Ilikeucoz has got to be one of the most addictive sites I’ve come across in recent weeks! Did someone do something nice for you? Or maybe you just think someone’s great and you want to tell them? Whatever the reason, ilikeucoz is the perfect way to show your appreciation! It takes 2 minutes to sign up and seconds for you to brighten up someones day with a compliment. Ilikeucoz messages can be sent to email address’ as well as registered users therefore there is no limit to how many peoples day you can make!

Ilikeucoz is the idea of Fabio De Bernardi and was developed in February this year at Launch 48  in London, England. Launch 48 is an event organised by a couple of London based entrepreneurs, which brings together people from various backgrounds in the web industry. Their task is to develop and launch an Internet business within 48 hours. Fabio’s idea evolved from a question his girlfriend asked him a few months previous – ‘why do you love me?’ So after thinking long and hard about this question, he came up with the idea for ilikeucoz, thus enabling us all to tell our friends and loved ones exactly that!

So what are you waiting for? Send that special someone an ilikeucoz and make their day extra special!!!

Click here to send a compliment!

A new site that helps us make money, and save money, renting from each other! Zilok – Rent Anything Online
 
Want to get your hands on a Blackberry Storm, but don’t have the spare cash? Make your lawn mower, handbags, bicycle and Nintendo Wii work for you!

Zilok, a website aiming to do for rentals what eBay did to person-to-person selling, is the “new hot stuff” helping us make money renting things online.

Everyone is welcome to join the online rental community, and it seems more and more people are doing it. It’s quite easy to navigate, and posting items for hire only takes a few minutes . The search engine is location-centric allowing users to find items near by.
 
And the beauty of Zilok is, you can help the world while you help your finances: renting from other people is the “Greenest” of all means of consumption.
 
Now ladies, let’s be good to the planet while we make money, shall we! let’s put it all out for hire!!!

Elizabetta Camilleri

Originally from Malta, Elizabetta first worked for Price Waterhouse Coopers before coming to London to study for her MBA at the London Business School. One of her most formative early influences was being appointed Strategic Marketing Director for eDreams.com, one of the first travel Internet companies.

Having experienced everything an Internet start-up had to offer, Elizabetta went on to work for one of the world largest and most successful companies, the international mobile giant Orange.  Based in the wonderfully named “Imagineerium”, the company’s Global Corporate Strategy division, Elizabetta worked closely with the board and various Country CEOs on all aspects of innovation and growth. It was here she honed her theories about the critical importance of sophisticated customer segmentation in the development and promotion of mobile services.

In the past few years prior to starting Tereca, Elizabetta has been at the prestigious technology consulting company Gartner as Director of their Telecoms and New Media practice.

Elizabetta is in the process of building Tereca,  a new business offering  a mobile internet service designed to streamline the process of accessing, sharing and organising contextual relevant information.

She is also part of the Aroxo Advisory Board working with the Founders (Matt Rogers and Andy Culpan) helping drive and direct the development of the Aroxo. Aroxo which just launched last week is the most innovative market place on the internet today. It enables buyers get to say what they’ll pay for hundreds of consumer electronics items.  They can even negotiate with sellers. Aroxo has been named UK’s Hottest Start-up at the LBS London Technology Summit, one of the Top 20 Most Promising European Start-ups, and won the Techcrunch Europe Pitch! Competition, sponsored by UKTI.

The common thread throughout all of Elizabetta’s professional experience has been her passion of harnessing the potential of technology to make people’s lives easier. Elizabetta has placed this philosophy at the heart of Tereca which is founded on the principle of using the mobile platform to deliver a new range of applications and services.

Hi I’m Wendy Tan White, founder of Moonfruit.com and Marketing Director of Gandi.net. I’m a tech entrepreneur, mother of two and a smart textiles designer for fun. When I started out in tech in 1989 there were certainly no groups like Girls n Gadgets, SiliconStillettoes or TheNextWomen so I’m really pleased there are thriving ‘Geek Girl’ communities who are having their say everywhere!

Moonfruit provides online tools for businesses, freelancers, designers and communities to build ‘Beautiful websites, simply.’  Our next release will include the addition of ‘Moonfruit People’, in response to our vocal customer base. In the Web 2.0 space, they expect to be able to  promote their websites to their social networks and to generate content for their websites more collaboratively.

Gandi.net is a top European domain registrar and virtual hosting provider. It’s know for being ethical registrar in an industry of ‘grey practices’. We’re the leading registrar in France with a significant customer base in the UK and US. We also launched a leading edge virtual hosting service last year, or ‘cloud infrastructure’. Specifically for small and medium sized businesses, our entry costs are lower than services like Amazon’s EC2. You only pay for what you use and you can add on more in real time as you need it, it’s resilient.

I founded Moonfruit in 1999 with my friend Eirik Pettersen, now Gandi’s CTO. I picked him on a ‘Cilla’ style blind date event, day 1 at Imperial College, studying computer science.  I was head hunted from a software consultancy by a client, Richard Duvall, to set up Egg the first internet bank as head of CRM.  He was an inspirational director, mentor and friend, letting me work part time while raising funding for Moonfruit, then becoming a seed investor. In 2004 he set-up the first peer to peer lending site www.zopa.com, he considered me an ‘old hand’ by then having raised £8m+ and scraped through the dot com crash of 2000. I advised him for a few months while I took a break from Moonfruit to have my two children and do an MA in Textile Futures at Central St Martins.

The main man in my Internet journey is my husband Joe White. I first met him running a web agency from an attic in Soho while doing his finals at Cambridge. He and Tony his partner built Moonfruit 1.0, introduced us to Bain who gave us an angel round, experienced the buzz of San Francisco when we raised funds from the president of Macromedia Ventures, ‘Big’ Norm Meyrowitz (discovered Flash). I had to sack Joe plus 48 other people in Moonfruit during the dotcom crash. Eirik and I had raised it back from the dead to profitability. Joe returned in 2004 applying McKinsey expertise to the business and it’s flourished to a point where Moonfruit’s grown 70% since last year.

In 2005, Joe, Eirik and Stephan Ramoin raised €13m and created Gandi Group buying in Gandi.net and Moonfruit.com. The whole group has doubled in revenue over the last 4 years. We have 50+ employees.

And why on earth did I do a degree in Computer Science? My mum and dad both worked in tech and I’d seen how fast paced and exciting it could be. My parents did projects all over the world and had dynamic careers for 30 years. My mum was supported well as a working mother by the industry and never thought being a woman in the industry was an issue.

And I have to agree with her … It’s been a roller coaster but I’ve never had a dull moment in the tech industry. Far from being hampered as a woman I’ve been well supported by both genders. It’s provided me with the flexibility to care for my children and pursue other interests as well as run my own business. Gotta love it!

Anke Holst

Thinking about my earliest Social Media memories, I remember one warm summer night in 1994 in Sweden. My good friend Zeljko ran the networks for the publishing house we both worked for, but then I’ve always liked geeks. He was a really clever guy from Croatia who I totally fancied. We used and developed the company-owned BBS which had existed since 1986 (cleverly called Com) for e-mails, groups, discussions. It had very early Instant Messaging facility, so if you were online simultaneously as another user, you could say hi without the need to send a mail.

It was all DOS based, and it did it’s job. We had users around the world and we could see early the many of the advantages and also pitfalls in using technology for communication.

But back to that summer night… I was reading in my room and got bored, so went to the computer and logged on… and there was Zeljko, logged on one minute after me. I was shy… do I say hi and risk a late-night IM chat that could have led to something else? I didn’t, I logged off… we remained friends, I married somebody else. A “hi” right then might have changed my life.

Silly story isn’t it? But it goes to show how an interest in using technology to socialise and communicate has always impacted on things happening in my life, and increasingly so with every year that passed. I learned to be less shy about being myself online as well as offline. I’ve learned that it’s ok to use any bit of technology to communicate, there’s nothing to worry about, as long as you use common sense – but that’s valid for anything you do in life.

Anke's Blog

Of course, online communication wasn’t called Social Media then. It wasn’t even called Instant Messaging yet – even ICQ, the first hugely successful IM tool, was a couple of years away. Being in a community of people who all used it helped, having community leaders who pushed it helped as well. I’m not really all that technical – I can get my head around basic programming but don’t ask me about the juicy details of the networks.

Anke’s BlogFrom looking at the history of online communication it’s obvious that a new development, simply using twitter and blogging, is taking the advantages of all the previous innovations – we can use direct and instant messaging, but if our conversation might be interesting to others, we can now also make it public, accessible and searchable to thers, and new tools to pick up the conversations which are of interest for every area of life are being developed all the time.

Individuals and organizations, even though they haven’t taken social media seriously so far, are now more than ever pushed by all the mainstream media coverage to use these new technologies. Larger companies are hiring PR firms, and right now that’s a gamble. While many PR firms are making promises about their capability to deal creatively with social media strategies, the reality doesn’t always hold up. Even in a specialised niche venture called Twitter Partners, which you’d think would have this side sorted, we can detect a certain lack of credentials.

So how can we contribute in this situation?

We are offering some crucial bits and pieces which might come in handy. The fact that there are many bad eggs and fake “Social Media Consultants” out there doesn’t mean that there isn’t a huge demand for sound advice and guidance – especially in the Third Sector, where we have many organisations working hard to create real value for the community, and who can increase their impact enormously by creatively using Social Media.

Here is what we can offer:

• Web-based tools to vet the credibility of your (prospective) Social Media consultant – to help you ask the right questions, and pick the best possible match.
• Social Media webinars in cooperation with the Salesforce.com Foundation.
• Simple training modules on questions around Social Media tools for individuals and organisations.
• Consulting and one-to-one training services, including setting up of customised wordpress blogs and accounts.
• Meet the Hive Mind that is Tuttle – a group of professionals within Social Media who meet in Central London every Friday morning.