StartupCafe

Next week sees the arrival of the 3 day Turing Festival returning to Edinburgh. This year is headlined by Steve Wozniack – co-founder of Apple.

On top of this, there are a few other events that anyone interested in startups should pay attention to. These include:

Aligning Interests: entrepreneurs & investors

A panel of international heavyweights & local entrepreneurs discuss how to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem, and look at how to remedy Scotland’s lack of seed funding for Tech.

http://venturecapital-turing.eventbrite.com/?ebtv=C

Pitch Clinic

A pitch coaching event run by Brian Caulfield: a former tech entrepreneur who had 2 exits worth over $100m, he then became an angel, and is now a VC at DFJ Esprit.

http://startuppitchclinic-turing.eventbrite.com/

Startup Party

Startups, partying. At Summerhall. What else do you need!

http://startupparty-turing.eventbrite.com/?ebtv=C

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/

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.”

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:

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