ENTREPRENEURS NEWS | IN BRIEF
NEW PIRATING PENALTIES SCARE INVESTORS
Angel investors and venture capitalists are hesitating to invest in digital content intermediaries (DCIs) as the US government contemplates new, tougher rules on pirated digital content. Under the US House Judiciary Committee’s proposed “Stop Online Piracy Act” a website could be subject to fines and penalties if its users uploaded pirated content. The Booz and Company study found that more than 70 per cent of the angel investors and venture capitalists surveyed would think twice before putting money into DCIs. They currently invest more than $40bn annually in early-stage companies.
FROM ZERO TO APP IN 24 HOURS
Floxx Media Group hosts a public hackathon on 15 December from 12pm, in which they will design, develop and launch a new application after a 24-hour marathon session. Established tech companies like Facebook and Linkedin credit hackathons for creating some of their greatest innovations. Earlier this year, Skype purchased GroupMe, which was valued at $85m despite being hashed together in a 24 hour hackathon. This hackathon is intended to not only make the development method more popular in the UK, but also to promote career possibilities in the field.
ENTREPRENEURS IN NEED OF A WORKOUT
Despite the recent encouragement to boost smaller and medium enterprises (SME) in the UK, many entrepreneurs are not fully financially fit and are in need of a workout to get properly prepared or informed to knowledgeably start up a small business, new research from Intuit, the makers of the accounting software QuickBooks, finds. About a fifth of aspiring and current SME owners don’t have or plan to create a business plan before launch, almost half don’t know the correct definition of “gross profit” and over 60 per cent are unaware of the £73,000 VAT threshold.