Some of London’s most innovative young tech firms grouped together in Brick Lane yesterday to promote more than 500 job vacancies between them.

The event – dubbed Silicon Milkroundabout – is part of an effort to help London’s start-up tech firms grow as a community and compete with other industries such as finance for the best of the next generation in computer science talent.

More than 100 London based firms – most of which are based around the Shoreditch/Old street ‘Tech City’  area that  is fast becoming the UK’s answer to California’s Silicon Valley because of the concentration of technical firms there – took to the Old Truman Brewery on East London’s trendy Brick Lane to show prospective new workers what they can offer. They were rewarded with a bumper audience which filled the area to capacity for much of the day.

One of the leading organisers of Silicon Milkroundabout, and a proponent for the start-up tech industry in general, was Songkick – a four year old company that runs an Internet based application which allows users to track the concert schedules for their favourite musical artists. The company employs 30 people in London and is growing fast, having been one  of the first 10 companies to set up in what is now the ‘Silicon roundabout’.

Songkick’s chief technical officer Dan Crow, who spent more than a decade in the US working for both Apple and Google, told The Cloud Circle that the tech industry in the UK has the potential to mirror its counterpart over the pond, where it accounts for 1.1 per cent of GDP (2009 figures) – a similar amount to oil and gas extraction.

“The tech industry is developing quickly in London and there’s no end to its potential,” he said. “Once you get a critical mass of tech based forms the infrastructure around them naturally evolves, with all of the services they can offer to each other, and this allows for huge amounts of further, innovative growth. It really can snowball.

“London is just getting to a point now where there are enough companies that we’re starting to see that ecosystem build. We’ve got a good base for a start-up community in London and I think emulating our friends over in Silicon Valley (California) or New York is now a realistic aim.”

Some of the other companies present at yesterday’s event included:

LastFM – one of the biggest and best known companies present, LastFM is an Internet radio and music monitoring social community which provides intelligent recommendations based on users’ listening habits. With a global presence, the company is looking for a web developer, UX developer and technology development engineers to join its team of around 70 in East London.

Shazam – Another that is already a huge hit, Shazam is the original application that ‘listens’ to a song and tells the user who the artist is and where to get the track from.

The company has 100m users and approaching three billion song tags. It is seeking developers to join its team of 100 based in Hammersmith, West London.

Pusher – Maintains web sockets – a key new addition to HTML5 – as an application programming interface (API) from its UK headquarters in Clerkenwell. Seeking systems engineers, architects, operation technicians and mobile developers

Level Business – A Camden based company which intelligently analyses data from Companies House to provide transparency on any UK business. The company is specifically seeking Django and Pythen developers as well as Hadoop experience and a lead architect.

Mimecast – Email providing friend of The Cloud Circle, present to look for talented graduate level Java and C developers.

Adfonic – A mobile application advertising facilitator which is only two years old yet already handles over 20 billion ad requests per month. Having secured £7m in funding, the company is looking to hire four or five new team members to provide platform support for its team in Covent Garden.

Twilio – A fast growing company co-located in London (Covent Garden) and San Francisco whose API allows companies to process incoming text messages and phone calls. Having recently opened its London office a spokesperson for the company said it was present at Silicon Milk Roundabout to build its presence here in London but always has one eye open for new talent entering the business.

Brave New Talent – A technical talent matching service which runs on a social network style platform and links developers with companies including Apple, Google, IBM and Tesco.

Idea Plane – Providers of internal corporate social networking and employee profiling tools which allows members of large organisations to find people and skill sets within their business, post company or project updates and advertise internal vacancies. The company recently signed a big deal with Deutsche Bank.

Check back on www.thecloudcircle.com soon for a full interview with Songkick’s Dan Crow, in which he discusses the best ways to get start up tech firms off the ground and offers his views on the potential of London as a tech rich city and the part the cloud has to play.