IBM, SAP, Cisco and Ascential Software are all located in Bedfont Lakes.

I suppose this isn’t quite the tech hub you envisage as these are all big tech giants and not really a place for start-up companies.

Sorry, but as someone who’s from Silicon Valley and now lives in London, I think you’re probably missing the most salient points here, which are that London has a technology-requiring financial services industry that Silicon Valley never had (and that acts as a gravitational well for software engineers), and that you’re thinking Micro whereas Silicon Valley is Macro.

I’ve written it up here: http://kirkwylie.blogspot.com/2008/10/london-techhub-dont-be-daft.html (Blogger doesn’t do trackbacks) after Rob Knight alerted me to this whole discussion.

Kirk

As you know I am truly for this and I really would like to see this come to fruition sooner rather than later, let me know if I can be of any assistance – I’m more than happy to contribute toward this, as are half of Scotland.

this is a great post and i would like go give it a little bit of a different spin with my comment.

I think that all the entrepreneurs in London should be way closer to each other. In my opinion that is even more important than whether your startup is based in Shoreditch or around London Bridge.

The reason why the valley works is also because of the way the people work and interact with each other. Startups and founders exchange ideas, there are common meeting spots and many organized events. People tend to talk more about their ideas and because of that it is easier to find people to start a project with.

In London we are getting closer to that but we could do more. To be fair, there are already some initiatives like the Social Media Cafe or the Mobile Monday and they both work well.

I guess my point is that we need more and a broader variety of these events. I´m looking for a jour fix to discuss the challenges of growth and choosing the right strategy. I would enjoy it to discuss our VC experience with other startup´s and or VC´s. I would like to see more than just 12 London startup´s in one room and i think i´m not the only one.

If the times are getting rougher than then best thing we can do is to be even better connected, support each other and listen to new ideas or solutions that might help everyone. Let´s sit down and think about how we can be stronger in a few month, maybe by using each others products, or by working together with clients etc.

Mike, what about a meeting under the TechCrunch wrapper? We would be happy to sponsor the first event.

Drop me a line under: bastianlehmann@gmail.com or @basti on twitter if you want to discuss.

cheers,

Bastian

This island has always seemed to have a habit of pulling itself up by its bootstraps in times of crisis … With the credit crunch looming large, that should provide a suitable fighting foe to keep us kicking against with zeal!

@Sam – your point about London-centrism and what is often termed “the regions” is a fair one. What we want to achieve with TechLondon is to extend facilities and networking to companies based out-of-town, and indeed right across Europe. It’s a fair bet that almost all ambitious tech companies will need to spend some time in the capital, seeing clients, suppliers, media, investors etc. What we’d like to do is to provide the sort of networking and meeting resources that a lot of people use Adam Street or Soho House for, but at a fraction of the cost. There’s also a number of options for networking in a virtual space, so we want to offer those to all comers as well.

Interestingly, my own startup, Execer, was very nearly based in Glasgow. This was in part down to academic partnerships, but was also because of the wise and enthusiastic support of Scottish Enterprise (I appreciate other opinions are available …) The LDA by comparison has been in chaos since the mayoral election, and are doing little to support the tech startup sector. TechLondon also needs to act as a pressure group to emphasis politically the significance of our business.

Pete.

The Huddle venue is great btw

Thanks very much for the mention in this post. I thought I might outline my motivation for putting time into this concept. Two really basic things: 1. I’d dearly love to see a new Last.FM or Skype type startup fly outta London and 2. It would be great for our developers to rub shoulders with other .NET people and maybe solve bugs/share tips over a coffee (I’ve seen that happen before and what a time-saver it can be!).

Cheers – Fletch

As for connecting Scotland and others parts of the country, yes, I agree. But allow me to point out that there are always initiatives to create these hubs regionally. What they lack is a big mother hub to plug into that has international significance – a place where the big cheeses in this business come in and out of every day.

Mike, I spoke to you a while back about our tech meetups in Edinburgh. London has some really good stuff going on, but I want to make sure that what’s going on in the rest of the UK also gets connected. So we’re starting to gather a crowd in Scotland and will start working our way down the country.

This island is missing the network or community or whatever word we want to use to describe interaction. I appreciate that this article was about the London scene, but it took me four and half hours to get the train down today (the plane left without me), it’s not that big, can we try and connect it all?