LONDON and Berlin are "competing to become the continent’s leading metropolis for digital start-ups. This week’s issue features one article about Tech City, east London’s burgeoning start-up cluster, and another on barriers to the creation of new companies in Germany".
"The leading firms in each city are thus in different stages of development. Berlin-basedSoundCloud (a service to share self-produced songs with more than 200m users per month), ResearchGate (the “Facebook for academics” with 3m registered users),6Wunderkinder (the maker of a list and task management service with 5m users) and Zalando (an e-commerce site with more than €1 billion ($1.3 billion) in annual revenues) can easily be called “start-ups”: each is less than five years old. The label fits less well for the firms leading the pack in London: King and Mind Candy, two online gaming firms with tens of millions of players each, have both been around for a decade. Wonga, a lender that uses algorithms to make decisions about who to give money to, is six years old.
Age difference notwithstanding, the hubs have much in common. They are now comparable in size. Estimates of the number of start-ups in Tech City differ widely, but if online maps showing their location are right, the cluster is now home to about 600 tech firms. This does not put London much ahead of Berlin.
Berlin now also has a similar support infrastructure to London: co-working spaces, accelerators (a start-up school of sorts), cafés and other places to meet. In London start-ups like to rent desks in Google’s Campus or in Warner Yard; in Berlin the places to be are the Betahaus and the Factory, which when it opens in a few months will be SoundCloud’s new home. In London the accelerator of choice is TechStars; in Berlin it isStartupbootcamp. And in London overworked entrepreneurs sip their latte at Ozone Coffee Roasters; in Berlin they gather at the Sankt Oberholz (although the latter seems more of a place to work than to talk: at a recent visit to the Oberholz, of the some 100 customers most stared into their laptops or other devices).
Both places are also decidedly international".
"Yet there are big differences in the urban environment in which both ecosystems exist. London is cramped, expensive and fast-moving. Berlin offers lots of open space, good value for money and an almost Mediterranean speed of life".
Source: The Economist
