It is the fear of every new intern that their day will solely consist of making coffee, running errands and being barked at by everyone from the Managing Director to the visiting IT man. So you can imagine my relief when I turned up on Monday morning to be warmly welcomed at the Hot Tin Roof office with a fresh cup of coffee and a desk all to myself.

The girls in the office went through all their clients and were kind enough not to laugh at my questions. I am now much more enlightened on the subjects of cloud computing and moo cards. What a difference a week can make!

The best thing about the internship, apart from the coffee, is the freedom to try every aspect of the PR industry. Sarah and Lucy definitely come from the school of ‘learn by doing’. I’ve attended business meetings, spoken to the editors of national publications and met the head honchos of Edinburgh’s creative industry at a business brunch, where I’m afraid the novelty of having business cards took over. I don’t think a single person went away without a shiny silver card and Hot Tin Roof on their mind.

So to conclude, the fears at the start of the week have been dispelled and I’m glad to say have been replaced with a fiery passion that PR is what I want to do. That’s the charm of Hot Tin Roof; bringing you round to their way of thinking.

heather@hottinroof.co.uk

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

www.funky-moves.co.uk

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

Money Dashboard, the online personal finance management service for UK consumers, is giving away an iPad to celebrate the launch of its latest product update.

To be in with a chance of getting your hands on this year’s most coveted geek toy, visit the Money Dashboard web survey.

Atkins, the UK’s largest engineering and design consultancy, has awarded RMD Power and Cooling a three year contract to maintain power protection equipment at all of its UK sites.

The project, which is worth over £200k, will standardise the provision of Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs) at the company’s 87 UK locations. It is the first time that maintenance of Atkins UPS equipment has been consolidated and RMD won the contract in a competitive tender process after outlining a detailed solution for the large and complex project.

The maintenance programme will begin with a dedicated RMD engineer carrying out a “health check” on every existing UPS. New batteries will be installed on all UPSs over three years old and faulty equipment will be repaired or replaced. The Atkins estate will be completely standardised with APC UPSs.

All of RMD’s engineers are approved to install and service APC equipment and following standardisation, the company will provide ongoing maintenance, guaranteeing a four-hour response service for Atkins’ high priority sites.

John Smykala, RMD’s Managing Director, says: “Atkins required an end to end solution to organise and maintain their UPS systems. The health check will reveal exactly what equipment is being used and the standardisation process will simplify management of this technology. Our warehousing capacity also allows us to hold “hot spares” for Atkins so we can repair and replace UPSs straight away, rather than waiting for delivery from manufacturers.”

Atkins was established in 1938 and offers specialist services in planning, engineering sciences, architecture and project management. The company has a turnover of £1.4 billion and has offices throughout Europe, Asia Pacific, the Americas, the Middle East and India. It is the official engineering design services provider for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Paul Hayes, Project Manager at Atkins, says: “RMD provided a solution that met our needs both in terms of value for money and attention to detail. The company has a strong track record in this area and was a clear winner in the tender process.

“RMD are known for their personal approach and it is important that we have a single point of contact, whatever the problem. I know that if I have a question or problem I can pick up the phone and the person I’m talking to will know my site and know our history.”

RMD is a leading force in the provision of innovative, integrated power and cooling solutions for data centres in the UK and Europe. The company has a powerful reputation in the industry and is one of only a handful of UK companies that can design, supply, install and maintain power and cooling.

Working in the public and private sector, for global brands as well as the SME, RMD’s clients include the NHS, Cairn Energy, Amazon and National Air Traffic Services.

For more information, visit http://www.rmduk.com or email Lucy Smith.

The European Union (EU) has selected a revolutionary cloud platform developed by Flexiant, the UK leader in cloud computing, as a test bed for a seven million euro pan-European technology project. The project, code-named Optimis, results from a highly competitive selection process which brings together Europe’s leading experts in cloud computing. The consortium of industrial and academic partners, including ATOS Origin, SAP and British Telecom, will create the software tools needed to run the next generation of cloud platforms.

Optimis was conceived to provide organisations with the capability of working beyond the inherent limitations of local cloud capacity by allowing workloads to be moved between clouds, whether public or private. Optimis 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.

Flexiant developed Europe’s first cloud computing platform, FlexiScale and is one of only three independent public cloud providers in Europe and five worldwide. Flexiant’s ground breaking technology, Extility, allows service providers and data centre operators to deliver a cloud computing service to their own customers. Flexiant will use its Extility technology to provide a robust proving ground for the EU project, demonstrating that the Optimis tool set is able to run in a real public or private cloud environment.

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 resource from hosting providers who provide a platform to collect, store and process data. The net effect is to drive down operating and capital expenditure while significantly reducing the carbon footprint of each transaction and providing infinite scalability.

Alex Bligh, Flexiant’s CEO says: “The evolution of cloud computing is moving at breakneck speed and we are delighted our cloud platform is being used to help develop the tools needed for a new generation of cloud platforms. It is a privilege to work with the EU at this level beside Europe’s information technology leaders.”

Five fearless JCI Edinburgh volunteers are preparing to brave broken glass [this month] to raise over £1200 for the Barnardo’s Caern Project and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS).

The JCI Edinburgh team will be taking part in this summer’s Glasswalk Challenge at Edinburgh Zoo, where 30 courageous souls will walk barefoot over 20ft of broken glass. Before attempting the glass walk, each individual must raise at least £150 sponsorship and attend an evening of training at the Zoo.

JCI Edinburgh is part of Junior Chamber International, the worldwide personal development organisation for business people in their 20s and 30s. It holds numerous social and fundraising events throughout the year and offers a stimulating range of activities to enable members to develop communication, presentation, leadership, project management, networking and business skills.

Simone Medonos, JCI Edinburgh Communities and Environmental Director, is one of the members who will be taking on the Glasswalk Challenge.

She says: “I’m quite nervous but I’m looking forward to challenging myself and I want to prove that I can do it. I don’t think the 20ft will seem quite so far if there are lots of people to cheer us on so I hope lots of our members will be there on the night to support us. It’s all for two really good causes so we have all been working hard to collect sponsorship.”

In 2009, JCI Edinburgh volunteers conquered the Zoo’s sponsored fire walk to raise over £1000 for the RZSS. This year’s team are hoping to raise at least £1200 with proceeds split equally between Barnardo’s and the RZSS.

The RZSS is a charity devoted to the conservation of animals and their habitats. It owns Edinburgh Zoo and the Highland Wildlife Park, home to over 1000 animals. The charity supports conservation and research project across the globe, runs education initiatives for visitors and schools, and receives no direct government funding.

The Barnardo’s Caern Project is JCI Edinburgh’s nominated charity for 2010 and the organisation has raised over £2000 for the cause through their successful Burns supper and quiz night events. The Caern Project provides short-term residential breaks in Edinburgh and support at home, to children and young people with a profound learning disability and who may also have severe physical and emotional problems.

Kenneth Logan, JCI Edinburgh President, explains why the organisation nominated the charity:

“We are a local organisation so wanted to choose a local charity and the Caern Project is responsible for a lot of valuable work in our community. Charity fundraising is very important to JCI Edinburgh and we believe that we can make a bigger difference overall by focusing all of our efforts on one incredibly worthy cause.”

Funds raised for the Caern Project could be used in a variety of ways including: outings for the 35 children and young people, specialist toys for children with disabilities, specialist sleep counsellors or gardening materials for the sensory garden at Caern House.

For an annual fee of £80, JCI members can access a wide-ranging programme of events, training and social opportunities. A voluntary organisation, JCI also has a long history of charitable work and fundraising. Recent local projects have seen members volunteer at the Grassmarket Mission, a drop-in service, helping to cook meals free of charge for those who need it most, as well as regular blood donor events.

For more information about this and other JCI events, please visit http://www.jciedinburgh.org.uk or email JCI Edinburgh President Kenneth Logan.