This month we are very happy to welcome Lorna Jane Mitchell to speak at SuperMondays. Lorna “lornajane” Mitchell is a Leeds based PHP developer, speaker and blogger.

This months event will cover Web services, a growing area of application development. In her presentation Lorna will look at web services and where they fit into our existing application architecture.  The presentation will cover how services work, a bit about the types of service available, and also give some examples of usage within and between systems.  Lorna is a huge PHP advocate, in the presentation she will look at the support for web services in PHP and why they are perfect partners.

February 3rd, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (2)

Over 100 people attended our first SuperMondays event of the year which was held at the Research Beehive at Newcastle University.

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.

January 26th, 2010 | Tags: affiliate marketing, dfds, ling valentine, lingscars, Tom Fotheringham | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (4)

SuperMondays are working with Northern Net, Arjuna, Rise Consultants, Microsoft, Sage and Onyx to bring you CloudSeminar on 28^th January 2010 at Middlesbrough Football Club.

Cloud Computing has far-reaching implications for businesses. Don’t get left behind – find out how to take advantage at ‘CloudSeminar’, an event featuring Microsoft, Sage, Onyx and Arjuna.

In recent reports both The Economist and Business Week have commented how cloud computing – where software, data and services are hosted on the internet – will transform the business world.  Make no mistake ‘the cloud’ is going to be disruptive to IT. It offers significant threats to market incumbents but huge opportunities to new entrants and established companies that respond quickly.

Head to CloudSeminar on 28^th January 2010 to discover how you can benefit.  The event, sponsored by Sunderland Software City is just £20 to attend and will take place at Middlesbrough Football Club on 28^th January 2010 between 10am and 1pm – Places are limited so book now.

What will you learn?

Delegates will leave the seminar with a clear view of the compelling reasons for using cloud computing – and how to do it.

Session one | The Public Cloud: Arjuna, a Newcastle-based Centre of Excellence in Cloud Computing, and 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 (MD, Arjuna) and Simon Davies (Microsoft)

Session two | The Private Cloud: A number of leading North East businesses, including Sage and Onyx, will talk about their practical experiences of using cloud technology.  Speakers: Mike Goodwin (Senior Architect, Sage) and Andrew MacLellan (Project Manager, Business & Information Technology Solutions, Onyx).

How to book? Call Jill Newey on 0191 305 5096 or http://www.amiando.com/cloud_seminar.html

January 20th, 2010 | Tags: Arjuna, Microsoft, Northern Net, Onyx, Rise Consultants, Sage | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

In December we contracted Your Film to produce and shoot a video that captures the supermondays experience. You can see this here:

December 21st, 2009 | Category: Featured | Comments Off

This month we ran two competitions…the winners are:

Le Web tickets (sponsored by The Difference Engine) :

• Mike Parker, OrangeBus
• Zoe Gilbertson, SneakArt

Technical Books (sponsored by WROX):

• Jo Little, OrangeBus — Photo
• Andy Banks, Foof Productions Ltd
• Jamie Hutchinson, Picture Canning North
• Richard Laverick, UBrands

December 1st, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

On Friday 20th November we hosted SuperStartup in partnership with the Entrepreneurs Forum. We were very lucky to get David Cohen from Techstars and Kevin Mann from Take Publishing to tell us their stories.

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:

http://bdaily.info/tv/news/26-11-2009/north-east-superstartups/

We were very grateful to Newcastle University and The Culture Lab for sponsoring the event. We are also grateful to the Entrepreneurs Forum for recording the videos.

November 28th, 2009 | Tags: dave cohen, Entrepreneurs Forum, kevin mann, superstartup, take publishing, techstars, the culture lab | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

SuperMondays, in partnership with Thursday Fizz, CONNECT North East, Adesign Association, Refresh Teeside, VBUG, The Hub and the Newcastle Branch of BCS are proud to announce:

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 at Hoults 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!

Platinum Sponsors:

Gold Sponsors:

Event Partners:

October 23rd, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

• Ross Cooney
  This was a quick presentation covering where databases come from? Why are new databases needed and what is the theory behind them?
  You can download the presentation (A brief history of databases) here.

• 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.

  

  Click to play this video.

  
  You can download the presentation (An introduction to SimpleDB and Google App Engine) here.

• 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.

  

  Click to play this video.

  
  You can download the presentation (An introduction to RAQUEL) here.

This event was sponsored by Codeworks Connect and The eCommerce Experiment. SuperMondays are very grateful to their platinum sponsors, Northern Film and Media and Sunderland Software City.

You can read some excellent blog posts about this event here:

• The Pickards Blog: SuperMondays: Databases
• Daniel Swan: SuperMondays – the oxymoron of face to face geek social networking
• Stephen Woods: First time at SuperMondays

September 29th, 2009 | Tags: databases, google app engine, RAQUEL, simpledb, SQL, supermondays | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

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:

I want to thank Alex and Hannah from Sailor Girl for finding and organising the venue for us.

September 2nd, 2009 | Tags: git, subversion, svn, version control | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (2)