Dublin-based mobile security solutions provider Sentry Wireless is on the cusp of seizing a tidy slice of the lucrative global anti-spam market thanks to its patented SIM firewall technology. Started by Matt Norton and Ciaran Bradley in late 2006, the company is making impressive inroads in Asia and its KidSafe solution is already giving parents peace of mind, enabling them to apply parental controls to their children's mobile usage. We caught up with Norton to find out more.

What's the concept?
We own the concept of the firewall on the SIM from which you can develop multiple applications, from parental control, to cost and expenditure control, as well as preventing SMS spam and enabling mobile payments.

Why's it unique?
It's patented award-winning technology. Sentry was named the most innovative mobile start-up in the Asia Pacific by the GSM Association (the association of mobile operators) following the launch of our parental control solution. We also won a Golden Spider award for usability. One of the main benefits of having an app on the SIM is it avoids integration with networks. It makes deployment more straightforward, mainstream and reduces risk.

Where are you now?
Geographically we're headquartered in Dublin and have an office in London. We've just completed a second round of funding and expect to complete a follow-on round by Christmas. We're going to live customer trials of our expenditure solution CallGuard in France and will trial our anti-spam product in Asia from October.

Where will you be in two years?
I would see us being more focused on anti-spam as it offers us the biggest strategic opportunities. I would expect significant deployment in the Middle East, Asia and India. We may have gone through Series A funding by then and be scaling up rapidly. We'll have approximately 50 employees where today we have 10.

Who's backed you?
We've put in our own capital, plus had a small seed round from angels and friends and family. We then secured significant funding from Enterprise Ireland, which has been an active shareholder and business partner. It's enabled us to leverage more than 30 offices it has globally and assisted with lead generation, sales follow-up and closing deals.

How much did you get?
I'd prefer not to say how much we received from Enterprise Ireland. It was significant though.

When did you raise it?
We took a relatively small seed capital round in 2007 and we'll complete a second phase of our follow-on round soon.

How long before the cheque cleared?
At the end of 2007 it took six weeks to two months. It then took seven to eight months to get the interim round over the line and will be 10 to 11 months before we complete. It's a reflection of the economic climate. Numerous investors have said that 18 months ago they wouldn't have hesitated and we'd have been about to get €1m to €2m virtually the next day. Even a year ago €100,000 to €200,000 would have been almost instant. Now even €25,000 gets serious consideration.

What did it teach you?
You've got to have a very clear customer proposition and have to find a hook to engage the investor. Not all will be interested, so you've got to knock on doors. You have to be ready from day one to follow-up as if you leave it three weeks after a pitch the deal will go cold. The business plan should still evolve throughout though.

How has investment improved the business?
It gives lifeblood to the business as an additional resource for a software house. It has increased our product development capacity and enabled us to scale up to mobile carrier grade.

Tell us something that would help another entrepreneur keep an investor happy.
Talk to them frequently, even when you don't have news. It varies for the investor, but for some it's every one to two weeks, others it's a quarterly presentation.

Why should we keep an eye on you?
We're going to dominate the anti-spam market. Sentry Wireless firewall will be on every SIM card.

When all five Dragons show you the colour of their money, you’re doing something right. But you don’t have to take it and for now Amanda Jones and James Brown of Red Button Design have left the cash on the table.

The design company, which specialises in creating products for the humanitarian market, was offered £50,000 in exchange for 10% equity shared between the Dragons in 2007. The deal was agreed yet never completed due, Jones says, to T&Cs and receiving an award of £45,000 from Oxford’s Said Business School.

So why were the Dragons so interested? Jones’ design student business partner James Brown created an ingenious way to purify water on a large enough scale in developing countries to make a difference. The creation was named ROSS (Reverse Osmosis Sanitation System) and while the patented product has since changed a fair deal the end-concept remains intact.

Here at cmypitch we have but a sketchy handle on the more intimate laws of physics, but in layman’s terms the Glasgow-based company’s water transportation, sanitation and storage device has the ability to turn 50 litres of contaminated or unsafe water into drinking water when covering a distance of just over a kilometre – pure gold for countries dealing with disaster, emergencies or a lack of access to safe water.

According to the UN figures, an estimated 1.2 billion people in the world do not have access to safe water, meaning Red Button’s creation could be a lifesaver. Indeed, 10,000 people a day are estimated to die from preventable illnesses. As compelling propositions go you’d look long and hard to find one with more market potential.

No wonder Red Button’s won a clutch of awards or commendations, including the 2009 National Laboratory Service’s Innovation Award, which is judged using a strict set of scientific criteria. It also secured a runners-up spot in the John Logie Baird “Young Innovators” Award, a £7,000 grant from NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), and a Wall Street Journal Innovation Award.

Since appearing on Dragons’ Den the two students – Jones has now graduated – have been working hard on the execution of the idea and development of the business model. Part of this was achieved after attending Doug Richard’s SchoolforStartups.co.uk the one-day bootcamp’s run by the straight-talking entrepreneur, investor and former Dragon.

Distribution will be key to whether it takes off, especially with an expression of interest in buying 50,000 units already in and a plan to sell to NGOs (Non Government Organisations) and Aid Organisations. The pair are in the process of raising finance again with a new business model, with a small initial tranche of £70,000 to road test the product in Ghana.

Uniquely Jones and Brown plan to split equity between angel investors, themselves and an alliance of worker-owned manufacturing plants. These co-operatives would receive the key elements of the system as a kit – pump, filter, deformable plastic bags, tank etc – and adapt them to the needs of the local communities in which they are deployed. The approach would also protect against abuse and remove much of the complicated administration. All sounds like a plan. Watch this space.

The internet is now home to a plethora of social networks, blogs, online group spaces and other tools that can help in managing a group or society. Yet judging by the rapid growth of GroupSpaces, what groups and societies have been waiting for is one central spot for their organising and tracking of members.

According to co-founder and CEO David Langer, once the project was off the ground, they knew they were on to something. "After launching this site in October 2006, with a target of signing up 50 societies in the first 6 months, we signed up over 100 in the first 6 days so there were early signs the idea had legs." CTO Andrew Young explains GroupSpaces as "a web-based service that solves all the problems of group managers with a combination of powerful, easy-to-use tools and an integrated portal. The online toolset is designed to fit in with groups’ existing conventions, helping to establish efficient, robust procedures and facilitating collaboration between group members, managers and the wider world.”

Currently, GroupSpaces continues to focus on student societies. After all, the duo founded the company while still at Oxford University, where they won awards and advertising contracts with blue chip companies on the back of huge amounts of traffic. "But the world’s a big place", says Langer. "Every club, society, charity and other real-world group needs to run a mailing list, keep track of their members, maintain a web presence and hold events – there are hundreds of millions of groups in the world who could benefit from our product." And investors seem to agree; GroupSpaces has managed to raise six figure sum from a consortium of investors, following a successful pitch at an investment meeting run by Oxford Early Investments.

GroupSpaces is free for groups with up to 250 members, and starts at £5 per month for more than 250 members, going to £45 per month for groups with 25,000 members.

“We’re a personalised publishing platform that aggregates large quantities of information, with different content for different users.” Andrew Davies is confident that this approach to online publishing is the way forward, and the way things are going, they may be judging the zeitgeist – a push for more personalisation – quite accurately.

Idiomag is an online music magazine that only presents you with articles on musicians and bands that you like to listen to. “We syndicate from 450 content partners, from Rolling Stone and Billboard to niche music mags”, says Davies, who launched the closed-Beta version of the site with Ed Barrow in November 2006. Come April 2007, a full version was launched, in time for the all-important facebook application a month later. “Ed was frustrated going in to WH Smith buying 6 or 7 magazines and then reading 10-15% of each one”, says Davies. The solution? Aggregation and personalisation. “We’re giving a personalised blend so people come back to the site.”

But as aggregators become more prevalent in the world of online publishing, critics argue that the value of the actual content delivered suffers. Davies is sure that the quality of the publications which Idiomag’s RSS feeds emanate from means this tag doesn’t apply to Idiomag: “We’re not a pile-it-high sell-it-cheap company”, he says. “We see high engagement rates with the content we have.” This is key for one of the main revenue sources, advertising. On some ads on the site, he says, there are ten times the industry average for click-through rates, which Davies puts down to trust. While traditional publishing costs (such as writers - “the price of content is being driven down dramatically”, Davies points out) virtually non-existent, and other sources of incomes based on itunes, tickets and merchandising, there are plans for expansion. Davies says there are plans to ‘get into bed’ with some big B2B publishers, as well the creation of a new personalised fashion mag once the musical side of things have been learnt from. “We’ll be adding film, gaming, gossip...from different sites aggregating feeds.” In addition, Idiomag launches the beta version of the mobile phone application.

Revenue generation appears more than likely, while relevant experience is also at hand: Davies co-founded web development company thruSITES, while Barrow’s father had been CEO of a company dealing with content rights management with an eye for social media, and handily for the founders, was willing to invest £150,000 in seed funding.

Having seen his team in action it’s obvious Daniel Priestley’s Triumphant Events is different. The sparky Aussie moved to the UK two years ago to set up the event marketing and management company in the niche area of real issues facing entrepreneurs as well as the usual inspirational stuff you'd get elsewhere. He’d cut his teeth running under-age club nights at university and managing a native version of the company from the age of 21.

On arrival here aged 25 Priestley joined Adam Street, a private members’ club for entrepreneurs, and the Institute of Directors to build what’s now an enviable contacts book.

And he’s been damned successful in achieving twin aims of securing world-class speakers and a devoted audience, along with a healthy £2m turnover. Renowned entrepreneurs such as Mike Harris, who founded two £1bn banking ventures in Egg and First Direct, and Roger Hamilton, chairman of the world’s largest network of socially responsible entrepreneurs and a speaker on ‘wealth dynamics’, feature on the roster, with speakers also typically running ‘bootcamps’ with smaller groups of entrepreneurs after main events for £500 to over £1,000 a pop depending on length – providing another tidy revenue stream.

In its two years here Triumphant has hosted well over 300 events, at which more than 40,000 have attended. It’s no coincidence that as many as 50% re-attend. “Most event companies are as good as their last event. They’re not worried about brand; it’s just get as much cash out of the audience as they can,” says Priestley, who claims that’s one of the areas that sets Triumphant apart. “Events is a constant challenge. If I own a fashion store and people can’t turn up on the day of a promotion they can turn up the next day.”

With this in mind loyalty and trust are crucial, which is why Priestley’s built up an arsenal of affiliate partners. Its network of more than 800 drives interest to the extent that when just a week before an event at the London Palladium, which holds 2,500, there were just 600 bookings, the strategy came into its own. Hammering the phones and a bunch of new affiliate sign-ups ensured Priestley’s team averted disaster by delivering an impressive 2,200 attendees.

The company also invested a great deal of energy and money in developing its web booking system and making becoming an affiliate an incredibly simple process. Again, having viewed the data from the back-end with Priestley, there’s no doubt it’s an advanced system, boasting, as it does, the ability to get real-time data on bookings, affiliate performance, and key financials. The business is expanding through city event managers in Manchester, Edinburgh, Milton Keynes, Birmingham and Bristol with a series of licensee ventures. Priestley’s also in the process of merging with a couple of event players to share expertise across verticals and event formats, such as exhibitions, seminars and training. With this kind of future-proofing and with Priestley living up to his name as a man on a mission, Triumphant is one you’ll be hearing a lot about.

In 2006, a new kind of business tool was launched, and its popularity has rocketed, with the user base seeing a monthly increase of up to 40% at times. Huddle provides an online space for companies and other groups with office, project and collaboration tools, providing a securely hosted work area with the ability to share ideas and files to other contacts. In some ways this had been done before – but Huddle manages to seamlessly integrate social networking into the mix.

According to founder Alastair Mitchell ‘We‘re bringing together all the different types of business collaboration in one place, but bringing the social network side in. It’s modern, fluid and flexible. The next step of social networking is for business; getting stuff done.’

There is a basic free set-up which people can work on over three workspaces (with one GB storage), or for a little more a company can jump on the ‘mobile’ trend, switching the whole workspace to the company’s servers. In fact, the disparate workforces of huge organisations like UNICEF and Reuters are already using the product. So how did the team come up with the idea? ‘I had the problem, Andy (McLoughlin) had the solution’, says Mitchell. ‘I was managing a large team in a marketing company who were happy using social networking but not stuffy enterprise tools. We thought ‘there has to be a way to bring these things together.’

Huddle started out being funded by the duo’s own savings, secured angel investing for the site build in 2006, and received venture capital funding a year later. All up, a mixture of £2.5m from private and venture has been invested. ‘You always need more money than you think’, says Mitchell. ‘And you always need not to be afraid to seek more financing.’

Growth has been fast – which Mitchell puts down to the social-networking aspect of the business: ‘We can go faster due to the nature of it – people are invited in. It’s viral growth with a business side.’ Although he acknowledges that the initial meteoric rise can’t continue forever, the future still looks very good. ‘It’s been very exciting for us...even people in the internet sector are recognising what we’re doing and integrating huddle into their solutions.'

Huddle recently secured a major deal with leading professional network LinkedIn, joining the likes of Wordpress and Google Presentations by adding appliactions enabling the synicing of users' online profiles.