Fiercely ambitious former management consultant Tim Aikin set up Team Boxwish in 2007. Having raised two angel rounds he's looking to accelerate the growth of its social shopping concept.

What’s the concept?
We’re a new media start-up focused on building cool social websites and applications centred around elements of popular culture. Our flagship site Boxwish.com is a movie inspired social shopping site where people can find and buy products (like fashion and gadgets) seen in movies. We also recently launched Movie-Cupid.com - a dating site for film lovers.

Why’s it unique?
With our first site Boxwish.com we were the first company around to build a site focused entirely on the inspirational aspects of movies – like being able to get the fashion, use the gadgets, drive the cars, visit the locations etc. Since then we’ve grown a basic concept into a powerful association engine, which ties together shoppable content with elements of popular culture, such as movies, characters or people.

Where are you now?
We’ve just expanded the team to six people, relaunched Boxwish.com and are working on a number of other great products including a new type of advertising platform and an e-commerce marketplace. We’re also just about to open a new funding round.

Where will you be in two years?
If all goes to plan we’ll have quite a bit going on, including not just our own consumer sites like Boxwish.com but also running our different e-commerce and advertising platforms for other consumer companies.

Who’s backed you?
We’ve got a small team of excellent angel investors who have been a tremendous support. They include a former investment banker, a chartered accountant and the UK marketing director for a very successful e-commerce company.

How much did you get?
We haven’t disclosed the amount raised so far but it’s six figures.

When did you raise it?
We raised our first round in March 2008, completed a small second round earlier this year and are just about to open another.

How long before the cheque cleared?
The time from initial meeting to money-in-the-bank was actually very quick in both rounds. That said each had at least three to four months of prior planning and preparation put into them.

What did it teach you?
The key thing I learnt was the value that being both prepared and passionate have in convincing investors to back you. It’s not only about constructing a convincing argument for the merits of your product, the strength of your team and the rigour of your financial model, but also delivering it in a way that demonstrates you’ve got the passion and dedication it takes to put in the long hours required to execute.

How has the investment improved the business?
In lots of ways. Completing our first round allowed us to get the ball rolling and prove our initial concept. Our last round gave us the chance to expand the team, bringing on board really talented technical and marketing leads. It also allowed us to evolve our strategy to be even more ambitious than what we started with.

Tell us something that would help another entrepreneur keep an investor happy.
Two key things, honesty and enthusiasm. Keep them constantly informed of what’s going on, good and bad (if it’s bad make sure you follow it with what you’re doing to get things back on track) and in doing so be enthusiastic and passionate enough to make them an ambassador for your brand. If they invested in your business they probably have more than just a passing interest in your industry, product or service. Make sure you engage them in what you’re doing, share your plans and visions for the future, get them excited about you and your brand so that they’re telling all their friends and colleagues about it.

Why should we keep an eye on you?
Our flagship site, Boxwish.com was an exciting first step but we’ve got a really ambitious product plan for the next 12 months and a passionate and dedicated team to make it happen.

We profiled Studentgems.com which was founded by Sue Harrison and Joanna Ward last year. Since then, they've raised a six-figure angel investment round. So, we caught up with Harrison to talk about the fundraising and progress to date.

What's the concept?
We’re a website where students can find one-off jobs and earn more than they would for waiting tables or pulling pints. And businesses can save money too. We had the idea when we were working on a project and needed some photography. Commercial quotes were £600 and we realised it would be cheaper to find a talented student photographer for half the price.

Why's it unique?
There are other places students can get jobs, such as job shops and recruitment agencies, but not typically where they use their skills, developing knowledge and talent. Equally, companies often outsource overseas to cut costs. And freelance websites expect professional freelancers to get in touch. So, there’s not a direct competitor, although classified jobs boards such as Gumtree and Craig’s List offer our biggest competition.

Where are you now?
We see our prime employer market as SMEs, but have sole traders up to Breast Cancer UK and Adidas using the system. We have 14,000 students registered offering 74,000 skills across 1,600 categories, and 3,200 employers.

Where will you be in two years?
We’d like to be a household name across the UK. If they need jobs doing Studentgems is a cost-effective resource. We’d also like to take the business over to the US.

Who's backed you?
Eight angel investors. It was quite a long trail. When we started we didn’t know anything about raising finance. Business Link introduced us to Wycombe Enterprise Hub, which is part of SEEDA (South East England Development Agency). They were fantastic, made us portfolio client and helped with the business plan, a Finance South East investor readiness course, and introductions to various networks. We then presented to three groups via a West Midlands-based network plus an Oxford-based network.

How much did you get?
A six-figure sum. Two investors also joined the board. We were happy to take investors who wanted an active role in the business. One is an ex-lawyer the other an ex-accountant.

When did you raise it?
About three weeks ago in September.

How long before the cheque cleared?
It took us about a year to finalise from the first presentation. We didn’t go from nothing to everything. We were picking them up along the way and wanted to get sufficient money to get on with running the business as fundraising is hugely time-consuming. We got pretty much what we need but left the round open as we still have some leads.

What did it teach you?
We were very aware we probably didn’t fit the normal mould for somebody starting a dotcom as we’re neither male nor 25. It taught us never to give up. You really do have to believe in what you’re doing. Everything takes twice as long as you expect. You can present to a group that’s interested and then the next week another group won’t be – there’s no rhyme or reason. We presented to gatekeepers, a hall full of people and a room of people. We had to gauge what would work best for us and go with that, making sure we spent the money where we were likely to get the best results.

How has investment improved the business?
We were able to get stands as seven or eight local Freshers’ Fairs in September which is quite expensive. Thousands signed up. So the money is going on marketing, building the team and enhancing the website – we have loads of developments in the pipeline.

Tell us something that will help another entrepreneur keep their investor happy.
Communication is key. Throughout the fundraising we kept people who said they’d invest fully informed of our progress and have a review each month. We also respond as quickly as we can.

Why should we keep an eye on you?
We hope you’ll see the emergence of Studentgems.com as a household name.

Ex-Goldman Sachs MD David Kaplan (CEO) and veteran musician John Thirkell (COO) started online music recording platform PureSolo.com in February 2007, got funded in May 2008, then launched in September last year. It announced a deal with major media company FreemantleMedia Enterprises to provide TV show The X Factor with an online karaoke platform this week (October 6 2009). See it here: xfactorkaraoke.puresolo.com

What's the concept?
The individual singer and instrumentalist have not been given the same online capabilities as bands. We’ve licensed well-known tracks to enable people to develop and record for themselves or the wider community. They can access high quality backing tracks at home for a very inexpensive rate. For £10 to £20 you can create your own CD.

Why's it unique?
My co-founder John picked up a trumpet at 13 but didn’t play with accompaniment until he did his Grade 8, yet we have the Berlin Chamber Orchestra as a backing track for individual musicians. In terms of online there’s no place but PureSolo to go for that. If someone wants to record and email to a teacher, friend or granny they can do it from a browser plug-in for the price of some sheet music.

Where are you now?
To be in the public market for a year, execute a deal we’re the right combination of satisfied and paranoid – 1% satisfied, 99% paranoid. It’s the beginning of our milestones. Ultimately people will see us as an enabler for jazz, singing or classical – a place for users to improve and share. Part of developing musicians is in the formal educational space. We expect to be incorporated into the Sing Up government-backed programme (www.singup.org).

Where will you be in two years?
We’ll be seen as an enabling platform for people to develop their music skills and use socially. We’ll have increased the number of X Factor-like deals, such as in jazz, guitar and classical.

Who's backed you?
The initial investment was from the directors, including myself. Investment went into the technology, research and securing licenses, then we went to the outside world. We spent time with private wealth individuals and angels, rather than formal venture capital. In the early stages they challenged the model and we evolved to take some risk out.

How much did you get?
We raised £1.1m from a small double-digit number of investors, but are keeping their details confidential.

When did you raise it?
May 2008. We were talking for over a year – the first conversation was general and conceptual. Then we had rough versions, hashing around ideas, then a formal offering document.

How long before the cheque cleared?
Raising money takes time from ideas to building trust in the management and belief that the project can be executed. These are important factors people consider as well as financials.

What did it teach you?
Plan ahead. You have to have a commitment and willingness to overcome obstacles. It’s hard work, but savour and love it, be passionate. When we look at great businesses out there like Spotify, it looks really glamorous, but we know how hard they’re working. I take my hat off to those guys.

How has investment improved the business?
It’s key to invest and spend to put money to the vision while striking a balance with the tough economic climate. It offers a little more flexibility in people and technology, paid our legal bills on licensing music, and got us in front of some very grown-up businesses. And they liked what they saw.

Tell us something that will help another entrepreneur keep their investor happy.
Honest, open, continual communication. We don’t have to write and post on a monthly basis, but if there’s a special development we keep them in touch with phone calls and invites to our offices. They trusted us with their capital so should feel a part of it.

Why should we keep an eye on you?
There are certain things we can do to make the platform even richer. And watch us in the education space.

The founders of Dublin-based Flexitimers.com Dervla Cunningham and Joy Redmond, would be the first to admit they could have launched at a better time. Conceived when the word recession still had a nostalgic quality and launched in the week after the recession was made official in Ireland in late September, start-up life certainly has its challenges.

Flexitimers was created to provide an alternative to recruitment agencies for the SME community. It also wanted to avoid the Elance.com and similar US models, which Redmond says results in the companies posting freelance jobs being bombarded with bids for the work, with the cheapest typically winning the business.

Cunningham had already set up and run two web companies - an e-business services company Zartis.com which was sold to US buyer Breakaway Solutions and Arekibo Communications, a web design consultancy. She often found it difficult to find the right people without paying recruitment agencies exorbitant sums, while Redmond has worked as a freelance market researcher for numerous blue-chip companies so had experienced the other side of the fence. "There was nobody covering it in Ireland," says Redmond. "There were agencies that would send out staff, but it would cost €800 a day."

At the time, the recruitment industry was still booming and companies were struggling to find the right people to fill available roles. Since then, of course, supply has far outstripped demand. But on the other hand, with flexibility at its core, repositioning the business as a recession-friendly alternative to taking on full-time staff was an obvious step. "There's a cap on headcount, but freelance staff is something more companies are looking for, while candidates are looking to supplement their incomes," says Redmond.

In addition to SME firms, the likes of Microsoft are among companies posting short-term positions on the platform, with Flexitimers' software matching candidates and companies. The offering has evolved too, with Redmond and Cunningham providing a more in-depth screening service. "We always wanted it to be a people to people business, not just an agency," says Redmond. "We've had a lot of hugely positive feedback and PR coverage, plus registrations of really high quality candidates or small companies offering flexible accounting, legal, IT, marketing and sales services."

By 2010, the screening service is likely to play a more significant role alongside the Web 2.0 technology and it's likely the pair will seek to raise some additional funds. They initially raised €100,000 from Enterprise Ireland, and utilised incubation and enterprise services offered by NovaUCD, the Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre in Dublin, the South East Enterprise Platform Programme (SEEPP), Dublin Business Innovation Centre (DBIC), Dublin City Enterprise Board (DBEC) and Wexford County Enterprise Board (WCEB), where Redmond operates from. They also put in €100,000 of their own money.

It's clearly been a tough first year and serious revenue is still more a target than a reality, but with upheaval comes opportunity and Flexitimers may well live up to its name and adapted quickly enough.

CRM software: Great if your business can afford it, but out of reach for the average small firm. So what's the alternative? iComplete.com thinks it has the answer.

iComplete claims to be the low-cost alternative to the likes of Salesforce.com Sage and 37 Signals; a 'dumbed down' version if you like, but actually very clever as it promises to simplify the complexities of advanced CRM systems. It's the creation of British entrepreneurs Stuart and Claire Hibbert and Kiwi Myles Hantler.

Like all good start-ups, the idea was the result of the market not meeting demand. Or at least not meeting Claire Hibbert's needs. She was running her own small beauty salon business and had no way of cost-effectively managing her customer relationships. Husband Stuart happened to be an experienced software entrepreneur and developer and along with sales specialist Hantler the trio developed the concept. The hope is that Claire was not alone in feeling the need - and that iComplete genuinely has the answer.

So what does the site do exactly? With an eye fixed on the future, iComplete is a cloud computing solution, storing data in the ether - or massive server farms set up to save people data storage nightmares. It enables users to manage their customer interactions and make phone calls via the web using Voiceover Internet Protocol (VoIP). The service stores details of prospects, customers, phone notes, reminders and follow-ups, a built-in calendar and other information salespeople like to have at their fingertips when making outbound or dealing with inbound calls. Any fears about security should be allayed, says Hantler, by the fact the service is password protected.

And where you might pay £1,200 a year to use Salesforce, iComplete is a freemium model, costing nothing for storing up to 1000 contacts and then £15, £25 or £50 per month depending on the number of contacts stored with the premium offering having no limit. So, clearly more affordable for 1-20 employee companies, albeit lacking some of the bells and whistles of its established rivals. Hantler believes the company's main target users will actually be moving from paper or spreadsheet-based data storage, so will not find the diluted functionality an issue.

You could argue that the fact that this is the case also poses a threat to iComplete's success as likely users currently rely on free products so converting them may take a little persuasion. There's also a chance that Google will move into the space, with Google Voice and its other cloud services potentially providing an attractive alternative to spreadsheets. And in the US, the Zoho.com suite of business applications is evidence that the space could quickly become congested. iComplete also has the lack of understanding of cloud computing at the grassroots to contend with.

Hantler though remains confident iComplete will go places - and with good reason. Stuart Hibbert sold his previous software business, described as Europe's first e-billing application service provider, in 2004. Hantler was also a part of X200 too and they successfully worked their earn-out. The track record and finance the pair were able to invest into the development of iComplete, plus its potential to challenge beyond the UK and a significant target market will be important factors in it achieving its potential. Judges for Dell's Small Business Excellence Awards, which has made the company a finalist, clearly concur.

Hibbert and Hantler plan to raise finance from angel investors or a low-level venture capital outfit in the early part of 2010 to expand and are still tweaking the model having only gone live in April this year. It's likely a white label offering via directory or media sites plus an iPhone application will play an important part in generating the reach the company desires. If the site's progress to date is anything to go by iComplete has a bonny future.

User experience is everything for a website – the richer, more compelling and intuitive, the better. This is where UXA Technologies Limited, trading as 10CMS, comes in.

Content management systems (CMS) – the back-end unseen side of a website – can be the most frustrating things in the world when they play up. And Flash sites have limitations around search engine optimisation and editing. CEO Fergal O’Mullane and the co-founders of 10CMS were familiar with these issues, with head of development Jon Benham having performed bespoke work-arounds for clients while running web design agency Bare Brands with O’Mullane.

A solution to this tiresome problem would be invaluable in terms of time and cost they reasoned. Benham then beavered away on a code to crack it. And like a war-time inhabitant of Bletchley Park he did. Once done, the company, was ‘go’, complete with a WYSIWYG CMS (‘what you see is what you get’ – meaning the editable back-end mirrors the front-end look and feel).

O’Mullane and his three co-directors ploughed in £1m. And in February the team closed a venture capital round from the Irish Enterprise Fund worth another €1m (three out of the four directors are Irish).

Between times, they promoted the solution to the highly fragmented development community to little success. Smaller businesses with full Flash builds were again too fragmented so they raised their sites yet again, this time to the top of the food chain – enterprise level - by offering to integrate their rich media solution with companies' existing systems.

A handy ‘in’ at Shell via one of the company’s non-executive directors a year and a half ago has proved a major milestone. With Shell.com already one of the world’s larger sites, with 80 different country sites in 40 languages, the stage for 10CMS is about as big as they come. Like many things there was an element of luck as Shell’s new global site encountered a stumbling block at the eleventh hour. “We were parachuted in within matter of weeks. They put us through the wringer in making sure it worked, but didn’t horse trade on price.”

Shell.com now boasts rich media ‘quadrants’, displaying key messages. The same commoditised solution is proving popular with retailers too with rich media slideshows, carousels of products, galleries, banner images and videos driving e-commerce conversion rates for the likes of high-end homeware store Heals.co.uk and children's shopping portal Kiddicare.com That is why O’Mullane has made the retail sector 10CMS’ main target for 2009. “One client told us that by increasing their conversion rate by just 0.5% would be more cost-effective than creating a new high street store. We’ve actually seen conversion rates more than double using the solution.”

This highlights the major issue for retailers during the recession – the need to cut costs, but make sales. Shifting more online and differentiating their sites is proving a sensible option and the trend is making 10CMS a beneficiary, to an extent, of this recession. The company has over 70 clients in the enterprise and e-commerce space and is expecting to hit break-even on outgoings this year after substantial investment, with another round of finance sought towards the end of 2009 to push it into profit. Providing market conditions don’t worsen dramatically the chances are we’ll all be seeing a lot more sites with a 10CMS back-end.

According to Creative Director Rob Wood, Music Concierge is a “music consultancy dedicated to offering bespoke services to brands and branded places” In other words, while there are similar companies around, Music Concierge’s focus is on the ‘bespoke’ part of that concept, helping restaurants, hotels, and brands at “'the high-end, brand-focused end of the market' achieve the right sound for them.

Wood hinks that his team’s background make all the difference. He insist Music Concierge has unparalleled knowledge of numerous genres and an enormous, less commercial playlist, which can potentially make a brand’s uniqueness stand out. As former editor of the now defunct but no-less iconic Jockey Slut magazine, as well as an established DJ throughout the nineties, he’s allowed to shout such credentials were the classic ‘lift music’ accusation to be leveled.

Like many start-ups, the idea came by chance. "Very organically, different brands started to approach me, to help them sound right, to choose music for their website or for their branded compilation album”, says Wood. “Hotels also started to approach me to help me choose their music.” With that, the idea was born, and hotels around the world, from Cape Town to the Maldives, including the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, as well as the Mandarin Oriental, are counted as clients.

The company went to market in the autumn of 2007 after being formed in May, with Wood using his own money and a loan from family members. In the same year, it won a number of accolades including winning the BT Essence of Entrepreneur Competition in 2007.
Now, expansion is the plan, with the hunt for funding and the setting up of up sales reps from mainland Europe, to India and the US underway. Lobby music might just be getting a whole lot cooler.

Like a growing number of residents in this most tea-drinking of nations, Will Shakesheff enjoys his coffee. So much so that a few years back he sold off his family’s Mercedes Benz dealership to sell the black gold from the back of a bike outside William Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Yet these are no ordinary bikes (and apparently, no ordinary coffee either). “I was in the car trade and wanted to do something less strenuous; so I came up with the idea for these bikes”, says Shakesheff. The bikes in question appeared on the BBC's The Apprentice, and are, like the coffee, ‘fair-trade’. In fact, from the fair-trade cotton and hemp in the staff’s clothing, to the bamboo stirrers, locally-sourced muffins, and free coffee for those bringing their cups back, every effort has been made to ensure the company’s credentials. As Shakesheff says, Bikecaffe is “an environmental and eco-friendly, no carbon footprint company bringing delicious coffee to everybody.”

Compared to his larger corporate competitors, who’ve been able to put down strong roots in virgin coffee territory, he puts the success down to a number of factors: “People were fed up queuing and fed up with the quality and cost as well.” Business outside Shakespeare’s house was so good that Shakesheff’s mind turned to franchising last year. And he’s been able to make the move without, to this day, having any funding. “I didn’t need it”, he says. “I wasn’t planning to franchise!”

The handmade bikes already have a strong presence in the Midlands, and have seen success in a range of locations: There are seven operating in environmentally-aware Cornwall, and interest from India, Turkey and France. And while the term barista might still be foreign jargon in British English, all franchisees "are properly trained in coffee making”, insists Shakesheff: “Brits are waking up to coffee.”

PeoplePerHour.com was founded in September 2007 by two Cambridge University graduates: CEO Xenios Thrasyvoulou and CTO Simos Kitiris. In the words of Thrasyvoulou,”We’re a community of freelancers facilitating remote work; it allows companies of all sizes to outsource work. The freelancer gets rated and builds a profile – we provide a safe platform for that to happen.”

And safety and security, in Thrasyvoulou’s eyes, is key: “Remote working has a lot of advantages if it can be done securely. As the employer you need to be able to first trust before you can delegate. The whole concept is accountability through feedback, the E-bay method if you like.” While users of the site pay a percentage to PeoplePerHour on completion of successful jobs, revenue is also ensured by the use of futures listings and premium listings.

Just months after the launch, PeoplePerHour attracted £350,000 of seed investment from prominent angel investors. But for Thrasyvoulou, there is both enjoyment and nobility in the bootstrapping involved in getting a business off the ground. Now on his third business, the Cambridge and Harvard graduate began with boutique lifestyle management business Arcanus, before extending the business to include high-end holidays.

The idea for the site came from the entrepreneur’s previous experience in business. "It was from personal need, I felt the pain factor in trying to find people to execute small but significant pieces of work. It was a nightmare. We all know the problems of hiring and firing... If you want just one thing done as a small company, you’re too small to justify going to a company dealing with it, whether it’s copy writing or having a logo designed. The traditional economies of scale don’t work. It needs to be automated and online."

With the economic downturn upon us, it’s not just ‘typical’ freelancers either. According to Thrasyvoulou, 40% of the users don’t traditionally work in this way, with many of them having 9-5 jobs. PeoplePerHour is counting on exploiting a gap in the market. Thrasyvoulou ‘s opinion? “There’s room for disruption in this space.”

Fairtrade products have become ubiquitous over the last few years, but haven’t by any means reached as many areas of food retail as they could. Obviously coffee comes to mind, as do bananas, but what about all the other food products from developing countries that we take for granted?

Liberation is the first 100% fair trade business, making headlines this week when it launched the ‘Harry’s Nuts’ brand with award winning surrealist comedian Harry Hill. It's a ‘community interest company’ – a social enterprise set up to protect the interest of the community in question. It puts a cap on dividends and locks the assets into the business.

‘We exist to serve the interests of producers and nut farmers, sourcing nuts from five continents...fair trade is giving aid through trade – it’s more sustainable’ , explains managing director Ceri Willmott. Co-operatives of nut growers and exporters at different stages of development work with Liberation. ‘We’ve worked with nascent co-ops and in some cases like Malawi we’ve helped start the co-operative from scratch’, adds Willmott. The largest shareholder is the co-operative itself, which takes a 42% share, while the other 58% of Liberation is owned by ‘ethical investors’. For this reason, the investors attracted to community interest companies are first and foremost concerned with assisting the community in question. On top of that, says Willmott, ‘We invest 1% of all our products in a producer partnership programme...which goes into helping the producers improve their products.’

Liberation is in the same stable as leading fair-trade brand Cafe Direct, being a project of Twin and Equal Exchange. Launched in June 2007 after some time trading as the Ethical Nut Company, the products can be found in Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Oxfam, amongst other stores, while 80% of the business is actually ‘own-label’ fair trade nuts for suppliers including the likes of Tesco.

An initial investment of £1.5m got the company off the ground, while a certain level of refinancing is being looked at to continue pushing the brand. But what it all comes down to really, suggests Willmott, is making a difference to the 22,000 farmers and their families. She was a City lawyer before completing a PHD in anthropology and forging a career in international development, and it seems this want for change is pushing the business – and the consumers – forward together. ‘We’re bringing producers from around the world to Kerala in India next month. So farmers from the middle of nowhere in South America will travel to meet with other farmers from the middle of nowhere in India!’ There’s not too many companies who can claim to host such an interesting annual meeting.