We have been very busy here at Skimbit headquarters. Busily putting together our exciting new version of the site, filled with lots of little improvements that will make you all smile (we really think it will!).

So, due to this crazy busy bee-ness, I’ve missed the last couple of Drink Tank events, the fabulous networking parties hosted by Huddle. But, my sense of duty overwhelmed me (I mean, one owes it to the community to put in a good partying effort every now and then!) and I extricated myself from my computer at the earliest in months in order to head to Bermondsey and attend Drink Tank.

Ciaran, my fabulous Senior Developer, came along, luckily as I always seemed to get a bit disoriented in the caverns of London Bridge station, and he steered me gently to the venue: first the Huddle offices, followed by Village East (a charming bar in Bermondsey).

And as always, I realised the second I arrived that I was doing myself a disservice by skipping previous events, as besides the opportunity to catch up with my ol’ Web Mission pals Andy from Huddle, Andrew from Rummble, Soks from Trusted Places, David from GroupSpaces, Alex from Latitude, Olli… from everywhere I think, I got to catch up with old friends: Nick from Fav.or.it, Nigel from ZygoHubs, Richard from ZebTab, John and Andy from Wigadoo, the generous and amazing Zuzanna from Huddle, and the glowing Yuri from City Amigos… and I got to meet new fabulous people like Emily from Hatch PR, Bindi from Microsoft, and Ian from Psycuity. It was a busy night.

It must be said, the Huddle guys know how to put on a party. At one stage it felt like trying to get into the most exclusive party in town (which I guess, it was) – with queues, door bitches, guestlists, drink tickets, and delicious nibblies. It was heaving and loud and intense, but that’s what you want in a party, so there were few complaints (although Emily and I did sneak into a calm alcove for a proper non-screaming-above-the-noise chat).

It’s funny: I’m currently helping a friend of mine who is about to start his own web start-up, and he is asking about how I built the entrepreneurial social graph I seem to have achieved in under a year of moving back to London to live. It is in describing in detail – after being questioned thoroughly – the steps I have taken to get here… wherever ‘here’ is, that I realise how actively I have pursued it and yet how organically it has happened, this immersion into such a supportive, incestuous, dashing, entertaining, fascinating crowd of entrepreneurs, or as Alex Hoye put it, “The highest density of Twitter users in the UK in one room”. You realise why they say being an ‘entrepreneur’ is more about personality than ability, because it all comes down to who you know, and people like to ‘know’ people they like, if you catch my drift. And I can honestly say that even if my endeavours don’t turn out the way I plan, at the very least I have had (and still am having) the most gloriously entertaining time, being a part of London’s entrepreneurial scene. And its events like Drink Tank that make this happen, so thank you Huddle and the many sponsors of the event for helping build this fabulous ecosystem.

We are growing bit by bit – welcome the newest member to the Skimbit team, Tamas from Hungary.

We are continuing our trend towards being a hugely multicultural company: we have an Aussie (me), English (Joe – well, he is kinda Aussie though), Ciaran (Irish), and Matthieu (French). What will our next recruit be?

We are all busily working towards our soon to be launched new design… bet you are all waiting with baited breath to see what we come out with?! We think you will like it – be patient with us, we want to do a good job.

Skimbit has changed a lot since I past posted. We are now a team of four, working in new offices in Shoreditch, London. We are working hard on our new visual design, on speed optimisation, on usability enhancements, and great new features. We have launched a really snazzy monetisation platform that is – we think – a world-first method for monetising user-generated content in a non-obtrusive way. You won’t even realise it is happening! We are really proud. We get to earn money and still be ethical, objective and non-salesy.

So, when I read that Visit London (a tourism board for London) was putting on an outdoor office, I thought my team utterly deserved a day in the park.

Four of us managed to extricate ourselves from our office, hopped on the tube, and travelled to the other (greener) side of London, to St James’s Park.

And there, to our joy and bemusement, was a fully designed and functional office – complete with paperclips, folders, desk lamps (not plugged into anything, of course!) and desk trinkets! We sat on office chairs, pulled out our laptops, and worked with glorious views of Buckingham Palace, the duck pond, and lush green trees all around us. It was a trifle difficult to read our screens in the bright sunlight, but we didn’t utter a complaint – if only every day could be so inspiring and liberating.

Unfortunately, nothing good lasts forever, or in our case, lasts more than an hour. Typically London clouds swept over our sunny sky, we started to shiver a little, but we obstinately stayed at our desks.

We started to feel a trickle of rain, and undeterred, we opened the Visit London umbrellas and huddled underneath as we continued working.

The rain started to get harder…. we persisted stubbornly for as long as we could, but it soon became a mute point. We had to pack our laptops away. But we really believed the rain would pass, so we stayed under our umbrellas for a while, and sure enough, the rain cleared, and the sun re-emerged!

With a quick wipe-down of the tables, we could continue our work in the now sparklingly beautiful afternoon.

It was again a shortlived pleasure. The rain clouds came back, and this time we were conquered. We returned to our indoors office, but with a smile on our faces. What a glorious experience to be out in such inventive playful surroundings!

Skimbit now has a good size team (Joe the amazing Marketing Director and Matthieu the incredible Operations Manager), but what we really need now is a CTO.

We have a team of developers offshore, but we would like someone to really champion Skimbit from a technical perspective, with experience in scaling web applications, and in building innovative services. As we are a small team, the CTO would also have to be a lead developer (so experience with Javascript, AJAX libraries and PHP essential), and probably be involved in some front end development work too. But aaah, isn’t that the joy of working for a start-up, you can be a jack-of-all-trades, and be truly an integral part of building something special.

Let me know if you or anyone you know would be appropriate. The candidate doesn’t need to have been a CTO before, but is ready (and experienced enough) to be one now, at least.