I’m asking you for some feedback - which science-based companies do you know of around the Brighton/London area?  Can you leave me a comment if you know one that I don’t already know?

Why am I asking?  I’m an A.I. researcher by trade, I’ve used Python, C++, Java and Matlab to solve ‘interesting problems’ over the last 8 years for a number of clients.  Most of them have been somewhere between Brighton and London.

I’m looking for new A.I. research work and I’m wondering which other companies exist that I could approach.  Possibly you’re an A.I. bod / geek / post-grad researcher in the area who’d like to know which companies might offer jobs or consultancy work.

So far I can think of:

• PANalytical at SInC (one of my current employers for interesting A.I. work)
• Proneta at SInC (very small company, John Hother sometimes has A.I. related questions)
• Observatory Sciences in Hove (seen via their job ad)
• Infonic in Guildford (formerly Corpora, they acquired my old employer Algorithmix years back)
• DataSlide via SInC (current employer, tiny + very smart ’storage solutions’ company)
• Ambiental at SInC (past employer, nice flood-risk simulations and modelling)
• Elektro Magnetix at SInC
• NeuroRobotics at SInC
• MindLab at SInC (new company, looks cool if works as claimed)

There’s the rather obvious bias towards the Sussex Innovation Centre (SInC) in the list above. I’ve been involved with companies that are here so I know an awful lot of faces.  I’m sure there are related companies out and about in the local area - any suggestions?

I’ve also spotted one related company:

• Oban Multilingual (via job ad) needing a math/stats analyst for SEO analysis

We’re trying a new format for the next £5 App event, it’ll be an evening Demo Camp (barcamp.org) where 6 people get to demo something cool or start-upy.

We’re looking for an even split between neat-geek and new-startup (preferably bootstrapped or angeled startups, no shiny-suits for sure).

Mark you attendance in Upcoming as usual (and un-attend if you can’t make it to leave space for others). We had 40 people last time, do reserve your seat sooner rather than later.

We have 6 confirmed speakers:

• ‘Google Maps + GPS + Python + Series 60 + giant pencil == live biking location demo’, Tristan Roddis (CogApp)
• Google App Engine ’stuff’, Simon Willison & Natalie Downe
• Evolvable flight-paths for crash-resistant landing vectors at a major airport, Matt Sarjent
• ‘Pistach.io: a cracking idea!’, Aral Balkan and Dave Stone
• ‘Inuda’s first public app… after two years of ‘Innovating’ alongside client work’, Jon Markwell and Kev The Dev
• ‘Arduino - Beyond Blink’ - Making cool stuff with LEDs, Seb Lee-Delisle

If you’d like to present at our next Demo Camp then get in contact with me (ian AT ianozsvald com) or John (demo AT fivepoundapp com).

Mr. Ribot has offered to Qik live-video the event (as he did last time), we’ll have beer and cake as usual and then we’ll be off to the pub.

I’m doing research on community-sites that have a paying subscription element as a part of our re-think for ShowMeDo. I found some nice data on ScreenCastsOnline and I figured I’d share it.

Don McAllister (UK) is the voice behind ScreenCastsOnline - he provides weekly screencasts to teach viewers about Mac software and web sites.

Don was interviewed by Robert Scoble in December 2006, he mentions that:

• He started in August 2005 to help family members learn the Mac
• He went full-time in March 2006
• In December 2006 he had 1,000 paying members
• He has 11-12k free listeners subscribing each week

Does anyone know of more recent information on the growth of Don’s site? I’d be particularly interested in more recent paying-subscriber figures so I could get an idea of how these things can grow.

According to the Extras page the subscription is $25 for 6 months. For that you get access to high-definition versions of the screencasts and the full back-catalog (costing $20 as a one-time setup fee). Casual followers get access to 3/4 of the content in a lower-definition format.

Don promises 1 new episode every week, the content is typically about Mac software or related websites. Episodes appear to be 30 minutes long. Apparently 21-25k screencasts are downloaded weekly (March 2007) - this is about 3* our own (according to our mostPopular page).

Christmas special - Don is offering a 10% reduction in the subscription during December.

We’re planning a move to a paid-subscription model inside ShowMeDo - we’d like to keep all the content freely available and start adding pro-features that enhance a user’s learning experience. Having never promoted a subscription model before I’m looking for feedback…

Here’s the question - which services do you pay to subscribe to on a monthly basis? Leave me a comment and I can do some research on how other companies get this right (and, ugh, wrong - see Experts Exchange below).

Currently I use 37signal’s BaseCamp free plan for project management, maybe I’ll pay for that when we have more to manage.

I also pay for my Yahoo email - the account came via BT back in the days of old, they were going to cut it off if I didn’t pay or [gasp] dial-in once every 3 months under the terms of my old contract (such a stupid plan - now I dislike yahoo and bt, before I just didn’t like bt).

I used to use Experts-Exchange (wikipedia) - they let you ask questions for free (though they’ve hidden the free option behind layers of pay-to-subscribe links now). You can ask a limited number of questions as a free user and more as a paying user.

You hand over ‘points’ in a very-inflationary system to the person who answers your question successfully. The system used to be successful but that seems to be broken by horrid forced-subscription options. Roughly the service costs $8 per month for users with larger plans for corporates.

HotOrNot has a unique subscriber model - it is free to join, if you want to talk to someone then one of you has to be a member (faq item 54).

In interviews I’ve heard them say that is usually the guy who pays to talk to the girls. You pay when the service looks like it has something useful for you (you rate each other before talking, rating is free, therefore you know the other person is a person and not an empty shill profile), you can stop paying as soon as you’ve had enough. I’ve never tried it.

Dating sites do something similar - I used to subscribe to The Guardian’s Soulmates - I paid a monthly fee for the option to talk to single girls, they have to be paying too to talk back. You don’t have a way of finding out if the other profile is an empty shill profile (a practice that less reputable dating sites routinely follow), otherwise the model is similar. Costs are roughly £15 a month (and yes - it worked for me :-).

There’s also a nice timely report on slashdot about ‘making a buck online without advertising‘ which details Consumer Reports’ approach to only having a subscriber model - no ads and no free plans. It seems that they do very nicely out of this.

Finally Tim O’Reilly has talked about the move from a ‘bookshelf model’ to ‘all you can eat’ for subscribers:

“With Safari, we’ve increasingly moved from a “bookshelf” model (in which you put books on a bookshelf and can only swap at month end) to an all you can eat model, because we’ve discovered that people consume about the same amount of content regardless of how much you make available.”

So - what do you pay to subscribe to? If you can point me in the right direction to services you like then I can see what might give our users extra value - and bonus points if you can point me at novel subscription methods (like HotOrNot) whilst you’re at it.

Hot damn - we’ve just been reviewed by ex-pat Automatic Romantic and our £5 App meets get a stunning write-up:

“Then again, I look at their Flickr stream and the general feeling of lash-up : Projecting onto a whiteboard in a room that looks like it’s either in the throes of serious refurbishment or spiraling down into dereliction (and taking some beautiful antique plaster ceiling roses with it), the beer drinking and eating cake out of foil, the hair, the art, the air of bonhomie and the realization comes to me that it’s not making do at all, it’s Rock n’ Roll.” [Ian's emphasis]

John and I were raising beers to each other last night off of this and we’ll be dining out on it for some time to come.

Related - old friend Simon Hammond is mulling the idea of exporting £5 Apps to Birmingham. I say go for it!

Take the meme and run with it, embrace quick experiments, low cost-of-failure, fail-fast approaches to testing business (and non-business) ideas…just Get On With It. See where it takes you and have a ball on the way (oh, and link back here and let us know how you fare!).

Do join us for a Xmas Special on Tuesday 4th December with a pro-consumer talk followed by Shardcore on the highs and lows of dot-com-boom Beenz.com.

Dear all, this is a quick pre-announce that the fandabbydosious Xmas Special for the £5 App will be on Tuesday 4th December (about 3 weeks time) at The Quadrant pub in the centre of town.

John has arranged private use of the newly refurbished upstairs room for us. I’ll also arrange some sponsored (free!) beer and the pub has agreed to do us a bit of a deal on beer for later. This xmas special will be popular so mark yourself as Attending (we do have limited nbrs).

Resident Artist Shardcore will be speaking on ‘The £50 Million App’ or ‘how he and Martin blew tons of cash during the dot-com boom on various start-ups including beenz.com. Martin is a past co-worker of shardcore, he also spoke on ‘The $30 Apps - life as a Mac Indie‘ a few months back.

Note that ShardCore’s art (a regular feature of our talks) is available for public view at the Tin Drum (Kemptown).

Quick plug - I’ll be speaking on Tues Nov 20th during Danny’s week of skillswaps on how to Master the Art of Screencasting - attend to learn why you should screencast, how you can do it in 5 minutes without installing any software and where you can host the videos for free afterwards.

Saturday’s £5 App Day went very well - during the day we had over 30 people attending the various talks (a similar turn-out to our regular £5 App evening meetings but without the free beer!).Most attendees were programmers and freelancers, some were ‘business types’ - most from Brighton but a few from out as far as Guildford, London and Birmingham (!).

See some photos (more) - thanks for those we have uploaded them! John was the main organiser with Matt Weston in the background and me on some publicity.

Things I learned during the day:

• Social media: Google’s OpenSocial standard isn’t ready yet (despite the hype)
• Social media: Writing a Facebook application is easy
• Copy-writing: How to write web-copy from the perspective of my target audience
• SEO: How many more in-bound links I need to get on the frontpage of Google for targetted terms

Allan and I opened the day with talks on boot-strapping. My Perils of Boot-strapping is online. My main points were:

• Boot-strapping is a valid (if slow) way to start a new company
• Boot-strapping is inherently low-risk towards money and commitment
• Harmonising with your day-job, so your reputation and experience grow hand-in-hand, is preferable

Allan covered how he created his successful Java software consultancy company (SensibleDevelopment) by growing organically which grew from his fantasy-footy game (EffEffElle). Allan spent time explaining the various ways that new companies can get funding and support in Brighton - his presentation (forthcoming) lists all of the possibilities. If you want to ask questions about this - join us on the BrightonDigital mail list.

Sadly Raj couldn’t attend through illness. He had a good talk lined up on ‘growth after boot-strapping’ including statistics from his Kwiqq.com - he has uploaded the presentation which is pretty self-contained.

Next John and Neil discussed ‘how to grow a £5 App’ covering: inspiration, ease of coding, language choice, source control, unit tests and having fun.

After lunch Premasagar and Madhava discussed Dharmafly which is their ethical web consultancy. The did a fab presentation (with Annesley) on how they built a Facebook application (including RSS feed) in several days and how they used this as a way to further broadcast their new ThoughtsOf.PRSarkar. The ThoughtsOf site is a WordPress site with some simple theming, they used the dated post-ahead feature to build a set of posts which are published each week.

Jon Markwell (Inuda) continued the theme of social media and discussed Google’s new OpenSocial. Importantly he explained why it isn’t ready for use yet - I found this talk to be extremely useful as I’d only heard the hype and not the sober inside story. Jon also talked us through Facebook’s new advertising platform and showed how he’d created a Brighton-targetted advertising solution for Inuda.

Paul Silver and David Rosam gave a short presentation on the key points of search engine optimisation. Following the presentation they used their SEO Analysis Tool (the ’site clinic’) to give us feedback on a couple of our sites. I have a print-out of my results and I’ll use the analysis to guide my own SEO for ShowMeDo. Do contact Paul and David (WebPositioningCentre.co.uk) if you’d like expert SEO advice and implementation.

To cap off a brilliant day Ellen de Vries gave us an excellent and very interactive talk on writing copy for the web. We had to work in groups to first explain our own websites ‘to our mum’ - i.e. using plain language and clear concepts. We worked through several more exercises and ended up explaining what we do ‘to our clients’ and along the way we all learned some new Copy skills. Thanks Ellen! Do contact Ellen if you’d like custom web-copy or advice.

Naturally at the end of the day we headed off to the pub to unwind. It looks as though several collaborations have begun as a result of the day and the ‘£5 App Meme’ will be travelling to Birmingham (thanks Simon!) to start a new group in Brum. Woot!

Upcoming events: OpenCoffeeSussex meets next Thursday in the Sussex Innovation Centre, Master Screencasting on Tues 20th for the Week of SkillSwaps, the £5 App Christmas Special (title: The £50 Million App) is on December 4th.

We host our first-ever day-long £5 App event tomorrow (full itinerary). We have 25 confirmed on Upcoming, another 10 by email with people travelling in from as far afield as Birmingham and London.

Hopefully there will be students from Sussex Uni and maybe random people from the 10,000 brochures that Wired Sussex have distributed. It’ll be a good event

Thanks again to Alan at Sensible Development for hosting us.

In summary - the day runs from 10am to 6pm at Pelham House in the North Laines - just off of Trafalgar St and 5 minutes from Brighton station. We have 9 speakers in 5 sessions, the event is free, you can drop in and out of events as you see fit.

We will have the internet (+hopefully wifi) and some of the sessions are practical so bring your laptop. It wouldn’t be a £5 App event if it didn’t involve some drinking after…

Session list (more detail):

1. (10am) Perils of Boot-strapping and Growth after Boot-strapping (myself, Alan Newman, Raj Anand)
2. (11.30am) Developing your £5 App (£5 App co-founder John Montgomery)
3. (2pm) Social Media Marketing (Premasagar and Madhava, Jon Markwell)
4. (3.20pm) Search Engine Optimisation for your website (Paul Silver)
5. (4.40pm) Successful Copy-Writing (Ellen de Vries)

David and Paul have blogged about their SEO/web-copy session, Raj has blogged about his growth-after-bootstrapping session. I’ve blogged about us on the Digital Festival site. You’ll find write-ups for all of our previous events on the official £5 App site.

For the Digital Festival we’re having a whole day (sign up->Upcoming.org) of £5 App Goodness aimed at moving your project forward:

• When: Saturday 10th November, 10am-6pm
• Where: North Laines, see Upcoming
• Cost: Free
• Food/Drink: You supply your own, shops nearby
• Wifi? Yes, laptops welcome
• Sponsor: Alan Newman of SensibleDevelopment (plug: talk to Alan for bespoke Java web solutions) - thanks Alan for providing the location!

We’re holding a whole day of £5 Appness to help move everyone a step forward with their respective start-ups and projects. We have 5 great sessions each with 1-3 speakers, each session is interactive, we want everyone to get something productive out of the day.

Programme for the day:

10am-11.30am The Perils of Bootstrapping (Ian Ozsvald, Alan Newman, Raj Anand)
I’ll give some feedback on the problems associated with bootstrapping borne of practical experience growing ShowMeDo and Services over the last 2.5 years. Alan will speak on related problems for EffEffElle and Sensible Development, Raj will cover fund-raising for growth past boot-strapping. Questions will be encouraged, war-stories will be told.

11.30am-1pm Developing your £5 App (John Montgomery plus others)
John and assistant(s) will cover some of the tools and techniques that will help you start a boot-strapped project quickly and keep it growing at a sustainable rate. Some things are key (e.g. source control, test frameworks) but are often ignored. The talk will include stories from the coal-face.

2pm-3.20pm A simple example of Social Media Marketing (Madhava and Premasagar, Jon Markwell)
In part continuing from Tom Nixon’s talk on Social Media at Vine Networking, Madhava and Premasagar (DharmaFly.com) will give a £5-App Talk on how they use Social Media for low-cost yet high-impact marketing for their clients. Topics will include building a Facebook App, MySpace, Flickr and Blogs. John Markwel will join the talk discussing Google’s new OpenSocial platform along with Facebook application development.

3.20pm-4.40pm SEO (Paul Silver)
Paul will continue his talk from BarCamp and give us the low-down on easy and successful ways to improve your rank in search-engines. Paul can give practical advice during the session, we want to kick-off SEO improvements for a few of you during the day. Paul offers SEO as a commercial service - you’ll receive expert advice for free by attending.

4.40pm-6pm A guide to successful Copy-writing (Ellen de Vries)
Ellen is a professional and experienced web-copy-writer who is little known (yet…but that will change soon!) in the geek scene. She plans to run a very hands-on session where we learn copy-writing by deconstructing each other’s web sites. Ellen offers copy-writing as a professional service - you’ll receive expert advice for free by attending.

If you want to move your project forwards on Saturday November 10th then mark yourself as Attending.

Paul Silver’s Hack Day on Nov 17th is a related event.

Recently I’ve been asked to help find a few candidates for some jobs - it seems that the ‘job ad’ solutions in Brighton aren’t all that well known outside of their immediate circles. I figured I’d summarise some of the options, please comment if you’ve something to add.

Newspapers:

The Argus: I hate to say it but I’ve heard that The Argus generates the largest number of applicants for tech jobs in Brighton. I hate to say it because an old-school printed newspaper that covers ‘everything’ doesn’t feel like the right place to find a niche tech job.

Two months back a tech company I know took out a half-page advert (cost approx. £2,000) and received several hundred replies. Between this and other routes they filled their four developer vacancies within a few weeks. Normal advertising is much cheaper - £30 to £140 - though it doesn’t say how long the ad is shown for.

I’ve also been told that the same company placed a similarly big ad in The Metro for £500 and received just as many enquiries.

Luke mentions that The Guardian’s Media and Technology section is a good place to advertise though the expense may only suit larger companies.

Job Boards:

Wired Sussex’s Job Board: Currently host to 97 jobs, mostly technical, I’ve heard of people using the Wired Sussex board with success over the years. Prices range from £80 - £250. The also offer an advertising service to get your job into The Argus.

Sussex Digital’s job board is a relatively new entrant, created earlier this year by Dave Stone and Josh. Their prices are considerably cheaper than Wired Sussex’s (£15 using the promo code on the page, £10 if you use the ‘bnm10′ promo code from the BNM list). Currently there are 12 jobs listed, all tech.

Sussex University Computer Science Dept.:

I have a contact inside my old computer science lab back from my MSc days. Dr. Sharon Wood is in charge of jobs for the dept., she is can pass on details of temporary/contract work to the students. Contact me (not Sharon) if you’d like a job to be passed on.

This is a great way to tap into a group of skilled programmers who can work on an ad-hoc basis and who might be interested in future full-time work.

A general link into the students at Sussex University is via CDEC (Career Development and Employment Centre - thanks John), they publish part- and full-time job requirements for all students and they can advise on the best way to reach the right people. They will also know about any careers fairs that might be running.

Mailing Lists:

The Brighton New Media mail list is the longest running tech mailing list for Brighton. The list is read by a large number of Brighton freelancers. Most of the participants will be focused on media and web development.

Job postings are welcome as long as they are clearly marked and not from agencies. Posting is free, just make sure you obey the list’s etiquette.

The newer Brighton Digital mail list (note: I’m a co-founder) is tech-business oriented. There are 57 companies on the list and soon there will be students joining. To post a job or skill request just post a clear message, it’ll reach Brighton-based tech companies and professionals who are interested in work in Brighton.

Events:

A final method is to pass on the word at networking events. As Luke mentions it is a great way to meet the right people - Brighton has a lot of opportunity for tech-networking.

People stand-up at the end of our £5 App evenings and talk about tech vacancies to the 20-30 attendees. The people who attend are focused on boot-strapping new companies and technical projects (and socialising over a beer or two).

The OpenCoffee Sussex events which are held at the Sussex Innovation Centre every 2 weeks are a great place to pass on the word over a friendly (and now free thanks to SInC’s management) coffee.

BrightonFarm meets regularly at the BelleVue pub and is a first point of contact to find web freelancers, Paul Silver maintains a list of good freelancers sorted by their skills.

Women in Media organise and are involved in events which encourage women to get involved in the media/creative industries here in Brighton.

Brighton Girl Geek Dinners are another women-focused event, generally held once a month (though recently replaced by Lunches). Boys can attend but the focus is to encourage women to get involved. Devi, Joh, Rosie, Ribot and Manuella are the organisers and they have connections between local companies and Sussex University.

Vine Brighton used to be women-only and now encourages mixed participation. The talks aren’t restricted to technology and are aimed at small businesses.