Posted in Local News, Opinions on 20 October, 2009| 1 Comment »
Once in a while, something just makes you go “WOW”. This morning, fellow StartupCafe blogger Mark sent me the link http://www.equityforpunks.com/. Not being quite sure what I would find, I found this video:
Now, I don’t even drink beer and I want to invest. Mark’s analysis of the situation is that Brewdog are taking unique way to connect with their customers while raising finance at the same time: (more…)
Posted in Opinions on 16 October, 2009| 3 Comments »
Now, let me pre-qualify this entire post first by saying that I think Scottish Institute of Enterprise (SIE) is a great institution, and I think they run some of the best events there are for student entrepreneurs. They do a great job. Plus, SIE intern Hilary Singer is one of our favourite bloggers.
But I have to say, when I heard about their new twitter competition, I was somewhat amused/perplexed/confused.
Why?
Well, you can win £150, and all you have to do is retweet:
Posted in Opinions, tagged dating, marriage, partners on 11 October, 2009| 5 Comments »
I’m often told that starting a business with someone is like getting married to them. Some of the most successful businesses have been built on partnerships – just look at Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Everyone has to have their ‘soulmate’ that they have to work with.
(more…)
Posted in Opinions, Personal Management on 29 September, 2009| 3 Comments »
We love technology. We love it so much that we start thinking about our next purchase, looking out for the latest in mobile phone, computing, or music technology, almost immediately after our most recent purchase. Thanks to 
people like us, a hungry demand for new technology has been accelerating the pace of product development and technological change. The tech industry loves us!
BUT, some of us love Mother Nature too, and our monster appetite for all things new and improved in techie toys is having a considerable environmental impact by feeding landfills/waste treatment plants etc and poisoning our soil, water and air. The fastest growing waste stream in the UK is apparently that of electrical goods. So what is a self-respecting technology lover to do?
I ask because I stumbled across a website recently called http://www.lastyearsmodel.org which does what it says on the tin, (more…)
Posted in Opinions, Personal Management on 15 September, 2009| Leave a Comment »
I briefly touched on attitudes and responses towards change in an earlier post which is the reason for this quick post. I stumbled across a book at a charity shop recently. It’s about four characters: Sniff, Scurry, Hem and Haw. The first two are mice; the last two are littlepeople. The book is about their relationship to change.
Who Moved My Cheese, written by Spencer Johnson, is a well known book and has been out for a while. Though it sneakily jumped off the shelf and into my small hands only recently, I had heard about it much earlier but not gotten (more…)
Posted in Opinions on 9 September, 2009| Leave a Comment »
One of my favourite tips from the Aspiring Women Leaders course (run by Informatics Ventures) this week came from Ken Morse, who suggested you should get a wing man (or woman) for your next networking evening.
His advice: Find someone in your organisation that shares the same networking goals as you do, go to the event together. When you’ve cornered Mr/Ms Big and making your pitch, get your wing man/woman to look out for any incoming pitchers and whisk them away. (more…)
Posted in Opinions on 6 September, 2009| Leave a Comment »
The Web's Original Logo
On Tuesday evening, Robert Cailliau, co-inventor of the Web, gave a talk at Dynamic Earth about the growth of the Internet and the Web, during which he compared the Internet to the world’s transportation network. Roads represent the physical cables that connect the world together, the rules of the road (e.g. drive on the left) are the protocols that form the Internet itself, and the traffic that travels along the roads are the protocols that make the Internet useful: E-mail, Bittorrent and of course, the Web. His description is a very good one, though there is one distinction I think it is important to make: there is a big difference between the convoy of trucks used to transport goods throughout this network, and what makes those goods valuable. (more…)
Posted in Guest Blogger, Opinions on 26 August, 2009| 1 Comment »
By Michael Clouser, Ph.D. Candidate, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy, School of Business at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Edinburgh, Scotland 06 July 2009: In response to Sunday’s article in the Scotsman “100,000 jobs to go across Scotland in downturn” I would like to first alert the readers of Hi-Tech Scotland, and the public at-large, to the notion that the downturn may turn out to be more than just a recession that lasts for a short time. The so-called experts who predicted it would be ending about now are now telling us next year this time; and others, who aren’t heard, are predicting much worse? Who knows? But we should prepare for the worse and act as if it is. The danger in not taking this looming depression into account is that (more…)
Posted in Guest Blogger, Local News, Opinions on 18 August, 2009| 2 Comments »
You may recall an article last month entitled Entrepreneurs: Born, Made, or Destroyed?, where I present the case that we are all born with entrepreneurial spirit and that society gradually beats it out of us. However, unless you looked back weeks later, you would have missed this gem of a comment added by Derek Moeller. I thought it deserved its own post, so his response below:
Entrepreneurship is about change, and change requires lots of failure mixed with the occasional win. For most people, failure is terrifying because they’re worried about what other people will think – whether they be family, customers, investors, employees, or friends.
Kids aren’t burdened with this, because our minds don’t start out with a strong sense of empathy to understand (more…)
Posted in Opinions, tagged android, google, mobile phones on 6 August, 2009| 1 Comment »
There is no doubt that in the coming few years we will see things hotting up in the mobile market. Recently saw the release of the iPhone 3Gs and the Palm Pre, and there is little doubt that mobile application development is becoming much more mainstream.
iPhone apps are now becoming a well known market (watch out for a forthcoming article on the Eucalyptus), but another potential booming opportunity in 2010 is the Android market. Andrey (more…)
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