Traveling Geeks

Archive for 'United Kingdom'

My Impression of UK and Euro Entrepreneurs from Today’s Seedcamp NESTA “Speed Dating” Adventure

by Susan Bratton on July 7, 2009 at 5:03 pm

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.

Please check out the Traveling Geek’s Blog for complete…

by admin on July 7, 2009 at 3:28 pm

Please check out the Traveling Geek’s Blog for complete coverage of the trip. It’s being updated every hour by each of us, so you’ll never know what you’ll get.

(Photo: Howard Rheingold, Sarah Lacy, Joe, Renee Blodgett, Jeff Saperstein)

Accel Partners London Hosts the Traveling Geeks #TG2009 Who is Coming to Lunch? Find Out!

by Susan Bratton on July 7, 2009 at 2:51 pm

Accel

Accel Partners is hosting the Traveling Geeks to meet a number of the companies in which they’ve invested, including Seatwave, Playfish, Alfresco, Weeworld, Mind Candy & Wonga.

Here’s who we’ll meet:

Wonga_new_hi-rez

Errol Damelin, founder and CEO of Wonga

playfish_blue

Kristian Segerstrale, founder and CEO of Playfish

John Newton, founder, Chairman and CTO of Alfresco

Seatwave

Joe Cohen, Founder and CEO of Seatwave

Michael Smith , Founder and CEO of MindCandy

Weeworld

Celia Francis, CEO of WeeWorld

Thanks to Sonali de Rycker not only for lining up such an amazing group of CEO’s and for bringing in Indian food for lunch – my special request.

Sonali is Indian (yay!) and we are in good hands for a delicious lunch to fortify us for this meet and greet. I had to find a way to sample the famous British Chicken Tikka.

I’ve been checking out each company and have already created my Avatar on WeeWorld. Do you like my van?

WeeWorld Susan Bratton's Avatar

Do I look like that?

by Craig Newmark on July 7, 2009 at 8:38 am

Well, last night, British Telecom hosted a dinner for the Traveling Geeks, best described by Renee Blodgett.

Let's just say that the image on the left, well, the wings are vestigial, the hat is not. (that is, that's me with the hat.)

Traveling Geeks – On the road in the UK

by Ayelet Noff on July 7, 2009 at 8:37 am

This is a re-post form Techcrunch Europe.

This morning we had a breakfast with Tristan Wilkinson, Intel’s Director of Public Sector and other Intel execs. We had an interesting discussion about the use of technology in the Western world, in developing countries, in the classroom. For example, we talked about how parents and teachers need to be more open to allowing kids to use technology, the internet, their mobile devices and not focus as much on the negative aspects of technology but rather on all the positive aspects. There is a huge problem with parents’ attitudes toward their kids’ involvement with technology and a huge divide in regards to educating parents:

We also had a little debate about whether Twitter is already a mainstream phenomenon or not:

Lastly, we discussed the importance of bringing technology to developing countries and what a difference even one cell phone in a village can make. However, Scoble, part of the TG party, also reiterated the idea which he calls the “Friend Divide” – this is to say that even if you have a computer and are able to get online, you’re still at a major disadvantage to people who have already built a rich network of friends which they can use to get and spread information.

Right now I am writing you from NESTA’s Reboot Britain conference. More postings to come as we continue on our fascinating British journey…

Reboot Britain – First Stop on Traveling Geeks tour

by Howard Rheingold on July 7, 2009 at 8:28 am

I knew it would be intense when I said yes to the call to adventure, but if the first day is any indication, the Traveling Geeks tour redefines intense. The day starts with an exercise in cat-herding, with the whole crazy crew piling into three London taxis. Try putting any five of those rather strong individual personalities into an enclosed space and “intense” is the only word for it.

We spend our first day at Reboot Britain, the kind of event I’d love to see in the USA. It was sponsored by NESTA, also the kind of organization I’d love to see on our side of the pond. You can get a sense of what went on by searching our tweets via the #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter. I was particular nervous because I was scheduled to speak at 6:00. I far prefer to get my talk over at the beginning of the day, so I can relax. The speakers were engaging enough for me to spend all day sitting down, which is not my custom. It was probably the first day in two years that I didn’t take an hour out to walk. I was surprised at the extraordinarily warm response to my talk. It was the first time I had spoken publicly about a subject I’ve grown passionate about – 21st Century Literacies. You know you’ve hit the mark when people are still sitting at the end of the last session of the day. I finished speaking, acknowledged warm applause, sat down — and people kept sitting. So I got back on stage and fielded questions for another 20 minutes. Thank you, London, for making my day!

After Reboot Britain, we were treated to the extraordinary hospitality of the extraordinaryJ.P. Rangaswami and his colleagues at British Telecom, aka BT. I first became acquainted with JP through his blog, Confused of Calcutta. This was not the usual thinking from a highly placed executive at a telecom operator. Not the usual thinking, period. So I started following him on Twitter (@jobsworth) and when I noticed that he was often listening to vintage Grateful Dead tunes, I struck up a correspondence. On one of his visits to San Francisco to visit BT acquisition Ribbit (more about them later), we got better acquainted over dinner. So when he heard the geeks were headed for London, he arranged a mind-boggling capper for our first day – dinner at the top of BT Tower. We were greeted by no less than the CEO of BT, who made some surprising and welcome statements that lead me to suspect that BT might be the kind of un-telecom, un-operator that the world needs to remove the telecom operators’ obstacles to a truly mobile web. We’ll see. Mark my words – just as Xerox PARC changed the world because Bob Taylor was a once in a century people collector, I suspect that BT is going to have a similar impact because of JP. Really. Watch and see.

Ian Livingston, CEO, British Telecom

by Craig Newmark on July 7, 2009 at 7:41 am

Hey, the Traveling Geeks met him last night at the BT Tower.

Apparently the guy publishes his email address, and gets a few customer service emails every day.

He answers or delegates each one.

I don't believe the CEOs of AT&T or Verizon do that, nor do they have any direct reports doing something like this.

(Related: this is why a President needs to keep his Blackberry.)

Is the Web Female?

by Renee Blodgett on July 7, 2009 at 2:25 am

Yesterday at Reboot Britain in London, there were back-to-back sessions and countless panels on technology, innovation, social media and the web.

It ranged from ending the digital divide, redefining the role of public service media, where next for the media and politics, consumer democracy or a politics of citizenship, to the future of policymaking, how video games open learning and creating a social, environmental and ethical revolution in business.

On the panel, “is the web female?” moderated by BT’s JP Rangaswami, four women talked about their opinions around a) what does the web ‘being female’ mean and b) should there be the “divide debate” at all?

Australian Joanne Jacobs was amusing and got a laugh from the audience when she said, I’d like to think that I’m the token bloke on the panel.” She tends to do more ‘masculine’ things online, she tells us. Before she went deeper, I was wondering whether that meant playing war games or creating widget skins in black and gray. Not quite.

Bottom line, how we spend our time online is different depending how much feminine energy we house in our daily lives. Are we women working from home, raising two children and active in our kids PTA? Or, are we women engineers developing the latest UI and have a child, but our husband does the chores and looks after the kids most of the time?

Or, frankly other issues altogether, such as the ones that we didn’t have time to really explore at depth. It’s not just how comfortable we are throwing ourselves into the public eye, but how much we say once we do, how often and with what tone.

Says Joanne, “Culturization is the hardest thing for specific needs or outcomes. The web a great opportunity for women and men to deliver what they are looking for and get what they want online.”

MT Rainey of Horses Mouth brings up the feminine versus masculine issue that I spend a lot of time thinking about. She says, “it’s not so much is the web female, but the question is how can the web men help bring out the feminine side?”

The flip side is true too and we see it in places like Second Life or chat rooms where women take on a male persona or act things out anonymously because it ‘feels’ safer to do so.

The debate in the hallway was mixed but most didn’t feel that technology was geared towards men. They haven’t been to Silicon Valley I was thinking. 99% of my client CEOs and head honchos have been men as have the majority of their engineering team. There’s always a token woman or two among us but I never feel as if they’re the main decision drivers. Bear in mind that this is the majority of my experience but not all.

I’ve certainly worked with women CEOs and proactively pushed women heads of business development and engineering for speaking roles and media interviews on countless occasions.

Masculine energy drives a lot of the UI decisions in many of my past experiences, as well as the marketing ones. When a target audience is predominantly female, then they’ll often fork out the cash for the research to make sure they’re on track with patterns and preferences. And yes, they look to me for guidance.

It’s an interesting dance however since designers, like artists, love to create what they love and what works for them – and we all know that this isn’t necessarily what their audience wants or needs.

One of the things women do online is get things done. It’s all about efficiency. Meghan feels that if women were involved earlier on, there would be more group regulation around commentaries on social forums and that technology would be more practical and efficient. More practical and efficient? I couldn’t agree more.

There’s also the issue about how comfortable women feel about making abrasive and controversial statements and comments on the web. Joanne feels that Americans and Australians are fairly comfortable about making abrupt statements online, although Sarah thinks that while American women are active on the web, they’re still not that comfortable with aggressive behavior on line.

It’s obviously a cultural thing. Joanne would love to see women participate in more games in the real world that are more outcome oriented. “If I was going to improve the web, it would be more game oriented for women entrepreneurs,” she says.

As for improving the web, MT says in the spirit of Reboot Britain, “we have a lot of users who don’t use a lot of rich-media sites. We should create sites where women can come to a place to help each other rather than having to rely on institutional resources only. We should take those two big slices of what we spend millions of pounds on in the public sector, and create things online where people can deliver the soft elements that will appeal to women.”

Meghan adds two things: “clarity and friendliness and making it easier to find things on the web.” That goes back to the old age search debate.

Things often come full circle.

BT Tower by Night

by Renee Blodgett on July 7, 2009 at 12:19 am

BT hosted a magical dinner for the Traveling Geeks at the BT Tower in West London last night. BT’s CEO Ian Livingston greeted us (below) and JP Rangaswami followed up with introductions to countless meet-and-greets, which included BT and NESTA managers and directors, as well as other partners and affiliates, such as a team from Ribbit, over from Silicon Valley for a board meeting. (they were acquired by BT roughly a year ago).

The view was incredible:

The food a treat (scallop salad, jersey royal potato pancetta frisse sauce with slow roasted beef fillet, girolles, baby carrot broad beans and summer truffles with red wine reduction).

The hospitality and service incredible (our telecom giants could learn a thing or two). Below a few fun snapshots from our evening.

The BT creative mastermind behind our a collage with character-like images of each of the Geeks…