Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
The School would like to wish ‘all’ of our students and Graduates a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year x
Archive for December, 2013
Home Sweet Homies @ the Founders Hub in Cardiff
In this week’s article Sue Maw (pictured above: right) one of the School’s Lecturing Team provides a review of the Good for Nothing Home Sweet Homies event at the Founders Hub in Cardiff. A great initiative that provides people with the opportunity to apply their skills to help support and solve charity and social enterprise problems.
Just in case you don’t know who we are: we are Good For Nothing Cardiff. We organise events (24, or 48 hours) that bring together a bunch of people with a wide range of skills and talents – makers, thinkers, do-ers, designers, planners, and everything in between – to help accelerate local causes that are focused on delivering social &/or sustainable good. This gives the causes concentrated access to a pool of talent that would normally be out of their reach.
Sue: On the 6th and 7th of December I went along to the Good for Nothing Home Sweet Homies event in Cardiff along with two final year students, Lufwendo (also picture above: left) and Jen.
It was billed a cross between Challenge Anneka and the A Team: we had to explain what that meant to younger participants. The venue was the Founders Hub in Cardiff which is one of the new breed of work and meeting places. It was a lovely space with the obligatory giant lego man head and retro gaming machines :-).
The aim of the event was to spend Friday evening and Saturday creating resources for two charities. There were participants with creative, business and computing skills. On Friday the two charities, Hafan and Oasis, outlined problems they were having, such as poor Web presence and the increased need to record charity beneficiaries for future funding applications. Jen came up with an awesome business and sustainability plan for Oasis.
On Saturday, Lufwendo and I were racing against the clock to produce a client database for Oasis, a charity working with asylum seekers. Our task was made more complicated by the fact that the solution had to be open source so the software we were using did not have all the features we expected. We had a design expert give us some good advice on form-layout and we made use of some great banners a graphic designer produced for the charity. As the clock ticked down the final seconds we finished off our last report – I’m sure students never work to deadlines that closely!
The event worked purely on donated time and resources: there was no budget. I should mention that there was awesome food, some of it cooked by the asylum seekers group. I especially liked the way that I kept getting handed cups of coffee as I worked. There is another event in the spring in Cardiff which I’ll pass on as soon as I know the dates. And of course it would be awesome to have a similar event happening in Swansea. Apart from the warm glowing feeling of having helped a charity, students have something interesting for their CV, a fun experience and networking with local business contacts.
TechHub Swansea Launch Party
TechHub Swansea is a New community and workspace for tech entrepreneurs in the City and becomes the fifth TechHub location after London and Manchester in the UK, and Riga and Bucharest in Europe.
TechHub with links to Google and Blackberry, nurture tech entrepreneurs, and provide a place where they can work, meet, collaborate, network, learn and have fun. TechHub state:
“We provide physical and virtual spaces that enable technology startups to work smarter, develop faster and increase their chance of success. How? Through our one-vision global community… Entrepreneurs and their teams drop in or set up shop, advice flows freely (so does beer and pizza), angels appear, relationships blossom.” (1)
The TechHub community and workspace in Swansea is designed to create opportunities for entrepreneurs and start-ups in the region to create new products and hi-tech jobs in and around the City.
In an article for WalesOnline by Rupert Hall, Matt Warren, entrepreneur and cofounder of TechHub Swansea said:
“We’re thrilled! Opening a TechHub in Swansea will massively boost the region’s existing tech businesses and help them compete on an international scale, while also being five minutes from the beach.” (2)
In a recent Blog post TechHub state:
“We are proud to partner with the Welsh Government, both local Universities and of course our global partners, Google, Blackberry and Telefonica’s BlueVia to bring TechHub to Swansea.” (3)
TechHub Swansea launch party will be on Friday 13th December 2013, for more information please click here: http://www.techhub.com/blog/techhub-swansea-launch-party/
Guest Speaker: Edd Turtle in a Startup Culture
Edd Turtle, a graduate from University of Wales Trinity Saint David in Software Engineering, recently gave a presentation about ‘Web & Software Development in a Startup Culture’. The presentation spoke about both the software principles used in industry and opportunities for any students looking to start their own company.
Edd is the lead developer at a local startup company called Hoowla, which is an online conveyancing solution helping buyers, sellers and their solicitors to collaborate on cases together. The first part of the presentation focused on how cloud computing is used within Hoowla and other companies to maintain it’s online stability and scalability.
The latter half of the presentation focused primarily on the opportunities available to students in the local area, highlighting that there are technology companies (and jobs) in South Wales.
The School would like to thank Edd for returning to the School of Applied Computing to share his experience and knowledge with our current students, and we look forward to future collaborations.
Video: Discover University of Wales Trinity Saint David
Learn more about the Exciting Changes within Welsh Higher Education and the Newly merged Swansea Metropolitan University and the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and the exciting plans for the future – check out the Discover University of Wales Trinity Saint David Video below as the Vice-Chancellor Prof. Medwin Hughes explains all:
UWTSD Applied Computing Blog 