RookieOven

Glasgow based Moviecom.tv is bringing a bit of Silicon Valley to Glasgow. On Monday 16th April YouTube Developer Advocate Shannon “JJ” Behrens will be giving several talks in The Corinthian, Glasgow. Kicking off at 5.30PM JJ will be giving two talks:

JJ coming to Glasgow all kicked off with Moviecom.tv winning the Global Red Herring award in October of last year, from the team being in Silicon Valley for a couple of weeks they established a great relationship with the guys in the Googleplex. Moviecom.tv CEO, Gillian O’Neil said  “Moviecom.tv is growing and expanding rapidly and we are exploring US horizons as part of the growth plan for the company. Meeting up with YouTube and exploring where we can integrate both our companies super cool technologies is a great opportunity for Moviecom.tv, I’m delighted YouTube are coming to hang out with us in Glasgow”.

It’s also a great opportunity on so many levels for Scottish startups, from a cultural perspective to listen to and quizing JJ on the Silicon Valley culture to an engineering perspective with the scale of YouTube and Google. The event is free to attend but requires registration through Eventbrite.

See you there?

Last Friday saw the first Amazon UK Hackthon take place in Glasgow University. With a top prize of $1000 of AWS credit on offer over 50 of Glasgows most talented CS students were in attendance.

I formed a team with two very talented University of Strathclyde Computer Science students, Daniel Reilly from first year and Chris Sloey from fourth year. Our idea was to create a shopping list for your travels. You input your destination and when you’re going and we return a list of things you’re going to need, so say your heading to Glasgow in July we’ll let you know you’re going to need an umbrella.

The team had a stack of knowledge and experience in Java, PHP, Ruby, Javascript with a touch of Objective-C. However we figured we were there to learn so we may as well be adventurous and try something new so we decided to build our hack with a language we had never used before so we went with Python. We set out to develop an API and from there we would build a mobile app and with time permitting a web front end.

With such an adventurous target we set out working the lean way – fail fast! We initially intended on using the go-to Python framework Django however we ran into a few problems and found the learning curve a tad too steep and with time against us we had a pivot and used the microframework Flask. We powered on made great progress and were ready to deploy, all attendees were given $50 AWS credit which would allow us to use EC2 but as feature packed as EC2 is we found it too time consuming getting set up and since we were using a git repository anyway we went with Heroku for hosting. Then we moved onto the front end, again the easy route was to do a web app but we wanted a bit of a challenge and decided to develop a mobile app, the outcome was Travel Bit for iOS.

the bits and bobs you'll need on your travels

After a night of lean working we pitched to a panel of ‘Amazonians’ along with the other teams. Hacks that caught my eye include an awesome implementation of voice control for the Amazon store via the browser by Mark Provan (and his team the Bogus Gasmen) and winner of the People’s Choice Award a crowd sourced tool for decision making by Giraffa Cakes. Whilst we didn’t win me and the guys are well chuffed with how we worked as a team and what we achieved. We hope to work on Travel Bit a bit more and hopefully launch it in the coming weeks.

Big thank you to Glasgow University for hosting and to the Edinburgh Amazon Development Centre for putting it on, hopefully see a lot more Amazon Hackathons across Scotland in the future.

*If you missed out on the Amazon Hackathon remember Startup Weekend Glasgow is coming up on May 25th-27th with £30 early bird tickets now available.

Last week I attended the London Web Summit for RookieOven. I curated the best tweets, quotes and pictures on my Storify, which is embedded below.

The London Web Summit was a great chance to see the newest startups in the tech scene, and hear from some experienced industry leaders.

Over the next few weeks I will blog some more thoughts on what we can learn from the London startup scene here in Scotland.

Time really is flying in 2012, almost at April already!! The good news with a new month is that it means another RookieOven meetup. As usual taking place in the Bier Halle Hippo Lounge (on Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow) on the first Monday of the month from half 6 onwards there will be free pizza to help fuel the startup talk.

March has been a busy month so there will be been plenty to catch up with. Firstly the announcement of Startup Weekend Glasgow which will be taking place over the weekend of 25th-27th May. Come along with business idea, pitch on the Friday night, form a team and build an awesome product. Early bird tickets are now on sale and costing £30 which covers the cost of all our meals over the weekend and a constant supply of caffeine to keep you coding through the night. I’m part of the team organising Startup Weekend so will be able to answer any burning questions on Monday.

Also in March we had a few product launches and new releases, one of which we can give a whirl on Monday with the BeerDog from Zendit. Allowing you to share your beer finds with friends, The BeerDog should be the perfect companion for the meetup on Monday.

RookieOven itself had an eventful month even with a new contributor, David Wong of Plantedd, sharing what he feel should be in a great startup logo and RookieOven attended the London Web Summit with Jamie McHale going down to check things out.

So what have you been getting up to this month? Look forward to finding out on the 2nd.

As you will have seen in the Scottish StartupDigest this morning Startup Weekend is coming to Glasgow at the end of May (if you missed the StartupDigest you can read more about Startup Weekend Glasgow on the Startup Weekend Glasgow blog) but before then there are other hack events going on across Scotland. First one up is Amazon Student Hackathon Glasgow on 30th May.

Taking place in Glasgow University from 9am on the 3oth until 1pm on the 31st, this is the first UK Hackathon organised by Amazon. Open only to students it’s great to see a large company such as Amazon support the local community and encouraging students to get involved in events such as this.

Each team gets $50 of AWS credit to use and Amazonians from the Amazon Scotland Development Centre will be on hand for advice and support. The schedule for the day is:

• Team Check-in 09:30 – 10:00 (Friday 30th March) – flexibility available for exam clashes etc.
• Welcome! 10:00 – 10:30
• Unconference 10:30 – 12:00
• Hackathon 13:00 – 09:00 (overnight)
• Breakfast 09:00 – 10:00 (Saturday 31st March)
• Presentation & Judging 10:00 – 11:30
• Prizes 11:30 – 13:00

This is event is only for students although if it’s a success I’m sure Amazon will organise more and large hack events in Scotland. Being a student at the moment it mean’s I can attend so will tweeting on the day and will report back on how it goes.

If you’re interested in going you can sign up at the Amazon UK Hackathon meetup group.