Beers & Innovation 3: Web Services & Mash-Ups (NMK) April 27, 2006

The UK's quirky innovation culture - at once dynamic and loveable, while at the same time maddeningly inadequate - has been taxing the minds of a lot of people recently....

Like in this post, from Tom Coates on Plasticbag.org, which elicited an avalanche of comments and was echoed around the blogosphere:

"...our industry seems dominated by a few moribund and clumsy giants leading a culture that's inarticulate, unadventurous and profoundly constrained. There's something very wrong here.

My main question is this: Where are all the bloody start-ups? Where are the small passionate groups of creative technologists (people with clue) getting together to build web applications and public-facing products that push things forward? Where is the Blogger or Flickr or Odeo or Six Apart of the UK? What aspect of this country is it that confounds these aspirations? And I know that Audioscrobbler is wonderful. I really love it. But eventually you have to ask - is that really all we can do?

So is it a lack of money or a poverty of ambition?"

Beers & Innovation was founded on the premise that an open debate on these issues is needed, and with the hope that together we can start untangling some of them...


Event submitted by Eventful on behalf of cubicgarden.