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.

Dr Jayne Wallace also introduced us to her work at the Culture Lab. Jayne is a digital artist with a background in contemporary jewellery. The core of her work considers how jewellery can act to play a role within what we each consider personally meaningful for us in our lives, in an emotional context, and how the expression of fragments of this can be enriched through the integration of digital technologies. Developments already exist in wearable electronics and digital product design that have taken the body as a location, but in many cases such digital objects miss many of the subtleties and inimitable qualities associated with jewellery. You can find more information on the work that Jayne undertakes here:
http://www.digitaljewellery.com/

Click to play this video.

Our final speaker of the evening was Andrew Waite who introduced us to the concept of ‘honeypotting with Nepenthes. Nepenthes is a low interaction honeypot which emulates several known vulnerabilities across multiple services and protocols. It’s ultimate goal is to capture live malware samples as the honeypot is being ‘exploited’.

A honeypot server should have no legitimate services installed upon it and as such it is assumed that all of the traffic that is targeted at it is considered malicious. Running a honeypot gives you an insight into how systems are being probed and as part of a broad IT security policy they can help you to secure your network against attacks. If the honeypot is placed externally, it can provide an early warning system for attacks. Placed internally they can help identify any internal infections.

Andrew has been running his honeypot for over a year and in that time it has had over 2000 recorded attacks with over 900 unique malware specimens, the first of which was recorded within 30 minutes of gaining a live network connection!

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!

May 29th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

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:

May 28th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

 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):

1. Market research – get it done! But take the results with a pinch of salt. In Sarats case the research told him that there was no need for another product like Fixx…Sarat felt that this was incorrect and went ahead anyway but he did so with open eyes!
2. Funding – developing a product takes several months, usually 6-9 months. To cover the costs of this work you will need some sort of funding, this can come in a few ways, including:
   • Debt funding (loans from banks etc)
   • Equity funding (business angel or the POC from NStar)
   • Bootstrapping (money generated from other activities such as consulting work
3. Patent – Many companies waste time and money on this area…Sarat feels that you should have a look at this area but get on with your product development rather than spending too much time and money on this area.
4. People – They are the hub of your business, choose them wisely!
5. Execution – Many product development projects fail to reach their true potential because of a lack of direction towards the end…often due to the boredom of working on the same project for such a long time. To truly succeed you need to drive through this boredom and deliver the project with enthusiasm!
6. Quality – Every aspect of the product development cycle must be developed with the highest levels of quality. Everything from the product literature, the installation process, the user interface and the reliability of the product must be perfect!
7. Customer support – this is often overlooked, but at your peril! Fanatical customer support is an extension of product quality control. If performed properly it will make your customers feel ‘warm and fuzzy’ and this will lead to more business through referral.

 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:

1. Market research is of paramount importance. You must understand your market and your competitors. You must find out who your customers are, how much they spend, what services they currently use and who their suppliers are. You must then use this information to locate your competitors (real or preseved) and find out everything about them. Rob recommends that you get a copy of their accounts from Companies  House to look at their finances. All of this information is needed so that you can market your product and get your potential customers to move to your services.
2. Project Plan, how are you going to deliver this? What are your milestones? These should be for development and finance.
3. Money, how much and when? Can you do this on a shoe string? If not then you need to understand how much money you need and how you are going to raise it (loan, debt or bootstrap).
4. Staff, who will you invite along your journey? True success comes to people who build a team around them. Rob recommends the “Beermat Entrerpreneur” by Mike Southon, which suggests that a business needs four people, and entrepreneur, a techie, a sales person and an accountant. Choose these wisely as you will be spending quite a bit of time with these people over the next few years! In order to get the best people it is often a good idea to give them shares in your business…this will give them the enthusiasm to deliver beyond the call of duty! Rob also recommends that you get a good accountant and pay them well for their services!

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!

April 30th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

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

March 31st, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (5)

•  Jonathan Noble — Microsoft Windows PowerShell, an introduction
  http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=1948859522116926743
  Microsoft released Windows PowerShell in 2006 to finally give Windows a decent shell and scripting language  for automation and PowerShell V2 will come installed and on by default in the forthcoming releases of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. Jonathan gave an excellent overview of PowerShell and he explained why it’s not just of interest to Windows sys admins.
   
• Jonathan Bradford: Online, Offline?
  http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=8398132870101829948
  A new generation of applications are emerging which will bring “online” applications to “offline” situations.  What might they look like? And how will they be built? Jonathan covered this topic in an engaging talk.

• Paul: Neural Science
  http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-4858805195992158622
  Paul discused the projects that Newcastle Uni are working on in the CloudComputing area.

March 10th, 2009 | Tags: cloud computing. cloudcomputing, google gears, Newcastle University, powershell, super mondays, supermondays | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

The January Super Mondays event was bigger and better than ever before. Our fourth event had almost 60 attendees and while we over ran a little on time, the crowd was well entertained with four excellent presentations.

(Tea and Coffee was sponsored by Lee Irving from Transcendit)

James Rutherford — “Flash – Saviour of the Universe”

James was first up and he gave a very interesting presentation covering the rather convoluted history of Flash from where it started in 1996 by FutureWave Software, its sale to Macromedia and eventually Adobe. James told a familiar story of how he tried to use Flash a few times in the past but he abandoned it due to its complexity, cost and lack of acceptable usability standards. James was going to forget about Flash development until he was commissioned to develop a game in late 2008. This time he was impressed at the way Flash had developed its feature set, including its increasing strong usability standards and impressive database integration. James urged us to take another look at Flash.

You can download the presentation here:
http://www.creativenucleus.com/talks/flash-saviour_of_the_internet/sm090126/flash_and_flex.php

Danni Matzk – I got into it for the penguins!

Danni started using Linux a few years ago out of frustration borne out of repeated antivirus updates on her WinXP computer. While Tux was one of the reasons why she moved over to Linux she cited OpenOffice, The GIMP, Firefox and Pidgin as excellent applications on Linux.

Running Linux on your laptop was rather hard in the past but with the advent of Ubuntu Linux things are much easier. Ubuntu is very easy to install and suports most network cards, wireless cards and USB broadband dongles.

You can download Danni’s presentation here:
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=df9nq2gq_47hj65r2cb

 

Paul Callaghan — “A taste of Haskell”

 

Paul was next up and he gave a presentation on Haskell, a little known advanced and purely functional programming language. The presentation gave a high level overview of the languages strengths, mainly it’s a great tool for manipulating data.

In particular, it is a polymorphically statically typed, lazy, purely functional language, quite different from most other programming languages.

Haskell changes the way that you write programs from functional steps to flow of information. This makes it easier to produce flexible, maintainable high-quality software.

You can download a copy of the presentation here, and Paul has setup a Haskell Google Group here:
http://groups.google.com/group/functions-in-the-north-east

Craig Rothwell — “Building a computer was easier in the 80’s”

 

The final presentation was given by Craig Rothwell from the OpenPandora project. The Pandora is designed to be a handheld game console with high-end PDA capabilities, but may also be run as a low-powered full-featured Linux desktop. The unit uses a 1GHz Texas Instruments processor, 256Mb of RAM and a battery which should last 10 hours.

The units are manufactured in the US as they have had problems finding a UK based company to work with. With over 4,000 pre-orders the unit this seems rather short sighted by UK industry.

Craig was supposed to bring a demo unit with him to the talk but the courier couldn’t get it to him in time. He expects to bring one next month and hinted that we may see them in the shops soon with a price point of around £200.

We also had contributions from the University Mark from the Twestival.

Newcastle Twestival is part of a global event taking place on Thursday 12th February. The event is more than a pint between a few folk who use Twitter; it’s a chance to be part of something bigger, to witness just how powerful and real Twitter’s influence can be. Because everyone running the event is a volunteer, all money raised goes directly to support charity: water projects.

We also heard that Newcastle University has taken the recent VAT windfall and put the money towards working with industry so if you need to engage with the university with a project there is funding up to £5000 application need to be in by April but funding available to June.

 

 

 

January 27th, 2009 | Tags: beehive research facility, Craig Rothwell, Danni Matzk, flash, Haskell, James Rutherford, Linux, Newcastle University, open source, openpandora, Paul Calaghan, super mondays, supermondays | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Last night we had 40 visitors to our third Super Mondays event. After drinking copious amounts of tea and Coffee (sponsored by Alex Kavanagh from Tinwood) we sat down for two presentations.

Alex spoke about the various free or open source applications that companies can use in replace of some of the more recignisable business applications. You can download Alex’s slides here:

• Alex Kavanaghs F/OSS Presentation

• Ross Cooney’s CloudFront Presentation (this draws creativity from Mike Richwalskys presentation at HighEdWebTech.)

The next event was Super Mondays event was set for 26th January. As always, we are very grateful that Newcastle University have given us acess to their excellent facilities.

November 25th, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (4)

Our second meeting held on Monday 25th October went very well, we had over 50 attendees from various demographics (start-ups, programmers, students, academics and enthusiasts).

The event kicked off with a 45 minute networking session where copious amounts of tea and coffee were served courtesy of Paul Watson from Newcastle University. At such an early stage in the ‘Super Mondays’ concept it is important for the various attendees to get together and discuss their common interests.

 

After the pleasantries were finished we got down to the business of the evening, Language Wars. This was an opportunity for four local developers to advocate their favourite development language and discuss their relative values. The lineup was:

Mike: PHP
Lee: Ruby
Brian: TCL
Alex: Python

 

 

In his speech Mike disussed how a large community and low barriers to adoption were a major advantage of PHP. He felt that language benefits from its lack of structure and that every task can be completed in many-many different ways using a myriad of different functions and modules. Interestingly, it is this proliferation that is also a major negative as due to having no firm coding convention means that it is often hard to support other peoples code.

Lee gave a great introduction to Ruby, its Japanese roots, early adoption in the East and migration to Western countries. Lee felt that Ruby had advantage over PHP because its code structure is very structured, leading to easily maintainable code. The advent of the Rails framework has helped to drive adoption of Ruby and it is gaining interest from mature PHP developers and perl developers. In the general discussion it was felt that while Ruby was rather processor intensive (perhaps in comparison to perl, PHP etc) it was agred that the cost benefit of rapid development and easily maintainable code was a major advantage.

Brian gave an excellent introduction to Tcl (“Tool Command Language”,  pronounced as “tickle”). Starting in 1998, the language was born out of frustration with programmers devising their own (poor quality) languages intended to be embedded into applications. It quickly gained wide acceptance on its own and is generally thought to be easy to learn  but powerful in competent hands. It is most commonly used for rapid prototyping, scripted applications, GUIs and testing.

Alex spoke on behalf of Python, a general-purpose, high-level programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes programmer productivity and code readability. The language has an extensive use of whitespace as block delimiters which leads to programmers producing code that is often generally easy to ready and subsequently easy to maintain.

Unfortunately, the event was very friendly and cordial! Each speaker advocated the adoption of a language as a function of the needs and skills of the project…not the technology. The general consensus was that languages need to have a large community adoption for them to grow and continually evolve.

The event was closed off at around 8:00 with a quick disussion around future events and how participation on the message board is essential to help build a strong and long living community. A special thank you to Shuoling for taking photos and publishing them.

November 5th, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (1)