Blog - TechHub

Jul 28th

TechHub is Looking for Member Blog Posts

TechHub Members, want to promote your startup? Launching a new product? Do you have expertise and accomplishments to share with your community? TechHub wants to hear all about it! Here is the basic blog post layout that we're looking for:

-Your name
-Your role
-Company name
-URL
-Twitter names
-How many people in the company?
-Where are you based?
-Description of your company/product (100 words max)
-What have you been working on lately?
-What challenges have you faced?
-What sort of benefits have you found from being connected with others in the tech community?
-What news or issues being discussed lately or in the press are most affecting or interesting you and why/how?
-What should we be looking out for from your company/product?
-Best piece of advice for entrepreneurs?

Answer as many relevant questions as you can and add any additional info as you see fit. Remember we're promoting YOU to our community so be savvy and add some of your own flair. If you're ready to post or have any questions or suggestions feel free to email me.

Happy Blogging!

0 Comments

Jul 28th

TechHub Helps Connect Student to Exceptional Opportunities

By Miguel Garcia

Chris Alexander is a TechHub Annual Member and current intern with Kusiri, a young but thriving startup near TechHub. As with any new venture into the startup world, there are many unique and exciting challenges that meet the intern. This is Chris's story, his past and current experiences and his drive to learn quickly and become a part of the best working environments available.

Every year for the past four years, I have embarked on a quest to find an internship at a tech company for the summer between academic years. I'm a programmer at heart and have always taken vacations as an opportunity to expand on the development work that I do in my spare time, in a full-time role.

My first placement was at Huddle, a Bermondsey (and now Old Street and San Francisco) based collaboration startup who has appeared in the news recently. My next was at TweetMeme, the Reading based social sharing and filtering company who pivoted into DataSift during my 18-month placement there. Both of these were distinctly different from what I've been

learning on a day-to-day basis in my Robotics degree, but neither as different as the company where I have found myself this year.

Called Kusiri, this 2 year old company based just down the road from TechHub in EC2 provides enterprise-grade software to global banks and international financial service providers. The Kusiri CAMRA product provides search federation, allowing organisations to easily integrate existing internal and external databases, websites and search servers into a single unified search interface and query language. It is available as software for existing corporate infrastructure; in a SaaS cloud configuration, and on clustered and single-server appliances.

I met the founders of Kusiri at a TechHub networking event and was intrigued by what is a completely different industry to what I’m used to. A startup that sells to corporates is a very different beast to consumer web startups which we are all used to hearing about from Silicon Roundabout and the Valley; from my perspective, it presents challenges not only on a technical but also a non-technical front.

From a technical perspective, development cycles are generally longer - turning around security-approved absolutely bug free releases takes time. There are other issues that come with conforming to client policies, for example getting all of your code working with specific archaic versions of Windows in the deployment - something startups in other sectors can simply

(and wisely) choose to ignore.

However, there are new challenges that have nothing to do with code that come from working in the City. A background in consumer web won’t get you far here: meetings are peppered with acronyms I’ve never heard of, names that sound like something I should know but definitely don’t, and stories that I can’t relate to. “A lot of money” also has a completely different definition in this world.

This placement has also given me an opportunity to learn about an entirely new industry from the people who have lived and breathed it for years, imparting their considerable knowledge in the area so that I may learn, improve, and (eventually) fit in. There are of course the usual startup perks - bean bags, office cats, and large amounts of caffeine - that we never

do without; we may be in the City, but we’re still a startup through and through.

Hope you enjoyed Chris's story. We would love to hear more stories like these from our Members, so if you have something special you would like to share with your community email miguel@techhub.com to get started.

0 Comments

May 10th

TechHub Member Blog: Neil Gallagher from Caped Koala

By Elizabeth Varley

Welcome to a new feature on the TechHub blog - Member Posts. We're selecting a TechHub Member each week to tell you a bit about their company and product, and to talk about some of the issues they're facing or interesting industry news that's caught their eye.

First up, is Neil from Caped Koala Studios...

photo (3).jpg

Neil & some of the Caped Koala guys in their previous digs before they moved to TechHub.

I’m Neil, CEO of Caped Koala Studios creators of educational virtual world Pora Ora.

We’ve been resident at TechHub since Oct 2010 and you can see from the photo why we wanted to move here and away from the serviced office at Regus – paying £950 for a tiny desk and 1Mb/second internet connection does not compare to the more flexible approach at TechHub and their 100 Mb/second connection.

Our product Pora Ora is a 3D virtual world where primary school children can learn, play and interact online. All content on the platform is mapped directly to the national curriculum with a ‘parents’ portal, providing parents and teachers with personalised progression reports.

Our aim is to foster a love of learning in young children, by engaging them in fun, social and educational content. The game offers children incentives including in-game currency, character progression and the ability to unlock new levels, enabling them to improve key skills at a level tailored to their personal ability.

Since moving to TechHub we have benefitted enormously from the wide range of networking opportunities which have contributed directly to a number successes, namely:

    Won the IC digital innovation contest
    Runners-up at geek n rolla
    Listed in the top-100 European startups in the Telegraph

We are now working actively testing our next release of Pora Ora which will be available to the public by close of play this week. This has many new exciting features that will kick-start the Pora Ora rollout. We have also engaged the BallouPR guys who sit behind us at TechHub and they will be running a number of events for us in the coming weeks so watch the space...

We have offices in London, Cork (Ireland) and Poznan (Poland) and, in total, employ 16 hard-working and creative individuals who want to put the fun back into learning!

In terms of recent news that's caught our eyes: we're seeing active increased interest in the MMO gaming space with the recent news of Tiny Speck’s latest $10.7m round.

This really hammers home the message that there is significantly more money available on the West Coast US that Europe for early stage pre revenue companies.

If you'd like to chat, you can find us on twitter:

@PoraOra
@Nelzer_1999
@capedkoala

0 Comments

Jan 28th

Barbara and Nicolas from YooMoot want TechHub for 10 Reasons

By Elizabeth Varley

Barbara Nowacka and Nicolas Holzapfel from YooMoot have made this great video giving 10 reasons why they want TechHub.

Make your own video and tweet it @TechHub to go into a draw to win free membership of TechHub for a year - somewhere to work and connect with tech entrepreneurs from all over the world.