Kent Round One

As promised, we will populate this blog every Friday with a range of interviews from people who have decided to go beyond their lectures and Kent Round One events and test their skills by starting their very own business.

Our first interview concerns a business who’s ads you might have seen floating around on a side of your facebook page or sitting on a table around the library. The name of the business is uFlog and its purpose is to create an online exchange space where students from UoK and Christ Church can post ads about any belonging they might wish to sell. The founder of this enterprise is a postgraduate student here at Kent by the name of Piperis Filippaios. He is very excited about his idea and hopes that at some point in the future it could be expanded to other universities.

The perk of this service is that everything is entirely free for anyone who is looking to buy or sell; which makes the planned revenue come just from advertisements on the website. At the moment, the newly started business is advertising strong on facebook, twitter and around campus and has already found some local businesses willing to post ads on its website.  Firms who wish to do so, get their very own mini account through which they can track the number of impressions or clicks they’ve got through uFlog.

Although the business has just kicked off, the owner has already hired two marketing assistants to promote the website both online and at networking events. It has received good reviews from investors at the recent Kent Entrepreneurs Initiative event and the fresh business owner is already making plans for an expansion of the business into a consulting service. By doing so, Piperis is hoping to create a connecting business which could offer consulting services in marketing and PR and liaising that with advertising on uFlog.

Whether or not this could penetrate the already established similar markets such as Ebay or Amazon by adding a local feature to it can only be decided by time. It’s an outcome which could come down to how the consumers from UoK and Christ Church receive it in following months.   For now it’s a business worth keeping an eye on and you can do so by visiting it at www.uflog.co.uk and becoming a fan on Facebook and Twitter.

Until next time,

Alexandra

Tags: entrepreneur, interview, student enterprise

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 10:40 am and is filed under Kent Businesses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.