Fubra Blog

Snow days at Fubra

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:34:33 GMT

Things were pretty hectic here at Fubra HQ last week, whilst Paul, Brendan and half the content team were away having a well earned skiing break in Val Thorens, France. The developers and network teams were hard at work putting together our new cloud hosting site HostOn.it, and as ever I was trying to calculate interesting things, such as "how much VAT do we owe this quarter?"

I was looking forward to having the whole team back in the office today - but it seemed the weather had other ideas.

Overnight, Fubra HQ, Aldershot and the surrounding areas were covered in a blanket of snow TEN inches thick! Some staff were unable to make it in, but the Directors need to set the example!

Here's Fubra's MD Brendan skiing - yes, skiing - into work!

I guess it must have been too tempting, having only got back from France late last night.

Even better, I was able to ski to the office too, which meant was able to ski yet avoid the extra luggage and insurance that easyJet piles on to air fares at the moment!

Of course, this being an internet firm, most of the team decided working from home on their laptops would be a good idea today - which left me with little to do but go and mess about in the park with everyone else!

Bail out Brown

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 10:22:34 GMT

Today, we're officially in a recession. This was caused by the nation getting in to too much debt and the government's solution to this problem is to get us in even more debt.

The government says that the cost of doing nothing is worse than than the cost of the bailouts to the banking industry, yet they are reluctant to make those costs transparent. We think the public have a right to know the truth about the sheer size and extent of these bail outs, and that there should be a debate on the merit of pursuing them.

Economics is often referred to as the dismal science, so we've tried to make it a bit more entertaining with our new Bail Out Brown site. The site aims to keep track of the nature and scale of the government's bail outs, whilst having a bit of fun along the way!

Introducing... Niggle

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:39:39 GMT

Niggle is the latest company to join the growing Fubra family, so we thought we'd take some time out to introduce ourselves. The business was co-founded by me, Helen Cammack, along with Paul Fisher, and aims to provide small businesses with a complete set of tools to enable them to collect and reward direct customer feedback.

Niggle offers online and off-line channels for customers to engage with businesses, such as public web pages, private surveys, SMS channels and freepost postcards. Everything is integrated in one online dashboard which analyses a business' incoming feedback and allows the business to respond directly and issue vouchers. Because Niggle is independent, the customer always stays anonymous and their private details remain secure. In addition to the technology, we also provide point-of-sale materials which businesses can display in their stores or premises to encourage feedback. Our basic online services are completely free, but it's backed up by a complete feedback package which is priced to make it (we think) a no-brainer for the small business which really cares what its customers think.

Why are we doing this? We believe passionately in customer feedback. Paul has run several of his own businesses previously, including restaurants, so knows how critical it is to stay in touch with customers. I have worked for companies with a reputation for poor customer service (eg NTL) and great service (eg Virgin) and I know which I preferred!

We are extremely excited to be working with the Fubra team. We tied up a deal in time for the New Year which means Fubra takes an active interest in our company, in return for not only financial support but also a whole heap of additional resources (PR, hosting, marketing, and mentoring). Both Brendan and Paul at Fubra share an instinctive understanding of how to operate businesses online, and that, combined with their super-quick, no-nonsense style of working make them the perfect partners for Niggle. The ideas and the decisions come quick and fast at Fubra, so we have a lot of work to do over the coming months!

2009 is the year for feedback. The companies that survive these hard times and remain on our high streets will be those that listen to their customers and adapt quickly and confidently. Larger companies have already started engaging with their customers much more closely. Where they have led, smaller businesses will follow, and we'll be there with the best product to serve that market. Do sign up for free if you're a business owner, and even if you're not, tell us what you think via our website niggle.co.uk.

We love feedback!

Hit President Bush with your shoes! Do it!

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:55:44 GMT

That was the instruction from entrepreneur Alex Tew in his latest online venture SockandAwe.com - a highly addictive game which allows you to thow virtual shoes at Mr Bush just like the Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at the US president. At the time of writing, more than 40 million shoes had been thown. Great success!

Since the game was launched on Monday we've been addicted to the satisfying 'thwack' of size 10's hitting Mr Bush's face at Fubra HQ, so much so that we bought the site! As of the end of a 24 hour eBay listing we are now the proud owners of SockandAwe.com.

It may seem like a strange addition to the Fubra portfolio on the face of it, but the figures dont lie:

Monday: 587 unique visitors
Tuesday: 417,397 unique visitors
Wednesday: 1,239,744 unique visitors
Thursday: 1,914,243 unique visitors
Friday: 1,140,394 unique visitors in the first 12 hours of today!

We have added a top scorer board and a made a few adjustments to the site but the concept is working so well because it's highly addictive we haven't wanted to change too much about the site.

Perhaps SockandAwe.com will fade away in a week or so or perhaps it will evolve into a cool site for flash games but whatever we do with the site we have all had great fun working on it.

The whole event has been pretty stressful too though as we were actually at our Christmas party when we found out we won the auction and a number of us came back and worked through the night to migrate the site and add more content and features.

Clearbooks online accounting service

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:58:16 GMT

Today I'm proud to announce the beta launch of a new online accounting software that we have invested in, called Clear Books.

Clear Books Limited has been formed as a 50/50 joint venture company between Fubra Limited and Tim Fouracre. Tim has been a friend of mine since we both studied our A-Levels together at Farnborough Sixth Form College from 1998 - 2000. He went to University to study maths while I was starting Fubra with Brendan. When he graduated in 2003, he came to work for us for a year before leaving to train to become an accountant with KPMG. He also ran a small business in his spare time building a network of websites including an accountants directory.

Once Tim had qualified as chartered accountant he decided it was time to go to work in the city as an investment banker, and a year later - we head hunted him as the perfect person to work with us on a new accounting system.

In June this year I got speaking to Tim about the lack of online accounting systems. We desperately wanted one for our own accounts, but the market seemed quite new and relatively under-developed. I had previously built a small invoicing system for my brothers' company, but it wasn't a double entry accounts system. Tim had been working on a basic double entry accounts system for his mum's dance school - but it didn't do invoicing. So we decided to merge the two ideas together and bring Tim on full time to work on it... and so Clear Books was born.

Tim is ideally suited to this project. An accountant, an entrepeneur and a programmer - all rolled in to one. And I'm delighted to say that he hasn't let us down. Just 4 months after he started full time on the project, we are now ready to launch Clear Books in beta mode.

I'm also delighted to say that we're offering a free accounts software for charities. It can be quite daunting for a new charity to work out all the forms they need to file with the Charities Commission. Clear Books makes this process significantly easier!

TalkOn.it keeps growing!

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:51:16 GMT

It has been quite a few months down here at TalkOn.it HQ. The sites are currently undergoing another re-design but we see this one as being the one that'll stay for the foreseeable future.

The reason for this blog is to celebrate our first day where we've broken the 5,000 unique visitors to the network and to let everyone into what exactly is going on with the sites.

Talk Football has long been the flagship site for the Sports Network and regularly attracts around 2,000 unique visitors per day. The site now hosts dynamic content in the form of blogs and of course the forums.

However it is not just Football that is carrying the network. Talk Boxing has been a long time favourite and has consistently been at #2 in the TalkOn.it charts. The #3 spot is a battle with Talk Cricket, Talk American Football, Talk Horse Racing and Talk Darts all fighting it out in a right royal rumble to be on the podium.

At the moment I'm working a lot on our Talk Skiing website. We are putting up resort reviews for all of Europe's major skiing venues. So if you are wondering where to go for skiing in Europe then we should hopefully have you covered.

We are hoping to create a community on these websites and of course to do this we need your help. If there are any sports that you are interested in then join us and help us make some excellent websites. We are always on the look out for forum members, moderators and bloggers. If you are interested in blogging for us then me know via the 'contact us' link on the websites.

On the forums we can now set up your avatars and profiles as well as join in with lively debates. Check out the Premiership Season thread or if you have an rule change that you'd like to see implemented in football then discuss it in our Rule Change thread.

It hasn't all been plain sailing though with the websites. Constant struggles to get the pages looking right has seen us making many changes but here we give you a bit of a snapshot of how the Football Headers have looked over the past year.