Cheers to London?s Tech Scene

I just heard two old English ladies talking about tweeting in a Shoreditch coffee shop. Earlier this morning, I ran into a venture capitalist from New York City on the street corner of Chance and Boundary. And last night, I witnessed an Android app developer hitting on a posh British chick. I believe the apt term is ?punching above his weight.?

?I?ve been here 6 years and the tech scene has never been as vibrant as it is now. There are some established startups like Spotify, SoundCloud and Moshi Monsters that have revenue, lots of employees and are backed by a few rounds of funding. In the last few weeks, I?ve seen about 2-3 great companies every single week. As a VC who has to pick what to invest in, it?s getting harder and harder because there are so many great companies to choose from?and that?s a really good sign.?

-Sitar Teli, a Senior Associate at Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures

Last week, I wrote about London?s Silicon Roundabout from a New York state of mind introducing our readers to the first startups I encountered such as social network Floxx, fashion startup Not Just a Label, the ?Economist of Culture? Crane.TV and gaming company Mind Candy. It?s clear that London has innovated in industries such as fashion, the arts and games, and is perhaps most proud of its emerging digital music industry. Digging just a bit deeper, let?s take a look a few more brilliant startups, meet the rockstars of London?s music startup scene and find out what the VCs are saying.

We R Interactive

?There?s a buzz in London at the moment, and that energy and optimism is only going to grow over the coming months as we build up to the Olympics. One of the UK?s strongest industries is its creative sector ? and it?s the coming together of content creators with people from a more tech based background that?s one of the most exciting movements going on in London right now.?

-Oli Madgett, co-founder of We R Interactive

In terms of social gaming specifically, it?s still relatively embryonic in London (aside from Playfish), but it?s growing as talent from more traditional gaming companies look to create new opportunities.

We R Interactive is an online games publisher that fuses the best of film storytelling and high-end gaming to deliver the next generation of interactive and social games across multiple platforms. Their first game, I AM PLAYR, lets users play the life of a professional soccer player. Check it out here.

The company was founded in March 2010 by entrepreneurs with varied backgrounds in the worlds of film, interactive TV and computer gaming and is currently backed by angel investors with similar industry experience. We R makes money through brand integrations and by selling virtual goods like Nike boots to users of I AM PLAYR.

Flirtomatic

We first wrote about Flirtomatic in 2008, and since then the London-based mobile social network has blossomed into a full-blown, cross platform flirting site. According to a local investor in the company, social activity on the platform is second only to Facebook in the UK. The app boasts a serious revenue model, making 70-80% of its cash from selling virtual goods. And I?m not talking about virtual kisses and hugs but unabashed personal advertising. Users can can pay to delete a bad rating, or to have more photos of themselves on the site and pay to be placed higher up in the sea of faces. According to the investor, 60% of the people using the app have met for a date. And in a city that has been described as ?not having a dating scene,? that?s impressive.

Newspaper Club

Moo, the awesome business card design site isn?t the only London based startup that has harnessed the power of the web for paper goods. The London based Newspaper Club is a new online service that?s breathing fresh life back into the lost days of printed media, by allowing anyone to design and print their own newspaper. Users simply upload photos and create a layout online. Then, the newspapers, in runs ranging from five to 5,000, are printed once a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays and delivered up to five days later.

Sponsume

Sponsume is a crowd-funding platform for artistic and entrepreneurial projects, which looks like a complete copycat of NYC?s Kickstarter. The site, launched in August 2010 by Gregory Vincent, a young French philanthropist, is the first generalist crowdfunding platform in the UK and Europe. Prior to creating Sponsume,Vincent, a ?passionate advocate of microfinance? worked as an assistant tutor at Oxford University and as a financial analyst in London.

AMEE

We wrote about AMEE in April, which stands for the ?Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine? and is an aggregation platform capable of coordinating the world?s entire carbon consumption data. Gavin Starks is the Founder and CEO of AMEE has been in the big data business for the last 12 years. Prior to AMEE, he developed Internet-based research tools in 1993, joining Branson?s Virgin Net (now Virgin Media) as employee number 5 in 1995. He also founded Tornado and was the Managing Director of UK digital music services company Consolidated Independent, which aggregated digital music from multiple platforms and delivered it to retailers like Amazon and iTunes.

Lyst

Lyst lets you follow your favorite designers, stores and stylists in a very similar way to Boston-based Svpply. The site keeps users in the loop with fashion and sale updates, lets them share items on social networks and provides ?buy here? links on the site. Lyst, which has offices in New York as well, ships internationally but will only show products and prices available in your country.

Magnolia Box

The online art industry was worth in excess of $1 billion last year and, as with most online industries, it continues to grow rapidly. In the same family as New York?s fine art startups like Art.sy, TurningArt and Artsicle, but with a different angle, the London based Magnolia Box offers an affordable solution for artists, photographers, galleries, museums, publishers, and picture library?s to sell art and image based products via their own dedicated e-commerce shop. In a sense, it?s like Etsy for art but with more technical oomph. The Magnolia Box offers its software platform called Magnolia Soft that comes with all of the features and functionality an artist needs to compete.

Artfinder

According to Google statistics, there are well over 215 million individual searches for some form of art each month, which is excellent news for Spencer Hyman, the CEO and co-founder of Artfinder, a company that wants to build the world?s smartest art service to help people consume and enjoy art online. Hyman was previously the COO at the Last.fm and plans to apply a similar technical strategy to Artfinder.

In a recent interview with GigaOM, Hyman said: ?If you want to build one of these great businesses like Last.fm, or IMDB or LinkedIn, you need to get four bits of a virtuous circle working. The first is the catalogue. Once you?ve got the catalogue, you can move on to the next bit, social profiles ? curating stuff, building their own collections, meeting people with similar tastes, sharing stuff. If you think about that, it?s never happened to art. If wanted to show me your 10 favorite pictures in the National Gallery, how would you do it? If you wanted to tell me about this great new street artist called Inky, how would you do it??

Artfinder is discovery, the search and the recommendation. It then provides the final piece of online consumption, ?an alternative to the postcard,? writes GigaOM?s Bobbie Johnson.

Right, enough with the games, the social networks and the art. It?s time for bass check. It was an exciting week for the online music industry. In light of Pandora?s recent IPO and $3 billion dollar valuation, SoundCloud?s funding from Ashton Kutcher and Spotify?s $1 billion dollar valuation, the digital music space is a very attractive place to be. We recently wrote about the collaboration between digital music companies in London, which includes digital music rockstars like Last.fmMixCloud and Songkick.

This week, I met with an editor of Wired UK and asked him what his favorite London based tech companies are. He answered: Last.fm, Songkick, MixCloud, Musicmetric and Tastebuds.fm. To be fair, my editor friend loves music more than most but after asking several other hooked in Londoners, it was clear that London?s startup scene is very proud of its music biz.

And it should be. London has an amazing music scene. There are more live events on average per night in London than any other city in the world. Songkick, the concert app that combs your playlists and notifies you when one of your favorite artist has a concert in town, tried to solve this one problem: that fans often don?t know about a concert until it?s passed. After working to solve it in London, the team has now moved on to try and solve it around the world.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/uk/2011/06/19/cheers-to-londons-tech-scene/

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