As for the visa issue, I believe you can get a lot done in 3 months and I needed longer, I could just go home and come back again to get another 3 months (I believe the rule of thumb is that you should stay longer in your home country than the US which would limit it to 6 months). I believe that if create a successful business in the US then you will find some way of staying, the Auctomatic guys managed it somehow.
As for the comments about the UK (I am British) I don't really know I just find that there is very little support for web startups generaly, we have an enterprise centre which I am part of but they don't really know what to say when they find out that you don't plan on selling anything. Everyone I know is very secretive about things, it's all about NDAs rather than actually learning from talking.
I'm based in Sheffield and my skills are most likely pretty basic comapared to most people on here but I enjoy designiing and creating asp.net sites which is how I want to do my contact site, probably not the best way but I think it's doable.
I can't offer you an internship but would be interested in talking about yours projects, I am based in France and in the UK. Email: lwcarab at gmail dot com
Similar situation - I'd be happy to talk to you about some of the projects I'm working on, and see if you'd like to go 50/50 on any of them. http://www.dedasys.com has a few of them, but there are others. I'm located in Italy, but am from the US.
Yep this was Kulveer and Harjeet Taggar from Auctomatic, as far as I know they only met up with their hackers (Patrick and John Collison) once at Y Combinator. And Auctomatic was an extremely successful investment, I doubt we've seen the last of those guys.
