Pioneering online accounting software company, FreeAgent Central, is celebrating this week after being nominated Web App of the year in the prestigious .net Awards. Last year’s winners include Stephen Fry, Twitter and DropBox.

The public now has until 12 October to vote for FreeAgent Central before a panel of 100 top industry experts decide the final winners. Last year an astounding 60,000 votes were cast, and this year’s awards ceremony is set to be the biggest and best yet.

With 16 categories, the .net Awards celebrate the best in web design and development, mixing public opinion with insights of a leading panel of judges from the likes of Yahoo, Adobe, AKQA, Opera, Last.fm and Microsoft.

Ed Molyneux, FreeAgent Central CEO comments: “This is an incredible achievement for us and we are very, very proud to receive such recognition from .Net. This is a big step forward in our mission to democratise accounting. We are extremely proud of FreeAgent and we hope our customers will help us out by casting their votes online now!”

This news follows the announcement last month of the company’s nomination for the Sift Media Software Satisfaction awards for the second year running, having taken home Gold last year.

This year’s SME Accounting Category is billed by Accounting Web as a fight between the ‘leading lights of the accounting software as a service industry’ with FreeAgent being a key player in the small business and freelance market.

FreeAgent online software is easy to use and gives a clear picture of profit and loss, making running a business easier and putting the small business owner in control of their finances.

As freelancers themselves, the three founders of FreeAgent Central needed a finance tool that would give them a clear picture of their business accounts. That product did not exist and so FreeAgent was born.

The software has a clean and simple design, highly intuitive and usable. It prepares VAT returns, calculates self assessed income tax and corporation tax and manages PAYE and NI. Users can monitor profit and loss, send and track invoices, track time and expenses, manage projects and payments.

The software was recently updated to allow customers to file their VAT returns electronically within the system directly to HMRC, saving many hours of paperwork.

FreeAgent also encourages collaboration between accountant and client by allowing accountants to login to the system, so they can offer the most up-to-date advice. Accountants can easily export trial balance data to generate end-of-year accounts.

An active online community of FreeAgent customers has grown up where users openly discuss ideas, questions and problems about accounts. Additionally there is a live advice helpline where users can ‘Ask an Expert’ about financial issues they may be having.

FreeAgent is accessible around the clock and from any computer, which is ideal for the way many small business owners and freelancers work.

FreeAgent is subscription based with costs starting at £15 per month for a sole trader, £20 for a partnership and £25 for a limited company.

www.freeagentcentral.com

Hot Tin Roof has been tasked with publicising innovative fitness company Funky Moves after its exuberant owner won investment on the current series of BBC Two’s Dragons’ Den.

Ralf Klinnert’s interactive fitness game won the support of Theo Paphitis and Peter Jones on the notoriously cut-throat business programme in an episode that aired earlier this week. The pair have pledged £120,000 in return for a 50% stake in the company.

The inventor’s innovative product “Funky Cones” consists of a variety of “intelligent” cones, each one containing smart electronics. One of the many applications is an interactive running game, similar to Simple Simon, where the cones are placed apart and the participants have to run between them following a sequence of flashing lights and sounds. The games stimulate memory, attention and coordination, while improving agility and fitness.

Klinnert has appointed Hot Tin Roof to maximise media coverage of Funky Moves while he is in the process of developing a mass consumer product. The campaign will focus on trade and digital media, as well as targeting national and regional newspapers. Building on Ralf’s lively personality and boundless enthusiasm, the agency hopes to nurture a strong online following for his company.

Sarah Lee, Director of Hot Tin Roof, says: “Ralf is so full of energy it’s impossible not to be excited and inspired by his ideas. There has already been a lot of media interest in the company so we’re getting off to a great start.”

According to Ralf, meeting the Dragons was a nerve-wracking experience: “Climbing the stairs and walking on to the Dragons’ Den set is when it really hits you. I was asking myself, what am I doing here? But I knew this was a major opportunity for me, I had prepared well and went for it.”

He confesses: “I thought I had lost it a couple of times, especially after three of the Dragon’s had pulled out. Then Theo said he liked the product and Peter got out of his chair and played with the cones and said I had a ‘fantastic product’. They both offered £60,000 for a 25% stake each in the company and I eventually agreed.”

Following his Dragons’ Den success, Ralf’s cones have been tested by 850 young people with the support of Halifax Council’s Youth Activity department to outstanding acclaim by professionals and youngsters alike. He is also in talks with an international sports equipment distributor, who specialises in professional fitness concepts for the youth sector, to explore a distribution deal for the cones.

For more information about Funky Moves, contact Sarah Lee

An interactive fitness game aimed at combating obesity in children has slimmed the wallets of two Dragons’ Den investors by a whopping £120,000.

Theo Paphitis and Peter Jones put up the cash in return for a 50% stake in Ralf Klinnert’s company Funky Moves, based in the Alba Innovation Centre, Livingston, West Lothian.

Ralf’s success, following a two hour grilling by the hardnosed “Dragons” was screened last night (Monday) in the latest episode of the BBC’s hit show. He left the Den with the money he came for and two new influential business partners on board.

His innovative product “Funky Cones” consists of a variety of “intelligent” cones – similar in appearance to those populating road works across the country – but each one containing smart electronics. A programmable wireless handset activates the selected application games mode.

One of the many applications is an interactive running game where the Funky Cones are placed apart and the participants have to run between the cones following a sequence of flashing lights and sounds. The concept stimulates memory, attention and coordination, while improving agility and fitness and is equally suitable for fun activity games for children of all ages and professional sports training from athletics to football and other team sports.

Theo Paphitis said, “Ralf gave us a really strong pitch for his innovative business. What was exciting for us is that Peter and I felt like young boys in a toyshop about to choose a new game which we couldn’t wait to try.”

Ralf Klinnert said: “Climbing the stairs and walking on to the Dragons’ Den set is when it really hits you. I was asking myself, what am I doing here? But I knew this was a major opportunity for me, I had prepared well and went for it.”

He confessed: “I thought I had lost it a couple of times, especially after three of the Dragon’s had pulled out. Then Theo said he liked the product and Peter got out of his chair and played with the cones and said I had a ‘fantastic product’. They both offered £60,000 for a 25% stake each in the company and I eventually agreed.”

Ralf added: “That was an absolutely ecstatic moment I will never forget. This was the breakthrough I was waiting for that makes all the hard work and struggle worthwhile.”

He added: “When I met Theo and Peter after the filming in London they told me they felt like boys in a toy shop who had just got their favourite toy, but were now going to make money out of it.”

Part of the £120,000 investment will be used to develop the Funky Cones into a mass consumer product and since his Dragons’ Den win in May the process is already underway.
Ralf is also in talks with an international sports equipment distributor, who specialises in professional fitness concepts for the youth sector, to explore a distribution deal for the sports and education version of Funky Cones.

Following his Dragons’ Den success the cones have also been tested by 850 young people with the support of Halifax Council’s Youth Activity department to outstanding acclaim by professionals and youngsters alike.

Funky Moves has been supported by Wellness & Health Innovation (WHI), operated by Innovation Centres Scotland (ICS) on behalf of Scottish Enterprise.

Janette Hughes, WHI Project Manager, said:” We were contacted by the Dragons’ Den to suggest potential participants in the programme and suggested Funky Moves. We are delighted at Ralf’s success. He has enormous drive and commitment to his project and this could well be the breakthrough he has worked so hard to achieve.”

The EU has chosen Flexiant’s revolutionary cloud platform FlexiScale as the infrastructure for a nine million euro FP7 (Seventh Framework Programme) project to enable the transition of mobile applications to the cloud.

Following a rigorous selection process by the EU, Flexiant will join a consortium of Europe’s leading experts in cloud computing, including Telefonica, Nokia, Orange and Ericsson. The consortium of academic and industrial partners will create a platform as a service (PaaS) infrastructure to support the optimized and elastic hosting of Internet-scale multi-tier applications. Transitioning key telecoms players onto the cloud will allow them to offer customers a richer array of innovative applications, will generate considerable cost savings and will substantially uplift their “green” credentials. The project, named “4CaaSt” will create a PaaS platform that is not specific to one cloud provider or one technology, ensuring uniformity of standards and protocols across the industry which will translate into appreciable gains for consumers.

FlexiScale, developed by Flexiant, will provide the EU FP7 project with a cloud environment to test use-case scenarios in real world conditions. Flexiant is one of only three independent public cloud providers in Europe and five worldwide. Its ground-breaking technology, Extility, the software fabric underpinning FlexiScale, allows service providers and data centre operators to deliver both public and private cloud computing services to their own customers.

This news cements Flexiant’s position at the cutting edge of cloud computing in Europe following an announcement earlier this month of Flexiant’s participation in another EU FP7 project (Optimis) which provides a test bed for the software tools needed to run the next generation of cloud platforms.

Cloud computing allows businesses to lease computing power as and when they need it, rather than having to buy expensive equipment. Businesses use the internet to access computing resources from hosting providers who provide a platform to collect, store and process data. The net effect is to drive down operating and capital expenditure whilst significantly reducing the carbon footprint of each transaction and providing infinite scalability.

Alex Bligh, Flexiant’s CEO, comments: “We are delighted to further strengthen our relationship with the EU and to be working with some of the largest telecommunications companies in Europe on this important project. Having been the first business in Europe to launch a cloud platform it is exciting to now be part of the team that will help move their applications onto the cloud.”

4CaaSt is conducted under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for research and technological development. FP7 bundles together all research-related EU initiatives and plays a crucial role in achieving the goals of growth, competitiveness and employment.

http://www.flexiant.com