The Fubra Blog
Calling all start-ups
Fubra is looking to invest in more successful web start-ups than any other UK investment business in 2010. So if you are running a business online and think you could grow it bigger with our help or investment then you should think about getting in touch.
Before you approach us though, I thought it would be good to give some hints of what we are looking for and what we can offer to you in return for shares in your business. In addition to reading about our company and investments on our site, to see what we are doing, these hints should give you more of an idea what to expect in a meeting with us.
Did you know? In 2009 Fubra invested £250,000 into private companies. In 2010 we want to invest double that if we can find enough good prospects.
But why are we special? Read the rest of this entry »
Igloo: the movie
With most of our staff stranded at home, the few of us that were able to come in undertook an epic igloo construction project.
It took nearly 8 hours, 6 staff members and over 100 snow blocks to create, as you can see the result was pretty fantastic.
My fellow designer Harry has prepared a brief video of the event complete with Hoff/Pingu soundtrack enjoy!
Snow Day Project – Building an Igloo
At Fubra we love the snow. When it snowed last year in February one of our Directors even skied into work (lucky for him, his house is at the top of a hill, and our office is at the bottom). So this year, with the arrival of up to 40cms of snow in some parts of the South, we decided to build an igloo in our office car park.
The following video shows you the construction process and some of the problems we encountered while building our snow house:
Happy Halloween from Fubra
Firstly I would just like to wish everybody a Happy Halloween and I hope you all have a devilishly good weekend!
It has been a busy week here at Fubra with investments, birthdays and lots of late nights making some cool Halloween posts for SixCrayons. Just like to say a big welcome to new Fubra investment Marble Construction who we have already been working with this week.
A few weeks ago myself and fellow designer Nick decided to create a couple of Halloween posts for SixCrayons. After a few late nights of pizza and lots of Cherry Coke we finally got them done. I created a rather fun Zombie Transformation Tutorial taking a few of the Fubra staff and turning them into Zombies.
Nick - being a huge movie geek - made a GhostBusters Isometric tutorial including all the GhostBusters, Ecto One and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Check out the full tutorial and be sure to ask him in the comments if there is anything you would like to know how to do. He has also included the Ai file of Ecto One for you to download and play with.
Read the Full GhostBusters Tutorial here »
One person who has been extra busy also outside of work is Annie, who has been making personalised cakes for the staff birthdays.
Annie bases her cakes around each member of staff’s personal interest, this week it was Steve’s birthday. He has a fascination with anything LEGO, hence this rather impressive LEGO minifig cake based on Steve himself!
Not only has Annie been making birthday cakes, we also had a selection of Halloween treats this morning ready for when we all arrived work! Great stuff – Thanks Annie!
Happy Halloween!
Generator tested for real – money well spent.
About two years ago Brendan decided that it would be a good idea to build our own data centre. It was of course me who ended up with the task of coordinating things and making sure that all the nitty gritty little problems were ironed out. I cannot of course take all the credit, many of the staff have been involved in the design and implementation and further enhancements are still in the pipeline.
Shiny, new - and it works too
It has been an interesting project and I have certainly learnt a lot along the way. At the start I had absolutely no idea about anything to do with data centres, power supplies, air conditioning, security cameras, or generators. I have followed a steep learning curve but we now have a fully functioning data centre at Fubra HQ.
All the design features we had put in to make sure it worked 100% of the time and which cost so much, were tested for real this afternoon when Aldershot suffered a large power cut. Within seconds our large and expensive generator cut in, the UPS feed to our servers hardly noticed the change from mains to generator, the air con continued to whirr reassuringly, and all our users were unaware of anything amiss at all.
The journey to get to this point has presented many problems along the way, but I think this is an ideal opportunity to say a big -Thank You- to everyone who has contributed to the design and build of our data centre .
Because we did it right, we had nothing to do this afternoon but check how things had worked and have a little debrief to see if there was anything we could learn from the incident. If the lights hadn’t gone out in our office we might not even have noticed! Well done one and all.