Following on after the huge interest in Alex Reid’s android presentation we have decided to dedicate a whole SuperMondays event to mobile payments and mobile development.
John Lunn, Chief Wizard, PayPalX
We are very happy to announce that John Lunn from PayPal will be travelling up from London to give a presentation on mobile payments. John has been building payments and fraud systems on the internet for over 15 years and has advised many of the successful and less successful start-ups on their payment strategies. Originally a java certified developer and now an all purpose hacker and Seedcamp mentor. John runs PayPal new developer network PayPalX in the EU.
After John’s presentation we will have two short presentions as follows:
Jonathan Williamson – Developing and releasing an iPhone Game
in 4 weeks
An Other — Windows Mobile development
These two presentation will be followed by a panel session where you can ask questions of all of our speakers and also Alex Reid (the Android developer from last month).
This event will take place in The Research Beehive at Newcastle University. You can find a map to the venue here:
http://tinyurl.com/czs4dp
We expect that this event will be fully subscribed. Please book your ticket early!
The event was set out in two sessions, these were:
Session one | The Public Cloud: Microsoft one of the world’s leading cloud providers, talk about the benefits of cloud computing. Discover who is using it and for what – and find out how you too can get started. Speakers: Steve Caughey (Arjuna) and Simon Davies (architect at Microsoft)
Session two | The Private Cloud: Sage, Onyx and Arjuna Technologies, talk about their practical experiences of using cloud technology.
We captured most of the event on video. the first few videos are available here:
About NorthernNet:
NorthernNet is a high speed telecommunication network, symmetric network of 100Mbs (upgradeable to 1 Gbps) that connects the North of England and beyond. It is available to businesses as a direct connection and, for the first time ever, as pay-as-you-go via NorthernNet Media Access Bureaux (MABs) located within 17 educational, cultural and business venues across the North, including within MediaCityUK in Salford.
How can we exploit the opportunities provided by super-fast broadband and MediaCity:UK to elevate the North to be a leading force in the European media industry? By connecting the North’s creative and digital industries to form a robust and competitive supply chain driven by innovation and collaboration. NorthernNet’s Innovation and Collaboration project, delivered in partnership in the NE with Codeworks, provides both the infrastructure and practical support for companies to explore collaborative working on real projects.
Tom Fotheringham from DFDS was the first to take the podium. Tom give us an overview of how DFDS have been using ‘affiliate marketing’ to grow their online sales revenue and how this is now an integral part of their sales strategy.
Running an affiliate marketing scheme is full of pitfalls for both the advertiser and publisher. In his presentation Tom gave us insight into both worlds.
Understand what you want to achieve, what are your goals, stick to your objectives but be prepared to adapt to changing circumstances
Concentrate on one or two areas of interest and avoid spreading yourself too thinly – A jack of all trades is a master of none!
Think about which merchants you’re going to promote – the higher product value and commission the more you will earn! Selling a CD about 0.50p
Consider affiliate programs that offer ‘lifetime’ revenue commission
Ensure you have the right tools; hosting, software, domains
Avoid wasting your time on unproductive websites
React to change and keep ahead of the game
PR – make people aware of your sites through press, radio and TV. Not everything is online
Sell yourself – demand higher commissions if you are one of the top affiliates on a program. Use your strengths to your advantage
Next to the podium was Ling Valentine from LingsCars.com. Ling is well know in the region and nationally as a crazy marketeer. While most people see the ‘crazy Chinees woman’ the truth is that afer only a few years Ling has built her business up to a £35m turnover by driving visitors to her website and using a very efficient suite of custom developed applications to convert sales.
Ling has developed a website that has polarised the online community. Half of the visitors are scared of the garish graphics and poor layout, but the other half love it and see it as a refreshing change from typical corporate websites. In both cases Ling benefits because invariable both contingents get on blogs and twitter to comment. All of this activity drives new traffic and eventually sales.
We wish Ling good luck in the future and hope that we will be seeing more of her ridiculous videos in Youtube and stupid animations on her website.
TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund from Boulder in Colorado. It takes 10 companies a year along an accelerated process of business development with very high quality mentoring at its heart. Dave gave a passionate presentation where he described his motivation for setting up the organization and how it has changed the lives of the staff in the 39 companies that have take part.
After some beer and nibbles we then heard from Kevin Mann from Take Publishing. Take Publishing is the first non US based company to be accepted into the Techstars program. Kevin described how he got involved in the program, how it worked and more importantly his recent success as a direct result of the high quality mentoring that he received. Kevin and his team are working on their BETA release in January 2010.
David and Kevin were also interviewed by the team at Bdaily. You can see the video here:
SuperChristmas is the Christmas party that brings our organisations together to round off an excellent year and to set the scene for 2010. The party will start at 7:00pm on Thursday 17th December 2009 atHoults Yard.
The ticket price includes a light dinner, ceilidh dancing, and as much free beer/wine/soft drinks as the budget will allow…all served in a farm house theme decked out with bales of hay!
Everybody is welcome, so please do invite your friends … there will be no presentations on the night so leave your laptops, notebooks and netbooks at home!
Looking forward to seeing you there!
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October 23rd, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off
Last month we ran a hugely sucessful event on databases at the Bedson Teaching Centre at Newcastle University. This was our largest event with around 80 attendees from various backgrounds including academic, business, startup and freelancers.
David Lavery
Dave started with a quick run down of the various databases that he has used over the years and then gave an excellent introduction to SimpleDB from Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine.
David Livingston
David told us about RAQUEL, a new database system that he is helping to develop with a team at Northumbria University. RAQUEL is being developed as an open source project and you can get involved in it’s development by registering at the SourceForge RAQUEL website.
Last night we had a sell out event at the Side Theatre. This is an excellent venue and judging my the feedback we will be back there soon.
David Coxon started off proceedings and gave an excellent presentation of how he setup the online store for The Baltic. Rather than choosing an off-the-shelf ecommerce application, David and his team decided to develop the shop from scratch. This was a risky decision but one that paid off in the end because after many long nights work the site was released on time and significantly under budget. You can download Davids presentation here and watch the video here:
Paul Callaghan then gave a detailed introduction to version control and why saving your data in bomb proof bunker is rather useless if your disk fails. Paul went on to introuduce us to Git, a free and open source version control system. Traditional revision control systems use a centralized model, where all the revision control functions are performed on a shared server where every Git clone is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server. Through a practical demonstration Paul showed us that branching and merging tasks are fast and easy to do. You can download his presentation here.
Finally we heard from Alex Kavanagh. Alex gave us an introduction to Subversion (SVN), another open source version control system. Subversion differs from git because it is a centralised repository, this means that all changes are checked into a central repository and users must communicate over the network with the central repository to obtain history about a file. You can see Alex’s presentation here:
