Mentors will lead and deliver workshops, skills sessions and talks, and Makers to populate a hands-on skills shop in which participants will be able to design, prototype and test their awesome ideas.

The majority of sessions will be at Summerhall, but some activities may take place at other venues around the city.  As a professional mentor you will help guide these young innovators.  Challenges will include exploring ideas of habitat and connectivity day 2 and sustenance day 3, culminating in an intensive skills shop on day 4.

As a mentor you will be eligible for support with travel costs and expenses  If you’re interested in applying to be a mentor and want to help pioneer a new way of life, then please email fuselab@scifest.co.uk for information.

FUSELAB 1: 1–5 July 2013
FUSELAB 2: 5–9 July 2013

You do not necessarily have to be available for both sessions.

Previous winners of the prestigious Edinburgh Medal, Chris Rapley, Colin Blakemore and Jocelyn Bell Burnell looked into the future and explored their ideas.  The 25th Edinburgh Medal was awarded jointly, for the first time in its history, to Professor Peter Higgs and CERN.

For more information on the event visit: http://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/whats-on/fuselab

Engage Invest Exploit

EIE has went from strength to strength since their first event in 2008, it has gained a reputation and became a “must attend” event for investors and technology entrepreneurs.

This year Informatics Ventures, the Edinburgh BioQuarter and the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation (ECCI) have joined forces to create what will be the largest ever investor showcase in Scotland.

This year EIE is to be held at the Assembly Rooms on George Street.  With over 150 investors, 550 + attendees and 60 startups  you can be assured EIE 13 is going to be a big one!  Taking place on Thursday 9th May, the day will consist of presentations from  16 selected companies.  A full schedule of the day can be viewed on the EIE website here.  The companies attending have been mentored by Bill Joss aka the ‘Pitch Doctor’ to successfully present their companies to investors.

EIE is an invite only event, but if you’re an investor and interested in participating in the day you can email gordon@informatics-ventures.com  You can also keep up-to date with details from the event on Twitter and Facebook accounts of EIE.

For more information about the event please visit the Engage Invest Exploit website.

The Commonwealth School Enterprise Challenge is a unique international business competition for school students, aiming to identify and reward the social entrepreneurs of tomorrow.  Students will get the chance to win fantastic prizes, and gain access to a range of educational resources that will help  students become the business leaders of the future!

 

The monetary gain from the School Enterprise Challenge stands nowhere compared to the gain made in terms of entrepreneurship skills, marketing skills and a horde of other benefits and real life-hands on experience.’

- Bal Bharati School, Nepal

The Commonwealth School Enterprise Challenge supports students to set up businesses at their schools, enabling them to learn a huge range of new and exciting skills. With its focus on financial, social and environmental sustainability, the competition is cultivating a global community of socially responsible young social entrepreneurs, empowered to change the world for the better.

Sound good? Download this leaflet for more information! Or you can Register here.

The next meetup is on Tuesday 7th May, between 8.30-10.30am, at Brew Lab (6-8 South College St, Edinburgh, EH8 9AA).

Janine (from Creative Edinburgh) mentions that there is no need to book, just turn up and have fun!

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Do you know anyone using tablets or smartphones for work, or supplying software to people who are? Would they like to type all their specialised writing twice as fast, using an app that takes a couple of
minutes to learn? An Edinburgh-based company is seeking FREE TRIAL users for a premium, bespoke version of their revolutionary word prediction app that not only completes words from their first few
letters, but also converts any reasonable abbreviation into full - ’qkly xpndg txt spk’. There’s no need to memorise any shortcuts, or train the app first, and it rapidly learns your usage.

It works integrated with ALL other apps (mail, web, SMS, etc.) in Android, and includes a host of helpful features such as next-word prediction, autocorrect, swipe-to-undo/redo, speech recognition, learning from previous email, and user dictionary. We can build a bespoke version for you or your company with further features like automatic backup and sharing of vocabulary, and are also looking for partner companies, to add valuable functionality to their products.

Flexpansion® works out of the box and adapts rapidly to you. It is based on its inventor’s PhD in Artificial Intelligence & Computational Linguistics at Edinburgh University.

You can try the free version, (rave reviews) on Google Play, and contact us via www.flexpansion.com .
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Here are the features, all available in our FREE APP:

LANGUAGE
* Word Completion
* Abbreviation Expansion (Fully flexible – the only one in the world)
* Autocorrect
* Constantly adapts and learns from usage

* Learns from your Gmail (beta)

* Define / remove own words & abbreviations – edit dictionary

* Languages: UK English, US English, German

INTERFACE
* Coloured suggestions indicating personal vocabulary items &
recently-used ones.
* Swipe for more suggestions

* Long-press for secondary characters
* Long-press ?123 for speech
* Long-press Return for smileys

* Tap Shift then swipe to move up/down/left/right. Caps lock for multiple moves.
* Swipe left to undo, right to redo.
* Swipe down on keyboard to disable prediction, up to re-enable.
* Swipe down twice to hide keyboard, tap in text to bring back.

* Option to remove keypress popups

* QWERTY, QWERTZ, ABC, AZERTY keyboard layouts

* Visual and sound themes (some only in Pro version) including
old-fashioned typewriter, drums, and party sounds including fireworks.

More details at the Cultural Enterprise Office (CEO) website: http://www.culturalenterpriseoffice.co.uk/website/default.asp?menu=s46

From their website: “The digital landscape is fast evolving, driven by the proliferation in devices & platforms through which content is created and shared. This is increasingly having greater influence on how creative businesses & practitioners operate.

The digital age casts its gimlet eye on all the creative industries – raw talent will shine through but new digital distribution networks, value chains and income streams are being conjured out of unexpected places. This conference will explore cross digital platforms as new drivers of creative business and the opportunities/ challenges that digital production and distribution have for creatives in Scotland.”

Tickets are available at : http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5429347324

More details at: http://www.creative-edinburgh.com/programme/our-programme/the-making-and-breaking-of-the-creative-industries.aspx

Woman in tech? Or know one?

Excellent!

We’re running a dinner and networking event on 19th Feb at St Andrews Square, Edinburgh from 6.30pm. The event is organised by BCS (British Computer Society) Womens sub group in Scotland.

The event is designed to be a relaxed, informal place for women who work in tech to meet, chat and  discuss ideas. Tickets are £12 which only covers cost of dinner (with dessert!)

More details at: http://www.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/49199

Q: So, first off, you’ve founded Legalesign and based it here in Edinburgh, I’m interested to know the main reasons for this.

A: Well, probably there are three main benefits for a start up in Edinburgh. First of all, everyone in start-ups is keenly aware of their cash flow and Edinburgh is a great place for living less expensively. When I’m in London I find money disappears from my pocket as soon as I walk out the door. In Edinburgh everything is an order of magnitude better priced and the quality of life here is super. I walk everyday to work through a UNESCO world heritage site and take in a fantastic view of one of the worlds great castles. Secondly, I find one of the main responsibilities for myself as founder is to stay true to what we’re doing, to distinguish signal from noise, and to stay the course. In London ideas and opportunities are everywhere, which is great, but behind every business is a lot of grind and focused effort and at some point you need to make some choices and create some distance and Edinburgh is perfect for that. I was talking to a friend in financial management who said a similar thing about her industry, I think it has something to do with why Edinburgh is also a top financial centre for fund management in Europe. Lastly, and these are two related points, the tech community and informatics department at the university here in Edinburgh is excellent. Our office at Appleton Tower is in fact the top floor of one of the informatics buildings. If I want to recruit some great talent I just put up a sheet of A4 in the lift, it’s as easy as that. The top three floors here are all start up businesses and there is a thriving community of tech start ups. There are also some more established companies here like skyscanner and freeagent who shine a light on the path for startups and who sponsor and support the tech community.
Q: Some people say capital is harder to acquire here?

A: Even though we’re in a downturn and a few hours down the track from London, if a business is developing well I think there is capital available for it. When you look around you see funding coming into successful businesses. I think it’s true that it’s less easy to get capital for very early stage businesses. But I don’t think that’s because of where we are, I think that’s because of the general discovery that bootstrapping a business goes a long way. By the way, I’m talking about web business here which just by their nature are not capital intensive businesses to get started. By bootstrapping you can eliminate a huge amount of risk, the net result I think are businesses that are more stable and investable, which is better for founders and investors equally. Eric Ries is a great proponent of that approach. I’d just add that ‘informatics ventures’ based down the corridor runs an annual event called ‘Engage, Invest, Exploit’ that showcases new ventures and has a large draw of investors.

Q: So where are you with Legalesign?

A: We’re heavily into our programme of continued improvement now which I want to remain a long term habit for the company. We’re excited about what esigning can do for companies and people are just beginning to realise that it’s a must-have for more productive businesses. In some ways we’re a start up for start ups, one of our key goals is to be flexible to business change and change for a start-up is the backdrop to day to day activity. But I have this picture that if all companies switched to esigning everyone would be immediately better off, that’s what we’re trying to do. In connection with what we talked about earlier, I mentioned about the tech community, well one of the advantages of that is that there are plenty of complementary products being developed here so we’re excited about the potential for co-marketing.

Q: What does the future hold, does the independence debate affect you?

A: Independence doesn’t really affect us at the moment. If you like, the worst case scenario is that we need to move in which case this would be relatively easy even if it’s undesirable, Edinburgh is a great place to live and work. If I can make a meaningful contribution to the independence debate I’d like to, but at the moment if I was to say anything it would be to ask for some harder facts and figures. I fear increasing rhetoric as we get closer to the day. More generally Scotland currently offers good support for early stage companies, we’ve found the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce who are a gateway to grants and other funding to be genuinely helpful and supportive.

Q: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today

Ben Eliott is founder of Legalesign.com, an online esign service for business.