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The summer is coming to a close. We were lucky to have Mat join the team in July on a industrial placement. He was highly regarded by the team and although he is now returning to France to continue his studies we will be keeping in touch. Mat kindly left us with an overview of his experience working at Sambastream. To learn about his experiences visit our career page.

We are looking forward to catching up again soon Mat! Good luck with the final year. On behalf of all the team.

I just realised I never followed up on our trip to the US so thought it was about time I rectified that. Well as I mentioned on our blog while we were out there, going to the US was eye opening. The approachability of people out there, and the insights and the way they operate, puts the UK Entrepreneurship scene to a lot of shame!

One example of how approachable US Entrepreneurs are compared to the UK, is Gist.com founder T.A. McCann. Two days before we were due to fly out to Seattle, Clarence sent me a link to their site to show an interview they did showing their product. I'd never heard of them, but I thought the product looked cool, and when we saw they were in Seattle we thought why not get in touch? Within 10 minutes of emailing them, T.A. had emailed us back and we had a meeting arranged for the following Monday.

And just in case you thought he had nothing better to do than meet start-ups he'd never heard of from the UK, when we turned up, he was in the middle of a team meeting and had just received $6.75mil. in VC funding a couple of weeks before! This is a busy guy, and we really appreciated him taking the time to meet up with us, talk about what we were doing and give us some extremely useful advice.

T.A. wasn't a one off on our trip either. People out there really appreciate the importance of openness, helping each other out with good advice, and its something dearly missing from the UK start-up scene. In later blogs I'll mention so of the other great people we met on our trip.

As for Gist.com, he signed us up for the private Beta they're running, and its Great! Now that I have to start the very nerve-racking task of cold calling companies to get our product out there, I've found Gist is the perfect tool to give you all the information you need to do that! Once you send someone an email, they automatically get put into your list of contacts and when you click on their name, it aggregates - automatically - all the information about them on the web such as their Twitter account, Google searches, websites...it does what I would have to manually take 30-60 minutes to do properly so I can at least know a little about who I'm calling before I pick up the phone.

Make sure you definitely check out Gist.com, its getting some great buzz and is a truley useful tool for anyone that lives by networking. Maybe T.A. founded Gist.com for that reason, he obviously believes in the power of making new connections and his tool is all about helping people do just that!

In an effort to provide more value to our customers, we will be publishing a series of white papers to share the years of experiance we have accumulated around Document Management, Online Collaboration and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

The first white paper - An Introduction to Document Management, is a nice introduction for those who have little or no knowledge in this area on what it is, and how it helps organisations.

To view this paper, and all the others we will be publishing - just click on the 'White Papers' link above or go here.

If you have any suggestions for white papers you would like to see, please leave a comment below and we'll try our best to provide a useful white paper that addresses core topics and issues people have in the above areas.

For those of you who have been following our blog, you may have wondered what happened to us. Well the short answer is nothing, we're still here, and still moving forwards at a fantastic pace!

Firstly, since we last posted a blog, you may have noticed our site has got a lot better looking and finally has some details on what we're planning to launch later this summer, SambaJam.

SambaJam is a product of all the knowledge and experience we've accumulated working with big and small clients who are itching for web 2.0 collaboration in their organisations, but struggling to find a complete solution that fits their needs. Well SambaJam is quite literally going to be the most advanced collaboration platform out there when we finally launch our Beta later this summer, and because we've built it with businesses and large organisations in mind, it will fit into any small or large organisation simply and securely. Watch this space for more info on what SambaJam will be, and make sure you sign up for our private beta (see form left) today so we can invite you to get a first look at SambaJam and most importantly get your key feedback in before the final version.

Secondly, we have just bought on another member to our team, Mathieu, a very competent and enthusiastic developer from France. He will be a great help to getting SambaJam completed with all the extra features and ideas we keep coming up with during the development. More from him soon...

So rest assured, we're still here and we're more alive than ever! Over the next few months we'll be visiting the US for a trip to the valley, getting SambaJam launched and hopefully with your support, show the world how online collaboration should be done!

I hope you have all had a good weekend! On Saturday we celebrated David's 28th Birthday at Konaki Greek Traverna (this place is good) and Zebrano.

On Sunday we welcomed our first developer to the Sambastream fold, Zhijun! After our first round of applications and interviews we were dazzled by his enthusiasm and java profficiency. Zhijun turned around an impressive GWT demo within a couple of days. Welcome to team!

Last night we all got a chance to take a (short) break from our start-up to celebrate Ale's 28^th birthday. The party was in Guanabara in Holborn, the kind of place you'd expect a start-up called SambaStream to hang out, and probably where we'll be again in 2 weeks for my birthday! Anyway, happy birthday to Ale!

We have had a large number of responses to our adverts for developers. It is great to see so many smart, qualified and enthusiastic applicants! We hope all our applicants will have patience as the team carefully reviews the questionnaires and cv's that have been submitted. Once complete we will start interviewing the lucky group that matches the roles we have available to start February.

Thank you to all who have shown interest! We will be in touch soon.

An interesting talk. Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization - new opportunities for people and business.

You can find more interesting articles at wwww.ted.com

It is with great pride that I join my friends Ale and David to start SambaStream! We hope it will be a successful and longlasting business and that you will enjoy following our story here at www.sambastream.com.

The move to start Sambastream has required a great deal of courage, patience and determination. The start-up has become an adventure for all of us. There are many dimensions to the business we need to fulfil and several challenges we expect to face as the new business grows. As each day goes by we make further progress and become more determined.

Our strength is that we are a talented, inspired and motivated team capable of getting things done. Though the three of us are very different, we share the same ambition that has brought our paths together. For the last 4 years we have worked for a large corporation, designing and building information management systems. Our commercial experience has given us a special insight into the needs of large and distributed organisations. We understand how to connect their people, make the completion of work simplier and more cost efficient. Our insight has provided us with the latitude to define innovative business solutions and to shape the companies ambitions.

We are fortunate to have met and gained the friendship of some inspiring individuals and to have the support of trusted friends, family and partners as the three of us take our first steps to create this new business. 

We hope you'll enjoy following our adventures here, the discoveries, pitfalls and surprises.

In 1998 Google started in a garage, in 2008 SambaStream is starting in a coffee shop with free wifi internet! The world is revolving and as it does we encounter new times and new opportunities.

Its been a long time coming, but finally Ale and Clarence have taken the big leap to join SambaStream full time, leaving their full time jobs in Accenture. To celebrate, we took this photo in front of an Accenture Tiger Woods poster in St. Pancras. No longer will we all be able to walk through airports and say we work for the company on all the posters, but perhaps one day we'll be able to walk past some of our own posters and say we actually founded that company ;)