Yesterday I had a brief conversation on Twitter with Elizabeth Varley of Tech Hub about their claims of 700% startup growth in the Old Street area. I’d suggest reading the original article and the Twitter conversation first. I was convinced to write up some broader thoughts by an excellent post by James Darling, so that is worth reading too.

It may seem pedantic to quibble over a number, but it is important when the number is in the headline of your article, and more importantly gets repeated by others and even Government. Whilst this may be a common tactic in PR it’s still fundementally misleading and irresponsible on their part.

To get this % increase they claim two sources:

1. A “crowd sourced” map thrown together by Dopplr shortly after the (joke) term ‘silicon roundabout’ was coined.
2. Further research by Tech Hub based on a detailed ethnographic survey of the area, done over a period of months, long after the term had stuck and more companies were eager to be associated

Now, they don’t claim the research behind the number is scientific (which is fair) but you shouldn’t use precise figures that appear to be so. Use appropriately unscientific terms like “significant growth” or other hand wavvy term instead.

Thats not to say the area hasn’t seen growth, but that 700% is an entirely misrepresentative number. To the extreme that using it is essentially making up a number to suit a purpose.

Most of all, despite being very careful not to explicitly say it, Tech Hub aligns themselves with this growth, suggestion they are in some way associated or responsible for it. Something I personally don’t believe to be true.

Recent events make me worry that Tech Hub have become the de-facto voice of “silicon roundabout”, despite being so new to the area, and rather different to the many existing co-working spaces. To me at least, this seems to be because they are entrepreneur and business focused, they’re not developers. Of course they’re going to be more willing to, and better at, speaking to the press and promoting themselves.

James does a much better job explaining that last point than me. I could happily write a few more hundred words on that alone, but I won’t tonight. I do feel compelled to make a point of

Tech Hub does not represent for me, or the whole of the area. It worries me that they appear to do so.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Design It, Build It conference in Newcastle, where I gave a talk entitled “Last.fm vs Xbox.”

It was a 30 minute presentation of our experience at Last.fm launching a radio application to millions of Xbox Live users. It was a mix of the Last.fm vs Xbox story, how we dealt with it, the tools we used and general tips for anyone dealing with large scale launches. I think it went pretty well, people seemed to enjoy it, even a few designers!

The presentation is available on Slideshare. I kept the slides “word heavy” so they’d make sense without the accompanying talk, though if you have any questions please do get in touch and i’ll try and help.

I promised some people I that I’d write more about how to find out about and get started with some of the technology and tools mentioned. I’m still catching up on life and work in London after an extended stay in Newcastle but i’ll be posting that soon — and going in to a bit more detail about the slides themselves.

Build It

The rest of the build line-up was excellent. Michael Brunton-Spall gave an overview of The Guardian’s scaling challenges and how they approach rapid application building, such as the MPs expenses crowd-sourcing effort

I Gareth Rushgrove’s “You’re going to need a bigger toolbox” a perfect topic for a conference to tackle. There are hundreds of languages & tools available but Gareth gave a great overview of some interesting ones you should learn more about on your own, getting you rather excited in the process. There’s a collection of all the built-it presentation slides which are well worth reading.

Design It

Sadly I missed the Design-It talks, but heard good things. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing slides and videos for Andy Clarke & Simon Collision, but i’ll be watching all of them when I have the chance.

Thanks

I have to say a massive thanks to the organisers (particularly @gavinelliott & @coldclimate) for running a brilliant event. I know first hand that even running a small tech event is a royal pain but they made it look easy.

I’ve booked my ticket for next year already and am looking forward to enjoying the day as a relaxed attendee. See you there?

A couple of weeks I made a trip to Music Hackday Boston. The 4th in a series of music hackdays, designed to bring together smart and passionate people to hack on music technology.

I won’t go in to grand detail as there have already been some excellent write-ups from Ben, Anthony and Brian, but it’s by far the best hackday i’ve attended. A perfect combination of smart people, brilliant technology and a great venue, even the wifi worked properly. It’s just a shame I didn’t find much time to hack on anything myself.

Another highlight were the panels. I’m not usually a big fan of panels at hackdays, they tend to distract from the task at hand, but with the wealth of smart in the room it would have been foolish not to have them. There were only 3 but they’re well worth watching and featured people who really know what they’re talking about. Videos for: Starting a Music Business, Music Discovery and The Future of Music.

Hack-wise I was most impressed by Dan Kantor’s playdarTunes. An iTunes like web-interface that you populate by upload your iTunes library file and then play tracks through Playdar (as it’s all local content, in theory). It’s similar in principle to the Playlick player (James introduced me to Dan, in fact) and I can’t help but get excited about this idea of portable music collections. Where not only is the audio portable, but the library itself could come from different sources and is sharable. What I really want is a slick web-based iTunes which lets me select which of my libraries (or friends libraries) I want to browse and listen to.

We’re getting closer and closer to that ideal thanks to technology like Playdar, Scrobbling and HTML5 audio. Since Boston there’s been more talk on the Playdar mailing list about exposing a get library type call for a resolver. This would be handy for local content in projects like playdarTunes, but even more so for larger resolvers/services - Imagine Magnatune providing that kind of library information, you could browse a library of their artists though your choice of interface and just play it. Hot.

I gave a couple of short talks to give an overview of the Last.fm API (panickedly put together on the plane) to help people use it, which was fun. The more interesting was the second one in a smaller room, lots of interesting discussion and questions. One of the common and surprising questions was about scrobbling, “Who’s allowed to do it?”. A lot of people were under the impression it’s a proprietary system, rather than a completely open protocol. Getting more people scrobbling (on Last.fm, on other sites/services, on mobile, etc) is one of our aims for next year, so we have some serious work to do here.

I was a bit disappointed I didn’t get to meet anyone from Libre.fm, who were supposed to be there. I’ve been in touch with them before and was hoping to discuss improving exporting your data from Last.fm. It’s always been possible, but it could definitely be easier.

A big thanks to organisers Dave Haynes, Jon Pierce and Paul Lamere who did an excellent job. Microsoft for providing facilities and Brian Whitman of the Echo Nest for being a gracious host.

I’m really looking forward to Music Hackday Stockholm now.