Features

Cash is pretty hard to come by these days and as many an entrepreneur knows getting that early injection of the ‘readies’ can be what makes or breaks your business idea. As we ourselves love a dabble in the kitchen, we were really interested to hear about Kitchenette, the first London Kitchen Incubator. Those of us who are aware of business incubators, will understand that a startup w...
Read Post »

Startacus occasionally dabbles at drawing. Not that we can claim to be any good, but we do believe that doing the odd doodle helps get the ol’ creative juices going (especially in dead boring office meetings - when you sketch out the boss sitting opposite). So we were glad to hear of The Big Draw - the month long celebration of...you guessed it...Drawing, that kicked off yesterday and runs ...
Read Post »

Startacus is looking to make a difference - to be inspired and also to ourselves inspire; to be inspire other people to do their own thing; create their own job, or just create something that they love. Our hope is to create a community of thinkers, creators and doers! Doing just that for the last 12 months, has been the wonderfully titled Nowhereisland, an arts situation project funded by the Ar...
Read Post »

Startacus has been keeping an eye on Trylife for the last while. Almost like a late night interactive Hollyoaks or Skins episode, Trylife is a hard hitting interactive online drama that has been launched in the last month or two , although has been years in Development. Although ‘interactive’ TV has been all the talk for years, there have not been too many successful shows t...
Read Post »

Hardly a week goes by these days without some new conference, unconference, event or festival being promoted targeting the creatives, the entrepreneurs and the startups. All good to see! However for many of us the location, the costs and the practicalities of being away from “work” for a few days at a time is far from ideal, no matter how interesting the speakers and the workshops may ...
Read Post »

Last week we explored the philosophy of the pop up shop. The mindset, the reasoning, the political clambering for involvement, and the success of pop up shops themselves.We highlighted the Pop up Britain shop in Richmond, Surrey, and to get a flavour of their thoughts, we contacted a few of the residents, to get their views on the experience itself. And boy can some of these startups talk - so muc...
Read Post »

Like LinkedIn, but face to face, with a mouth full of food, Lets Lunch launched in the States in 2010 - now Startacus hears its coming to the UK - hungry to find out more? A problem with LinkedIn (at least the free version) is that in terms of business networking, it is not always the people that you know and get linked-in with, that you in an ideal world would really like to network with. Lets ...
Read Post »

Part 1 - The philosophy of the pop-up shop... Its like the chicken and the egg, the pop-up shop and the recession. Which came first? Well in the case of the pop-up shop, they can be traced back to the late 1990’s, and both offered a short term sale opportunity to both the in-vogue brands of the moment and the cheap, thrown in the back of a lorry with a suitcase companies, to sell their stuf...
Read Post »

11 years ago, I left University. A few years later, someone mentioned a site that they had started using called Facebook. I had, up until this point, dabbled with Friends Reunited, a site where unsurprisingly, you tried to reunite with old friends. It was okay, but once you got past the reuniting part, there was little point to the site, apart from to, I suppose, keep saying hello! My new friend,...
Read Post »

The work of incubators and accelerator programmes and their impact on startup businesses is well documented. However there is now a new player in the game - the “portfolio startup”. One such of these is Dublin’s recently launched Scale Front. Scale Front aims to be a company that builds startups from scratch. Founded by two serial entrepreneurs, Sean Blanchfield and Brian M...
Read Post »

If you’ve got an idea for an online retail business that you’ve been thinking about setting up, then a recently launched competition by the eCommerce platform Shopify should be right up your street. The Build-A-Business initiative is quite simply not to be missed.... What do you have to do? Basically you come up with a product to sell, open your online store through Shopify and then ...
Read Post »

One of the greatest things about having your own business is the ability to do what you want (as long as it’s productive!). And here at Startacus, we’re no different, and music is the one thing we couldn’t live without. Music can be inspirational, memorable and can get the creative juices flowing. Finding that Jeff Buckley CD from 1994 can feel like finding a £20 note in t...
Read Post »