After 2 weeks in sunny California, Dilan and I are back in the UK and are looking forward to the next 6 months of intense product development. As we’re going to be coding lots and I don’t want to neglect this blog I’m going to be posting highlights of our trip to SF (including random videos). Here’s the first video from the trip including our take on Start Up School. Enjoy!

To see all of Garry’s Start Up School photos check out his Posterous Blog.

Videos of all the speaker are also available on David Langer’s post and at Omnisio.com, I particularly recommend DHH’s very amusing talk on how to make money on the internet.

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The more I use Twitter, the more I wish that Scoopler already existed! As the list of people I follow grows, I seem to increasingly turn a blind eye to the high profile twitterers, who seem to post the most frequently. This is ironic, considering the reason I am following these guys is so that I can keep track of the latest tech news, and the freshest memes. The problem is that only about 1 in 10 of these posts is interesting to me. In contrast I read my (actual) friend’s tweets religiously.

Speaking to a few twitter users, I know that this problem isn’t unique to me. There’s also been some recent talk in the blogosphere of twitter spam increasing and developers have been quick to realise that there is a need to organise the Twitter information better. Quotably, Tweetmeme, TweetScan, AlphaTwitter and more recently Twitlinks are all websites which aim to make sense of the tweetosphere. But, what does this all have to do with Scoopler? Well, we are currently working on a prototype of Scoopler which will begin to tackle this problem.

We had been trying to work out what the essence of Scoopler is over the last few weeks, the feature that made it really unique, which we can demonstrate easily as a prototype running on top of the Twitter API. Two features really stood out:

1) A location focused service which shows a user a events in their location and the tweets about those events. The service would connect people who are sharing the same experience of an event, so that they can discuss it via microblogging as it happens.

2) A Digg like website for the microblogosphere where users can highlight posts about interesting events in real time. As Mike Arrington points out, Twitter is already a great source of breaking news, because the real time nature of microblogging means information is dispersed faster than via blogging and mainstream media.

Option (1) is a bottom up approach to Scoopler, and is actually the path Buzzspotr, a service created by London based startup i-Together, is taking. Buzzpotr was featured on TechCrunch UK last month, when the service was mothballed, but I have been in touch with Jof recently, who has assured me that they’re working on resuscitating it. Given that we have just under a week to put together a prototype to demo, when we’re in the valley, building a location based service seemed a little too ambitious! So, we decided to go for Option 2, with the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) principle in mind. Building a Digg for the microblogsphere was actually our original idea, so after a month of Biz Dev it’s good to know that we haven’t lost sight of our vision. The prototype will run on top of the Twitter API, as well as plugging in to Twitter’s public stream via Jabber.

How will it work?

When you are twittering and you want to share a piece of news like a product launch, you “scoop” your post and it appears on Scoopler’s front page. Scoopler users can rate scoops and comment on them. We forward those comments back to you on Twitter and if you like someone else’s post you can scoop it too. If your post is rated highly and there’s a lot of discussion about it, it will stay on the front page. The aim is to create a source for breaking news, especially experiences of events as they happen. We’re working out the mechanics of how scooping a post will work but its going to be dead easy, I promise! To make sure we don’t lose sight of what we want to achieve, we actually put together some mock-ups of what Scoopler might look like. Check out the homepage and the page for an individual scoop and tell me what you think.

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On Thursday, I received the email I had been eagerly anticipating over the last couple of weeks: Dilan and I have been invited to interview for Y Combinator’s Summer Funding round. We’re pretty excited about the opportunity to pitch Scoopler to Paul Graham, and more importantly as is the case with YC, pitch ourselves!

The interviews take place in Mountain View, CA, so we thought, while we’re in the area we might as well make the make the most of it and expand our network, bounce our ideas off potential Scoopler users (e.g. event going microbloggers) and perhaps event meet some investors. Our tickets are booked and we’re flying out on Friday, 18th April to San Francisco, and we’ll be staying until 2nd May. We’ve managed to blag somewhere to stay, thanks to Sumon from Snaptalent and some of Dilan’s friends from his days at Oracle. On the agenda so far, other than the YC interview is Start Up School (also run by YC) and the Web 2.0 Expo.

We also happen to be in town at the same time as Web Mission, the government backed project to take 20 UK tech startups out to network in Silicon Valley, including Groupspaces.com, the startup I worked on at Uni. As more and more of us Brits invade the Valley, in search of greener pastures, you have to wonder who’s going to be left? If we’re lucky enough to make it on the YC Summer round, we’ll have to relocate to Boston from June to August, and like many of the British YC teams, once we get comfy, we probably won’t want to come back! However, it isn’t all doom and gloom because the startup scene in Europe is improving, as my good friend David Langer (CEO of Groupspaces.com) points out in his recent post. While I do agree with Dave, that the Silicon Valley is more of a state of mind, perhaps our short trip to San Franciso will give us a chance to see if you really have to be in California to achieve it!

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I was going to post this last week but we hadn’t secured the domain name yet and then I forgot! Here it is nonetheless:

Dilan and I have been doing lots of brainstorming over the last couple of weeks and among the ideas we have looked at, one really stood out: The vision we have is to provide a microblogging platform for discovering, sharing and discussing events and news.

Ok, so that sounds like pretty blue sky thinking. What we want to do is provide an events aggregation website with the added feature of being able to microblog about a specific event you are attending. This idea spawned from all the Twittering that has been going on during SXSW. Our line of thought was that maybe there’s a better way to collect all the twitters about an event like the infamous key note by Zuckerberg, so everyone can join the discussion on a single thread. You can kind of do this on twitter, by using hashtags and tracking them, or setting up a user account for the event and @replying to that user, but twitter isn’t events focused, which is beauty of it - you can twitter about anything.

We came up with a working title - “Scoopler.com”:

With this new idea to work with, we did some more networking and threw it out to the usual OpenCoffee crowd in order to get some feedback…

So far so good - we did a bit of tweaking and everyone we have spoken to thinks the idea has some legs, including some potential investors. We even managed to (somewhat unintentionally) land our first pitch on Thursday, with Promethyan Labs, a seed fund that “has just recently been established to work with ambitious young entrepreneurs to help them build great companies” in the words of Rupesh, one of the partners. The pitch went very smoothly considering it was our first one!

–UPDATE–

I finished the first version of our Business Plan last week but it was a bit too long so we’re trying to boil it down to 10 pages. We also just submitted our application to Y Combinator, which is a seed fund that give startups the initial capital and guidance they need to turn an idea into a company. Auctomatic and Snaptalent are two UK companies who have gone through YC already and have been given some great opportunites as a result. In fact, last week, Auctomatic announced that they have been acquired by Live Current Media for $5M in cash and shares - Congrats to Kulveer, Harjeet and Patrick. It just goes to show there’s hope for us all!

Next up: Mini-seedcamp on Friday… I really need to start blogging more regularly again.

P.S. My twitter is @AJisThinking.

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Its been about a month since my last proper post and you may (or may not) have been wondered what has been keeping me busy. Well in short we’ve been trying to crystalize the ideas we had around Face Your Cause into a useful social application with an attractive business model. In doing this, we came to the conclusion that Face Your Cause would operate really well as a social enterprise, and I have now decided to take a back seat on the project in order to investigate new ideas and opportunities.

I feel like a big mistake I made when getting involved with Face Your Cause was jumping at the idea without considering any alternatives. Having been stuck in the application process for graduate jobs at the tail end of last year, I was raring to get involved in a project in January and as a result I jumped on board without too much consideration. Over the last few weeks it became increasingly clear to me that while Face Your Cause is very likely to be a successful venture in the social enterprise and charity domain, it wasn’t appealing enough to make a full time commitment.

It’s impossibly difficult to commit 60 hours a day to a start-up and give it 110% without being passionate about it. At the beginning of this week, before it was too late, I was faced with the difficult task of telling Tom about my concerns. After a few long discussions on Monday and Tuesday, we came to a decision: Tom is going to carry on with Face Your Cause, outsourcing the rest of the development, with my help on the technical side. This leaves me back at square one, with a new team and new ideas.

This time I am working with Dilan Jayawardane, an MIT CompSci graduate who was previously working at Oracle. We’ve just started brainstorming, and our shortlist of potential projects is growing steadily. Hopefully we can come up with a disruptive innovation rather than a pile of chindōgu.

If it all goes belly up, maybe Dilan and I could open a Sri Lankan curry house?

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