A couple of weeks ago Hong Kong based GrowVC came out of closed beta and launched their crowdfunding platform to the world. I was excited because GrowVC was described an “equity crowdfunding” platform, implying that investors receive equity in the businesses they back. To my mind this is an essential requirement for any platform that’s [...]

Last night I gave a talk about crowdfunding at Minibar London. The audience mainly consisted of people working on early-stage ventures. I took a straw poll about funding. Some had already raised finance from friends and family or institutional sources. Many more were planning to raise money in the coming year.
I tried to present an [...]

I’m pleased to announce that the first tranche of Trampoline’s crowdfunding process was successfully completed today. We had all the investor commitments more than a month ago but it took til now to get the paperwork drawn up and executed. The last few signatures came in earlier today. This is an exciting moment for Trampoline [...]

It’s now one month since we announced Trampoline’s crowdfunding project. As Techcrunch reported we rapidly received commitments for a third of a million pounds. We’re now close to initial completion at half a million pounds with a solid pipeline of investors moving towards the second stage. At this point certain patterns are evident which may [...]

Today we’ve announced that Trampoline is financing the next stage of its growth through an innovative process called crowdfunding instead of traditional venture capital. We’re raising £1 million from up to 100 private investors with a minimum stake of £10,000. In the last few years crowdfunding has established itself as an alternative model in the [...]

Over the last three months I’ve been doing a lot of presentations to IT and HR leaders about understanding and working with informal structure in the enterprise. My talks usually provoke a barrage of questions about privacy, inter-generational behavioural divergence, the potential for employees to “game” automated analytics and so forth.
One thing that’s surprised me [...]

Back in September I was at the Network Roundtable in Washington DC speaking on a panel and launching SONAR’s Flightdeck visualiser. The Roundtable is the premier international gathering where large enterprises using organisational network analysis (ONA) get together to swap notes on what they’re doing. It’s masterminded by Rob Cross, Professor at the University of [...]

Before I even consider this, I think my title is ineffectual in actually grasping the differences I want to point out. This comes from a distorted sense of scale we have when it comes to barcamps. What makes a large scale camp large scale? 50 people, 100, 1000? And what makes a community camp community [...]

I’ve always meant to go to SXSW. Next year I just might make it. My proposal made it to the Panel Picker stage, which is nice, but with the popularity contest now well and truly afoot I should probably have a go at getting the word out. So:
Tapping the Mainline: Designing for Learned and Evolved [...]

My presentation at SkillSwap seemed to go down well and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I’ve posted the slides to SlideShare but a few of the screenshots have been mangled and the embedded version here only shows about half of what it’s supposed to. The good folk at SlideShare are investigating, apparently. There will be audio [...]