• There are over 150 companies hiring at SiliconMilkRoundabout this weekend with over 500 technical jobs up for grabs at London start ups (with salaries from £20k to £100k

• There are 3,134 Graduate technical jobs available in the UK and over 1,000 in London currently listed on Adzuna.co.uk, the UK’s most comprehensive job search engine.

• The average Banking IT salary is £57k which is 19% higher than the average tech start up salary. Tech startups offer greater job satisfaction and the upside of options, but this salary gap is what the start hiring community is up against.

• 23% of start ups currently hiring in London are offering stock to graduate tech employees; 0% of banks hiring graduates are offering stock.

• Despite their age, workhorse languages such as C and C++ continue to remain at the top end of the software development landscape in terms of use and job potential. That being said, Ruby, Hadoop and HTML5 are the fastest growing “in demand” tech skills with employer demand up 70%+ year on year for all of these search terms

• Graduate Mobile developers can demand a premium, with the average graduate salary for iPhone developers at £34k and Android developers at £35k, 20% higher than the average graduate tech job.

• Despite what appears to be an abundance of tech jobs in the UK, 13.1% of computer science graduates remain unemployed (source: HESA). 7,000+ computer scientists graduated this summer from University in the UK.

Miicard is is about creating a system of trust online amongst people, and between people and businesses, to improve the safety and convenience of our online transactions.

As a beta tester, you can set up your public identity through your online bank account and have that verified. In return, you get 6 months free service when it launches.

More details available at: http://www.miicard.com/blog/201110/beta-testers-wanted-digital-passport-miicard

Also, you can check out a recent video demo of miicard at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTyDCGyZQAE

More details at: http://thesandpit.com/the-sandpit-blog/2011/10/5/sodash-wins-pepsico10-europe-2011.html

and http://pepsico10.com/

Congrats Dan and Joe!

The 30sec version:

We’re going to try to be more efficient in how we manage events and job listings on StartupCafe.

Events: add them onto Open Tech Calendar – and you can view them on our ‘Events’ tab. Add ** to the start if it is a one-off event.

Job listings: add them to workinstartups.com – and mark them as Edinburgh – and you can view them on our ‘Jobs’ tab.

Also, if you’re launching something or got some exciting news, drop us a line at hello@startupcafe.co.uk.

The 5 mins version:

Hi folks,

As you’ve probably noticed, things at StartupCafe have gone a bit quiet in the past few weeks.

To be honest, it’s just been a case where we’ve all been snowed down with work or been away on hols over the past few weeks. But as the semester starts again and the University is waking with activity, we’ll be kick-starting our activities.

We really want to spend more time adding events and covering the different startups in Edinburgh – things have grown so much since we started two years ago! – but in case you didn’t know, StartupCafe is only a sideline thing that we do, which we don’t make any money from. We really don’t want to be the bottleneck from reaching the rest of the community.

To help manage the day-to-day admin (which is growing), there’s a few changes we’re making, and we’d really appreciate it if you can help us by contributing through these channels.

Events

Edinburgh has so many tech/startup/social media related events that there’s something going on every week.

Rather than having our own calendar, we’re going to add any events we hear about on the Open Tech Calendar. The calendar is available for anyone to contribute.

That way, if you want to see what events are going on this week, you can just add the calendar onto your Gcal.

To see what’s going on that week, view the agenda list on our Events tab.

Job Board

We often get asked to post job requests on the blog. We’re more than happy to do this, but as you can imagine, it gets quite cumbersome if we get a lot of requests.

Rather than our own platform, we encourage you to post the job listing at workinstartups.com (Seedcamp uses this!) and mark the location as Edinburgh. We know this isn’t ideal since there are startups outside of Edinburgh – and we’re hoping to be able to include the whole of Scotland soon – so watch this space!

We would really appreciate you – people in this awesome community – helping to make this community even better by using these tools so that we can spend more time on covering the startups and writing new content. Thank you!

The position requires basic iPhone dev skills, including experience with the maps functions and integrating multimedia and video.

Conrad Molleson, Artistic Director at Hoda, confirmed that the position will be paid, and that the app is just one element of a bigger plan:

If a student were to take it on it would be in the region of £500. A supervisor would be paid according to experience. We currently have an ECA student working on the Flash version and Heriot Watt have offered the use of their iPhones. We also have an engineering student from Leeds who’s looking at the GPS app development. Ultimately, we’re hoping for a ‘soft’ launch at Dynamic Earth for mid September.

As a bonus, Hoda has a talented team of artists providing compelling artwork for the app, as you can see in the preview video below. Interested? Send your CV to info[at]hoda.org.uk.

This prestigious, public-facing role has been held by some big names in the past—namely, StartupCafe’s very own Jess Williamson, who has since moved south to work at a new startup accelerator. Prior to that, you may recall the reign of Sarah Luger, another powerhouse of networking and organisational talent.

The new co-ordinator position will be 15 hours per week on a decent salary scale, and most interestingly, has a contract for up to two years. Full job description and application details here.

This is a great opportunity to throw yourself into the middle of the University’s entrepreneurship scene, and to harness real resource to put on cool events that contribute to the greater community. So tell your friends to apply, and make them tell their friends, because it behooves us all to get someone awesome and inspirational leading the E-Club come September.

What does Persuasion API do?

We have a learning algorithm that optimizes persuasion strategies per individual website visitor. [This tool was the subject of a recent feature in Wired magazine, which explained the difference between taste profiling, which is what Amazon or Netflix uses to recommend new products you might like, and persuasion profiling. While the former tries to guess what you like, the latter analyses how to pitch it so that you're most likely to buy.]

What’s your company culture in 3 words?

Fun, handsome and good-looking.

Who is your ideal/target customer?

Large e-commerce website like Amazon or M&S.

How long have you been working on this idea?

Maurits Kaptein, my co-founder: 2 years.

Me: what idea?

What stage is the company at? How will you generate revenue?

We will start beta testing this September. The business model is based on paid API calls (suggestions of persuasion strategies per individual).

What’s the next big milestone for Persuasion API?

Three big launching customers + business case = meeting with American investors.

What’s the long-term dream for the company?

Open up profiling data and becoming a clearinghouse for cookies.

What top three lessons do you have for startup companies, and how can they start being smarter about their online marketing today?

Lesson 1: Know influential people.

Lesson 2: Know a lot of easily influenced people.

Lesson 3: Make sure you know which people are which!

What’s the No. 1 reason people should come to your upcoming talk in Edinburgh?

Because you are going to learn something without being bored to death.

Who would you like to meet when you’re in Scotland in August?

We would love to meet the Pirate Bay dude. He’s cool (and handsome). [Peter Sunde of the Pirate Bay and micropayments startup Flattr, is speaking at the Turing Festival on Saturday, 27th August at the Surgeons' Hall.]

And there you have it. Arjan will be speaking about the Science of Persuasion on Sunday, 28th August, as part of the Festival’s segment entitled Science, Technology and Creativity: Open Innovation at the Bleeding Edge. Day tickets can be purchased through the Turing Festival.

So it’s congratulations to Joe and Dan – and in particular to the latter who has just had some exciting baby news!

Incidentally, following the investment, they’re currently hiring. So if you’re interested, make sure you give them a call…

This is due to kick off at our new SF MozSpace (office) around September but soon to go international, including London town!

Web: https://webfwd.org/
Blog: http://blog.webfwd.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23webfwd

Michael and Gregor are the brains behind a new lip-synch technology for video games, which automatically generates high-quality facial animations directly from recorded speech. You can see a cool video demo of their technology on their website.

Fourty-seven universities from across the UK were invited to nominate student-led companies for the Santander awards; from these, ten finalists were chosen to pitch to a panel of judges in London. Speech Graphics were the only Scottish company to make the finals.

Since incorporating late last year, Speech Graphics has also won a John Logie Baird award for innovation, and were one of eight companies selected to deliver live investor pitches at Engage Invest Exploit (see their 60 second version of that pitch).

Here’s a roundup of the other startups that caught Santander’s attention:

Jottify is an “online community which allows people to share, discuss and sell anything they have written.” Fame and fortune appear to have caught founder Jack Lennox off-guard (the Jottify website simply says “Jottify: coming soon”), but if that’s all you need to commit, it is possible become a Facebook fan.

Guitar Lesson Lounge, founded by Guillaume Devinat, aims “to create the best video guitar lessons online.” You have to sign up to access the videos, but you can try out the following for free:

• three video guitar lessons including notes and chord charts
• a beginner’s guide to guitar fret hand technique
• your personal song lesson collection
• future free guitar lessons.

One2One Medicine, founded by Grant Milne, provides “support and guidance for future doctors from school to graduation.” Amongst other things, One2One have released their own app on iPhone and Android, which claims to help prospective doctors study for their exams. They’ve gone with an expansion pack model, where the initial content is free, but the really useful stuff costs £1.79. Fortunately, extensive market research on my part reveals that this is a price point most prospective doctors can afford.

Radfan Heatwave, founded by Simon Barker and Roland Glancy, produces “a more efficient central heating product to reduce bills and energy waste.” What more can you say?

The Fold is a new clothing brand for the “professionally chic” woman. I wish I could be professionally chic, but unfortunately, my chic-ness just don’t pay the bills. Co-founders Cheryl Mainland and Polly Fowler have developed an attractive first collection of womenswear, which ranges from black to dark navy in colour, and is accentuated by £95 belts. Is this why London is so expensive?