Due to a dearth of workable Wi-Fi (damn BT Openzone!) TechCrunch UK&I has been unable to do much of a live blog from MediaTech 2.006 but here are some random-ish quotes (treat them as paraphrases/commentary, we aren’t quite up to verbatim typing yet) from the day so far. And if you want to text a question to the panel organisers text “MT” followed by the question to 80003.

Morning session:

Russell Buckley - Managing Director Europe, Admob: AdMob delivered 40% of the traffic to a unammed mobile ad campaign. Why? Because it was easier to click an ad than it was to get consumers to type in a long url on their mobile. More and more brands are waking up to the mobile web in the same way they did ten years ago to the Web. But this time, it’s not a big mind shift for them. The fact that there were 130,000 registrations for .mobi inside 2 weeks means lots of brands are registering defensively. There are more web enambled mobiles than there are PCs. Especilly in BRIC markets. The PC is being leap-frogged, bypassing the PC.

Michael Bayler – Director, The Rights Marketing Company: Are consumers consuming content? Yes. They already have the content. They are finding it already. People buy ringtones not for the music but to define themselves. It’s a digital T-Shirt. We look for return on attention. But the media industry looks for ROI. Media companies capture value by charging a toll – an oversimplication but true. But the media doesn’t exist until people pay atttention. The winners in the space will be those who create a ‘dashboard’ to the ecosystem. [Ed - Sounds a little like Google's strategy?].

Gurprit Singh – Director, Emerging Technologies, Microsoft EMEA HQ: [Ed - This was the Standard, "Microsoft Live" presentation. Move along people. Talked about convergence. Strange slide with 'me' in the middle surrounded by PCs, mobiles and Xbox, but no TV. Dodged a question about why the Media Centre had bombed, saying it was 'early days'. This feels like a fig leaf to cover the fact that Microsoft doesn't know what to do.]

More to follow when we get Wi-Fi working again…..

Opera arguably reinvented the mobile browser with the original release of Opera Mini. The innovation of Opera Mini was to be able to fit four quarts into a one pint jug. By putting most of the guts of the browser into a smart proxy layer, they were able to create a smart browser that could be downloaded and installed on most phones, not just so-called smart phones.

Opera’s new Mini, announced this week, isn’t just an incremental upgrade. The new Opera Mini plugs directly in to the phone camera to allow photo blogging directly from within the browser environment. See here for an example of this (Charles McCathieNevile snapped this at the W3C Advisory Committee meeting here in Tokyo – I think he got my good side).

So why is this revolutionary? Of course, it allows users to bypass MMS and other operator-sanctioned photo sharing mechanisms, but that’s no big news. Other downloadable applications have enabled photo upload and mobile blogging, but in integrating this function into the browser, Opera has turned Mini into a read/write application. The browser, traditionally the tool used to consume information, becomes a sophisticated content creation mechanism as well. Users who otherwise might not go through the trouble to download and install a photo blogging application will suddenly find they have this capability.

Of course, desktop browser users already enjoy this kind of capability through Ajax applications and browser plug-ins but these capabilities have not been present on the mobile platform. And by the way, photo blogging isn’t the only new feature. The new Mini also allows users to directly access RSS feeds and enables secure Web site access.

Video circulated on email and generating viral buzz, for years considered not worth tracking, is gradually taking its place among the TV show ratings universe in the form of Unruly Media’s viral video chart which we previously reviewed here on TechCrunch.

Last week they did a deal with the Guardian, syndicating their weekly viral video chart. Unruly’s Scott Button says the Guardian will carry a Top 20 News & Current Affairs listing of videos this Friday morning. Deals with other media companies appear to be on the cusp of being signed as well.

OK, OK, no more 2.0 ‘clichesuffixes’

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the launch of Wesabe (not to be confused with the nuclear horseradish) for several weeks. Firstly, it’s an interesting concept and secondly, one of the co-founders is Marc Hedlund - O’Reilly Media’s entrepreneur-in-residence and author of hugely entertaining and informative talks on VC Funding for Geeks.

Wesabe essentially helps users figure out where they can save money and manage their finances better by anonymising, aggregating and analysing  their personal financial data and comparing it with that of other Wesabe users. Users can tag each entry in their spending (lunch, movies etc.), set goals for themselves and tag their spending entries to find tips and shared goals from other users.

Wesabe is a great concept - a 43 Things for your money – and it’ll be interesting to see how the community evolves over time. Users are already sharing useful tips and advise, many of which can be glaringly obvious, but nevertheless hearing it from another person with a similar lifestyle can be valuable. Perhaps with a future layer of reputation, the tips may be eminently trustable.

Though Wesabe is a US startup, it emphasises a gap in the British financial services sector and UK startup scene. Britain has one of the largest concentrations of financial sector expertise in the world, a population that favours digital transactions over cash (and is very much in debt!) and yet the world’s fiscal hub is not giving rise to the emerging generation of Money 2.0 startups – the likes of BillMonk, ChipIn, FEED Tribes, Fundable, Prosper, TextPayMe and indeed, Wesabe.

Is this a consequence of conservatism in the financial sector, the glamour and glitz of social and entertainment based Web 2.0 services or simply the superior entrepreneurial abilities of American startups. Ironically, the one exception is Zopa, founded by former VPs and execs from Barclays, Tesco Personal Finance, Abbey and Egg; the latter, of course, led many innovations in online banking and lending in the first dotcom boom.

There’s perhaps a structural change that could help move things forward. Wesabe has shown that unbundling our banking data from our banks can help create new areas of value and usefulness – coincidentally, Marc led a panel discussion on Open Data at Web 2.0. Perhaps if banks began to offer platform services, like secured RSS feeds from your current account, they could assist in ushering in an ecosphere of innovative services that add value to their business and create growth for others…perhaps creating future acquisitions for themselves as those startups flourish.

A few years ago, the DaVinci Institute hosted a summit on the Future Of Money - I think it might be an interesting time to revisit those themes

Although tomorrow MediaTech 2.006 is now full, organisers Library House have kindly extended an invitation and media/tech firms who want to come to the evening drinks from 6pm to 8pm. The venue is the IMAX Theatre, Waterloo, London. The networking drinks are sponsored by Cobalt Corporate Finance.

MediaTech 2.006 will include contributions from Google, SKY and Yahoo, entrepreneurs like Bob Young CEO, lulu.com and co-founder of Red Hat, Russell Buckley of Admob, Sequoia’s latest investee company, and investors such as Index Ventures, one of the founder investors in Skype. The day’s speeches and panels will be also feature 17 young ‘upstart’ mediatech companies and some leading bloggers (possibly Robert Scoble as well).

Registered attendees include representatives of leading VCs and corporate names and some of the top entrepreneurs and innovators from the convergent space of Media and Technology. So far the list included people from from 3, 3i, Acacia Partners, Advent Venture Partners, Albany Venture Managers, Alegro Capital, Amadeus Capital, BBC, Benchmark Capital, BT Group, Celtic House Ventures, Esprit Capital Partners, Eden Ventures, Google, Guardian Media Group, Impetus Partners, Intel and Intel Capital, Logitech Europe, Microsoft, Mitsui Capital, Oracle Corporation, Orange, Partech International, SKY, Siemens Venture Capital, T-Mobile, TLcom Capital Partners, Yahoo, and more besides.

TechCrunch UK & Ireland will be covering the event.

Last week I was in Manchester at NW StartUp 2.0, co-presenting with Ivan Pope from Snipperoo whose company I have been tracking for sometime now. Ivan spoke about how he sees widgets changing the way we interact with the web and about how his new company Snipperoo has developed a new universal tool for managing widgets.

“Our aim is that the Snipperoo system works with all the web widgets in the world. So, rather than using a specific kind of widget, our aim is that you use our widget, which is universal, in order to choose which other widgets you use. You can use Snipperoo with any site that allows you to embed javascript.”

Well widgets are certainly getting the web spotlight right now, today the Wall Street Journal (subscription only) has a story about the growing popularity of widgets …” and recently Niall Kennedy and Om Malik co-produced Widgets Live! In addition SplashCast also make some very smart and interesting predictions for the future of widgets in 2007. There was one prediction that certainly pleased Ivan.

“A widget aggregator, such as Widgetbox or Snipperoo will be bought by a big media company like Yahoo! or Google”

One thing to note, the idea of widgets is not new, they have simply been updated and re-marketed like so many other Web 2.0 ideas and technologies. For example during the Web 1.0 period, we had Microsoft’s desktop items using a precursor to RSS called CDF – Channel Definition Framework – to deliver information to small desktop applications. Even before that, Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 2001 talked about loosely coupled reusable software (intelligent agents) helping form part of the Semantic Web.

Widgets today are not really intelligent because most of the information in widgets is delivered one-way down to us as plain text or pictures. What is really needed to make widgets more useful is bi-directional communication such as the SSE initiative (Simple Sharing Extensions) from Microsoft i.e I receive data within a widget which I or another machine can change before it is (re)acted upon.

So widgets are another building block for the semantic web along with RDF, Microformats, Content Labels. etc.

This week, BBC News is running a series of stories on the Future Of TV – of course, YouTube, IPTV, mobile TV, BitTorrent and other forms of online TV figure a great deal in these articles; the UK is notoriously namechecked as the source of between 10 and 25% of all TV piracy.

It’s fair to say that one of the consequences of Web 2.0 is the increased bias of binary content amongst traditionally XML media and marked-up text. Consequently, there’s be an increased demand for services that can understand the nature of binary content like photos, audio and video. London-based Nativ TV is seeking to provide under-the-hood solutions for the management of rich media.

Nativ’s recently launched Mio solution provides video-based services with workflow tools for the ingest, validation, filtering, cataloging and manipulation of video content…the kind of capability that future YouTube’s, Revvers, broadcasters and content owners will need – to automate and manage large volumes of complex video content. Notably, Mio includes a set of APIs to aid integration into existing enterprise systems.

Nativ founder Jon Folland has a respected track record in working with broadcasters like Channel4 and the BBC as well one of the first IPTV channels, MTV Live. Though Nativ appears to understand the video workflow needs of braodcasters with a perspective others may lack, the applicability of Mio to managing large volumes of user-generated content is unclear.

Now what’d be really interesting is racing Mio against an equivalent Mechanical Turk powered workflow platform…Human vs. Cylon

LeWeb 3 is nearly closed for registration but one company going is LouderVoice an Irish startup that has just launched its prototype alpha version today.

“After a short delay, we had our prototype Alpha walkthrough today and it really is a humdinger. The current plan is to have the Beta of the prototype ready just before Le Web 3. If it is looking good and there is any interest, I may do a corridor demo or two.”

Well I will be at Le Web 3 and will certainly try and catch Conor O’Neill to see the demo [info@loudervoice.com]

If not the plan is to run a new event in Ireland in January next year to help get early venture Irish companies in touch with interested investors. The event is called Ireland Startup! and it forms part of a series of regional Startup! events. The date and format of the event are currently being finalised but the details will be published here shortly on TechCrunch .

A few weeks ago, Firefox contributors from around the world met at Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View, CA for the Firefox Summit 2006. Below is a link to the Agenda and Proposed Sessions.

Sadly I couldn’t go but last week I met Ian Hayward of Glaxstar - UK developers of Firefox add-ons (Yahoo’s delicious add-on) and the organiser of the Firefox party, which I will be going to this Friday. Attending the party will be several of the Mozilla developer team, if you have any questions.

Speaking briefly with Ian and others about the summit, it seems the key take-away were the number of concerns & challenges facing Mozilla as is starts the countdown to Firefox 3.0, the first being how to avoid becoming bloatware.

“we need to shed some ten year old platform baggage while retaining our (large) lead in web compatibility.”

Personally I prefer Firefox 2 to Internet Explorer 7, not just because of the faster rendering engine or the better standards support, not just because of the extensive 3rd party add-ons but simply because it looks and works the same on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms, as do most of the add-ons. So my user experience is the same irrelevant of the underlying operating system. So when people talk about the possibility of a GoogleOS, for me Firefox is already the WebOS but I do agree that Mozilla needs to stay lean and mean, shed a few Netscape Gecko pounds and ensure that the additional “nice to have” functionality is delivered via the extensive add-on marketplace and/or greasemonkey scripts.

The second challenge facing the Mozilla project is in the mobile space, especially given the new challenge following today’s announcement of Opera mobile/mini and the recent news from 3 of their x-series mobile broadband initiative. One proposal discussed was the development of a new version of HTTP to address solely the mobile community.

“Another problem with the mobile Web is HTTP. We would like to start work on something similar to Waka as soon as possible.”

Although there are other web protocols such as FTP, I suspect Sir Tim Berners-Lee will be hanging his head at this thought. I would not like to see a new protocol but better Mozilla support for the new W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Proposed Recommendation.

The third issue raised concerning the Mozilla project is the continued release of Linux builds that now run on an extremely wide variety of distributions. This is a large burden, because claiming a release runs on “Linux x86″ requires compatibility with extremely old libraries and forces a lot of checks to happen at runtime which slows down Mozilla.

“The various distros can do a better job at this than we can, and they also happen to have most of the users, outnumbering Mozilla builds by more than 10-to-1. For Firefox 3, there will be no release Linux binaries, but nightly builds will continue, on a single, relatively modern reference platform. getfirefox.com will still have options for Linux users, but they will be in the form of packages from Red Hat, Ubuntu, Novell, etc. The same arrangement will be made for OpenSolaris and other Unix versions.”

Other sites worth visiting:

• Firefox Mobile
• Firefox 3.0
• Mozilla Labs (new)
• Mozilla Developers

Mozilla is about to start a Firefox TV campaign (flicks) with Spot Runner, the first Internet-based ad agency that makes it really easy for companies like Mozilla to advertise on TV. Spot Runner does TV advertising — commercial production, media planning and buying. This is one of Saul Klein’s (VP of Skype and founder of Video Island) favourite companies and a potential acquisition for Google. I wish there was an equivalent over here in the UK.

Below is a list of flicks that meet the three criteria set out by Mozilla for their flicks:

1. Appeal to a wide, mainstream audience
2. Capture an audience’s attention and imagination
3. Don’t directly attack our competition by name

Daredevil, This is Hot, Billy’s Browser, Web for All, Give me the soap, Painter, One Window for Every Reason, Improve, No comparison, Sunday Morning, Life Lessons.

And finally for those of you who have not seen this humorous spoof site http://www.msfirefox.com please do so before Microsoft’s lawyers get it closed down.

With the news that Wayn.com has secured $11 million from British VC fund Esprit Capital Partners to fuel its expansion, it appears “location” is the new wave in social in networking. We’ve seen it invade the verticals of music (MySpace), eateries (Yelp) and shopping (Crowdstorm). Now, where you are and who you are is as important as what you like.

They will also be looking at new revenue streams (ticketing surely, and beefing up the subscription model?), other markets, trip planning and rich media (YouTube meets TripAdvisor?) .

WAYN allows users to create profiles, search for other travellers near them and make real-world friends, as well as informing family where they are. Membership has grown from 45,000 users in March 2005 to seven million today, and is increasing by up to 35,000 new members per day according to the company.

Like a lot of Brit-start-ups the Eastern European aspect is never far off. Part of the funding will be used to expand its development team in Poland.

Given that Brent Hoberman will join WAYN’s board as chairman in January 2007, a link with Lastminute.com seems logical (travel packages + friends, new and old?). Stuart Chapman, partner at Esprit Capital Partners, also joins the board. The funding also includes a group of angel investors including Adrian Critchlow and Andy Phillipps, co-founders of Active Hotels, David Soskin, chief executive, and Hugo Burge, vice chairman, of Cheapflights and Constant Tedder, co-founder and managing director of Jagex, which runs RuneScape, the online multiplayer game.

Although Wayn’s membership cover 220 different countries, it is mostly known in the ‘gap year’ countries of UK, Australia and Europe and has little presence in the US. That should change with the new funding for marketing. And looking at Alexa it is the only UK-based social media travel site to come even close to TripAdvisor.

Wayn has also had criticism because of the way it encourages people to add contacts from Hotmail, Gmail etc. although the company has said it is now easier to opt out of these.

So if location is the new wave, where does that leave “location-oriented” started-ups like TrustedPlaces.com, TravelHiker.com and BuddyPing.com? It may mean that other startus in the space either attract new funding, or perhaps will change their business model to get some of the “WAYN-effect”.

Social Networks really came to the fore in 2006. Millions of people have created profiles and in many cases they have created multiple profiles on multiple social networks. I must admit I don’t use any of the consumer social networks, just LinkedIn if that counts and my own blog. But what comes next with social networking; more friends, more pageviews, more widgets?
Well the answer may come from Bebo who today launched their new personal “home” page which I think would have been better off being called “My World”. This new home menu tab is a link to an aggregated landing page that shows you what new things your friends are doing in their profiles. Below is Jose’s page from Bebo and it shows his friends new friends, their new photos and the new bands they are listening too.

In many ways this is a social discovery engine, as opposed to search, based on your friends attention metadata. i.e what they are listening too, looking at or learning about.

By coincidence or not, over the weekend a story appeared on USA Today about social shopping and how people would like to see this as part of their social network. Imagine if Bebo enabled people to rate/recommend products or places within their own profile and that this information then appeared on their friends aggregated home page i.e social shopping meets social networking.
Philip Wilkinson’s [CEO CrowdStorm] blogged about this over the weekend.

What it goes to show is that shopping can, and indeed is, a social activity both on and offline, and that it can be one of the most powerful word of mouth marketing activities due to the “trust factor”. As the article says, a lot of the big social networks would benefit immensely from integrating a social shopping element and they will know that this is not an easy task to do organically. Thinking back to my old price comparison days, ask any of the big players what happened to their own efforts at creating a price comparison engine and then ask why they gave up and partnered with a specialised player…

Either way we will see if the big social networks try and do this themselves or if they seek to acquire specialists like CrowdStorm, TrustedPlaces and/or other social recommendation sites.

Over the last couple years, the rise of remix culture has begun to penetrate hardware design and consumer electronics. The emergence of SQUID Labs, O’Reilly’s MAKE community, Neil Gershenfeld’s Fab, open source projects like the TuxPhone and Greenphone coupled with the decline of companies like Sony, have all contributed to new possibilities in opening the design and specification of devices to the consumer. Open source mobile handsets, in particular, offer the possibility of making an end-run around artificial barriers to innovation in the mobile industry.

Scottish-French startup, Crowdspirit, is looking to capitalise on these unfolding trends and help consumers to ‘scratch their own itch’. The service lets members submit ideas and projects, collaboratively define specifications, invest real money if they wish, and finally purchase the product they desire.

As the service isn’t yet open for registration, it’s unclear how sophisticated Crowdspirit’s collaborative tools are, nor how flexible and cost-effective the manufacturing or supply chain will be. Nevertheless, the concept is appealing and creates a valuable mediation between consumers and producers in a market where consumers have little influence and could potentially share in the co-creation of value. On the other hand, we could end up with a generation of Homer-centric products…

I just hope they launch in time to make the rumoured iPod phone fulfil everyone’s projected desires

I’m still astonished how quickly Second Life has mainstreamed, Duran Duran gigs aside, there’s a surprisingly rapid corporate adoption of virtual presences by the likes of IBM, Reuters and American Apparel. Recently I learned that Theakston is also seeking to establish a virtual pub in SL!

Linden Lab’s creation is giving rise to a interesting secondary economy of real estate, avatar accessories, in-life artefacts and indeed an emerging consultancy market on how best to exploit SL. Next month, Linden is hosting a pair of workshops, in London and Boston, for agencies looking to help their clients establish projects and presences in Second Life. The London event, How to position Second Life to your Clients, will take place on 13th December.

I wonder if I can convince Sam and Mike to hold a future TechCrunch event in SL

BT announced today that their IPTV solution, BT Vision will finally launch on 4th December which nicely coincides with the recent announcements about the rollout of BT’s 21CN network in Cardiff. As yet BT have not announced their pricing strategy for BT Vision, but given Sky’s lead in the home entertainment market and their announcement today of Sky Anytime (previously Sky by Broadband) I guess it will have to be competitive. Although I wouldn’t bank on it just yet as this is a potential future cash cow for BT and I doubt they will come out all guns blazing on price, just in case they get overwhelmed by demand like CarPhone Warehouse if the price is set too low.

A spokesman did however say “there would be a measured roll-out of the new service that would pick up momentum in the spring.

Or in other words 21CN is behind schedule, we’ve missed the key Christmas season but after our CEO promised the City that our service would launch before Christmas, we had better deliver something or our stock price will be affected.

So other than the usual regurgitated content announcements and hyped visions of an IPTV future, there wasn’t really anything new to be learnt today. However the technology behind BT HomeHub and BT Vision is more interesting and insightful as it shows that possibly BT has a cunning plan, even if more often than not it feels like there isn’t.

Firstly the BT HomeHub router comes from a company called 2Wire in the USA and according to their website the “2Wire HomePortal® 2700HGV intelligent residential gateway features an advanced ADSL2/2+ modem, integrated VoIP, unprecedented QoS features, simplified installation with secure instant wireless setup, and extensive diagnostic tools.  The gateway’s modem supports broadband speeds of up to 24 Mbps, which is necessary for delivering IPTV. In addition its includes a USB 2.0 port allowing for Network
Attached Storage and Print Server functions.”

So basically BT is putting in place the hardware platform ready for the future rollout of its highspeed ADSL2+ network which of course is the 21CN network so often talked about. The problem BT has right now is that companies like O2 with their acquisition of BE and others are further ahead in their ADSL2+ rollout strategy. 

As we all know the race for customers began when CarPhone Warehouse announced their “free” broadband offer but the real cut throat competition won’t take place until next year when BT has both the platform (21CN + Vision + HomeHub + Fusion) and the freedom to compete (Ofcom will remove the gloves once 1.5m phone lines have been unbundled by BT’s competitors).

Only one entry worth showing in this week’s Money Mondays this week…

They say: “ArtistsOnline enables visual artists, illustrators, craft makers, photographers and the like to promote and sell their work. ArtistsOnline has two customers, firstly, artists wanting to promote and sell their artwork. There is a free account that will enable them to do this. There is also a subscription account that adds more features like a CV, advanced watermarking for images, highlighted listings and more. Secondly, the art and craft buying public. The site was launched in July, e-commerce side launched last week. Built and designed by one person.

We say: “There were 93,200 commercial artists according to the 1991 Census. Given people like Damien Hirst, I dare say there are a lot more than that today – and they all need somewhere to show their works. And this doesn’t include the many tens of thousands of people that make, sell and exhibit artwork as a hobby. Ok, so etsy.com last year sold $10million worth of goods and deviantart.com has a lot of traffic. The latter has over 28m artworks. But… This is not an easy space to crack and not necessarily hugely profitable, at least given the size of the UK market. Plus, ArtistsOnline doesn’t exactly sell itself. The FAQ item about selling art online is only 3rd in line and simply says “To be able to sell artwork online, artists must first apply to ArtistsOnline to do so.” Not exactly helpful. However, there is the seed of something interesting here. Click on an artist’s image for instance and you’ll get a beautiful Ajaxified image pop-up. That’s a lot more than you get out of a site like eyestorm. The site also has tagging, tag clouds, profiles and RSS feeds for individual artists, etc. You get the feeling that with just the right push in the right direction, this could actually be a truly great site. Heck, that’s what Money Mondays are for, right? And there is nothing to stop it being applied to a wider market than the UK.”

Contact: Ed Lea, ed [@] artistsonline.org.uk

Background: See here for more info on how Money Mondays works.

The advent of RSS is revolutionising the way information is disseminated from push (email newsletters) to pull (RSS subscribers), although email still remains the primary means of [permission based] communication. For many these two means of communication are viewed separately, with most people having both an email client and a RSS aggregator, but of late, email clients like Outlook 2007, Mozilla’s Thunderbird and GMail (via greasemonkey scripts) have started to combine these two communication sources into one client view. This is great news as I can now start to read/delete/post/forward my incoming emails and RSS items much quicker using my universal communication client.

Of course managing the flow of information out is also a key factor for every company executive. At least with email I can track both delivery and read notification, with RSS I can still only track the subscription numbers but imagine being able to combine these two means of communication into one marketing message, so that everytime I send out an email it at least contains my RSS feed headlines as an advert in the email footer.

Well one UK company Myzan Ltd has developed a new RSS management tool for email users called Flaremaker RSS-Signature. I have been using Flaremaker for the last few months and personally I like the way I can extend the reach of my blog by making each email a potential marketing opportunity. Below is an example of my own email footer created using the simple Flaremaker tools and back-end services.

Of course there are others that offer a similar RSS service such as FeedBurner, Nooked and Fedafi

Thanks in advance

Sam

Sam Sethi | Entrepologist | mobile: +44 7985 705075| blog: techcrunch (UK) | skype: samksethi | This email is: [ ] bloggable [ ] ask first [X] private |

We wrote about Gift Tagging the social “wishlist” start-up when it first launched a few months ago. Speaking with Jeremy Baines (CEO) over the weekend he told me they have just launched their GiftSpace widget which means that people can now signup for Gift Tagging, select the things they want to list whilst browsing and then have their wishlist published in either their blog or profile.

I just updated the TechCrunch UK event listing and realised I missed off the Geek Girl Dinner number 9 which is this Wednesday with special guest stars Robert and Maryam Scoble along with Hugh MacLeod. Sadly the event appears to be full with a waiting list forming already. Apologies to the A-List bloggers but I think the most interesting speaker will be Nicholas Ampazis from Feeds 2.0 who will talking about the future of RSS and its relationship to attention metadata.

DATE: Wednesday 29th November 2006
TIME: 7:30pm – 10:30pm
WHERE: Balls Brothers , 5/6 Carey Lane, London, EC2
MAP: Mini Map google map
HOW MUCH: Free Event: Sponsored by Microsoft Cambridge Labs
SIGN UP: http://londongirlgeekdinner.pbwiki.com/

Also a quick congratulations to Sarah Blow the organiser for the successful launch of the Barcelona Geek Girl dinners. I had suggested to Sarah that possible she could organise a Paris Geek Girls Dinner before Le Web 3. If you are interested let her know (send an e-mail to info [at] Londongirlgeekdinners.co.uk) and if there is enough demand you never know.

Robert Scoble – author of the Naked Conversations – and now Podtech ScobleShow, is coming to the UK next week. He’ll be presenting at the Online Information 2006 conference with Adriana Cronin-Lukas.

Robert says “I have my video camera and would love to meet up with anyone who has interesting technology to show me.”

Robert and Hugh McLeod are also trying to organise a geek event in London. I have left Robert and Hugh a message which I hope they will pick up because there is of course the Firefox Party at The Lane Bar on Friday. Tristan Nitot – the head of Mozilla Europe – and several other key Firefox developers from the US will be there.

Robert sadly won’t be going to the IT@Cork conference but Hugh McLeod will be there speaking along with Marc Canter. I don’t know how long Robert is over in Europe but there is Le Web 3 on the 11th December (764 people already registered and closing fast) and the London Geek’s party (they hit 400 sign-ups in exactly 35 hours).

For the last few months I have been talking with Manoj Ranaweera and Ivan Pope of Snipperoo to create a series of entrepreneurial networking events outside of London. I am pleased to say that on Thursday night the first NW Startup 2.0 event took place in Manchester and over 30 people attended.

I was going to write a post on this but one of my fellow speakers David Terrar of Twinfield and the Enterprise Irregulars (a must read if you are interested in Enterprise 2.0) has done such as sterling job that I will let him tell you more. Below is an edited snippet from David’s post.

I met some really interesting people. I spoke with Stephen Tominey, the MD of acrticPigs. He told me all about the interactive, 3D animation that his company does, particularly applied to the education sector. Philip Hemsted and Anish Kapoor are the founders of Yuugoo. Phil and Anish have just secured VC funding for the next stage of their company from Rising Stars. Their product allows you to collaborate with IM, VoiP and to share screens instantly, and working in and out of the office through firewalls and across different platforms.They seem to be addressing the issues for the enterprise and platforms in a way that the guys at Blogtronix are too – they should get together. I met Ian Eddison, who works for Chamberlink advising business in the North West. I met David Thomas, Director of D-Geo, who have a product that helps a potential innovator through the key steps of analysis in evaluating their idea – i2m. And I also met Steve Livingston of KPMG. Steve get’s a special mention, mostly because KPMG were kind enough to pay for the food at the event.

Like David I enjoyed speaking with several of the people mentioned above. I also spoke with Chris Leigh from RealTime Race’s. One thing I would take away from the evening was the fact that it felt a bit like London in 2005. There was lots of positivity and lots of energy but most of the entrepreneurs were still struggling to find a good Angel or VC i.e one who could understand their opportunity and not talk to them like a banker with one eye on a short term ROI.

But most of all they were keen to talk to fellow entrepreneurs, create a community and learn from each other. This first event hopefully will facilitate that.

Finally regarding the next event, it is already in the planning and will hopefully take place in Leeds early in the new year. There will also be a similar event started in Brighton called SW Startup 2.0, the details of which will be announced here shortly. I am also working with other people to start similar events in Edinburgh, Dublin, Belfast, Bristol and Cardiff – “from an acorn an oak tree grows”.

I would like to add that these events are not TechCrunch events but I am certainly keen to help the organisers get them started, help promote them and attend if asked. If you would like to sponsor (£500) or host one of these events please let me or one of the named organisers know.