Venturefest Yorkshire 2008 

We had a great time meeting old and new faces at this year’s Venturefest Yorkshire. A big thanks to all of you who visited our stand in the darkest, loneliest corner of the exhibition hall downstairs at the York Racecourse!

Our stand incidentally was located right opposite the BBC’s Dragons’ Den where we met some interesting characters wandering around the exhibition. One chap I distinctly remember, walked up to the Dragon’s Den stand, picked up a leaflet and muttered something like “… last resort for me this Dragons’ Den lark…” To which I duly skipped over and asked him if we was OK (he did look a little down in the mouth). What he said to me was quite surprising really. He claimed to have invented a simple, economical to produce (mere pence if I remember rightly), electronic device that not only makes wireless networks more secure, it can increase their overall effective range. Let’s have one then eh?!

He continued to tell me that he had worldwide patents and even managed to stop someone in Taiwan from copying the idea and selling them on e-Bay. Crikey! This sounds like a great product. And with that, he wandered off muttering again something along the lines of “2 years I’ve been looking for investment. All I need is someone to buy the idea from me so I can retire to Brazil (or somewhere)…”Surely if any of the investors he spoke to at Venturefest were half interested in his product, we could expect to see it very soon in a PC World maybe? Depends on whether he goes to Brazil sooner rather than later. He really did sound cheesed-off with the whole thing. Stick at it I say. You’ll come good soon, I’m sure of it.

I also attended an afternoon session from Ben Kench, The Can-Can Man, who incidentally wrote the first Selling for Dummies guide. The most prolific thing I came away with after listening to Ken was ‘stick to it’, no matter what. His motivational ‘Business Booster’ presentation was all about realising what we all CAN do, whether we are professional or non professional people, not absent-mindedly pondering what we could do.

I do hope the inventor of the wireless security device does stick with it. If he does, he’ll get his dream and retire to Brazil, or wherever it was he mumbled!

Tags: Business, Dragons' Den, Inventor, Patent, Venturefest, Wireless, Yorkshire

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 1:10 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.