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« Previous EntriesFriday, February 12th, 2010
Thanks to an amazing community.
I thought I should take the time to say a big thank you. Partly because I’m grateful, but partly because it’s perhaps not entirely obvious what an amazing tech community we have around us.
About two hours ago, I posted looking for some kind souls to host this techmeetup website. TechMeetup is run entirely by a group of amazing people who volunteer their time to do so, supported by a group of benevolent sponsors who don’t ever ask to stick ads on our foreheads and understand where we’re going. We’ve all put in a lot to help bring together a community of tech enthusiasts, lovers and haters, startups and more experienced companies – and today the result was never more obvious. The response to my request was incredible – I would openly like to say a hugely warm thank you to the tons of individuals and companies who reacted straight away and offered to help:
Brett Sheffield from Gladserv
Omar Ali from Flexiscale
Tom Griffiths from Hubdub and Fanduel
Rory Fitzpatrick
Paul MacDonald from IFDNRG
Daniel Winterstein from Winterwell Associates
Darcie Tanner Condie from Civic
Steven Moffat from TheBurgh
Janek Mann
Paolo Ciarrocca
Paul Ferrie
Now that you see the amazingness, I suggest we start to do more together – more specific meetups (I hear a Lean Startup meetup is a-brewing), hack groups, and design/development workshops. Nothing need be super serious, TechMeetup is thinking about organising a hack weekend soon just for fun. All the support is there for anyone who wants to set something up and improve our abilities and quality of the Scottish tech scene, let me know and I’ll happily help you connect to the right people or sponsors etc.
We’ll be taking Flexiscale up on their hosting offer, so a huge thanks to you guys for making it easy for us to keep our site hosted with you.
Friday, February 12th, 2010
Kind soul wanted to host TechMeetup website
I wanted to do a quick shoutout for any kind souls willing to host www.techmeetup.co.uk or sponsor our hosting for another year. The site is very light and it really doesn’t cost much – heavy things like videos are hosted with Vimeo. The only requirement is that a few of us have access to it – to maintain, and also we’re doing a small redesign soon to make the site a bit more user friendly and it makes life easier if someone on our side has admin access.
Of course we’ll acknowledge the kind party who helps us out and we’ll give you a free t-shirt. It’ll be a second hand Seedcamp t-shirt. TechMeetup doesn’t have any.
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Bloop, a better way of introductions?
The introductions at TechMeetup are two things: 1) a great way of meeting people at the meetup and 2) boring and laborious.Therefore, I suggest change.
So we made a small mobile web app, called Bloop, that let’s you post your introduction at your location. You can simply grab your name and photo from an existing profile on the web, no registration needed. Post your question/conversation/thing you’re looking for and have a look at what others are thinking or talking about.
Now you don’t need to remember everyone’s name or introduction, just have a peek at bloop.at and go chat. I don’t expect a brilliant solution first go, but I want to try a few things and see what works. So please bear with me, and the more feedback the better.
Head over to Bloop (it’s designed for mobile screens right now) and post your introduction ahead of time or just do it while you’re at the meetup. Feedback to sam at techmeetup dot co dot uk – thank you all!
Update: You can now read up new releases and what we’re working on for future versions of Bloop on our blog.
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Build a webapp in 48 hours at Launch48 – ya wanna?
I’m going down to Launch48 next week to check it out. It sounds like a really good weekend and I’m going to blindly advise that everyone should come. Launch48 is a little bit more than a hack weekend, and a little bit less than a full Seedcamp week. But it looks like a great in-between and most bestly (yes) – it’s run by startup people so you know it’s not going to suck.
Convinced yet? Take a peek at their ridiculous sponsor list including Google, Sun, PayPal, TechCrunch and a few others – full list of names covering the weekend is here. They have a great panel of speakers and mentors who will help out during the weekend. You can either come down with an idea, or join a group for the weekend and hack together over the weekend. There doesn’t seem to be any restrictions on project type as far as I can tell.
There weekend is split into two parts: guest speakers on Friday night (Launch48 Conference – £50) and then the whole weekend of building a web app/business with mentoring and lots of other developers (Launch48 Weekend – £10). You can get both for £60 but the guys at Launch48 have been very cool and given TechMeetup a promo code for 50% off – oooooh! It’s limited in how many tickets it will work for but I don’t know to how many – so it’s first come first served. Go.
Promo code for 50% off: L48M-0807-TM
Buy tickets here: http://www.amiando.com/Launch48.html