Last night over 30 people attended the first NW Startup 2.0 event - the first of its kind in Manchester. The session brought local business people, startup ventures, business advisers and the people with some money to invest, together to talk about how technology can help. These kind of sessions happen on a weekly, or even daily basis in London, but there is very limited coverage in any other region, and so Manoj Ranaweera is trying to start a trend up in the North West.
The keynote session was delivered by Sam Sethi. Sam runs Techcrunch UK, and some other businesses, and his business card (which has a great Hugh Macleod cartoon) calls him an Entreprenologist, which he says is a much better term than serial entrepreneur. Sam talked about web 2.0 and emerging technologies, the semantic web and the possibilities of what web 3.0 might be, as well as more esoteric things that I don’t quite get, like Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world where people are doing business, buying and selling stuff, but making real money. I’ll come back to that in another post. Ivan Pope of Snipperoo explained a bit about his business, and why he is so excited by web 2.0 technologies and how they can help people. Sniperoo builds widgets - these are content gadgets that you can add to your website to do useful or clever stuff (like the things going on in the side columns of this blog). Manoj talked about the importance of bringing this kind of networking event to the North West, about how blogging has helped his business and connected him to contacts and opportunities in ways that would have been impossible with traditional networking. For example he met all of the people on the rest of the panel, and organised the event through his blog. I told the Joe Kraus story of starting Excite in the 90s, and then Jot a couple of years ago, highlighting that the barriers to entry for an entrepreneur have come down dramatically, so that the practical costs of starting a business now are a fraction of what they were 10 years ago. Consequently there are more entrepreneurs starting businesses. I also talked about the way the low cost, function rich web 2.0 and SaaS tools can help, and how these tools and social networking are changing the structure of businesses today, breaking down the traditional hierarchies and allowing talented people in organisations a voice in a much more democratic way. I also did my usual evangelising of the importance for all of these businesses to start blogging tomorrow!
I met some really interesting people. I talked to Gang Lu, who has just finished his PhD and is heading to China to set up Techcrunch China. I spoke with Stephen Tominey, the MD of acrticPigs (and Tanya, who didn’t say much - she’ll know what I mean). He told me all about the interactive, 3D animation that his company does, particularly applied to the education sector. He hadn’t heard about Jeff Han’s multi-touch screen, but I’m sending him the links. Philip Hemsted and Anish Kapoor are the founders of Yuugoo (by the way, their website is a blog - that’s a good idea!). Phil and Anish have just secured VC funding for the next stage of their company. Their product allows you to collaborate with IM, VoiP and to share screens instantly, and working in and out of the office through firewalls and across different platforms. They seem to be addressing the issues for the enterprise and platforms in a way that the guys at Blogtronix are too - they should get together. I met Ian Eddison, who works for Chamberlink advising business in the North West. I met David Thomas, Director of D-Geo, who have a product that helps a potential innovator through the key steps of analysis in evaluating their idea - i2m. And I also met Steve Livingston of KPMG. Steve get’s a special mention, mostly because KPMG were kind enough to pay for the food at the event, but also because he found out about it reading this blog. It’s always good to meet the people you’ve been connected with through the web face to face.
Everybody seemed to enjoy the event, and I’m sure they’ll come back to the next one (and hopefully tell their friends).
Technorati Tags : Enterprise+Irregulars, blogging, networking, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, startup+2.0, Manchester, Techcrunch, sinipperoo, ebdex
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