Back to looking at opportunities…. and looking at a few young (well, youngish) UK companies that have caught my eye as I’ve been surfing around.

As part of “what to do now?” I’ve been looking at a few companies over the web… and some of the companies that have stood out as interesting are:

At first looks, Sentient are a straight-forward web consultancy. But beyond their contract work, I’ve also noticed some of their own sites - specifically SportsDo (a GPS/route sports tracking site) and, just in the last few weeks, BlueHoo (a mobile/bluetooth based social website). As a Microsoft partner, these guys have just hit a big time publicity pot with a keynote spot during the recent big “Cloud” (Windows Azure) unveiling.

Huddle are a small London-based team producing project planning and collaboration software - aimed at everyone including the “enterprise”. They have a freemium model - where customers get fully functioning software for free, but can then pay for extra bells and whistles - especially larger storage size and more people access. They seem to have lots of traction already - including some great case studies in uk government departments and some new traction within LinkedIn’s new application environment (based on OpenSocial?).

Dunnhumby supply the data mining knowhow behind Tesco Clubcard. They’re the people who go through buying data and identify trends - trends like the famous beer and nappy correlation. Somewhat bizarrely, I actually first heard of them when running a marathon - some people behind me were talking about them in the most polite terms - about the unique skills they had in the market, about how much Tesco love them, and about how nice a place it is to work.

Lokku operate the Nestoria gmap-based property-buying website. There are plenty of other websites just like Nestoria, but I like their look&feel, their interaction with other websites (e.g. qype), the way the company supports open source projects (such as mapstraction), and the way they’ve opened their service as a set of programmatic APIs.

This company first came to my attention under the banner of the petrolprices website. Since then I’ve seen them on quite a few other websites - including ourproperty, propertysnake and housepricecrash. They’ve also just started on a whole family of talk.on.it websites - interesting to see so many websites all running on the same tech (their own CMS). Not sure if this is a good company or not - but interesting to see them making a splash in UK websites (UK media brands?).

So why am I blogging about these specific companies? Not sure really - just looking at the way UK companies are making businesses on the web!