Heading to StartupChile

This is a quick update – we’re flying tomorrow to Santiago for 6 months of the StartupChile project ($40k funding, no equity, hundreds of projects flying in from all over the world). If you’re interested in taking 6 months to build your own project I’d suggest you take a look at applying to the next round.

Kyran Dale and I are flying out to build our StrongSteam AI and data mining toolkit (its a cloud API with local language bindings). We have our first client and we launched the alpha API to our first testers a couple of days back. Once we’re in Santiago we’ll add some more testers, expand the API and deliver our first project, then after March we can really ramp up the creation of data mining APIs for people to play with. We’re excited to be in talks with a few people about releasing the alpha at a couple of hackday events, it’ll be really interesting to see what people do with our optical character recognition, image matching, face detection and image manipulation tools. If you’re interested in trying out the Python API then do sign-up to the mailing list on the homepage.

Emily (my fiancée) is also heading out with her TinyEars iPad app, she’ll build a child-friendly app that’ll help kids learn to read out loud by using speech recognition to spot errors in their speech. She’ll be looking for testers with iPad 2s and young kids who are learning to read, do get in touch if you’re interested in the testing.

We had a fab sendoff at the Northern Lights a few days back, cheers to all who came along 🙂

Finally – I’m a bit honoured to have been selected as a teacher at PyCon in the US in March, I’m running a half-day tutorial on High Performance Computing based on my tutorial at EuroPython. We’re using a bunch of these ideas in StrongSteam, it’ll be great to run the tutorial again.


Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.