24hourlondon

"I'm not a twenty-something blonde girl," Chris Osburn tells me in his soft American accent. He's right He is responding to a question about where he fits in to the rapidly developing digital landscape and explaining – odd as it may seem – his unique selling point. We have met at The Dove pub on Broadway Market in Hackney because much of the advice I have been receiving about how to market 24hourlondon has included intriguing references to co-opting "social media influencers". Which is all very well but my ideas about them come nearly entirely from reading arch articles in the Guardian about jet-setting glamourpusses wth vlogs. Whereas, to the naked eye at least, Chris seems more like one of the guys who would write about them in print and I find this oddly reassuring. So I'm trying to find out more about these exotic creatures and what they do? How can Chris – exotic on the inside – help me and how can I help him in return? I'd found him ...

Right you hairy lot. Call this a late conversion to the art of marketing. For at 24hourlondon we need to grow our app downloads. To this end we have devised a competition - or at least a clever man called Rishi Lakhani , whom we met on the London Startups site, has - which we are hoping will do the trick. We're hoping it will be *even* better than this trick Yes! You can win £500 and a crate of craft ale brewed by 24hourlondon's very own Dr Dean – at his microbrewery in Cornwall  –  by following this link , downloading the app, telling us the name of your favourite late-night London haunt that is currently missing from our database. Then email us with its name and say what you like about it. Some delicious Tremethick ale, my lover The winner will be chosen on October 1 by an independent judge and informed on October 2. Then I'll blog about it so the whole thing is seen to be completely transparent. What could possibly go wrong? Tell your friends. Pleas...

Tonight's been memorable for me and for nearly all the wrong reasons. I was doing a shift on the night news web desk of the Guardian in King's Cross, which is not most people's idea of a day job but I've been doing it for a while now. And I'd gone on my break early. So at about 10.15pm, when Twitter began to light up with horrible news from London Bridge – shortly after a false alarm along the same lines from Turin – I was at my desk. My colleague and line manager Paul Gallagher was initially the only other person there but by the time our three other colleagues returned from their breaks a few minutes later – propelled back to their work stations by an online news alert – he had already fielded messages from several senior editors, including the editor-in-chief, pitching in or offering to come in to the office. In the next few hours the web desk filled out, reporters' offers of copy from Borough Market a mile or so down the road were accepted and the d...

24hourlondon is a solution to a problem: how to get the best from a city where the licensing laws often seem stacked against you.  You can download the app in Android or iOS   from here . A closed pub But why is London like this? What got us to this point? James Nicholls' book, The politics of alcohol: a history of the drink question in England , suggests that the recent move to allow pubs to stay open later is a break with the deep past and that restricting pub opening hours has traditionally been seen by the government here as a way of restricting the alcohol intake of working people – to make us more productive capitalist worker bees. As evidence for this theory, Nicholls points to what happened during the first world war, when the temperance - anti-booze - movement was big internationally. In the US it led to an unsuccessful attempt at complete  Prohibition but in the UK its high water mark was the creation of the Central Control Board (CCB) in 1915, wh...

It's been a long road for 24hourlondon . Back in 2012 we had had around 4,000 downloads but couldn't seem to make any headway on the business side. Often when we spoke to other companies about the next step for us they couldn't see the relevance of an app to their sector: in particular I remember a conversation with a taxi firm who couldn't see why digital marketing would be beneficial. Since then Uber has happened and I guess it isn't a mystery to them any more. It felt a lot like banging one's head against a wall. Maybe we were just too early? It was dispiriting after all the time, energy and money we'd spent. Then last year I wrote a piece for the Financial Times about unicorns in Europe . And I realised that the whole tech landscape had changed in four years: there was something resembling an ecosystem. My research led me through a labyrinth of accelerators, incubators and angel investor networks. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Ma...