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Innovators Pitch Night

August 8, 2012 in Capital Raising, Cloud Computing, Entrepeneurship | No comments

I have been on the LESANZ.org committee and looking at how we can build the profile of the organisation in Perth. I came up with the idea of holding a pitch event because it would introduce innovators with the corporate advisors, IP lawyers, and Patent Attorney’s tha make up most of the LESANZ organisation.

It was just an idea until my friend Kris Borgraeve agreed to help by agreeing to be the Master of Ceremonies, something he has had a lot of experience running for Belgian TV. It has taken about 10 days fulltime effort to pull this together and we now have a brilliant line up of innovators across the full specrum from engineering, chemical engineering, bio-technology and of course IT. It’s amazing to see the diversity of top quality ideas that are ready for investment.

We now have over 100 attendees registered and hosting it in the IBM building will be perfect but its going to be jammed to the rafters. It goes to show that Perth is brimming with innovation and entreprenuership. There were a lot of people who would like to have registered but could not with the short notice. Clearly there is a strong market for doing more of this. It was only a one off event but perhaps we will run it again.

Given the amount of work I’ve put in to creating this I have decided in the end that I will be pitching GoPC.net tonight.

Graeme

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Innovators
Pitch
Night

Join us for an entertaining night of high-energy, nail-biting, quick-fire pitches from some of our most promising innovators and entrepreneurs as they battle it out to raise an eye brow from our panel of judges, a den of seasoned Angel and Venture Capitalists.

Hosted by IBM at their West Perth conference facility and moderated by Belgian TV News Anchor Kris Borgraeve, we have assembled a lineup of technology businesses ready to pitch their opportunity at the judges. Contestants have just 5-minutes to cover the highlights and
convince the panel of their viability and market opportunity before the judges are let loose with scalpels to critique each pitch.

This is going to be a night at the intersection between entrepreneurs, executives, investors and thought-leaders. A cross-networking event designed to help you meet the new faces on the brink of commercialising innovations which may be flying well under your radar.

For innovators and entrepreneurs this is your opportunity to network with the entire eco-system of professionals and experts involved in nurturing the commercialisation process.

The Judging Panel: 

Liddy McCall – Yuuwa Capital

An experienced lawyer and fund manager, Liddy has been involved in technology commercialisation for over 10 years. As a Director at Macquarie Bank she was focused on mergers and acquisitions in Sydney and North America. Liddy co-founded a number of biotech companies including ICeutica Inc which was acquired last year by a US pharmaceutical company. Most recently, Liddy co-founded Yuuwa Capital which is a $40M early-stage
venture capital firm based in Perth.

Stephen Llanwarne – Tech Angel

After forging a career in IT technologies used by investment banks such as Nat West Capital Markets, Stephen moved to London where he ran the IT systems for Deutsche Bank, Bankers Trust and Merrill Lych. Stephen was a Founding Partner CIO at Zurich Capital Markets and in
2004 became an active business angel investing in start-ups. Stephen is a founding investor of www.Mig33.com, the worlds largest mobile social-network, www.moboom.com a mobile web development platform and of www.dsc-it.com, a local software house. In addition, Stephen advises on a number of other start-ups.

Rob Newman – Stone Ridge Ventures

Rob has a successful track record as a technology entrepreneur in both Australia and Silicon Valley. He has twice founded businesses based on technology from WA Universities with a combined market value of over $200M. As a Ph.D. student Rob invented and co-founded QPSX
Communications Pty Ltd which supplied technology to telecommunication carriers across the world. Rob also founded Atmosphere Networks to commercialise technology from Curtin University which securing US Venture Capital and was ultimately acquired by Ditech Communications. Rob is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Stone Ridge Ventures a leading WA technology venture capital firm.

The Moderator:

Kris Borgraeve holds a Master’s Degree in TV Journalism. He spent 10 years as a prime time TV news anchor, TV talk show host, radio host and news journalist in Belgium producing stories and live-reporting for VTM, RTL-TVI and Sky News. He co-founded MultiMedia Makers, a video production company which produces TV News quality video for the Internet enabling businesses to better communicate their message. Kris relocated the business to Australia in 2010 and is a Foreign Correspondent for European TV stations. He speaks fluent English, French, Spanish, German and Dutch.

Event Details
Date: Wednesday 8 August 2012
Time: 5:15 pm
Arrival and pre-drinks
5:45 pm Pitches and Judging
7:15 pm
Drinks, Food and Networking
8:30 pm Event concludes
Venue: IBM
Conference Facility, Level 1
1060 Hay Street, West Perth WA 6005
Parking: Street parking in surrounding Hay Street, Parliament Place,
Murray Street
Cost: LES members:
$  25; Non members: $  50; Students: $ 10   *incl GST
RSVP: Monday 6
August 2012
Book: Book
online here:Visa or MasterCard accepted or advise EFT/ChequeThe tax receipt will be emailed to the recipient immediately upon
booking

Due to catering, cancellations received after the RSVP
date will not be refunded. Dietary requirements to be advised to the
Secretariat when booking is made.

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Launched

March 28, 2012 in Capital Raising, Cloud Computing | 2 comments

We would like to announce the new system is now live!

And we are all going out now to celebrate. 🙂

It is exhilarating, having created a vision to actually build it and then, after struggling for so long with some really difficult issues, finally break through to release another brand new concept technology to the market.

Over the next few days we will be continually tweaking things and will then look to launch the next upgrade in about a fortnight.  This has been such a monolith upgrade but future changes will be released in very rapid succession on the new platform.  What is next is that we are bringing back the free trial account so anyone can try out AppStore and set up a trial virtual desktop.

Graeme Speak
CEO/Founder

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Pithy advice on Pitching in Silicon Valley from Mr Walter Newman

February 26, 2012 in Capital Raising, Cloud Computing, Entrepeneurship | No comments

Some clear direct advice to help me with pitching in Silicon Valley from Mr Walter Newman that are worth immortalising

Short is good.
Long is bad.
When long seems good, its bad.
When short seems bad, its good.

Walter is a highly decorated WWII veteran (including the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur), a leading San Francisco businessman and city councellor, philanthropist, community leader and friend.  I regularly walk with Walter through the Presideo on Sunday mornings along with his son John Newman, Ben Lyon, Edgar Stone, Dianne, cousin Geoff, and other family friends.

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Making the Cloud tangible for investors

November 14, 2010 in Capital Raising, Cloud Computing, Entrepeneurship | No comments

The moment after something new is invented and people see it, its obvious to everyone and seems as though it was always there.

I met a very intelligent eBusiness entrepreneur on Friday who had not heard of the concept of a virtual PC desktop or cloud computing before.  He told me, with some consideration, that it might start to catch on in about 2-3 years time.   Gartner Research predict the virtual PC desktop industry will be worth $65billion in 3 years time representing 40% of the professional desktop market.

I’m now pitching for our next investment round in GoPC.net (early expansion stage).    When I raised our first external investment round in 2007 the concept of a virtual PC desktop was, for most of the savvy investors I pitched too, completely intangible.  We raised the round it but it was a lot harder than I expected.  I’ve since seen many Web2.0 pitches in Silicon Valley and I understand how investors find these businesses so unquantifiable and risky.

It frustrates me when people think of GoPC.net as a vague, emerging, intangible technology.   So our new pitch now is based on hard physical demonstrable facts.    It leads with a case example from one of our enterprise customers this year who reduced a $600,000 IT upgrade to a mere $30,000 representing 95% cost saving.   GoPC.net is a physical infrastructure replacement.  It’s tangible, the customers are real and they are saving a fortune.    There’s also an adjunct business opportunity for GoPC.net’s Channel Partners.  In this case example, the implementation and migration project for our partner netted them $70,000 revenue in the first 6 months.  From now on anything that customer does will involve GoPC.net and the channel partner.   So its extremely tangible and the funding raised from this next round is to drive growth through sales.

We are now making extensive use of video to make complex concepts visual.  And we use live case studies to show how physically real it is.  It’s a simple subscription revenue model that replaces a business IT infrastructure for 1/10th of the cost, 1/10th of the logistics and 1/10th of the support ongoing.   In the case of GoPC.net, the Cloud Platforms and AppStores draw market share away from Microsoft and hardware.   It’s a physical business that we’ve managed to virtualize.

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Cloud computing: the next revolution with GoPC.net

May 20, 2010 in Capital Raising, Cloud Computing, Entrepeneurship | 4 comments

Here is a video newsreel taken last week about cloud computing by TheMultiMediaInstitute.  Kris Bogaeves and Els van de Veire are a TV news anchor and producer/journalist from Belgium.  Their story was researching cloud computing and the sweeping changes it is bringing to both the business world and to individual personal computing.

Full credit to them, as they condensed 6 hours of interviews and filming into a very crisp 2 minute summary of where cloud computing is heading today.

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