Earlier this week, we shared some information about the Digital London Startup Challenge, a competition that aims to showcase the UK’s best, newest, and most innovative enterprise business ideas. Below, Simon Hill (CEO of Wazoku, the idea management software company behind the initiative) gives a bit more detail about the Challenge and how to get involved…

Here at Wazoku we are delighted to announce the launch of the Digital London Startup Challenge. The challenge is inviting startups to enter their business and showcase their innovative products for enterprise and is running as part of the Digital London summit as a competition to showcase the UK’s best, newest, and most innovative enterprise business ideas.

The Challenge website is now live for entries and votes and the Challenge will run until the 14 March when the winner will be announced at the Digital London summit. As a startup ourselves we know one of the biggest challenges faced when starting out is getting exposure for your business and being seen and found by the right people.

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L-to-R: Mark Roth (OfferMobi, an Arc Angel portfolio company,) Howard Schwartz (FundingPost and Arc Angel Fund) and Alan McGlade (ARC Angel) (Credit: Lauren Keyson)

At the massive FundingPost entrepreneur-VC pitching event in Midtown last week, 70% of the attending companies were based in NY; the rest came mostly from surrounding areas like Philadelphia, New Jersey and Connecticut. The two FundingPost founders, also investors in the ARC Angel Fund, gave their take on the differences and similarities between the companies they saw at the event versus the ones they see on their West coast events.

What Joe Rubin saw was lots of technology, software, mobile tech, internet e-commerce and Internet advertising at his NY event.  He said, “These are the hot sectors I am seeing in NY now, even nationwide; but mobile advertising is really hot in NY.”

He said that Arc Angel is going to be inviting 10 of the founders and CEO’s they met to make initial pitches to our angels; all of these startups are in the seed and early stage tech space. “A majority of them have a little bit of revenue or at least a couple of beta customers trying them out; there were definitely some cool ones. They all have a product built – although a product is never finished in technology.”

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“The Canadian Trade Commissioner Service is pleased to launch a first ever Canadian Technology Accelerator (CTA) initiative in New York City, a hot-bed for technology entrepreneurship and world capital for advertising, media, commerce, and innovation.”

(flickr.com/meddygarnet)

Six Canadian startups are headed to General Assembly this month, part of an initiative by the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service. The Canadian companies will spend three months inhaling the fumes of Silicon Alley from a pretty perch at General Assembly, thanks to a partnership between General Assembly and the Consulate General of Canada in New York.

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Others have tried and failed to make a coworking space grow in Williamsburg. (The Makery is dead! Long live, Bnter’s new office!) But “real estate professionals” and born-and-raised Brooklynites  Morris Levy and Richard Beyda may have the home-court advantage. The duo opened The Yard, a 14,000 square foot coworking space, in November and are already at 65 percent capacity.

A number of tech companies, includingHype Machine, Wanderfly, Mobile Roadie and Uber are already working out of the space, as well as a few startups still in splash page mode, like Gander TV and Spotflux. Somewhere between 60 to 70 percent of The Yard‘s residents are techies, although that wasn’t exactly the owners’ intention. “We knew there was a need in Williamsburg/Greenpoint for something like this, but we didn’t realize the tech scene was happening here and that that was the direction it was going to go,” Mr. Levy told Betabeat by phone.

Now that the startup syngery is under way, however, The Yard has been “planning strategic alliances” with angel investors whose portfolio companies might be interested in working there. For example, Mr. Levy said he’s currently in talks with Brooklyn Bridge Venturesfounder and First Round Capital alum Charlie O’Donnell, who launched a Kings County-centric seed fund last month.

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A new competition is looking for the most promising British business solutions. Image courtesy of: sxc.hu

Digital London, the event for digitally connected enterprises and smart cities, and Wazoku, provider of idea management tools, have announced the launch of a new competition promoting UK innovation.

With the Government recently announced backing for innovation, with £75 million to support high tech start-ups, this competition is aimed at providing great exposure and incentives for the most promising solutions.

Businesses are invited to enter the competition and showcase their innovative market ready or beta-stage product and service ideas which will be open to public vote and shortlisted by a panel of industry experts drawn from speakers at the Digital London event, including Ray Wang, Principal Analyst & CEO, Constellation Research Group, and Joe Baguley, Chief Cloud Technologist EMEA, VMWare.

The panel of judges all have the relevant commercial experience and expertise to offer a truly unique opportunity to entrants.

Visitors to the Digital London event at Excel on March 13 and 14 will then vote on the shortlisted businesses to select a winner. The winning business will receive great exposure and over £5,000 worth of prizes for their business including an exhibition stand at next year’s Digital London event, access to Wazoku’s Idea Spotlight idea management software, production time in a video suite to record a promotional company video and £200 to spend at Moo.

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EC1 Capital is pleased to sponsor The London Silicon Roundabout Group part of TechMeetups.com, a rapidly growing community for tech startups in London and other major cities across the world.

EC1 Capital has a grassroots strategy connecting with digital startups across London and the UK. You will often see us at the various tech centered social events across London and in the popular co-working spaces.

EC1 Capital is a new £10m fund launched in February 2012 that makes early stage investments in digital companies. “We are looking for great cohesive teams with scalable ideas that we can help to build a great business via capital, connections and mentoring.” comments Julian Carter, Co-Founder of EC1 Capital.  For full details see their website atwww.ec1capital.com.

TechMeetups has been setup to create a global network of Tech communities from San Francisco to Sydney. The goal is to create a global Tech cluster of over 50 inter-connected Tech communities by 2013.

“Having EC1 Capital as our early stage investment partner will be a great boost to our TechStartHub Startup program and to the hundreds of Startups looking for early stage funding in the community.” Shawn, Founder of TechMeetups.com

To contact EC1Capital contact info at Ec1capital dot com

To contact TechMeetups contact Shawn at Techmeetups dot com

Welcome to the “Silicon Roundabout,” which is luring young companies with government funding, Google-sponsored office space, and a new start-up competition.

NEW EYE VIEW:Welcome to the new "Silicon Roundabout," formerly better known as the Old Street roundabout in Shoreditch.

The start-up scene in London

may not be as well known as the hotbeds of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley or New York City, but it is striving to offerentrepreneurs looking to launch companies a buzzing business environment. The UK capital hopes to lure talent with its East London “Silicon Roundabout,” (OK, a “roundabout” sounds a bit dinky compared to a whole “valley,” but the area boasts a new Google-sponsored space for start-ups as well as 300 innovative companies) as well as measures to boost the city’s start-up scene, including £75 million in funding for high-tech small and medium businesses from the government’s new Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth and the Digital London summit showcasing local tech talent that’s due to be held March 13 to 14.

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Bloomberg and David Karp. Dana Rubinstein

Following a press conference this afternoon at which the mayor predicted the city would one day surpass Silicon Valley as the nation’s tech capital, Tumblr C.E.O. David Karp qualified things a bit.

New York City was just starting to develop its own distinctive tech “flavor,” Karp said, after the event in Tumblr’s Flatiron headquarters.

“If New York is growing in technology, San Francisco is going to be growing in technology too,” Karp told me. “And the fact that there are so many investors out there today. That industry is going to stay out there. I think we’re going to find our own kind of flavor.”

That flavor, said Karp, “tends to be very design-centric and very media-centric. New York continues to really excel in that sort of stuff because, again, we’re just so steeped in it.”

Bloomberg has made the city’s plans for a tech-oriented campus the centerpiece of his third term. The campus is intended to spin off tech companies and thereby diversify New York City’s economic base, which is now heavily reliant on, and heavily sensitive to, disruptions in the financial and media sectors. But, as the mayor has consistently noted in his remarks, the campus also taps into New York’s growing tech sector, one that he says may soon overtake Silicon Valley as the tech capital of the United States.

In December, the mayor said, “We’re well on our way to achieving our goal.”

Today, he put a slightly more conservative time frame on that goal.

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Art by Mike Lucas

Ruckus Wireless has taken $22 million in Series G funding to bring its Wi-Fi equipment into the carrier market–a new opportunity for the company that’s potentially bigger than the enterprise market where it’s built its sales so far. Meritech Capital Partners joined existing investors including Focus Ventures, Motorola Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures.

Fight My Monster, which developed an online trading-card game for boys, said it closed a $2.1 million seed financing led by Greycroft Partners. Fight My Monster was founded by engineer and entrepreneur Dominic Williams, its chief executive, who created the game based on the experience of his four sons online.

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