Archive for October, 2009
« Previous EntriesThursday, October 22nd, 2009
Tech Meetup Aberdeen #1 – 21st October 2009
Last night (21st October) saw the inaugural TechMeetup in Aberdeen, which was a resounding success despite the weather. Around 30 people turned up to see what TechMeetup was all about, with a good mix of business folk and academics (but, unfortunately for Sam, no Blackberry developers).
Our benevolent sponsors this month were the Department of Computer Science at the University of Aberdeen, who provided both the facilities and the food & drink. The evening kicked off in the university’s Meston Hall with the usual beer, pizza and networking before moving through to the lecture hall for the talks.
First up was TechMeetup founder Sam Collins. Sam set the tone for the meetings by sharing the principles on which Tech Meetup was founded, encouraging informal over formal and fun over organisation.
Next up was Gavin MacLean of Open Planet Software who gave a great talk on OpenCL titled “Unleash your hidden supercomputer”. Gavin demonstrated that the hardware locked up in your graphics card could be harnessed to ease the burden on the CPU during complex, resource-consuming calculations. He ended with a demonstration that compared the speed of running with a single-thread of the CPU, dual-threads of the CPU and finally with the GPU.
Last but not least, James Littlejohn of MePath.com gave a really interesting talk on MePath, explaining how it uses the “wisdom of the crowd” to create a personalised lifestyle magazine based around any blog given to it. He also went into detail on the areas which allow MePath to stand out from the crowd itself, such as smart profiling to find similar bloggers and the Make feature that can help you find products based on your lifestyle.
All in all it was a great start to what is sure to become a mainstay of the Aberdeen tech scene.
A big thank you to Gavin and James for being the first to step up with talks, Dr Bruce Sharlau for organising the room, beer and pizza, Gordon Murrison and Marius Ciocanel for recording the event, Jim Emerson for helping to organise, John Eddie for getting the ball rolling in the first place and organising the organisers and finally to Sam for helping us get a TechMeetup in Aberdeen and getting us off to a great start.
Videos for Sam, Gavin and James‘ talks are now available on Vimeo. Both Gavin and James blogged about their talks.
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
TechMeetup Glasgow #6 – 28 October
October 28, sees the return of TechMeetup Glasgow with a new format, after its 1-month sabbatical. We’ve got 3 speakers lined up to give talks. One talk will be our “main event” of the evening, whilst the other two be 5-10 minute “lightning” talks.
Laurence Hughes, 2Fluid
Over the next 6 months, TechMeetup will be inviting one guest speaker each month from each of Glasgow’s top creative/digital agencies to come a give a lightning talk on what they’re up to. Laurence Hughes of the recently rebranded 2FluidDigital is the first to step up and will be give us an overview of their latest projects, what technologies they’re using and where 2Fluid are going. If you’re looking for a job, to compare notes or indeed to check out the competition, don’t miss it!
Andy Bright, Tattie & Toppin
Andy is a Glasgow-based UX professional who recently parted ways with the TicToc family to go freelance, a choice already proving successful. Andy will be offering his experience with paper prototyping and how he creates value and reduces risks with sketching.
Ijonas Kisselbach, Vamosa
Ijonas is CTO at Glasgow-based software company Vamosa. He’s just spent the last year transitioning the company’s products from the enterprise desktop to the Amazon cloud. Ijonas shares his experiences in how to develop software and keep customers happy at the same time using a small team of dedicated developers.
We look forward to seeing both familiar and new faces next week at our usual location in the Saltyre Building on Caledonian Uni Campus.
TechMeetup Glasgow is made possible through the continued support from Wireless Innovation.
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
DirectedEdge, recommendation systems, Wikileaks and citizen journalism
We now have a channel on Ustream! Both talks from last night were broadcast live there.
Scott Wheeler talks about recommendation engines from TechMeetup on Vimeo.
Some pictures from last night can be seen on Flickr as well.
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
IDEA Lab
at the last techmeetup Prof. Michael Fourman, former Head of the School of Informatics came to talk about IDEA lab which is helping university projects that are not necessarily technical to make the most out of technology by funding a tech team to help them.
So if you are interesting in working on a cool project in conjunction with the university (or have a cool project but need some technical help) checkout the video and slides below.
Michael Fourman talks about IDEA Lab Edinburgh from TechMeetup on Vimeo.