It has been one month since the Trav­el­ing Geeks kicked off our trip to Lon­don and Cam­bridge with a Tweetup at JuJu in Chelsea. (I was the chief orga­nizer of trip.) From this dis­tance and van­tage point, here are a few ran­dom impressions:

• I think too much can be made of the dif­fer­ences between entre­pre­neur­ship in the UK and in the United States. While it’s true that Sil­i­con Val­ley nur­tures a spirit of inno­va­tion marked by the mantra “Fail often, but fail fast” — an axiom that per­mits exper­i­men­ta­tion with­out demand­ing an imme­di­ate return to investors — it’s even more true that the busi­ness­men and entre­pre­neurs I met along the way have the same fire in the belly — a burn­ing desire to build some­thing of great value.

• Seed­Camp was a high point of the trip to many of us, and apart from the well-done, com­pact pre­sen­ta­tions, it was fas­ci­nat­ing to watch tomorrow’s young busi­ness lead­ers min­gle with each other and exchange ideas and con­tact infor­ma­tion. Cross-pollination at its best. Spo­tify, Hud­dle, Skim­links, Zemanta — these are names that may grow into notable con­sumer brands in the com­ing years, and Moo arguably already has. (Here’s my writeup; and here’s my video inter­view with Skim­links founder Ali­cia Navarro.)

• Appre­ci­ated the free exchange of ideas at the Econ­sul­tancy Round­table, includ­ing London2012 direc­tor Alex Balfour’s frank take on the give and take between broad­cast tele­vi­sion and new media at the Lon­don Games.

• Enjoyed get­ting to know all of the geeks bet­ter: Meghan Asha, Sarah Lacey, Sky Schuyler, Susan Brat­ton, Craig New­mark (pic­tured above), Robert Scoble, Ayelet Noff and espe­cially Howard Rhein­gold, who rarely trav­els in a pack despite his book Smart Mobs. See my short video of Howard in front of King’s Col­lege dis­cussing the themes of his clos­ing keynote at Reboot Britain, an event that pro­vided a per­fect kick­off to the week.

• The Mon­day morn­ing round­table with Tris­tan Wilkin­son, Intel UK’s Direc­tor for Pub­lic Sec­tor, nicely framed many of the week’s dis­cus­sions, with a thought­ful exchange about a social media lit­er­acy gap tak­ing the place of a hard­ware dig­i­tal divide.

• I had the good for­tune to be seated, dur­ing a din­ner in one of Cambridge’s his­toric col­leges, next to two fas­ci­nat­ing entre­pre­neurs: to my left, the founder of mobis­peech, maker of Cap­turaTalk (“take a pic­ture, hear the word and under­stand,” a mobile OCR tech­nol­ogy app par­tic­u­larly use­ful for peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties such as dyslexia and those learn­ing Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage). Down­load a free 30-day trial of Cap­turaTalk here. I’ve lost the fellow’s name — he didn’t have a busi­ness card, alas — but I found his sense of humor cap­ti­vat­ing. “We prac­tice what we preach and hire dyslex­ics. Almost every­one on staff. Hon­estly, proof­ing our mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als has been a prob­lem,” he said with a laugh.

• To my right was seated William Tun­stall Pedoe, founder-CEO of True Knowl­edge, which is about to make a splash in the search mar­ket­place. (Enter a ques­tion, get an answer back.) Here’s Renee’s video inter­view with William.

• Did you know that Cam­bridge is cel­e­brat­ing its 800th birth­day this year?

• I think we were all enthralled by the stun­ning land­scapes through­out our jour­ney, from the fab­u­lous view atop the BT Tower (thanks again to JP Ran­gaswami for the fab­u­lous din­ner) to the his­toric archi­tec­ture of Cam­bridge. Here are my photo sets of Lon­don and Cam­bridge. Is there a more civ­i­lized way to top off a business-heavy day of appear­ances in Cam­bridge than with punt­ing on the Cam while sip­ping cham­pagne? I think not.

• An after­noon at Cam­bridge Con­sul­tants proved what I’d long sus­pected: that Europe is ahead of the United States when it comes to mar­ket­place effi­cien­cies and gov­ern­ment incen­tives to reduce our car­bon foot­print, as the demo of a green kitchen with smart meter­ing amply demon­strated. (The U.S. needs to play catch-up — fast.) Too, the glimpse we got into the future of wire­less med­ical devices was espe­cially illuminating.

• The tech­nol­ogy piece of the trip came off bet­ter than I expected, thanks to the gen­eros­ity of our spon­sors (BT, Intel, NESTA, East of Eng­land, Nokia, Skype, Pure Digital’s Flip); here’s my debrief­ing with our tech lead, Sky Scuyler, who made the week go smoothly.

• Another high­light came with a light-night game, led by Susan Brat­ton, that stripped away social con­ven­tions and laid bare some of the secrets we carry with us. Thank you, Sarah, Robert, Susan, Ayelet, Rocky and Paul Carr of the Guardian for a mem­o­rable evening.

• Jane Austen jokes aside, Craig New­mark is a very fun guy to travel with.

• Had a rol­lick­ing good time at the Guardian pod­cast with Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones and the Guardian’s Emily Bell and Matt Wells. Here’s my writeup.

• We do owe one final shoutout to our spon­sors for mak­ing this trip hap­pen, in par­tic­u­lar Ken Kaplan of Intel (with Chris­tine Ngo also of great help), Roland Har­wood of NESTA, Karyn Barnes of East of Eng­land Inter­na­tional (pic­tured above with Craig) and JP Ran­gaswami of BT. We owe you our ever­last­ing gratitude.

• Also a big thank you to my part­ners in crime, Trav­el­ing Geeks co-founders Jeff Saper­stein, who brought a wel­come calm­ness to the pro­ceed­ings, and Renee Blod­gett, who pro­duced a big chunk of the media and brought in some needed spon­sors at the end.

• I owe a debt to the Mal­mai­son hotel, which shipped the sport coat I left in my room, and to Clare of Econ­sul­tancy, who made sure my LP-Micro strobe was sent back across the pond. Now if I could just locate my wits.

Cross-posted to the Trav­el­ing Geeks site.

Related arti­cles

• Meghan Asha on high­lights of Trav­el­ing Geeks UK (socialmedia.biz)
• Intro­duc­ing Trav­el­ing Geeks Lon­don (socialmedia.biz)

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.