Lord Stafford comes to the East Midlands!

As you may be aware, last November, NTU SPEED was involved in the 1^st Festival of Innovation expo at the NEC. This was organised in conjunction with the Lord Stafford Awards (LSA). Unfortunately as the LSA were based in the West Midlands we were unable to enter and possibly win any of the awards. Undeterred, we gave it our best effort and, I believe, put on the best stand and had the best turn out of the show!

As a result of this effort (I wish, not really!), this year the East Midlands will have it’s own Lord Stafford Awards. The LSA are moving from the West Midlands initially into the East, before being expanded across the country. They will give £5k per company winner + considerable PR (to judge from the West Midlands event)

All of our SPEED businesses are potentially able to apply to these awards as, through their connection with The Hive they are “in association with an East Midland’s university.” There is a strong desire from the University for NTU to figure prominently in the applications, so you can expect plenty of help and support!

There are prizes of £5k each award and the deadline to return to us of Friday 25^th April.

I encourage you to look at this link for the LSA and if appropriate, contact me to get an application form, which we will fill in together. Before applying make sure you have read the judges criteria, under which the awards will be made, and try to see where your business fits in.

PLEASE RETURN YOUR APPLICATION TO ME so that I can co-ordinate those from SPEED

GOOD LUCK!

I have been getting the Enterquest newsletter for the past six months or so. I often find it useful and sometimes inspiring. I especially like the Just One Word thread, always on the look out for new words and phrases, that's me! Check it out and sign up for the newsletter if you feel so inclined. I can't see if you can sign up for an RSS feed from it, but if you see it, please let me know!

We are off to Thirsty Thursday tonight, it's my first so I don't really know what to expect. Sim, from Bantum Clothing is speaking so I guess it should be fun. I'll let you know. Harriet from the SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise) team has been promoting it through her blog. She got inspired by Antonio Gould's seminar on Blogging that we held here in November. I think she's found out that a blog can be a hard slog. But it's the same with any promotion, 'if you throw enough balls at enough coconuts, you'll win a fish!'

That's not mine, it's from Men Behaving Badly Sorry!

pics

Financials

Here's a knotty problem.

How do you set your price? Do you charge what your competitors are charging, or maybe a little less? What about a simple mark up on your costs? Simple, if you have a product to sell, not so easy if you're a service provider. What about saying 'OK, I want to earn £xxx a month. I can do three jobs per month, so will charge £x per job and earn enough'

All valid ways of working out your price. BUT, what if you can't find out what your competitors are charging, what if you have nothing in the market to compare it with, what if...?

What do YOU think?

Hive successes

We've had a busy week of PR for NTU and the Hive.

SPEED graduate Kawsar Miah has had alot of exposure in the local media, so I'll join the bandwagon and feature him here. Kawsar is currently running his business from an office in the Hive alongside his final year studies.

Plus, we've had SPEEDsters Nathan Thompson, Andrew Dean and Dan Breen shortlisted for the HSBC Unipreneur competition to win £20,000.

Nathan is having to manage his time studying his 2nd year of Product design alongside his Mystery Shopper Brand.

Dan got a phone call early in the morning from his local radio station and honed his 'off the cuff' interview style! Dan's website is www.uni-fied.co.uk

Andrew's business www.thewiserevise.co.uk featured in an article in the Nottingham Evening Post last week. Read it here

Well done guys, come on female entrepreneurs...what are you waiting for?

Talking of female entrepreneurs, check out Harriet Lynas' blog for news on the upcoming Thirsty Thursday event on 21st Feb at Oceana. If you're curious about it, check out the blog and post your commments or questions on the blog!

See you there

What's a Wiki then?

So I finally gave in, and got me a wiki...I don't know why I didn't do it before. Well actually, I know exactly why I didn't. FEAR! I know, you're shocked. Me...afraid of some technology, crazy eh?Let me tell you a terrible story of ignorance and education...

A certain lecturer mentioned the word wiki to me months ago. 'What's that?' I think to myself, why don't I find out from the web? And where do I go for my information? well Wikipedia of course! So I visit Wikipedia for their definition of a wiki and I try to read about it. I see the first bit of techie stuff about syntax and html and think 'aggghhh!'

Meltdown.

OK. I think, I can handle this, it can't be that hard. What's a great example of a wiki? Oh right, Wikipedia! (Yes, it took me that long to work out what a wiki was, and yes I now know the clue's in the name)Well, that just looks like a big encyclopedia, what benefit would that be to our SPEEDsters? And how can they interact with that, wouldn't it be really (really really) boring? So I guess I just said nah, it's not for us.

But that lecturer was joined by other people saying, no you've got it wrong, it's not just for facts and figures. It can be for anything...huh? So I look again.

Now, how many pages has Wikipedia got? According to the stats page Wikipedia has 2,186,422 articles in English today. How do they keep tabs on all of that? How do they make sure they stay in control of it all? How do they stop people putting up bad stuff?

Meltdown number two.

OK, so I haven't quite worked out meltdown number two, but I felt my fear and did it anyway . Let's face it, there's not going to be 2 million pages on any wiki I can make. Not this side of Christmas anyway. So I am now prepared to give it a go. YouTube (and Simon C) then got me into Lee LeFever, and he helped me to get my head round it (finally) with this simple clip

OK, next question what can we do with a wiki? The scary answer is pretty much anything we want...the less scary option is to use our wiki like a yearbook, or as a directory for ourselves, and see what grows from there.

So here it is...The NTU SPEED wiki...use it!

Brands

What's your favourite brand? What makes that brand attractive to you?

After careful consideration, I think my favourite brand is Apple, mostly because I love my iPod. They have made some interesting moves over the last few years, coming back from the 'wilderness' years with a very strong image and product line. Although I didn't think the PC vs Mac ad with Mitchell and Web fitted that image

and in a way it opened the door to PC users getting their own back...

I hanker after a Mac, although I have noticed that being a Mac user makes you a bore about PCs and how rubbish they are! I can't have one yet anyway, because my lovely sewing machine and it's design software doesn't speak geek yet.

Anyway, back to branding, the Design Council published this article before Christmas, you may find it interesting reading. http://www.etelligent.co.uk/etelligent/mp-getEmail.asp?CID=30999&SEID=1358&CC=designcouncil&CEMAIL=shall46417@aol.com&T=0&FRM=1