At the height of the Web start-up boom, the monthly gatherings of First Tuesday, where would-be dotcom millionaires could meet the people with the money, were the place to be. Last year, First Tuesday had to hire Lord's cricket ground for its London matchmaking meeting to accommodate the eager venture capitalists and budding entrepreneurs with business plans.

Every guest had a name badge, with red dots for the investors, green dots for the entrepreneurs, and yellow dots for the companies providing services for the Internet.

However, by the time the organisation reached Oxford earlier this month, the City had moved on. Red-dot guests were nowhere to be seen at First Tuesday's first Oxford networking event amid the dinosaurs of the University Museum. The theme of the evening, aptly enough, was "Fast Track Fortune and Fame...the reality".

First Tuesday's Thames Valley organiser, Mr Steve Morton, cheerfully admitted that investors might be a little thin on the ground. Mr Morton and the network's other "City Leaders" have bought the global First Tuesday brand from Israeli Internet investment company Yazam, for considerably less than the price Yazam paid last summer. The Thames Valley group is sponsored by Microsoft, accountants Ernst & Young, computer giants ICL and PR company Charlton Communications, of Hanney, near Wantage.

In America, First Tuesday events have effectively become recruitment fairs, as stunned victims of the dotcom slump seek new jobs in established IT companies.

Mr Morton conceded that the same thing might be happening in the Thames Valley, where nearly every mainstream computer company has recruitment problems. "We believe the networking concept is incredibly powerful," he said. "People like our speaker Chris Cowpe, of advertising agency BMP DDB, are used to being approached by people who want to get into advertising. He doesn't mind that happening and he still finds the occasions useful."

The other speaker, the managing director of Thame-based Internet technology specialists Connectology, Mr Jonathan Wagstaffe, agreed, saying the First Tuesday events helped him to keeping in touch with what was happening in the industry.

Another yellow badge wearer was Mr John Woods, of Site Intelligence, based at the Harwell Innovation Centre. He had been to a London First Tuesday event when his company was raising seedcorn capital. "In the end we found our funding elsewhere, but it was a useful to talk to investors," he said. He is a great believer in the importance of networking, having found his funding through word of mouth. "This is a good area to be in and the innovation centre has been great. We found funds and a good spread of customers within the Oxford ring road."

He already had good contacts in the area, having set Site Intelligence with former colleagues from Oxford Molecular, where he had helped to develop the company's website. Site Intelligence provides "visitor intelligence" - facts and figures about the computer users who click on to websites - and Mr Woods sees the dotcom downturn as a business opportunity.

"Last year, just having a lot of hits on your website was enough; this year we have all had a cold shower and we have to measure how we are performing. We segment the figures to tell you if you are reaching your target customers.

Entrepreneur Mr Phil Andrew was less pleased with the First Tuesday event. He was beginning to regret his decision to trek over to Oxford from Wootton-under-Edge, in the Cotswolds, to raise £200,000 to expand his company, Amateur Football Results & Analysis, into Europe. His venture uses clever software to produce statistical analysis of the results of some of Britain's 140,000 amateur football leagues - including the Witney and District Boys' League.

Co-organisers of the Oxford meeting were the Upstart Network, run by Oxford graduates Mr Ed Pattinson, Mr Philip Koh, Mr Nick Marsh and Mr Jeremy Sugden. Their degrees in engineering economics and management had equipped them for top jobs in the City, but instead they decided to set up their own business introducing students to the world of entrepreneurship.

Mr Pattinson said: "We help students find investors and if they don't have ideas for their own business, we find them jobs in start-up companies."

He admitted that the collapse of Internet shares had come at a bad time for the company, which they set up before doing their finals last year. "There is still a massive economic benefit in promoting entrepreneurship and there is still a need to give students the chance to set up their own businesses," he said.

"All of us had jobs lined up at top banks and consultancies, but we turned them down. In a start-up you still work long hours, but it is quite different from being stuck in a bureaucratic organisation. There are very few people who jump out of bed eager to go to work but I do."

He added: "There are two things that you get from a start-up - control over your own life and job satisfaction and experience.

However, the dinosaurs towering overhead looked like a terrible warning to those who cannot move with the times. Mr George Whitehead, of the Oxfordshire Investment Opportunity Network, appeared to be the only guest who could have been wearing a red dot, and he had a plain white name-badge, with no dots at all. He remarked wryly that investors were now running a mile from anything to do with the Internet. "People try to disguise their ideas to prove that they aren't a dotcom - often fairly unsuccessfully," he said.

After networking busily all evening, I can reveal that "wireless" is the new buzzword attracting new money, although no-one has yet worked out how to make a profit out of it (does this sound familiar?).

Mr Woods, of Site Intelligence, had another way of looking at it. "A venture capitalist from Cambridge told me that what Oxford needed was for a few companies to fail, because in Cambridge it had freed a lot of very talented people to become entrepreneurs. I wouldn't wish that on Oxford, but I could see his point."