Category: Scotland

Our 5th Birthday! And Open Data for the win

Last week was our 5th birthday, and we got cake from James’s partner!

We also saw a great story about our Open Data this week. ODI Leeds have just published the UK Tech Innovation Index.

Edinburgh and Glasgow came 2nd and 4th respectively, which lead to stories like this one from FutureScot.

And Data for this work came from 3 sources – Meetup.com, EventBrite and …. us! There is a good blog post with a full write up here.

Open Data is key to what we do and has been built into the site from the start. In this and our other projects, we have provided this, have tried to re-use it where possible and have tried to encourage others to produce more and better Open Data. So it’s great to see it pay off in something like this.

We’re looking forwards to continuing down this route over the next year – get in touch with any feedback.

Welcome to new sponsor Aspose (File Format APIs)!

Welcome to our second sponsor Aspose.

Aspose provide programmers everywhere with a powerful set of file management libraries and APIs. Aspose supports some of the most popular file formats in business, including Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Outlook emails and archives, Visio diagrams, Project files, OneNote documents, and Adobe Acrobat PDF documents. They also offer OCR, OMR, barcode generation and recognition, and image manipulation APIs.

These are available as straightforward API’s, or as libraries for programming languages such as .Net, Java, Android and more. You can get an evaluation license to test the libraries, and the API Service is charged on a usage basis, with a free basic level.

Examples are available on GitHub. As well as us, Aspose also support community groups worldwide. Aspose have been going since 2002.

They join Amazon Development Centre Scotland, who are hiring staff in Edinburgh. Thanks to both of them for support – this enables us to keep running and offer a open platform to everyone!

Tech In Scotland now lists news, tweets, online communities and companies!

Back in July we launched a companion site, Tech In Scotland. As well as events from Open Tech Calendar, this now lists news, Twitter lists, and online communities.

As well as the website, we also provide email lists and twitter feeds for each city – so it’s easy for everyone to get the latest info.

And today, we are starting to list companies! Anyone can add a company or edit an existing listing from the website. (All moderated.)

And we are drawing this all together on our new map!

It’s early days, and we’ll be working on this more as data starts to flow in and we experiment with how we can present it and see what people want.

We have seen several sites that collect info on local tech communities before, and with Tech In Scotland we want to be careful to take a step back and focus on what would be really useful for those people living in or visiting a place. Let us know what you think!