#techlondon

Connecting the startup & tech community in London. Join the fun at www.techlondon.io

[techlondon]

Hi, I would be interested of joining and wanted to ask about the fee charge. First I really like your site and onboarding, really cool. The reason I have about not paying the fee for now is I am looking for networking in the UK, but to help to land us clients and quality network events. We are currently Techstars London and we are in need to find customer to be awesome in demo day. So if you think your network can help me to achieve that in a month then I am ready to invest in you guys :)

Sure thing - would be great to have you on board! Just fire over your email to techlondonio [at] gmail.com and we’ll send you an invite :)

[siliconmilkroundabout]

Top 10 Things To Do Before and After #SMR9

If you’re heading down to London’s Truman Brewery for Silicon Milkroundabout 9.0 next weekend, you’re also heading into the heart of London’s artsiest district. The fair will be happening between 1 & 7pm so, if you aren’t saving all of your...

[duedil]

Where Are All The Startup Jobs?

Over the last few weeks we joined forces with the team at Adzuna to find out where all the startup jobs are in the UK. To do this, Duedil and Adzuna identified startups across the country to discover what regions and cities had the most vacancies and what skills they were looking for in their next employees.

Read More

[techlondon]

Don't you think it's deceptive to not mention prices and let users spend time filling out a form to then ask for debit card details and payment at the end of the form? - Samuel

Hi Samuel, on the first page of the form we do mention that there is a fee (see bit.ly/techlondonio) - but we really do appreciate your feedback - we should really do better at making it more obvious - pointing out the fee on our landing page for example. 

If you email us at [email protected] we would be more than happy to send you a free invite.

[lucasjgordon-deactivated2019101]

MakeScreenshots

This year I decided to make 12 Apps In 12 Months to master Swift and push myself to launch side projects more frequently. I knew that to be able to achieve this goal, I would need to work efficiently and automate as many processes as I could to allow me to focus my time on...

[techlondon]

Great post by Lucas!

[slackhq]

Integrations 101: Adding Twitter to Slack

The more you bring the tools you already use into Slack, the more powerful Slack becomes (kind of like Voltron). With more than 80 integrated services (and counting!) that’s a whole lot of power. But which tools should you integrate, and why?

This is the start of our series on integrations with one of the quickest and most powerful options: integrating Twitter mentions into a Slack channel in just a few clicks.

How does this help my team?

Many companies use Twitter as a one-way broadcast of corporate news, while your customers may prefer to get support or request features. In other words, they want have a conversation on social media. 

Using Slack to track every Twitter mention of your company’s @username is a good way to gain insight into how (and how often) customers talk to and about your company. It also means your team can talks about the best way to answer a tweet in your Slack channels before they “tag in” to answer publicly on Twitter.

Twitter integration is a powerful tool for your company and the setup process takes just a couple of minutes to complete, which we’ll walk through below.

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[techlondon]

Our Favourite Food & Drink Startups in the UK

David Bushby:Hi guys, B R A I N S T O R M --- who are your favourite UK food & bev startups in UK...? G O !

curran:Desk Beers!

Chris O'Sullivan:pronto! shuttlecook & pact

Jono Lief:EarlyBird

Simon Edwards:Personally quite like Taste Cocktails! Toby's a great guy too. (and thanks @chriso !)

[lucasjgordon-deactivated2019101]

Slack x Typeform

Over the last month I’ve joined some exciting new Slack communities. I’m inspired by people coming together to discuss common interests, and using existing technologies to organise and create.

Slack is a service for team communication. The company is going from strength to strength, and is being used by a ton of startups to replace Skype, email and other internal communication tools. But more recently, people are starting to use the platform to host communities such as #startup, #nomads, #techlondon and #music. It turns out that though this wasn’t the intended use case, it works really well and the communities are growing quickly.

Most communities that I have come across are using Typeform to allow users to apply, and then manually inviting users to the Slack groups. @levelsio wrote a great article on how he managed to hack Slack into a community platform by discovering an undocumented API endpoint, and automating the invite process for #nomads. I was speaking with the admin teams from #techlondon and #music, and they were interested in doing something similar so I decided to take a look at @levelsio's work and create a Parse Cloud Code module to automate sign ups for them.

If you’re not familiar with Parse, check it out, it’s awesome. I used to use PHP and MySQL for my backends, but it took time to set up and wasn’t always reliable. Parse has solved this problem for me, and recently I’ve been working more with Cloud Code to automate daily reports on the performance of my apps, and scrape news articles for Smile. So, for anyone interested in a Slack and Typeform integration for Parse, here you go!

The Parse docs are very thorough, and I don’t think it would be too difficult for a user with no technical knowledge to set up a new account and begin running Cloud jobs. I’m interested in developing this module to the point that anyone can set it up and get started with auto invites, as I think the Slack community movement is important and there shouldn’t be a barrier to entry. So go through the repository and please get in touch if ther are any issues as I’d be happy to help, and I’d like to know what I can do to clarify the process.

@jonbstrong and I are considering organising a Slackathon in London to get devs together who are interested in building tools to help Slack communities grow. Please join #techlondon if you’re interested in participating!

Follow me at @lucasjgordon if you have any feedback! You can also subscribe here to receive new blog posts via email!

[chatthemes]

Tumblr

This is the theme a lot of us use here at Tumblr. For when you miss your Dashboard but you still need to talk to your coworkers.

#36465D,#36465D,#5396C6,#FFFFFF,#6F7983,#FFFFFF,#57B983,#9F74BB

[techlondon]

Sweet theme that the chaps from Tumblr use for Slack

[slackhq]

Press the Start Button: Slack for Windows Has Arrived

Every week, hundreds of thousands of people all around the world sign into Slack from a web browser on Windows. Each of them is (we imagine) yearning for something more. More than 30% of our users run Windows, and their disappointment in the lack of desktop app has been noted. Today, we provide our answer:

Slack for Windows is available for download right here, right now

Read More

[techlondon]

Slack app for windows has arrived!

[techlondon]

I think the group in this slack channel will only ever give you a good advice. There are some people here with some amazing experiences to share and hopefully we can all learn from each other.  I think what shocked me most is that you have an HR Tech startup and still felt this ad was OK.  I'm glad that you've now seen that it really wasn't.  In all my experience of hiring for Bloomberg, Getco, ThoughtWorks and Facebook the one commonality is that they are all striving to make their tech teams more inclusive and better reflect the people that actually use their product.  The trouble with inherent biases is that if we don't stop to double check we just fire and forget. As far as job descriptions go - a great advert will communicate your company culture, help you stand out from the crowd and actively discourage those people who don't fit - based on their skill set not any other criteria.  Remember a job advert is more than just a job description: make your advert aspirational, tell the reader how they would make a difference to the organisation, and why their skill set matters to you. Make sure you include all the details they'd need to apply and keep that application process simple and low friction.  Get what you need from them to make a decision but your ask for a CV, cover letter, code samples and a video for an unpaid position will get you nothing but the most desperate of candidates. In this market a developer will apply to any of the other hundreds of jobs that are available.  Try to A/B test different titles and descriptions of the role on free to advertise sites - find out what works to attract views and then graduate this copy to the paid for ad sites.   When you've written your ad run it through Joblint (http://joblint.org/) then the Gender Decoder for Job Ads (http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/) and finally the Hemmingway App (http://www.hemingwayapp.com/) - you should end up with a balanced, fair advert with well written copy.  The best job adverts are exactly that - a job description is an internal document for HR a job advert engages and should be the best piece of content marketing you're capable of.  I wrote a blog about using motivation to better engage here if you fancy a read: http://mattsdebate.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/why-job-descriptions-suck-and-what-you.html I'm glad you can now see that there were problems with the job description you posted and that I know the next one you write is going to be awesome.  I'm happy to help you and look at it for you too.  You can send me a message here.

Matt Buckland from Forward Partners

[programmingisterrible]

Step 1. Don’t discriminate on age, gender. These are illegal in the UK. Be careful about the working time directives too.

Step 2. Don’t ask for people with twenty years of coding experience, under thirty, who are willing to work until 2am, who are loyal and obdient to the job but desire to start…

[techlondon]

Response to a job advert recently posted on the #techlondon slack

[appearin]

Slack is a tool for team communication that have been growing rapidly this year. Quite a few appear.in users have requested a way to quickly escalate the conversation from a Slack channel to an appear.in room.

We have therefore worked with the Slack team this fall to make an official integration...

[techlondon]

Fantastic video conference integration for slack!

[techlondon]

what do you think the next big unicorn categories will be? cabs/transportation? home automation? food delivery? health? can we expect some billion dollar/pound companies from these spaces?

Eran Ben Sabat

I think that some categories have to be vertically integrated to create an even better optimised resource utilisation. As an example, plugging in Uber with a Food delivery  with Eat24 so that all orders are dispatched via Uber. There are many fat industries where there are opportunities to create Unicorns.

Jamahl:

I think the ‘local services’ market is going to get bigger and bigger.. the likes of Mopp/ Bizzby / Magic etc..

[techlondon]

What are the popular taxi companies now? Uber vs Hailo vs Wheely? I haven't seen a Hailo in a while. Do they still operate?

Answer from Eran Ben Sabat, one of our techlondon.io members: 

Hailo is a blackcab company, Uber is more of in the every car business. Different market segments all together.  I never heard of Wheely. 

And Jamahl:

Taxicode is going to be pretty big, I hear London VCs are throwing cash at them

[techlondon]

I wanted to talk a little about this group. I think it's really powerful. Our focus is community. The reason why Silicon Valley is so good at what they do is just that - lots of smart people in a condensed space. This group is our way of bringing the gap. Let's keep this going, growing and supporting because stronger community => stronger environment => more VC interest => more money => more opportunity => more success => more happy startup people => more beer/wine.

Anton Gu from Hitch

[slackhq]

One year with Slack

[techlondon]

If only slackhq hadn't killed the auto invite API though ಠ_ಠ