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Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Last few places left for British Computer Society (BCS) Women’s 1st Scottish Event

Posted in Events on 12 June, 2012| Leave a Comment »

So, it’s been a while since we had a women in tech gathering in Edinburgh … so Sharon Moore and I have decided to put one together! It’s the British Computer Society’s (BCS) Womens first ever Scottish event and we’ve got quite an evening up ahead.

We’ve tempted womenintech’s Maggie Berry all the way up from London to talk careers and combined with a chance to network/mingle with like-minded people, plus a great buffet dinner, it will be an event not to be missed!

Only a few tickets left, so get yours here:

https://events.bcs.org/book/308/

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Scotland’s first javascript conference to be held in Edinburgh June 2012 @scotlandjs

Posted in Events, Local News, tagged , , on 7 June, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Edinburgh will see Scotland’s first Javascript conference held on June 26th 2012 at The Royal College of Physicians on Queen Street.

The editor of Javascript weekly will be delivering the keynote speech and the rest of the day will see the following talks:

  • Nought to real-time, multiplayer game in 16 hours with Pusher: Philip Roberts
  • Garbage Collection & Heap Management in JavaScript: Ryan Sandor Richards
  • DNode – Callbacks all the way down: Tane Piper
  • Responsive Web Design, Mobile First and Progressive enhancement in action: Leonardo Lanese
  • Testing your Backbone from the outside-in: James Newbery
  • Y Not? – Adventures in Functional Programming: Jim Weirich

(more…)

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Glasgow Gets a Slice of Silicon Valley… for 54 Hours

Posted in Events on 23 May, 2012| Leave a Comment »

If you’ve got an exciting new business idea, some of Scotland’s top entrepreneurs could soon be helping turn it into a reality.

Start Up Weekend is coming to Scotland for the first time from Friday 25 to Sunday 27 May. Hosted by business accelerator Entrepreneurial Spark it challenges participants to work together to get a brand new technology company off the ground in just 54 hours.

Anyone with a business idea is invited to go along and pitch. Those with the most potential will be invited to form a team and build their product before facing a panel of expert judges.

Organiser Michael Hayes, from Scottish tech start up blog Rookie Oven, said: “You don’t need a technical background to take part. The whole idea is for people from all walks of life to work together, to try and create something brilliant. We want to see talented people whether they are lawyers, graphic designers, nurses, developers, IT experts or anyone else who fancies it all collaborating. That’s what will make it such a special weekend.”

Around the world 200 similar events will be taking place in more than 30 countries and the Glasgow version also has the backing of Allan Lloyds of Insight Arcade and Jim Duffy of Entrepreneurial Spark.

Tickets are priced at £40 (£30 for students) and give attendees entry to Start up Weekend Glasgow from the evening of Friday 25 May through to pitching on Sunday the 27 May, as well as meals, snacks and enough coffee to fuel all night coding sessions.

Michael Hayes says: “Start Up Weekend Glasgow will bring a bit of the legendary Silicon Valley culture to Scotland for an unforgettable weekend of creativity and company creation. It’s an excellent opportunity to promote the Scottish technology scene globally and we’ll have some of Scotland’s best technical and entrepreneurial talent coaching attendees to make sure we create some truly innovative products.”

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Silicon Milkroundabout Job Fair This Week End

Posted in Events on 22 May, 2012| 1 Comment »

Tech Jobs galore at the Magic Milkroundabout!

Tech City is booming again as the job fair for graduate technology Ninjas, Gurus and even the occasional Jedi is back this weekend with the latest Silicon Milkroundabout. The event will see 100s of the UK’s top start-ups offering more than 800 jobs to the UK’s brightest and best Tech and Engineering graduates. Big names like Twitter, Songkick, Moo, Wonga, Mozilla and Moshi Monsters will all be there. There are 1,500 tickets for each day of the event. Saturday is for Product Management and Design and Sunday is dedicated to Engineering.

Key Graduate Recruitment Stats from job search engine Adzuna.co.uk:

  • There are 4,167 Graduate technical jobs currently available in the UK, up 33% since the last Silicon Milkroundabout just 6 months ago. Of these jobs, 31% are in London.
  • Over 7,000 Computer Scientists will graduate this summer from University in the UK, meaning just under 2 applicants for every graduate tech vacancy. Compare this to the UK average number of applicants to graduate positions of 50, and it’s clear there is a massive supply demand imbalance in Tech.
  • There will be well over 100 companies hiring at SiliconMilkRoundabout this weekend including Songkick, Mozllia, Twitter and Shazam with over 800 technical jobs up for grabs for the attendees. Positions on offer start at £21k (Junior Dev, undisclosed company) and range all the way  up to £60k (Perl Developer, undisclosed company)
  • 25% of start ups currently hiring in London are offering stock to graduate tech employees – 0% of banks hiring graduates are offering stock.
  • The average Banking IT salary is £51,158k which is 22% higher than the average tech start up salary. The highest paying Graduate Tech position in the City is an eye watering £75k. This is what the start-up hiring community is up against.
  • Mobile developers are in hot demand in 2012 with the number of job vacancies up 65% year on year for Android developers and up over 100% for iPhone and iPad developers. Graduate Objective-C developers are able to demand starting salaries of £41,327, 23% higher than the average technical graduate job.
  • Appetite for HTML5, Hadoop, Android jobs continue to grow with search volume for these languages up an average of 82% year on year.
  • Despite what appears to be an abundance of tech jobs in the UK, 1 in 10 Computer Science graduates remain unemployed. (source: Higher Education Statistics Authority)
  • 2012 is seeing massive growth in new “tech terminology” in job ads. Graduates looking to get a head start should be clued up on – “Big Data” (1,300 ad mentions), “Social Discovery” (112 ad mentions), “Augmented Reality” (186 ad mentions), “Mobile Payments” (920 ad mentions) and the “OpenGraph” (88 ad mentions)
  • Key Battle – Android and iOS Developers are duking it out for best mobile Graduate salary, with Android devs on average getting paid £1k more P/A than iPhone developers.
  • There are currently 596 UK employers looking for “Gurus”, over 70 “Ninjas” in hot demand and even one Tech employer looking for a “Coding Jedi”. Tech giants Google, Apple and Facebook appear to be leading the charge with these new stylistic superlatives.

Andrew Hunter, Co-Founder of UK job search engine Adzuna said: “It’s amazing to see the start up scene in the UK really starting to boom and it’s even better to see the brightest minds in the UK picking jobs in startups over banks. Events like the Silicon Milkroundabout are fuelling this new, entrepreneurial wave in Britain.”

Average Graduate Tech & UK Wide Salaries:

Job Title
Average Graduate Salary
Average UK Salary
Objective C
£41,327
£49,956
Python developer
£37,498
£52,568
Java developer
£35,524
£50,615
Android developer
£34,990
£45,135
iOS Developer
£33,426
£48,957
Ruby developer
£32,872
£43,086
Games developer
£32,021
44,901
PHP Developer
£31,956
£38,850
Startup developer
£31,570
£47,960
Perl developer
£31,102
£51,592
Hadoop
31,092
56,360
Javascript Developer
£30,011
£41,505
HTML5 jobs
£29,510
£43,076
iPhone / iPad developer
£27,592
£40,647
HTML jobs
£27,585
£39,176

Number of available Tech Vacancies, Growth in number of Jobs available and Growth in Graduate Appetite for specific languages:

Job Title
Number of Current Vacancies
Year on Year Growth in Job Vacancies
Year on Year Growth in Search
Objective C
781
71%
1%
Python developer
872
46%
88%
Java developer
1247
72%
-3%
Android developer
721
65%
6%
iOS Developer
1210
112%
3%
Ruby developer
765
41%
17%
Games developer
881
84%
38%
PHP Developer
201
33%
28%
Startup developer
1101
83%
1%
Perl developer
743
56%
-1%
Hadoop
207
88%
110%
Javascript Developer
1484
71%
67%
HTML5 jobs
2194
22%
1%
iPhone / iPad developer
733
112%
21%
HTML jobs
1021
13%
5%

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Dublin demo event requests Edin startups – free to demo, all you need is good chat!

Posted in Events, tagged , , on 19 April, 2012| 1 Comment »

Fancy going to Dublin but can’t justify a trip purely for pleasure?  Why not take the opportunity to demo your startup, FREE, to a new audience at a Dublin Beta startup demo event on 30th April?  Dublin Beta is a quarterly get-together of founders, developers, designers, students, investors and similar.

I haven’t been along to one of these events but John O’Rourke from the organising team has this to say:

“The event structure takes 12 early stage startups with a something to demo, puts them in the informal setting of a Dublin pub, and lets conversation flow over a few pints. Everyone who’s demoed with us so far has been blown away with the range of tough questions they’ve fielded on the night.  

So far we’ve had two events with over 400 people at each. We’re gearing up for our third on April 30th. Since then the direction has morphed somewhat; we have positioned ourselves as (more…)

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DrupalCamp Scotland 2012 – free to attend – register online

Posted in Events, Local News, tagged , , , on 10 April, 2012| 18 Comments »

Who uses Drupal?  Who’s just generally interested in the platform?  And who among you are non-technical decision makers keen to explore the business benefits of using Drupal and open source software in general?

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. (more…)

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@ideatransform – startup bootcamp connecting ideas and skills to improve the world

Posted in Events, tagged , , on 3 April, 2012| Leave a Comment »

  • Who would like to have a meaningful impact on the world?
  • Got a cool idea but lack the skills to bring it to life?
  • Or want to use your superpowers in design, web dev or business to help develop someone else’s vision for improving education, healthcare, finance, community or mobile?

The Idea Transform team are organising a startup bootcamp weekend where people pitch ideas on a Friday evening, the audience votes for ideas they’d like to work on and people form teams to work on projects over the rest of the weekend.  The event aims to inspire projects that can deliver long-term change across the globe.  These projects will then be judged, and a winner announced on Sunday evening.

Teams will be supported and inspired throughout the weekend by mentors and speakers who will be on hand to answer questions and offer advice. The event will be held in Cambridge on 20th-22nd April 2012 at the Cambridge Judge Business School and is supported by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning.

I’ve been told by the organiser that last year’s event saw many make their way down from Edinburgh and Glasgow so, if this is of interest, check out their website for more details.  Developers in particular are especially encouraged to attend!   (more…)

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WhiskyWeb – THE web conference in Scotland

Posted in Events on 27 March, 2012| Leave a Comment »

This Sunday is your last chance of getting hold of tickets to the inaugural WhiskyWeb conference in Edinburgh on 13th-14th April.

WhiskyWeb is conference created for the web community, by the web community, Whisky Web will have something to offer everyone who works with the web, be they a designer, a developer or something in between. This is an amazing opportunity to get your geek on in Scotland’s inspiring capital.

There’s not that many tickets left so make sure you get yours quick!

[http://whiskyweb.co.uk]

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Gameippy – startup being formed this weekend

Posted in Events, Support, tagged , , , on 24 March, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I’m at Startup Weekend London and have joined a team called Gameippy! We’re trying to build a startup in one weekend and could do with some support in terms of feedback, twitter follows (@gameippy) and facebook ‘likes’.  I’ll be posting updates on Startupcafe and on our twitter throughout the weekend – any feedback or messages of support will be gratefully received!

Gameippy.com is a portal where consumers can find fun games to play to win discounts and prizes from their favourite brands!

It is also a platform for brands to engage innovatively with consumers and deliver promotions through mobile games.

Why should brands use our platform as opposed to only their website?

  • For exposure to a greater audience than just those that would normally visit their websites
  • To cultivate goodwill with customers by engaging with them in a fun and rewarding way
  • Players will be able to share the games they like with their friends
  • Players can rate games resulting in rankings that show companies how they are performing
  • Companies will be able to ‘feature’ their games

Wanted: we need some feedback from companies, and agencies who are responsible for delivering campaigns for big brands.  Please spend 60 seconds to answer a few questions:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGh3QkZLRkU3OGZRdEdzcUlyTWsxUHc6MQ#gid=0

Thanks folks!  🙂

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Learn programming in Edinburgh

Posted in Events, Local News, tagged , , , , on 8 February, 2012| 13 Comments »

Are you learning, or do you want to learn, programming in Edinburgh?

Then you might want to saunter along to some free networking events in Leith aimed at like-minded folk, where the idea is for you to pair up with other people to study, and also get advice if you don’t know where to start.

A meetup called ‘Learn programming in Edinburgh’ has been organised and…well here’s the blurb on the meetup page:

“Get advice, meet other grasshoppers and find a study partner. We’ll be running some networking events and a 12 week intro class on programming & web development.

Anyone is free to pop along to the networking whether or not they think they might want to join the class.  Especially welcome are non-technical startup co-founders and web/graphic designers! (more…)

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