I have been working with the team at LoyaltyTech, a company that delivers business and technology solutions in the demand chain – e-commerce, loyalty programs, customer analytics, and social network integration – paticularly in multi-channel retail environments.    Australian retailers have lagged behind North America and Europe in their adoption of these strategies.   DTDigital recently posted on how important it is for Australian companies to pick the pace and predicts that this will be the year it happens.

In recent visits with customers and prospects,  I’ve found that many of them don’t have an appreciation of how cost-effectively some of these initiatives can be implemented to provide a measurable increase in revenue and lifetime value of customers.  Improving your customer’s experience doesn’t have to cost $1m and can provide multiple opportunities for increased loyalty and cross/up sell.  Contact LoyaltyTech to learn more.

I’ve recently become  more active in Melbourne Angels, the local group of angel investors that is part of the AAAI (Australian Association of Angel Investors).  The angel investing community in Australia, while active, has been fairly informal in the past.  The AAAI has been busy over the past couple of years trying to put together a structure to help us get more organised and raise awareness among entrepreneurs and government about what we are doing.

What’s great about the angel group for me is that provides the investors with the ability to pool their resources, both experience and $$, to make more effective investments.   For entrepreneurs, a group of angel investors provides a way to get exposure to and feedback from a variety of difference experiences and people who have a lot of knowledge from multiple industries of what it takes to successfully start, build and exit a business.

Anthill Magazine recently posted some of our group’s panel feedback from a Pitch Club event.  It’s not my best performance but it was a great night and an opportunity to see a lot of business ideas in a short time!

If you are looking to raise early stage capital, you are welcome to make a submission to Melbourne Angels.

I’ve recently started working with eOriginal, a digital signature and vault solution that has had great success in North America, particularly in consumer lending but also in government, health and transport/logistics.  This sort of product offfers some fantastic benefits for companies that generate significant numbers of agreements or other documents requiring signature.  In addition to reducing the cycle time for execution of documents, the cost savings on printing, couriering, filing and retrieving documents makes for a pretty compelling investment case, particularly since eOriginal is an on-demand SaaS offering.  It’s easily integrated with loan origination and other document production systems.   The electronic vault technology is the only solution accepted in the U.S. for purposes of securitising pools of financial instruments and is covered by an impressive portfolio of patents.  It ensures that the electronic originals are tamperproof as well as providing for transfer of ownership of documents.

Australian legislation, through the Electronic Transactions Act (1999), enables electronic signatures as a mechanism for execution of most kinds of agreements, but we seem to be in the very early stages of adopting this technology.  I’d be interested to hear your thoughts about why the adoption has been so limited?  And of course,  if you are interested in the solution feel free to contact me!