Meeting Milo

Following the Milo’s Yiannopoulos ‘Grim up north‘ article in the Telegraph, there was a bit of back lash from the region, many of us challenging Milo to come up to the North East and see the state of the tech sector for himself.

Well on Thursday he did just that, Milo spent a few hours in the ‘fourth‘ on Pink Lane, (somewhere he described as  ‘Silicon Alley’ i believe) talking to start-ups from all over the region, about what its like to be start-up in the North East, public and private sector funding and support networks.

These conversations look the form of one to ones on the roof terrace, which were videoed (possibly for Tech Crunch, looking at the logo on the end credit!). See what some of our start-ups had to say for themselves,  in the rough cut of the video;

I popped up to the Forth to see what was going on for myself, and there seemed to be quite a crowd in the corner waiting to have a chat with Milo, in some ways you’d think he was a visiting dignitary, rather than a journalist.

It was nice to sit and have a quiet drink and catch up with the likes of Chris and Robert (Pez) from bdaily about their new offices (and tv studio), Paul Smith (twitchhiker) and his new project ‘Feats of Tweet’, David and Paul King and the imminent launch of  ’1 day later’, and to meet a few new people. I missed the likes of  Ross Cooney, Kieron Donogue and Sarat Pediredla, managed to i catch up with most of them later at Codeworks and heard all about their current projects including work with with managed cloud services for creative agencies, playlist sharing for spotify, and bug tracking solutions.

Having seen the video, I’m quite glad that I chose not to have a one to one, I’m not a start-up or even really in the industry, and those of you that are and made the effort to get up there, summed it up pretty well. It would have been nice to have had the likes of Heb Kim (codeworks) , Jon Bradford (VC), James TerKeurst (digital city) and many of the other outstanding voices within the region adding their thoughts as their responses to the original post were all outstanding, but i guess were all busy people and sometimes can’t make these things.

In many ways I am very proud of the North East, its were I grew up, its where I choose to live now, and its somewhere I’m passionate about, but sometimes, just sometimes I just have to hang my head in shame; During Milo’s visit he had his wallet, containing his cash, cards and train tickets home. While he’s promised not to let this tarnish his view of us, it’s not big and its not funny and it only re-enforces the stereo type.

Final Words: Milo While I still think your original article was a little reckless!  I do agree with some of what you are saying,  some money is being wasted and from the video, it sounds like we could do with more private investors. Thanks for coming up,  you are a man of your word, i appreciate you did taking the time to come up and meet us and you deserve respect for that. Sorry to hear that your wallet was stolen while you were here,I know its no consolation, but that really isn’t

Ps. The video looks fantastic, can’t wait to see the finished thing!  I hope your visit hasn’t but you off the North too much and that we’ll see you next year at Thinking Digital 2010!

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One Response to Meeting Milo

  1. david coxon says:

    The first of three Tech Crunch articles by Milo has just been published here: http://tr.im/tYp3

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