobe?!

To use different types of people for different terrortaries is one thing, but to actually photoshop an image like they did is another. I think.

Were they being racist or just stupid?

My online experience of EasyJet when trying to change my flight was pretty horrific. OK. That’s half true. The site wouldn’t allow me to change it and I was unable to find a phone number to call their helpline. So, true to my style, I turned to my twitter community for help. And as usual, they came up trumps - a user called flyawwway replied with the phone number +44 871 244 2377 within minutes. After less than 5 minutes on the call, I was put straight through to a human and my flight was changed. Problem sorted.

But that’s not all and this is why my online experience with EasyJet wasn’t entirely negative - minutes later on Twitter I received a response from easyJetCare - according to their profile, ‘ If you need any assistance, Paul and his team are able to offer support which can improve your experience when traveling with easyJet’. Paul from EasyJet continued the conversation online to ensure I was a happy customer.

I’m extremely impressed by EasyJet’s adoption to Twitter, as I was and still am, with Lastminute.com who responded in the same way when we had issues changing flights with them.