Author Archive
« Previous EntriesFriday, March 5th, 2010
Edinburgh March Techmeetup
This Wednesday (the 10th), 6:30pm onwards, Appleton Tower level 8 (map here). Beer, pizza, and soft drink as usual + more drinks in Pear Tree afterwards.
Speaking this month:
- Juozas Kaziukėnas – on his project codenamed “Anansi” which aims to provide market information and statistics for businesses by using web spiders and data mining techniques.
- Abdel Saleh, co-founder of Said.fm will give us a demo and talk about some of the tech behind it.
See you all on Wednesday.
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
TechMeetup Edinburgh February 10th
TechMeetup on tomorrow – Appleton Tower level 8, 6:30 onwards. Pizza, beer, Pear Tree
afterwards – all as usual.
There won’t be a long talk tomorrow, leaving more time for catching up
and meeting people.
Two lightning talks/demos – Hypernumbers [1] launching their first
public products + update on IDEA lab [2] with demos of a couple of
data mining & visualization projects.
See you all tomorrow
1. http://hypernumbers.com
2. http://idea.ed.ac.uk/IDEA/Welcome.html
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.
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
TechMeetup turns one. New £300,000 fund, being an entrepreneur and making Agile work
Over 70 people turned up to join the celebration of TechMeetup’s first birthday. We kept it rather low-key on the night, the only change from the usual was cake (lots of it). Plans for a big fancy party with blackjack and hookers (imdb) are currently in the works at TechMeetup HQ. There was a good number of newcomers which is always pleasing to see, and a number of companies looking to hire people (especially C++, iPhone, Ruby and Python/Django developers).
It goes without saying that TechMeetup would not be what it is today without the hard work of Sam Collins and the help of our sponsors, Informatics Ventures.
Prof. Michael Fourman, former Head of the School of Informatics joined us to talk about Idea Lab, a new project he’s involved with which aims to bring together small teams for short development and experimentation projects to evaluate novel research applications of informatics. A £300,000 fund has been allocated for these projects. Head over to Idea Lab’s website to find out more and get in touch with someone from the team if you’re interested.
Simon Montford, a serial entrepreneur and most recently the founder of Vibio recounted the story of icollector.com — his previous startup — set in the midst of the dotcom bubble, and shared the lessons he’s learned along his journey. The biggest takeaway for me personally was the reminder of how important it is to look after your customers.
Finally, Alex Heneveld (blog, @ahtweetin) of Cloudsoft talked about how they use Agile. Alex’s approach is very pragmatic and flexible, and he’s not hesitant to throw out things that don’t work in a particular project or team.
Selective Agile by Alex Heneveld
Make sure to watch the video of the talk when it’s up. I’m sure even seasoned practicioners of Agile will learn a thing or two.
Follow us on Twitter (@techmeetup) to be notified when the videos of these talks go up.