2008 was AWESOME beyond belief. But Keith Bohanna told me 2008 does not stand a chance against 2009… and, he was right. If 2008’s theme was travel, 2009’s theme was business foundations…

Pretty much everything I did this year centred on building business, building understanding of our needs, thinking big. I’ve learned to think BIG. This time last year I would have suggested to you we had a nice little niche product for search & rescue teams. This year I’m telling you we have a product that will be used by governments to save more lives, make rescuers safer, and give tighter budget control, in all aspects of rescue - fire, air ambulances, oil rigs, sheriff depts, coast guard, you name it.

Here’s my year…

Selected as training officer for my local Coast Guard rescue unit.

Ski Trip no 1. Skiing in French Alps with great friends.

Getting to pitch my business at Future of Web Apps Dublin. Big moment for me!

Built an awesome assault course for the local scout troop.

Our team of 4 from the East Coast region was awarded 2nd place at the Irish Joint Search & Rescue Games (JSAR).

Ski Trip no. 2. I got to be part of the Outsider Magazine Winter Ski Shoot, I’m in bright green!

19th May 2009 we had the official public launch of Decisions For Heroes. Here is our site. It is awesome and still holding up.

I got to fly a plane for my birthday! Awesome! Thanks Aoife!

I was developing code very hard. We dropped Google Maps and went with Microsoft Bing. We launched a huge number of new features in 2009, which you can catch up with on our blog.

I got to meet the Commandant of the United States Coast Guard on his Irish trip. Very nice!

I got to fly from Dublin airport to Arklow return in one of the Irish Coast Guard Search & Rescue helicopters.

I became a Search Group Leader with the Centre for Search Research.

I was qualified as ‘Search Management Initial Response Commander’ by the Emergency Response Institute, Canada.

Decisions For Heroes wins €10,000 in the iQ Prize. Nice!

I was lent a narrow-boat for a week on the Oxfordshire Canal. Thanks Phil!

Donnchadh left the RNLI and started working with me to lead our contact with Search & Rescue Teams.

We win the Most Innovative Website in Ireland. Bonus! (Thanks Eamonn for the representation on the night!).

Lots of inter-agency working with Civil Defense and Skerries and Drogheda Coast Guard.

We did our first trade show! The first physical presence of Decisions For Heroes at the Irish Civil Defence Officers Conference.

I pitch Decisions For Heroes at the EU Headquarters in Brussels as a solution for emergency readiness. Big pitch. We get accepted onto a proposal for a security framework.

Organised a joint training exercise with St John’s Ambulance.

Moved to Cambridge UK. Set up the business in BeginSpace on the main street.

Pitched D4H at the Cambridge Tech-Meetup to a crowd of UK techies. Great reaction.

We got a huge load of press. Long may it continue!

I’m interviewed on TV3, national television.

We exhibited (thanks to SARAID!) at the Emergency Services Show 2009. This was big. Very big! We got ourselves proper pop-ups and branding, and everything else needed for a physical presence upgrade.

I get conferred with a Post-Graduate Diploma in New Business Development from DIT for my work on Decisions For Heroes.

Our teams start to send us in photos of themselves using Decisions For Heroes in the field. Seen here at the Indonesian earthquake.

Our paying customers start to receive welcome packs.

Organised a joint training exercise on remote technical rescue.

Qualified as a Level 2 Merit rescue climber with the Irish Coast Guard.

We launched our Facebook Fan Page. Facebook continues to be our no 1 source of leads to spread D4H. This is another part of us pushing the boundaries on that.

And with 1 day of the year left - I slipped in Ski Trip no. 3! I short 2 days on the Swiss Alps to meet old friends who I used to workj with out there.

So…

The Good, The Bad, The What Would I do Different.

The Good - the year rocked. Just scroll up! Lots of rescue team interaction.

The Bad - think big quicker. For too long, I thought small.

The Different - we are now thinking BIG. Ignore the little ones. Go BIG or go home. Playtime is over.

Never base your entire business and product distribution on solving the problem of a single internet company.

This should only be used if your business model is to get bought out by that internet company, and you’re in a strong position to be bought.

The great thing about the internet is it’s flexible. But this flexibility means fast change. It means that unlike physical businesses they can change rules and access fast. Your business can be blocked out overnight.

I’ve tried to find a few examples.

1/ If you offer an IKEA assembly service (me hole!), chances are that store isn’t going anywhere overnight - if their profits are booming, so are yours. If they launch their own assembly service, they can’t block you from doing it too. If they shut shop, another self-assembly company will replace them. If your business model works, you could claim to be pretty safe. Here you are solving the problem of self-assembly furniture, you’re not solving the problem of IKEA.

2/ Now, if your business is based on doing some API trickery to help people only on Facebook, or only on Twitter, or only on the iPhone do something, you are solving the problem for Facebook, Twitter, and Apple. This is like being the self assembly company, but every time you want to assemble a piece of furniture you have to rent a special screwdriver from IKEA and return it right-after. Would you start a business based on that? Would you take that risk that IKEA might stop you one day?

This news today is a great example of what is to come for many of these companies. See ya. Buh Bye.

All of these hooks into these tools should be used as quick wins or to build a business, not be the business. It’s critical to surf the trends, not swim in them. There is a big difference between being a business and being a feature.

Look & Taste is a good example. They launched a great iPhone App to build their business. If Apple pull the plug or lock-down a feature, they’ve still got their business and they’ll find another route to market.

Qwitter launched Contrast onto the international stage, gaining them speaking opportunities and new clients for their business. The job here is done, Twitter blocking them or not.

-Robin.

CAMBRIDGE, UK - Last night I was at the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs (CUE) Business Creation Competition ‘Grand Launch’. The CUE competition is celebrating 10 years and its winners have been funded over GBP 33 Million (not that it’s about funding volumes - remember guys… it’s all about sales! a piece on that later.).

The panel from the evening had a group of past winners including one I’m now sharing desk-space with in our new office (Emmanuel of MagicSolver).

Shamus Husheer - CEO of Cambridge Temperature Concepts was the most interesting panellist and he had a few gems:

The later you decide to become an entrepreneur and begin a start-up, the more assets you have gathered in life. The risk becomes much higher - investors will suddenly expect you to have these assets on the line if theirs are too.

Shamus also quoted Jack Lang of Judge Business School as always applying this filter to every idea. Does it meet an…

Global Sustainable Unmet Market Need

Every word there is important.

Global - Is the market big enough? It’s got to scale big to be big money.

Sustainable - Is the market here for a while? Selling something that is temporary, kills itself, or doesn’t add real value is not good.

Unmet - Is this a blue or red ocean? Are there competitors in this market, who have already met the product need?

Market - There has to be a market for this. That means people have to be willing to pay money in exchange for it it. Great idea, no money, no market.

Need - People have to need it. No point in a product that solves an need that people don’t have.

(I’m going to write about needs and wants later - it’s another of my hot topics at the moment.)

On a note behind Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, the evening was as expected students dressed in suits calling each other ‘their colleague’. Ahhh wonderful pomp.

As I attended as an unregistered guest, at the last minute - dressed in jeans, rugby shirt, and fleece top - I still managed to circle the room and meet some fantastic people. I even managed to spill a glass of red wine down the back of the legs of one of the Cambridge Angels, bonus.

Cambridge really does have a lot of business and technical and talent. Unlike anything I’ve every seen, there are lots of PhD, MBA, and Master students offering their abilities to get interesting project work both paid and unpaid.

-Robin.

CAMBRIDGE, UK - If any Irish contacts are interested in making the trip - check out Cambridge Geek Day. If you’d like to come on the day before, maybe we could arrange a little exchange with some other Cambridge Start-ups and a few drinks the night before. I can try find people in your industry and match you up properly before-hand.

Some iPhone and CodeIgniter people already matched up in my head.

-Robin.

CAMBRIDGE, UK - OP:D4HUKL is now well underway. To get sales of Decisions For Heroes underway in the United Kingdom, as company director I have moved here until next summer. While D4H still has a base in Ireland, we’ve now me on the ground as part of the start-up hub of Cambridge where there is good technology activity, lots of available research students, and under 1 hour to London by train.

Decisions For Heroes is now embedded firmly in BeginSpace, and thank you very much to them and Jeremy Parsons for the office area, city centre base, broadband, available mentoring and advice.

I intend to give as much back here as possible and offer all the mentoring I can give to other start-ups who are following down the same roads as I have taken over the last 18 months.

Enjoy some photos of my location for the next few months :-)

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” –Howard Aiken

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Please list here cases where you talked to somebody about your idea for a start-up, the pros, the cons, and then when you did your start-up they had already done it so you couldn’t.

Anyone? No? No takers? Ok.

Please list here cases where you talked to somebody about your idea for a start-up, the pros, the cons, and then when you did your start-up those conversations were really useful on putting perspective on that little idea that pinged around in your head, the one everyone was going to buy, and you could run it in 1 hour a week if you automated it, and you’d be a millionaire by Year 3 with 90% exports, and investors who wouldn’t sign NDA’s anyway would love you because you told nobody other than them yet.

Anyone? Yes? Me. You? Ok, now we’re talking.

Tell everyone. Then listen. If they didn’t get it, don’t force it. Change your ’story’ a little and re-tell it to the next person.

Ideas are nothing without everything, because it takes your everything to implement.

-Robin

Links:

Alpha inspiration written by my cousin.

(Image Credit: Bridge on the Oxfordshire Canals, by Author 2009)

What do we have?

We’re an island, we have lots of strong tidal currents.

We’re the most westerly country on European continent, we have strong clean south westerly winds.

We’ve the Atlantic, which gives us waves to beat the band.

I’m all for just sacrificing a piece of land and eco-powering the landscape. As many wind turbines as you can fit in it. Let other countries rent land to put their turbines there. Have the whole thing whirring ready to take off if the wind gets strong enough. Block the channels, get turbines underwater.

Step 1/ 2015 - Become the worlds first eco-powered city.

Step 2/ 2020 - Become the worlds first eco-neutral powered country.

Step 3/ 2025 - Become the first country in the world to export eco-power.

I don’t care, I really don’t care, nor want to hear if the technology is not there to store or transport the electricity. The technology would be there if there was the incentive to build it. Anything is possible, and if the government want to spend €80 billion on an investment (including a €100 million X-Prize to find a way to do this) this is the thing to build.

This can be part of Ireland’s dramatic and ambitious goal I’m still harping on about.

-Robin.

Sarah Lacey puts it well today…

The people who extol the virtues of “sensibility” are never the people at the core of the next great companies.

Start-ups by definition don’t have the experience, market position, funding or resources to tackle obvious market opportunities. If what they’re trying to do makes clear business sense, a bigger, better-positioned company would do it. A start-up’s only edge is that it’s not built into legacy businesses and preconceived notions and can do something, well, crazy.

I’m a firm believer that there is no better time to start a business. The big boys are all cutting their innovation budgets, and facing inwards. They’re focussing back on their core products to pay next months wages. Take them now while they’re not looking. At worst, you’ll be a great purchase for them when they need to catch up again. Pick a niche, own that niche.

Umair today talks about Awesomeness is the new Innovation…

Innovation often isn’t. Innovation means, naively, what is commercially novel… What makes some stuff awesome and other stuff merely (yawn) innovative?…Thick value is real, meaningful, and sustainable. It happens by making people authentically better off.

What is awesomeness? Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That’s a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics…. Beancounters feel challenged and threatened by it, because it feels fuzzy and imprecise… Gen M knows “awesomeness” when we see it.

(Photo Credit: Road Sweeper in China (or a fairground ride for witches?) - by RevolutionCycle.ie)

DUBLIN, IRELAND - NAMA is hot on the airwaves in Ireland at the moment. The National Assets Management Agency is an Irish Government initiative proposed to function as a bad bank, acquiring property development loans from Irish banks in return for government bonds, primarily with a view to improving the availability of credit in the Irish economy. The original value of these loans is estimated at between €80 billion and €90 billion.

That’s €80 and €90 billion.

Now I’m no economist - and so I don’t feel I have much of an economic say other than what the media feed me. I do understand that the risk isn’t €80 billion, unless the price of property in Ireland dropped to €0, but I don’t have a handle on the entire risk we are taking and the consequences. But this is what I do know as an engineer…

People, the media, the government are swinging around figures and interchanging the words billions and millions all the time. Ah yeh… sure once you’re in the millions, you may as well start talking in billions. I don’t think people appreciate what a billion is.

1 billion, is very big.

Here’s an example of the scale we are talking - I gave this over dinner last night…

1 million seconds is 11 days.

So how many days are in a billion seconds?

1 billion seconds is 31 years.

That is the difference of scale. And, what is so enormous about these figures, is the contrast in scale to the human life expectancy (which is 77yrs in Ireland).

1 billion minutes ago the Roman Empire was flourishing. So if the Roman government had started a deposit saving scheme with the “Banco de Senatus Populusque Romanus”, and made a lodgement of €115,200 every single day, they could have a party today as they’d be making their last trip to the bank for their NAMA payout with a total of €80,000,000,000 (billion) in their account.

57.6 family generations later. The loan that their great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfathers took out.

-Robin.

(Photo Credit: Author training exercise with St John’s Ambulance Brigade and Coast Guard, last Wednesday.)

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Facebook has been an excellent tool for us to reach the market. Check out our Decisions For Heroes Facebook Page. One of the most important things is to make your content shareable. And very few sites do this.

When somebody shares your URL, you get total control of what they send. You can choose the image, the text, and the title by changing the html meta tags.

First things first. Go to Facebook, and write a message, make a wall post, post to your profile, and somewhere in it, mention our URL http://www.decisionsforheroes.com you’ll see you get a nicely formatted link to share.

That’s done like this in your header:

<link rel=”image_src” href=”http://www.decisionsforheroes.com/images/facebook_logo.jpg” />

If you don’t give it an image, Facebook will take the first image on the page - which is not your most relevant marketing image. Even worse, if it can’t find a suitable image in your markup, you might get no image (but guess who’s worse than that!)

Get your logo in there. Get the image square (it will show bigger in the feed). Get your marketing message straight.

This is the start of your newest jump on the band-wagon industry, and I’m calling it SNO*.

-Robin.

*Social Network Optimisation.