First up in the Dragons' Den was Ling Valentine with her contract hire website and an eye-catching poster showing her URL printed onto be nuclear missile. Her website has a crazy design that is on first glance a complete mess but the more I looked at it, decided it actually seems to work. I read through her site and was especially amused by her advice page on building a good website which had this nugget of information:

Use program like Macromedia Dreamweaver and sit with clever druggy student who show you some basic skill.

Duncan and Richard were interested enough to make an offer that the equity stake they demanded was too big and Ling abruptly refused it, telling them ' Chinese eat dragons for breakfast'. Her advert on a missile was a good publicity stunt, and you couldn't help but think her appearance on Dragons' Den was just another one, but good on her for that.

More popular with all the dragons was the husband and wife team who wanted to sell a kiss moulding kit called Send a Kiss by Benje. The idea had come about when the guy had a heart attack and thought of something he would wanted to leave behind to his wife. All of the dragons loved the idea but also agreed this was a' lifestyle business' that could make a great living in a couple but that probably wouldn't make a big return investors. Peter Jones said he found the back story to the business ' heart rendering' when he surely meant heart rending which was quite a funny Jade Goody moment for someone who had just been blasting another pair of entrepreneurs as ' idiots'. The couple didn't receive any funding although Peter did buy one of the kits from them for £50 which was like some kind of patronising act of charity since they already said the RRP was £14 99. Theo said he may be able to put them in touch with someone who could help them and maybe he was true to his word because the Send a Kiss website has a non-affiliate link to Theo's underwear store, La Senza which implies some kind of relationship was born.

Finally in the den was in Imram Hakim who had iTeddy - a teddy bear with a media player embedded in its stomach and day content subscription service on the associated website. It seems like a pretty reasonable idea and surprisingly affordable considering it was apparently a video player as well and Imran had a very polished product to show considering he had only come up with the idea five months earlier. Most agreed it was a good idea if he was able to get the patents, and Theo and Peter ended up investing in the business. I don't mean to fisk Peter Jones's every contribution but he made a point of saying in his negotiations that Imran could ' have the money today'. Followers of Dragons' Den know that despite the impression of cash being handed over, these deals are long drawnout affairs are often never take place one due dilligence has been carried out. The deal was dependent on a patent being granted, which Richard thought was unlikely, and he may have been right because I can see no mention of iTeddy in the patent office database.

Labels: dragons' den, entrepreneurs, review, tv