Wake up and smell the new dotcom brew

Web 2.0 is producing a new wave of entrepreneurs with London acting as the epicentre for most of the developments. Dominic White looks at who might be the leaders of the new generation

At 10AM on Thursday morning the 5th View Bar in Waterstone’s flagship West End store was alive with activity. Two dozen would-be dotcom millionaires had gathered with laptops and business cards at the ready for a power-networking session over lattes and free Wi-Fi.

At the same time two Irish teenage brothers, John and Patrick Collison, were preparing to agree the sale of their web software company, auctomatic.com, which helps sellers to transact more easily on auction sites such as eBay, to Canada’s Live Current Mediauver for about £2.5m.

Their tale was the latest web triumph to inspire the new generation of dotcom upstarts. It followed this month’s $850m (£425m) sale of Bebo.com, the social networking site, to AOL, which generated a life-changing windfall for UK-born founder Michael Birch and Xochi, his American wife.

Last year, British dotcoms attracted greater levels of venture capital investment than was seen even during the first dotcom boom. But for every success story, there will be hundreds of also-rans in the web race, warns Mike Reid, director of venture capital at 3i.

Read the full story at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/03/30/ccdotcom130.xml