Member Article

Preston entrepreneurs leave Starbucks office to take on Silicon Valley

Three Preston-based digital entrepreneurs are heading to San Francisco to promote their social networking technology at an international conference.

‘dbee’ is a corporate social network that allows users to rate each other’s opinions, and Californian technology giant, Oracle Corporation have invited founders Guy Flintham, Adam Jones and Andrew Green to showcase their ideas at the week-long event.

Oracle Open World San Francisco is one of the largest annual technology events in the world and attracts the industry leaders in cloud computing, software and hardware development from the largest technology companies across the globe.

Oracle and its Social Media team will be running interactive discussions based around its keynote speeches and expert panel sessions. dbee will be providing a VIP debating chamber to create an innovative and engaging experience for all of this year’s attendees.

The three friends founded dbee in 2011 after regularly meeting to discuss their creative ideas over a coffee in their local Starbucks.

They developed their idea from concept to launch over the following months all from this local coffee house and have seen their bootstrapped project move from an academic discussion tool within UK universities and colleges to recognition from one of the world’s largest companies, all within 12 months.

CEO Guy Flintham said, “Just 18 months ago whilst chatting over a coffee in our regular Starbucks haunt, we couldn’t have dreamt that our tiny seed of an idea would be recognised by such tech giants as Oracle.

“We have seen our creative vision for social media being discussed by some serious big hitters in Silicon Valley and now have them looking at ways to integrate us into their operations. It is a truly exciting time for our small passionate team.”

The dbee team have been supported by the Northern Lights Business incubation hub based at the University of Central Lancashire’s Media Factory, where they have been involved in EU and local authority mentoring projects designed to support start up businesses through their early stages of development.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .