StartupCafe

On Thursday, half of the Startup Cafe team were en route to London to attend the Launch 48 showcase. Jess, Hilary and I were heading down to do general networking with the London startup crowd. Joining us were Sam Collins from Bloop; Stuart Roebuck from ProInnovate and Alex Cole from Peekabu.

I thought that since we were in the same place, it would be a perfect time for an update on how the companies are doing …

Jess Williamson (TenBu Technologies):. “We’ve launched a new generation of the product and have secured distribution partners in 8 countries. We’re also working hard in getting into the U.S. Our new product got write-ups in Engadget and Gadling last week which was really exciting! Also, we got asked for a nio to guard the enigma machine, so hopefully we can keep Britain’s secret safe in the 21st Century!”

Stuart Roebuck (ProInnovate) “I’ve been doing a lot of coding at the moment, but slightly frustrated with the lift web framework. My battle with O2 has been quiet, but its still bubbling in the background. We’ve just launched into beta and have over 30 users actively using it so its a very exciting time for us.”

Alex Cole (Peekabu): “We’ve had a  good response from investors and are looking to close seed funding very shortly. We also showed our alpha prototypes to some second year students as well as investors and we’re confident that our concept is appealing to people ages 6 – 100. We also recently pitched at the Edinburgh Pitch contest.”

Sam Collins (Bloop) “I’ve been drawing lots of robots lately because in the next version, we’ll be introducing the Bloop robot. We’re just about to release our beta but it’s invite only; starting with Edinburgh first. Also, we’ve moved our url to bloop.co from getbloop.com.”