Last week I attended and talked at EIE'11, the investment conference run by the Informatics department of the University of Edinburgh. The focus is on creating interest in the startup companies spun out from the ideas of the academic staff and students.

Wednesday afternoon was essentially investors talking among themselves. The most useful perspective came from Deborah Magid, Director in the IBM Venture Capital group, visiting (like myself) from the Bay Area. She was very clear about IBM's approach - they need to see $10m in revenue to consider an aquisition - they get involved with much smaller companies through the partner program and competitons like Smartcamp.

Thursday was for pitches - some in person, and some by means of a series of 1 minute videos, 1 per company, presented back to back in sets of ten. There was a useful collection of data about numbers and amounts of investments into Scotland by Stuart McKnight, Managing Director at Ascendant Corporate Finance. Sandy Ferguson, Senior Partner at MBM Commercial gave perspective on the lack of interaction between the billions of pounds of capital being managed by insurance and pensions companies in Scotland and the startups seeking funding, contrasting that with the investment approach taken by, for example, Calpers, which invests less than 10% of its large portfolio in 'alternatives' which include venture capital.

Nigel Eccles talked about Fanduel, and I talked about Musemantik - both spinouts from the Informatics department, at different stages of development.

There's a list of the exhibiting and pitching companies at the EIE'11 website. Most interesting to me were Contemplate - for finding concurrency issues with Java code, with two large London investment banks as initial users; and D-light, who have developed a modulation scheme useable over LED lighting - think wifi, but using light instead of wireless frequency.

References

http://www.scotsman.com/businesstechnology/Magid-leads-IBM-team-checking...
Thursday afternoon presentation about Musemantik pdf
http://www.eie11.com/exhibitors
Other blog posts http://blog.salientpoint.co.uk/2011/05/22/event-report-eie-11/ , http://rookieoven.com/2011/05/20/pick-of-the-bunch-from-eie11/
Last year's notes
http://www.cunningsystems.com/2010/05/edinburgh-eie10

Cunning Systems evaluates product and service ideas in computing and communications. If you would like to discuss an idea, contact us at info@cunningsystems.com