We will point entrepreneurs towards investors who suit their needs and have a serious appetite for their deal.”That is very different from getting 38 knock-backs before you find someone. We are not saying: ‘Here’s a bunch of names, off you go.’ It’s not a Yellow Pages thing. If one knocks you back, we will take you to the next.”Neylon plans to cater for investors in larger deals (£10m to £75m, and £75m plus) by developing streamed news content, and is also keen to develop risk appetite by offering individuals private placing opportunities. At some stage he wants to go global, but not just yet.”The common mistake is to set up operations two inches deep all over the world which provide little value. We want to be 10-miles deep and be of incredible value to the user, and then take that template and roll it out At the moment, the challenge is to stay focused.”. During the war in Yugoslavia last year, hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees fled their homes. Were they running from the Serbian military or Nato bombs? Was the refugee flight completely chaotic, or was someone orchestrating it with deliberate precision behind the scenes?

During the war in Yugoslavia last year, hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees fled their homes.

Were they running from the Serbian military or Nato bombs? Was the refugee flight completely chaotic, or was someone orchestrating it with deliberate precision behind the scenes?
In the turmoil of war, truth often disappears behind the TV sound bites. Now an international consortium of human rights groups is hoping technology will unearth some of those truths in the wake of the Kosovo tragedy.The consortium recently released a watershed report, Policy or Panic: The Flight of Ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, March-May 1999, analysing the flow of 400,000 refugees out of Kosovo last year. The report resulted from a nine-month joint research effort by the Tirana-based Institute for Policy and Legal Studies (IPLS), The East-West Management Institute in New York and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington.Dr Patrick Ball, deputy director of the AAAS Science and Human Rights Programme and author of the report, said the Kosovo study reflected the new trend of human rights groups using technology to turn the tables on repressive governments. In the past, human rights organisations often viewed technology, and particularly computers, with distrust. However, in the past two years, they have been turning technology to their advantage, using it to investigate repressive governments just as those governments once spied on them.While faster desktop machines and the internet have played a key role in this role-reversal, Dr Ball said the real shift in power came with cheap, off-the-shelf software programs that allow human rights groups to track abuses with the same precision only governments could afford two decades ago.”Groups working in repressive conditions – on the sharp edge, examining [regimes] up close – are gathering and analysing data.

The focus is on information management technology, not just communications. The net is useful, but the real pay-off has come from analytic technologies,” he said.”The advances in databases, word-processing, spreadsheets and encryption software is where the real revolution is taking place for human rights groups.”For the past eight and a half years, Dr Ball has been advising grass-roots human rights groups on databases and data security. It has been an uphill struggle, he says, with many groups resisting using computers for anything more than basic word-processing.Fortunately, the situation is changing, he said.”HR groups are beginning to recognise the tremendous analytic power that aggregating large-scale data brings to us – and you simply cannot do that without technology. You can have cards in an index file, but that’s not really an information management system,” he said.The Kosovo report examined a total of 22,000 records from five different data sources. These ranged from one-to-one interviews with refugees in camps in Albania to hundreds of pages of handwritten notes made by Albanian guards near the border town of Kukes as ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo.If they could reconstruct the refugees’ migration flows and match these to the timing of either Nato bombing or Serb attacks, Dr Ball’s team believed they would have irrefutable evidence of what really happened in Kosovo.”The patterns were very complicated. We were trying to track the movements of hundreds of thousands of people among hundreds of villages during nearly 100 days. Do a little multiplication – you’ve got a lot of data points.