Turing Festival 2015

It's Festival Season over in the Capital with the Turing Festival brings digital technology into the Edinburgh Festival. It's a celebration of digital culture and creativity and previous years have been host to speakers such as Richard Stallman, Steve Wozniak and Jim McKelvey of Square.

After a year off in 2014 it's back this year and is now taking place over 3 days (21st-23rd August). Again it has a great line up that's relevant to the tech community in Scotland.

Day One: Full Stack Marketing

Day one is being billed as 'Scotlands best marketing event'. Organised by the guys at Stipso the speaker line up includes some of the biggest names in inbound marketing such as Moz, Unbounce and Hubspot.

I think across Scotland there's no lack of technical and design talent. Where I do think we often fall short is our ability to market our products. Having some of the leading minds in marketing come to Scotland to share knowledge and advice is invaluable.

But it's not all about the folks coming to Scotland. I like the fact we have local marketing talent on stage as well with Mike McGrail of Velocity Digital doing a session on "pay to play or fade away".

Day Two: Scaleups

Day two has Codebase pulling together an amazing line up of 'Billion Dollar Scaleups' for a single track day featuring the top minds in startup growth, with analysis from founders and investors with deep industry knowledge.

Names like Eileen Burbidge, Gil Dibner and Damian Kimmelman join local founders like Gareth Williams, Lesley Eccles and Ed Molyneux to share actionable and practicable advice.

I always love hearing from founders their story in their own words. You often see the non-linear path to success they take. The ups and downs we all face can lead to success at the scale these guys have achieved. We're lucky in Scotland that we have companies such as Fanduel and Skyscanner who have achieved massive scale in recent years and are so willing to share their advice and experience with local companies.

Day Three: Ethereum Developer Workshop

Day three promises to be a little different. It's a full day workshop for developers who want to learn more about blockchain technology. Specifically Ethereum.

Ethereum is a decentralised platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.

Laptop is required, it's a hands on day.

Get your tickets

Tickets are still available from the Turing Festival website and are bought on a per day basis. Not into marketing but want to know more about billion dollar scaleups? Then just buy what you want to take part in.

There will also be nightlife and plenty of networking opportunities at Turing, which in all honest no matter how good a lineup there is often proves to be the best part of these kinds of events. The chance to meet talented, diverse people from around the world over a few drinks is invaluable.