The Big Data Debate

ThinkingBob brought ‘The Big Data Debate’ to Club Workspace and in so doing, made their first ever appearance at our Clerkenwell venue. The Big Data Debate brought a flood of techies into Club Workspace, all of whom were eager to learn more about big data. 

Before we get into the nitty gritty, Big Data deserves an explanation. Big Data is a term used to refer to data-sets that have grown so large that ‘normal’ software finds it awkward or impossible to process them. ‘Big Data’ is, by definition, data that is too big for normal procedure.

James from LexisNexis

James, the Head of Strategic Analysis at LexisNexis, explained that he is someone who uses a system that deals with big data exceptionally well.

LexisNexis curate and license authoritative content, and disperse it to those who need it. For example, they collate a whole heap of data, package up all of the data on a certain subject - ‘startups in London’, perhaps! - and send it out to those who need that information.

LexisNexis cast a wide net, and pick up data over 4000 sources, some of which are quite niche. Over 25 million documents are filed by LexisNexis every day, and they sort them into four different taxonomies. 

Therefore, if LexisNexis didn’t have a ‘big system’ to sort their ‘big data’, they couldn’t provide their service.

Adam from Mongo DB

Adam from Mongo DB explained the technical wizardry that goes on when you’re creating a system that deals with big data. 

He first explained that vertical scaling gets very expensive, very quickly. Horizontal scaling is the way to go, it’s the Mondo way! Adam dispelled the myth that all developers think they need is a shema and an index, it won’t scale up!

What Adam recommends is to have one active node, and two subsequent nodes that replicate data. Those three nodes equal a shard. The process of adding more shards, that is horizontal scaling. 

Adam warned developers that shards can ‘compete’ if they’re not properly built. He’s seen situations in the past where the second shard has deleted all of Shard One’s data! To avoid this, it’s best to build all of the shard that you’ll need in one installment. Rolling out subsequent shards when 3 are already build, for example, can cause problems. 

Thank You 

Thank you to the team from ThinkingBob who put on a great event, and filled the Club with new faces! Thank you, of course, to Adam and James for sharing their expertise.

Nice aaS: Computers as a service - the revolution

Nice Aas. Perhaps no other event title has provoked more double-takes in Club Workspace history! But 'aaS' is, of course, an acronym for 'as a service', the term applied to computer services that are sold as a such, rather than as products.

ToMax Talks and Dreamstake brought this cheekily titled event to the Clerkenwell Club Workspace venue. The event explored how computers as a service make life easier for the consumer. Another topic discussed were tech startups who want to sell their software, infrastructure or platform as a service.

There were three speakers on the night. The first wise words came from Dreamstake’s CTO, Ralph Stenzel. The technical whizz behind Dreamstake’s new platform gave a very brief introduction to 'aaS' before the two keynote speakers took to the stage.

Ralph Stenzel’s Introduction to Aas

Ralph kicked us off by explaining different kinds of 'aaS'. He started with SaaS: Software As A Service. Ralph’s example of SaaS was Google Mail. Their mail-delivery system is their software, and end-users use it as a service.

Infrastructure as as service, IaaS, was the second kind of service that Ralph introduced. A current and relevant example of IaaS is Cloud based storage, such as Dropbox. The final type of service was PaaS, platforms as a service. An example of a PaaS is AppEngine from Google. End-users treat Google’s library-like platform as as service.

Charlie Pool of HitMeUp

After Ralph had cleared up some definitional problems, Charlie Pool of HitMeUp took to the stage. HitMeUp, Charlie explained, is a competitor to Groupon that wants to make 'the whole group-buying thing less annoying.' HitMeUp makes group-buying relevant to location. Therefore, instead of getting spammed about offers that are nowhere near you, a HitMeUp user only receives info about deals that are a reasonable distance away.

Also, you’ve guessed it, HitMeUp is a PaaS model. As an entrepreneur in the PaaS field, Charlie found himself in a unique position to chat to the audience about what works and what doesn’t.

Charlie declared that the time is right for startups who want to launch a PaaS, or any kind of aaS, service. Charlie explained that a combination of the banking crisis and the rise of social media have paved the way for aaS services to take off.

The banking crisis has undermined the reservoirs of trust that consumers once had in banks. A knock-on effect of this is that many longstanding brands have seen their brand-equity slide too. This is due to a widespread change in mindset. Without even realising, consumers are asking themselves: if huge banks can fail, what’s stopping huge brands from failing too? Social media is invited to this party as it enables small startups to achieve massive exposure. As big brands drop the ball, small startups can pick it up! And as they’re picking it up, their skillful catches can be monitored and praise by the masses over on social media.

Therefore, if your platform, software or infrastructure (as a service!) does something that these old, slow-moving mega-brands do - and does it better! - then now is the time to push it hard! Charlie’s example: the death of bookshops and DVD outlets, caused by online sharing platforms.

Paul Joyce of GeckoBoard

Paul Joyce was the second keynote speaker to take to the stage. Mr Joyce is the cofounder of GeckoBoard, a SaaS solution that allows users to pull disparate data from a volley of different sources. An interesting point to note is that many of the sources that GeckoBoard collates data from are aaS services! Without the rise of aaS, Paul’s SaaS wouldn’t even exist!

But instead of talking about GeckoBoard, Paul spoke with great insight and intelligence about the upsides and downsides of running a SaaS business.

Paul warned SaaS entrepreneurs that they will have cashflow problems! The reason for these monitory misdemeanours is this: if your software is packaged as a one-off buy that the end-user receives as a CD, then you get a pile of cash up-front that you can use to grow your business. However, as SaaS businesses are usually subscription models, you will receive a smaller amount of money each month. Unless you attract massive volume very quickly, you will encounter slow growth.

After this bad news, Paul threw out another problem! SaaS businesses have to spend their CAC (Cost to Acquire Customer) before they know the customer’s LTV (LifeTime Value). This means that startups take the risk of spending £500 on advertising, for example, only to attract ten customers who end their lifetime-engagement after spending £30 each. If your platform really is the bees knees then this problem won’t arise, but it is a risk that SaaS models take.

After all of this doom and gloom, Paul turned to the positives of being in the Saas scene. The industry is growing, and as the supporting tech grows alongside it, it’s only going to get stronger. Computers aaS is becoming the norm. Is it easier to buy your tunes from iTunes or a CD shop? The easy answer to that question demonstrates the success of aaS, an it’s here to stay.

Thank you

Thank you to Charlie, Paul and Ralph for delivering some expert advice, and thank you to Dreamstake and ToMax Talks for brining the guys into Club Workspace. Thanks also to everyone who came along for the event.

Startup Marketing Advice from Octopus Communications

Emily and Chris from Octopus Communications came to our Leathermarket Club Workspace location to deliver some top drawer marketing advice. The dream team from Octopus were brought into Club Workspace by Dreamstake, who were hosting the ‘Marketing’ leg of their Dreamstake Academy series.

The Octopus duo began the evening by explaining four simple steps. If startups follow these steps, they will achieve a coherent marketing strategy that will do them many favours. As a startup, you must: know your audience, benchmark your brand, develop a marketing strategy, and integrate your marketing activities with your products and sales.

Knowing Your Audience

Knowing your audience isn’t as easy as it seems. You need to ask yourselves these questions: Who will buy from you? What is their Language? What is their tone of voice? These questions may, at first, seem speculative and hypothetical. However, Emily shared a method that allows you to ground these questions in reality.

If you know that your audience comprises of IT workers from large companies, think of that guy from IT that you know. When you chat to him, how does he chat back? What would he say about your product? How would he say it? Your task is to emphathise with, and to adopt, his lingo.There’s no use talking to the prince with a paupers lingua-franca.

Benchmarking Your Brand

Benchmarking your brands means discovering where you are now. You need to discover the level of brand awareness that have achieved thus far. The easiest thing to track is social media. If you search for your business’ name on Twitter, for example, you can see how many impressions that you’re making. You will also be able to see who’s talking about you, and how positive they’re being.

An important question to ask during the benchmarking process is: are you engaging the right people? If you want to engage consumers, but 80% of the people tweeting about your are suppliers, you’ll need to redress the balance. Another important question to ask during your benchmarking process is: how do you compare with your competitors? Who are they engaging with? What’s their tone of voice? What are they doing well? What are they missing out on? Could you pick up the balls that they’re dropping

This isn’t just your product competitors either - the people who offer the same or similar product to you - but research your price competitors. An easy way to think of a price competitor is this: if you have £5 at a train-station, do you buy a meal deal or a paperback?

Building a Marketing Strategy - and Creating Content!

When building a marketing strategy you need to have a focus, don’t use ‘big idea thinking.’  Emily illustrated what she meant by ‘a focus’ by offering this example: ‘we want a leading university to adopt our platform within 12 months.’

In other words, you need to make the focus of your marketing plan relevant to your product, and to your goals, and your niche. Set a target, and create a marketing approach that helps you hit it. If your focus is to get your technology platform bought by the music industry, then get in touch with key influencers such as music mags, bloggers and radio personalities.

If your product or service alone isn’t comment-worthy, then create content! If your product is as dry as toast, use your brand personality to flavour your blogs and video content. A massive example of this would be Aleksandr Orlov, the Compare the Market Meerkat. Comparison websites are boring, meerkats aren’t. Compare the Market have even used their character-based brand-personality to open up another revenue stream, meerkat merchandise!

Integrate Marketing with Product and Sales

You should be mindful of your marketing standpoint all the way through your customer’s lifetime. Even when you’ve already sold them your product or service, and have begun the process of educating them, don’t forget to view the terrain through your marketing goggles.

A question to get right is this: Am I engaging with the person who cares?! Chris illustrated this point by talking about a former client of his. The client was a printing company - they supplied printers and printing support to large corporates. Before the company had developed their marketing strategy, they thought that it would be best to educate each member of staff about their printers. They discovered that this wasn’t the way to go.

They found that it was better to comprehensively educate the single member of staff who was responsible for IT support, and let that guy deal with everyone’s issues, should they arise. The end-users just want their printers to work, and if it doesn’t, they want a point-of-contact who’ll sort it out when it doesn’t!

Startups and Social Media

The Octopus duo had one last thing to say about social media. They recommended that startups identify the five biggest social influencers in their area, and set about conversing with them. If you have their ear, you can build these relationships to your advantage.

Striking up conversations with ‘random’ Twitter users can seem a little stalkerish to those who are newcomers to Twitter. The advice on this issue is: get over it! It’s fine. Twitter is a conversation medium, it’s what people expect.

Thank you

A massive thank you to Dreamstake for making this event happen, and to Octopus Communications for providing the advice. The biggest thanks, of course, to everyone who came to Club Workspace to widen their marketing horizons.

How working in 'the cloud' can help SMEs

The way that businesses and entrepreneurs go about their everyday business is rapidly changing. One of the newest additions to the workplace is cloud computing. Although this may seem completely foreign to you right now it is important to know about the advantages this can bring to SMEs.

For project management and storage of sensitive company information, cloud computing is now arguably the most effective method. Here are a number of reasons why an increasing number of businesses advocate working in 'the cloud' with their employees and their customers.

Sharing and collaboration

The days of projects being managed in a small team in the same room are now largely gone. Now businesses may work across the country or even worldwide on tasks together. The cloud enables users to access project information online in a secure environment.

Subsequently businesses can guarantee full visibility on the progress of projects. Some cloud computing solutions also offer notifications to alert staff members of changes or comments on content.

Reduce the need for licenses

For businesses that continue to work offline outside of 'the cloud' they are still required to pay licenses for the use of software. The beauty of ‘the cloud’ is that businesses can simply add or take away the number of users they require. This kind of flexibility is unheard of as businesses often struggle to reduce the number of licenses required to use software.

Scalable with your needs

It is often unavoidable that projects take on a life of their own and become bigger than you first anticipated. With cloud computing you can work safe in the knowledge that your storage and accessibility is easily scalable to help you reach that completion date.

Accessible on multiple platforms

The increasing use of tablets and smartphones means that many business owners take their work home with them. Cloud services are accessible anywhere at any time online and therefore businesses can keep track of work on a variety of platforms irrespective of location or time.

Choosing 'the cloud' isn’t purely a technological choice for businesses. It is simply a cause for efficient undertaking that can lead to cost savings and considerable revenue growth.

More business advice for SMEs

Four things to look for in an office broadband connection
Building your brand post-Recession
Going global with your business

The Urban 20: George Green School Take the Trophy at Workspace Group’s Cricket Tournament

On Wednesday 20th June, Workspace Group and The Cricket Foundation’s Chance To Shine initiative teamed up to host the Workspace Urban 20. Five teams of secondary and high school students took to the astroturf crease in order to compete for the coveted Workspace Urban 20 trophy.

The tournament took place in Kennington, only a stone’s throw from Workspace Group’s Head Office at Chester House and (more impressively!) only a short stroll from The Oval, the home of Surrey CCC and the site of some of England’s greatest triumphs.

Given the prowess with the bat shown by the five teams, some of the Urban 20 cricketers may become quite familiar with the Oval turf in years to come.

The Urban20 teams represented three local schools: Dunraven, Stockwell Park and George Green. The five teams competed in a mini-league, with each team playing a short fixture against each other. Recognition must go to the all-girls team from George Green, who managed to out-cheer and out-scream the boys all day long!

As well as receiving medals and a trophy, the team who topped the league would play a celebratory fixture against a Workspace Group 'elite' XI.

There was very little to separate the five teams as the group stage drew to a close. Three teams, once from each school, ended level on points at the close of play. Therefore, it came down to a three-way bowl off.

After a tense affair, George Green’s boys came out on top. First place at the Urban 20 was theirs! Though lifting the trophy must’ve felt good for George Green’s captain, I’m sure the experience only paled in insignificance when compared to sharing the green with the Workspace Group team.

The Workspace Group XI were a teeming welter of talent. With experience drawn not only from Head Office, but from all four quarters of London. Seasoned cricketers from Leroy House, Parkhall Dulwich, Westminster Business Square and Club Workspace all joined the possé, bringing with them their undisputed skill and ability with both bat and ball.

Most members of the Workspace team had been letting their talent mature for a number of years. The Workspace team’s secret weapon, who shall remain nameless just in case any cricket scouts are reading, claimed that he hadn’t held a cricket bat since 1988. Lulling the rookies into a false sense of security, I’m sure.

Needless to say, we lost by one run. But, of course, it isn’t the winning that matters, is it? It’s the taking part.

Here at Workspace Group, we’re very happy to have sponsored a competition that has brought these three local schools together. It was great to chat to the students, and to find out how school was going, and just how much cricket coaching they receive! The sportsmanship on show from the school teams was commendable too. It it worth noting that sledging was only heard on the field when the Workspace fielding team started encroaching ever closer to the wicket.

Another triumph of the day were the t-shirts. Each young cricketer wore a special 'Urban 20' shirt, the design that graced the tee was designed by one of their rank. Therefore the Urban 20 was not only a sporting triumph, it was a celebration of the students’ design and vocational talents too.

Thank you very much to the Cricket Foundation and Chance to Shine for putting on such an enjoyable event. Thanks to your efforts, the event ran like clockwork! The biggest thanks, of course, goes to the schools. Without your impressive sporting ability, the day would’ve been impossible.