Side-point, but hopefully relevant. I helped out at the Techstars London demo day and after bugging the managing team on one of the prep days, we were able to find out what they saw as some issues unique to the UK and the one they always saw was "too much code, not enough talking to customers" - they've had start-ups apply with over £2 million spent, and a stunning product, but with no real customer input thus far or dveloped target market after.

My fear, though I hope I'm wrong, is that openloopz will be another one of those failures created by our apparent 'Original Sin' as a tech community.

I wouldn't consider that unique to the UK. That's a common problem throughout the startup community (I'm on the teaching team at an accelerator here in NY and it's the same way).

It's just more fun to build a product than it is to talk to customers before touching a line of code...