for a 20-30 person hackday, it's not so much of a big problem. You wouldn't need more than a /24 for that, and you'd still be inside the * 8. But most tech events with more than 100-ish people I've been to have failed on their wifi at some point, and it's normally for this reason.
It's worth noting that these are approximations of zip code areas, rather than exact zip codes. http://www.census.gov/geo/ZCTA/zcta.html - for most reasons, it'll be good enough, though.
I can't say I've experienced anything like what you've talked about. What places in the UK and the US are you talking about/comparing ? My experiences have been in London, Bournemouth and Phoenix.
Do you mean start a company, or build a product? As another UK expat in America, starting my first company here (and having run a company back home), the process for starting a company in the UK is slightly more efficient than in the US.
If you're talking about finding investment, that's a different matter. But finding investment is only "easy" in a few places in America. It's certainly no easier to find investment in the city in which I am based than it is in London.
Edit: (and I'm not so sure we should all be building companies that need hundreds of thousands of dollars to get off the ground. That places exist where we can do that in the world is great, but bootstrapping creates different types of worthwhile businesses.)
When I first started using tilemill, I missed that you can create indexes for shapefiles. This turned a 12 hour render into a 15 minute render for my particular use case. The devseed guys show how to do it here : http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/mar/29/speed-optimizati...
The "disappearing playlist" the parent refers to is a licensing issue, not a technical one, as far as I could tell. When I was in the UK (now in the US), whole artists catalogs would go missing all at once. I eventually stopped paying for the service because of this (it wiped out about 10% of the content from my playlists).
Yes, there are, and I've found a bunch of them. I used to go to gangplank alot, but now I only get there about once or twice a month since I went from self-employment to normal employment.
I've not been involved in Heatsync other than to see some of the cool things they do. I was lucky enough to meet a bunch of the founding people on the day they came into Gangplank 2 to start their collaboration, though.
This sums up why I've had so much culture shock moving from the UK to Phoenix. People don't get it when I say that selfishness is what really hurts me here, not the heat or any of the other factors.
That said, it's all of our fault. Every day, in this place, I feel myself getting a little more like everyone else here. Thanks for reminding me that I need to do better.
I wonder how well this would work were it extended further into employment, too. A $3000 bonus to quit when you've worked somewhere for x years and are still in a job because of habit or fear could be a nice way to get rid of dead weight.