Pugs and Spreadsheets: Edinburgh TechMeetup

Lava Pug in Shark Gear

Last night was the first Edinburgh TechMeetup of 2012 and was also the first one organised by Dale Harvey who takes over from James Baster. As usual the meetup kicked off with a scrum for pizza followed by the introductions then it was onto the first talk which was given by Gordon Guthrie, CEO of Hypernumbers.

Gordon was sharing his experience of using The Lean Startup principles, such as the MVP, when building Hypernumbers. Gordon also ran through the Hypernumbers product and demonstrated some nice implementations of the product with real big name customers like Pret A Manger. Gordon noted 2011 was a year of value for Hypernumbers and 2012 is going to be a year of growth. If you know any heavy spreadsheet users I’m Gordon would love to hear from them so get in touch.

Second talk of the evening was Yann Seznec, founder of Lucky Frame. Yann was showing off the latest product from Lucky Frame – Pugs Luv Beats  - an iOS game that marries Yann’s love of music and games to the internets love of animals in cute costumes. Sounds weird and well it is totally bizarre but looks great fun as you use your pugs and the variety of costumes you can dress them in to them to make music. This video explains the concept and even has dogs in cute costumes:

Pugs Luv Beats is a universal app on the App Store priced at £1.99. The Lucky Frame guys are finalist in the Independent Games Festival in the category of “Excellence in Audio”, IGF is on 5th-9th March so best of luck to the guys with that.

As always with TechMeetup I met lots of great new people and caught up with some familiar faces and enjoyed the excellent talks. TechMeetups are monthly, going on across Scotland and I would highly recommend getting along to one. The next one in Glasgow is on the 25th of January with Jamie Boyd talking about responsive design and Sebastien Lambla giving a talk titled “HTTP Caching 101″.

So on the 25th, see you there?