Archive for 'Traveling Geeks'
Seedcamp pointer
I’m going to just quickly mention that on Tuesday we met with some Seedcamp companies, at the 
offices in central London. Craig Newmark has put up a nice quick summary with links in case you want to check them out. Craig is a fellow Traveling Geek. I will pick my favorites later, although I liked all of them, and will let you know what each technology is going to be useful for in my professional life. You will find them all fascinating and probably will end up using one or more of them some time in the near future.
I know already that my first favorites will be technologies that help find and then aggregate information that will make your blog or web site more informative for your readers. Or that make your job as a blogger easier because they help you locate not only your own writings (which believe it or not is a problem for many bloggers) but new information from sources that you trust.
Colalife: using Coca-Cola distribution network for social good
Well, Colalife.org, something casually observed at NESTA, as part of the Traveling Geeks tour in the UK, is a bigger deal than I expected.
BT Openzone Wireless Broadband
I wrote about the open wi-fi network in central London – back when I was just “hoping” that it would give us coverage while in London. Indeed it looks the network is around and that there are many wireless hotspots. I don’t know yet how pervasive the outdoor coverage is, but coverage at shops (coffee shops for example) seems pretty much available.
But the service that’s saving my life here is BT Mobile Broadband, which is available for £15/month (special promotion) on a “commercial” plan. (See photo of their [new] USB plug-in device above)
Advertised as providing “up to 7.2Mb (actually I would say 7.2mbps – or megabits per second) I was getting 2.5mbps on Sunday afternoon, and through the week have been getting upwards of 640kbps almost all of the time, which isn’t as good, but is roughly equivalent to a DSL line in the US. It’s also not quite as good as wi-fi, but if you’re at a public-access wi-fi spot, you’re unlikely to get anything better than the 640kpbs speed anyway.
On Monday at Reboot Britain [see Howard Rheingold’s article on the conference, where he spoke] we were inside a steel and brick building, in an inner room, and the local wi-fi was so overloaded it couldn’t maintain a connection for longer than a few minutes [this is common for large conferences of geeks], and I stayed on the BT Mobile service the entire day and it was rock solid, though at the lower data rate. That’s why I say it “saved by life.”
If you’re in Britain, need data on the road, and can’t tether your computer through a phone, this service seems like it would be indispensable. [I don’t know whether non-British national can purchase it short term…but if so, it would be great.]
[Disclosure: BT corporate is providing the device for me and the other Traveling Geeks, along with service, for the week I’m in London. I have no obligation to write about it or promote it.]
The Guardian Dialogues
Last night, The Guardian featured three of our Traveling Geeks (Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, JD Lasica) on stage with British counterparts for a lively discussion on the demise of the newspaper as we know it and the emergence of Twitter and other less “professional” upstarts as seen by conventional media outlets.
This is a tired argument. Perhaps Sarah Lacy said it best in her wonderfully witty way, ” Maybe we should just shut down the newspapers now and avoid the ordeal of watching the slow death.” JD chimed in that it is like “Shooting dinosaurs in a barrel.” Robert, Sarah and JD each suggested that media companies must change to survive and perhaps incorporate social media, Twittering, and more democratic means of information gathering and distribution into their economic model. Basically, change or die was the message.
However, this topic is fairly narrow. While media journalists are clearly concerned about their own paychecks and pensions, this is much bigger than just whether the Guardian and other print media can survive (the moderator even had the Chutzpah to single out our own Craig Newmark and tongue-in-cheek accuse Craig of deliberately eliminating newspaper classifieds, which had been a honey pot for newspapers).
The Barbarians are at the Gates in every sector of the communications industry. Advertising agencies are being decimated by the Google model, Encyclopedias and paid resource media have been annihilated by Wikipedia, Network television conglomerates have been supplanted by Cable subscription channels and digital narrowcasting, and the movie studios are enraged by You Tube and other web sources to download feature films outside the movie theatres, on and on with the music industry and I-Tunes , etc.
In other words, the journalism industry is not unique in its economic viability being challenged. The Internet/digital media content delivery model is not just a hiccup, but a tectonic shift. Our Traveling Geeks are players and informed commentators in that shift.
We are here in Britain to both listen and engage with our counterparts. So far, it has been a great ride.
Seedcamp at NESTA, part of the Traveling Geeks tour
Hey, the folks at Seedcamp, with NESTA, have done remarkable work with a number of British Net-related companies. My fellow geeks spoke with the following day; I was consistently impressed, these guys have real stuff. I've already started using some of their work:
Basekit Rapid website design and development tools.
Groupspaces Group webspaces.
Huddle Huddle.net combines live conferencing,
project management software and document sharing.
Kwaga creating a new revolutionary service that will
help you manage your mail.
Moo miniature business cards
Qype Local reviews on everything
School of Everything puts teachers in touch
with potential student
Skimlinks hyperlinks keywords in websites
Spotify legally downloading songs.
Stupeflix automatically arranges and animates
banks of pictures.
Ubervu meta-web 2.0, merges and tracks
conversations and feeds across the web.
Zemanta dynamic text editor that assists in
content creation and addition
Songkick music concert online database.
UK Startups Look For Funding And Escape From Echo Chamber
I’ve been meeting a lot of UK entrepreneurs as part of the Traveling Geeks trip and I’m hearing a lot of the same things US startups tell me. They are looking for funding and also fed up with seeing the same people at their meetups.
Funding is a big problem in the UK because there are very few European VC funds actively investing. And very few angels. Many startups are looking to the US for funding but they tell me that most US VC firms have closed their UK offices.
One entrepreneur told me: “We’re thinking of relocating some of our team to San Francisco so that we can be closer to the VC firms. Several VC firms have told us that they love our product but we are not over there. And so they wouldn’t consider investing.”
That was a common theme: that US VCs won’t invest in startups unless they are in Silicon Valley.
I didn’t have the heart to tell people that even if you are in Silicon Valley funding is really tough right now.
I ran into Don Thorson from Silicon Valley based Ribbit yesterday. Ribbit had a very nice exit about a year ago when BT bought the company for $105 million.
Mr Thornson was in town for a board meeting at BT. We began talking about startup funding and he was complaining that the Silicon Valley VCs aren’t doing any investing. He says there are some very good startups around but many have just a few months of runway left.
This is a serious situation. If we can’t have sustained funding we won’t have a crop of next generation companies to harvest when exits open up.
It’s one thing to have no exits but it’s another to have no companies to exit. That means no new money to reinvest in Silicon Valley.
The UK entrepreneurs regularly get together at various events but many are getting fed up seeing the same faces and hearing the same stories. I can relate.
– One entrepreneur told me: “I’ve started going to fewer events because I wasn’t getting much value from them. And everyone’s business ideas started sounding very similar. I’d rather spend some time developing some original ideas.”
The UK entrepreneurs are heavily into social media and Twitter. Some hope to be acquired by larger startups that have the potential to go public once financial markets open up. But when that happens is anyones guess because the UK economy continues to splutter.
Right now, it seems that a few seed investments would go far in the UK. A few angel investors could make some smart bets at good valuations.
I’ll mention some of the startups I’ve been meeting in a later post.
in UK, that three-prong plug thing? it’s a long-running gag
I guess it's British humor, but the three-prong electrical plug you need here, it's all been a joke.
For that matter, same thing with driving on the left hand side of the road.
Both, some kind of Benny Hill or Monty Python kind of thing, and we fell for it.
My Impression of UK and Euro Entrepreneurs from Today’s Seedcamp NESTA “Speed Dating” Adventure
We started off the day today with a fun event created by Reshma Sohoni and Alasdair Ball of SeedCamp. SeedCamp is an early stage fund that also provides exacting business support and grooming for UK and European start ups who are socially-oriented. Typical investments are up to 50 thousand Euros for about 10% of the business.
By the caliber of the entrepreneurs and the quality of the business ideas I witnessed today, Reshma and her team are making smart investments and providing wise and plished council for the entrepreneurs they back.
Every single one of the thirteen companies was, in my estimation, a great idea combined with a terrific leader or team. The most successful to date include Spotify, the European version of Rhapsody’s “all-you-can-eat for one monthly fee” celestial jukebox; Huddle, which bills itself as the collaboration tool for the MySpace generation (I will do a separate post on Huddle for you as I know you will want to try it) and Moo.com, the on-demand printing company with a smart solution for mass-customized printed products like business cards, stickers and “moo cards” which are their own smaller, clever creation that’s become a standard with the social set.
Other companies that stood out for me were SkimLinks not only because Alicia Navarro was the only female CEO, but also because she’s in a very hot category – website monetization infrastructure. More on SkimLinks arresting start up story and how it works in a very smart way in another post.
The one person with whom I didn’t get to meet but still was very impressed with their initial presentation was Stupeflix. Perhaps the name doesn’t translate well in the US – why would someone want to start the beginning of their company name with a word that sounds like stupid? Nonetheless, this is beyond a cute video creation tool like Animoto, Stupeflix allows you to use XML to slightly change the assets within any video to create multiple unique versions of a video. Best explained by example, they showed a weather video where the location and temperature were automatically changed for various locations on the fly. You could master one video and then have unlimited versions automatically customized by city.
Andraz Tori of Zemanta gave me a quick and helpful demo of his blog writing suggestion tool. This authoring suggestion tool provides related links, images, related stories and more which make every blog post have more robust content and links. I’ve been using it so far this week and can tell you I would not give this tool up now that I’ve used it.
Another tool I have not yet tried but know will be addictive is UberVu. This is one of a new breed of social meta tools, like MobyPicture (recent post about MobyPicture) that aggregates comments from across one’s social sites into a single interface where you can see comments from your followers to your posts, all threaded together in a single application. You can reply to those threads within UberVu and it will place your replies back out in context without requiring you to do so much webpage traveling. UberVu’s idea of providing reporting for rollup data will significantly help the social media managers and social listening companies keep track of all their conversations in a single UI. There’s a business model in this one, though it may take a few attempts to right-size the offering and prices.
I have to run off to The Guardian – we’re doing a podcast round table there. It’s pouring rain like hell and I wish I could just keep telling you about the companies we met today. I promise to write more to you about some of the individual companies, many of whom are in early or private beta.
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BT’s Programmable Broadband!
BT’s Open Broadband is a BRILLANT solution to broadband issues for businesses. What is it exactly? As far as I can understand, it allows companies to easily program broadband strength with a couple paragraphs of XML for specific websites. This is fantastic for stream gaming where you’re gaming via the cloud. In short, this is perfect for any application that needs guaranteed bandwidth. I love this idea, if only someone would implement it in the US. My first site request would be YouTube (bah!).
Click here for more info on the development of Open Broadband.
