Brighton is also fantastic for new media and I see lots of emerging companies all the time. The culture for growing talent and laid-back attitudes is definitely very strong here. We also have excellent places like The Skiff which are mixing pots for talent, and events like Farm which get talented people together with people that need it.

So yeah, we have a great freelancer culture and small agency culture, it's about whether we want to also foster the start-up culture too.

It's definitely not as bro-centric as Silicon Valley seems. We have great events like Bar Camp, but it's much less "in your face" seeming.

Brighton is also a lot smaller than London - so we have all the right things, and moreso than most cities, but it's less foreboding and intimidating than places like London. I'm also not sure how many people would be happy with risking becoming like those places. Things are really tight, and people still have their passion for coding. I hate to think of that being pillaged by greedy capitalists.

Frankly, any attempt to put it anywhere else would just end up with a split between the anointed location and London. There's already a strong telecoms presence in west London along with a fair few IT companies anyway. When you have a genuine choice then fine, choose another region, but when the choice has already essentially been made by the market, why introduce potentially damaging artificial distortions to try and fight it?

Having said that, Cambridge is sort of it's own little world of specialist IT outfits but it just doesn't have the scale to become much more than it already is, or to develop synergies with other industries.

The other issue with Cambridge is that they think they can get away with paying people -- senior people -- £35,000 a year\. Even if you hate London you're better off contracting in the midlands where you can probably get £350/day if you're not completely hopeless.

\ based roughly on my experience investigating the job market there a few years ago.

I know developers with 3-5 years experience in Cambridge earning significantly more than that. Redgate Software, for example, pays its junior (i.e. zero experience) engineers £35k / year.

Really? That's good to know. Glad to know the salaries are higher.