With the continuous growth of the CatN guide section, and numerous additions to the blog reel, I felt it would be a good time to summarise the highlights of the CatN blog over the last couple of months, just in-case you missed anything!

Benefits of Cloud computing

Published June 30th 2010

Cloud computing can now be considered an established technology, with its adoption by giants like Google.

The article, Benefits of Cloud Computing looks at the issues of scalability, cost, stability and security, and the solutions that Cloud Computing offers.

UK Government hosting

Published June 30th 2010

The COI (Central Office of Information) released the annual report for government websites at the end of June 2010, giving us an insight into expenditure for all sections of government informational websites, and analytical data such as visitor numbers.

In the report, Does the UK Government get value for money?, we carried out an analysis on the data provided by the COI to determine whether or not the UK Government receives value for money (cost per request) from their hosting expenditure…

Cloud hosting check-list

Published July 16th 2010

Numerous web hosts are now providing Cloud hosting products but, after conducting some market research, the features and services offered vary greatly.

In order to help customers choose the most suitable cloud hosting platform for them I wrote the Cloud provider sign up check list which offers advice on the important features to look for when choosing a host, and to suggest services that they may not have considered before.

WordPress Multi-site guide

Published August 9th 2010

The release of WordPress version 3.0 has integrated the WordPress MU (Multi User) functionality into the standard WordPress install. It is now possible to host numerous blogs on a single instance of WordPress.

Enabling multi-site and setting up a blog network does require some technical knowledge and is not the simplest process. The guide Enabling WordPress 3.0 multi-site walks users through the process with the required configuration specifically for CatN vCluster explained in detail.

Remember, you can check out the CatN guide section at catn.com/support/guides for a regularly updated vCluster knowledge base.

The CatN blog is available at catn.com/blog, and remember to follow us on Twitter for updates about new guides and articles.

Still feeling triumphant after our first Fubra Bootcamp and with our successful candidates now working away at creating a big buzz around Fubra and pushing the great sites that we have, we are now ready to embark on our second Bootcamp!

This time around we are looking for enthusiastic and go getting sales executives to sell the advertising space that we have on our network of sites. Beginning with the travel network we have made a start on selling the advertising and have a proven process in place which has helped us achieve excellent results so far. Feedback from our current advertisers has been really encouraging and for the right person this job will be especially rewarding.

We are now looking for one very unique person who will be able to keep this online ad sales ball rolling and ensure that we stay at the top of our game as the perfect place for advertisers to make their target audiences aware of their products and services.

Our second Fubra Bootcamp will give 3 candidates the opportunity to spend one month learning the ropes and proving themselves as the best ad sales executive around for the chance at one available position as our leading advertising sales employee.

This is not for the faint hearted, and we only want the best here at Fubra, so please only apply if you are willing to put in the hard graft required to get to the top! If you do recognise the skills and qualities we are looking for in our Online Advertising Sales Executive post then get in touch fast! We will be conducting interviews soon and if you make it past the first few hurdles for a spot on our Bootcamp you will be well on your way to proving to us that you are the perfect match for this job.

We do things a bit differently here at Fubra and aim to make sure that our advertisers always receive great communication with us and work hard to make sure that their advertising works even harder for them sending them bundles of potential customers. Someone who is able to build on existing relationships and set up new ones easily with an honest, ethical, enthusiastic and positive outlook will fit perfectly with us and will be well rewarded for their efforts in a great working environment with loads of strong career prospects for the right people.

If this sounds like you, hesitate no more. Just drop us an email with your most inspiring C.V. and covering letter telling us why you are the next successful candidate!

It’s been a very busy bank holiday weekend at Fubra following an intermittent backplane failure on one of our storage arrays. With the help of our storage vendor, Coraid, we’ve managed to stabilise the failing unit as a temporary measure while we move all of the storage to our other array.

This is taking us quite some time however, as it contains hundreds of gigabytes of production storage. We hope to get this process completed later today.

Platform Improvements

On Tuesday we are expecting to receive a replacement for the failed unit, at which point we will be making some fundamental changes to our storage model to ensure that any future failures of this type can in future be recovered much more quickly. This will be done by replicating all data to a warm standby array that can be switched in immediately in the case of an array going bad.

Although there is still more planning to do, we expect that this measure will massively reduce the impact of any future storage array issues.

In addition to improving our storage array architecture, we are also making other improvements.

The most fundamental change is that we are finally eliminating all of our Lustre-backed storage, and replacing all customer volumes with raw volumes hosted directly on the storage array itself. This has been planned for some time, and will reduce the complexity of our storage to provide much fewer points of failure. The difference will be noticed by all customers previously hosted on our Lustre filesystems.

In addition to stability this will also improve filesystem performance as there will be fewer servers and network round-trips involved in the stack.

Improving Communication

Another area we will concentrate on is communication. We recognise that improvements need to be made when it comes to giving a realistic resolution timescale, and are going to work on this in the coming days to put in place an improved system that enables us to communicate more effectively and respond faster during events such as this.

On this occasion, due to the scale of the outage we had difficulty keeping everyone informed in a timely manner as we scrambled to get things fixed. In the first hours of response it can be very difficult to give an idea of timescales, as it can take some time to get to the root cause. This is much more difficult when the issue lies in storage.

As the week unfolds we will make further progress announcements. In the time being if you experience any problems at all then please contact us via the usual channels and we will rectify the problem as quickly as possible.

I’d like to offer our sincere apologies to all customers affected by these recent issues, and give our assurance that the measures we are taking will dramatically improve our hosting platform for the future.

CatN is a new hosting service that provides clustered php hosting, while offering levels of control similar to a dedicated hosting solution.

Why clustered hosting?

Clustered hosting has many benefits:

• Load is spread across numerous servers, reducing the reliance one machine, and avoiding bottlenecks.
• Your site will be spread across all parts of vCluster, so if one server goes down, the remaining servers will continue to host your site and keep it live.
  
• Different processes can be separated. We use a separate layer of servers for serving scripts to static content like images, which enables us to control resource use and guarantee performance of php scripts with dedicated resources.
• The nature of clustered hosting enables us to scale our super computer to meet any demands on capacity instantly. Experience no drops in performance when they receive a visitor spike, we simply add more servers to meet the new demands.

Features

We have focused all features of vCluster in order to give total control to you. Our policy of transparency allows you to view and control every aspect of your vCluster. We have achieved this by clever implementation of features…

We have developed a control panel that currently offers management of all access control options, vCluster stat viewing with 5 minute accuracy, and phpMyadmin database management.

Control panel features; running total bill viewing, billing alerts, data centre environment stats, and domain purchasing will be added soon.

vCluster has been developed specifically for hosting php applications such as WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal, and provides a powerful platform for php developers, with SSH, (S)FTP and version control support.We have tested and written install guide for the majority of php CMS’s and forum applications.

We currently offer a dedicated IP for every customer, multiple domain hosting, SSL and ecommerce support, upgrades to extreme database hosting, and usage billing.

Too good to be true?

Over the last few weeks we’ve been reviewing and refining our billing system before deployment next week. Until this new billing system is in place we’re allowing free sign ups on catn.com. All the pricing information pages will be deployed with the billing system, so you can check prices before you decided to continue with your vCluster account beyond the free period.

This is your last chance to get to grips with the vCluster super computer before we start charging in 5 days time, so head over to catn.com and sign up for your free account now!

I wanted to write a quick blog post the importance of blogging as a company on the web. Fhoke – another local web company – recently wrote a blog directed at their clients on how important it is to make time to blog.

“Updating your site regularly gets you noticed, your competitors and clients may be watching, and when you update something it might get their attention and they’ll come look.”

They also listed a total of 19 tips on how to drive traffic to your blog, including these:

What’s Fubra Bootcamp?

Fubra Bootcamp is a new way of hiring employees that we came up with and decided to try out to find out if we could achieve our hiring goals such as:

• Hire the best employees
• Hire people who want to stay with the company for the strong career prospects and don’t just want any old job
• Find hard working, smart, creative and individual people who are eager to learn new skills and be part of our growing company
• Increase employee retention through better assessment strategies
• Create a buzz around wanting to work at Fubra

Over the last month or so we have been busy here holding our first Fubra Bootcamp in which 5 potential employees were put through their paces competing for 3 spaces in our growing team as Online Marketing Assistants.

What does bootcamp involve?

Our selection process involved starting off with 60 applicants. We then decided on around 40 people who took our initial pre-interview test which was designed to test research and communication skills. Next was the interview stage, and around 20 applicants were invited to come to our offices in Aldershot, Hampshire for more assessments and a face to face interview allowing us the opportunity to get to know each person and find out what their skills were.

After much discussion we chose the 5 interviewees who had the attitude, skills and experience we were looking for and invited them to attend a one month trial period with us. At the end of the month’s trial they would be told whether they were to be offered a full time position or not and that they were competing for 3 positions that we had available.

The month’s trial involved training sessions in online marketing and advertising, brainstorming days, welcome lunches, halo playing and many other tasks based around determining where each persons skills lay and what they could bring to the company plus what we could offer them.

Why have a bootcamp?

You may wonder why we chose to hire people using this type of process, considering that this is not something that is usually the norm for most businesses.

Well, we did look into other routes as well, and one of them was hiring through the governments Apprenticeships scheme which seemed like a good opportunity to find talent among those who wanted to learn new skills as well as earn money which, in theory, should have been perfect. However, it turned out that this route was not suited to us at all due to the time and costs involved in dealing with the process and because the NVQ courses on offer alongside the job were not really related very well to our work. It seemed that there were going to be a lot of hoops to jump through in order to show that we were “training” the students properly, according to the NVQ syllabus. However, the training that we were required to cover would have actually been far too simple to be beneficial to the job role or in fact, to the student. We do think that Apprenticeships are a great idea in principle and could bring a lot of people back to work, but really they could be run so much better if the emphasis was put on to the employer to come up with a training program and syllabus covering skills related to their industry which was then approved by the governing body.

Another option was just to hire people based on the popular C.V. filtering, plus one or sometimes two interview process that is adopted successfully by many companies. We have tried this before and found that, whilst first impressions undoubtedly count for a lot, it has proven very hard for us to find the best suited people with such a short character assessment which can often turn out to be a false judgement by even the best of assessors due to the environment of the typical interview and the fact that anything will be said in order to impress and secure the job. This can lead to a bad decision being made by both the interviewee and the employer about whether the role is suitable for the candidate.

So we came up with the Bootcamp process to give both us and the potential employees a chance to get on the job experience, get to know everyone, learn new skills and be assessed over a whole month. This allowed room for discovering whether the 5 candidates were really suited to the job and to the company as a whole which we see as just as important to the development of each individual and their career with us.

What was the outcome?

Bootcamp was completed on Wednesday 31st March 2010, after a lot of suspense about who would be offered a full time position with us and overall has been a great success. We are now very happy to welcome to our team Hannah Bird, David Pomonis and Ricky Dawn who are our new Online Marketing Assistants and will be working alongside the whole team to improve the traffic, visibility and buzz around our network of websites.

A big thanks also go out to the candidates who didn’t make it through at the end of the month, it was an extremely hard decision to make and Warren Tilley and Ben Egan also did an excellent job in their time with us.

This whole process has been a successful one for both us and our new team members as we have both had a chance to get to know each other and they have been able to get an understanding of the job that needs to be done to find out if it suits them.

Everybody came up with some great results across their tasks and we are really happy to have such creative, enthusiastic and hard working people in our team and look forward to getting on with their first task of working on increasing the profile and profitability of our Airport Guides network in time for the summer travel season!

Congratulations to Hannah, Ricky and Dave we all look forward to working closely with you all and producing some excellent results in the near future!

When’s the next bootcamp?

We have already started to think about our second Fubra Bootcamp and how we can improve the process, so keep checking back for updates on when Bootcamp 2 is to be held and if you are interested in attending just get in touch and tell us why you think you would like to work for us.

This is potentially something which we could use to employ for other positions in the company as well, and we are excited about looking into this for future recruitment drives!

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.

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.

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?

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!

I wrote last year about Gordon Brown’s announcement that the UK Government would be releasing a load of data for public consumption.  Today the first step in that plan went live.  Data.gov.uk is a repository of a whole load of data sources provided by the Government on everything from Council Tax rates through to local NHS dentists.

We here at Fubra have been part of the discussion surrounding the release of the data for the last few months, and are really pleased to see something coming to fruition.  While the site is still in beta it really does show promise for those of us who just can’t get our hands on enough data.

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.