London OpenCoffee 31Oct’13

A straightforward social / networking event in the cafe of UCL’s Roberts Engineering Building. I’d been warned that this can be a hit/miss event with small turnouts, but today’s was great for me. I would guess there were 15 or so people, most of whom I didn’t get around to speaking to, so no complaints from me.

I ended up having a good chat with a guy called Kishan who wasn’t intentionally attending – just happened to be working on his laptop in the corner where we congregated. Turned out he works with the UCL Advances team, which supports startups from UCL staff and students, but also works with external entrepreneurs.

He showed me a UX application he was working on that allows sample users to work naturally, in their own time, rather than coming in to an artificial ‘lab’ setting. They use the camera on a smart device or laptop and record the user’s voice as well as recording all screen interactions. Back-end number crunching gives analytics.

As it happened, I had arranged to meet Liz from tanktop.tv there, and they are looking for some UX testing and stats, so things worked out rather neatly.

A lighter weight commitment than the evening events I’ve attended, but none the worse for that.

EVENT RATING: Good – go again.

Don’t Pitch Me… Oct ’13

An event nicely tuned to allow early-stage startups to show and tell without being under pressure to sell themselves hard – the idea being that they are looking for constructive feedback from the attendees rather than collaborators or investors, with equal time allowed for presentation and Q&A for each slot. The evening is structured to allow lots of time for networking, both before and after the presentations.

Each of the four presentations made me sit up and think, which is obviously to a large degree down to the discrimination of the organisers, the cheerful and effective Three Beards, but also suggests the incredible fertility of the startup scene, and the enormous range of smart/ingenious/useful/revelatory wrinkles that are still to be shaken from the unfolding digital fabric.

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Tech Debate: “Equity vs. Salary for co-Founders”

This Developers & Entrepreneurs Meetup wasn’t actually my first. Over the last couple of years, I have been to a couple of other similar events. Nevertheless, it’s the first one I’m going to write about here, so I’m grateful it was a good one!

This wasn’t a ‘pitching’ event, but a well managed discussion around a fairly well-defined topic. We heard from two speakers about their own very different experiences in finding their co-founders, and what sort of conversations and agreements they had come up with (Jose Bort of pickevent.com and Kwesi Johnson of Imakethathappen.com – both startups that have launched recently) .

Both were very open, and their stories were interesting, which got things off to a good start, and from then on there was a fairly free flow of contributions from around the room.

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