How perceptions of Being Bigger may not always play out in reality.

First Mover Advantage. A popular adage in this era of perennial web startups. Equally as strong has been the thought that established players – the big fish – can simply move in on the small fry’s niche patch and bring it to the mass market – the Free Rider effect.

Groupon is arguably a case in point. Out of nowhere the young gun from Chicago has been described as the world’s fastest growing company and a $6bn gamble, only for such heavyweights as Google and Facebook to begin to muscle in on it’s coupon territory, sensing their already huge ecosystems will at least make the new guy irrelevant.

This is the textbook case. What happens when the innovator is somewhat higher up the foodchain? We may be about to find out.

Google has accused Microsoft’s search engine Bing of ‘monitoring’ their results for search terms and seeking to mimic them on it’s own site. While kudos go to the Googleplex for gaming their own search engine to find proof, it’s interesting that Microsoft feel that Free Riding on an innovator the size of Google can actually work.

Think about it, what hold has Redmond got on your computer these days?

Apart from the difficult to ignore growing band of Apple eaters, personally I can’t remember the last time I used Office or IE, both systems previously heavily relied upon by Microsoft to cross sell/arm twist users into other services. Sure they’ve still got the OS. But then the legal battles have all but robbed them of the leverage this previously gave them.

Google on the other hand have a rapidly developing web services suite that is keenly integrated with their search – when you sign into Google, you get all their services without downloading one byte more.

Mimicking Google’s search will do Bing – and by extension Microsoft – absolutely no good whatsoever, because their ecosystem is no longer the trump card it was.

Indeed if informed opinion is anything to go by, it should be attempting to differentiate and not play copycat.

A few thoughts on the creations unveiled at last week’s showcase show and tell conference in the Maiden City.

First up, the keynote from NYSE (who bought up NI startup Wombat Financial Software in Belfast). To be honest the corporate speak gave me flashbacks of what it’s like to work in that dreary environment. But 500 jobs isn’t to be sniffed at, and neither is their plans to create an API for 3rd party development to offer services based on their stock ticker platform. While it likely doesn’t go far enough – I’d like to see it made public so that independent programmer/traders like myself could start playing with it – it’s a step in that direction and is to be widely welcomed.

Not so welcome was the sole question for the guy, which wasn’t really a question at all – more a plea to help all the unemployed people around Derry (not to mention “6,000 on the dole in Inishowen”…) get jobs. That was the gist of it and it sounded desperately out of sync with a new outward-looking Northern Ireland unafraid to compete with the rest of the world on merit. Host for the day Mark Nagurski moulded it diplomatically into a question about why NYSE likes NI. Hooray.

Now the startups…

Monscierge. Hyper-local kiosks for the hotel industry. Without wanting to turn this into a written word version of Dragon’s Den, I’m sceptical as to how they will break even on an apparent cost per unit of £30k.

Crowd Scanner. The creation of two Galway-based techies helps social interaction in the real world by supporting a kind of social data entry via smart phone and are also developing location-aware integration with the Facebook Graph API. Their spiel was very well executed – engaging and energised. Wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a Silicon Valley startup competition. I just wonder sometimes are people in danger of becoming ‘drowned’ in the data their smart phones are capable of providing them?

Code4Pizza. This made me hungry. It’s an impressive achievement to get lines of code pushed out just by offering up food – I’m sure a student of Maslow would have something profound to say about this – and I think it deserves greater exposure to the corporate governance sector in the UK in general. The lifeblood of such a movement is open data and if it could be sold to corporations and the public (not just government) as a corporate responsibility win then we may see activity take off. And more pizza obviously.

Onotate. A very slick web app built to serve as the graphical interface between designer and client. Annotation in the form of smileys is a very natural webby way of expressing reactions. A nice metaphor. Particularly impressed with the drag/highlight action shown in the live demo. Web design community is notoriously fickle but these guys are making the right noises.

Data Sentiment. Location-based marketing featuring bespoke branded apps on a client by client basis. Undoubtedly the big location sites are circling round very similar territory but what was interesting in founder Jase Bell’s talk was his point about the data his apps generate about customer interactions – how often they shop, what day of the week they choose to use an offer, etc. If DS can show real value in this space they may well find themselves speaking to nationwide retailers.

Sonru. Online asyncronous job interviews. One for large corporations no doubt – at least those with hundreds of applicants for each opening – perhaps as a screening method, or finding how an applicant copes with a different type of interview pressure. Down at ground zero it’s difficult to see past the power of skype for free.

AirPos. “Cash registers are the 2nd most used interface in the world after ATMs”. Owner Marty Neill & team has set out to bring the user experience for point of sale systems up to speed with a networked society. There’s no magic dust here – get the old product, wire it to the cloud and suddenly the client gains a holistic realtime view of their supply and sales. Add in mega-competitive price tag and it’s a matter of getting the business to scale fast enough before the competitors do.

Newsrupt. A digital marketplace for news. The youngest (?) entrepreneur wowed with a healthy disregard for staid corporate speak and launched into what could be described as a tirade of determined optimism and self-belief. What impressed me most was her answer to her single question from the audience ‘what is the revenue model?’. Lyra McKee batted it down with all the apparent experience of an executive on a quarterly earnings call. We’ve all been told entrepreneurs need passion – if this is correct then they also need to make it plausible – Lyra managed this to create a sense of elevated purpose around newsrupt. Listen to me I’ve got something worthwhile to say. The challenge is to make this evangelism stick in one of the most cynical industries in the world. But it’s as good a start as any.

Addendum – McKee displaying similar single-mindedness, this time on acquiring a team to realise an idea.

Clearway Med. Reducing Asthma by helping prevent mouthbreathers from mouth breathing. Full disclosure: I’m a mouth breather. Apart from feeling vaguely under threat it’s obvious there’s a problem with a solution here and they are working on achieving a defacto global patent. One of the eSynergy proof of concept fund winners.

Taxizapp. Disruptive mobile marketplace for taxis and callers. Free for callers, taxis pay a fee much smaller than the amount traditionally handed out to the big agencies such as Value Cabs, etc. I like the simplicity of this idea a lot and together with the other marketplace startup Newsrupt I’m interested in their ideas on how they can scale the userbase – the chief obstacle in making a success of both ventures and a chicken and egg scenario.

Exise. Social network client with a very impressive array of analytics and swish visuals. I get lost in the threaded conversations though – perhaps less emphasis on the ‘social network client’ end of things and more on the graphs and other metrics. Intrigued by the ideas for sentiment analysis too. Challenge I guess is to expound the benefits of the analytical features to business.

Miximo. ERM for clubs & societies. The difficult 2nd album from the makers of PollDaddy. Interestingly mentioned taking a cut of ecommerce transactions (fulfilled by Paypal) as their business model. A different angle on being the middle man from the marketplace startups – unsure how much ecommerce the organisations they are targeting actually engage in though.

EyeSpyFX. Latching onto a recent Wired theme on the rise of the wider internet at the expense of the WWW, founder Anthony Hutton describes a world were every device is connected and the subsequent need to control them centrally, as opposed to p2p. EyeSpyFX work in the niche of web cams and provide a cloud based solution that makes it easy for consumers to use remote web cams but are on the lookout for enterprise use cases.

Planzai. Project management initially for bands and delivered via following a set sequence or ‘blueprint’. Founder Rich Dale hopes to recruit subject matter experts from other industries to create similar specialised project structures. Specialisation is key in a niche flooded with competitors.

rediscOvery. AR platform to tag locations with multimedia data. Proof of concept implemented with Titanic Quarter and historical archived content. I’m sure there’s loads of these about but getting the Titanic name is a big win no doubt. First Showcase app created on App Engine!

Boomio. Freelancers portfolio site for web & print design community. To run in parallel with the Creative Boom network that aims to help those working in the sector market their services and start winning contracts. The local network aspect is interesting and should help visibility in a busy globalised market.

Cycle Send It. Budding cycle delivery micro franchise. Toying with the idea of replicating Belfast model in other cities with a £100 buy-in (+ sales commission) to network for any cyclist wanting to deliver packages for a fee. I like the potential to scale a workforce and get paid for doing so. A lot will depend on marketing Cycle Send It better than competitors.

And that was Showcase startups, or rather what I seen of them – more on the web here – Learning Pool’s Paul McElvaney on starting up one to watch in particular. In all a very vibrant and interesting day that highlighted there is actually quite a bit happening in the NI tech scene right now just below the surface. Some apps are looking for steady organic growth, others hoping to be disrupters that have the potential to mushroom overnight. Very different challenges. The case of NYSE/Wombat right at the start of the conference highlights what can be done when the technology is good enough. The rewards outweigh the risks.

You can still view the Googlezon-inspired vision here. I left the bank a year later, but kept an eye on the Revolution platform. It failed miserably. The trouble was they were providing a great integrated digital service that no one in the city knew they wanted yet. Banking is a notoriously fickle industry, and change only happens when trusted relationships introduce it. Revolution’s newly recruited marketing team was manned with former developers, admin staff & inexperienced hires from other banks.

The Digital Markets idea was sold to IT, but it wasn’t sold to the business. So no one from the business sold it to clients. It died a death and now the only evidence I have left is the promo mousemat. Morgan Stanley jumped on the same RIA-powered capital markets bandwagon again, only it was 4 years down the line. Sean Park and his team were ahead of the demand curve, offering something clients would want, but the disconnect between the two prevented the success Revolution should have been.

Looking Around Today
I see a similar scenario developing in a nascent Northern Irish startup culture. A myriad of new media outlets encouraging the growth of chatter about chatter. Strong characters at the helm driving rapid policy creation around buzzwords. The usual presence of the me-tooers and their on-message signal/noise, and as this is Northern Ireland, an avalanche of support structures all offering their wares to the potential idea industry (for those familiar with the Province and it’s current systemic faults, see the rise of the victims industry, where everyone needs help with their troubles and no one is to blame for causing it). A packed diary of events fills out the days and weeks. The blogosphere is alive with what seems at times self-referential posts about this thought leader and that movement. It all seems so ‘go’. But is it?

So Far, So Revolution
I think it is fair to say today’s NI does not have an outstanding reputation for entrepreneurship. Recession notwithstanding, we are still relatively over-dependent on civil service jobs and require a grant culture to encourage business development whether it is for blue chips locating their service centres here or local companies making a go of it. Like hawking web 2.0 to the investment banking industry, encouraging entrepreneurship here in the midst of a recession is a tough sell.

After a while the traditional bank hierarchy in Dresdner closed ranks on the would-be usurpers in it’s Digital Markets division. InvestNI & the rest of the NI statutory bodies could well do the same to local efforts to establish a VC culture. Or they could try to shoehorn their own corporate objectives into the series of funding initiatives underway aimed at ideas (as opposed to companies).

Such a move would be a mistake, but within corporate strategy meetings it could be construed as synergistic. At Dresdner Park railed against the numbers men who “didn’t get it” at the time in internal blog postings. I detect the same hostility against traditional avenues in NI’s would-be VC community. More thoughtful criticism of the traditionalists is also online. Either way, they highlight a problem that isn’t going to be removed unless success, measured in figures, is found.

A lot depends on the type of idea the monies will flow to. On the 24th of this month the 1st round of potential startups will be announced. It may be a watershed moment for tech culture here. Interesting times.

Addendum: What was Dresdner’s failure, became Sean Park’s success. And maybe a man who could help NI out.

• The 30% of private funding requirement for the £5m VC fund can be from another investor
• The Proof Of Concept fund is grant based as opposed to equity
• They are in the process of collecting anchor startups for a first round of funding
• Launch date is 1st of May.
• They have already had a meetup with potential opportunities
• Another one is planned in the next few weeks
• E-Synergy is the firm running the show
• It depends who answers their phone as to whether you’ll get any info.