So congratulations to Mimecast (which is probably the best known within the legal market) and the nine other digital companies who have been invited to pitch for funding at #Pitch10, a Dragons Den type session to be held at No.10 Downing Street (that’s the home of the UK prime minister for non-UK readers) on 31st July.
The other (to quote the official website) “rising stars” and “most promising digital companies in Britain selected by an independent panel of digital leaders” (whatever that means) are CertiVox, Digital Shadows, DueDil, Huddle, kykloud, Lumejet, ROLI, Swiftkey and Transferwise. The management team of CertiVox includes co-founder Frank Boening, best known in the UK for his time with Workshare, while Huddle recently made it into the “losers quadrant” in Gartner’s new Enterprise File Synchronization & Sharing Report (in effect secure alternatives to Dropbox).
The 10 companies will be pitching to 70 “investors, financiers and corporate partners” with “an addressable market of £50 billion.” Anyway good luck to everyone – although it should be noted this is not a UK Government initiative, it is merely being hosted by 10 Downing Street but organised “by an independent panel of advisors representing Britain’s digital sector” namely Eileen Burbidge, a partner and founder of Passion Capital, and Jon Bradford, founder and CEO of Tech Stars London.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that in replying to the 600+ tech companies that either pitched or were invited to participate, an aide with Downing Street CC-ed the entire mailing list rather than use the BCC option. (Yeah, this new fangled email thingy is a bit hard to master.) The net result has been a spamfest and the creation of at least two LinkedIn and one Facebook groups for the unlucky 590 to network and pitch their ideas. www.pitch10.co (this URL is correct).