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

ReadWriteWeb has a fantastic blog about the social networks in the far east. I wrote a similar blog about social networking globally.

Given Facebook is popular in US/UK (and Africa) it still has a lot of catching up to do when you compare it will QQ.com’s 300m users. Another interesting figure is Facebook’s position amongst other web properties, according to Alexa:

Although China’s Facebook aka QQ.com is number two in popularity in world’s oldest continuous civilization. The general reaction towards Facebook is getting fairly negative. Personally the statistics matter less than what my non-geek colleagues are saying about FB: “Boring..nothing exciting”, “I have 121 friend requests”, “I have pending messages”… not really optimistic!

Compared to the beginning of last year Facebook has seen 41.8% rise in attention but is now losing it at 3.8%. I would be interested to see steps FB is taking to turn things around.

Tags: Compete.com, Facebook.com, QQ.com

Dopplr is a social network aimed at business travelers. By just this defination the creativity and effort put behind the project is not very clear.

Although once you get the chance to signup to it, you will understand the pain and effort which has gone into preparing this network. For starters the usability is spot on. Some examples:

• Add a trip: It allows you to type a location and once you finish typing it suggests possible locations.

• Focus on Travel: In my opinion a niche social network should do what its there for example: Flixster deal with movie, Flickr - Pictures. Dopplr does exactly what it says on the tin and shows you the places you are about to travel.

• Suggests Coincidences: You can see who might be at the same location as you at a given time.

• Recommendations: But I think Dopplr really hits the spot is with its recommendation engine. Dopplr suggests what you should do in the city you are about to visit, based on others recommendation.

There are also other features which are very attractive. Example: Inviting through other networks like Gmail, Twitter, Flickr and Microformats.

An excellent team and good quality investors has indeed helped to create the buzz:

Tags: Dopplr, Business, Social Network

PepsiCo is launching a social network around European football. The site is available on pepsiyouniverse.com

Obviously site has excellent potential with football fanatics. Although I’m not sure how they are looking to market it. You can already build your profile on the site. Apart from profiles you can take part in a quiz:

Brands are obviously entering social networking in a big way. Pepsi is cleverly levering consumer’s interest in Football as oppose to the drink itself. So what are the potential benefits for Pepsi. Some really obvious ones:

• Brand promotion, appeal to younger adopters
• Showcase its ties with one of the worlds most played sport.

Less obvious benefits:

• Market research of its product and brand
• Increase customer loyalty and
• Acquisition of (potential) customer details

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Tags: Pepsi, Social Network

Readwriteweb had an interesting article about Future of Social networks.

Alex May has some view on it too:

“The problem with the ubiquitous approach is that, like Facebook’s privacy policy, I suspect it’ll be nigh on impossible to opt out, thus limiting functionality for users who do not want to share their information.

Of course, it seems to be going in this direction within government and our society in general.  Generations to come won’t know what privacy means.

I think it’s about time for an ebay type site for people’s personal information.  Sell your details to the highest bidder!  It has value for advertising/marketing/security - time for the payback!”

I personally found this timeline really interesting:

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Tags: Readwriteweb, Portability, Socail networks

GigaOm one of the respected Web/technology blogs has just released an online community for open source software. The platform is for open source built on open source (Drupal). There are several open source software (150,000+) already listed in the directory.

The site also include s a Google Q&A style section.

Some nice facts which came out from the site :

• There are more than 150,000+ open source projects on the go
• 71% of the worlds developers have used open source software
• 50% of organizations have some open source software in production

Tags: OpenSource, Software, GigaOm

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

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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.

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Tags: Socialnetwork, Niche Networks, Facebook

Business Week has a very interesting article about Social Media, thanks Alex for pointing it out. The article is primarily correcting their earlier writeup about Social media in 2005.

There are 9 pages of very interesting information and well presented.

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Tags: BusinessWeek, Social Media

There are several ways to monetise your social network, especially when you have over 10 million users. WAYN last week announced :

a deal that will see its members offered a branded pre-pay credit card.

The traveller’s network has agreed the partnership, with Tuxedo Money Solutions, to allow its 10.8m users to sign up to the card.

It makes sense to offer credit cards to frequent travellers. I wonder if they have an affiliate deals with other credit card companies too. As I can see Capital One’s ads on their site:

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Tags: WAYN, Tuxedo Money, Credit Cards, Capital One