—

Hello,

Participants are needed for an experiment that involves answering some questions on a Supply Chain Management scenario with the use of an appropriate software system.

-What: You will be asked to answer questions on a Supply Chain Management (SCM) scenario. For this task you will use a simulation and explanation system.

-When: by the 10th of May (could consider a later time too, if needed)

-Where: Informatics Forum or over Skype

-Participants’ profile: business/management studies or relevant industrial experience, no expertise in SCM (basic knowledge is allowed)

-Duration: 1 hour

-Prize: SCM textbooks for the two participants with the best performance

If you are interested, please email me at A.Manataki@sms.ed.ac.uk to arrange a convenient day and time.

Kind Regards,
Areti

A growing number of you apparently – I hear that the number of Drupal users in Scotland is growing rapidly.  So why not head to Edinburgh University’s Informatics Forum on 25-26th May 2012 to attend DrupalCamp Scotland – a free training and networking event – to meet, learn from and hang out with other users and fans?

Free Drupal training sessions are being planned for Friday 25th May as is a Drupal for Business event aimed at folk who want to understand how the free and flexible, open source modular platform can make a difference to their organisation and clients.  Saturday 26th is to be filled with presentations and discussions to suit all levels of practitioner.  Social events will be arranged for the end of each day.

So would you like…

…to attend?  You know, so you can chat to your peers (whether developers or non-tech business folk) about their experiences?

…to sponsor?  Go on, show your love for the community!

…to be actively involved and propose a session?  You know, so you can show off, ahem, share your knowledge? You’ve got until 30th April for this.

Then get in touch with the organisers on @drupalcampscot or visit the website: http://camp.drupalscotland.org. Oh, and tell them you found out about this via StartupCafe (‘cos we like it when our ears get warm).

So Ali, tell me about your new startup.

Our latest project is called BookAdopter, and it’s a website that helps students buy and sell their university textbooks. Check it out at http://bookadopter.com.

Why another textbook exchange site? Why do you think you’ll succeed where others have failed?

It just doesn’t make sense that students buy the same textbooks over and over every year. Not only does this have a significant cost for students, it also has serious consequences for the environment.

The fact that there have been so many other attempts at tackling this problem shows us that people recognise the need for a solution. It’s just that up until recently we haven’t had the right combination of tools to come up with such a solution.

Online social networks are now ubiquitous and dense enough to make such exchange platforms really work. With BookAdopter we’re trying to strike the perfect balance between simplicity and ‘network-awareness’, and that’s why we think it’ll be a success.

How have you tried to make BookAdopter distinctive?

The website is distinctive for three reasons: 1) it’s free, 2) it’s simple, and 3) it makes it easy to share listings.

BookAdopter is free for everyone. Neither sellers nor buyers pay us a penny.

BookAdopter is simple. To use the website you won’t ever have to register, sign up, or provide your bank account details.

Perhaps most importantly, BookAdopter’s integration with Facebook changes the role of students (i.e. the sellers) from a traditionally passive one to an active one. Sellers can post an individual book listing (or a list of all of their uploaded books) to Facebook with a single click. This is much easier than having to manually design, print and pin posters.

Tell me about your team.

I co-founded the website with Philippe Ducrest, a Business student at the University of Edinburgh. We share the same vision for the project, so it’s been great fun working together over the past few months.

I’m currently studying for a PhD in AI at the University of Edinburgh. I’ve worked on a number of projects like this in the past; perhaps the most successful of which has been KeepMeOut: http://keepmeout.com.

Wil Whiting, a University of Edinburgh alumni, has also recently joined our team and will be helping us to develop and promote BookAdopter across the UK.

Do you need anything from our readers?

To turn BookAdopter into a success, we need to get as many books in our database as we can. So if any of your readers have textbooks they want to get rid of, they should upload them to BookAdopter!

And if they don’t, it’d be great if they could tell their friends about our website, because almost certainly some of them will have books that they no longer need.

We’re also working on an ‘ambassador program’ to help students help us promote BookAdopter at different universities, so if any one would like to work with us, please do get in touch!

[BookAdopter.com]

Edinburgh startup Hubdub are in need of a talented web developer to help them with their fantasy sports game FanDuel.  They’re offering £30-40K depending on experience as well as stock options to the right person.  Is that you? Is it?  I’ve pasted their blurb below for the more curious amongst you:

——

At Hubdub we are building the next generation of sports entertainment for web and mobile. That’s a pretty big goal, and we’d love you to help us achieve it.

Our next generation fantasy sports game, FanDuel, is growing at 30% month on month and getting rave reviews from The Washington Post, ABC News, TechCrunch and (most importantly) our users.

We recognize our success is dependent on creating an amazing product, and as such our developers and designers get a pretty good deal:

• Responsibility for delivering features that matter to a highly passionate userbase
• Flexibility to work from home up to 3 days per week, choose your own hours
• Casual, non-corporate but fast-paced and exciting work environment
• Rewarding and varied development challenges that you help shape
• Play with cool stuff: web sockets, Amazon S3, TDD, lighttpd and plenty more
• Smart colleagues who push and challenge you
• A fun place to work with great office banter, team days out and plenty of free beer!

Responsibilities

• Work with the product, design and development teams to scope, implement, test and maintain game functionality
• Front end (JS) and backend (object oriented PHP5, MySQL) development
• Work to challenging deadlines in an Agile environment
• A share of technical support

Requirements

• A passion for technology, programming and teamwork
• High skill level and commercial experience of PHP application development, including front end Javascript
• Experience of principled object oriented design (in PHP, Java, or similar)
• Experience of a live deployment environment, source control, and agile methodologies
• Highly proficient and productive with the desire to build high quality, robust web applications that users love

Experience of any of the following is a bonus:

• Building consumer/social web products or games
• Working in a startup
• User- and test-driven development methodologies
• Linux sys admin, server configuration and scaling backend systems
• Realtime systems (for example, with websockets)

Compensation

Competitive package of salary (£30-40k depending on experience) and stock options

This is an extremely exciting opportunity to be part of a high-growth, venture-backed startup in Scotland, and the energetic and rewarding work environment that comes with that. If you’re talented and motivated developer we want to hear from you!

———-

Apply here: http://workinstartups.com/job-board/job/812/senior-web-developer-php-mysql-javascript-at-hubdub-fanduel/

There next two events will be held on:

• Wed 8th Feb 2012
• Wed 15th Feb 2012

I haven’t been along to one of these meetups yet (I’m in London at the moment so unlikely to be able to attend for a while) so if you do go along, please let me know how it is!

Here’s the link to the meetup page:  http://www.meetup.com/learn-programming-in-edinburgh-alloa/

• 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.