By Dianne Cornes, YBI Director, Non-financial resourcing
Last Thursday afternoon I was at the finals of the IBM SmartCamp for UK & Ireland, sponsored by KPMG, StartUp Britain, StartUpBootcamp, PlugandPlayTechCenter, Silicon Valley UK and Society of Kauffman Fellows.
IBM has a strategic commitment to supporting business start ups, and the SmartCamp global competition is one aspect of this, demonstrating the real cash investment that underpins its commitment. The energetic chair for the event was IBM’s Caroline Taylor, VP of Marketing, Communications & Citizenship, who described IBM’s activities in running the Smartcamp competition as “enlightened self interest” in believing that creating a “smarter planet” is good for IBM and good for society.
IBM’s philosophy, as lucidly expressed by IBM’s Stephen Leonard (CEO, IBM UK & Ireland), is that no company today can be best across the myriad of new possibilities within its own vertical silo. Today’s world calls for horizontal partnerships, and hence IBM’s active pursuit of these and strategy of partnering with SMEs.
Keynote speaker Larry Augustin, CEO SugarCRM, gave to-the-point guidance on the elements of a pitch that a venture capital firm will look for:-
1. Clarity – describe your idea in one sentence
2. Market – go for biggest marketplace
3. Customers – target those who can pay
4. Focus – do one thing well
5. Need – what is the need you are meeting
6. Be different
7. Build an A team of staff
8. Be agile – biggest advantage of a start up
9. Frugality – forces focus
The five finalists had developed businesses that met the IBM “smarter planet” criteria. The ideas and business plans were extraordinarily impressive:, ranging from a medical diagnostic that can test on the spot for multiple diseases from a single pin prick blood sample; to a team that promise to deliver ‘Li Fi’ – internet connectivity via your light bulb; to a team that uses fuzzy logic to analyse traffic movements around our congested cities multiple times a second, so that they can predict traffic jams 20 minutes in advance – benefits for ambulances and the like, quite apart from ordinary traveller, clearly huge.
The ‘Li-Fi’ idea of accessing internet via my lightbulb just blows me away, and clearly not just me, as this team (incubated at Edinburgh University) won “the People’s Vote”. I have no idea how it works, except that the internet will somehow travel along light waves in the same way as it currently occupies the radio wave part of the spectrum – but anyway, as I don’t know how it all works at the moment (in case you hadn’t guessed!), it just means a new technology I don’t understand swapped for an existing technology I don’t understand, but in a way that frees up masses of additional capacity for the world – the radio waves are totally congested apparently. How clever are these people!
The winner, Profitero - ”pricing intelligence for retailers”, similarly identified a need around pricing for online retailers and gather a mindboggling 30 million pricing points several times a day to give their clients (already including Tesco, even though they only started up in business in 2010) a competitive advantage. They will now go forward to the IBM global smartcamp awards in January.
You can find out more about Profitero here:
