—-PRESS RELEASE—

AirPOS Ltd, a Belfast-based software company making integrated ePOS and eCommerce software for SME retailers, announces a Series A investment.

Having achieved seed level investment in March 2010 from Silicon Valley based private investor and entrepreneur mentor, David Kirk, AirPOS Ltd are proud to have taken the Company to the next level with a Series A investment of £235,000. The funds will assist the company in developing and marketing their cutting edge retail platform that allows retailers simple and seamless stock and sales integration across their instore platforms, web stores and eventually mobile platforms.

AirPOS worked with a syndicate of investors led by the Invest Growth Fund managed by E-Synergy and also included Michael O’ Neill, Bright Sky Facilities Management and Giant Associates to raise the new finance. The company will invest the funds to accelerate the development of their unique cloud based Point of Sale and web store software, grow their rapidly expanding team, and execute rapid international expansion into Europe and the USA.

Continuing the growth of the AirPOS team the company are proud to announce the successful recruitment of Les Curran and Jason Bell. Les has joined the team as Chief Operating Officer and was previously with Kelsius and Logica. Jason has joined as Chief Technical Officer having previously founded Datasentiment and UVoucher.

Martin Neill, CEO and co-founder, said of the investment; “We are humbled by the faith the investors have shown in buying into our vision for AirPOS and are looking forward to giving retailers all over the globe a world-class software product founded in Belfast, built in Belfast and now invested in Belfast. We are also delighted with the talent we have attracted into the company and are very much looking forward to the next phase of our development, starting right now!”

David Kirk, ex Senior Vice President of AOL and Cisco Systems said of the deal: “This is like being in on the ground floor of E Bay.”

His thoughts were echoed by the company’s Chairman Tim Brundle who added: “The AirPOS team has enthusiastically developed a great product with massive growth potential. I am pleased to see that their innovation is now available to the world.”

Link to article on AirPOS.co.uk

The Europas, the TechCrunch Europe Awards 2010 for European tech companies, will be held on November 19 in London (tickets available here). Entrants have been informed by Crunchbase, our database of startups, and will be voted on by the industry. These results will influence a subsequent voting round from The Europas Advisory Board of experts, chaired by TechCrunch Europe.

But we need your votes!

Therefore we’re calling out strong arms and clear heads for a Bank Holiday Monday Build-a-thon. We need folk who can lift, carry, people who are not afriad to pick up a hoover or a dustpan, people who want to help build up old PCs, install Linux and get a network up and running.

We’re going to bring the desks up, we’re going to build as many as we can and then we’re going to eat pizza. Please RSVP in the comments if you’re coming!

Technology incubators have been around forever – a spit over fifty years, the first one being credited in NY in 1959. So important are they to infant companies that there is a National (US) Business Incubator Association ( http://www.nbia.org/ ) who just happen to be celebrating their 25th anniversary this year. The heady days of the dotcom bubble saw a revolutionary set of incubators for Internet companies, starting with Bill Gross’ IdeaLab. The last fifteen years have seen Y Combinator’s and Plug n’ Play’s popping up all over the globe. Everywhere bar Northern Ireland – until now.

Incubators are much, much more than a cluster of desks and computers, telephones and videoconferencing. Real incubation is about transferring business know-how as quickly and relevantly as possible into the minds of inexperienced entrepreneurs so that they can turn that big idea into a big business in the shortest possible time. StartVI takes that concept one step further.

It’s easier to explain StartVI in terms of what it isn’t rather than what it is.

StartVI is definitely void of bureaucracy. Paper kills trees and green is good. Forms kill souls and karma is king. The only application entrepreneurs need to submit is a 5 – 15 minute video. Just explain why this is a brilliant idea, in a big market, with a hot product and an ace team.

NO MORE BUSINESS PLANS.

StartVI is about building businesses – NOT writing about building businesses. (But somewhere in there, you’ll have to create a 2-3 page overview and a 12-15 slide deck of your investment opportunity.)

StartVI is also virtual. (Another play on “VI”=Virtual Incubator). After all this is 2010. Web 2.0 is already legacy and the folks that will rock the technology business world have grown up with Twitter, Skype, YouTube so meeting, conferencing, mentoring, presenting, discussing, deciding can all be achieved without face-to-face contact. That’s not to say there won’t be any in-person contact-just that lacking it won’t stop progress. Eliminating the tyranny of time and distance-shifts enables StartVI to bring mentors and advisors from around the world to bear on StartVI companies. A small, but enthusiastic group of successful entrepreneurs and executives from Silicon Valley have already offered their time to support this effort.

And if StartVI is not your father’s incubator, it certain isn’t your mother either. It’s about entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs. It’s #JFDI – and if you don’t understand that then #fail. And since it isn’t a father or mother figure, you obviously get treated as an adult. The perfect entrepreneur for StartVI has an attitude, and reeks talent, imagination, passion and – most of all – ambition.

Oh, and that “SIX” … it’s six companies, for six months at 6%. Applications start in April, but this is the first time through so if you expect everything to launch smoothly as silk, then you’ll be disappointed, not just with StartVI, but with your own business launch. This is the new world. Launch and be dammed, but run like crazy to pick up all those dropped balls.

Welcome to tomorrow.

Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. it’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere. – Barack Obama

We’re going round and talking to people about VI, what it is and how it intends not only to deliver but also to be sustainable. One thing is certain – though the concept may be nebulous and hard to understand at first when you come from a world which is ruled by the price per square foot of space, when it’s explained correctly, everyone gets it.

I’ve put some of that into this PDF document which you can download and read, forward to anyone else and generally quote from.

VI is about taking a chance, it’s about a few motivated individuals who are going to shoulder part of the burden of risk for a few startups. And we have to remember that it’s okay to fail – as long as you don’t let that be the end.

We’re providing a place, a process, desks, chairs, light, heat, painted walls and experienced mentors. This is only part of what we see as missing in the Northern Ireland startup scene and we’re interested in talking to other like-minded folk who can help put together the other parts of the picture.

Remember, VI is not tied to a place or a group of people. It’s an idea, a process. If you want to replicate the VI process then get in touch and we can help put together the same process and same ideas in your location.

If you want to help, get in touch.