After weeks of reaching out to his network and canvasing for votes it has paid off. Thank you to everyone who voted. There is a term for business initiatives funded on small budgets. They are called Boot Strap… well growing organically from the ground up as is the case with Phil’s web studio there should also be the term, Shoe Lacing! Congratulations Phil you can count on the continued support of PCM projects.

Pitchit5k: The Winner.

Posted on May 16, 2011 by SeedUps

Seedups are pleased to announce the winner of the Pitchit5k competition: Phil Campbell and his PCM projects entry. The Nottingham based entrepreneur has won the $5,000 competition launched at the prestigious SxSW festival in March.

The competition was launched to celebrate the US launch of North-West based firm Seedups, the crowd-funding matching engine for early stage startups. Requiring people to submit a 60 second video pitch of why their company deserved the money and then using their social networks to vote for the best, entries came from all the US, UK and Northern Ireland, with PCM Projects coming out on top.

Seedups matches early stage startups up with tech-savvy investors, and has attracted nearly 500 entrepreneurs since its launch in February of this year, and the trip to SxSW in conjunction was one of a few early high points for the fledgling company; which also opened its first US office in March and was named as one of the Irish Echo Small Business 50.

The winner of the competition, Phil Campbell, established Fibrecamp a few years ago as a drop-in centre for making media for the web. Phil says “this money will help to build our first product from the studio to help our more mobile clients and local business that want our services at their own locations.” This social media command centre is called Rattlr.

Phil hopes that this will be the start of something brilliant for Fibrecamp: “we can really take the studio and our services to the next level, and who knows, maybe in the next few years we will have our wish of having Fibrecamps all across Europe and beyond.” Philip made extensive use of his social networks to ensure the victory, and was complimentary of the Seedups platform “Seedups are firmly on my radar as the go-to people for funding because of the things they stand for.

Seedups founder, Michael Faulkner, was ecstatic that the competition was so well received. “The competition was introduced as a means to show startups that we were ready to help them, and also highlight the services we provide. We’re delighted with the response and delighted for Phil and his efforts.

By using a unique combination of “micro-investments” from a crowd of investors, Seedups offers a viable alternative to traditional financing models, and for investors it collates numerous attractive seed stage investment opportunities in the one location. The fledgling service has already attracted press coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in being championed as one of the Irish Echo Small Business 50.

The competition, launched at SxSW, attracted entrants from all across the United States, Scotland, England and Northern Ireland. PCM projects beat Troll Inc, a video games developer concentrating on the smart phone market, into 2^nd place.

Vast network: Julia Clarke of the Nottingham Caves Survey (above and right) examining the Peel Street sand mine caves.

By erik petersen

A largely unknown world is being explored under Nottingham. Erik Petersen met the people charged with exploring the city’s caves.

DAVID Walker and Julia Clarke were in the caves beneath the Paul Smith shop in Low Pavement, setting up a fairly expensive laser.

That activity has a slightly sinister sound, like maybe Sir Paul has turned Bond villain and is preparing to release a secret weapon on an unsuspecting world.

But David and Julia work for the University of Nottingham, and their laser is not of the city-levelling variety. It helps them create digital moving images of the cave, which will soon go up on the internet alongside other images that take viewers on realistic flythroughs of many of the caves under the city.

The videos are part of the Nottingham Caves Survey, the two-and-a-half-year project David, an archaeologist for the university and Trent and Peak Archaeology, leads.

“We’re about halfway through the project as it stands at the moment,” David said.

“If we can survey 100 caves to the standard you see on the website, that would be a good dent and a good advertisement for Nottingham’s caves.”

They recently surveyed cave number 50.

“That now takes us to a grand total of about 10 percent of Nottingham’s known caves,” Mr Walker said.

The project was never meant to survey every cave under the city. Instead, it’s meant to be a baseline study, a point from which future researchers can study and build.

But they’re still trying to discover as many new caves as possible. To that end, they’ve put the call out for people who might be living or working on top of caves. People have got in touch.

“We’re getting better known, which is good,” Mr Walker said.

“We’re still finding out about new caves that have never been recorded before … or ones that have been just sort of forgotten about.”

There’s the Peel Street caves under the Arboretum – a huge underground labyrinth of sand mines.

There’s the one in Fishpond Drive, The Park. Set behind a block of 1970s flats, it’s a Victorian folly or summer house set into rock. It would have been an up-market Victorian plaything. Figures of Samson and Moses are carved into a bench.

“It’s a seriously ornate bit of work,” David said.

Other caves, like the ones under Willoughby House, have a more utilitarian, functional look.

One of those was a cellar cave, another was converted during the war to an air raid shelter. “It still retains some of its air raid shelter paraphernalia,” David explained.

“And it still has an air raid toilet. Everybody loves a toilet.”

They enjoy finding that “time capsule stuff”. But Victorian follies or Second World War air raid shelters aren’t quite the holy grail.

“The real goal will be to find a cave that we can definitively date as being Anglo-Saxon,” he said.

“But there are no caves surviving that anybody knows about.”

About 10 percent of catalogued caves are demonstrably medieval.

“I guess there are probably more Victorian ones that anything else,” David said. “A lot of the standing buildings in Nottingham are from that great Victorian expansion.”

For many Victorian pubs and even houses, something like a cave larder was quite popular.

“As well we see in the rich folk of The Park particularly … cutting caves for wine cellars, and for show,” he said.

“People are using their environment and showing them off one way or another.”

Over the years, the showing off has often stopped. Some were walled off and forgotten about. Others – ones that have more public entrances – had different problems.

They’ve housed the homeless, been used by drug users and generally fallen into as much a state of disrepair as a cave can fall into.

“This has been one of the problems of the caves, as it were,” David said.

“They have been increasingly locked up and blocked off over time.”

He would like more made of promoting the caves – perhaps with leaflets and maps.

He likes “day caves” and “night caves” – public caves that can be toured by day, and caves under pubs that can be visited at night.

Publicans and other businesspeople who have caves might be more inclined to make the not insubstantial investment of bringing them up to modern safety standards, if they thought people were going to visit.

But that’s a debate for another day.

“We’re still really at the early stages of pushing that end of it, pushing what comes next,” David said. “But we’re doing quite well at the survey part of it.”

The main goal is to catalogue and help preserve the caves. But David doesn’t just want to see them turned into stagnant museum pieces.

“They’ve been dynamic for the last 1000 years. They’ve changed over time,” he said.

“There’s no reason why they can’t be used in a more interesting way.”

To learn more about the Nottingham Caves Survey and see the cave videos, visit www.nottinghamcavessurvey.org.uk.

Jailhouse rock: King David’s Dungeon, below Nottingham Castle. King David II of Scotland was reputedly held captive here in 1346.

Secret passageway: Nottingham Castle and the medieval Mortimer’s Hole tunnel, leading to Brewhouse Yard.

Beneath the rock: Caves in Castle Rock, including Mortimer’s Hole, Brewhouse Yard caves, and Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem Inn caves. Visit www.nottinghamcavessurvey. org.uk