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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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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