You can see my entry at:

http://www.computerweekly.com/galleries/240255-13/Kate-Ho-Great-female-technology-entrepreneurs.htm

If you’re on my facebook network, you’ll know that I finally submitted my thesis back at the start of November 2009. The title is “Understanding Requirements work in E-Science Projects” (the abstract is available here). I am still waiting to hear on the viva date, and if things go well, it should be soon. I have to say, that the last few weeks months were manic. Things were being pulled together and throughout this time my supervisors – Stuart Anderson and Mark Hartswood – and my officemates – Massimo Felici, Jenny Ure and Conrad Hughes – were all fantastic.

Much to the relief of my friends (some of who had started to send me messages checking to see if I was still alive), I printed and binded the thesis on 2nd Nov after an all night session of work.

After that, I pretty much moved into my new office in Appleton Tower, where I am one of the new EPIS entrepreneurs. I’m working with Jon Oberlander on some funky innovative multi-touch and multi-modal research (which then could be commercialised). The new venture is called Interface3 – to represent the third new generation of Human-Computer Interfaces. It also hints to “Third Places”, a term to represent public areas such as coffee shops and shopping malls, after the home being the first place, and offices being the second place. I even wrote a startupcafe article about the naming.

I’ll be posting more about my new venture soon – so stay tuned!

Lastly, in my attempt at some work-life balance, I decided to take my first holiday for about 8 months in the Calendonia Pine Forest with the fantastic Treesforlife organisation. The mission for Trees for Life is to restore the Calendonia Pine Forest – of which, less than 1% currently exist. Centuries of de-forestation, demand for wood in war time, growth of non-native trees has meant that there is very little natural Scots Pine forest left.

Work-wise, we ended up planting 1841 trees – between a combination of Aspen, Birch, Hazel, Rowan and Birch Silver. To my astonishment, the final totals are available on the Trees For Life work week website. The other amazing thing is, I also fell my first tree! In fact, I felled several trees (some even by myself)! There are also some photos from the holiday too.

(Courtesy of Sophie Marsh.)

But most of all, the holiday was just fantastic because I ended up with a bunch of fantastically fun and diverse group of volunteers. Lisa gave us pilates lessons, Robin and Lucy had an immense amount of knowledge about nature and Phil and Gordon just made the whole atmosphere chilled out and easy. Not to mention Frederique (Fred) of course, who was in charge of the kitchen and ensured that I got 7 days of home cooked food.

I couldn’t recommend Trees for Life enough. I was looking to book my next holiday already!

So onwards and upwards. I’ll be posting more onto here soon!

The Interactive Mortgage Guide is designed to take advantage of the multi-touch capability of Microsoft Surface to help you make sense of the variety of mortgage options available. The Natural User Interface (NUI) enables us to give you an interactive and multi-media approach in providing information – from interactive graphs, videos and information cards. Designed to be used unassisted, the application offers an enjoyable and innovative method to find information on monthly repayments and total interest payable for 10 – 35 years periods based on current interest rates for Fixed Rate, Variable and Offset mortgages.

Here is a demo:

http://vimeo.com/5567256

We were pretty excited when the Times decided to write a piece on us for this sunday’s paper. What resulted was this:

“Police leaders have warned that a new website allowing the public to criticise the service could be hijacked by troublemakers”

followed by …

“The site, modelled on Patient Opinion, which encourages online criticism of the NHS, will allow people to suggest areas for improvement or to offer praise.

However, officers have expressed concern that the site will be hijacked by disgruntled members of the public to make unfounded criticism.”

This did not represent what we are trying to achieve with MyPolice at all. Here is our official reply. Douglas Greenshields has a well-thought out criticism of the negative journalism, plus a view of how a service like mypolice could benefit the public.

MyPolice cannot be further away of being a site which allows people to “shop a cop”. In fact, the focus on positivity is one of the main reasons why I signed onto the project in the first place. I have a number of friends in the Police Force (mostly through my rugby connections), and I remember telling Sarah Drummond (who came up with the idea) at the start of SICamp how I wouldn’t work on a project which could be similar to Rate-my-cop. The negativity would be too overwhelming. She convinced me that it would be a platform to praise police officers as much as giving constructive feedback. It was going to be a place where the public put their point of view across. This could be good feedback (when was the last time you wrote to thank someone?)

This opinion is further reinforced by James Munro from PatientOpinion, who pointed out that 50% of the feedback they receive on their NHS rating site are positive.

You didn’t read it wrong – half are positive.

The team knows that MyPolice edges a difficult line – how to provide feedback without plain rude criticism. We want to encourage positivity (in fact, that’s the first word that was written down in our first ever brain-storming session). That’s what makes this project so interesting to work on. The point is to provide a platform, not a soapbox.

Bela Hamid, Thomas Drapier, Jessica Williamson and I have been working very hard lately and now we’re ready to launch StartupCafe:

“We aim to be a fun and humorous place to go to for local startup news. We’ll be offering you an alternative commentary of tech, startup and social media news; along with announcements of jobs, events and competitions (all with a dose of silliness). As if that’s not enough, we’ll also be showcasing local startups and giving them a place to shout out their successes.”

This blog grew out of two needs. One, the Edinburgh startup scene has become so big that its difficult to keep track of. We wanted somewhere that people can get their daily dose of local startup news (with the emphasis on local). On top of that, while each startup has their own blog, we wanted to create a central place where we can help young companies celebrate their successes, advertise for resources and share ideas. Add a sprinkle of tech commentary and you have us!

Check out our quirky bios on the About page – for better or for worst, we decided that we were not allowed to write our own bios and instead the other three people would.

So take a coffee break, pop by and join in the conversation! And make sure you spread the word!

PS. You can contact us at hello@startupcafe.co.uk

Thanks to Hermoine Way from TechFluff.tv, along with Jonathan Sarno and Alex Cone from CodeFab, I had the pleasure of getting a scholarship to the iPhone Bootcamp in London this weekend.

The iPhone Bootcamp is a well established training course over in the States, and this is their first venture across the pond. The goal is simple: to turn complete beginners to iPhone developers in 24 hours. What this really translates to is a crash course from 10-6pm everyday for 3 days. Of course, most people stay beyond 6pm …

The organizers impose a limit of 15 people taking the course. There were 9 of us taking this class. Obviously this meant that there was a lot of one-to-one tuition and plenty of time to ask questions. The tutor, Alex Cone, knows a scarily large amount about Objective C and the iPhone development process. In fact, he can even tell you where to find the Apple engineers at the WWDC happening next week.

The course covered the basics of iPhone development. Here’s a basic run down of the contents:

Day 1 – It takes you from writing the mandatory “Hello World!” application (in a rather attractive combination of blue text on yellow background)

Day 2 – Goes through the basics of building a Table View application (which is the list view you get on your iPod). First you’ll hardwire the list in the code, then you move onto loading the list from a plist (property list), then through to loading a list using SQLite.

Day 3 – The morning covers web services and basic animations at breakneck speed, before getting splitting the class into groups and getting them to build an eBook application from scratch.

Accompanying the course is a BIG stack of slides, as well as a student package which includes sample code to the exercises.
As you can imagine, it was a lot to take in. I didn’t know anything about programming in the Cocoa framework or in Objective C – but I still managed to follow most of the exercises. I’m not saying that I didn’t get lost, and I did spend quite a bit of time trying to understand what was going on at a conceptual level. But I certainly got a rough idea of things. This was helped by the fact that I had programmed in Java before, and had an understanding of Model-View-Controller structure by playing with RubyonRails. Anyone without a basic understanding of either of these will struggle.

Also, there was a mixture of novices and slightly more experienced programmers on the course; a few had developed iPhone apps before, and a few (like me) don’t even own a Mac! I think everyone found their own level – some of the more experience coders just added more things for “style points”, whilst the novices followed the instructions.

Despite being exhausted, it was well-worth it. It definitely comes highly recommended and if anyone has money for sponsorship, I’m sure Alex and Jon would like to come up to Scotland!

So a BIG THANK YOU to Hermoine, Jon and Alex for letting me attend the course and I’m off to save up to get a macbook and an iPod Touch!

I’ve submitted two ideas of my own: GiveKnitting.org and Girls in Tech.

But I’ve been keeping an eye on the other entries, and wanted to talk about my favorite ones:

PoliticalPromise.org

Their tagline is: “No one keeps track of political promises. Someone should.” – what more is there to say? As the submission points out, we need accountability from politicians and more of it. You only have to look at the scandal from MP’s expenses to be able to see how much we need political accountability. This is even more important as we head towards the next general election. We need parties to fulfill their promises; not just provide us with hollow election rhetoric which is discarded as soon as they get into power.

Although in saying this, we also need a counter-balance. If the website could also provide a section where people can vote to say that they do not want this promise (e.g. ID Cards) then that would make the platform even more powerful.

Open paths

The idea: “crowdsourcing the development, maintainance, documentation and mapping of new and existing long distance walking trails.”

As someone who gets lost on long distance walks, I wholeheartedly see the need for this. Imagine this: out in the middle of nowhere, your google maps app doesn’t work and the only sign in front of you is a single arrow in a big field: you suddenly realise how nice it would be if there were more useful signs. You get back from holiday and read this – yes, it is a great idea.

Kudos
The idea: “The concept is to provide a site similar to www.elance.com but rather than companies paying freelancers, the freelancer gives up his/her time for free and the company pays the project costs direct to a charity.”

Volunteering your time for charity is a great way of giving something back. Part of the problem is that volunteering takes a fair chunk of time since most charities want you to take on a role rather than just a one-time job. This is one way to get freelancers to donate one chunk of their time with low commitment.

Food for the people, by the people

The idea: “A catering business that unites people with lower income and people who can cook but are not necessarily trained chefs.”

Provides a place for amateur wannabe Masterchefs to showcase their talent – Did I ever mention I’m a pretty awesomedecent cook?

For people that have never heard of the Moonwalk, here’s the basic idea: take 10,000 men and women, get them to walk a full marathon (26.2 miles) or the half marathon (13.1 miles) in a brightly decorated bra to raise money for breast cancer. If you haven’t seen it, I suggest you venture out in town on 20th June 2009 (unfortunately the official route cannot be publicised for Health and Safety reasons – but it starts at Inverleith Park – well worth heading along to see!).

I volunteered at the first Moonwalk back in 2006, then again in 2007, had to miss 2008 due to Islay, and I’ve signed up again to volunteer this year. I’ve volunteered at a couple of other events before, as well as running a few myself, but the Moonwalk has always stuck me as a shining example of how to treat and value your volunteers well. Since us social media types will inevitably run an event at some point (big or small), there’s a few ways where I think the Moonwalk organisers have got it completely right:

1. Give people clear roles and responsibilities
People like to be told what they are doing, and what they are responsible for; especially in the context of a big event that they don’t know a lot about. At the Moonwalk, you are told explicitly beforehand what you are expected to do, where you’re expected to be, and roughly when you can go.

This is easier in a larger event than a smaller one where there might be lots of little jobs, thats fine, but tell volunteers what their primary role is, and let them know when their role is expected to end and their responsibilities fulfilled.

2. Tell people what to expect.
As a volunteer, we were posted an information booklet on the event (similar to the participants booklet) which detailed the route, what to expect, what to wear, and contact information of the organisers. Certain volunteers such as Team Leaders and Drivers were asked to attend a pre-event briefing too.

Do not underestimate how much more confident volunteers feel if they know about what is going on besides their own part. Tell them about what else is going on. Don’t assume they know the event as well as you do.

3. Give volunteers a single contact number
One of my favorite things about the Moonwalk is that they give out one number which volunteers should call in case anything happens. Thats ONE number (which is printed everywhere) for ANYTHING. I’ve volunteered at events when I don’t know who or how to contact anyone about a problem (e.g. have I finished my shift? Where are the nearest toilets? How does this person get a refund? etc).

Give volunteers one mobile number. More importantly – make sure you pay attention and answer it!

4. Get Feedback
Volunteers are often the people on the ground. They are likely to be the ones that know what has gone wrong (or requires more attention). Get feedback from them. After the 2007 Moonwalk, I was emailed by the organisers to ask for feedback. In fact, I had some major points that I wanted to say without sounding like I was making a fuss. Having someone explicitly ask a few days after the event gave me a chance to voice my views (and feel like my opinion is valued).

Ask for feedback. Even if it is an one-off event, ask for feedback so that you can improve your own management skills.

5. Tell volunteers how valued they are
How would you NOT want to volunteer after reading this …

Thats not all. As well as the volunteer booklet, you get a certificate sent through the post after the event. Not to mention Hot tea and food (never under-estimate the importance on giving people a nice cup of tea), and there’s a goody bag at the end too.

6. Impart your vision
At the start of the evening, Nina Barough would stop everyone in the volunteers’ tent and say thank you. She did more than just say ‘thanks for coming’ though; she would tell us about the story of how the Moonwalk started, and what she’s gotten out of it. Its almost impossible to not get infected by the passion that her and the rest of the Moonwalk team have for what they are doing.

Tell people about your vision about the event: why are you holding it? what does it mean to you? what is the end result?

The Bottom Line …
Of course, not all of us will run an event on the scale of the Moonwalk, nor are we full-time event organisers. The point is, if you’re running an event that will need volunteers, think about how you treat them. Think about how they will view the event and what they will have gotten out of it apart from the free t-shirt and the free ticket. Give them something more than that. Give them something to rave and rant about!

womenintechnology.co.uk: http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/updates-from-womenintechnology

Ewan Spence: http://www.ewanspence.com/blog/2009/04/20/skipping-the-edinburgh-gi…

Social Innovation Camp: http://www.sicamp.org/?p=342

Thanks Maggie, Ewan and Katee!

Sarah has just confirmed our second speaker for the evening – Polly Purvis – Executive Director of Scotland IS.

At the last count, 27 Tickets are sold (out of 40) – so get your tickets quick!