Traveling Geeks

A view, with Traveling Geeks #1

I guess that’s not bad.

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.

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.

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

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!

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:

• Errol Damelin, founder and CEO of Wonga

• Kristian Segerstrale, founder and CEO of Playfish

• John Newton, founder, Chairman and CTO of Alfresco

• Joe Cohen, Founder and CEO of Seatwave

• Michael Smith , Founder and CEO of  MindCandy

• 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?

Do I look like that?

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

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…