Traveling Geeks

On the London Tech Scene

Ayelet Noff of Blonde 2.0 Sarah Lacy and I at the TechCrunch Europa Awards in London earlier this month on the UK tech scene. Damn fly……

Andrew Scott Talks Rummble…..

Andrew Scott talks to me about his latest gig, London-based Rummble. Rummble builds you a personal trust network, recommending stuff from people with similar tastes – some will be friends, but many will be people you don’t even know yet. Click play to learn more.

A Chat with Andrew Mulvenna of Pearl Software

Below an interview I did with Pearl Software’s MD Andrew Mulvenna during a Cambridge TweetUp in the UK earlier this month.

Cambridge Consultants UMI Lowers Energy Consumption & Saves Money

Below, I’m talking to Eric Wilkinson at Cambridge Consultants in the UK to better understand their UMI (Universal Metering Interface), a new low power board-to-board wired interface. UMI is primarily aimed at smart metering of meters (electricity, gas, water, heat), displays and gateways.

Many metering product developments are being held up because the communications standards have not yet been finalized by the relevant national authorities.

UMI solves this problem by separating the metrology and communications functions into modules with a wired connection between them. This unbundling is useful because the metrology standards and regulations are stable.

Manufacturers can develop smart-ready MID-approved meters today by including one or more UMI ports. These meters can actually be installed in the field now; the primary aim is at ultra low power applications.

UMI will be launched as an open standard later in 2009. The below video shows how this technology can be used to regulate kitchen appliances.

By monitoring energy consumption, UMI can automatically turn off higher energy consumption appliances during expensive times and run lower priced appliances when absolutely necessary, saving consumers money.

Consumers can actually select what they are ‘prepared to pay’ on a dial on their wash machine or other appliance. Click play to learn more.

Mitzi TV’s Take on Quirky London

At this month’s TweetUp in London, I had the opportunity to meet with Mitzi Szereto who runs around London and shoots, all of which ends up on Mitzi TV online.

She’s actually a yank who nows lives in London and her videos are her personal take on quirky London……. from prowling the streets of London in pursuit of a bowl of jellied eel and chatting about vintage cars with shoe designer Jimmy Choo and Formula 1 racecar driver Tiff Needell, to being recruited into a dance by a troupe of Morris dancers.

Below Mitzi with Geeks Sky Schuyler and Renee Blodgett

Social Media in Schools

Below is a little background on Andrew Davis, Director/Coach of The Worst Kept Secret, who is spearheading a social media initiative in English schools.

We first connected at a London tweetup this month, where I learned not only what his project is doing in education but also about his consulting work which facilitates brands to maximize their marketing potential through social media. And, of course the man has a blog so you can tune in if interested in learning more.

Having helped to launch MySpace in the UK as well as BBC Radio’s 1Xtra, he is now turning his attention to developing social media courses for secondary schools.

Andrew’s school project is gaining momentum, so much so that the Daily Telegraph, the Brand Republic and ITN’s Teachers TV all have something to say about it.

Entitled Social Media Fundamentals, this is the first time social media will be taught in secondary courses. Davis aims to explain the rise and relevance of social media including networking sites and integrate core subjects such as English and Maths at the same time.

London’s Bishop Challoner Catholic School is the first school to book Davis’ services. He will deliver a four-week course starting September where students will be required to submit a reason for being on the course, and the application will work as part of their GCSE coursework requirement. Thirty will be chosen and the fact they have had to work to get onto the course, means only those most eager to learn will be involved.

Davis has worked alongside Heads Of Faculty to devise a course tailored specifically for the needs of the school. In this case, the students will plan the school’s end of year music event.

Davis has developed lesson plans that look at planning an imaginary event, writing for web, and fundamental social networking skills that will eventually be used on a real event. As part of the course, Davis will invite former contacts from the music/media industry to share their experiences with the children.

Getting Ahead with the WOW Factor

From this week’s London Evening Standard on branding and getting ahead with the WOW factor. As Amazon’s Jeff Bezos once said: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

A Chat with Songkick’s Pete Smith & the Basekit Team

Learning more about Songkick and Basekit. Click play for a Q&A with the founders of both compelling British startups in London earlier this month.

Qype – What’s the latest at the “European Yelp”?

This is a re-post from Techcrunch Europe.

I met Qype last week at the Seedcamp Speed Dating event as part of the Traveling Geeks tour.  Here’s a quick heads-up if you’re new to it: Qype is a way to discover new places (restaurants, events, nightlife, sports, etc.) with a focus on European cities, by going through other users’ reviews and feedback. There are many categories for each vertical, along with a simple to use search engine and Google maps. The site currently enjoys a traffic of 11m visitors per month and has over 350,000 registered users from 9 European countries (UK, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Ireland and Brazil).

In the video below, Andrew Hunter (UK General Manager) explains how the service is differentiated from competitors like the well-known – at least in the US – Yelp. For instance, the site shows each review in 6 different languages, thereby allowing people to read a review about a restaurant in London in German, French, English, Spanish, Polish or Portuguese.

Innovation And Culture – Reflections On My UK Trip

I just got back from the UK spending much of my time with the Traveling Geeks, a group of leading Silicon Valley bloggers and journalists meeting with UK government agencies, UK tech companies, and startups.

It was a very good trip. Here are some notes:

– There are some well established UK startups with good business models and they are profitable. One example is Seatwave.com, which trades show tickets between fans. Spotify and Spinvox are also doing very well. Are they still startups if they have a business model and are profitable?

– Startups face the same problems as those here – funding. There are very UK VC firms and few angels. One estimate I was given was that in the Cambridge area there was just 5 million pounds ($8.26m) available for VC investments. A puny amount. Some startups are seriously considering relocating to the US for better access to investment capital.

– Successful European entrepreneurs have a tendency to go sailing and not come back. But that’s not always true. I met some serial entrepreneurs in Cambridge: Stuart Evans, chairman of Novacem, a developer of a unique type of “green” concrete; Richard Green (photo), CEO of Ubisense; the very impressive Sherry Coutu, (photo)a rare woman serial entrepreneur and one of the hosts of our Cambridge tour; also Steve Kennedy from Nettek.

– Cambridge Innovation. The area around Cambridge University is known as Silicon Fen and represents the European innovation capital. There is more money invested in innovation in this region than anywhere else in Europe. A key part of this infrastructure is the organization Cambridge Angels. I met a couple of the Cambridge Angels (Stuart Evans and Richard Green.) It’s an impressive organization with an interesting portfolio.

– Lots of government agencies and organizations to encourage innovation. At times it seemed as if we were meeting with larger numbers of representatives of groups encouraging startups than with innovators.

It was good to meet again with David Riches, chief executive of East of England International, which helps companies get established in Silicon Fen. I had met him three years ago when he was running Think London. Also represented was NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts – “A unique and independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative.”

– UK is not great for startups. The UK government wants to encourage more startups but it’s a tough place to start companies. Taxes are high and stock options are taxed unfavorably. There is a shortage of talent and salaries are high. But there has been a slight shift in the culture, there is more tolerance of failure these days. But a good job and salary is still more highly valued than a job at a startup.

– Watching the news n the UK is interesting. Much of it is taken up with stories about the government; the government said this today; the government issued a report today; the government is looking at this; the government needs to do this… In the US there is a healthy distrust of the government and far fewer government stories or an expectation that the government needs to do “something.”

– Gadgets and dongles. We were giving some gadgets to try out:

— Nokia allowed us to use their Nokia N79 phone with the Symbian interface. The phone was a solid piece of hardware, excellent photos and good video. The Symbian interface however, was horrible. I couldn’t believe how bad it was, we were all complaining about it. It was far from intuitive and it took far too many steps for the simplest of operations – including something simple as answering the phone. The BT sim card worked reasonably well (it uses the Vodaphone network) but data services didn’t work at all on my phone.

— We were given BT dongles, wireless USB modems that we used with our laptops. These worked well in most places around London. However, because of all the video we were shooting and processing, we quickly ran through our bandwidth allocations without knowing it and spent several days trying to troubleshoot the dongles. BT increased our bandwidth caps and they worked fine but it would have been good to know that this was the problem.

— Intel let us use some MIDS (Mobile Internet Devices.) I played with an Mbook from Uvid. It’s got a cool touchscreen display, nice size but everything was tiny – it tries to display Windows XP on a very small screen. I’m not a fan of MIDs or of Netbooks. I generally find the form factor too small to be useful and their performance subpar. They seem to combine the worst aspects of a cell phone and a notebook. In terms of a light and small form factor, the Macbook Air is still the best, imho.

We also had the new Flip Ultra. Although many digital cameras have great video for the same price, it was handy to have this easy to use “one-click” device. The quality of the video is excellent but I wish I could plug in an external microphone. It also does well as a regular camera, I was pulling some great single shots from its MP4 video.

Here is a list of my posts about my UK trip in chronological order:

– Sunday – Arrival and Tweetup in Chelsea

– UK Startups Look For Funding And Escape From Echo Chamber

– Digital Inclusion And The Moral Obligations Towards Tech Education

– Monday – Reboot Britain – The Traveling Geeks Help Out

– Monday – The Geeks Eat Dinner At The Top Of The World

– Tuesday – Seed Camp’s High-flyers

– Tuesday – It Never Rains But It Pours . . . More BT Innovation

– Tuesday – Guardian Newspaper Media Panel . . .

– A Guardian Newspaper Media Panel, Twitter, From Back to Front And Beyond…

– Tuesday – Back To Soho and Dinner With Agency.com

– Wednesday – Humpday – Lunch With Skype

– Wednesday – Time-Off For Good/Bad Behavior

– Thursday – A Visit To Accel Partners – UK Is Tough On Startups

– Thursday – Ecoconsultancy At Shakespeare’s Globe – Why Innovate?

– Thursday – SVW Goes To The Europas . . .

– Friday – Cambridge Startups

– Friday – Cambridge Consultants, Nokia And Microsoft Research Labs

– Friday – Looking For Ghosts In Peterhouse College Founded 1284

Also, lots of excellent coverage from my fellow Traveling Geeks here.

– In addition to the people I mentioned in my articles above, it was great to meet and talk with: Karyn Barnes from East of England International (excellent host); Jon Garside, sales director of Syphan Technologies; Michael Litman; Kai Turner, head of information architecture at Agency.com; Mike Ferg (@MikeyFerg); Wendy Tan-White. founder of Moonfruit; Vincent Camara, founder, Intruders.tv; Nancy Vega, Said Business school Oxford; Alistair Morely technology director at Cambridge Consultants; Oo Nwoye co-founder of Onepage; Professor Ian Leslie, Cambridge University; Amanda Horton-Mastin, Innovation Director at Comic Relief; Rudolph Rosini, Ecec VP at Cellcrypt; Nitin Dahad at Techspark; William Tunstall-Pedoe, CEO of Trueknowledge; Luke Brynley-Jones, Managing Director at School For Startups; Matt Rogers, co-founder of Aroxo.