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 Sapien - New challenges in UI. A look at new technologies, the User Interfaces that control them and what challenges we can face with new thinking.

John Gallagher - Smarter than the Average Application. Users aren’t stupid and lazy, but much modern software is. That’s John’s opinion. He’ll be telling us why and the AI techniques he’s using to make Lapsus, his time tracker, smarter than the average application.

Like last month, we’re holding this month’s meetup in room M329 of James Weir Building at Strathclyde Uni. So bring yourself, your experiences, and your opinions. We’ll bring the drinks, the pizza, and the speakers.

See you then & there,

Sam, Ijonas & Heidi.

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 we’re doing, or get help on our projects from others.  It’s been running in Edinburgh for several months, with a good turn out, nice folks and great speakers – held together with the magic of pizza and beer.

On the 22nd April, Tech Meetup Glasgow will start and it’d be great to have you along.  Three excellent speakers are lined up, covering a variety of topics – from running a ticketing startup, to an introduction to developing for Android. Kick-off is at 7pm in Room M329 of the James Weir building on Stratchlyde University’s campus.

With your help and feedback, we are going to work hard to make this functional for everyone around us – a monthly event to allow you to share news, demo the technologies and projects that excite you, meet people with complimentary skillsets that may want to help out, and generally get to know others in the tech community.

So if that sounds good to you, be great to see you there.  Bring yourself, your experiences and your opinions with you.

Sam, Ijonas & Heidi.

Lastly, visit our site http://www.techmeetup.co.uk for a backgrounder on TechMeetup including past talks.

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 Cuts” and “Final Cuts”.

It’s an interesting experiment traversing the lists and having to choose one over the other… The 1980s were fertile ground for lots of great albums, especially 1987 was unbelieable. The late nineties and noughties where often spartan and I found myself struggling to pick anything some years.

So without further ado, here are my 36 albums.

Feel free to comment on my list, dispute my selection, or point me to your list…

Other lists I’ve found are:

• Werner Vogels
• Nick Carr
• Phil Edwards
• Martin Wise

Enjoy, but be warned compiling your own list is a labour-intensive, brain-draining, and difficult activity. Cancel all appointments, notify family members, and switch off all phones: you may be some time. (unless your 6 years old, in which case I suggest the you start with The Sugababes).

Edits:

1973, 24 Carat Black “Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth” replaces Roberta Flack “Killing Me Softly”
1988, Queensryche “Operation Mindcrime” replaces Cowboy Junkies “Trinity Sessions”
1978, Kate Bush “The Kick Inside” replaces “Grease : The Soundtrack”

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, technology-obsessed, fun-loving, and inspiring team-leader, who knows his way around the Java and .NET spaces.

Working at Vamosa, you’ll occupy a fundemental role at Vamosa. We’re a product company, and you’ll be in charge of the products development. So we want you to bring ideas, be opinionated, tell us where we’re going wrong, but also be amazed by some of the stuff we’ve already done, because we think we pretty clever.

So if you are that person, contact me through email at ijonas.kisselbach@vamosa.com.

Cheers,
Ijonas.

P.S. Please, no agencies!

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 care whether Mac users can run AutoCAD. Similarly Bebo users won’t give a damn whether or not Facebook or Ning users can run Flixster…. unless Bebo users can share the Flixtser data, their movie reviews, with their friends on other sites.

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 within the “container”, i.e. the social network site and cannot cross the boundary to another site. For example, the developers of Flixster can now write a single app for all social network sites using the Open Social APIs, however I couldn’t share my Flixster data on Hi5 with my some of my friends on Bebo, eventhough the same app would be available.

Marshall Kirkpatrick hits the nail on the head by saying that Open Social should really be called Open Widget, as it more aptly defines the problem it trying to solve.

Open Social helps developers write apps for multiple platforms. Open Social does nothing to help users connect across multiple platforms.

Soup.io

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 “best-of-breed” or more likely “works-best-for-me”.

My flickr stream gets mashed up with my tweets and delicious discoveries – all wrapped around with my rather wordy ramblings on Wordpress and presented by to the world via either a nicely templated website or a singular RSS feed.The “cherry on top” is the ability to point a domain such as www.ijonas.com at soup.io and all of a sudden, all of that content is presented through single page on the web.

Once again, open standards are enabling production as well as consumption of content on the internet. In this case I can try out any RSS-enabled service such as Pownce, take the RSS feed my content generates and wire it into my soup.io page. If I stop using the Pownce service, no problem… my soup.io mashups lives on.

So to me soup.io serves me better as aggregator than a microblogging tool. I’m a little confused by their offering of functions that allow you to post messages, pictures, and videos… IMHO the soup.io developers should expand on the site’s ability to aggregate content from more sources and improve the already great look-and-feel customisation/templating features.

soup.io –> recommended!

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 where writing connectors into external systems is a constant drain on development resource, leaving data in-place is not a guaranteed best practice.

Still goes to show… You could be building complete and utter nonsense and get a discredited person like Michael Brown to sell it as snake oil.

Oh what a world….

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/08/PID_012101/Podtech_Michael_Brown_on_InferX.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/3766/former-fema-chief-michael-brown-on-data-mining&totalTime=832000&breadcrumb=18aaed5837da4ebead6f094f122e0d88]

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 (installed on Windows XP)

The Polar CS300 computer setup uses a PC microphone to transfer and convert the data held on the watch. The great thing about Parallels is that it comes with microphone support, meaning the Windows environment running inside Parallels gets to hear what’s happening in the outside world.

So all you need is to setup the ‘ingredients’ listed above. Then:

1. Launch Parallels with Windows XP.
2. Once your inside Windows launch the WebLink SW software providing the details as per the Polar manual. At this point place the software in transfer mode so that its listening out for data.
3. Now grab your CS300 and activate ‘Connect’ mode, choosing ‘Send’… SonicLink will start squelching all sorts of little sounds.
4. Quickly place the watch on top of the microphone. In the case of the MacBook Pro, the microphone is underneath the speaker grill to the left of your keyboard.

If you run into any problems, go ahead and use the comments section below… I’ll see if I can help.