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Scenius - Belgian Tech Scene - Kris Buytaert

The great Kris Buytaert has written an overview of the Belgian Tech Scene for our Scenius blog. Kris has been posting for us for months, reporting about events at the heart of Europe, so it's great to have him condense all his knowledge of the Belgium into our fine article:

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.....

... 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.

Scenius: Erlang – The CEO’s View by Gordon Guthrie

Gordon Guthrie is the CEO/CTO of a start-up in Scotland called hypernumbers.com. He has kindly written a great article on Scenius about Erlang, and why a company should and shouldn't use it:

CEO’s don’t have opinions on programming languages. Or they shouldn’t. Programming languages are merely an epiphenomenon of the business requirements – if a programming language can do ‘it’, whatsoever ‘it’ might be, then it’s in.

So why might a CEO, like myself, venture such an opinion? - and such an opinion attached to the new sexy language de jour. Oops. Old hands will immediately know where to pin the blame, a techie ‘playing up’ – for ‘up’ read ‘out of their league’.

Indeed, what opinion could a CEO offer on a programming language. It would seem to me it would have to be one of two stark options either you should use it – or you shouldn’t.

So before I tell you that you should use Erlang, as tell you I will, it is probably worth making the case against first.

Link

Innovation, Technology and Enterpreneurship in Italy

Antonio Bonanno has written a great piece for Scenius about the Tech scene in Italy. Antonio is one half of Digital Natives, along with Giorgio Montersino, and has a great perspective on the burgeoning start-up, blogging and Web 2.0 ecosystem growing in Italy:

..... 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 ...... 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 ...... 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 ......

Antonio also highlights a 2-day conference called "State of the Net" taking place on February 8th-9th in Udine, where the order of business is to discuss what innovation really entails. And Christian Alhert is taking Minibar to Milan on the 15th Feb.

It's an exciting time to be a techie in Italy. Thanks, Antonio.

Scenius - Paul Robinson and Andrew Disley on Manchester and the North-West

Over on Scenius, Manchester's Paul Robinson and Orrell's Andrew Disley wax lyrical about Manchester and the North-West. To quote Paul:

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 ...

... 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.

Steve Bowbrick on Scenius

Scenius has an interview with Steve Bowbrick, the UK web pioneer. Steve has been involved with the web since way back when it had to wear a nappy. His CV is an impressive list of groundbreaking start-ups and web innovations. He's a serious thinker about where the web is going, yet he has a pop sensibility that understands that energy and exhuberance can sometimes trump experience when it comes to making a project work.

I'm really enjoying everything from the current 20-something generation of hackers. I guess it's like any area of human activity: the vigourous, young crowd arrives with no history. Sometimes that's a bad thing, because they have to repeat the preceding generation's mistakes but it's also incredibly powerful. Attending a tech conference these days is like a crazy collision of a scout camp and a rock festival: epic enthusiasm and can-do attitude plus a kind of effortless confidence and impatience with the old ways.

AJAX is a great example: I think it was born out of an impatience with the set-in-their-ways, 'can't do that' thinking of the Web 1.0 crowd. The AJAX gang have just said: "We want a richer client side experience and we're just going to hack together all these older methods to achieve it". Likewise with Ruby. Ruby may fail but the youthful, impatient mindset that created it won't and successor languages will be faster and simpler still. Web 2.0 is about renewal and energy as well as about platforms and data and APIs.

Link

Scenius: South Africa by Dirk Tolken

For our third Scenius interview, Dirk Tolken of Cape Town-based Media Marketing Solutions Providers Peronii to talk us through the tech scene in South Africa:

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.

Dave Cross on Scenius

Our second interviewee on Scenius is a profile of Dave Cross, the founder of the London Perlmongers, author of Perl Template Toolkit and all-round good guy.

Friends of mine will tell you I'm a shocker for quoting from my own writing, now here's the first chance for me to quote from an interview I conducted. This is Dave speaking:

It's a very exciting time in the web industry. I think that people are just starting to see what the web is capable of. Barely a week goes by without some new cool web-based application being released by Google or Yahoo! and there are hundreds of start-ups filling small niches. For me, the most exciting area is the number of web sites that are making their data available though web services - allowing other sites to incorporate their data. I don't think we've even begun to scratch the surface of what this can achieve. In the middle of June I'm hoping to go to the Hack Day that is organised by Yahoo! and BBC Backstage. That will be a great opportunity to meet up with lots of talented hackers and to create cool and interesting applications.