Wednesday, February 28, 2007

New Venture round 2

I am participating in the New Venture contest in the Netherlands, see this. It is contest for writing the best business plan for your business idea with a fisrt price of 25.000 euro. It consists of three rounds, first idea description, sceond feasibility study and third the business plan. Next thursday is the finale for the second round.

The last 10 persons will get a price of 1000 euro. Last week I heard I was one of the last 20 (from 160 participants). I have to give a 2-minute pitch for the jury where they decide which are the best 10 pitches that get a price.

Very exiting all. Will let you know more about the results.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

intro online motor selection platform specAmotor

Dear people,

I haven't wirtten a blog for two months now. I saw that to my embarrasment when I logged in. That is because I have been pre-occupied with getting my site online, and writing a feasibilty-study. The study is finished and the site is functional enough to let the testers do their thing en so I can call my site beta ... yes, finally (well finally, it still needs a lot of work).

It is called specAmotor and is an online motor selection platform and can be found here. What it does is find the best electro-motor for the specific application of my visitors, being engineers that want to find a motor. It has a supplier-neutral database, which is its benefit: Engineers do not have to visit all manufacturers sites, or portals which gather motor information where they have to dig into the pdf-catalogs to get what they want (which I know is a hell of a lot of work, so that's why people just don't bother anymore .. they stick to what they know, even if a better product X is available. If you don't know it, then you won't reach it. If you only know manufacturer Y and Z and they have motors that are 'good enough' then you don't look further.

specAmotor will calculate the best motors for them from all motors plus reductions so product X will be found. Each motor gets a ranking indicating its suitability which is determined by a couple of factors.
The engineers get presented this ranked list and can pick whichever motor they like. Then the calculation results will be shown for that motor. This goes pretty far (temperature of the motor-windings, timeplots of voltage and current, etc.) and covers everything to be able to decide if the product is suitable.

It is all a matter of being found I quess. The portals and sites like GlobalSpec and DirectIndustry give a lot of information, and are very popular. Because of that popularity they contain a lot of motors, but no means to determine which of those 7000 possibilities is good for the particular application of the engineer. GlobalSpec tries a little to do that with their overhyped SpecSearch, which is nothing more than a standardised way of a database search. It can be applied to any database, so it is not designed for motors in particular.
It allows you to search on features of the motor. That will narrow the search from 7000 to 3000 motors which in it self is not very helpfull, but it has a bigger flaw: Because you search only on the features of the motor you are not able to rank the motors to suitablilty for the engineers application, the application is just not in its equation. So the engineers are forced to manually check or calculate the suitablity of 3000 motors.... would you do that?

I think we can conclude that specAmotor has what it takes to be the site of choice for engineers that want to find a suitable electromotor. Yet, it is not introduced yet, so my next steps will determine its success which is exciting. Want to tell you more about the next steps, failures and successes in this blog.