What’s Hot?

Last Thursday, I was invited by Tim Lambertstock to pitch GroupSpaces at an event entitled What’s Hot? held by Oxford’s branch of the British Computing Society at Oxford’s e-Research Centre that was looking for “A selection of Hot Technology ideas to change the world”. Along with GoNumber.com and a concept-stage idea for a communications gadget for tour groups, I had to talk for 5 minutes summarising GroupSpaces and then answer 5 minutes of questions from a panel including:

• Jan Hruska – Co-Founder & Director, Sophos
• Eileen Modral – Manager, Oxford Investment Opportunity Network
• Jeff Barr – Senior Web Services Evangelist, Amazon
• Adrian Walmsley – Oxford BCS Branch Webmaster

Having had a few months off being grilled since we were raising the angel investment I found it useful to polish my pitch and answer the usual questions about user acquisition, monetisation, team etc.

At the end of the evening, the audience had to vote on which idea they liked the most and I won by a small margin. This meant that I received the prize of £100 and duly purchased the first round of beers for everyone at the Lamb & Flag (St. Giles, Oxford) afterwards!

The other nice thing that came out of the evening was the opportunity to speak to lots of members of local groups around Oxford; it was very reassuring to hear that they all shared similar pain points to those I named in the pitch and they’ll hopefully start Beta testing our product once we extend the Beta outside the student market.