Posted in Events, tagged 2011, eif, festival on 6 August, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Whilst the latest talk around the Edinburgh tech circle has been about the Turing Festival towards the end of the month, I’m actually looking forward to the other festival happening this coming Thursday and Friday that we don’t often hear about: Edinburgh Interactive Festival.
Formerly known as the Edinburgh Games Festival, in recent years, the festival organisers have embraced the emergence of new media interactivity and broadened its appeal and audience. (more…)
Posted in 60 Second Interview, Events, Local News on 2 August, 2011| Leave a Comment »
With the full schedule for the Turing Festival now published, here’s a taste of what’s lined up for August. Our first stop: Arjan Haring, self-described wannabe breakdancer and science rockstar, and Chief Rebel Officer of Dutch startup Persuasion API.
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. (more…)
Posted in Events, Knowledge, tagged multi-platform, publishing, trc media on 20 July, 2011| Leave a Comment »
This year, I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the participants on the TRC Cross Creative programme ran by TRC Media.
Yes, at first, I hadn’t heard of TRC Media either. After looking up their website, it turns out they’re a charity that provides training to the media sector – TV, publishing, games and digital/web creatives.
Their Cross Creative programme is a 9 month ‘course’ which takes together a number of people that are creative decision makers in their organisation and exposes them to high-level speakers to help them grow their business and find interesting new partners to work with.
The class of 2011-2012 are: (more…)
Posted in Events, Local News on 18 July, 2011| 2 Comments »
This August marks the inaugurual Turing Edinburgh International Technology Festival. Intended to be “an emerging technology event, bringing together the cream of the world’s technology-based innovators and entrepreneurs with Scottish web, broadcast and mobile talent,” the new festival is a sort of experiment, with big plans for the future if all goes well.
Confirmed speakers include reps from Facebook, Seedcamp and Union Square Ventures (behind Twitter, Foursquare, and Zyng). Word on the street is that a Google+ developer is also on the speakers list, (more…)
Posted in Events, tagged Angry Birds, Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio, The Inspire Conference on 8 June, 2011| 1 Comment »
Meeting and chatting with the Mighty Eagle of Rovio (makers of Angry Birds) was definitely a highlight for the StartupCafe girls.
While there were many cool folk at The Inspire Conference, a thought leadership event, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get a photo with Peter Vesterbacka and his business card 🙂
While in conversation, it turned out that Peter remembered Jess from an event in Barcelona two years ago!
Given how many people he must meet travelling around the world at events and stuff, she must have left quite an impression, and quite frankly we’d expect nothing less!
I’ve taken lots of notes from the conference but Day 2 is today so I’ll try and get them on the site tomorrow.
Posted in Events, Local News, tagged conference, Inspire, london, Senate House, tech events, thought leadership on 6 June, 2011| 1 Comment »
Given that I share the same office as Launch48 all I’ve heard for the last 8 1/2 months is ‘Inspire’ ‘venue’ ‘sponsors’ ‘speakers’ ‘ticket sales’ etc etc. So I for one am irrepressibly enthused that the conference is finally here.
The next two days will see the StartupCafe team soak up lessons and thoughts shared by inspirational speakers from the world of technology, creativity and entrepreneurship.
Tomorrow Soundcloud will be talking about un-muting the web, TweetMeme will ask ‘What is Big Data?’ and Wolfram Research will discuss the coming of age of computation. And that’s just the morning. The full schedule can be found here.
Aside from enjoying the intellectual theatre, I hope to see some familiar faces and make some cool, funny, new acquaintances. I would encourage quirky folk to find me and say hello. If you don’t fall into that category, (more…)
Posted in Events, Local News, tagged birthday party, cloudsoft, community, fanduel, kotikan, mbm commercial, skyscanner, startupcafe on 28 May, 2011| 4 Comments »
Wow. What a party. What a turnout. When the Edinburgh (and Glasgow!) startup community comes out to play, we really do play! (We managed to drink through the £500 bar tab in an hour and 15 mins – bet there are a few sore heads this morning.)
And don’t take it from me, here’s what other people said about the night:
Posted in Events, Local News, tagged birthday party, cloudsoft, edinburgh, fanduel, kotican, mbm commercial, skyscanner, startups on 27 May, 2011| 1 Comment »
StartupCafe is a fun and happy place to go to find out about other startups in the scene so that when you encounter folk at coffee mornings, tech meetups, networking evenings, presentations or even the local pub, you might recognise your fellow entrepreneurs (aspiring or otherwise) and feel a connection!
Yes we like to offer news and opinion and generally have a chat on the site but we like to give startups a place to shout their successes, share their lessons, discover what their peers are up to and feel like they belong to a welcoming, funny, supportive, quirky little community.
Are you an Edin based startup? Let folk know who you are! Let them know what you do! Let them recognise you and support you with cheery words of wisdom or a free beer 🙂 (more…)
Posted in Events, tagged hacks and hackers, journalism on 25 May, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Posted in Events, tagged Events on 22 May, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Here’s this week’s events menu …
Monday 23rd May, Lean Startup Lessons Learnt
Startup Lessons Learned 2011 is the sequel to last year’s inaugural event, which brought together nearly 400 entrepreneurs and executives interested in building and supporting lean startups. The goal for this event is to give practitioners and students of the lean startup methodology the opportunity to hear insights from leaders in embracing and deploying the core principles of the lean startup (more…)
StartupCafe 