Venturefest Yorkshire: Was it Worth the Petrol?
11th February 2009
Venturefest Yorkshire is “an expo of Yorkshire’s most inspiring science, technology and knowledge entrepreneurs” which is held at the Knavesmire Stand at York Racecourse in the UK.
The City of York is about a 40 minute drive from my office and today was 2009’s Yorkshire Venturefest expo. However was it worth the petrol, the £1.50 per cups of coffee and the overpriced steak burgers?
Let’s see…
At these events it’s typical to see a good mix of different business types, exhibiting.
This year’s event was no exception and included the usual raft of companies offering the normal run of the mill services that have been around for ever; solicitors, accountants etc of which, to my surprise, there was only a sprinkling. There seemed to be a large proportion of web and new media type of companies this year: not particularly interesting from my point of view on the whole. Added to this there were the usual government or local authority quangos and professional support groups supplemented with a few charity stands dotted in between.
The companies that did grab my attention included an innovative start-up that was offering an online, paperless invoicing system, a company selling a web based business accounting system which did the job of the usual desktop software apps like Sage and a dot-com start-up that specialises in selling images to students and student organisations. Their strap-line on all their literature was “Expose yourself to thousands of students”. Clearly they didn’t get the joke until I pointed it out. Can you guess what they’ll get changed at their next print-run? How we laughed! (well I did anyway).
So far nothing to write home about (or blog about as the case maybe).
Upstairs on the 3rd floor were a group of stands from many of the “Business & Enterprise Colleges” or “schools” as I used to call them, from around the region.
These proved to be quite interesting and I spent a good hour browing each stand. Each one was manned by a handful of students who as part of their studies, had worked on either a specific business idea or product innovation. Some of these were good, particularly as most if the kids were under 16. I liked the idea developed by one school, of a self-contained bicycle lamp that could be charged from a laptop via USB. Cool!
So apart from these latter examples and bumping into a few of my old contacts, there was nothing there at todays expo that was going to light my fuse.
Still, was it worth the petrol? On the whole yes; after all it’s only a 40 min drive away and a few hours out of my day.
Oh – and I liked the steak burgers: even though they were overpriced!
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Tags: Business Life, Business Networking
Jane Lambert Says:
Yes, Jamie, I did attend Venturefest yesterday. This year’s was very much better than those of the last two years. I will be back next year.
23rd April 2009
Richard Holmes Says:
Hi Jaimie. Glad we caught your eye and thanks for the mention. Things are going well for Liquid Accounts at the moment- probably as more business owners look for better value software to do their accounts. If there’s anything we can do to help, please let me know.
cheers, Richard
23rd April 2009