So it goes

Here’s another quick Flip video of an event we had earlier this month.

After an introduction to entrepreneurship support at Edinburgh, six teams of students each came up with a new business idea and pitched it to the audience.

The ideas all fit into one of the six categories for the Business Idea Competition we’re running. This year, students will be awarded specific prizes for arts and culture businesses, social enterprises, e-commerce sites, product design, science or technology-based businesses (including software), and new ideas in retail. I’ve put up a page on LAUNCH.ed with all the details about the competition. continue reading »

The Business Idea Competition launches on the first of October. It was high time for some new marketing materials.

Here’s the general theme I made for this year’s University of Edinburgh round, thanks to a very helpful Photoshop tutorial website.

Watch for more details about the competition soon!

Halfway through the week. The University is a place of surreal, barely controlled madness.

Bumper cars roared around the central square yesterday, while people in gorilla suits handed out cotton candy and Welcome to Edinburgh! guides. New students canvassed the campus frantically trying to find out where to sign up for courses, where to get their student cards and where to go for the induction events. The Societies Fair was a heaving mass of people. The stuffy hall was filled to the brim with students, society barkers, cheap freebies and the sound of the bongo society drumming away. continue reading »

Freshers’ Week is back. Seventeen and 18-year old students are descending on the campus from all directions. New post-graduates are mingling in the student bars. And we’re madly trying to print fliers and get our website up to date.

I’m at work early this morning to pick up 500 fliers that we’re hoping to hand out over the next couple of days. We’re giving out a couple of modest cash prizes to induce students to register with our new website, and we’re trying to sign up at least 300 new students to our mailing list. All told, it would be excellent if we could reach 2000 incoming students this week. continue reading »

I have just finished our first promo video using our new Flip HD camera. The film below was done entirely on the Flip, and subsequently edited in iMovie.

(Caveat: the animations of the LAUNCH.ed logo were professionally produced by Dunedin Arts. They did not use a Flip.)

I think the quality of the sound and video compares very well to more expensive cameras. Any thoughts?

continue reading »

I had several reasons for not rushing out to read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

1. The book was immensely popular. Occasionally, this is indicative of quality, as in the case of Freakonomics. More frequently, widespread popularity is indicative of terrible writing. Case in point: The Da Vinci Code; Harry Potter. continue reading »

Edinburgh entrepreneurship blog Startup Cafe just published my article about Scottish gaming magazine (and University of Edinburgh start-up company) SquareGo.

Some facts that didn’t make the final cut:

1. SquareGo’s Managing Editor Josh Wilson was recently arrested in Cuba for crimes unknown. He has since been released and has not been charged with anything. The police have explained that it was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Josh has gained one heck of a story for his grandchildren. continue reading »

We’re revamping our website at work. It’s a big job. The developers are furiously coding. We’re drafting lists of keywords to spread liberally through the new web copy. I’m organising a photoshoot to provide new stock photos for the page.

So far, everything seems to be going smoothly. The developers have given us some mock-ups and the new site looks great. They’ve even managed to incorporate some of the features from a paper and glue collage I made to represent the new home page. It’s a good thing too. I spent hours cutting little buttons and menu bars out of my National Geographics. continue reading »