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Developer Updates
Developer Updates
I have a meeting arranged with Schroders on Monday 3rd December to discuss the potential of raising second round funding with their support.
The agenda is as follows:
Meeting attendees will be Annabel Watson from Casenove Capital along with:
Following the board meeting, I met with Charlie Milton and Tim Lander to discuss staffing / advisors and the potential of one or more NEDs. Other than to agree that we need to work on a number of contacts in areas that would not conflict with what we can already offer, we agreed that it would be a good plan to explore developing relationships with a number of people primarily in the following areas:
I also arranged for both Charlie and Tim to meet Michael Fasosin who is the man who introduced me to Casenove and now Schroders. Whilst they thought that Michael was a very decent guy, I think the initial take from it was that they felt he would be a very good investor, door opener, and person to have involved, but not necessary in a formal capacity at this point. I have a meeting with Schroders on Monday 3rd December to present forghetti to another group of people. See the relevant post. We agreed that I should keep the conversation warm with Michael Fasosin.
This last week, thanks to an introduction via Harry Akerman, Lee and I were able to have a meeting with Prof Vladimiro Sassone and Dr Andrea Margheri.
You can read more about Vladimiro using the links below.
https://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/vsassone
http://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/network/vladimiro-sassone/
As the lead Professor at Southampton University in this area of Cyber Security, he is responsible for the development of the students, but also of the Cyber Security Academy. You can read about this here:
Download the brochure or read about is on the website here: https://csa.southampton.ac.uk/
Basically having had the meeting and having presented forghetti to them they have now put a proposal to me for us to become part of the Academy and for them to evaluate the strength of the forghetti system, security, algorithm and process between now and the launch of the app.
This would give us both the credibility to be part of such an Academy, but also the validation of the methodology, something which I strongly believe will give us a lot of comfort over the coming months.
There is a cost to this, of £10,000, however, they have agreed that this can be paid over the course of 12 months in £2,500 instalments.
I am very excited about this opportunity as it immediately gives forghetti the gravitas that is needed for a system and it is from an organisation that has credibility itself; not simply a paid consultant. See the video below:
I have now followed up with Basck regarding the potential to patent the forghetti end-to-end solution. I have sent them an overview document and video of the application in action and will be reviewing this with them this coming week.
They are of the mind that it is certainly possible to submit the application here in the UK. The initial cost of drafting the patent application based on the invention report is £5,500.00.
This covers you with patent pending for 12 months at the end of which you can either file the patent in several countries or you can extend the patent application period for another 18 months.
The filing in the UK would be great as we will get the search & examination report issued early, i.e. 6-8 months after filing the application, which is still before the international (PCT) stage.
It means that on launch we can have “Patent Pending” on the materials.
The agenda for the meeting held on the 12th November 2018 at The White Hart in Stockbridge was:
Minutes of the meeting. (PDF)Other useful documents used at the meeting can also be referred to here:
The iOS app was followed swiftly by the Android app. Despite some initial bugs, the apps are really coming together and we are now on release 7 of the software.
The major bugs in the app have now been ironed out and the team are now focused on the authentication of new users using the Google OAuth system.
Following on from our board meeting, thanks to the introduction from Nigel Webster of James Robinson, I have now agreed with him to work with the team from next week onwards.
James comes with over 10 years of working with Nigel at CorelTree and will be able to support, guide and enhance the development of the desktop application.
He has recently completed two product developments into Electron which is the system we are using to create the desktop app. So he is well qualified.
He has spent a couple of hours with the team today and we have gone through all of what we have already done and all that we still need to do. He is initially able to work 2 days for a couple of weeks, and thereafter for 4 days a week. We are going to review the amount of time needed after the first couple of days of actual development time next week.
I believe that this is going to give Lee a great support.
Dan has also stepped in to work on some of the elements of the application that Lee had put to one side for the moment, and I am pleased that Dan has been able to make great progress in the development of the majority of the pages that are needed in the app.
The agenda for the meeting held on the 17th September 2018 at The White Hart in Stockbridge was:
Minutes of the meeting. (PDF)Other useful documents used at the meeting can also be referred to here:
I am pleased to confirm that the EU Trademark Registration has been granted on the 21st August 2018. So there is no need to consider buying an Italian restaurant!
For the past couple of months, I have been working with my nephew on a part time basis to build up our marketing plan and strategy... the list of influencers is getting quite long and the extension of that into the US and countries outside of the UK now mean that the list is going to grow very quickly....
We have also been profiling different target audiences on Facebook... the numbers are quite interesting...
To give you a sample here you go:
Direct Response Test 1: 20-55 w/ child aged 8-18, ESPotential FB reach: 240,000
Brand Build Test: 20-55 w/ child aged 8-18, ESPotential FB reach: 240,000
Brand Build Test: 20-55 w/ child aged 8-18, ES +software USAPotential FB reach: 1,600,000
Direct Response Test: 20-35 Life Hacker + ESPotential FB reach: 240,000
Direct Response Test: 35+ Life Hacker + ESPotential FB reach: 180,000
Brand Build Test: 20-35 Life Hacker + ESPotential FB reach: 240,000
Brand Build Test: 35+ Life Hacker + ESPotential FB reach: 180,000
Brand Build Test: Travel + ES 20-35Potential FB reach: 2,200,000
Brand Build Test: Travel + ES 35-65+Potential FB reach: 1,800,000
It is amazing what they know about us all...
I have now secured the following domains for a couple of years.
I am particularly excited about .at and .in since these are ones which we can play with a little...
forghetty.at/the-world-cup
forghetty.in/france
and so on... you get the idea!
Some of the other one's also set the mind racing... .tv, .global, .love
Further to our meeting with Jason, we are now in a position to get the whole of the mobile app, webApp and desktop app translated as well as the website, animations etc...
We have a technical plan and I am now just putting this all together to give to Wessex Translations.
As you have seen this week, we have been working on the animation that we want to use as the teaser when we launch.
We have now 17 variants of the animation with different colours, durations and lead wording.
The animator has created an alphabet of animated letters in the forghetti font so that we can effectively change the front end of the animation to say whatever we like very easily and very quickly.
The different wording that we have used at the moment are:
We have then done a few of varying length...
The plan will be to use all of these, and more, across the initial marketing, see which variants get the most take up and then push those. I plan also to get the front end words translated into multiple languages, so that we are pushing varying messages around the world.
Carl, Lee and I visited Jason this week and had a complete update on progress.
Jason and Simon (two people working together on the app development), have made great progress and have basically built the iOS and Android versions of the app. At the moment they have simulated all the actions, but as of this week we have now given them all the API code, as well as the HTML for the Doodlepad, access to the database and the whole set up.
We will see things progress quickly from here... we are now getting down to the detail of the application sign up process and any wording inconsistencies between the WebApp, desktop app and the mobile apps
Thanks to Rory James-Duff, we met today one of the founding team members of Spotify here in the UK. A really interesting chat where we discussed the merits of Forghetti and the different methods of getting a product like this out into the market as quickly as possible. Here is a brain dump of some of the things which came from the meeting.
The conversation was both re-assuring and at the same time challenging as his opinion was very much that in order to make this big, we need to go fast and without any hesitation into the US market as well as other UK speaking languages.
He liked the product, completely understood the merits of saving nothing and remembering a doodle and could also understand that the current products out there are targeting a different type of user if for not other reason than the wording that they use and the branding and personality that they adopt - ie technical and more B2B style in their marketing.
He felt that the use case on the PC was certainly more important than solely on the mobile where he said he did not need to login to apps that often as he was always "logged in".
Re-assuring as he basically agreed with the plan that we have and the branding, tone of voice work that we have completed. He said that it was quite unusual for him to have the conversation with a company where the marketing, positioning and tone of voice were being dealt with from the start and this was very positive.
His view was that journalists, PR and tech blogs were going to be the key to getting out their quickly and to look at all the influencers that would be able and interested in sharing this with their networks. This is work that we are doing at the moment identifying suitable partners and channels.
The reason for hitting the US market was simple… there are a lot of people all within one jurisdiction all who speak the same language and whilst there are cultural differences, there is a better Return on Investment breaking into the US market as there would be hitting the French, Italian or Spanish markets. He also said that the UK market was simply not big enough…
His view was that someone could copy this and so we need to be fast as soon as we are out of the blocks. Another reason for going to the US ASAP as potential competitors may well determine that it is not such an easy win if the original product that they want to copy is already in the market.
I think the underlying message out of the meeting was that we are on the right track and that we need to think big from the outset and think smart on how we market the product.
So I believe that we need to get into as many markets as possible, in as much as we need to translate the little collateral that we have, translate the app in multiple languages and consider marketing online across numerous countries ASAP with the focus being on the UK, US and other English speaking markets.
"Think Big and your deeds (our dreams) will grow." (link to a poem which I think you should all put on the back of your loo doors!)
Some facts about Spotify experience and also other views gleaned:
As you know we have a plan to be very visual across a lot of social media.
I have been working with one company in Winchester and I also have another animator coming to work with us in Winchester July 2nd but I thought you might like to see the first efforts from one of them... it needs work, but gives you an idea of the type of thing these guys can do...
Click to view the short 6 second version
Click to view the long 25 second version
The aim will be to produce several of these short videos as well as a couple of longer ones which attract the reader enough to make them want to see what it is all about...
We are not there yet, but I hope by the end of next week, we will be in a good place.
The long version could be shown on our website, but also could be used to send to people with whom we would like to partner...
Lots of progress has been made on the development of the desktop application which will be ready for PC and MAC at launch.
Here are some screenshots of what the web.alloc8tor.com version and the desktop version will look like.
And it will even be accessible from a mobile phone if you happen to have two... or want to access it without installing the app.
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