Xmas in London

13 November 2006

If you had any doubt that something is going on in the tech scene in London, just check out the list of names signed up for the BBC Backstage London Geek Xmas Party.

Yes, that’s almost 500 people.

They opened it up for registrations on the 10th of November. 3 days ago.

I think 500 people in 3 days is pretty interesting. Possibly more interesting is that it was more like 350 in 24hrs – that’s a huge signup rate for something that was only announced on a couple of blogs. More credit, as always, goes to Ian who’s behind all this (along with a whole load of other helpful people).

I remember back a year and a half ago that getting almost a hundred geeks together was pretty amazing; we’ve certainly come a long way from that though. It’s certainly going to be interesting to see where the scene goes next year; whether it’s already reached it’s natural peak or whether it’s going to keep getting bigger; going from strength to strength.

What’ll be fascinating to see is whether this social activity ends up with interesting business concepts, ideas and partnerships; one of the proposed reasons for a lack of a UK startup scene was the lack of a social scene. We’ve got that now, so is that the main reason preventing small, innovative companies from succeeding in his country a social reason, or are there other more important economic forces at work?

From: Articles

13 November 2006