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.

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!

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.

It’s also been a great success. Nearly 200 new students signed up to our newsletter—so many that we ran out of sign-up sheets.So many postgraduates showed up to the induction that we quickly handed out all 500 of our leaflets, and had to start giving out branded beermats instead.

With two days left in Freshers’ Week, my initial goal of reaching 2000 new students is suddenly sounding very doable. For tonight: print more sign-up sheets, and fast!

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.

Phil told me the other day that while he was at school, it never even crossed his mind that he could start a business, or work for himself. He didn’t think about freelancing or consulting, or working for a startup.

There are probably hundreds more students entering the University this year with just the same mindset. It’s not a bad mindset, but Phil describes it sort of wistfully, as if he might have made different choices if he had thought about entrepreneurship earlier.

That’s just the message we want to give to other students. Armed with SIE’s brilliant new “I’m an entrepreneur” posters, LAUNCH.ed beermats, chocolate coins and loads of other branded goodies, I’m off to spread the joy of enterprise.

(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?

Image credit: Marcus Vegas

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.

2. It is possible to feel like you’ve read the book without ever laying eyes on it. At least, that’s how I felt after watching a Malcolm Gladwell clip on Ted, attending a Radley Yeldar presentation rife with Blink anecdotes, and reading numerous references to Blink in newspapers and magazines.

3. New books cost too much money. This is especially true in South Africa, where a new book costs as much as a three-course dinner at a fine restaurant, but is still generally true of the rest of the world.

Curiosity got the better of me when I saw Blink available in the library at work. (Note that libraries are, in general, a very good way to avoid conflict with reason three.)

Blink is great. It’s better than any quotations you’ve read in articles, and there’s more in it than any man can pack in a PowerPoint. It’s well written, interesting and thought-provoking.

Moreover, Blink doubles as a book on relationship advice. One of the primary examples Gladwell explores in the book is a scientist who analyses interactions between married couples and then predicts whether or not they’ll eventually get divorced. The science is solid, correctly predicting marital fate in more than 90 percent of cases. Feeling a little unsure about your partner? Read Blink to find out what sort of behaviour is a “deal-breaker” for couples who divorce.

Perhaps you’re happy with your love life? Well, then maybe you need to read Blink because you’re a bit racist, and you don’t want to be. I’m not pointing any fingers; we profile people all the time, whether we want to or not. Blink explains how that process works and how to train ourselves out of racist tendencies. This is important, substantive stuff.

Perhaps you’re neither racist nor passive-aggressive toward your mate? Don’t worry, there’s plenty more in this book for you. It’s a fast read, educational, entertaining, and currently available for a four-week lease from Launch. Consider it recommended.

Image credit: chefranden

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.

2.  SquareGo was a finalist in last year’s New Ventures competition (sponsored by Launch, my employer and the University’s support service for student-entrepreneurs). They later advanced to the Scotland-wide round.

3. TC Larsen, Enterprise Manager for Square-Go, spent a year abroad at the University of California, Berkeley. He happens to be Norwegian (a nationality that borders the makers of this fine vampire film), and plays a very competitive game of Flight Control on his iPhone.

4. Dave Cook, acting Managing Editor while Josh is cavorting in the communist hemisphere, is an award-winning games journalist (2008 Regional Games Columnist of the Year from the Games Media Awards).

5. To prevent what the site calls “viagra spam”, anyone wishing to post a comment on the SquareGo website must pass this extremely rigourous test question: “What colour is an orange?”

That’s all for now. Over and out.

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.

While the website nears completion, I find I’m still stuck in the Martin Luther King stage of development. I dream of a website where Edinburgh students can easily find information about entrepreneurship and enterprise events. I dream that one day, not just Edinburgh students, but Edinburgh staff will come streaming to the site to learn more about the University’s start-up companies. And I dream that our Twitter following will surpass that of Sarah Palin.

I know it’s cheesy, but wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t it be so much nicer if we could find out about all the entrepreneurship events in Edinburgh from a single website? And wouldn’t it be fabulous if some of our entrepreneurs got a bit more press coverage, especially on their home turf, than (soon-to-be former) Alaskan governors?

Here’s hoping for a mini enterprise revolution. Reach for the stars!

Image credit: Darren Hester