You may recall that last week saw a group of innovative Austin-based digital media and gaming companies on a two-day showcase of Tech City. Following last week’s guest post from one of our visitors – Andy Jones, VP of New Business at Small World Labs – we’re now pleased to host another guest blog, this time from Ken Cho
Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder of Spredfast. Read on, as Ken shares his first day’s impressions…

It’s Monday morning and my alarm goes off and my mind is immediately filled with the Flight of the Conchords’ singing “it’s business, it’s business time.”

I was invited to be a part of a delegation of Austin digital media companies exploring London’s burgeoning technology hub in an effort to build connections between the two cities – a digital diplomat per se. The goal of the mission was to promote Central Texas as a digital media center, learn more about UK trade and markets and meet potential business partners. Mayor Lee Leffingwell (Yes, that’s how I roll) led the three-day visit to London’s Tech City, which is one of the fastest growing technology centers in the world.

The timing of this trip couldn’t have been any better for me. Since my company’s inception, Spredfast has worked on a global scale. We are privileged to count some of Europe’s biggest enterprises and agencies among our clients. As a result, I’ve been researching the impact of establishing a larger UK presence will have in terms of improving our client service clients and accelerating our growth so this trade mission to the UK comes at a very opportune time for Spredfast. This mission opens doors that were not available to us on our own. As a result, I will have not only a more informed but also compresses our time lines.

Tech City extends across east London, from the traffic junction that joins Old Street with City Road (the Silicon Roundabout) through to the Olympic Park in Stratford. According to a November Guardian article, “For decades, this was just the ugly Old Street roundabout. Since 2009, it has been coined the Silicon Roundabout, supposedly Britain’s answer to California’s tech-centric Silicon Valley. Three years ago, the area housed only a dozen digital startups. Now there are at least 300 – and that’s a conservative estimate. Last.fm is based here, as are Mind Candy (creators of Moshi Monsters), SoundCloud and TweetDeck, which was bought by Twitter for £25m last fall. It was a sale that made the tech world sit up and listen.”

I met up with the rest of the Austin delegation – an impressive group of entrepreneurs, British trade representatives and the Mayor – at the Hoxton Hotel located in the heart of Tech City. I was looking forward to engaging with our group as much as I was to learn about London’s digital media landscape. With a mix of traditional and modern furniture, the Hoxton felt like that perfect central after-work meeting place for start-up folk to have drink, mingle and share their experiences essential for a startup scene.

We then headed down to the Great Eastern Dining Room for dinner. The cuisine at the Great Eastern Dining Room rivaled that of San Francisco’s Slanted Door. The English do get a bad rap about their cuisine but those who think that should visit this restaurant. After dinner, a group of us went across the street to a traditional English pub, The Griffin. I think The Griffin’s jukebox stole my iTunes playlists. We closed it down – good group of folks and good times.

The mix of technology, creativity, and trendy venues for off-line meet-ups are key ingredients to a successful and innovative digital media center in today’s world. I found these elements in on the first evening that I spent in “Tech City”. These ingredients are found in the SoMa district in downtown San Francisco where you can find Twitter and Posterous and countless others. The concentration of successful startups in SoMa has caused the Sand Hill Road venture capitalists to open up satellite offices in SoMa. With the track record of likes of Mind Candy, Tweetdeck and Last.fm, I would not be surprised to see more venture capitalists setup shop in Hoxton in the near future.

We’ll be posting more of Ken’s thoughts on Tech City in the next few days – in the meantime, you can follow him on Twitter at @chonuff.