A strong and vibrant IT community based in the North East Of England
This month we ran two competitions…the winners are:
Le Web tickets (sponsored by The Difference Engine) :
Technical Books (sponsored by WROX):
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.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8PXxKfnwwQ
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4RTvdZpIg0
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO6h8RScNyQ
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.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgGk_UfkVDQ
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbxHCh8E5tM
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0gXdV66ewk
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.
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:
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:
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.
Alastair Mc Donald introduced us to the world of geocaching (pronounced geo-cashing), a treasure hunting game which is played by thousands of players around the world. The game is an intriguing mix of treasure hunting, navigation, and outdoor hiking/walking. Players (geocachers) place caches in hidden locations around the world and log them on a geocaching website. Anybody with a GPS device can then try to locate the geocache.
A typical cache comes in the shape of a tupperware box that contains a pen and paper. Once located the player can open the cache and sign the register. There are many types of cache and these are listed on the geocaching.com website.
Players are encouraged to find local caches and place a few themselves. Alistair has been playing for a few years and now has 14 caches located around the country.
Gavin Elliot and Justin Turner from the Ecommerce Experiment told us about how they plan to revolutionise the ecommerce market.
The Ecommerce Experiment was setup in early June by the Carrot Media team. Over the next three years the team will setup and run an online shop. During this process they will blog about all of their experiences. The team plan to discuss each step in detail including:
You can follow the team on their blog and twitter.
Mike Parker from OrangeBus told us about how he uses Drupal to ‘Work less, Surf more’, a story which told us how he uses Drupal for rapid development.
Drupal is an open source development environment (released under the GPL) used by tens of thousands of people to power scores of different web sites, including Nike, Sony, Yahoo Developer Network and Beyonce (if it’s good enough for Beyonce it’s good enough for me). Drupal makes web development easy by combining an excellent PHP, mysql and user interface in a powerful environment that allows for third party modules and plugins.
Mike used an example of a website that he developed in 45 minutes to demonstrate how easy it is to develop using Drupal and the CCK, Panels, Five Star and Views modules. This was Mikes second presentation to SuperMondays.
Our final presentation of the night was from Ryan Dewhurst who introduced his ’Damn Vulnerable Web App’. DVWA is a PHP/MySQL web application that is damn vulnerable. Its main goals are to be light weight, easy to use and full of vulnerabilities to exploit. Used to learn or teach the art of web application security.
Ryan first released DVWA in December 2008 and since then it has gained quite a following. It has been developed for the use of information security professionals and students to test out their skillz and/or toolz in a legal environment.
The newest version of DVWA is 1.0.4 and was released at SuperMondays under the GPL.
The group want to thank our four speakers for their time and commitment….and Northern Film and Media for their sponsorship!
This month’s event was different from previous SuperMondays events for a few reasons, not just because of the fact that we held it on a Tuesday. This month we changed the venue, the format of the event and the topics of the speakers. We hope that you liked it!
During the first hour we were encouraged to walk around ‘Space 2’ of the Culture Lab to speak to various product designers about their research projects. This including presentations from Tom Martindale and his multitouch surface computer, John Dawson and his interactive computer application and Guy Schofield and the rapid prototyping facility that Lab uses.
The second part of the evening was in a more traditional lecture environment. The event was opened by Professor Atau Tanaka, the Chair of Digital Media and the Acting Director of Culture Lab. After a brief introduction to the facility, its place within the university and a synopsis of some of the work that is undertaken there Mr Tanaka passed over to Patrick Oliver.
Patrick described the Culture Lab as a place to research the interaction with computers in everyday life. Projects such as the ‘Ambient Kitchen’ push the bounds of pervasive computing and apply them to everyday tasks in a normal domestic kitchen. The kitchen has many computers and sensors placed in the floor, walls and inside the appliances which collect data to be relayed to a collection of computers which analyse the data and provide feedback on a collection of displays around the room. The Ambient Kitchen is typical of several of the projects at the Culture Lab in that it captures the users motions and actions with a view to understanding what they are doing so that helpful prompts can be given if necessary. The work has many applications but it is most powerful when it’s applied to provide ambient assisted living for older people or people with dementia. The ultimate goal is to help people with everyday tasks such as making a cup of tea or preparing a meal.
Andrew uses this data, in combination with server logs and intrusion detection software to help predict, prevent and secure his IT network. Doing so gives him a fully rounded understanding of his IT security needs. You can read more here:
http://infosanity.blogspot.com/2009/05/may-supermondays-presentation-aftermath.html
‘If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles’ - Sun Tzu
We are very grateful to Atau, Paul and Jane and all the staff at the Culture Lab for opening their facility for such an inspiring event. We would also like to thank Northern Film and Media for sponsoring the event. Finally, thank you to Shuoling Liu for all his hard work with the video recorder!
Our new image was chosen by 56% of the voters as their favourite. The image was designed by James Rutherford from Creative Nucleus. The full results are:
The results
Roxy Bramley from Northern Film and Media was first to the podium to tell us about the Digital Dockyard (www.digitaldockyard.com). The dockyard is a new social network for the North East’s new media and gaming sectors. Created in partnership with Northern Film and Media and 4iP the dockyard hopes get developers working together and perhaps pitch on some exciting projects that can be funded in part or in full by 4iP and Northern Film and Media.
Sarat Pediredla from Hedgehog Lab was next up and he told us about the journey that he took when he decided to leave his well paid job and start developing a new suite of enterprise products, the first of which (fixx) was released a few months ago. Sarat described his seven pillars to product development (from a business side):
Rob Mathieson from Tipstar then brought us through the steps he followed to raise the £150,000 that he needed to get Tipstar off the ground. The process started fifteen months ago when Rob came up with the idea. After some market research he found that the project needed significant development work and had some particularly expensive licensing costs. Raising cash was the only way to get his product to market.
If you need to raise money you MUST develop a business plan. No investor will even look at your project if you don’t have a very comprehensive and well researched plan. Things to consider are:
Many inventors take months developing their products and they don’t release them until they are finished. Rob believes that you should get a proof of concept up and going immediately so that you can show potential investors and business partners what you are talking about…rather than spending your time talking about vapour.
Product Architecture is key…but remember that your trade partners and investors only care about system stability and scalability…they will look at you with glass eyes if you tell them what operating system you are using or what development methodology you use. Keep it short and simple, all you need to do is convince them of your abilities without boring them with jargon.
To raise money in this market you need to be approachable, sociable, reliable and above all you must deliver upon expectations. Newcastle is a small place and the community of investors and professional advisors is very small…be careful out there!
Chris Barber from Carrot Media was first to the podium to tell us about a project that he as recently worked on integrating an online apparel shop into the Amazon.com market place. Chris’ client was already selling their clothing products very successfully through their existing online shop and on ebay but wanted to expand their exposure.
Amazon can expose your products to huge numbers of people and using an XML feed it is easy to manage your sales, stock and returns. An added advantage to the system is that all payments are handled by Amazon…which lends credibility to the enterprise.
Once the project was in place the client was very happy to receive the first order within a few days and since then orders have kept flowing. Due to the automated nature of the system it is expected that the system should manage it’s self and that the client will be able to use a simple CMS to add, update and modify products.
But the project was not as smooth as expected; Chris was amazed at the lack of support and documentation for the project and the time that it took to get the project completed. While the actual work only took two weeks to complete it took over three months to get the answers necessary to complete the project.
Chris felt that the project was a great learning experience and judging by the questions from the audience it seems that he can now be considered an expert in this area…if you have a need to integrate an online shop to Amazon.com then you should give him a call! You can download the powerpoint presentation here.
You can fiew a video of Chris here.
Oli Wood told us about Arduino, the open source micro processing board. Oli learned to read on his first computer, a Spectrum ZX. The Spectrum XZ was remarkably easy to write functional software on. Using the Spectrum and the later BBC Model B, a whole generation of enthusiasts learnt how to change the background colour of their monitors. Since then the scene has dried up.
Arduino was developed in 2005 by a team of Italian hardware developers (Gianluca Martino, Massimo Banzi, and David Cuartielles). They became frustrated at how hard it was to find an inexpensive, powerful microcontroller to drive their arty robotic projects.
In the winter of 2005 the team produced their first prototype with an initial 200 boards after a personal investment of €3,000. Since then they have sold tens of thousands of the unit to buyers all around the world.
Arduino is intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. There now seems to be a rather healthy community of people who are using Arduino in commercial, artistic and hobbyist projects. Arduino is a cheap and stable unit which is very well supported by excellent software and a vibrant enthusiast community. These are the qualities that make Arduino an excellent tool for rapid prototyping.
Tinker.it is the official UK distributor for Arduino. The official boards sell for around £20 each but due to it’s open source status there are hundreds of cloned boards that are available from a multitude if suppliers around the world. Some of these clones are exact replicas of the original but there are a few boards with smaller form factors and some with additional components and features.
If you want to produce your own boards there are only two rules, the first is that the team has reserved the name Arduino, which it trademarked. The second rule is that you can not distribute your board on a blue background. If anyone wants to sell boards using the name or blue colour they must to pay a small fee to Arduino.
You can see a video of Oli here.
If you would like to find out more about Arduino then check out the official website here:
http://www.arduino.cc
