Summary of Calum Brannan's activities to date

Calum Brannan started a company at 15, called PPLparty, he then rolled that into Youmeo with some funding.

Calum wasn't making money, but he'd met James Leavesley, so they got some more money from investors known to James through IOD West Midlands and created Red Brick Labs, as a way to make money whilst trying to get Youmeo off the ground.

If Calum is to be believed, they weren't making money (again), so they sought alternative funding and received this in Spring 2009 and put Youmeo and Red Brick Labs into receivership, paid for by the new funder, which still hasn't been wrapped up! - is there a pattern emerging yet?


Now we come right up to date - Calum and James then walked out of Inormas and are now (apparently) using the names "Social Helium", although there's no website up yet and have a new Limited Company called CBJL Ltd, (Co. No. 07055592) - clever name, don't you think?  CB=Calum Brannan and JL=James Leavesley.  They also appear to be based from The Quadrant Business Centre at 3 The Quadrant, Coventry, CV1 2DY, which looks quite nice!


So they've now abandoned 3 companies, one way or another, leaving many tens of thousands of £'s of debt behind them in the process and achieved all this in about a year and the 2nd company (Youmeo/Red Brick Labs) wasn't even fully wound up before they'd already moved on to the 4th company!


Where's the money coming from to fund this company?  Well, that's a story for another day, and there's much, much more besides!!

Calum Brannan and his team's technical abilities

At his offices, in Coventry, very close to where he lives, Calum and James set about trying to build what they had promised their clients and getting as much publicity as they could:


http://www.wmictcluster.org/Inormas  - read about how James Leavesley and Calum Brannan met



http://twitter.com/inormasmedia - "We are a social media technology and strategy company based in the UK. Our team is a mix of experienced marketeers and cutting edge technicians."

Unfortunately, these "cutting edge technicians" weren't quite as sharp as they claimed and an independent audit of the system demonstrated some pretty fundamental issues in just about every aspect of the system.......

Here's what the report about the system they'd developed for their largest client had to say at the time [it's important to note that we've been told that some of these issues have now been addressed.]

Introduction:
The Bxxxx TV site is far too complex as outlined in the points below.

The purpose of this document to highlight some of the more serious problems with a view to providing guidance on the way forward.


Overall complexity:
Although the scope of this site is quite wide, it has been built in a way that makes the system difficult to maintain. Inormas are currently in the development phase, before people are using the site and it already slow and cumbersome - making changes will become much more difficult (if not impossible) once the site goes live.

The data structure is extremely (and unnecessarily) complex, the database contains over 100 distinct tables. By comparison, Facebook (built on the same basic code, happily supports 250 million users and all their content and applications with just 30 tables.

The system does not appear to have any design documentation or project plans and most of the code contains no comments (something that goes against all best practice). Although the system uses a framework, it uses it poorly and with a system this complex the framework is no substitute for a clear definition of the goals of the system, how it has been implemented and how the data is organised – all of which seems to be missing.


Poor use of MVC (Model View Controller):
The purpose of an MVC framework is to separate the different major functions of the site so that it can be worked on by people with different skills and easily maintained on an ongoing basis.

The Model, which is the heart of data driven site, should contain the business logic, in particular the routines that access and update information or data.

The View should contain templates to display the site in different languages and for different devices like mobile phones.

The Controllers should identify which View a request needs and which Models it needs to access to provide the data for templates. All contemporary literature and generally accepted best practice (including Zend) recommends keeping the Controllers small and simple.

This site contains over 13,500 lines of code in the controllers, including one of the most important controllers, which has 3,000 lines of code on its own – this is anything but “Small and Simple”.

There is also far too much code in the Views, which do not use a dedicated templating language. There is even more code in the View helpers which also access the Models but do not show up in the Controllers.

This means that the organisation provided by the framework is almost completely subverted. The code starts to become one mass of up to forty thousand lines of interconnected spaghetti code, which probably explains why the system is so slow and makes it almost impossible to build a Version 2 of this system as it stands today.

The Controller should act as a manifest or list of which resources are required for a particular request or action. This means that when the site has performance issues, you should be able to quickly identify which resources are causing the problem. The complexity of the Controllers and the fact that some resource access goes through the helpers, not the Controllers, makes identifying performance issues very difficult and extremely time consuming and it make rectifying issues near to impossible.

Another good reason that the Controllers should be kept simple is that Models and Views can often be easily transferred from one framework to another (see next section), whereas the Controllers are more unique to a particular tool. Some frameworks use no code in their Controllers whatsoever.

The whole framework directory structure is also very complex, with no documentation or guidelines of why it has been implemented in this manner.


Choice of Framework:
It is debatable whether an MVC architecture is the ideal structure for a social media site. Because the site will contain content, which is defined by managers and ultimately end users, it is questionable whether the structure of the site should be driven by its directory structure, as opposed to being data driven.  Again, this has performance implications.

Regardless, having chosen an MVC structure, it is difficult to see why Zend was used. It is one of the biggest and most complex frameworks and is widely regarded as one of the slowest performers, whether this site will scale to a million users is highly questionable.


Organisation and Management:
As above, a number of the fundamental design decisions were highly questionable, but the technical management of the site and development work is also flawed.

The source control system doesn’t work meaning that a number of people are directly using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to update the main working copy of the site.  This makes it almost impossible to test potential solutions. It also means that updating the site is complex with a good chance that one persons changes could overwrite, or otherwise compromise, somebody else’s.

There is no structured project management or work allocation/monitoring, other than a bug list with over a hundred items on it. Key members of the team are often too tired to produce high quality work or communicate effectively. Tasks are poorly defined and undocumented, which is confusing for the users, bad coding practice and will be very difficult to understand in six months time when something needs fixing and the developer that did has left.

There are no written guidelines on the configuration of the site. The site would not work with a standard installation of PHP because a depreciated (out of date) method was used to separate the PHP code from the HTML in the Views.

All of the above leads to very slow progress, poor morale and the application of unrealistic deadlines, which were never met, which is also going to impact relations with the client. Whilst this situation may be acceptable in the design phase, it should not exist in the development phase and is completely unacceptable and untenable once the site goes live.

It would be far more intuitive both for people using the site and for people maintaining it in the future, if content, such as polls, surveys, adverts, etc. could be added or maintained by editing a representation of the page itself.

Conclusion:
It is possible to rectify some of the more serious problems but it would be highly unlikely that such action and direction would come from the same people who created the existing system.

A large amount of the system could be migrated to a better design but it would have to happen very soon before the problems became entrenched and the system needed to be started from scratch.

In other words, the current approach must be stopped and the solution migrated to a robust, reliable, scalable and properly built platform without delay because if this system goes live as it stands, it probably won’t work, it will consume vast amounts of time to keep it limping along and Inormas will lose credibility with the client to a degree which is probably unrecoverable.

So, the question is this:  "Does this sound like the sort of project you would want to have spent a very significant amount of money on?"  and, moreover, "Do these guys sound like they know what they are doing?"

"Cutting edge developers" that's pretty similar to how the people who built the Titanic would have described themselves at the time, doesn't it? 

 

Calum Brannan's appalling investor track record

With three failures in about 6 months, Calum Brannan seems to have an amazing record of using other people's money but delivering very little in return......

Looking at the funding for Youmeo.com, he seems to have persuaded a large number of bright people to part with many £tens of thousands and yet achieved little, which begs the question as to how his new concept, "Social Helium" will fare.

Listed as shareholders for Youmeo, we have the following (amongst others!):

Norman Younger - 1 share - Investment £1.00

Calum Brannan - 89 shares - Investment £8900

Votivation Ltd - 5 shares - Investment £17150

Calum Brannan - 90000 shares - Investment £zero

Votivation Ltd - 5000 shares - Investment £zero

James Leavesley - 13970 shares - Investment £10,001

Paul Tuson - 4576 shares - Investment £9356.91

Lisa Meadows - 4576 shares - Investment £9356.91

Orchard Growth - 629 shares - Investment 1286.17

Richard Boot - 9779 shares - Investment £19999.91

Michelle Stott - 6985 shares - Investment £20000.01

James Leavesley - 5588 shares - Investment £9999.84

Richard Boot - 5588 shares - Investment £9999.84

Ronald Blease - 2235 shares - Investment £3999.58

3 others 1397 shares each  - Investment £1000 each

(Note to self - Must investigate Votivation Ltd)

So, in summary, Calum Brannan managed to get more shares than anyone else (in fact, everyone else put together!!) without ever significantly putting his hand in his pocket, whilst everyone else funded his gravy-train to the tune of about £111,150 - I bet they were annoyed when it went down!!

Imagine how James Leavesley and Michelle Stott-Leavesley, a young married couple, must have felt pissing such a huge amount of money down the drain and yet James seems to stick with him - hard to understand unless he expects to see his money back sometime!!  What other reason could there be for them starting CBJL Ltd and promoting their new concept of "Social Helium".

As anyone who's ever been to a fair knows, you should never trust a kid with helium - they either have a concentration lapse and let go of the balloon, so it floats away, or they breathe it thinking that it sounds cool to have a voice like Mickey Mouse!

I'm finding it hard to imagine why anyone would want to invest into, or even get involved with Social Helium or any business in which Calum is actively involved (!) when he's taken down, or attempted to take down, three companies in the same space within less than a year - does that seem like a safe bet to you? 

I wonder if the DTI know he's had such an appalling track record?

On another note, we hear that there's been some very interesting movement with respect to the whole Bob Edmiston / Christian Vision / Boost TV saga and there should be more here very soon - If you like some scandal, generously laced with hypocrisy and dirty dealing, then you're gonna LOVE this!


We just want to ensure we've checked our facts before we publish.

 

Calum Brannan re-writes his CV

According to Calum Brannan's LinkedIn Profile, which he's obviously updated in the last few days (!!), he's never worked for Inormas!  Instead, he now seems to have used the time between the Spring and Autumn of 2009 working for SalonToolkit and Youmeo.


I'm sure that this will come as a huge shock to the people who've been paying his salary for the last 6+ months, as they don't seem to get any credit at all for the time and money they spent on him!


Moreover, Youmeo has been in the hands of the Receivers for the last few months, since his Red Brick labs/Youmeo venture, which he operated with James Leavesley, ran out of money and went down the pan!!  Which is why the original www.youmeo.com URL doesn't work!!


According to Calum's version of events, on LinkedIn, his employment history looks like this:

Experience

Social Media & Digital Consultant

CalumBrannan.com

Information Technology and Services industry

September 2009 – Present ( 4 months)

Helping businesses understand the everchanging world of social media and digital marketing.

Non-Exec

SalonToolkit Ltd

Internet industry

May 2009 – Present ( 8 months)

A new startup using SAAS to provide low cost, quality diary management and SMS reminder solutions.

Ambassador

Enterprise UK

Government Relations industry

September 2007 – Present (2 years 4 months)

We were founded in 2004 by the British Chamber of Commerce, the Confederation of British Industry, the Institute of Directors and the Federation of Small Businesses, funded mostly by what is now called the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills.

Founder/CTO

youmeo.com

Privately Held; Internet industry

April 2008 – August 2009 (1 year 5 months)

Youmeo.com was founded by young entrepreneur Calum Brannan in 2008, after being re-branded from PPLparty.com


It is a social networking aggregator. This technology allows its users to manage and update all their social networks from one location.


Youmeo is based from a converted Electric Factory in Coventry and it's team includes people from Bebo, Yahoo, BBC, KPMG, Media Corp and Trutap.

Calum has 6 recommendations (2 reports, 1 co-worker, 3 partners) including:

Founding Director

Redbrick Labs

Information Technology and Services industry

September 2008 – June 2009 ( 10 months)

Founding Director

PPLparty ltd

Internet industry

April 2005 – March 2008 (3 years)

PPLparty was created in 2005 for the clubbing community, it was sold into Youmeo.com in early 2008, where a new board and team transformed it into the cutting edge social media aggregator.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


So, there you have it - Calum Brannan has re-written his CV and ex-sponged Inormas from it.  This begs an interesting question - if Calum was working on the development of Salon Toolkit for this period of time, why was he asking for a salary from Inormas, when he wasn't actually doing the job they were paying him for........?


Perhaps more importantly, was he fulfilling his duties to clients like Christian Vision during this time?  And, even more importantly, what has happened to all the code written for Christian Vision, by his team, whilst he was off developing Salon Toolkit at Inormas's expense....?


We've also heard a rumour, unconfirmed as yet, that there may have been some extremely unsavoury and possibly illegal shenanigans going on between Bob Edmiston, the multi-millionaire chief of IM Group, Founder of Christian Vision and major benefactor to Grace Academies in Coventry and Solihull and the Calum Brannan / James Leavesley duo, now operating as CBJL Ltd.


You'll recall from the earlier blog, entitled

A bit more background about Calum Brannan

That the 4th Charitable objective of Christian Vision is, quote:

4. OTHER CHARITABLE PURPOSES BENEFICIAL TO THE COMMUNITY WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE PROMOTION OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP AND MORAL VALUES WITH THE EMPHASIS ON HONESTY AND INTEGRITY IN EVERY DAY LIFE AND IN BUSINESS.

Now, we're pretty certain from the information shown to us, that this simply isn't the case where Robert Norman Edmiston's conduct in this matter is concerned...... and, if it's true, there are going to be some pretty heated exchanges on the subject when the Trustees of CV find out about this!!

Not to mention the few words that "Benevolent Uncle Bob" is going to want to have with James and Calum about the mess they've made of things!!

On the other hand, where Calum's concerned, it's not even clear that he knows when he's lying and when he's telling the truth, as we have reports of him doing it without even taking a breath!

Watch this space - the juicy stuff is coming!!

Calum Brannan's apparently unethical approach to business

More than one person has described Calum Brannan as, to paraphrase, "lacking in integrity" and some of the descriptions I've been given were far less flattering.  "He'd sell his Grandmother for the bus fare home, even if it wasn't raining" was another I was given - I'm simply repeating what I was told!

In this context, it's not hard to see why he (apparently) finds it so easy to flit from one funder and company to another.  PPLparty became Youmeo and not, as Calum suggested on his About page something he "successfully exited in 2007" - this is simply not true, he transformed PPLparty into Youmeo and took a large amount of investment.

Then according to Calum's About page

From the pioneering early days of consumer social networking, Calum founded Inormas in 2009; a business focused on providing social tools and communities for charities, corporate firms and global brands.

In fact, Calum was not the "founder" of Inormas, and according to Companies House, he wasn't even formally made a Director.


This is correct, but only after he'd put his old businesses, including Youmeo, into receivership - you'll notice that Youmeo STILL has pride of place on his website, despite the fact that it is in the hands of the receivers!  Not only that, but he was actually still operating it until very recently, hosted on the servers of his most recent employer without their knowledge or consent!

There's more!

He also had a few other companies hosted on that server without their knowledge - appointment toolkit was one example, but there were others!

Calum and James also used the funding from the Inormas investor to stoke their pipeline for Social Helium, including claiming expenses for trips to see potential clients...... only to take this pipeline with them, when they left Inormas.

The question is this: "If you build a pipeline of business on company time, claiming salary for your work and expenses for the trips and purporting to represent a company, when you have absolutely NO intention of allowing them to benefit from that business - which Section of the Fraud Act covers this?  False representation?  Fraud by abuse of position?  Or is it just plain Theft?

There's more!

It would appear that, as far back as late Summer, Calum and James had hatched a plot to create a pipeline of business, funded by Inormas, that they had absolutely no intention of allowing Inormas' investors to benefit from.  In other words, it appears that for up to 3 months before they actually left Inormas, they were already planning to take the business that Inormas had funded and paid for in order to set up their new company, Social Helium!  Bear in mind that everything they've done so far has FAILED!

We can reveal the names of these clients, but won't be doing so at the moment.

However, there's MORE!

It would appear that one of their larger and longer-term clients wasn't just aware of this, they were actually complicit in it happening.  We have seen emails between Calum Brannan and a senior member of this client which agrees the basis upon which it will happen!!

And there's MORE yet, but that's for another day......

But, referring back to the points made at the start of this post, it's possible to see why some people might be motivated to make disparaging comments about Calum's integrity and trustworthiness, if the information above is even partly true.

 

A bit more background about Calum Brannan

On Calum Brannan's Twitter Page, he describes himself as a, "20 year old, coffee drinking, technology entrepreneur. Straight from the classroom to the boardroom!"

With the warm glow of success behind him (perhaps he was still sitting in it, in fact) he moved on from PPLparty to other ventures.

He created youmeo, about which he says "Descrption: Youmeo, a simple utility to bring together all your social websites and friends into one place. You can update them all at once, we support the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Be sure to e-mail me for an invite code. I’ve been luck enough to work alongside some great people on this project including Angel Gambino (ex VP of content at Bebo, MTV and BBC)."

When that didn't make any money, he went into business with James Leavesley [Note: exact dates are unknown] and, together, they set up Red Brick Labs, funded by a couple of James' contacts at the West Midlands IOD. These eminent local businessmen each invested 5-figure sums into the business, according to my sources.

As RBL, they managed to pick up a few decent pieces of work, including Christian Vision and LighterLife to create social media platforms for these companies.  Christian Vision, Registered Charity 1031031 (wikipedia entry), was set up and (as we understand it) substantially funded by Bob Edmiston.  According to their entry on the Charity Commission website, their Charitable Objectives are:

1. ADVANCEMENT OF CHRISTIAN FAITH. 

2. RELIEF OF PERSONS WHO ARE IN CONDITIONS OF NEED, HARDSHIP OR DISTRESS ARISING THEREFROM WHO ARE AGED OR SICK. 

3. ADVANCEMENT OF EDUCATION. 

4. OTHER CHARITABLE PURPOSES BENEFICIAL TO THE COMMUNITY WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE PROMOTION OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP AND MORAL VALUES WITH THE EMPHASIS ON HONESTY AND INTEGRITY IN EVERY DAY LIFE AND IN BUSINESS.

Remember these, especially #4, as we'll come back to it in the future.

Back to Red Brick labs:

Earlier in 2009, our intrepid entrepreneur realised that, having come straight from the Class Room to the Board Room, he hardly knew how to run a bath, let alone a business and RBL went bust, leaving the funders with significant losses.  Both Red Brick Labs and Youmeo were still in receivership at the time of writing this.

Unperturbed, Calum Brannan sought new sources of funding, which he found in the Spring of 2009 and he started again under the brand name of Inormas, having retained Christian Vision and LighterLife as clients.

To be continued......

A bit of background about Calum Brannan, in his owns words........

This is taken from his website http://calumbrannan.com/about/

Uniquely placed, Calum Brannan is a young technology entrepreneur concentrating on cross-platform social media, SAAS (Software as a service) and delivering traditional services with the right balance of emerging and/or proven tech, ultimately to solve age old business challenges.

Background & Experience

• Created www.PPLparty.com at the age of 15. PPLparty experienced massive growth and popularity. Calum grew the user base on a marketing budget of £0 to way over 400,000 users and successfully exited in 2007. [In fact, he morphed it into youmeo, but that's another story!]
  
• Calum then shaped the social networking functionality at Trutap (Started by Doug Richard, famed for his appearances in BBC2’s Dragon’s Den). At Trutap Calum was the 2nd team member into the London office after the CTO. [And, it was here that he met Carl Uminski]
  

[He still names Carl Uminski of Trutap as his mentor.  I couldn't make the link to the Trutap website work, so not sure if he's put the business into receivership, or something.....but I've been told that Carl has no issues with using other people's money to start businesses and walking away, although I've been unable to independently validate this allegation - but it's certainly a recurring theme in Calum's short history!] 

From the pioneering early days of consumer social networking, Calum founded Inormas in 2009; a business focused on providing social tools and communities for charities, corporate firms and global brands. [with someone else's money bailing him out from the insolvency of youmeo/Red Brick Labs (more later)]

Calum [claims that he] and his team have the inside angle on the evolution & future of social media/networking. His clients include house-hold names, ‘AAA’ PLCs, charities and government organisations.

He is regularly involved in roundtable discussions and consultancy with leading CTO’s, marketing directors, CLO’s and CEO’s from a range of companies including Vodafone, BT, eBay, Bebo, Simon & Schuster, AGA, Lighterlife, Christian Vision, Yahoo, Oliver Rothschild Corporate Advisors and Glam Media to name but a few.

[Note - it's not as "regular" as he would like to have you believe - some of these names were just one brief meeting and no sale!]

Recognition and Publicity [which he LOVES!]

Recognition and awards include being named by the IOD’s Director magazine as their youngest ever “Director of the month”. Revolution Magazine also crowned Calum as a trailblazer for his first company PPLparty.com.

His ventures have achieved full pages in major publications such as the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Times, New Media Age, Revolution Magazine, City AM and the Birmingham Post.

When Calum isn’t working he loves traveling, spending time with his friends and family and even the odd cider on a sunny afternoon.

Availability

Calum is availiable for consultancy, speaking, drinks and writing. [But clearly not spell-checking!]