Want to work in tech? Great companies we met at Silicon Milkroundabout

Team Blippar at Silicon Milkroundabout in east London last weekend

Maybe you’re a tech startup hunting for bright new employees to join your team. Or maybe you’re a tech enthusiast desperate to work for a cool company doing awesome things. Whatever your story, and whichever angle you’re coming from, if you’re interested in innovative businesses built on code, there’s only one place to begin your investigation.

Silicon Milkroundabout is a biannual London job fair with a difference. The company - founded by Pete Smith and Cristiana Camisotti, and based in east London - hosts networking events ‘to connect the UK’s most talented developers, data scientists, designers, product people and marketers with the teams who are making the Internet’.

Follow the signs to the fair! ©Twitter/Nic Cary

Their first event, held in May 2011, took place in a pub. These days the fairs are rather more robust - high-energy spectacles that see over 150 companies - some big, some small - gather in the Old Truman Brewery just off Brick Lane to demonstrate what they do and encourage Britain’s best talent to apply for thousands of open positions.

Team Blippar attended Silicon Milkroundabout’s ninth event last weekend, commandeering an area in the Brewery and transforming it into an interactive orange paradise. The atmosphere was brilliant, full of inspiring, entrepreneurial companies such as ASOS, Uber, Amazon Instant Video, Net-A-Porter, DueDuil, Farfetch, Zoopla, SwiftKey, Moo, Secret Escapes, Adform and FootIt (to name a tiny handful) doing astonishing, innovative things, and each attempting to shape their industry forever. (We know, because that’s exactly how we feel about our own visual browsing app.)

Blippar CEO Ambarish Mitra at the event last weekend ©Twitter/Gorilla Theory

The floor was heaving with excited applicants eager to work for ‘the next Google’, and we were thrilled by how many of them were keen to see our new version of the Blippar app in action. We had great fun blipping all sorts of things – from Coke cans and magazines, to apples and cereal boxes – and met some truly talented people.

But if you didn’t make it, don’t panic. We still have tons of positions open at Blippar in most of our global offices. So whether you’re a data engineer in India, a back-end developer in San Francisco a marketing analyst in Turkey, a mobile QA tester in Amsterdam, a project manager in London, a finance manager in New York or a deep-learning infrastructure architect in Tokyo, check out our careers page to see if there’s a role for you. We’d love you to help us make the whole world blippable.

Job applicants visiting the Blippar stand at Silicon Milkroundabout

Five cool startups we met at Silicon Milkroundabout:

1. Borrow My Doggy

Borrow My Doggy does, well, exactly what it says on the website-shaped tin: it lets people who don’t have dogs borrow four-legged walking companions from those who do. People with dogs and people without dogs both create online profiles, then set their location and send local people messages to arrange a ‘welcome woof’.

Founder Rikke Rosenlund started the company in 2012 after caring for a neighbour’s dog, and thinking to herself: ‘There must be thousands of adoring dog lovers who, just like me, would love to take care of a dog for free, and would look after the dog really well. We should create a way to put dog-loving people & pooches in touch, as it would make so many people and dogs happy!’ Visit the website.

2. Bloom & Wild

‘Give the gift of fresh flowers, posted straight through their letterbox,’ say Bloom & Wild, a floral delivery company who realised that delivery flowers often get lost in the post when they’re delivered while a recipient isn’t home. Each bouquet is beautifully packaged into box that fits perfectly through a letterbox, and the company promise that they always arrive in perfect condition. Magical.

‘Our intuitive website means that in just a few clicks you can send an arrangement of fresh flowers. Designed by our professional florist, each bouquet is stunning and long-lasting.’ Visit the website.

3. Chaser

Never chase an invoice again – simply get Chaser to do it for you. Their core mission is to help businesses avoid the scourge of late payment by getting their invoices paid on time, automatically. ‘We understand how much it hurts when customers don’t pay their invoices on time. We know from our Qualified Accountant and Finance Director experience that polite persistence pays when it comes to invoice chasing. With Chaser, you can automate the process of chasing up customers over email.’ We like the sound of that. Visit the website.

4. Easy Roommate

‘Helping you find a flatshare you can call home,’ is Easy Roommate’s core proposition. And we think it’s a lovely one: simple, emotive, and clear. Enough to make us want to boot out our current flatmates and find new ones through this lot. Their international company has created 5,456,267 flatshares (and counting) all over the world - from London to New York to Santiago to Sydney – and their website (which currently advertises some 50,400 available flatshares) is super-easy to navigate. Visit the website.

5. Peak

Mobile gaming fans eager to test and improve their brainpower (rather than just fritter away their commute swiping birds and collecting sweets) should download Peak, ‘where science meets fun’, immediately. ‘Enjoy becoming better every day,’ say the gang behind the app, which enables you to give different cognitive skills a pretty rigorous workout, take on trickier mental challenges, track your performance and genuinely improve your memory. Fun, too. Visit the website.

The next Silicon Roundabout will be held 14-15 November 2015 at Old Truman Brewery, 85 Brick Ln, East London, E1 6QL. (1pm - 7pm).