Over 12 months ago I wrote a bit of a rant about how I thought the tech sector in the north was being overlooked.
So 18 months later are things still the same, or has there been any progress, or is the UK tech scene still firmly rooted in the south?
You can see from the comments on the original post that Ryan Carson’s FOWA bus did come to Manchester, which was a good start.
The list of conferences and unconferences in the north grows too, there have been Barcamps in Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds & Barcamp NorthEast was held in Newcastle. Geekup has expanded from Manchester & Leeds and now has meetings in Chester, Liverpool, Preston and Sheffield.
A new conference aimed at the stuff that can easily be missed when creating an app or website, ThinkVisibility, was announced last week, looking at revenue streams, SEO, accessibility and usability, and that’s happening in Leeds.
NWS2.0 goes from strength to strength, companies like edocr & Yuuguu continue to shine and the myriad of freelancers, design agencies and small web shops are based up north.
3 of the largest online stores (Ebuyer, Dabs & Scan) are based in the north, we have 2 large ISP’s (Plusnet, who I work for, and Zen ).
Sheffield, Leeds & Manchester all have large universities with well respected computer science degrees.
We have communities based around PHP (phpnw), Ruby and Python amongst others, and they all hold regular meet ups around the north.
So yeah, I think it’s fair to say that 18 months later there is more to the UK IT sector than London & Brighton, even more than when i made that post …
Have I missed something? Add a comment and tell me which of your favorite Northern companies & conferences I missed
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