Today Aroxo launches its ambitious play, aiming to create a brand new space in between online retailing and the auction model – specifically targeting eBay. This is, put simply, the thousands of years old process of buyers and sellers haggling over price put into an online model. But there is more to it that that, since it also brings pre-qualified leads to sellers who want to offload inventory quickly. So how does it work in practice?

Every day people are walking into a store with an Amazon page printout asking the store to negotiate the price down. Aroxo takes this idea online.

Say you want to buy an iPod (the site is launching mainly with electronics to start with). As a buyer, you type in what you’re prepared to pay, creating a “Want-it” note. To guide people away from putting some crazy low crazy in, buyers get told an average price for how much something is going for retail. A thermometer tells you how close you are to the price the seller is looking for and you can specify a time limit, say a week, for the seller to respond.

All those iPod buyers then go into the system and the sellers, watching on the other end, see the offers coming in and can bid to offer the iPod at a price which makes sense for them and which might entice the buyer, all in real time. All the tools to handle payment, settlement, feedback are built into the platform.

The two parties then either strike a deal, or continue negotiating until one side caves in and a transaction goes through. There’s no commitment for all this, it’s completely free and no-one gets the buyer’s email address or contact details. However, although there is no commitment to buy when starting the negotiation, if the buyer chooses to send a negotiation and the seller then accepts their offer, then they are committed to the purchase. It’s sort of haggling for the 21st century.

The site is as easy to use as a normal retail site. Since the site is based on pre-qualified buyers, you don’t have to have to wait for other buyers to join you, unlike the old, failed group-buying model of sites like LetsBuyIt.com. The advantages are that buyers can potentially bag a bargain, and don’t need to use search engines as much. For sellers they get to sell off excess inventory without needing to reveal themselves, if they so choose.

How does Aroxo make money? It’s the connector for the transaction and takes a very small fee from the seller to contact the buyer. This prevents spammy offers and keeps the system clean. Here are their prices.

This is in effect a kind of “buyer driven” commerce that is not really being done right now since Amazon is retail, eBay is pure auctions. Aroxo is therefore very recession-oriented. In theory the site could actually be used for other things than white goods, like negotiation over airline tickets or car leasing. Of course, that puts it into competition with Priceline. But the differences are this: Aroxo offers the buyer a choice between sellers, rather than just one provider. Buyers can negotiate the price, unlike on Priceline. And the buyer isn’t initially committed to a purchase.

There are some big advantages for sellers. They can get rid of stock quicker than by normal means by targeting, say 1,000, buyers really fast, and knowing they can deliver the goods. It can be an anonymous disposal system for the supplier, or they can brand the hell out of it with their logo, the works.

Aroxo.com will launch in the US later this year, but for now diverts to the Aroxo.co.uk UK site. This can be used for visitors outside the UK to buy and sell on under British consumer law and the site’s T&Cs.

Although the site only launches to the public today, Aroxo has in fact been in development for over 2 years, bootstrapped by founders Matt Rogers and Andrew Culpan (@aroxo on Twitter). They lead a team of 10 spread across Croatia and India. The site contains 250,000 lines of code, according to its founders, which in startup terms is a lot. Culpan was the Vice President of Strategy at MTV UK & Ireland and before that a Strategist at Orange. Rogers has previously worked with T-Mobile and Orange and is a former management consultant.

The one thing I don’t like about Aroxo right now is its interface. It’s way too light green. But at least that’s fixable. With the ability to negotiate on price and offering a crop of pre-qualified buyers, it’s hard to see how it can fail in these recessionary times. Of course eBay is going to be a prime target for Aroxo. So how serious are they about taking on the auction giant? Well they’ve signed a “multi-year deal” deal with Iomart to host the Aroxo backbone, so that at least indicates that they must be reasonably serious.

GeeknRolla – The Movie from Mike Butcher on Vimeo.

GeeknRolla was a day long (April 21, 2009) conference I created for startups. As part of the day I asked startups around Europe to celebrate with a little rocking out. This video was created by Bonney and Klein, conceived by Stradbroke Advisors. GeeknRolla was sponsored by Viadeo, and supported by UK Trade and Investment, as well as NESTA, School for Startups and Bootlaw.

Robin Klein’s open letter to the UK government about how to stimulate startups got a lot of response from TechCrunch Europe readers. We’ve decided to run two responses to his letter, making their own case for how government intervention should take place. The below is by Simon Cast, (@Simoncast) a freelance Product Strategy/Product Management analyst. The other response is here.

TechCrunch Europe posted an open letter by Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling and Lord Dryson Minster for Science and Innovation about what to do with purported stimulus funds. BVCA wants the money to go to large VC funds whereas Robin Klein wants to see the money channelled to supporting very early stage companies (amounts less than £100k).

Robin’s logic and reasoning is sound and I agree with them. But it is not a good use of the money for two reasons.

Tech (web) Focused
The idea is far too technology (read web) focused. There are lots of opportunities throughout the UK for entrepreneurs to create businesses; many, indeed most, outside the world of the web. Why shouldn’t someone starting a lawn-mowing business have access to early stage funding as a technology developer? Both create value. We in the technology sector tend to be myopic about start-ups, small businesses and entrepreneurs. Richard Branson can hardly be accused of creating a technology business and yet he is by most measures the UK’s most successful entrepreneur.

Yes, technology creates long term value and wealth, but the vast majority of wealth is created by companies outside of the technology sector using technology and not developing it. It is created by a lawn-moving business using twitter to alert their customers that their lawn is done and having a website where clients can go and book a visit using something like BookingBug to provide the functionality. The lawn-mowing business is creating value through better customer service and consequently generates wealth. Would a business angle or early seed stage fund invest in such a company? What about if it is located in the hinterlands of Wales?

Relying on Judgement
The mechanism for distributing funding relies on someone making a judgement call as to what is potentially a good opportunity. The act of making a judgement takes time and as many commentators pointed out in response to the open letter, time is very precious at the early stages of a business. Waiting more than a month for a response is a massive drag on very early stage businesses. Small business need responses fast.

More problematic is that a person can only make the judgement based on their experience and expertise. Many great opportunities will be bypassed as the judges’ focus on what they know. Now however is a time to fund companies that are moving into new areas and new ways. It is a time to let 1000 flowers bloom. In the end the only real judgement that matters is that of the market. It would be better to create a situation where those companies can be judged by the market rather than a limited individual. The market is crowd-sourced investment decisions.

Proposal
In place of co-investing or creating lots of seed funds, I propose that the UK government create a scheme of income-contingent loans. Under the scheme an entrepreneur can take out a loan that covers his previous salary up to a maximum of £50k to £60k. The loan is paid monthly like salary and is re-paid by the individual (not the company) through the tax system (similar to student loans). Other characteristics of the scheme are:

* The scheme would provide loans for up to 3 people per business in the first year, followed by another 2 new employees in the second year
* The loans are tied to the individual and are re-paid by the individual based on the individuals income
* An individual can only take out a loan under this scheme once every 5 years

An income-contingent loan scheme provides funding irrespective of industry or goods and services. It addresses the funding gap that is a barrier to entry for all entrepreneurs and has a lower administrative burden. The loan scheme can be administrated through the existing Government banks and through an online loan application system which are widely geographically diverse, scalable and most importantly can return a fast decision.

One big objection is the potential for fraud. Nothing involving money is without the potential for fraud and venture funding is not immune (witness Tiger Telematics). By putting the liability to re-pay the loan onto the individual reduces the avenues for fraud using this scheme. The other limitations are also designed to reduce the attractiveness of fraudulent behaviour.

Conclusion
Granted, the loan scheme is unlikely to produce the next Google but I would rather see the loan scheme generate 100,000 businesses all employing an average of 10 people. That would be far more valuable to the UK economy as a whole than 1 Google.

Ideally, you would run both an income-contingent loan scheme and co-invest in early stage investments. However, given the realities the loan scheme is more valuable. The co-investment scheme should follow. By the time the co-investment scheme is up and running many of the first lot of companies that have benefitted from the loan scheme will be ready for their first round of funding.

Robin Klein’s open letter to the UK government about how to stimulate startups got a lot of response from TechCrunch Europe readers. We’ve decided to run two responses to his letter, making their own case for how government intervention should take place. The below is by Jens Lapinski (@jenslapinski), the CEO and Co-Founder of aiHit, a London-based business information company with VC backing. He was previously VP Analysis & Consulting at Library House, where he advised organizations on innovation programs and investment policy. The other response is here.

What the UK needs is a large and sustainable investment ecosystem that covers seed, early, and expansion stage. For the last 50 years, various UK governments have experimented with a mixture of programs and initiatives. I suggest we build future initiatives based on the past’s success, not by repeating the many mistakes that have been made.

1) Seed Phase – Seed new companies by bringing back a modified SMART Award
By far the most successful program that the UK has ever run in terms of giving early stage money was the £45k SMART Award program. The program required founders to invest £15k in their company and, if qualifying conditions were met, they received a £45k grant. This program invested in both startups and product ideas of established companies. The former worked well, the latter not. Later on, the program’s responsibility was given over to the regions and the brand was abolished.

I would suggest revitalizing the SMART program with the following criteria: £15k own investment, £45 grant by government, provided following criteria are met:

- Company younger than 18 months
- Company less than five employees
- This is grant money, not equity investment, not a loan

The grant should be centrally administered. There should be no regional focus. All government loan or equity investment programs at this stage that I am aware of don’t work well. I would therefore make this a grant. This program’s aim is to help early stage companies get off the ground that then grow to employ many people. I would rate a success any company receiving money that lasts for longer than three years and that employs more than ten people at this stage.

2) Early Phase – Seed new VC Firms by creating seed funds in cooperation with established VC firms
The key problem in Europe’s investment ecosystem is the slow birth of new VC fund management companies. Looking around, I largely see fund managers that have been around since before 2000. These fund managers have progressively raised larger and larger funds, moving later and later stage. What any healthy investment ecosystem needs is a continuous supply of new VC companies ‘bubbling up’ from the bottom. These new VC fund managers naturally start out with smaller funds, investing smaller amounts of money per company. Eventually, they will mature, raise larger funds, and move later stage themselves. In order to get VCs to invest early stage, you need young VC firms. So I suggest we create a system that results in a continuous ‘supply’ of new, small VC firms, which invest early stage.

I would suggest expanding and making permanent a program to ‘seed’ Seed VC Funds in cooperation with established VC management companies.

Specifically, I suggest doing the following:

- Offer a seed fund to all VC fund management companies that have closed a VC fund larger than £75 within the last year (maybe two years initially) and do this continually.
- The seed fund should have a size of £10-20m
- These funds should be equity investment vehicles, not loan or grants.
- They should have no co-investment limitations
- The funds should be fixed term funds of 12 years
- Ask the VC firm to invest half of the money (at least say £5m), the remainder should be from government
- Ask the VC firm to have the fund managed/run by somebody who is NOT a General Partners at the VC firm’s main fund. This should be somebody from the middle management of the VC firm.

The principle is to establish a program that enables the next generation of managers at VC firms to run ‘their’ own shop. Over time, I estimate that some 30%-50% of these emerging seed fund managers to be successful. This means they will start raising the next fund, eventually separating from the ‘mother ship’, setting up their own VC firm, and thus growing the ecosystem of VC fund managers. The reason why I would establish these funds in collaboration with established VC funds are manifold. In short they are: By sharing the cost of people, offices, etc, the seed fund can work with a smaller amount of money than would be necessary, if it operated on its own. The operations would share deal flow. The seed fund managers could ‘soak up’ lessons learned from the more established fund. By aligning the vintage date of the main, larger funds, with the smaller seed fund, the seed fund can have the larger funds invest in follow-on rounds. This means that the seed fund invests in early companies, not so much in small companies. By only offering the seed funds to VC firms with recently closed funds, the government can choose fund managers easily, as closing a new fund means that the VC firm is good at what they do. I would rate as a success that the seed fund returns a positive return over the fund’s life time, and the spin-off the of the seed fund into a new VC firm.

3) Expansion Phase – Ensure that the government remains an active LP/ fund of funds investor
In a time when many LPs have problem honoring the capital calls of their GPs, I strongly suggest the government not waiver. In addition, I would suggest that the government aggressively support European institutions as an LP investor. All of this is already happening, don’t take the foot of the gas pedal!

Summary
Grants at Seed Phase. Collaborative equity investment at Early Phase. Cash as a fund of funds investor at Expansion Phase.

Investing £100,000 in 10,000 start-ups sounds good, but investing it via equity is hard. By making it a grant program, you remove many of the problems associated with the cost of making an investment work at this size. I further suggest investing larger sums of money intelligently in collaboration with existing VCs, and to continue investing even larger sums as an LP at expansion stage.

All of the above has been shown to work. There is real data and real evidence for this. SMART Awards worked in the UK. The support of new VC funds worked all over Europe and specifically in Israel. The European Investment Fund is a heavy LP investor in many VC funds, some of which have done extremely well.

I suggest we do what works first. We can improve from there.

It looks like the guys at Spoonfed have stolen a march on Time Out and other event guides with the release of their iPhone app, the Spoonfed Events Radar, available free from the App Store as of today.

The launch is the first step of the startup company’s mobile strategy which extends the Spoonfed events listings database to the mobile platform, making it easier for Londoners to find interesting things to do while already on the move. It also puts paid to one of our major criticisms of the Spoonfed service when it officially launched in January this year, when the mobile strategy was one of many planned but as yet unrealised features.

Using your location as a point of reference, the Event Radar scans the surrounding area for events happening that day. Found events are represented as blips on the radar dial, and users can then tap each of the blips to find out more information about cost, artists, genres, time, distance and what to expect from the event itself.

The radius scanned expands or contracts dynamically depending on how many events it finds in your vicinity, and results are usually limited to between three and 10 events from which to choose. Each event listing integrates with Google Maps, so you can find your way to the venue without a hassle.

You can see a screencast of the navigation, which is among the smoothest I’ve experienced using an iPhone app, here:

Events Radar was developed in conjunction with mobile apps agency Ubinow and is the frontrunner to the next stage of mobile development, which will bring the same functionality to other handsets.

Another recent addition to the site’s functionality is integration with venues’ Twitter feeds, so that Spoonfed users who aren’t on Twitter don’t miss any of the last minute cancellations, news of secret gigs and other announcements venues such as the Science Museum or Koko make via their Twitter feeds.

Spoonfed’s revenue model includes ticket sales and outsourced advertising as well as event marketing services targeted at venues and promoters. Being able to drive the website and brand over mobile will no doubt make the company’s offering more appealing to a corporate client base.

Alexander Will, who co-founded the company with Henry Erskine Crum after they met studying at London School of Economics says all the planned mobile products are about differentiating Spoonfed from their competition.

Given a recent comment posted by a employee freelancer for TimeOut on the Mobile Geeks of London Facebook group looking for an iPhone developer to work “on spec” to help pitch the idea of a mobile phone application to an editor “too busy to hunt for developers or business plans”, it seems the kids Spoonfed are on the right track.

UPDATE: We’re happy to point out that the person on Facebook who appeared to be speaking for Time Out was in fact an over-enthusiastic freelancer and not someone acting in an authorised, official capacity.

It’s clear now that Phorm is slowly but surely deadpooling – and I don’t use that phrase lightly. It’s lost the battle to convince customers that its ‘deep packet inspection’ technology isn’t an invasion of privacy (whether it is or not is now almost irrelevant, that’s how it’s seen). It’s been exposed as having had dealings with the British government it previously denied. It’s launched a ham-fisted, aggressive blog (StopPhoulPlay, oh come on…) to argue its case, which bizarrely attacks potential customers. It’s – to use to that handy phrase – all over bar the shouting. Phorm is now irrevocably associated with controversy. So who and what comes after Phorm?

Because it’s as simple as this: The idea of tracking user behaviour is simply not going to go away, not matter how much “privacy campaigners” like Privacy International might rail against it. Ever since the first cookie embedded itself into a browser, Internet and media companies have been trying to figure out ways to increase revenues via greater ad targeting – and user tracking is a huge part of that.

So, in Phorm’s rear-view mirror is another company, Feeva. Word on the street is that some time ago – well before all the above happened – people from Phorm and people from Feeva met, trying to convince each other that each one was right on how to go about user tracking. Phorm, lead by Kent Ertugrul, was convinced it had the solution and duly launched. But Phorm’s plans to track BT users via a cookie has lead to scrutiny from European regulators and a wave of attacks from consumer activists. Likewise Silicon Valley-based NebuAd was sued in November in the US and is now liquidating its assets. Another, Adzilla, is also attracting law suits galore.

But Feeva has kept its powder dry. Did it decide to lie in wait until Phorm had taken all the heat? We’ll probably never know. What is clear is that Feeva proposes a radically different approach, which may well win out in the end. And it goes like this:

The San Francisco company targets Internet users with geographic and demographic precision. It does this by harvesting geographic and other information directly from ISPs – but, crucially, in a way that doesn’t identify individual users and in such as way as to put distancing between it and other players like Phorm.

Feeva merely obtains the user’s location down to zip/postcode as they request pages by placing tags on Web page requests (called HTTP header requests) as they pass through an Internet router. There is no software on the consumer’s device, no cookies or IP addresses obtained and no tracking of the user’s web surfing. Feeva doesn’t use IP addresses – as Phorm does – to obtain the postal code, but via its software sitting on the ISP’s router.

With information on the community that an Internet user lives in, and no information about the user or their web behavior, Feeva taps into the well-established method for ad targeting used by TV, Radio, Magazines, Classified Ads, direct mail marketers for years: postcodes.

Once Feeva has the user’s zip code (remember, not their exact location) it can match it with other information it knows about the users in that area code (average incomes, demographics, census data etc) and advertisers can use the identifying tag to send appropriate advertising – an ad for a BMW to a central London address, an add for a MacDonalds to a suburban one for instance.

How’s it going to do this? Well, remember that software on a router? It’s going to embed itself via a partnership with Internet router giant Cisco. (Back in February it quietly announced this: PDF). By partnering with Cisco the solution scales almost immediately in a huge way.

Make no mistake, they have done their home-work: Feeva has been working on this technology for *nine years*. CTO Jaz Bangacomes from the WiFi and cable industries. CEO Nitn Shah has worked at Cambridge/Bell Labs and the FCC. People like Richard Purcell, ex-Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer are advisors. Feeva is so far backed by angel money and then an undisclosed VC round in 2007.

Phorm isn’t doing that. It’s using cookies. Yes, Phorm says it does not identify individuals either, since it assigns a random number to the cookie’s browser, and then forgets the surfing history once the browser is tagged. The trouble is it’s still tracking that user on that browser, on that computer, not the much more general profiling information of people in that postcode. Thus Phorm keeps having to fight fires about it “spying” on users, while Feeva simply says it’s just like any other long-existing marketing company, targeting on postcode. It’s slightly crazy that no-one has thought of this before, in relation to ISPs I mean.

Ad agencies pay Feeva to access the tags it produces (60-100 with categories) and Feeva distributes a share of the revenues backs to the ISPs it works with. QED. Plus, this is a completely new revenue stream for the ISP, remember, which doesn’t get them into the kind of hot water with their users that an association with Phorm does.

Feeva’s main route to market may be slower – it has to work with ad networks like DoubleClick to access and educate advertising agencies – but its unlikely to draw the kind of firestorm Phorm has. And of course, it can do that same kind of thing on the mobile web, especially with better handsets like the iPhone, which has a decent browser which is location aware.

So, while Phorm is pummeled daily by the press and activists, I would expect Feeva to be announcing deals with Ad agencies and ISPs fairly soon and attracting a great deal less controversy with it.

This week’s TechCrunch Europe Job of the Week is for a C# ASP.NET Developer with BraveNewTalent.com.

Remember, it costs only £20 to post *any* kind of advert on the CrunchBoard related to your startup/business, whether it be jobs, searches for office space or requests for new projects.

Every week we publish the Job of the Week here (8,000+ on RSS) and Twitter it to about 7,000+ more people. To apply to have Job of the Week featured, put up a job on the CrunchBoard and contact editorial.

Fresh from their pitch at the TechCrunch Europe Geek ‘n Rolla event last week, UK social gambling startup Smarkets has completed a second round fund raising of £145k ($210k), exceeding the first round fund raising total of £100k in May 2008.

Despite what are clearly tough economic conditions, six private angel investors (details undisclosed) have participated this time and the funds will be used for the upcoming Smarkets launch.

In addition, Smarkets has completed its open RESTful API, in what appears to be a first for the betting industry. This is a betting exchange platform built with Erlang, a programming language enabling Smarkets to process thousands of bets per second.

Last week CEO and co-founder Jason Trost pitched Smarkets at Geek’n Rolla, a TechCrunch Europe for startups and investors. Here’s their pitch, recorded by Smarkets themselves:

A wrap-up post collating lots of feedback and thoughts by people who attended Geek’ n Rolla is coming. But one of the most hotly debated issues since the conference on Tuesday has been the panel about Women in Tech, specifically tech startups. Here’s who was on the panel and the original title:

11.50am
Panel: Just a girl – Balancing Tech Culture: Getting more women involved in tech startups

Moderator: Cate Sevilla, BitchBuzz
Panellists:
Leisa Reichelt, User experience consultant
Sophie Cox, Worldeka.com
Paul Walsh, OpenSoho (startups networking event) & Entrepreneur
Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson, Huddle.net
Nacera Benfedda, Director of Product, Viadeo

First some background about why I put this panel together: A long time ago I was a journalist covering the media industry. That business sector was (and is) full of women, probably even over 50%. It is full of smart women contributing to a vibrant industry. I then moved on to writing about new media. In the mid-1990s, admittedly, there were more men than women generally, as it was a more male/geeky environment then. That changed and I would say that the “new media” sector is pretty balanced these days. But over the last few years I have headed profoundly into the tech space and I have been puzzled at the dearth of women involved. It really doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to be honest, and from time to time it pops up in conversations on and off-line. Plus, I think it’s something tech startups should address, not because they are inherently sexist – far from it I would say – but there are huge advantages to be had from tapping into this relatively untapped talent. And sometimes male-led tech startups don’t really *think*. For instance, they will get the cheapest office they can find in the most dangerous part of town and then wonder why they can’t attract any female candidates for that job opening…

So I felt we needed to discuss it. After consulting with lots of people and consulting with the chair, Cate Sevilla, we decided to put the debate slap bang in the middle of a fairly mainstream event for tech companies – GeeknRolla. We could have put it on as a standalone event. But we figured that would just be alienating the subject even further. It needed to be debated by men and women, broadly.

In hindsight we should have balanced the panel with more than one man – and the irony that a bad sore throat cut down our only guy was not exactly invisible. (Paul Walsh was unable to join the panel due to a bout of viral tonsillitis. And yes I replaced him with a banana, hey it was a little joke).

However, we soldiered on. I felt I couldn’t join the panel as I was running the whole day already. So I figured I’d let the panel kick things off their own way. Half way through it became clear that we did need a male voice. Milo Yiannopoulos, a tech blogger with The Daily Telegraph seemed keen, so he volunteered. It wasn’t a bad idea because frankly he provided a fairly opposite-end-of-the-spectrum point of view (to put it mildly).

At that point the audience got fired up and we had some great debate and great questions. Our live blog kicked off a debate. And the next day Yiannopoulos blogged his views again (see below)

Since then, a war of words has kicked off about the whole subject. Frankly, I’m not sure how productive this war is going to be, and Cate and I were keen to find SOLUTIONS to this issue, not just more mud-throwing. But I hope out of this debate that tech companies and startups really do start to *think* about whether they could behave in a more female-friendly way. After all, there are many sound business reasons for doing so. So I’m going to encourage you to get involved in the debate and please go read the posts from these commentators and form you own view, whether you agree with me that that this is an “issue” or not.

Here is our transcript of the debate covered by TechCrunch Europe writer Basheera Khan. Here is a selection of just some of the posts so far:

Telegraph: “Men perform better in many technology jobs. Must we apologise for that? (32 comments)”

As Joshua March pointed out yesterday, since most start-ups are founded by developers, and most developers are men, it’s natural that a lot of the CEOs on the scene are male. But the tech scene is much bigger than the startups themselves: there’s an entire ecosystem of VCs, PRs and journalists. Many of these jobs are done by girls. As Paul Walsh puts it: “The women who want to work in technology are working in technology.”

Manufactured anger over the lack of women in tech (22 comments)

It’s my opinion, which I’ll articulate tomorrow, that the books of males vs females doesn’t need to be balanced in favour of more females. Why? Well, because there are plenty of females in tech and those that aren’t, don’t want to be. Ok, so there might be a small percent who would like to be in tech, but don’t make it. But can’t the same be said for any industry?

Computer Weekly:

Ciara Byrne makes a good comment underneath Yiannopoulos’s blog, saying, “Working in an environment where you are always the only woman (apart from the secretary) does get wearing and you always feel like an outsider to some degree. While positive discrimination is not the answer, creating an environment which is more female-friendly would help.”

That is the point women are trying to make – they’re not anti-men, and they’re not calling for special treatment, they’re just trying to describe their own experiences and think about how they could help more women get involved in the sector. It’s obvious that there are plenty of excellent female technicians and IT managers around: the problem is that they make up just 15% of the industry, and there should be more. The caveman proponents of “men good, women bad” arguments are getting increasingly lonely as more and more men decide mixed teams are more successful, but there’s still a long way to go.

James Higgs

[Milo's] argument boils down to “men and women are different, men are better at tech, deal with it”. This is bullshit. Here’s why.

Milo seems to think that technology is a pure meritocracy, and that we can therefore say that because there are fewer women in tech we can draw the conclusion that women are not as good at it as men. But this argument doesn’t fly.

While women are under-represented, there are also comparatively few people from ethnic minorities in programming jobs in the UK. However there are quite a lot of people from ethnic minorities working in more lowly (i.e. less well paid) technology jobs like first line support and so on.

Are we therefore to draw the conclusion that white people are genetically best suited to be programmers? Of course not.

It’s not that long since we debated whether “allowing” women into the Vienna Philharmonic would change the orchestra’s distinctive sound (it didn’t), or whether women were capable of running a marathon (they are). These barriers have been torn down and exposed for the simple sexism they were. The same needs to happen in the tech industry, and the sooner it happens, the better.

Andy Skipper

The first panel discussion at today’s inaugural Geek’n’Rolla conference stirred a mite more controversy than the tech industry is used to at that type of event, and rightly so: the subject was of the imbalance of gender presence in the world of tech startups.

The panel discussing the point was formed entirely of one gender, which is never conducive of completely unbiased debate where the subject is gender equality, although the choice of replacement for Paul Walsh (out with viral tonsilitis, poor cherub) was provocative to the point of comic parody of right-wing journalists at large (being a journalist for the Telegraph, and largely apathetic to the lack of gender balance in the industry). He did raise a few laughs, intentionally or otherwise, but on the whole I don’t think his presence added to the discussion at all, and was a distraction from discussion of what I believe is the core of the problem: inherited social stigma and media reluctance to portray work in the tech world as anything other than rooms full of bespectacled virgins, socially inept, unhygienic, and, almost invariably, male.

This is not a world where the blossoming teenage girl, about to choose her career path, and, perhaps more importantly, her future social sphere, is likely to base her aspirations. The media needs to change first, and we can help them do that; in fact, the seeds were sown in the late 90s by the likes of Martha Lane Fox – they were just never followed through.

The issue is not going to be solved by forcing technology on girls at school, or by blaming the culture. The media needs to buy into girls as geeks, as unhygienic as the guys. So how do we make that happen?

Broadstuff

I was tied up in the morning so only arrived in time for a fairly interesting (in all senses of the word) panel on Women in Tech. The issue of “why there are fewer women in Tech than men” crops up perennially and usually circles round with no conclusion. No change this time, but the ante was upped by the Daily Telegraph’s Milo Yiannopolous taking the contrarian, un-PC, (and inaccurate in my experience) “its natural that men are better at some things and its OK”. Gets you fired from Harvard but got Milo mild admonitions and (according to him anyway) lots of private support.

Ah well…..I go back to Janet Parkinson’s work last autumn in Berlin which showed that there are more women on-web than men, controlling more spend, and they use the quite Web differently – so anyone who designs applications for what women want has probably got a competitive advantage that most (male built) sites will never understand. I recall Wired’s Ben Hammersley going hammer and tongs at her in Berlin when all she had done was assembled a basic fact base of these things (see the link above) , so there is clearly something deeply visceral in some men about admitting all this stuff, which Milo clearly tapped.

Hudde / Zuzanna

When Mike Butcher of TechCrunch asked me to participate in a panel on ‘Balancing Tech Culture’ at the Geek n’ Rolla , I thought I’d better find something to talk about. Enter ‘Getting women in start-ups’ research survey targeted at the tech and start-up industry. The results were predictable. They usually are on a 200 person sample. I am setting your expectations – it was not a scientific piece of research.

Women are the minority in the UK start-ups. 33 per cent said they had none or only one female colleague on staff, and 65 per cent admitted women were underrepresented in their firms. Worryingly, the majority of women in start-ups are in the low impact positions such as office management and manning the reception. Only one-third were employed in software or tech development.

Our panel tried to get to the bottom of why this number is so low and how we could fix it. It was a heated debate (you can see the transcript here), led by Cate Sevilla of BitchBuzz with Sophie Cox of Worldeka, Leisa Reichelt of Disambiguity and Nacera Benfedda of Viadeo, with a brief appearance from Milo Yiannopoulos of The Daily Telegraph.

The answer: one hour is not enough to sort this out. There was no general consensus. We agreed that there may be several reasons behind the current situation including gender inequality, culture, lack of female role models and female VCs.

Personally, and that’s possibly because I spent five years doing sociological research on similar subjects, I believe it’s a cultural issue. It’s true, tech is a women-friendly industry – we are liberal and offer flexible working hours. Yet, I don’t see young girls queuing up to be the next Gina Bianchini. Can we have ‘balance in tech’? Sure, perhaps in 50 years, just when we are hitting the equal numbers of men and women in the government. Once again, it will all come down to education.

Silicon Stilettos / Wendy Tan White

How do we get more women in tech? As many people have said it comes down to exposure, education and changing media portrayal. If you believed an industry was ‘unsexy’, ‘geeky’ and male dominated. Why would you aspire to working there as a young woman…. At school, I had an extremely enthusiastic maths/IT teacher, she really encouraged me to study computer science at uni rather than natural sciences or something deemed traditional for girls to study. Perhaps it was the one good thing about being at a girls grammar school, we all believed there was nothing we shouldn’t or couldn’t do. My friends at school still thought I was a little crazy wanting to study computer science, ‘Isn’t it dull?’… I’ve worked in manufacturing, finance and tech businesses and I’ve personally found the tech industry the most supportive. I’ve been equally supported by men and women and I love the fast pace, appetite for change and can do attitude of it’s communities.

BitchBuzz / Cate

“…There are also men out there – many of whom I met yesterday – that do acknowledge that this is a problem, and are willing to speak up about it. I have to tell you, being in a room filled with geeky men who were even acknowledging that, hell yes, we do need more women in tech was fucking amazing. I hit some sort of Geek-Guy-Tech-High. Having guys take the microphone and stand up for women in tech had me so blissed out I didn’t even know what to do with myself. And, the fact that Mike Butcher would even organize and have a panel of this nature at a major start-up event says a lot in itself. (Huge fucking high-five to Mike!)

At the end of the day, I’m thankful that Paul Walsh and then Milo Yiannopoulos agreed to be on this panel, and that they both took the time to blog about it. I mean, your views on women in tech are heinous and are exactly why things in tech for women suck sometimes – but at least you get people talking about it. We had a room full of people talking about getting more women in tech start-ups. People were debating about it on Twitter. The blogosphere has boomed with pieces about our panel and about women in technology.

This is a great step. Even if we can’t all agree – the conversation is what’s important. It’s putting the spotlight on these issues, whether you even think it’s an *issue* or not.

We’re getting coverage, we’re getting people thinking about it, and that is exactly what needs to happen.

Huge thank you from BitchBuzz to Milo, all our panellists, Mike Butcher, Petra Johanssen, Rassami Hok Ljungberg and the entire team.

Picture: (CC) Benjamin Ellis – benjaminellis.org

In the two days since GeeknRolla ended I’ve had some great feedback from you all about how it went. And I’m afraid to say that I’ve been hard pressed to find much criticism of the event. The feedback, in real life and on Twitter (see #gknr) has been roughly 99% positive (no, really!) even if I do say so myself. So, given that you can comment anonymously on this blog post, feel free to re-balance the views, if you really do have any feedback on how we can improve next year. And I’m still collating all the Tweets and blog posts for a more comprehensive wrap-up. (Picture: (CC) Benjamin Ellis – benjaminellis.org).

But, in the main I think everybody got something out of the day. Although I was concerned to make sure things would go well, I was, however, not too surprised, since I really didn’t have much to do with it. I simply did what I think all conferences should do: research the industry, take soundings from key people, invite clever people to speak and then select the most appropriate presentations. I was merely the ringmaster. Our speakers and panelists did all the heavy lifting, and for that I am hugely grateful. OK, I might have had something to do with the event in that I am a fairly rigid time-keeper, I like to keep things moving and, frankly, I like everyone to have fun. After-all, why shouldn’t conferences be fun? They are full of smart, witty people. But I also had a little fun myself- adding a musical flavour to the event – and generally getting people to network furiously, creating a mini-Silicon Valley style event in the heart of London.

Did it help that we priced it extremely competitively (£75 for ‘early bird’, £95 full price)? I think it did. Suddenly my friends from a startup in Krakow could afford to come and network with their London compatriots. I loved that.

The original idea behind Geek ‘n Rolla was for (deep breath) tech startups to talk to other startups about the experience of being a startup. What had they learned? What would they do differently? How did they survive? How did they hire people? All of these issues are too often assumed, and for some reason startups are all expected to learn these things themselves or by some mystical osmosis. I wanted to puncture that assumption and by finding speakers who were the bluntest, frankest people I know – some of whom, like William Reeve, I had to coax out of a five year conference avoidance, or like Jof Arnold who has never presented his findings about being a mobile startup before. And, well, it looked like it worked.

So for now, I want to thank all our speakers and panelists, sponsors (the very supportive Viadeo, Bootlaw, UKTI, NESTA, School for Startups, Park Lane Champagne), TechFluffTV for their video, Rassami, Petra and Bash (my awesome team) and you the delegates for making the day and the night a real Geek ‘n Rolla experience.

I leave you with me making a fool of myself at the After-party. But I just love rocking out…

Inuk Networks, the UK-based startup IP TV and triple-play service service, has been acquired by Move Networks, one of the leading IPTV providers in the US. Inuk’s platform has lots of potential for targeted advertising and converged, especially as it has a PC/Mac multi-room solution. Details of the deal were undisclosed. Move Networks allows broadcasters like ABC, FOX, The CW, ESPN360, ProSieben, and Televisa to deliver live and on-demand high-quality video to PCs and other web-enabled devices.

Currently Inuk’s biggest services is providing digital IPTV, phone and Internet services to over 40,000+ students in the UK. Its Freewire TV service is free to students with access to the JANET high speed network, which connects all UK universities.

In June last year Welsh broadcaster S4C and investor Wesley Clover put in £9.5million of second round investment into Inuk. Wesley Clover is the venture vehicle of Wales-based Sir Terry Matthews, one of the UK’s leading technology entrepreneurs who seeded Inuk initially (and Inuk is based in Wales).

Underlying FreeWire is what can only be described as a ‘virtual set-top box’. In other words, Inuk has developed a client application for both Mac and PC which turns the a laptop or desktop into a set-top box able to receive broadcast-quality TV. It’s not a P2P application but multicast which means it could scale to millions of users relatively easily. Not only that, but Freewire works a bit like a web application, which means you can even build widgets for it. So you could, say, watch TV and have an IM or Twitter conversation with other friends watching the same show. Since launching in September 2007 Freewire TV has created a potential footprint of 100,000 student bedrooms at over forty universities around the UK. Inuk Network’s Freewire delivery platform is also capable of delivering VoIP and broadband internet access.

Send me an Angel – Funding and How to Handle Angels

Nick says: Finding an angel is like finding an invisible man – they don’t tend to broadcast their presence but they network to find likely opportunities, and they also know each other. They’ll group together by region so they can do larger investments as well. There are plenty of companies out there who say they can get you into networks, and will charge you a percentage fee of any money you raise – which can mean a 10% hit to your funds before you even spend anything. Steer clear of anyone who promises an instant solution of raising money – get out there and go to the events. Blog, get on Twitter, do whatever else you need to do for people to find you.

Key things to remember:

• Build a plan of how to find your angel
• Get on with your angel
• Valuation is what you make it
• Get a good lawyer

BIO: Nick Halstead is the CEO & Founder favorit Ltd, which runs http://fav.or.it, http://www.tweetmeme.com and http://www.feedbroker.net. Fav.or.it at launch generated a frenzy of tech-media coverage for its approach to bringing a more mainstream view of the social web to consumers and to businesses. Nick has been in development for over 15 years running multi-million budget projects for some of the biggest development studios in the UK. An active participant in the London Tech scene who likes to evangelise the use of Twitter, data portability and the use of the social web for businesses.