June MiniBar Presenters

At this June MiniBar meet up the presenters will be, The  Guardian API’s Stephen Dunn, The Wow Agency‘s Alan Stuart, IBM SmartCamp‘s Kevin Farrar,  UKTI Head, Information Communications (ICT) Team – UK Trade & Investment’s Simon Carter,  The Difference Engine‘s Jon Bradford, and StartUp BootCamp‘s Oli Johnson.

The Guardian’s Open Platform is available for application developers, giving them greater opportunity to do a number of things. The four components of the Open Platform are, Content API, MicroApp Framework, Politics API, and Data Store. The Content API gives users access to over 1 million articles going back over ten years. In addition it allows the users to have access to picture galleries, podcasts, and video. The MicroApp Framework gives a user the option to integrate applications directly within the Guardian Network. This permits a developer to directly serve content, data, and tools to guardian.co.uk users by publishing content from their own database into the pages of the site, or even creating new pages on the Guardian website on which one can run their own application. The Politics API provides information on election day results, candidates, parties, and constituencies, which can be used to create any number of applications. The Data Store is a directory of data sets that could be very useful in building applications. Part of this is the Data Blog which publishes spreadsheets and data visualizations based on data collected during the news process.

The WOW agency is an initiative within the London Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Computing. It incorporates top students into projects providing low cost, state of the art products. These products include user-centered web solutions, support through optimization, usability, and brand building for start-ups. Along with this the agency provides students and graduates of the highest calibre with a wide range of IT and networking skill sets.

IBM Smart Camp is an exclusive global program that has been designed to bring together entrepreneurs, investors, and experienced mentors in order to build a smarter planet. This collection of individuals allows for access to world class advisors, along with a route to seed and venture capital. This program is run on a city-by-city basis and is available to five companies in each location. These five companies will then spend a day with 25 world-class entrepeneurs, investors, and industry experts. IBM Smart Camp is partnering with a number of organizations including, Seedcamp, SDFORUM, Kauffman Fellows, TechStars, Enterprise Ireland, Stockholm Innovation Group (STING), Massachusetts Tech Leadership Council and Dublin City Council to name a few. The objective of this program is to help companies build an investor ready commercial proposition to secure funding, last year 4 out of 5 companies involved received funding or investment offers from partners of the program.

UK Trade and Investment sets out to work with UK-based businesses, ensuring their success in international markets. The UKTI also aims to encourage overseas companies to look to the UK as a global partner of choice. The UKTI’s objectives include improving business performance of UKTI international trade customers, emphasizing innovative and R&D active firms. They wish to increase the contribution of foreign direct investment to knowledge intensive UK economic activity. They have a goal to improve the reputation of the UK in leading overseas markets. Simon Carter, the head of the UKTI Information Communications team, will be discussing how the new government has changed UK Trade and Investment.

The Difference Engine is mentor led and is an acceleration program designed for digital businesses. This program offers accepted applicants £20,000 of investment capital, and thirteen weeks of intensive business development. The motivation for this program is the designers belief that the early stages of a business are the most formative and can define how the business team will evolve. The Difference Engine program is open to anyone from anywhere, and is supported by DigitalCity Business, Sunderland Software City and the Entrepreneurs’ Forum.

Start Up BootCamp is a 3 month start up accelerator, a northern European initiative affiliated with Techstars. The goal of the program is to allow a participant to transform their startup idea through Start Up Bootcamp’s injection of money, provision of free incubator space, and access to over fifty mentors. The three month program begins with coming up with an initial business idea, getting mentors on board, many panel discussions and networking events with mentors, and reshaping the initial idea. The second month involves creating a business prototype, continued interaction with mentors, meeting potential customers, and further remodeling of business idea. In the final month participants begin to sell, train for presentation skills, and finalizing the product or prototype. At the end of the program the participants pitch their finalized ideas to Investors on Investor’s day.