Elance is a website which helps companies hire and manage staff online.
For businesses that hire people with specific skills on an hourly or project basis, Elance offers access to online workers and provides the tools to hire, view work in progress, and pay for results.
For skilled professionals who want to work online, Elance offers access to qualified clients and a virtual workplace.
Join us for the next Startup Wednesday at 2pm on 26th January in Arts Building S21 (second floor). We’ll be looking at legal issues for new businesses.
At idelica.com you’ll find fabulous food and drink from carefully-selected producers on the Continent, often the result of following age-old family or local recipes and using ingredients of incredible quality. These foods are finely-tuned using the producer’s passion for perfection and their investment in new food research and technologies to make their foods fit for commercial export, being certain to replicate – and some cases exceed – the quality of their traditional, hand-produced predecessors.
Idelica was started by Emma Lopez-Johnson who started out in the speciality food industry by co-founding the Spanish food import and distribution company Edeli Ltd in 2005. Most of her previous adult life was spent working in publishing in London, but she grew up in Dorset on big rations of the famous Andalucian appetite for life and tapas inflicted by the Spanish family on her father’s side on countless Summer visits to Almeria.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the term for a collection of techniques used to ensure that your website achieves as much traffic as possible, by ranking highly on searches from Google and other search engines. SEO is an industry in its own right, but there is much that you can do for free, yourself, to improve your website’s ranking.
Run jointly by John King, Royal Holloway’s Entrepreneurship Careers Adviser and Seb Butt, Royal Holloway Entrepreneurs’ Training Director, Startup Wednesdays is an exciting new course being launched next week, so don’t miss out on securing a place!
This FREE, yes FREE interactive 9 week course shows you how to:
Find an idea
Build a team
Plan the first year
Set up a website
Market and sell products and services
Raise investment
Handle accounts and legal structures
…and much much more
This course is suitable for anyone who has an idea they want to make happen, doesn’t have an idea but wants to have one, or just wants to find out how to create their own career.
Jessica Ratcliffe, a founding committee member of Royal Holloway Entrepreneurs, recently faced tough questioning from angel investors on the hit BBC TV show, Dragons’ Den.
First broadcast on BBC Two on Monday 13th September 2010, Jessica pitched for investment for her game-swapping website, GaBoom.co.uk. A passionate gamer and entrepreneur, Jess has been working tirelessly since January 2010, to develop and launch her dream game-trading platform, GaBoom.co.uk. “We have developed a safe, easy and unique way of trading games online; providing users, not only with our automatic user-matching system but two secure and insured postage options to take the hassle and risk out of trading their games online.” says Jess.
Jess told the Dragons the support she had received at Royal Holloway, one of the UK’s top destinations for student entrepreneurs, had been a critical factor in helping her to build her business. As a committee member of Royal Holloway Entrepreneurs, the student enterprise society, she has also inspired other students to follow their dreams.
Jess believes that pre-owned games will remain the choice of many gamers across the UK. “With approximately 12.4 million people in the UK currently buying their games second-hand, it is going to take something massive for all of them to switch to only buying their games brand new,” she says.
Doug Richard, who featured as a Dragon in the first two series of the show, thinks the current Dragons made a mistake by not investing. He told the BBC that GaBoom presents a “clear and wonderful opportunity… Jessica, wherever you are, there’s one ex-Dragon who believes in you.”
The Design Council have produced a series of great design guides for small businesses, combining practical advice and case studies. The guides include:
Getting British Business Online is a joint initiative between Enterprise UK, Google, BT and E Skills to help small businesses create their first websites and help them understand the opportunities offered by the Internet. The campaign has set a target of helping 100,000 UK small businesses get their first websites easily and for free by the end of 2010.
If you want your own website, for free, visit gbbo.co.uk to register your domain and to get a basic Google website.
You can then transform your basic website into an advanced, all singing, all dancing WordPress site by coming to one of our workshops! Email web@royalhollowayentrepreneurs.com to book a date.
Despite the decline in popularity of myspace, social networks can still provide a brilliant business opportunity. Facebook continues to grow rapidly and has a great advertising model, and our very own Jack Lenox’s eNovella, a social network and publishing outlet for aspiring creative writers, demonstrates that you can take a great yet simple idea, combine it with a dash of business acumen and a sprinkling of web skills, and create something special. If you are looking to build your own social network, you might want to start by reading these slides, which tell you in detail how to generate ‘social traction’ – ie., attracting and engaging end users.
Read the First Comment 
At 
David is the CEO and Founder of GroupSpaces, the world’s leading student society management software.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the term for a collection of techniques used to ensure that your website achieves as much traffic as possible, by ranking highly on searches from Google and other search engines. SEO is an industry in its own right, but there is much that you can do for free, yourself, to improve your website’s ranking.
The Design Council have produced a series of great 
Getting British Business Online is a joint initiative between Enterprise UK, Google, BT and E Skills to help small businesses create their first websites and help them understand the opportunities offered by the Internet. The campaign has set a target of helping 100,000 UK small businesses get their first websites easily and for free by the end of 2010.