2011 October | TechMeetups

30th Oct2011

London continues to become more expensive for tech sector talent

by Techmeetups

Original post by By James Seechurn, Consultant – The Radford London Team

Employees of London-based tech companies can expect a 13% premium on the national average according to the latest figures from our Global Technology Survey (GTS) UK database of over 87,000 incumbents.

The diagram below demonstrates the average regional base salary as a percentage of the UK average.

Regional pay as a percentage of the UK average

At face value, this may seem like an attractive uplift for employees working in the capital however the pay differential has remained consistent with that of last year, whilst the cost of living continues to rise.

The latest CPI inflationary figures of 4.5% from the IMF across the UK eclipse the year on year average salary increase figure of 3.2% taken from our Q3 2011 Trends Report.

Furthermore, rental prices in London have increased by 12% since August last year resulting in the average rental being 52% more expensive than the rest of the UK.

Large year-on-year increases in the cost of living coupled with stifled pay increases for many tech firms means that the challenge of attracting and retaining talent is at the top of the agenda.

Structuring short and long-term incentive programmes whilst fostering effective employee engagement is essential to address these issues.

For more information please go to www.radford.com/emea, or e-mail us at emea@radford.com.

Category : News, Sponsors

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30th Oct2011

Life as a London Tech Startup: on the Hunt for Brilliant Brains

by Techmeetups

Original post by Dan Barker via THE HUFFINGTON POST

It might seem from watching certain films that making your own tech startup is as simple as organising a drinking competition in your college dorms. You might also think that success comes overnight, or that its coming is due to little more than good timing.

But as anyone with any experience of building a software company will testify, it’s hard work. What the media don’t always report on when getting excited about building new ‘investment hubs’ is the fact that startup failure rates are, and always have been, extremely high. And although it’s really common sense, what the recent ‘sexing up’ of entrepreneurship through TV and films somehow manages to ignore is this: What really makes early-stage tech businesses succeed is having talented, skilled people working together effectively to build things that people want.

And by talented, skilled people, I’m talking about the people who actually build things. Software engineers, designers and architects are what make great, world-changing internet startups, not bureaucrats organising broadband provision in Dudley or tech journalists getting excited about their friend’s new Groupon clone.

For all the political puff and media salivation around ‘Silicon Roundabout’, our experience of the East London technology scene over the past year has been somewhat mixed. While the concept is certainly in the minds and on the lips of the full cast of well-meaning accountants, lawyers, journalists and other supporting characters buzzing around every startup event, the people who actually get things done – the aforementioned designers and engineers – are often conspicuously absent.

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30th Oct2011

Wikileaks Should Look Out: Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales

by Techmeetups

Original post by Melanie Hick via THE HUFFINGTON POST

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales moves to London

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is ditching Silicon Valley to move to the Silicon Roundabout.

Wales, who will thinks Wikipedia should tread carefully, and says he’ll never integrate Facebook likes on his site, sees London as the most central location for working in the internet industry.

Wales will live in Marylebone with his English fiance, and will choose the tech hub around Shoreditch as his base.

Wales told Huffington Post: “It’s a fabulous cosmopolitan city, and I will be here for personal reasons.

“It’s an advantage in some ways being in the UK. My work is very global and the UK is very centrally located for travel purposes. And it’s centrally located in other senses as well. Tech City here is great, and I’m intrigued by Tech Hub and some of the tech incubator spaces, I think that’s really cool.”

As much as Wales is pro-London, he’s also very much anti-crowd-sourcing, the term that is, not the concept.

“The term crowd-sourcing is really about getting people to do work for free or cheap. And I think that really disrespects what people are doing and are interested in doing,” he said.

“It’s a misunderstanding of what’s going on in online communities and it’s not really respecting the power of that one individual who does something interesting.”

As an alternative, Wales believes companies that should work with communities, rather than make communities work for a single company. The founder of a peer-edited site would say that though, wouldn’t he?

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28th Oct2011

Twilio launches in the UK

by Techmeetups

Original post by Miya Knights via CloudPro

US-based startup crosses the pond to launch cloud communications platform and open European beta

US-based cloud communications companyTwilio has arrived in the UK with its first customer.

It has launched Twilio Voice, its application for building web and mobile applications that can make and receive telephone calls, with customer support software provider Zendesk as its first major European customer.

The company has also opened its first European office in the Silicon Roundabout area of east London. And it has also launched its first public beta in Poland, France, Portugal, Austria and Denmark, with an additional 11 European countries slated to be added by the end of 2011.

Jeff Lawson, Twilio chief executive and co-founder said international functionality has been among its top requested features from customers since the San Francisco-based telephony infrastructure web service hosted on Amazon Web Services launched almost three years ago.

“Through our powerful APIs [application programming interfaces] we enable developers to build fantastic, innovative products. We estimate there are more than 10 million software developers worldwide, and we look forward to serving a greater number of them than ever before from our European headquarters in London,” he said.

Over 60,000 developers worldwide already use its platform, and it counts eBay, Sony and LinkedIn among its customers.

Twilio developers can buy local UK telephone numbers from the Twilio.com website and use Twilio’s API to integrate phone calls, text messages and internet protocol (IP) voice communications into web, mobile and traditional phone applications using their existing unified communications software engineering resources and skills.

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Category : News

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28th Oct2011

London Silicon Roundabout Weekly Roundup 28-October

by Techmeetups

London Silicon Roundabout Weekly Newsletter 28-October-2011

Category : London Silicon Roundabout, Newsletters

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27th Oct2011

Kevin Hartz, the Silicon Valley whizz kid taking on Old Street

by Techmeetups

Original post by Gabriella Griffith via LLB

Ticketing tech wonder Eventbrite raised $50m in Series E funding earlier this year. Now, it’s heading to London

On Tuesday night in Shoreditch, deep in the wired-up bowels of Silicon Roundabout, San-Fran-based tech company Eventbrite celebrated the opening of its London office.

The office is in a space with a dozen or so other start-ups. Kevin Hartz, CEO and co-founder, is delighted to be mingling with fellow tech peers. He’s even staying at Bebo.com founder Michael Birch’s place while he’s here.

“Getting a free ride from an old friend,” he tells me.

From series E funding of $50m to arriving in London

Eventbrite received series E (the fifth round of) funding to the tune of $50m in May this year. The company’s raison d’être is to “democratise” the ticketing industry by taking the pain out of planning events of all shapes and sizes: “no event too large, no event too small,” insists Hartz.

Hartz admits Tiger Global, who led the latest funding round, has helped him think internationally. As a result he’ll be spending some of his new capital setting up here, in our capital.

Having created a .co.uk web domain, changed all talk of dollars to pounds and ironed out Americanisms to fit in with the Queen’s English the new site is ready for lift off. But looking at the figures, Eventbrite wasn’t faring too badly with us Brits before.

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Category : London Silicon Roundabout

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27th Oct2011

Taylor Wessing to open second London office in new tech push

by Techmeetups

Original post by Friederike Heine via lw

Taylor Wessing is to launch a second London office in east London’s ‘Tech City’ as the firm looks to add to its client base with more UK and international technology start-ups.

The new office, which will be based near Old Street in Islington, will be staffed with lawyers from the firm’s technology, media and telecoms, venture capital, intellectual property, tax, inward investment and employment practices.

The firm is planning to rotate the lawyers based in the office to offer a wide selection of its staff the chance to get experience of the tech sector, while it will also put on informal ‘drop-in clinics’ for tech companies to come in for ad hoc advice.

Taylor Wessing acts for a number of well-known tech businesses, including Google, which it recently advised on its purchases of deals website DailyDeal, mobile visual search startup Plink and speech synthesis company Phonetic Arts.

The announcement comes after Google and a number of other high-profile tech companies such as Firefox have recently moved into the area, with the former recently signing a ten-year lease on an office block near Old Street’s so-called ‘Silicon Roundabout’.

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26th Oct2011

Tech Weekly Live: Tech City Talk (Enterprise) Reading

by Techmeetups

Original post by Aleks Krotoski via guardian.co.uk

If you build it, will they come? In November 2010, the government announced an innovation cluster called “Tech City” based in London’s East End. But what’s actually behind the catchy title? Here’s some background reading about tonight’s Tech Weekly Tech City Talk.

Eric Van Der Kleij: No 10′s guru set to super charge UK’s Tech City (The Independent)

New ‘enterprise zones’ announced around England (BBC)

Can enterprise zones work this time around? (BBC)

Today programme on enterprise zones (and more) (BBC)

Google says it would pay more tax in the UK (The Telegraph)

The politician’s guide book to East London (Alex Deschamps-Sonsino)

Tech City: One Year Later (Alex Deschamps-Sonsino)

Silicon comes to Stratford (Wired)

Well done Google, but Tech City needs to storm the Olympic Park next(Tech Crunch)

How digital technology can revive public services (The Guardian)

Silicon Roundabout comes to Buckingham Palace (Financial Times)

Future Human’s Liquid City event write-up (Squareglasses)

Google leases London property for start-up launchpad (Information Age)

Category : London Silicon Roundabout, News, Premium

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26th Oct2011

Tech City: Inside London’s digital start-up hothouse

by Techmeetups

Original post by Jo Best via silicon.com

How entrepreneurs in a corner of East London are gearing up to compete with Silicon Valley…

FEATURE

Q: Why did the East London hipster burn his mouth?
A: He ate the pizza before it was cool.

For many Londoners, the east of the capital – the area around Shoreditch and Hoxton – is associated with a tribe of hipper-than-thou kids wearing shoes with no socks, glasses with no glass in them, and riding bikes with no gears.

It used to be a grubby part of London, and as cheap rents attracted an art, fashion and digital community, start-ups moved to the area. The tail wagged the dog, the galleries, the bigger businesses and technology heavyweights followed.

Nowadays, the area around Silicon Roundabout still plays home to tens of digital start-ups, working in disciplines including design, mobile apps, social media, analytics, consultancy and more. However, it has of late been joined by some more long-standing technology companies – including BT, Cisco, Firebox, Intel and Twitter (through Tweetdeck). Even Google recently took out a lease on a property in the area – along with a handful of professional services firms aiming to serve the growing digital community.

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25th Oct2011

MORE THAN 500 DEVELOPER JOBS AROUND SILICON ROUNDABOUT UP FOR GRABS

by Techmeetups

Original post by DigitalArts

More than 500 jobs will be showcased at Silicon Milkroundabout, a jobs fair for the London start-up community, which is taking place this Sunday.

Some 105 UK start-ups, including Shazam, Mozilla and Last.FM will be attending the event to showcase available jobs with salaries of up to £100,000.

Furthermore, there will be no jobs agencies to get in the way of the networking that graduates and developers will be able to do with the technology companies attending the event.

Other start-ups offering the jobs include organiser Songkick, a website and service that provides personalized news about live music events, Moshi Monsters, Moo, Lyst, Mendeley, Stackoverflow, JustGiving and Just-Eat.co.uk.

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US-based startup crosses the pond to launch cloud communications platform and open European beta

From series E funding of $50m to arriving in London

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