UK Start-up Tech Autumn 2009

It was a long summer and things have moved on dramatically as far as tech is concerned. My own career has gone through a couple of back flips with the odd somersault thrown in for good measure. My project for the past ten years: Emojo hit the wall as the funding dried up from most of our start-up clients and prospects.

It meant doing a complete re-think as to what to do with my career, and where to go. In the end I've started a new venture Comrz, which is a Social Commerce consultancy, working with companies to build profitable communities. It's given me the chance to have complete re-think of the tech I use, and I've made some big changes over the last few months.

Email, Chat and Document Sharing - Google Apps Comes of Age

Google Apps has dramatically improved over the past year. Possibly the biggest change to my way of working has been the shift to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange. When starting up the new venture it came down to a straight choice between hosted Exchange and Google Apps. In the end Google Apps won out because Gmail works brilliantly with email on all our devices, and Google Docs provides a great online platform for live editing of the documents. The tight integration with Google Talk means that it is now a must-have component of our setup. The fact that Google provides Apps for free for up to 50 users and allows you to use your own domain made it a simple choice in the end since I didn't have a 100% feeling about any of the hosted Exchange options.

Voice and Teleconferencing - Skype

It's clear that Skype wasn't the cash cow eBay hoped it would be, but it's reliability, good quality audio (even in low bandwidth), great chat and most importantly incredibly intuitive conferencing options make this the key voice comms platform for us. It's still leagues ahead of Google Talk, and probably the reason Google invested in building up Google Voice. The ability to pull together a quick teleconference with the key players on a project is a key productivity cornerstone.

Cloud Hosting - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

What a brilliant solution. I had heard about the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud for years, and when it came to setting up our new venture, 'not' having to run the servers was a key criteria. This comes from having to do so with my previous four ventures and finding it a never ending drag. We trialled many offerings (no names mentioned) but needless to say pretty much none of them worked for us (or even came close). The one which did was Amazon. The recent changes to their tariffs have made their offering dramatically more price competitive as well. This is a great platform for basic virtual servers, applications and storage.

High End Hosting - ACC Yotta

Great as Amazon is, it is also seriously limited in what it can offer at the high end (e.g. only one IP Address per server, unbelievable). When looking around, it was clear that we needed to work with a real high-end hosting innovator as well and we found one in Yotta. The shift to running all our operations off the cloud has been very complex, with hundreds of updates required in our core solutions and changes in the way we work. Yotta have been great at providing valuable feedback, and have also enabled us to embrace all the latest hosting tech to improve the performance of our high-end hosting solutions.

VOIP - Talking Platforms

Our telco setup was easily sorted. We have been through years of working with one unreliable VOIP provider followed by another, until we started to work with Talking Platforms. What a great outfit. They sorted us out quickly, provide an extremely reliable service, and supported us on all our various VOIP devices (Snom handsets and X-Lite PC soft phone). Now I have the three comms Icons sitting next to each other on my Windows 7 toolbar, and can communicate with ease wherever I am.

OS and Office Suite - Microsoft BizSpark

What a programme. Microsoft BizSpark is essential for any startup (i.e. free Microsoft software). I think it is a great move for Microsoft, since otherwise I can see companies wholesale trying to go with free competitors even though they are inferior. It also buys Microsoft time to get it's online offerings in place. That said this is a real productivity boon and a great cost-saver for us and we love Microsoft for it. Especially with Windows 7 and Office 2007 which are just superb. Why can't Adobe do something like this. I love their tech, and it is a cornerstone of our company, but it sure is expensive for a startup.

Mobile Tech - Apple iPhone, Android, 3 Mi Fi, Kensington Ultra Portable Battery Pack

I'll do a bigger post on this later (see earlier posts), but the fact is that I've done a 180 degree turn on this over the past few months. Android has come such a long way over the past six months, and the 'Donut' / 1.6 release running on my Dev Phone One (G1 for developers), coupled with it's tight Google integration is now my main mobile work device. My primary phone is now without doubt the iPhone. The push integration with Google Apps is just the icing on the cake, what a package.

The other new tech is really enabling, and solves key frustrations for and online Entrepreneur. The first is the Three Mi Fi solution which allows me to have my own personal Wi-Fi setup wherever I am. What a great solution which 'just works' if only all tech was as easy as this. The other great enabler for all my power hungry devices, which just don't get through the day, is the Kensington Ultra Portable Battery (currently out of stock on Kensington's own online store).

PC / Laptop Hardware - Dell

I've been with Dell for a few years now, and whilst I really don't like the way every add-on is over-priced, the core hardware is reasonably priced, works well and comes with the great Dell service, which I'm happy to pay a premium for. I used to be a Sony guy for years, but they really need to solve their 'crapware' mentality for me to take them seriously again. They're great at taking good hardware, loading it with terrible software, and turning the resulting user experience into a dog.

Social Apps - TweetDeck, and iPhone Apps

I'm sure others will come to mind, but right now I've removed pretty much all my social apps from the PC / Mac with the exception of TweetDeck. Their execution across the board from the desktop to the iPhone is simply superb. I must have 50 odd iPhone social apps, so that will have to be a separate post, but I am using the Facebook app, Layar and Nimbuzz fairly regularly now alongside TweetDeck.

Entertainment - Spotify, iPlayer and iTunes

I always like to be legal for all my software and media, given that I've spent years running software related ventures, so finding services that make it easy to be legal is a big deal for me. You always need to chill out, and Spotify Premium is now my go-to service for music, it really makes my Android phone a great music device (when used with a good Bluetooth headset). The fact that it now works on all my machines (PC and Mac) and mobile devices (iPhone and DP1) means that I don't have to use anything else. The offline mode really is the killer feature.

For light entertainment and news the BBC iPlayer is superb, and I'm still an iTunes user, although no longer for tunes, but instead I find myself downloading the odd movie, Podcast and TV series.

Web Platform - Affino from Comrz

It's been a lot of work to completely start from scratch with a web presence, but I've been having great fun with Affino from Comrz (my new venture). We've been refining the user experience greatly over the past few months and it's become pretty slick now. It's a great Social Commerce platform, designed to run modern integrated commercial sites, and the fact that we've been able to roll out our entire online presence on just one platform is such a productivity boon. The fact that it is super scalable now on the cloud is even better.

Office - One Alfred Place (plus lots of home offices)

One thing I absolutely did not want to do when starting up this company was have an office (we'll see how well that goes). A key criteria with the new venture is that we can work with the best people wherever they are, and I wanted to force things so that we wouldn't build any kind of centralised base, and instead keep everything light and cloud based.

Our strategy was to find the best business clubs wherever more than one of us was based (currently just London) so we could meet up and meet customers and prospects. After a fair amount of research (and also based on my experience of having meetings in London over the past 15 years) we settled on One Alfred Place which has the slogan 'A better way to do business'. So far it's been great (just looking forward to the network being upgraded). It's a highly professional environment, with great networking events and great working spaces.

Wrap Up

I've always believed that the enabling technologies we're seeing will result in smaller, more distributed companies. The problem traditionally was that the technologies which were available to start-ups were inferior to those available to the Fortune 500 and the FTSE 100 and therefore left them at a great disadvantage. That really is no longer the case. It's hard to see how we can imrove on the tech we can enjoy right from the outset as we scale up.

Now we just need to get the financial system sorted in the same way to cater for start-ups. Given the way it's virtually disintegrated in the UK over the past 12 months (and never was very good before) there's a lot of scope for a 'killer app' here.