Nuts and Bolts!

They say that time passes quicker as you get older. This seems to be true for New Edge Engineering as the last few weeks have pasted so quickly. We have been putting the nuts and bolts of the business systems in place and starting to act on them, such as:

• Bank account set up (picking the best deal from which4U list).
• Time sheets helping to track the use of time and to focus on the most important items needing to be done.
• Expense sheets to track costs.
• Marketing plan to determine how we intend to attract customers.
• Business plan for a new service (with the working title 'Food Planner') that New Edge Engineering is incubating.
• Market research at the British Library.
• Market research questionnaire created for the 'Food Planner' (click here to help).

As part of the marketing and sales process, we realised that New Edge Engineering had no face. As an initial start to this we decided to get some professional photographs taken to reflect the brand of New Edge Engineering. Lucky for us, we knew Tun Shwe at Go Logic who was willing to help out and had a fun day out and about London. Tun actually took some photographs on film, which he prefers over digital. Go Logic is providing a photography service and are able to help promote products, services or companies via the web. Check out Tun's personal Flickr Stream and if you contact Tun please mention New Edge Engineering.

We have discovered another interesting networking site 'Meet The Boss', which was signing people up at the IPTV World Forum a few weeks ago. Also attended the London Facebook Developers Garage evening that was about how people are monetizing their games, there were some interesting ideas, which could be used as part of the Marketing Funnel to start the spending.

The main focus for the last few weeks has been on the business and marketing plans that are starting to take shape, especially after reading the business link information. Also learning the marketing vocabulary and strategies to increase and attract customers. As part of the discovery we came across Marketing Spiral that seems to indicate a change in ideas, luckily some marketing friends were willing to talk and explain the basic ideas of what marketing aims and objectives. Thanks for that.

This new knowledge has been used to focus on the 'Food Planner' service, which lead me to the British Library to read about ABC1 consumers, Cooking & Eating, Telecommunications and E-Commerce: The Internet Grocery Market to help understand the current market that the 'Food Planner' will be helping. I had forgotten was amazing reference library it is. For people that have never been in or used the British Library, it free but you do need a Reading Pass to get into the various reading rooms. The usual id and proof of address needed to get your free Reading Pass. For us the Business and Intellectual Property area is great as they have all the marketing reports and assessments from all the major research companies providing information about many industries and is open till 8 pm most nights but check.

So after reading a lot about the internet grocery market I have put together an initial questionnaire to test the 'Food Planner' idea and get a better understanding of what people want. So please help, pass along http://research.newedgeengineering.com/foodplanner and thanks in advance.