Invariably those companies have targeted the mobile carriers that run those networks, but a new startup called Wandera is focusing its MDO technology on the people who get stuck paying those data bills: enterprises. Wandera has attracted the attention of Bessemer Venture Partners, which lately has been investing heavily in the telecom and mobile infrastructure space. Bessemer is the sole investor in Wandera’s Series A round, forking over $7 million.

Wandera was founded by Eldar and Roy Tuvey, two brothers from London who created security software-as-a-service company ScanSafe and sold it to Cisco Systems in 2010 for $183 million. After working for Cisco for two years, the Tuveys decided to return to the SaaS model with a new startup, this time selling optimization rather than security software to their enterprise clients.

Eldar Tuvey said Wandera has built what is in essence a cloud proxy server through which all phone-bound HTTP traffic is routed on its way to an enterprise’s mobile devices. During that traffic’s brief stay in that cloud, Wandera applies any number of optimization and compression techniques intended to reduce the amount of data that flows over the airwaves to those devices – and ultimately reduce the mobile data bill the company has to pay each month.

But Tuvey said Wandera is providing more than just a megabyte-culling data grinder. It’s developed a sophisticated set of monitoring and control tools that allows an enterprise to keep tabs on what apps, webpages and services its employees are using and to apply specific policies on that use.

For instance, an enterprise could set strict limits on social networking use, banning it outright or imposing caps on the amount of data an employee can consume in the Facebook app. Or it could prohibit video streaming when employees are roaming internationally, but allow it when they’re on their home networks.

Tuvey said enterprises can even go so far as to apply specific optimization features depending on the app used. So a company could let employees consume as much video or social networking content as they please — as long as they’re willing to put up with choppy frame rates and pixelated images.

“They can implement whatever policies they see fit,” Tuvey said. “It’s completely up to the company.”

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The operator’s latest marketing tactic involves one of London’s greatest icons: the Hackney carriage, or “black cab” as most people call it. EE has put a 4G MiFi router into 50 of the vehicles in London and Birmingham (40 in the former, 10 in the latter), and passengers will be able to use the service for free.

Displaying a true marketing professional’s grasp of physics, EE brand chief Spencer McHugh claimed in a statement that users will be able to “browse, download, catch up on emails, Tweet and check Facebook literally at the speed of light”.

EE’s three-month promotion is not the first to combine the black cab with wireless connectivity. Back in December, ad firm Eyetease said it had gained approval from London’s transport authorities to put hotspots into the vehicles, with users needing to watch a 15-second ad in order to get 15 minutes of free surfing. The ISP Virgin Media also gains a great deal of exposure by providing Wi-Fi for commuters in certain London Underground stations.

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Abramovich’s new 23.3 percent stake in Truphone isn’t quite as impressive as his outright ownership of the world-famous Chelsea Football Club (that’s soccer to us Yanks). But the investment is a huge vote of confidence to an aging startup, which is on its second business model in six years. Abramovich’s investment vehicle Minden led a £75 million round – it’s first since its £16.5 million Series B in 2008 — valuing the company at £300 million.

Truphone started out in 2006 as the mobile equivalent of Skype, developing handset software that allowed customers to place free or low-cost VoIP calls over Wi-Fi to international destinations and while roaming onto international networks. Rather than compete with other VoIP providers like Skype it partnered, supporting their services within its client.

But in 2010 Truphone became a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), creating an international SIM card that access multiple networks in different countries as if they were “home” networks. The result is a service where customers paid the same local rates regardless of whether they were in the U.S., U.K. and Australia.

Truphone plans to use the new funds to expand its virtual footprint outside of Anglophone countries. It plans to target the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Poland, Germany and Spain this year, but is also in negotiations with carriers in other countries to buy capacity off their networks, the company said. Truphone added that it would hire another 500 employees, most of which would be based in the U.K.

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But it’s not just their love lives that French officials find tough to negotiate: the internet, too, gives them plenty of heartache.

One example? A series of offensive Twitter memes that swept through France over the past couple of weeks has provoked a strong reaction at the highest levels.

First came #UnBonJuif (“A good Jew”), which became the spark for a volley of anti-Semitic jokes. Then there was #SiMonFilsEstGay (“If my son was gay”). You can guess the rest. Clue: it wasn’t nice. France has a particular sensitivity to hate speech, and the torrent of Twitter abuse prompted Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the Minister for Women’s Rights, into action. In the pages of Le Monde, she denounced those spewing racist and homophobic messages and said she plans to start a consultation involving Twitter in the New Year to see what can be done to stop the tide.

Propos homophobes sur Twitter : en contradiction absolue avec les valeurs de notre République. Inacceptables et punis par la loi française.

— Najat Belkacem (@najatvb) December 22, 2012

Homophobic remarks, she said, were “in absolute contradiction with the values of the Republic”.

Of course she’s right — homophobia is vile. But it will be interesting to see where this goes. Is it grandstanding from a politician, or will there be a genuine policy that gets produced? The way the government chooses to act could be indicative of its approach to the internet… and it could go either way.

After all, seen in one context, this is yet another attempt by French officials to “civilize” the internet. That’s been a regular refrain from French leaders, first with Sarkozy and now under the man who replaced him. The internet — an American invention — is a debasing force on France, a threat to l’exception culturelle, and a powerful disruptor that must be kept in check.

But it’s not just France that feels this pressure. In another sense, this is just one small part of the much wider struggle between Europe’s establishment and the social media. Governments across the continent have been sent into a tailspin over internet freedoms. Germany has struggled with Neo-Nazis on Twitter, and Britain probably has the best — or worst — form on this. It’s thrown people in prison, dragged silly court cases on forever, and held parliamentary investigations into how social media up-ends the order of things.

And the battle between Twitter and free speech is isn’t just an issue in Europe, or in censorious regimes. The same questions are appearing, if in slightly altered forms, in America. Take the unmasking of Reddit troll Violentacrez, or the decision to publish the addresses of registered gun owners. Even in America, people are beginning to understand that “free speech” doesn’t mean “speech without consequences”. Exercising your right to say what you like to extremes doesn’t mean you won’t get held accountable.

Perhaps it’s all to be expected.

It’s nearly a year since Twitter announced that it would censor tweets in some jurisdictions — an agreement that it largely got blasted for, even if it was sensible. Now officials are trying to flex their muscles.

However, when new legislation gets mooted (as it inevitably does) we need to remember that almost every country already has ways of dealing with hate speech in real life, they just need to understand sensible ways of applying those laws in the online environment. For example, when Twitter users falsely accused a British politician of being a child abuser, I pointed out that legal recourse to tackle was already there. Lord McAlpine has wasted no time acting on that.

At the same time, ordinary people — who have suddenly been granted a super power — need to understand where social media slots into the spectrum between private conversation and public broadcast. After incorrect — and potentially dangerous — information rebounded around the network after the Sandy Hook shootings, I argued that if Twitter allows anyone to become their own media outlet, then we should all assume individual responsibility for what we tweet.

Nothing changes, but we need to navigate this course very carefully. Let’s see if France decides to take the high road or the low.

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And now Last.fm is cutting back even further on playing tunes, as it struggles to turn a profit for owner CBS.

The service, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary currently, will in 2013 require subscription for the “radio” features of its desktop client in the US, UK and Germany, and will stop offering the service elsewhere in the world except Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Brazil (announcement). Curiously, web radio will remain free.

A CBS VP with Last.fm oversight told me in 2010 it hoped to turn a profit that year, but we have since received no confirmation, when asked, that has yet happened.

Last.fm introduced the £3-a-month subscriptions belatedly in March 2009 as it dawned on the industry that ad-supported music streaming could not support online businesses in the same way it does traditional radio. A year later, it abandoned on-demand music streaming — the most costly of all to license.

Instead, Last.fm is happy to advise users to listen instead through services like Spotify, which have overtaken it in the sexy stakes and inside which Last.fm now even has an app of its own. At the end of the day, why shouldn’t Last.fm charge for the same kind of service Pandora does?

With less and less music — at least, free music — Last.fm is reverting to its original core concept of tracking listening habits (or, “scrobbling”) and making connections through the data. The site is celebrating its tenth birthday by outputting historic artist and track popularity data as charts in press releases. Like a 90s boy band reforming for one last tour, if there were a more potent illustration that much of the value of Last.fm  – which CBS acquired for $280 million in 2007 — is in the past, I don’t know what it would be.

But this diminished focus is, at the same time, joyous — for, connecting data about songs and their listeners has always been Last.fm’s strong suit…

• Any lapsed Last.fm users like me who revisit the site today will find the recommendations and gig listings based on their listening habits are excellent.
• When experienced inside Spotify, Last.fm’s recommendations are one of the best things about the Swedish music player, which has lacked meaningful discovery features until last week’s upgrade announcement.
• Meanwhile, the Xbox Last.fm app, free for those who subscribe to a Gold Xbox Live membership, is an excellent way to program eclectic music during parties.

Last.fm’s radio subscriptions may keep ticking over with perhaps a couple of hundred thousand subscribers. But now it’s probably time to mine the music data, not the music itself, to find Last.fm’s real value.

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March 2008: Dopplr relocates to a sublet at Moo Studios, 100 City Road, directly overlooking the roundabout. We’re always bumping into startup friends in the street, the cafe life is great, and there are regular rooftop barbecues at nearby Last FM and Moo on Friday evenings.

23 July 2008: I’m chatting in the office with (probably) Russell Davies, Ben Terrett and Matt Jones. We’re talking about the neighborhoods our friends work in in other cities, and I jokingly suggest that Old Street has become Silicon Roundabout. It feels very British, slightly awkward and a bit silly. I put it on Twitter.

“Silicon Roundabout”: the ever-growing community of fun startups in London’s Old Street area

— Matt Biddulph (@mattb) July 23, 2008

24 July 2008: At the Moo Summer Party I bump into Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times. I mention the joke and say I should draw him a map so he can write about it. I don’t expect this to happen.

25 July 2008: To my surprise, Tim emails me. He says he pitched the story to his editors and they want it. I write back with a list of the first 15 or so companies that come into my head, mostly friends:

“Here’s a list off the top of startups and agencies based in Old Street/Hoxton/Shoreditch off the top of my head:

Dopplr, Moo, AMEE, Trampoline Systems, Redmonk, Last.fm, Skimbit, Techlightenment, Kizoom, Schulze & Webb, tinker.it, LShift, Cohesive FT, Poke, Consolidated Independent.

and these are supported by the San Francisco-style cafes with late hours, available power sockets and free wifi: Shoreditch Old Station, Coffee@whitecross st and LCB Surf.

My guesses for why it’s more than a coincidence:

It’s out of zone 1, so it’s cheaper and out of the way of commercial streets full of shoppers

It’s near enough to The City, the West End and Canary Wharf to get to meetings, but has more of a casual character and streetlife

Great food

It’s mid-gentrification and there are lots of good property deals on small rooms in soon-to-be-demolished office buildings

Easy to reach if you’re living in the cheaper areas of east and south-east london like Hackney”

27 July 2008: Tim asked for a map so I made one on Google Maps and tweeted about it.

28 July 2008:Mark Prigg of the Evening Standard gets in touch after seeing the tweet and says his editor wants to do a story in the paper tomorrow.

29 July 2008: Tim blogs about the idea for the FT, and the Evening Standard sends a photographer to take a picture of me by the roundabout. I register siliconroundabout.com and point it to a generic Ning social network that Matt Jones set up.

30 July 2008: The Evening Standard redraws the map with the same companies I listed, and writes about it on page 11.

The newsagent in Old Street underground has the story headline on the boards outside the shop:

I’m a bit surprised.

Techcrunch writes it up too.

August 2008: Many startups email me asking to be added to the map. The government’s Department of Trade and Industry emails asking if they can help Old Street companies expand their business overseas. Real estate companies email me offering kickbacks if I help them get companies into office space.

After this, it’s all a bit fuzzy.

Ben Terrett created some ironic merchandising shirts with a lovely design:

Wired did a big special in January 2010 with a helicopter shot and a new map with lots of companies on it.

Tech City happened.

I moved to Berlin in November 2009 and was a bit surprised at how big the whole thing was when I came back in November 2011. The unscientific original list of 15ish companies is often used to create false measures of growth — 15 companies listed in 2008 to 400 companies in Wired’s 2010 article means 25x growth!

Since then, the name has been cited in a Victoria and Albert Museum show on British Design. Thinktanks and academics have done studies. And there’s now a street just off the roundabout called Silicon Way.

All I really did was give an emerging community/movement a silly name that they somehow rallied behind. The community in the area goes back to the first dotcom boom, and Shoreditch has been a creative hub for decades.

Strong community people like Richard Moross and Michael Acton Smith have done much more than I ever did to throw parties, get people together and use the name as a banner. I think the Tech City initiative may have done a lot to cement the name, in what amounts to a classic display of British stubbornness: “the government comes in and calls it Tech City, but it’s our Silicon Roundabout”.

All photographs used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Matt Biddulph, except the Silicon Way photograph, which is copyright Matt Webb and used with permission

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Listen to the noises coming out of the local companies, and it’s clear that they feel good about this. Former Facebook executive Joanna Shields, now working for the government’s Tech City organization, said it would help turn a “vibrant community” into a “global leader in tech innovation”. And the head of Google Campus, the internet giant’s local bridge-building effort, said it would “help to establish London as a global center for tech entrepreneurs”.

London’s time, you’d assume, is now.

But here’s the message I took away from it all: it’s time to step things up.

Promised unfulfilled

Britain’s government has been one of the biggest cheerleaders of London’s nascent startup scene over the last few years. While the Old Street area has been a center for the country’s digital economy ever since the birth of interactive media, the decision to create an official “Tech City” movement has seen a concerted effort to court technology companies.

This is for a few reasons. It’s partly an attempt to find some light in the economic gloom. It’s partly an attempt by Prime Minister David Cameron to appear connected, forward-thinking and switched on (look at his relationship with Google to understand the positioning here). And it’s partly an attempt to turn the legacy of the Olympics into something more by enticing big tech firms to the area — even if they don’t contribute much in the way of tax revenue to the British economy.

But Cameron’s commitment to bolstering the startup economy is actually even deeper than that.

Right now, I think the British government — or at least it’s gov.uk team, which is rebuilding government services to be “digital by default” — is actually the most exciting startup in the country.

It’s dealing with big problems in a smart way, tackling and operating in a lean, mean, aggressive manner: a world-leading approach that Tim O’Reilly recently said set the standard for governments. And to do that, it’s hired some of the most impressive coding, design and strategic talent around. Over the last couple of years a sequence of great talent — mainly from London, many of them friends of mine — have been sucked into the gov.uk machine as they try to reinvent the way Britons connect to their public services.

Don’t get me wrong: tackling big problems is great, and the work that Government Digital Service is doing is extremely important. But I think it’s an indictment of the local scene that so many great people are choosing to work for the civil service, and that the apparently thriving scene around Old Street seems to be more and more reliant on government boosters.

So how do you fix that?

The challenge to Britain’s startup community

A few months ago, I wrote that London’s tech community was looking at “golden moment”: a confluence of circumstances that could see the region really push on and make good on its promise.

Now, however, I’m less optimistic. There are lots of great companies and strong ideas floating around the UK startup scene, but right now there are too many poseurs and very few world beaters. The latent potential is not being achieved, and the signal is being crowded out by all the noise of bearded startup hipsters tapping away aimlessly in local coffee shops.

Still, I believe this is a glass-half-full situation. Those who are really taking the bit between their teeth and developing serious businesses are doing very well. Moshi Monsters has turned into a massive children’s brand; online loans company Wonga is doing things that banks can’t; innovative smaller outfits like BERG and Makie and others are making waves in their industries.

But the scene needs an injection of real talent and ambition — in part from the same people who have been subsumed into the government’s digital efforts. While they get down to Important Public Service stuff, the hangers-on have fallen into a self-congratulatory funk, drunk on applause from boosters and ego massages from investors looking to pump up their own interests.

Fortunately, most some of the talented individuals working on gov.uk are contractors, not staff. When their time is up, they’ll be back out. Let’s hope they do something great when they’re free again.

In the meantime, listen up, Silicon Roundabout: don’t buy into the mirage of success. It’s time to stop combing your mustaches and build something important.

Update: Mike Bracken, who heads the GDS project, has been in touch to say “most of our people are civil servants, as we’ve removed loads of contractors as per government policy”.

Glass of wine photo courtesy of Flickr user Davide Restivo

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YPlan’s Passbook-integrated iOS app only works for the British capital at launch, but it offers an interesting range of events, from gigs (Hot Chip and Chemical Brothers co-manager Robert Linney is a backer) to shows, whiskey tasting, rooftop cinema and, er, chessboxing (a thing, apparently).

“For bands, live concerts and events present the biggest revenue drivers. But many of these live events aren’t sold to capacity, with millions of seats staying empty every year,” Linney said. “YPlan is aiming to change that for the better. Not only does it give YPlan’s customers immediate access to some of the coolest live performances in London, but it also helps the artists by allowing more fans to discover and see their shows.”

Compared with social event discovery services such as Vamos, this is a much more curated affair, with an element of learning the user’s tastes.

“We learn everything from what the user does,” YPlan founder Rytis Vitkauskas told me. “We track the clicking and booking patterns and we become smarter over time. This only works once you have lots and lots of events. That is ultimately the objective, to always have a shortlist, but a pretty well-tailored list.”

Now, about that ‘lots and lots of events’ point. YPlan isn’t really starting out with that many, largely because it sources its events directly. The sales team is led by an ex-Time Out digital director, though, so there’s clearly experience on that front.

YPlan quietly took in a round earlier this year and, according to Vitkauskas, it won’t need any more cash until next year, when it expands out of London. “Then we do the States, starting from the East Coast, then back to Europe — Berlin and Spanish cities,” he said.

Given the highly curated nature of the service, I would imagine that YPlan will have to be very deliberate about its growth strategy. But it will be interesting to see how it pans out, particularly as a more tightly-controlled counterpoint to the social tack taken by the likes of Vamos.

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And it appears tech startups have a very strong role to play, picking up the slack left by London’s declining financial sector.

On Monday, the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) issued a few pieces of interesting news. I say ‘interesting’, but for the money folks it’s just bad news: London has lost its position as the world’s financial center, and bonuses in the City (the banking district) have fallen dramatically. But all is not lost – caffeinated coders to the rescue!

“The key areas driving the London economy in the years to 2017 are expected to be the MIC [Media, Internet and Creative] sectors of London’s ‘flat white’ economy and the more traditional Business Services such as business consultancy and accountancy,” the think tank said.

Just to drive the point home, the CEBR projects a 31 percent rise in employment in London’s East End by 2031, compared with nine percent for inner West London. The east, of course, is where all the startup action is.

Geography aside, this shift would have some pretty significant social effects, CEBR economist Rob Harbron told me:

“The MIC sector employs a lot more people for any unit of output. It’s expected to help drive employment growth in London over the coming years, and to spread out employment over more people with a lower wage packet.”

In other words, the tech sector may pay less than banking (hardly breaking news, that) but it employs more people.

The irony of this situation, of course, is that London’s tech sector exists largely because of the city’s status in the financial world. If it weren’t for the capital’s capital, chances are the UK’s tech startups would all still be up in the Cambridge hub.

In the end, it comes down to diversification. As the financial crisis has demonstrated quite clearly, London’s extreme reliance on the finance industry is highly risky. That industry isn’t going to go away, of course – not while London stays where it is, geographically speaking – but it does appear that the tech scene is forming an increasingly essential pillar of the city’s economy.

No pressure, then!

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The rise of open source, cloud computing and the newly created distribution channels has also dramatically changed how solutions and businesses are created – known as “lean methodology” – and has been embodied by The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

In a similar manner, the costs associated with startups that include a hardware component are also going through a rapid decline.

And at the same time as these cost reductions, Kickstarter has created a marketplace for the crowd funding of hardware projects. More importantly, it has created a framework for startups to essentially run “smoke tests” — as advocated by Ries — to ascertain whether there is demand for a product or service, as well as the price points that the market might accept.

So why does hardware or Internet of Things need an accelerator?

While many of the conditions are highly conducive to support the rise of Maker communities, it’s still a relatively immature ecosystem. Much of the activity and noise is focused on just hacking around rather than having a commercial focus. It’s a good thing and encourages innovation, but tapping into this high energy Maker culture with a guiding hand from experienced mentors has the potential of spawning new ideas – the black swans for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

More interestingly, this emerging market is also attracting some extremely smart entrepreneurs who avoid the trends and fashions of others and like to play on the edges. The technical complexities associated with hardware – the things that make it hard – immediately limits participation to only the brightest engineers.

But it’s not all a bed of roses. It has been previously highlighted that technology projects have one of the lowest success rates among all Kickstarter categories, with only 29% percent being successful. Only fashion projects do worse. In addition, not every project goes well. Delays occur, especially with more complex projects. Some teams over stretch themselves and fail to deal with many aspects of the delivery that are new to them. Even Kickstarter has been forced to admit that “it’s not uncommon for things to take longer than expected.”

And this is where accelerators can help to nurture and support the best and the brightest in this emerging Maker community. As entrepreneurs with domain experience and expertise, mentors can provide first hand knowledge in managing the complexities associated with designing, prototyping, building and the manufacturing of physical devices — which reduces the operational and investment risks of projects.

There are other ways that an accelerator can help, too.

Being a hardware entrepreneur is also a very lonely existence, unlike our more popular and mainstream web service cousins. The peer to peer learning and cohort effect of getting the best and brightest entrepreneurs in the same sector working alongside each other cannot be underestimated, both during the program and in the future.

Finally, there are real practical differences between hardware and software which make being part of a dedicated accelerator even more valuable.

Hardware development has specific resource requirements that include access to a workshop space that with, say, 2D laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC routers and so on as well as support from industrial designers and engineers. Any of these individual resources might be prohibitively expensive or difficult to source, but within the framework of an accelerator their shared cost and accessibility can be invaluable.

Hardware is hard. But that’s what makes it fun and highly investable – given the right resources, environment and support structures. Why shouldn’t the Internet of Things have a dedicated acceleration program?

Jon Bradford is the CEO and co-founder of Springboard, which launched its SpringboardIoT accelerator this week. Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is the founder of Good Night Lamp, a new Internet of Things startup.

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