TechMeetup Glasgow #3 is taking place on July 1st. Hey folks, guess what? Time for another TechMeetup in Glasgow, specifically next week Wednesday. The evening will follow the usual format: 2 great speakers, lots of good chat in between talks, and beer and pizza provided by our friends at the Hillington Park Innovation Centre. This month’s speaker’s topics are as follows: Craig Nicol – A talk on the application of genetic algorithms and what makes them useful. Thomas Figg – demonstrating his language interpreter project, giving us an overview what it takes to build a small...

TechMeetup Glasgow #2 is taking place on June 3rd. The first TechMeetup exceeded our expectations. Three great speakers created some vigorous debates. When we asked you to “bring yourself, your experiences, and your opinions”, you certainly heeded our call. We also got some great feedback and with that in mind we’re making some small changes. We’re going to have one less speaker, allowing for more debate and more informal chat in between speaker presentations. We’ll also have more bottles of water available. This month’s speaker’s topics are as follows: Dave...

Tech Meetup is coming to Glasgow on April 22nd. There are a ton of events for entrepreneurs to meet investors and bankers and VC’s but let’s face it, we’re tech, so let’s talk about tech. No name badges, no business models, just the growth of our eco-system and the advance of our tech – be it web apps, software, mobile apps, hardware, games… There’s an overlap across many of these and it’s always interesting to hear what people are hacking together, know about or have worked on before. TechMeetup is just that – a space for everyone to meet up, talk about some of the cool stuff...

There’s a new meme traversing the Internet. It involves compiling a list of albums (long play records) for each year of your life. In my case there’s 36 years of albums to choose from, going all the way back to 1972. One further rule is that you’re not allowed to pick an artist/band more than once: so no picking Prince for Purple Rain in 1984 and also for Sign O’ The Times in 1987. I’ve spent lunchtime today, and about three hours tonight compiling what I think is the definitive list, although in Ridley Scott terms, I reserve the right to issue “Director’s...

Hi folks, I’m the CTO for Vamosa, a software company headquartered in Glasgow, with an rapidly expanding office in Boston (across the pond). We’re a 30-man strong company with a small development team in Glasgow that needs expansion. Our software allows clients to migrate and transform huge websites, from one content management system to another. The software is built on both J2EE and .NET, using the usual suspects in componentry: Spring, xUnit, Hibernate, etc. etc. Woven through all of this is a big helping of both Jython and IronPython. I’m looking for an opinionated,...

Robert Scoble says: Joe from Flixter denotes why this is SO HUGE: his app will run anywhere that the OpenSocial platform is running. Plaxo. Ning. NewsGator. MySpace. No rewriting of apps. The Open Social announcement is an equivalent to Sun announcing Java in the mid-nineties… The big promise back then was write-once run-everywhere… Java never became the major success for writing end-user apps that Sun had dreamed off, so the jury has to be out. Hopefully the Open Social API designers will keep Java’s history in mind as they take their technology forward. MS Windows users don’t...

So there we have it… Google has made a big splash into the social networking arena. Open Social is its name and helping widget developers is its game. Great news for developers, but no news for users of these sites.Robert Scoble is raving about it something rotten on twitter and his blog, like a surfer riding the big kahuna… I love his excitement but I can’t share it. End users now get the same “virus apps” spreading across multiple social sites (MySpace, Ning, Hi5, etc) because these apps are can now be built atop the same APIs. The problem is the data remains stuck...

Soup.io is a great new web app coming out of the YEurope oven. In short its a little bit of microblogging mixed up content aggregation from other sites such as flickr, twitter, delicious, and in my case Wordpress.com (there’s more take a look). There’s already some chat in the blogosphere comparing it’s microblogging features to twitter and pownce.Soup.io lacks the immediacy of twitter and its desktop & SMS entrypoints, but that’s ok by me.Soup.io to me is a wonderful way to aggregate the content that I’m producing through various web apps, which I would consider...

This is funny because its classic case of desigining a black magic product thats scans all the databases in the world in-place using its adaptable plugin modules that enables it to extract hidden terrorist messages from your mum\’s recipe spreadsheet in her Documents folder and correlate with credit card spending in Indonesia, via the included plugin module that sits atop of the VISA global credit card database. My favourite line in the pitch is…. and I guarantee that I\’m not taking it out of context: because its distributed, its totally secure Nuts! As someone working for a company...

I’m noticing quiet a lot of search results hitting this blog, looking for ideas on how to integrate the Polar CS300 and your trusty old Mac… in my case a MacBook Pro. Well, I’ve got it working but it isn’t the most elegant of solutions… First of all there is to my knowledge no OS X version of the Polar software, therefore I’ve had to employ the following… Ingredients 1x copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac (installed on your Mac) 1x copy of Windows XP (installed inside Parallels) 1x Mac Book Pro 1x Polar CS300 watch 1x Polar WebLink SW software installed...