Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

On Friday 20th November we hosted SuperStartup in partnership with the Entrepreneurs Forum. We were very lucky to get David Cohen from Techstars and Kevin Mann from Take Publishing to tell us their stories.

TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund from Boulder in Colorado. It takes 10 companies a year along an accelerated process of business development with very high quality mentoring at its heart. Dave gave a passionate presentation where he described his motivation for setting up the organization and how it has changed the lives of the staff in the 39 companies that have take part.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8PXxKfnwwQ

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4RTvdZpIg0

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO6h8RScNyQ

After some beer and nibbles we then heard from Kevin Mann from Take Publishing. Take Publishing is the first non US based company to be accepted into the Techstars program. Kevin described how he got involved in the program, how it worked and more importantly his recent success as a direct result of the high quality mentoring that he received. Kevin and his team are working on their BETA release in January 2010.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgGk_UfkVDQ

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbxHCh8E5tM

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0gXdV66ewk

David and Kevin were also interviewed by the team at Bdaily. You can see the video here:

http://bdaily.info/tv/news/26-11-2009/north-east-superstartups/

We were very grateful to Newcastle University and The Culture Lab for sponsoring the event. We are also grateful to the Entrepreneurs Forum for recording the videos.

SuperMondays, in partnership with Thursday Fizz, CONNECT North East, Adesign Association, Refresh Teeside, VBUG, The Hub and the Newcastle Branch of BCS are proud to announce:

SuperChristmas is the Christmas party that brings our organisations together to round off an excellent year and to set the scene for 2010. The party will start at 7:00pm on Thursday 17th December 2009 at Hoults Yard.

The ticket price includes a light dinner, ceilidh dancing, and as much free beer/wine/soft drinks as the budget will allow…all served in a farm house theme decked out with bales of hay!

Everybody is welcome, so please do invite your friends … there will be no presentations on the night so leave your laptops, notebooks and netbooks at home!

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Platinum Sponsors:

Gold Sponsors:

Event Partners:

• Ross Cooney
  This was a quick presentation covering where databases come from? Why are new databases needed and what is the theory behind them?
  You can download the presentation (A brief history of databases) here.

• David Lavery
  Dave started with a quick run down of the various databases that he has used over the years and then gave an excellent introduction to SimpleDB from Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine.
  
  You can download the presentation (An introduction to SimpleDB and Google App Engine) here.

• David Livingston
  David told us about RAQUEL, a new database system that he is helping to develop with a team at Northumbria University. RAQUEL is being developed as an open source project and you can get involved in it’s development by registering at the SourceForge RAQUEL website.
  
  You can download the presentation (An introduction to RAQUEL) here.

This event was sponsored by Codeworks Connect and The eCommerce Experiment. SuperMondays are very grateful to their platinum sponsors, Northern Film and Media and Sunderland Software City.

You can read some excellent blog posts about this event here:

• The Pickards Blog: SuperMondays: Databases
• Daniel Swan: SuperMondays – the oxymoron of face to face geek social networking
• Stephen Woods: First time at SuperMondays