Archive for 'United Kingdom'
Econsultancy London Round Tables
Econsultancy has set up an event for the Traveling Geeks where we’ll have round tables discussing technology as it relates to community, customer service and innovation with a focus on social media tools.
This is a way we can “power network” with a LOT of UK companies that are clients of Econsultancy’s and are of interest to us.
We are meeting at the Swan at the Globe – the restaurant at the Globe Theatre originally build in Shakespeare’s time.
The Companies:
Photobox, Warner Music, eOffice, lastminute.com, Channel4, Intruders tv, MakeYourMark.org, Mandate, Macmillan Cancer Support, Equalities Human Rights Commission, London 2012, Progenit, Poke, Random House and Summit Media
The Geeks:
* Robert Scoble @scobleizer
* Craig Newmark @craignewmark
* Sarah Lacy @sarahcuda
* Howard Rheingold @hrheingold
* Meghan Asha @meghanasha
* JD Lasica @jdlasica
* Tom Foremski @tomforemski
* Sarah Austin @pop17
* Susan Bratton @susanbratton
* Jeff Saperstein http://sapermktg.wordpress.com
* Renee Blodgett @weblogtheworld, @magicsourcemedia
* Jim Schuyler @jimsky7
Find out more about each of them and their interests at https://tg.planetlink.com/geeks/.
Econsultancy guests:
* Community Product Manager, BSkyB
* Manager, ba.com and Mobile Innovation, BA
* Global Digital Marketing Director, Warner Music
* Commercial Director, Photobox
* Head of Marketing for Future Media & Technology
* Founder & CEO, eOffice
* Head of Digital, OMD
* Co-founder, Poke London
* International COO, MySpace
* Head of Innovation, lastminute.com
* Head of New Media Marketing and Communications, Channel 4
* Head of Content and Co-Founder, Intruders tv
* Platform Evangelist, Adobe
* Jim Sterne, CEO, Emetrics
* Digital Guru, MakeYourMark.org
* Head of Social Media, iCrossing
* Associate Director, Mandate
* Director, Nixon McInnes
* Freelance Social Software Consultant
* Head of Digital Marketing, Macmillan Cancer Support
* Head of Digital, Equalities Human Rights Commission
* Head of New Media, London 2012
* Head of Social Media & Stakeholder Engagement, UK Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills
* Head of Audience Development, Telegraph Media Group
* Editor-in-Chief, Internet Retailing
* CEO, Make It Rain
* Junior Account Executive, Make It Rain
* Senior Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University
* Content Editor, e-skills UK
* Project Officer – Skills, Northwest Vision and Media
* Head of Ecommerce, Random House
* Digital Media Communications, EMEA, Dell
* Marketing and Ecommerce Consultant, Progenit
* Managing Director, Summit Media
* Online Help Manager, Carphone Warehouse
Rebecca Lieb, VP North Amercia was a recent guest on DishyMix where we talked about Econsultancy and her new book,“The Truth About Search Engine Optimization.”
Click here to listen now or subscribe in iTunes.
Rebecca Lieb on The Truth About SEO, Journo Interview Techniques and Oceans & Otters
Traveling Geeks: A Guardian Newspaper Media Panel, Twitter, From Back to Front And Beyond…
Tuesday evening our third event that day for the Traveling Geeks (but not the last) was to take part in a media debate at The Guardian newspaper’s offices in north London.
The Guardian is one of the UK’s largest newspapers and its media section is superb — anyone that is anyone in the media industry reads it, and anyone that’s interested in media — reads The Guardian’s media section.
It was a very good turnout for the event despite horrid downpours. Part of our TG gang (Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, and JD Lasica) were on the panel discussing the future of media with the Guardian’s Emily Bell, and the BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones.
It was a good discussion but it felt very “2005” in terms of the subjects, which kept returning to blogger/social media versus mainstream media.
The Butcher of Fleet Street
I was sitting at the back of the room next to fellow TGer Craig Newmark of Craigslist. And inevitably, the panel’s moderator couldn’t resist asking him to stand up and explain himself for killing the newspaper industry.
Craig is mightily fed up with this question. And I agree. It is not his fault that the newspaper industry is in trouble. But Craig handled it all very well, throwing in a line “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” which drew laughs and distracted the panel from further pursuit of a tired line of questioning and drew the discussion back to the favorite subject of the day: Twitter.
From Back To Front
It was fun publishing from the back of the room and having our Tweets projected onto a big screen in the front of the room.
Here is the evening’s Twitstream.
And here are my contributions:
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.
