Monthly Archive for September, 2008

Berlin plans taking shape

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on September 30, 2008
in News
. 0 Comments

It’s going to be a tight turnaround (flying out first thing Wednesday 22 October; back evening of Thursday 23) but I’m looking forward to my Berlin trip next month.

First, I’ve never been to the eastern side of Germany, and getting excited about actually setting foot in the city of Cabaret, the Wall, Christiane F. (yes, I’m that old) and banging German techno. Apparently, my family have also got relatives there, but not sure if I’m going to locate them in time. Who knows, maybe we’ll actually bump into each other at the Kaffee Burger?

Second, the schedule for Web 2.0 Expo Europe, taking place from 21 - 23 October, is filling out nicely. I’m looking forward to whole heap of sessions, starting with Stowe Boyd’s Better Media Plumbing for the Social Web on Wednesday morning. Lorna Li at Salesforce recommended Stowe as someone I should speak to re Leadership 2.0 so I’m hoping to catch him after the talk.

Also, it’s great to see that my friends Suw Charman-Anderson and Alberto Nardeli will be giving keynotes. Alberto will be Changing the World for the Better Using Web 2.0. How could anyone resist? The topic of Suw’s talk is still tbc but, knowing Suw, it’ll be delivered clearly, intelligently and with passion.

Finally, I’m thrilled to be able to hook up with the dozens of other European bloggers on Web 2.0 Europe’s blogging programme. Hopefully something social can be sorted out for the Wednesday night - my one night in town. If anyone reading this will be in Berlin and fancies doing something that evening, let me know!

By the way, if you don’t have a ticket for the Web 2.0 Expo Europe, but are thinking about going, readers of this blog get a 35% discount - just sign up using ‘webeu08gr53′ as your discount code. Maybe see you there?

Life on Mars

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on September 29, 2008
in Passion
. 0 Comments

37 Signals CEO and founder Jason Fried has been working since he was 13.

“My parents sent me to work at a grocery store. I’ve always worked. I guess I learnt to love working.”

But after completing his college degree (in finance, since you ask), three or four months into working a big company, it dawned on Jason that corporate life just wasn’t for him.

“I decided I wasn’t fit for that sort of environment…I just can’t stand red tape and bureaucracy. There’s a tendency to add hierarchies and levels of management to projecst that don’t need it. Why start off by assuming that everything’s going to go wrong?”

He went freelance (as a designer) and after a short space of time, age 24, decided to start up a company with two friends.

It was 1999. Jason and his co-founders decided to name the company 37signals after the number of signal sources from space which remain “unidentified” at that time.

They wrote a 37 point manifesto which includes truisms such as “Choose to do one thing and do it right” (No.4), “Don’t keep them waiting or they’ll leave and never return” (No.13), “It’s better to tell a short story well than a long one poorly” (no.16), “Corporations don’t use websites, people do” (22) and “Don’t just do something because everyone else is doing it” (28).

Nearly ten years on, 37signals holds true to its beliefs. One thing the company is widely respected for is its simplistic approach to problem-solving.

A favourite maxim is “Bloat is bad”. And this reflects in the company structure: despite being a leading provider of software to the developer market, the business employs just 12 people.

Clearly, recruitment is key. How do they approach it?

“We’re quite established so there’s a big element of self selection,” says Jason. “Our culture is pretty ‘out there’, clear…transparent.”

“What was the last thing you learned?” is a favourite question to ask in interviews.

With regard to getting people to be passionate about working for the company, Jason just expects them to be themselves:

“We’ve one guy who doesn’t sware. He’s very quiet and very religious. But he’s true to himself, and he fits in brilliantly.”

In an effort to help people be themselves, 37signals gives financial support to extra-curricular activities, “whether it’s flying lessons or whittling”. Each employee also gets a corporate credit card which can be spent on personal activities.

“People ask, what will you do when you employ 50 people? You can’t give them ALL a credit card?! But I say, it works now, why worry? If we decide it’s not working in the future, we can change it. Nothing is set in stone.”

Ricardo Semler is “an idol”, as well as James Dyson.

Jason believes in trusting people as far as possible, and not filling their days with cc-ing and directives.

“The latest thing bothering me about business is that I hear about friends with work days full of meetings and emails. They can’t get anything done! People don’t have to be in the office for 8 hour days – or longer. [I believe you should] get the work done – and get out!”

And what if someone’s struggling with a project?

“If what you’re doing is too hard, cut it in half. Always scale back scope. Don’t throw more people at it. Instead, deliver half of what you expected to do.”

It’s working life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Local Hero

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on September 29, 2008
in Listening
. 0 Comments

It’s a bright, crisp September morning and I’m walking up and down Cole Street, on the Western edge of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district, looking in shop windows, taking photos and generally killing time before my next appointment.

On the opposite side of the street, a short, slightly portly man in a grey jacket and beret is offering treats to a short, slightly portly dachshund. The dachshund jumps up politely as each new treat is offered, tail wagging.

“There you go, Coco,” says the man.

I step over to say hello, because I recognise the man as Craig Newmark. A discussion has ensued between Craig and Coco’s owner as to whether or not the dog is overweight.

Coco looks healthy – glossy, even – and I’m sure Craig’s treats are harmless. After all, this is a man who has built his reputation (and, no doubt, some fortune) on customer-satisfaction.

An hour later, when I meet Craig Newmark again (this time for our scheduled chat at his local, The Reverie Café), he’s still worried about the neighbourhood dogs.

“I’ve run out of treats,” he laments and pats his pockets, fruitlessly.

Conversation with Craig is peppered with asides like this. His attention is easily diverted, sometimes by a real-time interruption, sometimes when a pressing thought appears to cross his mind.

You get the impression that his charming unpredictability was just one of the factors that made Craig decide early on that maybe he wasn’t right to run a global business. Conversely, Craig’s interest in others is what made Craigslist the enormous success it is today.

Craig started craigslist back in 1995 as an online listings service for the San Francisco area. By the end of 1997 the site was getting 1m page views per month. By 1999, the service was doing so well, Craig incorporated it as a business.

“I did a mediocre job [as CEO] for about a year. Then I realised Jim [Buckmaster] was much better at it than me. It was a major act of ego releasing - and a little bit scary. But we’ve figured out how to work together – it keeps changing. I’ve learnt a lot of tough lessons along the way.”

Like Ross Mayfield at Socialtext, Craig realised that for his company to reach its full potential, he needed to step aside. He retains the title of Founder, but now works solely in the area that interests him most – customer services.

Craig’s corporate philosophy is very much centred around listening to what others are saying, and keeping channels of communication open, both inside and outside the company:

“Consumers and line workers are the people who know how the business should run. The people who are good at climbing up the ladder, that’s their key skill – this is why hierarchies are dysfunctional. It’s very important to try to stay flat.”

Craigslist is unusual for a global company in that much of the work is done by volunteers (the pro-active members of the online user community): “The user community runs the site. That way it’s connected more to the people it’s serving.” In fact, the original craigslist office in San Francisco still only employs 25 people.

Craig believes that good customer service – and employee relationships - is what keeps his employees, volunteers and customers coming back:

“My advice is to do something that people can honestly believe in. That’s how it works. We realised early on that the term ‘culture of trust’ embodied what we do.”

One of the things Craig did early on was ban banner ads from the Craigslist site; he sees no need to kowtow to commercial pressures if they don’t chime with the underlying nature of the business.

“A company can be very successful by doing the right thing.”

As for Craig himself, he fact he has stepped aside as CEO now means he has more time to focus on the things that really matter to him. The success of craigslist means he’s in demand for media interviews, and regularly invited to speak at conferences worldwide.

Craig acknowledges that he has a public role to play:

“I feel like I’m having an extended 15 minutes of fame. For some reason, people listen to me, so I might as well have something useful to say. There are causes that need people to stand up for them.”

So, Craig speaks on behalf of the Iraq and Vietnam war veterans, supports Barack Obama and advocates Spinewatch, a campaign set up by journalist Jay Rosen to encourage the US media to be more critical (where necessary) of the US Government.

Despite all this, Craig remains typically self-depreciating:

“If you think I’m a celebrity, you need to get out more!”

Keystone Corps

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on September 29, 2008
in Leadership 2.0
. 0 Comments

It’s a bright, sunny afternoon at the Googleplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

In between the white and glass buildings that house the offices, swathes of green grass and neatly trimmed hedges offer relaxing spaces to chill out or eat lunch in. Red, blue and yellow umbrellas and seating add a Google-branded completeness to the landscape.

Every so often a Googler speeds past on a bright yellow JacMac Scooter, off to the next meeting or, possibly, one of Google’s many free talks - maybe a ‘Google University’ lecture, a “TechTalk” or an Authors@Google seminar (this week it’s Sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson).

You won’t see many cars here. But there is space for nearly 2,000 of them underground. The 26 acre Googleplex includes public trails and a 5 acre public park - a spirit of space and leisure pervades.

I’m looking out on all this from the corner cafeteria of “Building 47”, where I’m sitting with Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise. Even indoors, it’s impossible to forget where you are. Red, green, blue and yellow prevails – cups, plates, noticeboards, chairs and, even, lava lamps.

With all the buzz around Chrome and Android, it’s hard to imagine that just a few years ago, when Matt started, Google didn’t do “apps”. Search and advertising (AdWords and AdSense) were the only products.

“Enterprise has always been in the strategy. It got delayed because of the ad side going stratospheric. Now there’s been a refocus. Enterprise is the second largest business at Google, behind the ads. And I like to say that we’re going to create the second ‘large’ business.”

Indeed, if Google Enterprise produces anything even half as successful as Adwords (which generated $16.4billion revenue in 2007), Matt and his colleagues will no doubt be very happy bunnies.

“There’s a culmination of events that make this the right time for apps,” says Matt. “Internet connectivity is almost ubiquitous, and cloud computing has hit a maturity point”

Ah yes, the cloud. Although there are disadvantages (see Bill Thompson’s piece on security), cloud computing is seen by many as the next big leap forward for the internet industry. And if the cloud is where the action is going to be for the foreseeable future, Google has an enviable share of it.

Google certainly seems to exemplify what Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien describe as the “keystone advantage” – this term is taken directly from biological ecosystems where “keystone” species are those that maintain the healthy functioning of the entire system because their own survival depends on it. Google is positioned not only to help foster the health of the system, its lynchpin role means that it benefits more than most from that system’s good health.

“Because every transaction is performed through the Google platform, the company has perfect, continuous awareness of, and access to, by-product information and is the hub of all germinal revenue streams. There’s no need for Google to do market surveys and statistical analyses to forecast trends in the ecosystem; the information is already in Google’s database.” (Iyer, Bala & Davenport, Thomas H., Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine, Harvard Business Review Article, 1 April 2008, pp.5-6)

See also Umair Haque’s recent piece on Chrome for a great analysis of the inclusive strategy of the launch behind Google’s new browser.

This full use of network effects helps make Google a definitive “web 2.0” company.

Furthermore, Google is in the enviable position of being seen as trustworthy by its users, as it doesn’t need to do anything underhand to obtain this invaluable information. Unlike other large monopolistic companies, Google is unusual in that it is generally liked and respected by its user base (“if we ever lost user confidence, we’d cease to exist in a very short time”, agrees Matt).

As for that “keystone” position, Matt nods his head: “We’ve become a big brand, a household name. We’re a mainstay, a staple, in all our users lives.”

This pole position in the ecosystem has another core advantage – Google has a continued ability to attract key talent:

“The team here are fantastic. In any company, there’s always a risk the team will get watered down but, if anything, the opposite seems to have happened here. The company has grown enormously since I arrived – we’ve gone from 2,000 to 20,000 in four years.”

Like many successful companies, Google has a notoriously drawn out hiring process. The company has to make absolutely sure that any new hires are going to be absolutely right for the fast-paced, intensively innovative environment – and help sustain Google’s competitive advantage into the future:

“It’s tempting to hire people with a long history of success but you can’t tell what the world will look like in five years time.”

Today, says Matt, Google’s sheer weight of users and its advertising income combine to enable it to watch – and follow – virtually every trend on the horizon. The business looks – at this stage – invincible.

With policies such as the “20% rule” (where developers spend 20% of their time working on their own projects – Gmail came out of this) and the famous “do no evil” mission statement, both part of the culture from day one, Google proves itself to be a textbook innovator.

“One of the things embodied at Google is empowerment,” says Matt. “A governance model and corporate structure do exist, but their impact is subtle. People want to be empowered and Google is lucky: we got to start out [offering empowerment] and then maintain it as we got bigger.”

And Matt is finding that his enterprise clients now want that sort of ‘flavour’ as part of their IT infrastructure:

“This Millennial Generation - Generation Y - grew up with openness and sharing as values. Now we’re seeing the other side of that – companies want to bring Google apps into their businesses – because their Generation Y employees are used to working with them.”

One to watch

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on September 27, 2008
in Leadership 2.0
. 0 Comments


Chanel Realegeno’s parents were both entrepreneurs, so she thinks it’s only natural she should be one too. At 19, she’s already secured US$250,000 of funding (from a VC she found on LinkedIn) and is about to launch her first company, Tyro Jobs.

Chanel is a student at California State University, Chico. Appropriately enough, she’s studying Entrepreneurship. She reads about my book online, borrows a car, and drives 200 miles down to Los Altos, where I’m staying, to talk about leadership.

“When I set up the company, I sat down with my business partner and asked, ‘What sort of bosses do we want to be? Do we want to run this company in the traditional way?’ “ says Chanel.

One thing she decided early on was that it’d be best just to let people work when they wanted to, as long as the work gets done: “I don’t think my generation wants to work a typical eight hour day.”

When she was looking for holiday work recently, Chanel was frustrated by the lack of dedicated websites: “too many of them were offering cr*p jobs, like envelope stuffing”. The idea behind Tyro Jobs is to give university and college students a trusted source of interesting and relevant work opportunities: “ideally, only quality jobs”.

Appropriately, “tyro” is Latin for novice or beginner. Sign up here for the pre-beta Tyro Jobs launch.

The wrong sort of feedback

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on September 26, 2008
in Listening
. 0 Comments

There’s a clutch of jokes that comes around perennially in the UK when our National Rail service starts to blame any type of delay or cancellation on the weather. One year, a platform announcer accused the “wrong sort of snow” of causing trains to run late.

As the UK’s rail network fears the “wrong sort” of weather, so companies are terrified of the “wrong sort” of feedback. Praise and benign comments are all very well, but things can go haywire if a customer suggests a solution that doesn’t chime with the corporate master-plan.

Salesforce.com has built a reputation on managing customer relationships efficiently. It offers more than 800 applications - the flagship product is a web-based “sales force automation” service which provides “streamlined” CRM. It’s difficult to make automated services sound exciting, but the simple interface Salesforce offers has caused quite a stir.

The company’s headquarters are in San Francisco’s Financial District, alongside the banking and corporate offices, and just off the Embarcadero (waterfront), handy for the trendy market stalls and shops in the city’s renovated ferry terminal.

Lorna Li has a pretty cool job at Salesforce.com. She’s Web Marketing Manager (social media and social networking) – which I guess means she gets to spend most of her day surfing around on social networks, upping the profile of Salesforce.com and generally chit-chatting with as many people as possible. Salesforce.com is a ‘Web 2.0’ company, so interesting conversations must be permitted.

Lorna arranges to meet me in the wine bar in the old ferry terminal. She’s running a few minutes late but luckily the bar staff have spotted my London accent and are doing their best to make me feel at home.

When Lorna arrives, we settle down to talk social media over a couple of glasses of local Napa Valley wine and some Cowgirl Creamery cheese.

Lorna tells me abut MyStarbucksIdea and Dell’s IdeaStorm, both built on Salesforce.com’s Ideas platform.

Apparently, some users of IdeaStorm started asking for Linux on their PCs. Dell, convinced that this was only a minority concern, introduced a “vote down” button in order that other users might demote the issue; this backfired when users voted down, instead, a whole raft of other topics.

As one blogger commented, what’s the point of asking for customer feedback, if you simply “demote” the suggestions you don’t like?

Sharing = love

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on September 26, 2008
in Sharing
. 0 Comments

In between the more classic songs (Jerusalem, etc) that we had to sing at my Church of England primary school, there was a happy clappy number which used to have my class teacher, Mrs Prentice, bopping from side to side in her purple kaftan (okay, so we quite liked it, too).

“Love is like a magic penny, hold it tight and you won’t have any, lend it, spend it and you’ll have so many, they’ll roll all over the floor.”

There is a similar sort of phenomenon at work on the web today. A culture of “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine”.

The academic, Clay Shirky, uses the term “social capital”, which he defines in this way:

“When your neighbour walks your dog while you are ill, or the guy behind the counter trusts you to pay him next time, social capital is at work. It is the shadow of the future on a societal scale. Individuals in groups with more social capital (which is to say, more habits of cooperation) are better off on a large number of metrics, from health and happiness to earning potential, than those in groups with less social capital.” (Here Comes Everybody, p.192)

Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield puts it into a commercial context:

“Steven Weber [University California, Berkeley] points out that there is no such thing as a buy vs. build equation for deciding to share intellectual property. But we’ve a version of Socialtext that’s free for up to five users. We can afford to give that away.”

Socialtext doesn’t disclose how many of the 4,000+ companies it serves use only the free version, but Ross is clearly seeing the strategy reap rewards.

As another example, Ross points to the success of WikiHow – one of the most-used wikis on the web:

“A while ago Jack Herrick (WikiHow’s founder) decided to start using a Creative Commons licence. He can send you a graph where you can see massive growth take place at the point where he changed the licence.

“That’s Web 2.0 – how sharing control can create value. We’re seeing more transparency. We’re seeing a culture of sharing versus one of hoarding… we’re shifting from a need to know culture to a need to share culture.”

Ross points me to a recent blogpost by a member of the US State Department which sums this up nicely.

With even established US government organisations as the CIA (Intellipedia) and US State Department (Diplopedia) now using wikis, it’s surely only a matter of time before everyone starts “sharing”.

But sharing needs to be done in the right spirit to work properly.

Purple-clad “Mrs.Prentices” the world over will be watching!

Mixing pleasure with business

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on September 26, 2008
in Knowledge
. 1 Comment

Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield works out of an unassuming office in downtown Palo Alto, a couple of blocks away from the Caltrain station (if you listen hard, you can hear the trains clanging) and a stone’s throw from the sprawling Stanford University campus.

Like just about everywhere else in Silicon Valley, Socialtext’s low-tech surroundings are a foil for the hi-tech business taking place. People talk on the phone about ‘mikis’ (mobile wikis) and ‘webinars’ (online seminars) as if these were common words in the English language. ‘Wiki Wednesday across the way’ is scrawled in faded marker pen across the reception whiteboard.

After a few minutes, Ross appears. He’s the first company chairman I’ve seen wearing shorts – ever. Admittedly it’s 28 ºC today. We go outside to sit a shady spot under a couple of Cypress trees, partly so I can make the most of the weather, partly so that Ross can have a cigarette.

Ross co-founded Socialtext, ‘the world’s first wiki company’ in 2002. What made him feel that this type of social media could work in business?

“So much interesting stuff was happening in the social space [at that time]. Adrian from Ryze was putting on loft parties and wanted to connect the people who went to them; Ben and Mena Trott from Six Apart, Evan Williams from Blogger…they all created tools to scratch an itch, to interact with friends from a community. The guy who invented Trillian [instant messaging between different networks] did it simply to connect with a girl he had met on a beach.

“It was just after the [dotcom] crash and a lot of people had been made redundant and I guess had time on their hands. The thing is, these [new] tools had better social dynamics, and they were lightweight and easy to use compared to the clunkier enterprise systems.”

Ross and his co-founders were keen to take that simplicity and apply it to business. For two and half years, they worked out of their own homes (“in a distributed fashion” says Ross, not without irony).

So, what’s the main diff between the early noughties and now?

“In 2001, it was the fear economy – the only people selling technology were the security companies, and then 9/11 happened! Now, there’s much less hype; buying behaviour and investing behaviour are verging on the rational.”

Ross cites the change in the consumer markets – the growth of wikipedia, open source etc – as a key change: “on the consumer side, the bar is raised higher”. Consumer products genuinely have to work for people, otherwise they simply won’t be used.

The growth of blogging, in particular, has helped enormously:

“We used to have a lot of push back from PR and legal departments. Not any more. Now there are thousands of blogging policies up on the web for corporate lawyers to pull down and adapt.”

In November 2007, the company entered a new phase, securing a further $9.5million of funding. This seemed a good point for Ross to hand over his CEO role to Eugene Lee, a former executive at Cisco and Adobe:

“I’m very much an early stage guy, very hands on,” says Ross. “I always knew that I’d have to step aside at some point. You start off wearing all the hats, then you’ve got to give every one away, ideally to suitable people. It was a very emotional decision when I first had to step aside [at my previous start-up].”

See Ross’ blog for more of his thoughts on ceding control.

Needless to say, the Socialtext platform, originally a wiki solely for the highly tech-literate, has grown and developed in six years. WYSIWYG editing, introduced around 2004, was a step forward. But the real tipping point came in 2006, when mass collaboration became possible.

It was around this time that more ambitious ideas, such as ‘Wikipedias’ for companies were introduced. The whole user experience became more transparent and participatory, meaning that ‘non-teccie’ types could access and use the platform with relative ease.

Ross constantly thinks about how to make the platform more genuinely useful - in internet parlance, maximising ‘network effects’ (ie, the more people using a network, the more powerful it becomes). Identifying when and how people interact with the Socialtext platform has been a key part of making it more relevant:

“Our VP of Professional Services came up with the framework of ‘in the flow’ use cases as opposed to ‘above the flow’: where [people used our platform] as an integral part of the process of a project, rather than outside of it. These [in the flow use cases] are what we specialise in.”

One context in which Ross has found social media to be particularly useful is change management – where people can “collaborate on the change”. He points to the recent merger between two large companies (7,000 employees each) as a good example:

“The wiki and social networking became a great way of getting cross-pollination to happen…in the past it would be 6 or 7 people, and $1million, just to define a structure or taxonomy. Now the approach is to let the structure emerge, let staff collaborate on building it.”

And Ross has some words of comfort for any CEO fretful of any loss of control s/he might experience:

“The person who benefits most [from good knowledge management systems] is the CEO because he can drill down and see exactly who did something and why it happened.”

There’s no doubt about it, Socialtext must be doing something right. Today, it’s a global company, with offices in California, New York and the UK, employing 50 people and serving more than 4,000 organisations.

The easy-to-use, accessible style of software that originally came from the social space has now entered the corporate world. For good.

Good vibes/ bad vibes

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on September 23, 2008
in News
. 0 Comments

Just back from Web 2.0 Expo New York via a long weekend in Derbyshire (yes, it was lovely and didn’t rain, thank you) and looking at my pile of interviews to write up, photos to edit, facts to check and general heaps of admin to sort out. Feeling a bit swamped.

Already needing to think about interviews to line up for Web 2.0 Expo Europe. My fave on the list so far has to be Netvibes founder, Tariq Krim.

Netvibes sits on my bookmarks toolbar between iknowhow and Twitter so you can see how important it is to me. To be honest I’ve never had another RSS reader so I can’t rate Netvibes comparatively, but I’ve used it for a few years now and it’s as simple and no-fuss as they come.

As for Tariq, not only is he someone who seems to ‘get’ the potential of Web 2.0, speaking regularly on ‘creative destruction’ and other stuff, he’s also done a truly ‘leadership 2.0′ thing by ceding management of his Netvibes baby to COO, Freddy Mini, a few months back.

So, that’s the good news. Hopefully Tariq will be around for interview. If he says ‘yes’ that’ll brighten my day. And give me more time to get back to that daunting pile of other stuff that needs to be done.

Supporting my London buddies…

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on September 15, 2008
in News
. 1 Comment

Digital Mission is a programme run by London-based digital community, Chinwag, on behalf of UK Trade & Investment.

The mission has enabled 21 of the UK’s fastest-growing digital SMEs to visit the Web 2.0 Expo New York, with the aim of helping them access international markets, and build partnerships.

This hand-picked selection of the UK’s best digital talent, including iknowhow’s friends at Headshift and UnLtdWorld, has just touched down in the Big Apple.

I’m looking forward to hanging out with them, drinking warm beer and eating Marmite.

If you’re in New York and would like to meet these companies, Chinwag are putting on some special events.

Hopefully see you at one of them!