scenius

Belgian Tech Scene - Kris Buytaert Explains

Kris Buytaert has been a prolific contributor to GMT for the last six months, bringing news of the goings-on from the heart of Europe, beside writing for his own blog, Everything is a Freaking DNS Problem. He is a long time Linux and Open Source Consultant doing Linux and Open Source projects in Belgium, Europe and the rest of the universe. He is currently working for Inuits, and starting up some new projects still in stealth mode.
Kris is the co-Author of Virtualization with Xen, used to be the maintainer of the openMosix HOWTO and is the author of different technical publications. He is a frequent speaker at different international conferences. He spends most of his time working on Linux Clustering (both HA and HPC), Virtualisation and Large Infrastructure Management projects, hence trying to build infrastructures that can survive the 10th floor test.
Kris was the obvious choice to ask for an overview of the tech scene in Belgium. He's done us proud.

Let's get started with discussing Belgium, if that even exists as a community... don't get me wrong ... I love Belgium, but the fact is that we are a multilingual country, and it's mostly these languages defining the communities. Luckily there are some exceptions. But still localisation is one of the borders. Where the Flemish speakers will mostly only work either for a local audience in their own language or for an international audience in English, the French speakers often stick with French as they have a big enough audience with that language.

Is the tech scene in Belgium buzzing? Does Belgium have a history of encouraging technology in general and computing specifically? What is the scene like with regards geeks getting together?

Geeks get together ... we have our GeekDinners, monthly events where people from different areas meet, have some fine food and chat about technology. The GeekDinners initiated by Serge van Ginderachter tend to attract an interesting mix of entrepreneurs and kernel hackers. The GeekDinners travel around - we started in Gent, went to Brussels, Antwerp, Leuven and now back to Gent. The GeekGirlDinners are  more hyped (even made it to local TV and national radio) but given the fact that I'm male I can't really comment on them as I’m not one of those wannabees that try to get a date with one of the geekgirls. We're up to the 5th Barcamp, we had 4 editions in Brussels organised by Peter Forret and now Thomas Bouve is organising an edition in Gent. Last but not least we have Robin Wauters organizing frequent OpenCoffeeClub, down in the center of Brussels.

Do you have a vibrant User Group infrastructure? Is there a cross-pollination between people in different areas of technology?

Usergroups tend to be really local and small, usually due to the language issues, they tend to start  … not gain a critical audience … then fall apart.
We had different LUG's over the years, but even the bigger ones are now struggling to get an audience.
Our MySQL group is really small, the PHP group is just starting, the Ruby Group seems to be growing steadily...

What events are specific to your part of the world? And what are the benefits of live events? How do they affect the attendee's creativity and output? What major conferences take place in Belgium? How do they affect the day-to-day life of a techie? Are they a source of inspiration or something that goes on in the background for a while but doesn't really touch the grass roots geek?

Fosdem definitely ... who doesn't know Fosdem? Already in it's 8th edition this year. Fosdem attracts geeks and FOSS developers from all over the planet. With figures up to 5000 visitors (no real figures as there is no registration required), Fosdem is starting to become the victim of its own success. Different development rooms are too small, the BeerEvent location is too small and there definitely isn't enough time to meet everybody who is around.
And of course Javapolis, the Mecca for the Java Developer, one of the bigger events in Europe. I went to the early editions but I haven't visited recently however.
Lots of new groups/organisations are started at Fosdem, most notably this year Fosdem was the founding point of the Postgres Europe organisation. Last year an Open Source Government workgroup was started.

Does the culture support start-ups? Are the government helpful in this regard? Is there a ready supply of venture capitalists eager to invest in the talent of a promising set-up?

I never really did much research on this topic so I’m pretty sure I’ll be missing some stuff here.
The governement support depends on which side of the language border you are - things differ a lot.
On the Flemish side, we have the IWT and the IBBT. I've seen a lot of people trying to get funding from the IWT and few succeeding. The IBBT is doing a good job at getting people together.
On the French side, we have Agence Wallonne des Télécommunications (AWT): their people are also pretty active talking to new businesses, helping them getting started.
The fact is that we don't have a good track record in trying, compared to other countries where you can become a serial re-starter: we have more of a try once, win or disappear mentality. Also we have what we call the "under the church tower" problem. Local businesses often think local, say local and don't even dare to go away from their local church. Luckily also that mentality is changing.

Are other techies supportive? Do the best ideas come from the best techies or do they come from outside the pool of Belgian geeks? Is there a particular business model preferred round your way, eg do the start-ups build to sell, use advertising as a model, give the app away and hope that somehow money will follow, or do people develop purely for fun?

Ideas come from everywhere, sometimes it's dreamers that have absolutely no clue on how to get started, sometimes it's techies who launch before the market is ready. I don't think there is a rule that defines our way of working. Lots of start-ups combine consultancy tracks to get the money rolling with internal development of the product they really want to build, the advantage is that they can invest their own money and still have bread on the table, the disadvantage is their time to market.

What part do key bloggers play? Is there a feedback loop that helps everyone keep in touch with what others are doing? What sites do you all read?

I'm not sure if there is a site we all read ... the tech communities have planet.geekdinner.be and planet.grep.be. There's gentblogt.be but there is much more going on. We have a couple of bloggers that are really talking about the bloggerscene (blogologie.be), others are reporting local startups and business ideas (web.2point0.be)
I'm personally blogging a lot but my audience is not the local start-up scene, I'm sure there are couple of them reading my blog since I'm advising them technically but the first Barcamp we had was more of a blogger meeting than a real techno start-up event where people came to meet and discuss fresh ideas. Lots of start-up folks are blogging, other are more focussing on their code. It's a mixture. Robin Wauters is organizing Plugg which I'm really looking forward to.

Lots of interesting stuff is going to happen in the next couple of months, I've been talking to a lot of people with good ideas ... and some of them are planning to launch soon I'll keep you folks posted :)

Innovation, Technology and Enterpreneurship in Italy

Antonio Bonanno is a resident of Milan, Italy. He is one half, along with Giorgio Montersino, of Digital Natives, a start-up created to help Italian companies put together a Social Networking business strategy. I met him through Franceso D'Orazio after the first Social Media Lab at IULM, when, after he and Giorgio had driven us around the city, he kindly agreed to write a piece summing up the Milanese and Italian tech scenes.

Hi there! First of all, I've got something to confess: this piece is the result of pizza.

Yes, I mean it. I met Craig Smith of O'ReillyGMT at the first of a series of events called Social Media Lab, and we had a great time together eating all sorts of pizza after the conference. Over pizza, it happened. He proposed I should write a piece about Italy and Milan, what's happening here in the Web 2.0/Live Web revolution, so here I am. My name is Antonio Bonanno and I'm one of the two partners of Digital Natives, a start-up based in Italy. What we do is try to help out companies and folks who want to create social networks.

When we talk of social networks, we actually mean a whole lot of things. Social networks have different technological platforms: they can be web-based, on your mobile, in Second Life, in your company's intranet. Each of them is about starting a conversation: with your friends, with your collegues, with some appealing stranger with the same musical tastes. My business partner Giorgio Montersino and I have been active on the Internet for about 8 years, during which time we have seen many developments happen, and we started to play a part in the late 90's when we began building websites. Although we've been working together for about 6 years now, we only recently started our own company. During these years, we met a lot of interesting people, and with a mix of their experiences and ours, I will try to outline what's happening on the Italian scene in the Internet field. On a personal note, I would like to thank Craig for this opportunity. So, here we go!

CS - Are the tech scenes in Italy and Milan buzzing? Does Italy have a history of encouraging technology in general and computing specifically? What is the scene like with regards geeks getting together?

There is a lot going on and the community is very active, but I wouldn't say that Italy has a history of encouraging technology, in general. We've had our great times (Olivetti in the 70s), but we recently lost a lot of that competitiveness in the field. I asked Mafe De Baggis, from Daimon, about this at LeWeb3: in her opinion, Italians don't like to take risks: they prefer to work for an assured gain, rather than risk high capital. Also, in Italy we have an "innovation caste", that makes it very difficult for people with good ideas to emerge from the underground. Mafe also played a part in the formation of the community of internet innovators in Milan: she told me about the very beginning, when people started to meet at a bar called Movida: at first they were seen as Martians by members of other business communities, but with time the community started to grow and regain the status of earthliness as the Internet itself grew. The variety of members of the community started to vary, too, from techie-only to a wide range of professionals, from journalist to the emerging jobs of the latest years, community managers, project managers and so on. The community is today still quite strong even off-line.

CS - Do you have a vibrant User Group infrastructure? Is there a cross-pollination between people in different areas of technology?

Working to organize a network of freelancers, I personally think intercommunication between different tech areas is vital both for the growth of new ideas and for the correct development of projects. Working without talking to each other doesn't lead anywhere: that's why, at Digital Natives, we don't forget that the person as a whole, and not only their specific abilities, are key to every project. Federico Fasce, community designer and blogger currently working with Daimon, has a different idea. He thinks that there are some interesting communities of people willing to help each other, some even with a solid knowledge base, and gives HTML as an example. It has active groups in HTML, PHP and general webapps and the forum managed by Giorgio Taverniti is a great source for SEO and web marketing information. These kinds of communities tend to form around technical topics. Cross-pollination is more of an issue: there is some within specific communities (web app developers talk to web app designers) but not among the communities themselves. One example is the web and the game industry in Italy: so far there haven't been contacts between the two that lead to a reciprocal cross-pollination of businesses.

CS - What events are specific to your part of the world? And what are the benefits of live events? How do they affect the attendee's creativity and output?

Especially lately, events have multiplied at all levels: governmental entities started organizing events with the aim of evangelizing people who are not familiar with the technology and the revolution that's happening; private organizations focused on getting people together to talk business; members of the tech communities self-organized to promote events with more specific targets, with a strong preference for the "barcamp" model. Nicola Mattina spoke and helped organize a lot of these events. He recently talked business at Web2Oltre in Milan: in his opinion, the event was way too expensive, although it was targeted at corporate executives. BarCamps instead have no cost for attendees, but unlike the ones that happen in other parts of Europe (UK) and where they were born (California), they tend to derail too much towards fun and put innovation and real exchange of ideas aside. It is really hard, Nicola says, to hear interesting things at BarCamps in Italy. Both creative and business output are not very well developed, although they are a good place to meet new friends and recruit people to work with on a variety of projects. Nicola suggests that for future events it would be best to adopt the OpenConference model, rather than continue with barcamps. On the same note, Federico Fasce thinks the most important activities at events is networking. Barcamps have so far been successful in that, because they have become "the place" for networking among bloggers and members of the different parts of the community. What Federico also sees is a great deal of attention coming from people who are not part of the community, trying to understand what is happening. Events like the recent one organized by Top-IX show an effort in this direction.

CS - What major conferences take place in Italy and Milan? How do they affect the day-to-day life of a techie? Are they a source of inspiration or something that goes on in the background for a while but doesn't really touch the grass roots geek?

From the perspective of Luca Conti, among the most popular bloggers in Italy with his blog Pandemia, most of the events that take place in Italy are nothing but an attempt to involve the big players that have something to do with the web but are not web-based businesses, thus come from the marketing/advertising side, to stimulate new opportunities and evangelize them. For this reason, the average content level of these events is quite low: it is often the case these events are little more than a showcase, where no real innovation takes place. The targets are traditional and new media and corporate managers who represent either big advertising agencies or companies that are interested in adopting web tools. The geek world is seldom participating in these events, because they have high entrance fees, and if they're free, they're very often simply showcases of products of these or that company. That is why Paolo Valdemarin and Beniamino Pagliaro organized a 2-day conference called "State of the Net" (February 8th-9th, in Udine), that has the aim to change this trend and speak of what innovation is really about: as Paolo told me, the event will be focused on the web and its impact on society from a professional and cultural point of view, with topics ranging from information management to the web's social impact. They recently launched the event, which is going to have a very interesting line-up that will be revealed day by day on the website of the event. The event is structured into 3-4 keynotes, 6-7 sessions in which a certain numbers of topics will be faced, in panels with a mixture of web professionals, both Italian and foreign. The event aims to gather both professionals and people who are just interested in those aspects of communication which involve the web.

CS - Does the culture support start-ups? Are the government helpful in this regard? Is there a ready supply of venture capitalists eager to invest in the talent of a promising set-up?

Speaking of start-ups in Italy at this time is a hard task. On one side, we see a lot of new stuff coming up, with very interesting products to be delivered to the market soon. On the other, it becomes more and more evident the need for a big change of culture towards enterpreneurs. Most of the investments and money are in the hands of the big players, who are just now starting to think of investing in smaller businesses (with some exceptions, of course). Alberto D'Ottavi, consultant and blogger, member of 1Generation and NewTwo, a network of entrepreneurs encouraging the intiatives of young entrepreneurs, thinks that despite the vast number of initiatives, mostly linked to incubators in universities, the level of innovation is quite low. However, the VC system in Italy is opening up to small initiatives. Today there are VCs in Italy - the real problem they have is that they don't find worthwhile initiatives: most of the initiatives that are now coming up are B2B, and they don't offer enough perspective growth. Italy had a great deal of innovative products in the past: Yoox, VolaGratis, Dada, Tiscali, Buongiorno.it, all Italian intiatives that had success both inside and outside Italy. The same enterpreneurs now are starting to welcome the new wave, which is actually already here. Luca Mascaro, owner of Sketchin, a company based in the Italian canton of Switzerland and operating a lot in Italy, has observed that a few Italian VCs started investing also in Ticino, to expand their range of action and possibilities. The start-up culture we have here in Italy (and Western Europe in general) is much different from the American or Northern European one: our entrepreneurs tend to risk much more, to reduce start-up costs. Our competitivity is mostly on risk, than on quality; as Eric Reiss noted in his recent keynote at the Italian Information Architecture Summit, in Italy we do more invention than actual innovation. Mafe De Baggis also notes that most of the initiatives of innovation that governmental entities launch are really hard to access: the deal of documentation that is needed to even access them is so high that creative and brilliant people are discouraged to even try. Lele Dainesi, one of the most popular bloggers and now working for Cisco Italy CEO Stefano Venturi, has been overviewing some really interesting initiatives Cisco is taking in Italy. From its position, Cisco is trying to replicate in Italy the Silicon Valley culture that made it the company it is. The Cisco facility in Monza is the biggest R&D center in Europe, with top level engineers, where a lot of the products Cisco does in the whole world are sent for testing and developement. In this facility, Cisco recently started a series of events trying to connect Italy and Silicon Valley, to encourage investments and innovation in our country. The most recent one is an event that took place with the presence of the US Ambassador in Italy, Mr. Spogli, and a panel of experts in venture capital and related subjects. As a follow-up, a group of Italian enterpreneurs and innovators recently went to Silicon Valley to present their products and look at opportunities there. Cisco itself is promoting a VC culture: one of the most recent acquisitions, WebEx, was done in that spirit. What Dainesi hopes is that Cisco will manage to replicate the same culture in Italy.

CS - Are other techies supportive? Do the best ideas come from the best techies or do they come from outside the pool of Italian geeks? Is there a particular business model preferred round your way, eg do the start-ups build to sell, use advertising as a model, give the app away and hope that somehow money will follow, or do people develop purely for fun?

Alberto D'Ottavi, as member of 1Generation and NewTwo, has a very good perspective from which to look at these matters: he thinks that we are now learning to be supportive of each other, because the working culture in Italy for many years meant looking for a stable job rather than taking risks as entrepreneurs. What happened recently is that on top of the few big companies, there are now a lot of smaller initiatives, led by a professionals or small companies. In the first New Economy, around 2000, we saw the explosion and the creation of a lot of initiatives in the tech field, even of a considerable size, mostly concentrated in Milan, which is the advertising pole, and Rome, the telecommunications pole. Now the situation has changed, we have a huge number of small professionals, who work and cooperate on a national scale, communicating and exchanging experiences through the Net, and events like BarCamps and such. What we're still missing is a structured ecosystem. The business model that is most used in Italy is the one of development and integration of new technologies, particularly B2B. Paolo Valdemarin agrees on the present situation, where there are a lot of protagonists who work in more than one project of development. He also notes that the level of competitiveness is low, because of the lack of structure of the company ecosystem, which makes it really hard to establish which is the most used business model, in his view.

CS - What part do key bloggers play? Is there a feedback loop that helps everyone keep in touch with what others are doing? What sites do you all read?

Since I was in Paris with many of the most prominent bloggers in Italy (according to stats), I took the occasion to ask them what their views about blogging are. Luca Conti writes on many blogs, the most important being "Pandemia". He has been a protagonist of the Italian blogosphere for a long time. The part played by bloggers, he thinks, if you compare it to the blogospheres in other European countries, is less prominent, even if the potential is high. The situation is slowly changing, even if the dimension of the blogosphere is small, and we almost all know each other. The fact that we have these connections, however, doesn't mean the blogosphere is fully cooperative inside. There is a good deal of competition, mostly based on views and visits more than content: in Luca's perspective, there should be more cooperation to help raising attention to some very important issues we all feel as fundamental (i.e. net neutrality, technology tools diffusion and so on). His five blogs: Stefano Quintarelli, Andrea Beggi, Giovy, Tommaso Tessarolo, Robin Good. I asked Nicola Mattina what he thinks of the Italian blogosphere. Some of the relations he had as a blogger then became work opportunies (like the one with Sole24Ore, the leading economic daily newspaper in Italy, which has a Thursday special on Technology called "Nova24"). Blogs, in his view, are used to start conversations: speaking through a blog is almost easier than speaking in the "traditional" way. One of the problems of the blogosphere in Italy, he thinks, is the fact that it's self-referenced: if you write in English, or speak of a project you made in any other language than Italian, only a few will pay attention. I asked Nicola (and all the others, too) to give me 5 addresses of blogs he usually reads; his list is: Zoro; Luca De Biase; Maestrini per Caso; Luca Conti; Gianni Cuperlo. Lele Dainesi thinks we're in a critical moment of the Italian blogosphere and of Web 2.0 in general, in Italy. The attention that is now given to bloggers is not based on content, but on what they do and say or who they know, in a sort of cult of presentialism. It's not healthy to keep the blogosphere closed as it is now: new entries are less and less, and this creates the akward effect of encouraging personalism. Lele thinks we should get back to content, and speak less of charts, self-exposition, or self-promotion.

The future of blogging, in Lele's view, is in social networks. He sees a lot of creativity coming from sites like FaceBook or Xing: bloggers will form microcommunities of specialists in certain matters. What is emerging now in the blogosphere is the need for identity management: people want to be different personas in different situations: being a "public persona" is radically changing. Mafe De Baggis, in a very interesting remark, said that the real crisis of blogging happens when bloggers sell their capacity for suggesting and criticism. One of the most important roles that bloggers should keep is the role of the "maven" (a quote from Tipping Point, Gladwell, 2001), people who are genuinely interested in providing you with the information to do the best choice. Five blogs for Mafe: Mamma per sbaglio, Zoro, Kurai, Squonk, Mantellini.

Before my conclusions, I would like to give you a sneak view of a couple of really good initiatives that are originated in Italy or by Italian entepreneurs and developers I got in touch with in Paris, and before in London at the Virtual Worlds Forum. One is Dixero. It was launched January 15th, and it's a service that was developed by Sketchin (owned by Luca Mascaro, who told me about it) and Phiware, with a mixture of Italian and Swedish capital. What it does is it gives the possibility to aggregate and vocalize your favourite RSS feeds with your preferred voice, transforming any entry in a podcast. It works with any standard RSS, from your calendar to your e-mail. In Luca's vision, it will help people "prolong" their 24-hours day, with the possibility of putting things to listen in background while doing other things. The other one is Myrl. Myrl is a social network for the Metaverse, a cross-world platform aiming to bring together users from multiple virtual worlds. The initiative was started by Francesco D'Orazio, who now lives in London, with Italian funds. The first upcoming release of Myrl will have a specific focus on social virtual worlds, bringing together users from worlds like Second Life and There.com. Among the most interesting aims and uses of Myrl, which are many, there are these two: Myrl helps bridge the gap between virtual worlds and the web and to integrate web2.0 tools in the Metaverse user experience, while gathering users from multiple social virtual worlds in one place to build a cross-world community of users, in order to stimulate cross-world interaction (world-hopping, not world interoperability), to stimulate a cross-fertilization amongst different virtual world user bases and to promote an organic vision of the Metaverse, as opposed to a walled garden style constellation of worlds. We are waiting for a public beta release of Myrl, which should happen in the next days. Stay tuned! I think that's all. Speaking to all these people with different views was extremely interesting and I hope it gives a nice portrait of the situation in Italy. For any other quesion or information, you can leave a comment here or contact me by e-mail.

Thanks for your attention!

Scenes: Manchester and The North-West

I was at Manchester Polytechnic between 1986 and 1989, playing about with online chemistry abstracts and yet not quite realising the potential that lay at my fingers. Manchester is a great city to live in, with the facilities of a major conurbation but the feel of a small town, and it has a fantastic tech pedigree. The city is a vibrant metropolis at the heart of the North-West and though it's much gentrified since I was there, it has a busy grass roots that goes out of its way to make things happen.

Andrew Disley and Paul Robinson are two players on the Manchester geek scene who are making real efforts to bring people together. Andrew started the GeekUp franchise, which has spread virally to the mouth of the Mersey and over the Pennines to Leeds. Like Andrew, Paul has quickly evolved from being purely a developer into an event organiser of note, co-founding User Groups and Community Groups because nothing at the time provided the forum that he needed. Both are strong advocates for the city, the North-West and the North as a whole, championing the cause of and encouraging the participants in the multitude of activities that take place in the towns and cities either side of the M62. These are guys with a world outlook but a local base and they move seamlessly from picking through the minutiae of a block of code to taming the maelstrom of a Northern tech meet.

They were good enough to answer a few questions about Manchester and the North-West.

Who are you? What do you do? What are you aiming to achieve?

Paul Robinson (PR): I'm Paul Robinson, the owner/founder of Vagueware Ltd which is a software development company and soon-to-be online publisher dedicated to innovation in the software industry. I'm loosely attached to GeekUp but more involved in the Manchester BSD User Group and the NWDC. I worked on public sector stuff a few years back, and before that was working in the local ISP scene. I graduated from UMIST (now part of Manchester University) in Software Engineering and have lived in the city centre for the last decade.

I'm a kind of a developer with strong sys admin skills who wants to get more into writing. ;-)

In more broad terms, my main business is Vagueware Ltd. It started as a software company building Rails apps freelance and doing bespoke work, but I've evolved my business plan in public. I'm now a few days away from releasing the latest version of that plan, aka "the simplest thing that will work", which is best described here:
http://blog.vagueware.com/2007/8/5/almost-there

My driving force is that there isn't enough innovation in the open source space, and developers aren't plugged in to listening to their user base. For now, I want to get the 400+ ideas for software products on my desk/in my head out there for somebody to be able to play with. If in the process we build ad-hoc open source projects or even commercial businesses off them, great.

Some people ask how I intend to monetise this, to which I shrug my shoulders and say "I'll work it out eventually". Like I said in my last post: doing interesting things appeals more than doing something boring with a guaranteed return. Or maybe I'm just dumb.

Manchester seems a great place to be a techie at the moment. Has that always been the case? Does Manchester have a history of encouraging technology in general and computing specifically?

Andrew Disley (AD):   Manchester is said to be the birthplace of modern computing, Alan Turing was based at Manchester University and his stored-program idea led to Tom Kilburn's "Baby" (Manchester Mark I) - the world's first stored-program electronic digital computer.

PR: Wow, where to start...
OK, first off Turing came here after the War and worked at Manchester University on "The Baby", the World's first stored program digital computer. The University is justifiably proud of this, and built a replica of that machine to mark the 50th anniversary:
http://www.computer50.org/

Between 1948 and until at least the mid/late 1950s the University was one of the few places you could buy a computer if you were a government type in need of one - it was really a pioneering centre of innovation in the early days. If you have access to the BBC Archive Trial there's an interesting docu in there called "The Brain in the Box" in which Profs Kilburn and Williams are interviewed.

As you probably know, Manchester went through a period of economic decline in the late 50's through to the 1990s with much of the North in decline. During that period there was a focus on industrialisation and Manchester kind of lost its way and ended up in a bit of trouble.

In the early 1990s there was some interest in digital media in the city, but it was mostly coming from the angle of "new media" - i.e. web design, interactive content, etc. There is an argument this is related to the rise of the Northern Quarter (where even now most web companies are based), which in turn was helped by the rise of the music scene in Manchester.

What helps this argument is that whilst most centres of digital innovation (Silicon Valley, Taiwan, China, Estonia, Israel, et al) are driven by the economics of the sector, Manchester is pretty unique in that it's driven by the creative possibilities. We need to make money, sure, but doing something interesting always seems to have appealed to the Manchester companies more than doing something outrageously profitable but boring.

After the '96 IRA bomb which required a major rebuilding of the city centre, there was a renewed sense of purpose in the region and the North West Development Agency (the NW's RDA) combined with ERDF giving the region Objective 2 status meant the council and several Universities were able to throw money at a purpose. This was described to me as "To make the North West of England the Silicon Valley of Europe." I was involved in one project at MMU to help businesses engage in digital media and to try and promote business development within the sector: help little web companies find their way to breaking big and dominating in their niche. That experiment broadly failed in immediate terms, but the knock-on effects have been considerable. A lot of companies in Manchester now know of each other and look out for each other as a direct consequence of that project.

In addition, the council set up MDDA which is still running. They're more interested in helping disadvantaged parts of the community gain access to technology but have a broad interest in business development as well.

If you add on top of that Manchester Digital - the city's own trade association for new media/tech companies - and the effort that goes into Big Chip Awards, you can see there's a lot of effort to try and make the sector really viable here.

Has the original goal been achieved? Are we Silicon Valley? No.

But then, I think the emphasis has changed: we're no longer interested as a community in being Silicon Valley - we're interested in being Manchester, and being the very best Manchester we can be. There's a lot of grass roots tech work going on here, with the largest University campus in Europe, with a massive R&D spend, and it's affordable and enjoyable living here, that's where the vive is headed...

What is the scene like with regards people getting together to talk geek?

PR: Strong. There are to my knowledge at least half a dozen regular geek get togethers every month covering everything from high-level topics of interest to business managers in the sector down to piss-ups with Unix sys admins.

Do you have a vibrant User Group infrastructure?

PR: There is a regular meeting of organisers of the various user groups (known as the North West Digital Communities, or NWDC for short) where we sit down face-to-face for a couple of hours, talk about what we're all doing and what we can do next.

I get the feeling we're all determined to make people talk to each other and make interesting things happen. We're supported in part by MDDA and Manchester Digital which gives us focus and means we get cross-pollination. Suddenly a guy who runs an event for VCs is talking to a Unix sys admin and trying to work out if those two groups can overlap somehow.

It's early days, but it's getting interesting...

Is there a cross-pollination between different tech areas, eg do the wireless guys party with the Unix crowd, do the developers and designers hang-out together?

AD:   As far as I can tell it's only been recently (the last 2 years) that techies in Manchester have started to cross-pollinate. At the end of 2005 I formed GeekUp, after I failed to find an exisiting User Group that would connect me with other designers and developers in the area. GeekUp, while predominately web related, isn't based on a specific technology so all techie's are encouraged to come along. GeekUp's take place each month and proven to be successful in Manchester there are now GeekUp's in Leeds and Liverpool. There is also a number of technology specific User Groups:
* BSD User Group
* Linux User Group
* .Net User Group
* North West Ruby User Group

In February of this year North West Digital Communities formed. NWDC brings together the leaders of local communities to improve the local digital community by sharing resources and pooling ideas.

PR:   Sometimes. The web guys tend to stay away from the Unix/Windows sys admin guys, but there is an overlap where developers mix between the two. VC events tend to draw SME developers looking to network and so it seems the Venn diagram puts development across the major groups.

I might be biased though: I'm a SME developer and I go to nearly all the events I can, and the only people who tend to show up to all of them with me are developers. We're like some kind of weird glue. :-)

What events are specific to your part of the world? And what is the benefit of live events to the attendee? How does it affect their output?

PR: GeekUp is exclusively Northern at the moment. To my knowledge me and Sam Smith run the only regular BSD User Group in the UK here. The OpenCoffee stuff was started down in London, but Manoj Ranaweera is doing a lot to promote them across the region.

There are plans for a much bigger event next year, but we're keeping that close to our chests for the time being. It should be quite interesting though if we pull it off. That will be very Mancunian in the modern/cosmopolitan/forward-looking sense of the word "Mancunian".

In terms of benefit, part of it is just knowing that there are other geeks around here. Knowing you don't need to move to London or CA to make something happen is something I think helps people. And then there is the conversation, the beer, oh the beer... :-)

What are employment opportunities like for a techie in Manchester?

PR: Variable. If you've got the skills, the work is here. A lot of kids end up going elsewhere in the UK but work hard to get back here if this is where they studied - it might have a reputation for rain, but there's something addictive about living in and around Manchester.

If you want to work for a small company (and take everything that involves) there is plenty of work around for somebody who knows their stuff. Bullshitters and coasters don't tend to last long in my experience: you either have the kung fu, or you need to go to London where you won't get noticed in the swarm of what I can only kindly refer to as "mediocrity". :-)

The BBC move is expected to produce a lot of jobs, but I'm cynical of how many will be recruited from local population...

In geek-related areas like biotech and engineering there's quite a lot of opportunity around here as well. Astra Zeneca invest in the region, and the University is trying to bring in a dozen or so Nobel laureates.

Where things really fly around here though is if you've got the balls to set up on your own...

Are there big companies that dominate?

PR: Not really. It's a SME city in many ways. That's expected to change to some extent with the BBC move to Salford, but big companies tend to move out to the suburbs or down South: a large web tech company in Manchester would be one having more than a dozen employees.

At the last count I saw in later 2005, there were reckoned to be around 4000 such companies in the North West, but that had a pretty broad definition of "digital" attached to it.

Do they innovate?

PR: Not as much as they should. I'm trying to do something about that. :-)

Most innovative company I think that geeks should know about, based a 10-minute train journey away from the city centre:
Starchaser

Yes, the rockets are real and they work. :-)

The Big Chip Awards is the place where a lot of local firms show off their digital media stuff, but I think in the next few years there is going to be a lot more in general tech locally.

As you probably know, innovation tends to come from smaller, risk-taking companies than it does much bigger firms. We're primed, we're just not moving as hard as we could yet, IMHO.

AD:   GeekUp runs it's own Job Board. The up and coming Media City UK will no doubt open up massive employment in the area, with the BBC set to move 1500 London based jobs up North.

Is the work on offer interesting or routine?

PR: It tends to be bespoke development work for larger organisations. High street names often bring their digital portfolio to be developed here. What's just starting to break out now is the start-up with their own technology funded out of VC or other investment channels.

I expect in the next few years Manchester will become more of a mixture of companies that develop for themselves as part of their own business as well as handling bespoke development as part of a media campaign.

Does the work focus on any particular technology or admin/programming skills? Are there Open Source opportunites?

PR: I'd say it's dominated by web and ISP work (we have the largest concentration of telecoms and data centre work outside of London) but there are some interesting light engineering firms doing interesting stuff with embedded systems. They're not prominent though, and don't talk themselves up.

What about the big national/international tech companies - do they have big set-ups that co-ordinate with the grass roots developers? Any developments in the pipeline to look forward to?

PR: Sun Microsystems is working hard to reach us, and they're just starting to succeed. They're based down the road, and doing much better at engaging than the regional IBM office (which is mostly sales). Google has a Manchester office but it's sales only.

If they took notice of us, we'd take notice of them. As it is, we're quite happy co-existing if they're not interested in what's under their noses.

Does the culture support start-ups?

PR: Yes. The Northern Quarter is very bohemian, and the city itself is full of relatively cheap office space. The cost of living is comparatively low for a cosmopolitan city, and VCs are starting to take interest. The Universities run R&D outfits and incubators and because the city itself is so small everybody kind of has a way of knowing everybody else - useful when you need ideas and contacts.

Are the government helpful in this regard?

PR: The Objective 2 funding has ended, but the NWDA still are trying to help in ways they can. The council are keen to help where they can through MDDA, but it's becoming more "self-hosting" through Manchester Digital and GeekUp and NWDC. We're trying to break the culture of saying "why isn't somebody doing something about this?" and actually doing something about it ourselves. It'll take a while, but if the enthusiasm is there, it'll work.

Is there a ready supply of venture capitalists eager to invest in the talent of a promising set-up?

PR: I know of one VC firm on the look out for local companies, and there are rumours of more expecting knocks on the door. To my knowledge, it's only these guys who go to the effort of trying to knock on geeks first:
http://www.enterprise-ventures.co.uk/

Are other techies supportive?

PR: Very. Sometimes the mailing lists for local techs can be a bit aggressive, but that's what happens when you get a bunch of intelligent, opinionated people who know what they're talking about together. In general though, great bunch of people.

Do the best ideas come from the best techies or do they come from outside the pool of Manchester geeks?

PR: All over the place. The geeks tend to be the waterwheel of the local industry, but they're not always the people who decided there needs to be a waterwheel in the first place. :-)

Is there a particular business model preferred round your way, eg do the start-ups build to sell, use advertising as a model, give the app away and hope that somehow money will follow, or do people develop purely for fun?

PR: It's mostly bespoke development, so you pay, we play, you get a working set of code to make you rich.

There's a mild increase in VC and investment funding, and they're keen to follow open models where possible. A mixture of build-to-flip and build-to-dominate in my experience.

There is a lot of hobbyist work around here though - lots of passion out there for doing interesting things. "Hacking" is starting to mean something pure around here these days, which is nice given that for  years the only geek group that met were 2600.

What part do key bloggers play? Is there a feedback loop that helps everyone keep in touch with what others are doing? What sites do you all read?

AD:  GeekUp has an active mailing which keeps everyone up to date with whats going on.

PR: The GeekUp afeeda is closely tracked and has several blogs on it from local geeks doing different things, there are plenty of mailing lists knocking about, etc.

What major conferences go on in your neck of the woods? How do they affect the day-to-day life of a techie? Are they a source of inspiration or something that goes on in the background for a while but doesn't really touch the grass roots geek?

AD:   Up to now the only major grass roots conference I can think of that Manchester has hosted was the first international OpenStreetMap conference. Next year Manchester will be home to a four-day long Futurology: 2008 Manchester UK conference. On a smaller level GeekUp hosted a one day mini conference on Ruby and Rails, and because of its success, Dave Verwer formed the NWRUG.

PR:  Have laptop, will travel: it's not unusual for whole groups of us to suddenly appear in Brighton, Berlin, London or Paris for a conference. Tends to be focused on EU and UK confs, but sometimes people wander off to the US.

I wouldn't say they're a major driving force, but make for interesting conversation. Like I say before, there are plans for us to do something here in Manchester in the next year which I hope will be notable, and then we'll see where we take that as a city.

South Africa by Dirk Tolken

The changes in South Africa over the last few years have been possibly greater as those in any other country on the planet. We asked Cape Town-based Web Entrepreneur Dirk Tolken for his take on the Tech Scene in South Africa:

Who are you? What do you do? How big is your operation? What's your role?

My name is Dirk Tolken and I am the managing director of PERONii Solutions (www.peronii.co.za), a new media marketing solutions provider based in Cape Town, South Africa. We are a small, sub 10 staff agency that enables us to keep up to date with current online trends and change direction quickly (especially with the volatile nature of SEO / SEM). This allows us to deliver the latest innovative web development and marketing technologies to our clients. Our services include web development, internet marketing (search engine optimisation, search marketing like PPC, email marketing and more) and graphic design.

PERONii is part of a group of companies that specialise in various fields, including inbound tourism, mobile software technology and online gaming, all of which we provide various inhouse Internet related services to.

My role in the company is that of chief strategist, new business, online marketing and project manager. As small business owner one tends to wear different hats at all times.

What percentage of your business is local, national, continental, or global? Do you find that the demands of your customers dictate what software you use? How aware are your clients of developments in the web space? Do you find yourself explaining new technologies to explain their benefit?

Most of our business is South Africa based (with probably a 70/30 split of local and national), but we're busy breaking into the global market with strategic partnerships and our optimisation skills gaining us ground on the internationally competitive search terms. We're actively looking for agencies in Europe and the US to promote our skills as we're able to provide service at almost two thirds of the pricing in the UK and US which is of course an attractive selling point. As far as continental goes, we find that tourism & communication plays a major part in how technology enters Africa (when taking a perspective from the Internet industry). There is an ever growing sub-Saharan tourism industry and with South Africa being the most developed country we often have tourism start-ups that direct tours to these countries. In essence we find it to be more South African initiatives than clients that approach us from other African countries (other than the odd 419 scam now and then).

We usually dictate the technology to be used, but in certain cases clients come to us with existing solutions and we then build on that or suggest better solutions.

In South Africa, people are starting to wake up to the power of online marketing and we're working hard on educating existing and prospective clients. I tend to keep a library of FAQ's that I use to educate prospects. I have been published in a local magazine, writing about the 'Power of Internet Marketing' and have had positive response on that so I'll be looking at doing more of that.

Technology developments like for instance Web 2.0 and other lesser known developments tend to go under the radar to most of the buying market here, except in some cases where mainstream advertising picks up on certain trends. There was an ad on TV recently about margarine of all things that mentioned blogging and the online community here were quick to criticise the advertising company for not using it to their advantage and actually extending the campaign to the web. It could have been great education opportunity for the mainstream.

Our larger portals and service providers also do well in education, but there's always something new and more education to be done.

How did you get into technology? Was that typical of South Africa at the time? What equipment/software do you work with? How does Open Source help you in your work?

I have always been interested in science and technology. I guess I grew out of science and adopted technology as my main interest. In my early years we were playing with Atari's, Commodore 64's and later PC's, mostly through gaming. In the mid to late 90's networking and getting Microsoft Certification was all the craze, with many networking engineers leaving for London. I still have friends who have stayed on there.

We're PC based, using all the major software (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash and a string of others). Open source helps a lot. Our space venturing pioneer Mark Shuttleworth, who started Thawte Consulting (online security technology acquired by Verisign) is now doing great work through his Shuttleworth Foundation to promote math, science and open source to young learners here. We use open source daily, but only that which has good support systems behind it.

Can you explain about the computing scene in South Africa? Is there much User Group activity? How about Events? How conducive is the South African scene to Start-ups? What particular challenges do new tech businesses face in your country? What African/South African developments should the rest of the world be aware of?

The computing scene in South Africa is alive and well and growing very fast. As mentioned before, gaming is a good entry point for young people to get introduced and the Internet is accessible throughout most of South Africa. We are pretty much on par with the rest of the world technology wise, but infrastructure tends to be a problem with the monopoly of Telkom, our main telephonics and Internet infrastructure provider. Things are however slowly changing with increased wireless mobile technology and a second telephone operator entering the arena soon.

The larger user groups here are mainly from large portals, but there are many smaller niche groups just as anywhere else in the world. Computing events are still limited to gaming mostly, but there are some conferences on Internet Marketing starting to show around the major cities. These are of course good points of access for the industry trying to do some education.

South Africa is a land of opportunity at the moment and entrepreneurial spirit is rife. Our economy is growing well and technology is playing a big part. There are various start-ups here that are leaders in their field globally. Paypal for instance was started by a South African, but unfortunately due to certain financial laws (mainly from SARS, our revenue service) we're not able to use it here. The greatest challenge for new tech business is the education aspect. I was part of a company in 2000 that developed dynamic pricing technology that was way ahead of what anyone has seen before (in fact I have yet to see something like it again), but we had a rather reluctant market at the time so it went down as a dot bomb. I think with that being history now, the second wave of Internet technology that is available now is much better received due to the local market having been exposed to it for longer. It is like any new technology that arrives on the market anywhere around the world I guess.

Developments here that the world can be aware of? That's a big question, but I can say that the South African tech / IT community consists of hard workers and we're technologically well advanced. We're not an India or China as far as outsourcing is concerned (as in pure bulk), but I believe we have a place in the world as the gateway to Africa, and Africa will be (in my opinion) the next big thing the world industries will look at over the next 20 years as there is much development (economically and technologically) still to be done.

Mobile technology is big in South Africa and there are some great social networking services on the up, which I am sure will spill over to the business world (as with web 2 technologies) as it grows mature. Tourism is also a huge industry here, and there are still many opportunities surfacing around the 2010 World Cup Soccer. We're looking forward to have everyone visit Cape Town!

Paris by Xavier Cazin

Introducing Scenius

Geeks and poets: both work in isolation, and yet both love to meet to talk shop. While it's a pre-requisite for techies to be able to work well on their own, it's abundantly clear that they thrive in a vibrant scene where busy user groups and stimulating events let them air their dreams in public. Give them a pint of beer and a few like-minds in a scruffy pub and ideas are triggered and innovative solutions to seemingly intransigent problems pop into their heads that might not have occurred when hacking away before a terminal. A thriving scene can help them lift their game to the next level as the fun and feedback catalyse their natural talent and their desire to create. Scenius is the word musician and producer Brian Eno coined to describe this collective intelligence working at scene level, the Greater-Than-The-Sum-Of-The-Parts phenomenon that kicks in when people gather with a joint M.O. and a willingness to pursue their own aims while helping their counterparts pursue theirs, the Get-Together equivalent of Web 2.0..

It's not just in technology that this happens - Paris in the 30's was the place to be a writer, the Brill Building in New York in the early '60's was the dream location for wannabe songwriters, the Grunge ethic and aesthetic crystalised in Seattle in the late '80's: suddenly, the infrastructure and the talent fall into place, a mixture of innovative ideas nurtured with intelligent tutelage, a touch of patronage and the appropriate marketing vehicles, and epochs are born.

All over the world, these scenes are blossoming, and each are as ripe for legend as any involving Hemingway or Joyce, Jobs or Torvalds, at least in the hearts of the participants. World notoriety might be a long way off, but there's a much greater chance of a project getting a wider audience or VC funding if there's an infrastructure and grapevine working to champion its cause and an existing user pool benefiting from it on a daily basis.

To look closely at the interconnecting parts of these burgeoning scenes is to see community in action. Each scene is different, each can learn something from the other, yet the common thread is the creative individual stretching themselves to make their mark, all the while having a fine old time in the company of their peers. Huge revolutionary leaps and small evolutionary increments are going on around the planet all the time, and the more we hear these tales, the more we feel we can do it, too, we can create something that makes a difference.

Craig Smith, May 2007

 

Paris: by Xavier Cazin

A few days before he spoke at XTech in Paris, I asked Xavier Cazin of O'Reilly Editions to talk us through the Parisian Tech scene:

Paris seems a great place to be a techie at the moment, with XTech just around the corner. Is that the case? Has that always been the case? Does Paris and France have a history of encouraging technology in general and computing specifically?

Paris is becoming a very comfortable place for a techie to live. Thanks to the explosion of high bandwith triple-play ADSL boxes, anyone can now enjoy at home a minimum of 600Ko/s incoming bandwith and 100Ko/s outgoing, as well as free telephony and hundreds of international tv channels for just 30€ per month. This network of boxes even allows Wi-Fi telephony; the most innovative player on the ADSL front, Free (www.free.fr) recently enabled this feature for its 2 million subscribers: you now can benefit from the free telephony feature of your own box whenever you walk near other so-called Freeboxes, or from any accessible WiFi network in the world for that matter. The future of networking in Paris also looks bright; free wifi access and fiber optics everywhere before 2010, dedicated servers in brand new datacenters for around 30€ per month: Parisians will be able to broadcast their own TV very soon, and companies won't need to host and maintain their own servers.

Technology has always been encouraged in France, but, until very recently, it was made "à la française", that is mostly via big universities and big corporates or directly via government initiatives. French innovators tend to come from these established structures, where they learned enough about French communication infrastructure to start a niche. For example, the founder of the above mentioned Free started as a Minitel service provider, where he understood the specificity of the France Telecom homogeneous network and key people. Quite a few French innovators today come from the early days of the French Internet (even people behind http://www.nabaztag.com/!)

What is the scene like with regards people getting together to talk geek? Do you have a vibrant User Group infrastructure? Is there a cross-pollination between different tech tribes, eg do the wireless guys party with the Unix crowd, do the developers and designers hang-out together? What events are specific to your part of the world? And what is the benefit of live events to the attendee? How does it affect their output?

Technical user groups have usually been quite small and informal here. Often they meet during their studies and start a project there, but don't try to grow. There may be tons of them that I didn't even hear about! There have been visible ones around Linux, TeX,  XML, PHP, IPv6 or Wi-Fi, and also music or games, but there doesn't seem go beyond a few dozens of people at the same time. The two biggest events for techies to gather and exchange are Solutions Linux and RMLL. On the proprietary side, Microsoft and Apple both organize regular events, but visitors seem to mostly come there in order to keep up with new products more than exchanging and building new opportunities or get exposed to new challenges.

Now that you make me think of it, it seems that almost no one still knows how to set up conferences in France that would gather key technical people and allow them to mix together and with attendees :-)

What are employment opportunities like for a techie in Paris and in France? Are there big companies that dominate? Do they innovate? Is the work on offer interesting or routine? Do they focus on any particular technology or admin/programming skills? Are there Open Source opportunites? What about the big US tech companies - do they have big set-ups that co-ordinate with the grass roots developers? Any developments in the pipeline to look forward to?

Someone who masters web technologies has no problem finding a job right now. But this is not because companies innovate, rather because they keep up with the natural movement of things toward Internet OS. Investments are usually made where money already is, not were innovation happens. Big US companies (IBM, Microsoft) have always understood that in France money was in publicly funded institutions :-) Apple always had a lot of faithful fans, and Google doesn't seem to have a specific French policy, although they probably were made bored by French publishers' attitude against Google Book Search. International companies usually do what French companies do when they want to hire: they go fishing directly in Universities and Engineering schools. They don't seem to see a need for setting up specific gatherings yet. This may change as interesting individuals will soon be able to expose their work easily thanks to telecommunication boom I was talking about earlier.

Does the culture support start-ups? Are the government helpful in this regard? Is there a ready supply of venture capitalists eager to invest in the talent of a promising set-up? Are other techies supportive? Do the best ideas come from the best techies or do they come from outside the pool of Parisian/French geeks? Is there a particular business model preferred round your way, eg do the start-ups build to sell, use advertising as a model, give the app away and hope that somehow money will follow, or do people develop purely for fun?

It is very difficult to find true risk takers here. Startups do exist, but they usually are financed on proper founds or because founders have established records or success.  Venture capitalists seem to invest in me-too projects that may one day be bought by big corporates that fear to be left behind.

In France, more than the usual rants about too strict labour rules, I think there has been a idealistic view that great projects, like real art, don't mix well with money, because having to make money from your product means making trade-offs and compromises and French people used to dislike compromises. As a result, a lot of great projects are just developed for fun and never compete: better nothing than a soiled thing :-) This is actually changing, but the change is just at its beginning. For instance, bloggers have nothing against soiling their blog with AdSense.

Often, the most ambitious projects seem fueled only by goodwill. For instance, videolan.org (home of VLC, the versatile multimedia reader) is a fantastic and crazy project that has roots in Ecole Centrale, a famous engineering school. They probably could have attracted a lot of money, but they preferred to continue to improve their tools continuously, as new students replace old ones. Another, smaller, project I like a lot, called Savonet/Liquidsoap (a scriptable radio coded in OCaml) would probably have a hard time finding investors while having the potential to be a marvelous multimedia tool.

What part do key bloggers play? Is there a feedback loop that helps everyone keep in touch with what others are doing? What sites do you all read?

It's interesting to note that the most visited blogs are web and technology reports more than new thoughts on how and where technology goes. People read these blogs to stay informed on latest technology or latest (international) events, not to get their mind boggled like they would on Radar, for instance. True geek blogs, with practical sharing of new recipes and experiments, often very good, all have a Google Page Rank of 0 or at most 1! Fortunately, some of them are relayed by the oreilly.fr site, which give them a bit more exposure. Also, I think people are still reading newsgroups a lot, which give them their technical fix more surely than blogs.

What major conferences go on in your neck of the woods? How do they affect the day-to-day life of a techie? Are they a source of inspiration or something that goes on in the background for a while but doesn't really touch the grass roots geek?

You know, Microsoft is doing a really good job at setting up small technical conferences around their new .NET products. Last year, I attended a presentation on SQL Server 2005 and LINQ that not only showed me that MS would soon become a true actor on the data and networking side of technology, but also triggered a lot of thoughts on what Web 2.0 actually was and where it is going. Inspired by Microsoft, do you believe that?

Other than that, the conference around Open Source and Free Software get their usual faithful attendees, but it's hard to get a sense of their output, beyond spending a nice moment with 10000 family members.

Other "Technical conferences" are not places for geeks but rather for IS departments.