• The power of branding
• Finding a designer
• Getting a great website

Get expert advice from one of the minigrants judges.

The £2,000 minigrants awards close at 5pm on Friday 19th March 2010. To give you the best chance of winning, one of the judges will be available this week to give you free one to one advice about your application. So if you have any questions about the application process, about terms and conditions, or just want to get your application into the best shape possible, make sure you take advantage of this opportunity to get some expert advice.

The advice clinics will be held in the Careers Service, Horton Building, at:

12pm-2pm Tuesday 16th March

1pm-3pm Friday 19th March

All information and application forms can be found here.

If you want to start using Twitter, set up an account first and then ‘follow’ our members. For an introduction aimed at beginners and hints and tips for advanced users, read this post by Guy Kawasaki.

Tall tree and the eye, by Anish Kapoor

I went to see Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy of Arts today. It blew me away – an amazing exhibition. It was great to see people interacting with the pieces – moving closer, then further away; swinging their heads from left to right to see how the artwork changed with the change in their perspective.

These interactions reminded me of something I read recently in Guy Kawasaki’s brilliant book ‘The Art of the Start‘. Guy talks about telescope phases, when entrepreneurs think up the next big thing to change the world, their heads full of dreams. In microscope phases, there is a focus on detail and a return to fundamentals. Perhaps the major banks are in microscope phases right now. According to Guy, you need both microscopes and telescopes to achieve success.

At the exhibition, some people wondered around, looking at the art from a distance to appreciate the immense scale. Some people walked up closely to each exhibit, looking closely at the texture of the material. Others did both; they moved closer then further away, taking in the totality of the work.

Perhaps it is this third group who really gained the most from the day. I noticed my tendency to look at the bigness of things, appreciate the scale; remembering Guy’s words, I made sure to look at each work more closely. I ended up spending several hours there, never feeling bored, and I’m sure I will return again.

Come to our drop-in advice surgery, Business Clinic, and receive individual guidance from an experienced adviser. Business Clinic runs every Tuesday from 10am-11am in the Careers Centre, Horton Building. You can book a slot by telephoning Careers on 01784 443073, from 9.30am onwards on the day you wish to come, or just turn up.

If you cannot attend Business Clinic because you have a lecture, you may book an appointment at another time by emailing clinic@royalhollowayentrepreneurs.com .

Getting users, getting distribution, getting attention, becoming viral – that’s the single most difficult thing on the internet to do. And just about every product fails because they don’t have any users.

Entrepreneurs tend not to focus on that. There are very few companies that have been able to get to tens of mills of users that have failed, other than for being sued or some other reason like that.

The other thing is that the people who would pay you for things, like carriers or big companies, typically don’t want to talk to you until you have tens of millions of users. If you have a thousand users and you go to British Telecom and say ‘I want to come up with a business model with you guys’, they’re not going to sit at the table with you.

So the focus on user growth initially may sound like an internet bubble-era way of thinking about things; but if you think about statistically what’s successful and what’s not, that is usually the succsessful thing, to focus on the virality and the user growth; and once you have that, what you look at is ‘who are we benefiting?’”

Joi Ito, Chief Executive of Creative Commons, in this interview in the Guardian

The networks are distributed across the UK with the South East having thirty networks listed at present.