I’m speaking on How to make Social Networking work for you at the British Library on Tuesday 29th. Its an open event and free to attend. To register click here.

This talk will cover topics:

“If you want to take advantage of using social networking for your business this will be a great place to start. With a presentation on how to create a network for your community and then plenty of time to meet others and business experts – this is a fantastic opportunity to get started.”

Tags: BritishLibrary, Raj, Social Network

This by no means is a go at anyone, region, demographic etc. These are just my thoughts on the current brain drain situation of entrepreneurial talent in the Technology UK scene.

Before I go any further it would be best to explain what I mean by brain drain.

Wikipedia: “A brain drain or human capital flight is an emigration of trained and talented individuals (”human capital”) to other nations or jurisdictions, due to conflicts, lack of opportunity, health hazards where they are living or other reasons.”

The Pain

Day in day out you hear about news from the valley about investment, merger and acquisitions, entrepreneurs/companies evaluated at crazy sums of money and much more. For a second as an entrepreneur you think.. hang on I have a similar ideas but I didn’t get nearly as much traction as the companies in the Valley. Another proof is check out the M&A news on Techcrunch V/S Techcrunch UK. I know Mike Butcher is working hard blogging regularly about the industry investments and acquisitions in UK/Europe, but there just isn’t enough activity.

The Pain Continues

Then you have the classic examples of people exported from UK to the valley. I don’t want to give specific examples but can’t resist mentioning Y-Combinator startup Auctomatic doing so well. I’m happy for Kul and Harj and what they have achieved in under a year of being in the valley. You start thinking damn my suspicions were right UK has some top talent, give them the opportunity and things will happen. Organisations like Y-Combinator add fuel to the fire (let me clarify its not a bad thing) by regularly exporting UK talent to Cali. Lack of high risk taking, seed funding investors in the UK means that entrepreneurs can’t resist the move.

Cure

So how can we prevent this and I think the answers are almost trivial:

1. More seed and early stage funding available to some crazy ideas. Investors need to think about the fact that 50 small crazy investments could mean a lot of work, but potentially could be more lucrative. My thoughts are that it could be as profitable as investing large sums in 10 companies (only 2 of which are cash cows - as the assumption goes)
2. Government should actively do something about it (not that they aren’t). Its almost the case now that anyone who proves their talent in the UK moves to California (a bit exaggerated) . I was once interviewed by a reporter who asked me when I’m going to Valley. I said I’m not. You should see the expression on his face - seemed like he saw a ghost ! And that was the end of the conversation
3. University’s should look at starting a venture fund like Stanford Student Enterprise Venture ( SSE Ventures).  This would have to be cash and advice, a lot of graduate know nothing about entrepreneurship although they can tell you what graduate scheme’s exist at an investment bank. You see investment bank spend a lot of money in organising campus tours.
4. Similarly we should have Startup campus tours where entrepreneurs come and speak about how budding entrepreneurs can learn
5. Last I won’t spare us, the entrepreneurs. I think we have to weigh up our social responsibility to create jobs, train budding entrepreneurs in UK/Europe to financial benefits.

I think there is a lot of work to be done here before this becomes a major worry. Although there are some signs of improvement. Recently I came across this on Intruders.tv, the London Technology Fund Competition:

“It is focused on the funding gap for new, high growth technology companies based in Greater London. It bridges the funding gap by leading and building a syndicate of investors or by completing the gap in an existing syndicate.”

Its open to all technology startup. The coolest thing in my opinion is that the decision of funding is made within 2 weeks of the application. Round one meeting takes place in literally 1 week.

Tags: UKStartups, Silicon Valley, Brain Drain

I blogged about it earlier and now the moment of truth RESULT TIME ! I’m glad Kwiqq is one of the companies going to San Francisco with the delegation.

Overall the judge’s feedback was very positive:

 Some of the companies I’m looking forward to meet:

Coull - Interactive video platform

Byteplay (dotHomes) - Real estate search engine

Hubdub - News prediction social network

WAYN - travel and lifestyle social networking community

TrustedPlaces - Venue recommendation network

Mydeo - Mainstream application for storing and sharing video

Silobreaker - Contextual and graphic search results

edocr - Making business documents interactive

Companies who made it

Blogged with Flock

Tags: WebMission08, San Francisco, TCUK

Alex the good man just sent me this link in French. Check out the market share of Facebook globally. In Asia it doesn’t have any market share. The Asian market is the biggest in terms of size of internet users but not in terms of social networkers. Orkut is big in Asia and Latin America.

 Although Facebook is the most popular social network in Africa. Clearly Social networking has not hit Africa as it has in North America

Blogged with Flock

Tags: SocialNetworking, Asia, Africa, North America

Today BBC has an article about Facebook’s declining users.

Users fell 5% to 8.5 million in January from 8.9 million in December, according to data from Nielsen Online.

Rightly it doesn’t mean its the end of Facebook, its just a slump in 3 big social networks: Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. What I’m more interested is in what Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen Online had to say:

“However, real growth potential lies in the niche networks - those based on a particular lifestyle or interest, such as travel, music, wealth or business”

Smaller social networks like Windows Live Space, BBC Communities and Friend Reunited saw a rise in Jan 2008.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Socialnetwork, Niche Networks, Facebook

Make Your Mark is the national campaign to create an enterprise culture among young people in the UK. The organisation releases monthly newsletter, this month’s topic is importance of networking.  I was delighted to contribute to the newsletter as a guest writter:

Download the PDF:  Make your mark Connect newsletter

My inspiration for this blog comes from two sources:

1. Boohoo: Book written by the founder of a company called Boo, which raised $135 million over 18 months and then went bust
   • 
2. James Eder: Founder of Studentbeans.com who I met at LSE

The reason why I think Boo.com went bust was, lack of financial management and no focus on product (the actual website which sold sports gear). Looking at some of the successful applications (and/or websites), there approach was bottom up. Eg: Skype, YouTube etc.

Bottom-up approach the individual base elements of the system are first specified in great detail. These elements are then linked together to form larger subsystems, which then in turn are linked, sometimes in many levels, until a complete top-level system is formed. This strategy often resembles a “seed” model, whereby the beginnings are small but eventually grow in complexity and completeness. However, “organic strategies” may result in a tangle of elements and subsystems, developed in isolation and subject to local optimization as opposed to meeting a global purpose.

These sites spent years working on their application, getting real users to their site, building their product from the feedback they received from their users. Once the product is right and you have the users, raising finance is almost trivial. Yes you need to get the critical mass but that will not happen solely on the basis of Marketing and Sales. This brings me to James from Student Beans. Whilst answering questions after his talk, James mentioned “Get your product right and you won’t need any marketing”. I’m aware these were not his exact words but that’s the gist of it.

I agree with James but also feel marketing and sales are very important. If you have your product right then it will generate enquiries.

This is relevant to people who are building a social network, sometimes the notion is to heavily market it: Pay per click, press releases blah blah and forget that the focus was the social network. Another factor is the design, Boo.com spent a lot of emphasis on design (or rather forgot the actual user):

The designers had forgotten that getting people to use the website and purchase items outweighed the “sexiness” of the design

If entrepreneurs and companies should keep the design rich but at the same time not too complicated, so its not multi-browser compatible. Users generally like simple looking websites which work! What impresses them is the functionality not just the design alone. Eg: Facebook, Myspace etc

Blogged with Flock

Tags: boo.com, studentbeabs.com, bottom-up, design

Started in September 2006. MTV is now pulling the plug on its User Generated Channel Flux, 1st Feb 2008 onwards. Flux community controls what goes on MTV. The more views a user gets, the more chances to be seen on TV.

So people are encouraged to upload stuff which would interests others.

I’m still not sure why this decision was made, anyway the good news is that the Flux web community will be alive. MTV plans to integrate the UGC concept into its MTV branded music channel. So much more to come from MTV UK and Flux

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Flux, MTV UK, UGC

Let me give you a quick over view of Voxswap. The site is still in its early stages and allows users to learn a new language with the help of the community.

There are chat, search features so you can quickly find people who can help you out and have a conversation. The site is targeted at languages hence there is a virtual keyboard for users to type all accents.

What in my mind is the USP (Unique Selling Point) of Voxswap ? I think its the attitude to KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid. The site is kept simple and the focus is to learn a language in a fun way. No silly unnecessary tools: pokes, super walls, vampire bites etc. Things like drag and drop mechanism to build your profile.

The site is not even a week old and already there are 225 users on it.

The site is powered by Kwiqq. We have gone through months of upgrade to build version 2 of our software. Voxswap is our first website in this series. Kwiqq V2 is built on Symfony.

Symfony is an open source PhP framework developed over several years. What I really like about Symfony is its:

1. Enterprise ready: Hence it allows us to scale as the community grows.
2. Built in Ajax: We can quickly deploy Ajax features for our clients
3. Clean code: I love the modular code and MVC model symfony follows
4. Open Source: This allows us not only to access the wider open source development community but also to give something back

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Voxswap, Learn Language, Kwiqq V2, Symfony, Open Source

Today is Kwiqq’s 1st Birthday and Wikipedia’s 7th Birthday. I’m proud of the team we have, who made this all possible. Thanks for everyone who has supported Kwiqq and been there for the good and the bad times.

You can see our achievements and ambitions for 2008. Big things expected this year, keep it Kwiqq !

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Kwiqq, Wikipedia, Happy Birthday