Archives of Life

Featured in BBC News

We’ve just had StrongSteam featured at the end of this BBC Tech article on foreign tech firms in the UK (noting that we’re a UK firm gone to foreign parts…) by Katia Moskvitch. I’ll add a touch of context, I’m quoted as saying that I couldn’t raise funding for StrongSteam in the UK. This quote […]

Bloody awful air in Santiago (“killer air”?)

I’m a London boy. I grey up on clouds of smoke (albeit not Dickensian-smoke but still…much pollution). Having traveled parts of the world I haven’t often encountered really bad pollution. Santiago has reset my levels. When running up San Cristobel (the big hill in the centre of Santiago) a few weeks back it was possible […]

Lean Processes in StartupChile (short talk this morning)

I gave a short talk this morning with Ryan Lou on the Lean Processes that a startup can use. For me I looked back on the start of ShowMeDo in 2005 (and now) and how we iterated using email, google groups, surveys and lots of discovery by talking to users. I then looked at how […]

StrongSteam’s first novel OCR matching API (Python demo)

Here’s a preview of our first novel API in StrongSteam. We’ve been working with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for a while, we set ourselves the task of matching a noisy photograph of some text to a pre-seeded database of entries. If you follow my blog you’ll already have seen our example iPhone app for the […]

Demos for Botanical Garden Label Matcher from StrongSteam

After a fair bit of graft we’ve finished our first product using StrongSteam – a Latin Botanical Garden label matcher (AKA “OpenPlants”) which runs at Kew Gardens, Wakehurst Place and other botanical gardens in Europe that use the usual black rectangular labels. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about then these 30 second demo […]

High Performance Python 1 from PyCon 2012 (slides, video, src)

This is the follow-on for my PyCon 2012 notes from the end post. I gave a 3.5 hour tutorial on High Performance Python 1, below I link to the slides, the video and the source code. UPDATE2 From October 2014 I’ll be training on High Performance Python and Data Science in London using Python – […]

Data mining/AI/robots/hackerspace meet-up this Thursday

This Thursday at 7pm our StrongSteam will run a friendly pub meet around: Data mining Artificial Intelligence (AI) Robots Hackerspaces The goal is to bring people together from StartupChile and the local community who are interested in the above subjects. The meeting is just a pub meetup, if there’s demand then I’ll organise speakers for […]

Five new Brighton businesses

Earlier in the year through Matt Weston a group of us met, funded by the Innovation and Growth Team, to start a peer-group for a set of four (wait for it…) new businesses. The group was successful – and for several of us it led to the realisation that our plans at the time weren’t […]

Broken economies, an economic thought, freelancer advice

A few of you who know me have caught more than a whiff of my increasingly sour mood over the state of many of our ‘developed’ economies. Between the bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, Italy about ready for a bail-out, Spain with 22% unemployment who might also need a bail-out (but…the EU packages can’t […]