The Fubra Blog
Investing in Solar Energy
Today we are happy to announce the launch of our latest investment: Marble Solar.
Marble Solar is a new business dedicated to the design and build of commercial and residential solar power panel systems. It is a collaboration between Fubra Limited and the directors of the Marble Group, a construction firm we have invested in.
Working with our friends at Bytewire over the past 2 months we have built, what I believe to be, one of the best solar PV estimation tools available online.
Step 1a – Enter your postcode
Step 1b – Draw your roof
Step 2 – View estimated income
Step 3 – Book a survey appointment
The estimator allows you to draw an outline of your roof on Google Maps, and select the orientation. It will then propose a suitably sized system for your roof, and uses either SAP 2005, or NASA solar irradiation data along with panel efficiency information to estimate the amount of electricity you could generate from the system over the course of the year. This data is combined with financial data such as Feed In Tariff rates and some assumptions on future price inflation to give you a projection of the amount of income and savings the system may generate over it’s lifetime.
For me, it’s great to see what our network of small companies can achieve when we work together.
Furnish.co.uk – how we take payments for sellers but avoid legal liability
In case you haven’t heard of us, furnish.co.uk is a home interiors personal shopper. We take the hard work out of shopping for your home by pulling together the best and most stylish furnishings from across the web. We work with multiple “sellers” and list a selection of each of their products, every one of which is hand-picked by us. Take a look to find everything from modern furniture through to gifts for the home.
We offer several partnership options to sellers, but the one I’ll talk about here is where we sell their home furnishings directly from furnish.co.uk, just like a marketplace. For example, a customer finds a coffee table on furnish.co.uk from a particular seller, adds it to their basket, checks out and pays, all without visiting the seller’s own website. The seller is notified of this and dispatches the coffee table to the customer. We take a commission on the sale. Read the rest of this entry »
Furnish.co.uk – how we automatically categorise content
From the outside, furnish.co.uk looks pretty simple; thousands of fabulous interiors products from multiple different stores, all easily searchable and nicely categorised.
But, in the background, there’s some seriously clever stuff going on. We’re automatically scraping stores’ websites (with their permission of course) or scanning their feeds at regular intervals, and then subjecting this data to heavy processing to determine category, style, colour, materials, etc and also doing some very leading edge stuff to make our custom-developed search engine produce super-accurate results. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
Accounting Software for 2010
As you might have seen from some of our blog posts last week – we had a lot of fun with all the fresh snow that arrived – but how did your business cope with the disruption to the country’s transport network? Luckily for us, as a web based company, if our staff can’t make it in to the office, they have most of the tools they need to work from home.
One tool in particular is an accounting software service that we’ve been working on for the past 18 months – it’s called Clear Books.
Traditional Accounting Software
Traditional accounting software typically provides a fairly archaic solution. Here’s the scene: You have an old windows machine in the corner of your office that has the accounting software installed on it. Your accountant or book keeper comes in every now and then to keep the system up to date. If you want some management accounts to see how your business is doing, you or someone working for you has to log on to that machine and export them. If it snows – your book keeper can’t get to the office and your accounts start gathering dust. If you are at home one evening, and you want to know how much you owe the VAT man – you have to wait until the next day to visit the office. You’ve paid a large amount up front for the privilege of installing the software, and then each year you have to pay to keep it up to date.
Traditional accounting software….
- Comes in a box
- Needs to be installed on a computer
- It can only be accessed from one computer, by one person at a time
- Has a hefty up front cost.
No Accounts Software
Some people don’t like using these old accounting software products, so they opt for an even more labour intensive approach; they get their accountant to physically collect all their invoices, and bank statements (also know as the black bin liner method), so that he can prepare their payroll, VAT and end of year accounts, and then physically deliver them back to them when he’s finished with them. This method typically gives you no ongoing picture of your businesses performance, and you have to rely on bank statements, spreadsheets or just your gut feeling to see you from year to year. Also, if you need to refer to an old document – you normally can’t because they are with your accountant.
Online Accounting
Then there is the new approach. We call this online accounting. In this scenario, the accounting software is accessed via a web browser. You don’t need to install anything on your PC. You can view your accounts from any computer (PC, Mac, Linux) with an Internet connection. So can your accountant or book keeper, so he/she no longer has to drive to your office. You and your business partners can be accessing the software at the same time, from any where in the world. There are no major up front costs, you just pay a small monthly subscription – and regular software updates are included as part of this. The software automatically generates your VAT returns each quarter, and lets you file them with HMRC with a few clicks of the mouse.
Online accounting software….
- Can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection and a web browser.
- Requires no software installation, updates or upgrades.
- Has a low monthly cost, with no up front fees.
If this sounds like something you want to know more about, you might want to read my 10 reasons to use Clear Books post.