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.

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.

A legal minefield
Technically, this is relatively simple. But it’s a legal minefield if done the wrong way. Any business that takes payment for goods becomes accountable under the Sale of Goods Act 1979, Distance Selling Regulations, etc. Several websites such as Not On the Highstreet appear to do precisely this with home furnishings; they take payment from the customer, pay the seller a proportion of this and keep the rest. They then attempt to contract out of their statutory obligations in their terms and conditions, insisting that it is in fact the seller who is liable in the event of problems. However, in my view and that of my solicitor, if this were ever legally challenged, it would fail. Legislation to protect consumers cannot be ousted by private agreement. It’s the equivalent of those shops who put a “No Refunds” sign in the window. The situation is that, like it or not, if a company accepts payment for goods, there’s a whole load of legal baggage that comes with that. In the eye of the law, they’re a retailer and there is nothing they can do to change this.

Paying the seller, not us
The only way to remove legal liability is for the customer not to pay us at all. They must pay the seller, who then quite rightly takes on the legal burden, and we charge the seller our commission afterwards. For this to work transparently, we need to perform some technical magic such that (1) the customer’s user experience of paying feels normal and natural, even though they’re paying the seller rather than us and (2) the whole process is automated, so we don’t need to get involved in manual invoicing and placing orders for home furnishings with sellers. In this way, it feels almost identical to if the customer paid us directly, except we avoid any legal liability. We do this as follows.

Paypal API
Every seller that comes on board must set up a dedicated Paypal account. If, say, a customer buys some modern furniture on furnish.co.uk and checks out, they’re taken to the seller’s Paypal page, not ours. The customer feels comfortable with this, as they just see a Paypal page. Nothing abnormal there. As far as the customer is concerned, their work is now done. But there’s more to the technical process.

The seller’s Paypal account is configured such that furnish.co.uk gets an automatic notification through the Paypal API when a purchase takes place. This information is then automatically processed, the commission due calculated and a tally kept of commission due for each seller. Because we can also automatically monitor payments made to our own Paypal account and by who, we also know when a seller has paid us our commission. So we can calculate the total a seller owes us by taking the commission owed from all sales and subtracting from it the total paid to us. The seller is automatically emailed regularly with the outstanding balance. The email to the seller contains a link that directly opens Paypal on a page ready to transfer the sum owed into the Paypal account of Furnish.co.uk. The seller simply needs to click a confirmation to make the transfer; it couldn’t be easier for them.

In the event the seller doesn’t pay within the allocated time, we have some powerful options available. We could remove the seller from Furnish, thus cutting off their income from any furniture sales on furnish.co.uk, or even contact the customer, so it’s simply not worth it for a seller to act dishonestly. An added beauty is that a seller is welcome to top up their payments to us at any time to avoid any risk of underpayment, just like topping up your mobile phone credit.

Ensuring automatic notifications happen
A flaw in the plan is that a seller *could* secretly switch off the automatic notifications from their Paypal account such that furnish.co.uk thinks that no sales are happening when they actually are. There’s an answer here too, which we’ll be implementing shortly. Every few days or weeks, we’ll automatically make a random payment of just a few pence to each seller’s Paypal account. If their notifications are set up correctly, we’ll be notified of the payment we made and we’ll just reduce the amount owed by that seller by the few pence we transferred. But in the event we don’t get notified of the payment we made, we’ll know that the seller has switched off the automatic notifications, and we can then deal with this accordingly.

I should mention that all of the above functionality is presently in development, but it’s looking good. I’ll let you know how it goes in a future post.

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.

For me, the most important thing about furnish.co.uk is that when a user types “wooden coffee tables” into the search or navigates to coffee tables or table lamps, that’s precisely what they get. They don’t see a coffee jug under coffee tables. I know of no sites that do this particularly well.

So, I thought I’d write about how we achieve some of this stuff – to start with, how we automatically and accurately categorise the thousands of products into our category hierarchy; how we know a bed is a bed, a wall light is a wall light, etc. I’m not the main technical guy at furnish.co.uk – that’s Alan – so I’ll keep things at a relatively non-technical level. But, hopefully, you’ll find it pretty interesting.

Categories and clones
We’ve constructed a hierarchy of hundreds of categories, covering every interiors product for the home. We did this by analysing other sites that sell home interiors products, e.g. John Lewis, Graham and Green, Marks and Spencer, Heals and then put together something that we thought worked.

We decided to let users have multiple ways to navigate through the category hierarchy to the same product for ease of use. However, for simplicity, each product only actually has a single category. That’s because we have ‘clone categories’, where a category can exist in multiple places. For example, Rooms -> Bedrooms -> Bedroom furniture -> Bedside tables shows the same items as Products -> Furniture -> Bedroom furniture -> Bedside tables. One is a clone of  the other and means the item itself only needs a single category.

Assigning categories
Based on the above, we automatically assign categories to items. For each item imported, we do the following:

1. We pull several fields out of the item that we think will give us a hint to its category and we prioritise these fields. For example, we may think that the item name is most likely to give us a hint, followed by the description. The choice of fields and their priority varies by supplier; some suppliers actually have a categories field that we can use.
2. Next, we take each of these fields in turn (highest priority first) and attempt to determine the category. We do this using a HUGE synonyms library that we’ve painstakingly put together from scratch, where each category has a set of associated synonyms. You can see a screen shot from our back end system below. Furthermore, each synonym is prioritised. So, the system finds all synonyms contained within the field that it’s analysing, but then chooses the one with the highest priority. There are also negative synonyms, i.e. where an item cannot be a certain category if it contains certain words. In the event the field contains multiple synonyms with equal priority, it uses the one that comes first in the field.
3. If there are no matches, it moves onto the next field within the item to see if that contains a synonym.
4. This is repeated for all items being imported. On rare occasions, no synonyms are found and items end up with no category. However, these are not published.

We’ve found that our processing and synonyms library is sufficiently good that any new supplier coming on board tends to get 95% correct categorisation. We then manually tweak the synonyms to ensure 100% accuracy for the supplier.

All pretty elaborate, but the result is clear and accurate navigation. We also use some of this information for the search index, but more on that in a future post.

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?

1. We are investing our own time and money not other people’s.

This is quite unusual in the investment space as most investors work on behalf of governments, pension funds, large institutions or wealthy individuals. They are paid to manage others’ money and then paid an extra fee called the ‘carry’ if they make good investments on behalf of their backers. Unsurprisingly because it is not their money most of the time they mess up in fact you would be hard pushed to find many venture investors who have made any real money for their backers in the last 8 years or so.

2. We focus on the earliest stage ventures where risks are highest.

Most venture investors will look to back businesses at a point when they don’t need the money in fact one we recently spoke to even boasted of it. We think this kind of pride in cowardice is exactly what a company looking for investment shouldn’t want. There aren’t many people or firms you can approach who will back an early stage idea or just people but we are just that and even less of those who do shout about it as most prefer to get qualified enquiries through their networks only. We want to cast the net wider for reasons that will become clear later in this post.

3. We care about the bottom line first and the big prize second.

One thing we have noticed is that a lot of investors tend to invest in first time entrepreneurs and through a process of transference decide that the entrepreneur is ready to take their company global and deal with huge challenges even before they have learnt to turn a profit. This is all very well for the investor who can later dilute the entrepreneurs equity when they need more funding because of the lack of profit but not great for building sustainable long term partnerships with entrepreneurs.

4. We don’t expect your business plan to do our job for us.

We would prefer you to spend time learning about us, deciding on what you need from us very clearly, and seeing how your business can fit in what we are already doing. Our job as investors is to know the market you are in we can tell you how big it is and we don’t just get our figures from second hand research reports. We look at real numbers and what is actually going on. All that means if you can tell us the benefits your idea is going to bring to customers of your business, we can figure the rest out. Most investors are not like this because they are investing in things they don’t understand and they want you to hold their hands.

5. We have access to loads-a-money if you can handle it.

Fubra invests small amounts initially from £5k to £50k is the range we like and the reason for this is that if you can’t build a business with this much money something is wrong. You shouldn’t think this means we can’t support you as you grow though because if you really need more money in the business and you can prove you can make a good return on it safely there is plenty more funding either directly from Fubra or from our extensive range of contacts who are keen to invest alongside us. Our investment partners can often add even more value to your business as many are very successful entrepreneurs in their own right. They know Fubra partners with the companies we invest in so they are very keen to work with anyone we are vouching for.

6. If we help you build a billion pound business we only want £300m

The main reason we want you to keep funding low is so that you can retain a good stake in your company. Some businesses think the equity we take up front is high as it is usually around 30% of the business, but if you take a typical venture route and have multiple rounds of funding you will typically end up owning less than 10% of your own business. We think hard work and turning a profit early on to give you real independence and a strong partnership with us is the best way to work together but it’s up to you to choose the best model for your company.

If you like the sound of what we are doing perhaps you should get in touch and find out 4 more reasons we are special. We only let people know all 10 when we actually invest.

You might also like to read my business partner Paul’s take on what we have to offer and are looking for here.

Before you do get in touch though please read what we don’t want too and get prepared:

Commercial or marketing founders with an idea but no one to help them build it. Lots of them tend to think technology is an easy afterthought they buy with investment. We respectfully disagree and some want us to help with the technology but as we are only getting 30% of your business so we are not going to build it all for you too. The advice I always give to marketing or commercial ideas people is get a co-founder if your strengths are marketing find a techy then come to us together.

The other way round, too. Whilst most technical people understand that to build a business you need to take something that costs 50p and sell for £1. However some lack this basic commercial acumen and are more interested in the technology itself than the business benefits of what they are doing for customers. If you can code we might back you as a one person business but we want to know you care about the customers you are going to be delighting with your software as well as the microprocessors that are going to be exposed to it.

Finally if you just want a small business, or you’re only in it for the paycheck. We are looking for ambitious people who really do want to grow the next Microsoft. It’s fine by us if you don’t have the idea for licensing Windows to IBM yet but what is not ok is if we think you would be satisfied if you were to build a small business. We want people on a mission to change the world not just people looking to line their own pockets get a nice house and retire to the bahamas. If any of our Entrepreneurs sell their business we would ideally like to see them investing like us and helping more new aspiring entrepreneurs start their own exciting journey which is what we think it’s all about.

You might think we sound a little keen to invest which may appear strange given the economic situation and you would be right. If you are wondering what the reason for that is you only have to read a bit about the world’s most successful investor who once said “to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful” Not to put too fine a point on it but we have been saving up for the recession which we believe we are now entering as we think it is the very best time to meet people who want to change the world rather than buy a flash car. So we are very excited about all the gloom which is good news for entrepreneurs as it means we will act quickly and help you get on with things, we hope you are too there is a lot of opportunity out there!

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.

The beta version was launched back in December last year (2008) and since then the software has shed it’s beta label (July ’09) and evolved rapidly, boasting a number of great features and reasons to use Clear Books.

The aim of this revamp was to standardise the page styles throughout and help clarify to new users exactly what Clear Books is and the services that are available, as well as including help and information for existing users.

Although no new content has really been introduced in this version, a number of previously hidden features have been made easily accessible. This includes the Partners and Business Directories and the VAT Calculator.

The re-launch coincides with completing the 100 paying users achievement and use of the new company slogan, “Free Your Time”.

All of those involved are really pleased at reaching this milestone, but we’re not quite there yet. Next on the list is to carry out a similar procedure on the accounts system itself (internal pages).

Displayed below are a couple of the pages which have been dramatically transformed to give you an idea of what things were  like previously and how they are now.

There hasn’t been much on the feedback side so far, but if you like what you see and are interested in using an online accounting product then head over to Clear Books now to find out more.

The websites were bought after tough negotiations with the old owner, however a deal both were happy with was reached eventually.

The four new websites are:

Top 100 Arena

Gaming Sites 100

Game Sites 101

MMORPG 101

These websites will complement the games already owned by Renegade Games, including the game that is newly being developed from scratch, codenamed SimRepublic.

The websites give a great platform for games to advertise, as the websites now owned by Renegade Games top 100,000 users per day. This is good progress after about 8 months of building websites.

Street Crime Gangster Game - Homepage

Street Crime challenges you to immerse yourself, compete and battle in the cruel unforgiving streets of murder, money and politics. It is also full of action packed features including petty crimes, grand theft autos (gta), jobs, organised crimes, getaways, missions and lots more. Work your way up from the rank of a lowly Hobo all the way to a Godfather, earning respect along the way by contributing to the community.

There is also a character building tool, can you model your character on yourself? Try your luck to increase your wealth at the casino which includes all the favourite gaming tables Blackjack, Roulette, Keno and Yahtzee. Manage your own plot of land and build buildings from brothels, nightclubs, lead factories and many others to help your criminal empire flourish.

Can you and your crew take control of the Streets? Will you take power and demand respect? Or will you lurk in the shadows? Find out now!

Sign up to Street Crime and get started now!

Niggle is a business focused on feedback.  Back at the beginning of 2009, when Fubra took an early stage investment in Niggle, we were working exclusively with independent restaurants. Through a process of product evolution, this week sees the launch of PatientPulse, a complete feedback system designed to continuously monitor patient satisfaction in GP surgeries, clinics, health centres and hospital departments.

The NHS has put patient satisfaction centre stage in recent years. In May 2009 the Department of Heath issued guidelines encouraging GP practices and Primary Care Trusts to use their own methods to measure patient satisfaction and capture real time feedback. More recently, the government has signaled that patient satisfaction will become a key metric in determining funding across the NHS.

PatientPulse uses web and mobile technology to track patient opinions across key areas of heath care provision. Using our trademark MicroSurvey format – which breaks traditional surveys down into bite sized chunks – we can increase both the number and the demographic of patients participating.  And unlike traditional surveys, results are analysed and available immediately – ready for action to be taken without unnecessary delays.

The system is currently operating in 8 NHS heath centres across the UK , with more to follow in the next few weeks. To read more about our new service, and patient satisfaction in the heath care sector, visit our website at PatientPulse.co.uk

The experience they have definitely shows. After almost 10 years of being an “internet business”, Fubra have a very good sense of how to build good websites, and make money on the internet. And they are not afraid to share this information with their investments.

I am building an online games business, and started off by investing in two websites, one game and one online games top list. I have been concentrating on building the top list the last couple of months, as I want to build a business where I am a middle man. After about 4 months, I have managed to more than double the income of that website, which feels great. These two websites now give me a firm foundation and a certain calmness, I am on track to building a good business.

I have now decided to start building something on my own from scratch, and see if the things I have learned will help. I will be building a portal for flash games, which links in well to the business I have already built. I have saved quite a bit of capital, which I can now use to build this site.

In summary, all I can say is it has been a great choice to accept an investment from Fubra and start a joint venture. I have learned a lot in the last 6 months, and I am a lot more confident about many things. To me, it was the knowledge that they added to my business that helped a lot.