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I was down at OpenCoffee London again yestarday and met up with another great random bunch of interesting people. First off Tony from XCalibre was talking up their new scalable processing and storage platform, it is the same setup as Amazon S3 & EC2 except XCalibre have a decent SLA (Amazon’s sucks) plus they have all the usual API’s for controlling all that power/resource.

SeedCamp

I also bumped into quite a few people associated with SeedCamp which just announced the final 20 chosen startups from an original 250+, this was also covered by the ft.com blog and TechCrunch. Amongst the final 20 is Buildersite which allows you to quickly find builders/contractors around the UK and then have them quote you on jobs. Ryan (the MD from Buildersite) is looking for a CTO at the moment so if anyone wants to get involved with a UK based startup that is already in with a good chance of getting funding from SeedCamp then drop me a line and I will forward it onto Ryan.

Nsyght

Some of the general discussiosn you get involved with really do vary at one of these events and one in particular got me on my usual soap box. The topic was search and mainly brought on by Scoble’s recent take on the future of search. I was giving my usual opinions and it just so happened that one of the guys from Nsyght was also taking part. Nsyght a brand new search engine (yes another one) which is currently in stealth mode but taking content submissions.

They have indexed in the region of 500,000 pages but say they have capacity for 10’s of millions before they have to upgrade further. The general premise is that the search results are tailored to yourself by means of using your social networks to gather information about what is most important to you. It was great to hear something new being attempted and I certainly wish them the best. For further coverage Mashable has a more detailed writeup or visit the Nsyght website. UPDATE: I have edited this paragraph 3 times now because I keep making mistakes spelling/typing ‘Nsyght’ is this a bad sign for people remembering/typing it into Google?

Meetings

I am continuing meetings with a whole range of parties that want to work with us on building on our projects, hopefully over the coming weeks/months I will be able to make annoucements on a range of partnerships. fav.or.it continues to get the most attention and was extremely well received at the OpenCoffee event (I don’t think many got away with not hearing me evangilise about it.) and everyone is desperate to get to have a go with the full version. Development has not been quite as rapid as hoped (and feature creep continues) but we still hope to have the private beta up and running very soon, plus we will be doing more videos/screenshots of the new layout/design.

PHP

PHP seemed to be a popular topic of conversation in the morning and in general the complete and utter lack of available programming talent in relation to PHP. My general view is that a large percentage of PHP programmers need to be re-taught from scratch anyway because 9 out of 10 PHP programmers have picked up so many bad habits writing PHP 4 style code. So my advice to anyone struggling in the UK to find development staff is to hire non-PHP programmers, the effort required is probably similar to having to re-teach plus you have a much large pool of programmers to choose from. From the programmer side get out there an learn PHP! The pay scales for PHP are going through the roof and big business is really starting to take notice (with help from Facebook apps) to make PHP more popular than ever.