Marc: My Words

Wigadoo, BizSpark, Seth Godin and 1st Birthday Parties

If you could see my office, then you’d know I sit in the same cluster as Lars. But you don’t so I’m mentioning it here. One of the handy things about sitting next to Lars (apart from the tidiness and general hospitality) is that he keeps me up to date on the startup scene such as his bent, handling our BizSpark activities (amongst other things).

If you’re a startup, you should explore what BizSpark has to offer – there’s a good post here too. I remember working on my own startup – the ill-fated Zapitover – back around 2000 and a portion of our startup costs was the licencing of Windows Server, SQL Server, and Exchange. BizSpark would have allowed me to buy a chair or a desk, or something (I’d be digressing to explain the full set-up we had, but suffice to say it was “bare bones” and ended in the usual round of failure and people blaming each other… YMMV).

Anyway, he mentioned Wigadoo, so I looked it up and just thought the idea was cool so I’d mention it. Essentially they provide functionality to organise a shared cost “event”, like an evening out, by providing some logic and issuing a virtual credit card on completion of the organisational bits and pieces.

So immediately I can see value in this:

• A bunch of us, including Stevecla, are off to see Seth Godin in London in a couple of weeks. But, you know, organisation of who’s going and who’s paying takes a whole bunch of email. And now of course there’ll be a complex set of cash exchange nearer the time, with added confusion as Stevecla avoids buying a round…
• LadyH organised Evan’s birthday party although the parents of 8 different kids were paying. Net result is that it’s a real pain to get the cash from everyone (especially when the amount is £16.23 or something).

In my experience, organisers always end up slightly out of pocket but sometimes that’s OK because they expect that. The challenge is when you don’t expect to be out of pocket and how that gets addressed. 

Nice idea. I’ll try it out next time I need to do something like this.