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Launch Tourdust: the long tail community travel site
This week saw the launch of TOURDUST, a community travel site for the long tail of travel, by founders and couple Anna Colclough and her husband. Because of their pitch during the Female Internet Heroes event, they decided to speed-up the launching of their website, albeit in beta-status. In her 3-minute pitch yesterday before a packed room of 100 interested entrepreneurs and investors, she started off by telling the vision of her business and what they are trying to achieve. Amazing and authentic, grass-roots, independent, off the beaten track travel experiences are to be found on the site, like one-man-organized- Iberian ham tours in Andalucia, Spain.
Tourdust travel experiences
Anna explained clearly in her pitch of 3 minutes the benefits for the niche tour operators who feature on her site, Read more
Start-up Interview: Remote Employment
Paula and mentor Karen
An amazing 3,4 million people in the UK work from home and many more millions have flexible employment, knows Paula Wynne, co-founder of remote employment. Her website is dedicated to home based, flexible and remote working and is promoting the idea that a modern day approach to working lives has many advantages; an increase in business productivity and competitiveness, reduction of transport congestion and a harmonisation of work and family commitment.
Since founding Remote Employment in January 2008, Paula has already been recognised as a pioneer in her field. She has been awarded for her business efforts to understand and reduce their impact on the environment and society by BT Business and charity Global Action Plan. In addition, she participated in the FreshIdeas Events competition for a mentor and was awarded, as one of ten promising businesses, a mentor in the form of Karen Darby, founder of comparison site simplyswitch. Karen will mentor and guide Paula for the duration of six months to achieve her business goals.
In our start-ups series, we talked to Paula about her company and her mentor.
How did you come up with the idea of Remote Employment?
TheNextWomen challenged and won
Well sort of. ThenextWomen participated in the Sprout Challenger of this year, a competition that sees ‘the most daring, original and flexible entrepreneurs’ of the Netherlands vie for the title of ‘ biggest challenger of the the year’ . Thenextwomen challenged media with a male perspective.
Competing against estate agents, creative catering companies and an online music platform platform and video pressagency, thenextwomen ended up on a 41th place.
See here for the rest of the challengers.
Many thanks to those that voted for us!
New Venture Business Plan Competition
new venture competition
New Venture 2008, the foundation of Management Center De Baak has started: the annual competition that offers anyone the chance to turn an innovative business idea into a solid business plan. A jury of 21 investors (of which 1 woman, Anne Portwich of Life Science Partners) will decide in 3 rounds. A total € 100.000,- of prize money to be won.
Seed capital for Tanzanian Entrepreneurs
deadline: October 17, 2008
Women Entrepreneurs in Tanzania will have a chance to get a share of US$ 530.000 in seed capital and business development services for their companies.
The prize will be awarded to 80 entrepreneurs in the Believe-Begin-Become 2008 competition, launched by Technoserve Tanzania and the University of Dar es Salaam Entrepreneurship Centre, and funded by google.org and local partners.
The Believe-Begin-Become 2008 competition requires entrepreneurs to submit a business plan. Read more
Season of the start-up awards!
Visibility is a major thing for start-ups, and one thing to be able to get that is to pitch your company in an event or for an award. Winning an award means media coverage, some times real money and access to investors. There are several competitions in which a start-up can submit its business. Strangely enough, there is no website which lists them all in an overview.., so we had to do some research on the web in order to come up with the following suggestions.
We want to create a complete list of awards here. So if you know of any other awards, please comment on this post so we can add it to the list.
Upcoming competitions
- Accenture Innovation Awards - Dutch companies in media, entertainment or communication that started in the last 3 years can participate.
- The Strands awards - competition for early stage international startups in the area of recommendation technologies with a very appealing price of $100.000.
Innovation Award: submit your company
A couple of posts ago we have written on the importance for companies to come above the radar. One of the ways to do this, we stated, is to be selected or nominated for an award. We made a list of awards and competitions, which we published at thenexweb.org and on this site.
As a member of the jury of the Innovation Awards of Accenture, I have realised that it makes sense for companies to participate in a competition. Not only are companies stimulated to name their Unique Selling Points in this competition, but others will also get to know these USP’s. Also, Accenture makes an extensive research report on these companies, and publishes about them blogs, newspapers and through a conference.
Accenture has issued a press release that it is interested in women-led companies and urges women to submit their innovative companies and concepts. I can only agree with this special request, and I hope that the women-led companies in this competition will be above the usual 5% of the entries.
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