From January 27th onwards, the last Friday of every month, at 10.30am at Fudge, we will getting together to hang out, chat, hear about new stuff and enjoy some nice food.

Who’s this for? Anyone from the digital and technology industry in the city, startups, creatives, designers, developers, geeks, gamers, investors… you name it, if you like techie stuff, and especially the web, you’ll fit right in!

Where is it? Once again, Rosie and the team at Fudge are going to be looking after us and have a wonderful selection of food and drinks for us to enjoy. The Fudge website is here with full details of their location.

You can say you’re coming along on our MeetUp site, but actually there is no real need, just come along if you can. I look forward to seeing you!

Why? Actually for a nice reason – workload and other commitments. After the success of last year, I knew it was something I wanted to do again, and made the conscious decision to start the organising process in January.

January arrived and BOOM, a lot of work, new clients, new projects and very little time spare. This has not let up all year and I realised that I could not do the conference justice and it was not going to happen.

So next year? Well, I’m going to be starting looking at the possibility again soon, but cannot make any promises… I’d love to truth be known, but it does depend on support and backing from partners and we all know that spare money is not something that these companies have lying around at the moment. Time to start making some calls…

For all the emails, tweets and lovely comments I’ve had about it being a highlight for people’s year, I am truly grateful. Thank you.

RIP Steve 

Brendan will provide a rare insight into IBM’s appetite for organisational change and its success in transforming its business model while remaining true to its strategic vision. Add to that its aim to build a smarter planet….and that really is big thinking.

About the speaker
Brendan is responsible for developing and executing marketing campaigns that will deliver sales pipeline for the IBM Business across all products, services and sectors. Prior to taking up this position in July 2010, Brendan has held a variety of leadership positions in the UK, Ireland, South Africa and across Europe. These have included Director of Marketing and Communications for the Chairman of IBM in EMEA, and Director of 2012 Games for Think London – the Foreign Direct Investment Agency for London. You can see his Linkedin profile here.

Book your place
The event is free to attend and will feature a Q&A session, with refreshments and networking opportunities available from 6.00pm.
Book online to reserve your place by clicking here and for further information please contact Julie Arnold: j.arnold@hull.ac.uk

(As a quick note, the Hallmark group has done a superb job giving the previously woeful hotel a major overhaul and I would recommend it).

It was a good turn out, with support from Alan Johnson, who spoke about how important it is for the city and local area. Martin Lauer from The One Point gave an excellent talk about his experiences getting funding and support from Sirius – he had nothing but good things to say and reinforced that something like this can make a huge different to the success of a company.

We gave an overview of the exciting digital community in and around Hull and also talked about some of the huge shifts in technology we are seeing such as smart devices, the post-pc era and the rise of the ‘app’! What was noticeable was the attendance; whilst excellent, was mostly from established companies and possibly not from the type of fledgling businesses / people who are going to be the ones who are going to benefit from KC Invest.

However, the good news is that we hope to get Sean Royce along to a MeetUp in the very near future to explain to the digital / tech community just how easy it is to apply to the fund.

KC Invest is a bold step which makes a huge amount of sense and we wish it all the best.

Details of the fund can be found below:
 
Through the fund, called KC Invest, KC hopes to stimulate business growth in the region’s economy and help create new, sustainable jobs for local people.
 
The KC fund will be administered by two local enterprise agencies, the Acorn Fund and Sirius. They will each receive £150,000 from KC to distribute as loan financing to business start-ups and expanding businesses in the sectors KC is focusing its support on.
 
Both the Acorn Fund and Sirius are Community Development Finance Institutions that are able to deliver loans through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). Because the financing provided by KC will be matched by ERDF, the total cash available to local businesses will be £600,000. 
 
People who apply for KC Invest funding through the Acorn Fund or Sirius will also have access to mentoring and support to make sure their fledgling business has the best possible chance of long-term success. Feasibility grants will also be available to fully explore business ideas where more market research is needed before financing is agreed.
 
Sean Royce, KC’s Finance and Commercial Director, said: “The ‘perfect storm’ caused by the banking crisis and public sector cuts mean that not only is the job market depressed, but it’s also harder than ever for people to obtain finance to set up their own businesses and create work for themselves and others.
 

“Yet we need those new businesses more than ever now to stimulate growth and help the country’s economic recovery.
 
“Through the KC Invest fund we want to give practical support to new business start-ups to help support the local economy and create new jobs.
 
“While we have the desire and resources to do this, we’re not experts in small business support, which is why we’re partnering with the Acorn Fund and Sirius, who both have excellent and long track records in supporting new business start-ups.”

 
Peter Sykes, Fund Manager at the Acorn Fund, said:

“KC’s commitment to the local enterprise economy is to be commended. We cannot have enough of this type of financial and hands-on support for new start-ups. It is to be hoped that the KC Invest fund can set an example of other leading local employers to get involved in the local community in a way that can help breathe new life into our economy.”
 

Alan Gordon-Freeman, Managing Director of Sirius, said:

“This is a fantastic opportunity for those involved in technology to develop and grow their own businesses. The funding can help to attract other forms of finance as well as bring other specialist support such as business management and marketing.”
 

People who are interested in applying for KC Invest finance can contact the Acorn Fund on 01482 324976 / www.hullbdf.com or Sirius at 01482 890146 / www.sirius-hull.co.uk. More information is available on KC’s website here.

“The cloud” is a wonderful place for developing your own products

It’s been just over 6 months since the Beta launch of Incentive Maker, a web based product that allows anyone to implement a professional staff incentive programme for their company, and just over 8 months since I first wrote a line of code for it.

Incentive Maker is the first SaaS product I’ve developed where the end client was myself and a business partner (Wildfire Advertising Ltd). This has given me a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to the technical architecture of the product and I’ve really made the most of this freedom.

Minimal budget

At the start of the project we lacked two key things; money and users. The only thing we really had to give was time. My initial plan was to host the Incentive Maker code and databases on my MediaTemple server, however when it came to improving hardware performance, it was quite costly and it lacked smaller increments.

The other downside to hosting everything internally is the responsibility factor. We certainly weren’t in a position to employ someone to look after the servers on a full time basis, so we needed to do things differently.

After a bit of research we decided to use Heroku, a cloud application platform. Heroku is one of the many hosting services that are based on Amazon EC2 services. This has been a real eye opener for us. Throughout the initial development and Beta process we paid next to nothing for the service, due to the system coping with the small number of users just fine.

On top of the codebase hosting we have two database hosting solutions; MongoHQ and Redis To Go. At the start of the project, including the Beta period, we used the free plans for both of these services.

I’m certain you can see my point here on the costs side of things. Other than our time, we had very little invested in Incentive Maker, even during the Beta stage. If no clients bought into the idea, then our losses would be a minimal.

Hassle free scaling

After the Beta period, we had a few clients on board, with more still giving Incentive Maker some consideration. At this stage we knew we needed more hosting power and more database space. This is where the magic really started.

More power took a matter of seconds to sort out. It was just a case of logging in, dragging a slider up and clicking an apply button.

More database space was again a very simple process. We simply had to sign up to a larger price plan, press the ‘clone database’ button and change a config file on Heroku. Job done.

As a web developer I’ve never had hosting this easy. The costs savings, in terms of time, from these kinds of services is incredible. Some may think that Heroku looks expensive when you up the number of dynos, but it’s worth every penny, or cent in this case.

Easy application monitoring, troubleshooting and tuning

As will all web based products we wanted to have monitoring and error handling in place. I didn’t, however, want to spend time developing code to do this for us. Fortunately there are web based services out there that could already handle this. We decided to use Hoptoad and New Relic, even better they come as addons to the Heroku service, and the costs for using them is even cheaper with Heroku.

The amount of monitoring information New Relic supplies is simple breathtaking and they are always improving the service. The money spent on this service is well worth it, even better, in a recent update, the standard package comes for free with Heroku.

Concentrating on what’s important, our own codebase

All these cloud services have allowed us to concentrate on what’s important, our own codebase. What is more, because of all these services, the amount of code we have to maintain is actually quite small, so our maintenance costs are pretty minimal.

Conclusion

In the past, the idea of having everything so spread out across different services would have terrified me and sounded like a management nightmare. The Incentive Maker project has changed my opinion dramatically and I’ve fully embraced the idea of “the cloud”. It’s cost effective, a huge time saver, and removes a huge amount of hassle and stress.

We have no idea what our requirements are going to be in the future, but we can confidently say we can happily cope with scaling for larger number of users, adding in extra cloud services and even moving to different services, should a better service become available.

Any future product development I’m involved in, will definitely be using these, or similar services.

A small independently owned restaurant with a passionate team (known to the regulars as Team Fudge!) the restaurant has an addictive personality, a friendly feel and is driven to deliver homemade brassarie style dishes focusing on great flavours, fresh food, no fuss!

That’s not to say the past 6 years have been without struggle for the young team.

Where there’s smoke there’s fire – especially in the restaurant business which is a super tough cookie to crack. Constantly pushing themselves forward, while keeping a very close eye on the financials, the team at Fudge have taken on every opportunity to learn the market, push through a recession, diversify the business to encourage income generating opportunities in order to stay focused, busy, and keep all the staff in full time employment and move in directions that ensure they do not stray from their creative, fresh food and clean crisp ethos that gives them their own little ‘milkshake moments’ as they put it.

In the middle of winning Gold Great Taste Awards for bakery items, their own creamy dreamy fudge, and popular chilli jam, a mention in the Harden’s Restaurant Guide, helping with the round the world Clipper Celebrations, cooking up giant Paella dishes from a warehouse on Hull’s marina not to mention teaching 250 adults to cook from scratch using fresh ingredients in the community – that some described as ‘life changing’ – they also took on a scruffy derelict unit next door to the restaurant on Princes Avenue with a vision of creating extra production work for the team during testing times for the restaurant and to give the Avenues area, and their regulars, the neighbourhood a fine foodie heaven it so desperately wanted!

Shock Snow over winter 2010 was the icing on the cake for the restaurant which took more than 200 cancellations in two weeks – turning the Christmas trade into a panic. And if that wasn’t enough, on the eleventh hour – the night before New Year’s Eve the funding strings were whipped away from them for the bakery plans next door.

Committed to their vision, chefs taking on painting, building duties, managers and waitresses mucking in and a lot of help and support from suppliers, customers, local business owners and consultants the team pushed through and finally secured enough to get the bakery open.

“It’s amazing to see how people genuinely cared for us. They believed in our product. When food prices are soaring the general discounting trend and swapping to poor quality commodities and cutting costs is the usual route in our trade but we held off. People really wanted us to be ok, get the bakery open and do what we do well. One regular mentioned us at mass, another put us in touch with the right people to help with small funding opportunities and others just kept supporting the restaurant by eating lots!”

Behind the scenes the three years of design, product sourcing and menu building can now been seen for all its glory in the Bakery and shop. “The product is just as we wanted it to be. Something to run alongside the restaurant, give the team new skills to learn – something we are proud of. “It’s a huge relief – now we need the support of foodies everywhere and people to spread the word, come and eat in the restaurant and buy a gift in the shop. Or pop in for a Thai chicken and sweet potato pie to take out for your tea and a takeout cappuchino… and just enjoy it as we do!.”

A few weeks in and the place is brimming with the Fudge Personality that the restaurant oozes. Bright clean and crisp, modern bakery homemade treats, whole pies and tarts to order, fresh bread baked on site by the chefs, pies, pastries, jams and dressings & fantastic quirky foodie gifts.

A box in the window is branded FUDGE BAKERY & SHOP…. PROVE YOURSELF… above that a card that shouts out….Jammy Devil! Need we say more….

We’d like to say a huge thanks to Rosie, Emma, all the team for looking after us on many occasion and letting us use their wonderful meeting room. Thanks guys!!

Fudge Restaurant/ Bakery & Shop/ Catering
93 & 95 Princes Avenue Hull HU5 3QP
01482 441019
www.fudgefood.com
Contact Rosie Goodman
07960444940

Known as the Centre for Digital Innovation or C4Di, the building could provide up to 6,700 sq m of space for businesses in the Fruit Market area of the city.

The project is being led by developers Wykeland Group, working with KCOM, Hull City Council, the University of Hull and Hull College.

This is a wonderful project, and one which could provide an amazing workspace and environment for many people and companies.

The partners involved want to get this right and they need your help to do so. If you could take a few minutes to fill in the survey below we would be very grateful.

>>> Click here to take the survey now <<<

(Approximately five minutes of your time).

Every response is put in a draw for £100 of Amazon vouchers. The winning survey response will be picked at random at the end of June 2011 and will be notified by email (make sure you fill on your email address!).

Take the survey!

For those of you who don’t know, it all blew up just over a week ago when people began to discover there was a location tracking database on their iPhone.

(If you want to know the ins and outs of how the iPhone knows where you are, then this is a must-read article by Glenn Fleishmann over at Macworld).

Now normally (most) people would a) not know about this b) not be able to access it and do much with it. In this instance, it was not the case. A simple application can be downloaded and used to visualise your movements and this is where things started to get messy.

An example of what this application shows is below:

Washington DC to New York from Alasdair Allan on Vimeo.

Pretty clever eh? So people were starting to become worried about if this database fell into the wrong hands, mischief could be made. However, it seems that this location data is not that accurate, so is there anything to be worried about?

The worry stems from the fact that people didn’t know it did this.

I’m not sure at this point. Apple have released a statement which you can read here. The first two items are below:

1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?
Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.

2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this?
Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.

And what is very interesting, is the last point >> Software Update:

Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:

- reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
- ceases backing up this cache, and
- deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

This is exactly what Gruber thought – it was something in the iOS software which was just missed. Rather than deleting this cache of location data every now and then, your iPhone stored it. Hence the ability to go and see “where you’ve been”.

It looks like Apple have realised this was a mistake and have made the above moves to put people’s minds at rest. That saved database of location certainly made the tech and mobile headlines last week and it goes to show that location is still very important to people like Apple, but also consumers.

It’s not only in the background where smartphones are recording your location. A huge number of apps use it, especially for photography. Instagram, Twitter, flickr… they all use “location services” on the iPhone.

I’ll be very interested to know what you think about “broadcasting” your location.

Are you becoming more aware of it?
Are you choosing not to?
Do you think it is putting yourself at risk from nefarious other parties?
Do hardware and software companies need to make us more aware of location and what is, and what is not tracked?

Over to you.

JM

UPDATE

Apple have just released the new iOS 4.3.3 and as you can see below, it is addressing the database:

So, it’s critical to have a good solution, and John Connolly has kindly written about his recommendation to change to Google Apps. If you are considering going this route, then this is essential reading. ( I’ve now gone down this route – Jon).

I was a MobileMe user up until about eighteen months ago.  I used it for syncing calendar entries, addresses and email between my iPhone, Desktop and Laptop.  Largely, it all worked pretty well, though there were a few things that I thought felt dated.  The major issue however, was that every few months something ‘weird’ would happen… Appointments I thought I’d entered disappeared, contact data seemed not to correspond between machines, and other spurious errors occurred.  After the initial panic surrounding whether I’d missed meetings came the tortious process of working out which device had the most recent data.  This was followed by a process of resetting sync data on devices that were outdated…  Something had to change.

On top of this I also had a few niggles that I hoped could be addressed.  I needed reliable calendar sharing with my wife where we could each enter social data, vet appointments, family birthdays, fuel deliveries, holidays etc.  The same was true for work colleagues, where we needed to share busy periods or meeting schedules.  Something also needed to be done about my ever growing email account (going back to the mid 90s), which has become unfeasible to migrate every few years to a new hosting server.

Solution

The Apple apps weren’t at fault; Mail, Address Book and iCal all provide simple and elegant interfaces and I was keen to stick with them.  The reliability of the service that synced all my devices was the issue and so I set about looking at alternatives.  One of the main things I was keen to avoid was a manual or ‘docking & syncing’ process offered by various 3rd parties. What I was after was a seamless ‘push’ of data in a way that those in corporate/Exchange environments are accustomed to.  I also wanted to avoid a web based service such as Gmail or Google Calendar as I just don’t enjoy their interfaces.

The solution I arrived at was to use Google as the infrastructure behind the Apple applications.

I now have:
• A Google Apps Account for my personal information (with various other accounts for family members)
• A Google Apps Account for my work information
• iCal, AddressBook, and Mail now sync seamlessly between my desktop and iOS devices.  Information entered on any device is then instantly pushed to all other devices.
• A scalable email solution
• The ability to share calendars, invites, and meeting information with family and colleagues from any device.
• My domain names tied to the relevant Google accounts.
• Very little (if any) spam – the Google spam tools seem much better than my previous hosting package.

I’d highly recommended it.  I’ve been using the set-up for over a year now and I have no complaints.

The SetUp

A year ago, there was very little documentation on this, however, Google have updated their documentation and it’s very comprehensive, so I’ve just collated links and added my comments.

Infrastructure

I’m going to assume you have a Google or GoogleApps account set up and you’ve managed to link your domain names with those accounts.  The Google documentation is great.  I just updated my MX records for my domain, which means Google handles all my mail.  Web hosting is still covered by my original hosting provider.

Setting Up The iOS Devices

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740

If you have multiple calendars in Google Calendar, you need to choose which of your calendars appear on your phone.  This is done through Safari on your iOS device.

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=139206

Setting Up Mail

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81379

In addition, Google recommend the following settings:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78892

I use Mail in a very simple way.  I have an Inbox, Sentbox,and Trash – that’s all I need.  Email for me is a communication tool, not a management tool, so I don’t use tags or contexts or any of the other features that Gmail supports.  If it’s in my inbox it’s not dealt with.  Dealing with it either means creating an Omnifocus task for it or replying.

Therefore, I turn off all the other folders for viewing in Mail – this is achieved using the IMAP folder subscriptions setting in Google Labs. Therefore, the only imap folders that appear in Mail are Inbox, Sent, All Mail and Bin.

Rather than then having a separate list of subscribed imap folders within Mail (sent, deleted etc), you really want these mapped to Mail’s main folders.  This guy has a good explanation of this:

http://blog.monkeysthumb.org/tuning-mail-app-gmail-imap-integration

However, in my setup, I map the Mail Trash to my Google Archive.  This is because I get so little spam these days that I rarely delete mail.  When I need to, I just drag the message to the ‘Bin’ imap folder.

Setting Up Address Book

This is simple, just go into preferences in AddressBook and check ‘Synchronize with Google’ and enter your Account details.

Setting Up iCal

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99358#ical