Plugg review

We travelled down from Derby with a smooth changeover at St Pancras onto the Eurostar planned but it all started to go horribly wrong at Leicester when I realised I hadn't got my passport! After a few phone calls we managed to arrange to have it couriered (is that a word?) to London. It would mean catching a later Eurostar but we had little choice. Luckily it went to plan and we got the Eurostar as planned but that wasn't the last of the passport saga....

It started off pretty well where there were a number of two minutes pitches from some interesting startups. The basic idea was that there was a panel of VCs who would decide which three would get to do a ten minute pitch.

I was already aware of Work Hound and was surprised that there wasn't more interest in what they're doing. I like their site and their approach - I wish them more luck in the future.

In between the startup stuff, Rudy De Waele gave a superb overview of what's what with mobile right now. I'm really into mobile stuff at the minute so it was good to have that sort of input from a an experienced guy like him. I think all the fuss in 2001,2002, etc was too soon but I think it's almost time for the mobile web. I use my iPhone a lot for web and email (more so than any other device (including Blackberry and every other similar gadget since 1997)) and it's almost there. If the speeds were increased (yes, an iPhone problem as well as a network problem) then there will be nothing stopping mobile web becoming huge.

The conference kinda lost it's way in the early afternoon with Sun doing their usual corporate kinda thing (which is fair enough seeing as they were a main sponsor) but then there was a bizarre session on a low enerygy data centre based on Cork. Now I'm all for green stuff but this presentation was about air flow, how chillers worked, etc - it really was not suitable for this event. My colleagues and I honestly thought it was a joke but after 10 minutes realised that nope, they really had got this one very wrong. The presenter was good and he's clearly a switched on guy but why they talked about data centres in such a way is beyond me.

It then got back on track with the VCs being very interesting to watch. I particularly found Julie Meyer of Adradne Capital and Paul Fisher of Advent Venture Partners interesting.

All in all it was time well spent but there was room for improvement. The venue was good, the VCs were excellent and the startups were suitably interesting but there was a couple of duff presentations (IE Sun and CIX) that could have been either shorter or more relevant. Sun missed an opportunity to talk about scaling in more detail - they basically gave an enterprise level overview to startups which wasn't ideal.

I also think more could have been done in terms of networking. There was no real opportunity for networking unless you just went up to someone and said "hi". I think if the seating was based around tables and there was a little intro from each person at the start then that would have helped.

So... after a Thai meal in Brussels and a good nights sleep it was back to Eurostar. I presented my passport to the Belgian officials - no problem - but once I reached British passport control (still in Brussels) they informed me my passport had expired a week ago! I'd managed to have my passport checked by at least 3 other officials without one of them noticing. So much for security!