At Twitter’s Chirp conference today, the company announced an interesting move. Currently, you can attach a location to your tweets, and not just co-ordinates either; you can boast your neighbourhood and city.
The logical extension, which Twitter will roll out this quarter, is attaching places to tweets. Hmm, sounds somewhat familiar…
Still, it’s a nice concept for someone to implement, one day. Someone who isn’t me.
Due to the WiFi seriously dying on me today (though it was mostly fine yesterday – go figure) I tended to tweet today’s sessions in bursts — the bursts corresponding to me being online and actually in the session, rather than offline but in the session, online but not in the session, or offline talking to someone interesting. Anyway.
In a reverse kind of order, here are a few Day 2 goodies. The day ended on a Gillmor Gang live session which consisted mostly of overweight loud Americans shouting at each other — with a surprising detour into a quiet and all-too-brief discussion on news filtering algorithms. One of the things about this panel that appeared on the Twitterstream was the fact it lacked women. I’ve also seen a few comments here and there about the number of women at LeWeb. Plus, a brief exchange that sparked at least one tweet — when asked what the audience liked about Google’s presentation at LeWeb, it’s apparently perfectly fine to note that the (female) speaker was “hot”.
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It’s a worn-out TV cliche, but the sad thing about such catchphrases is that sooner or later they inevitably ring true. This particular adage starts to hit home while travelling; it’s taken the entire morning simply to get to London, while various Twitterers who left after me are already happily settled in Berlin.
It’s not just the inconvenience of travelling from Scotland, though; while time might be valuable, but travelling time often becomes a wonderful opportunity to mull things over and spend time thinking about problems in a new way. The problem comes when you end up being severely limited when it comes to various growth opportunities, simply due to location. While I could fly down to London with today’s Monday morning commuters for the odd meeting or two, it starts to get really messy when there are simply so many events going on — all of which would be both enjoyable and beneficial — and I’m stuck in the wrong country, half a day away.
Moving to Edinburgh was a hugely positive experience for me, but the strain of trying to create an innovative web startup in an environment that likes to deal with the bricks-and-mortar businesses it’s familiar with is going to hit home sooner or later. I’m unsure of the economic implications of taking a Scotland-registered business to London, but my overwhelming instinct is that this is something that will have to happen when the business is at the right stage for it. London opens up access to events, to communities, to employees and to customers who simply don’t exist in Scotland.
A step further than this, though one unattainable without some sort of help [YC LINK HERE], is the ‘ultimate’ destination of a web startup: Silicon Valley. A modest English computer scientist taking America by storm; well, it’s been done, but I’m almost frightened by the macho, bullish, in-your-face attitude from American entrepreneurs. I’d love to experience it and see what the community is like — my experience working in America still ranks as one of the best periods of my life — but in such a sink-or-swim culture, I think I need more than just a cute accent and weird hairstyle to get by.
Of course, one can take an entirely different take on the situation. Instead of moving a Scottish business to London, why not move some of the attractive things about London to Scotland? Networking events can be created; people can be lured up here with promises of a life away from the big smoke; employees and customers can be found. Having experienced the Cambridge entrepreneurship scene and now the Edinburgh one, there are definitely things to take away from Silicon Fen that could create a new Silicon Glen; however, in order to even get to this sort of space, critical mass is very important.
I’m torn between two ultimate aims, but fortunately the route to both starts off the same. Make contacts, organise events or suggest ideas to event organisers, build up links with the London startup community and what there is of the Edinburgh one (I fear I know pretty much all the companies that fall into this category, though firms like design and marketing agencies are technically on the fringe, and I certainly don’t know all of those). Foster a healthy relationship between Edinburgh and Scotland’s technology entrepreneurs, dive into the action and see if there really is potential up here, or if Soho is where it’ll have to end up.
I guess the first question to ask is: who else is working in social media, crowdsourcing, AI, web apps, etc, etc. in Scotland? Watch this space for answers!
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