Tuesday November 10th 6.00 PM till late

Sun CBC London

Tickets are free and are available here:



Tuesday 10th November at Sun Microsystems’ Customer Briefing Centre in London. 6pm for pizza and beer kindly provided by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials team. The event will be developer and startup-centric with the content best suited to people who are already developing applications on top of Twitter or who intend to start building a Twitter application in the near future. At 9pm we head down to the pub conveniently located directly underneath the briefing centre.

Nest Building

    * What next for devnest? What we can do in between meetings, to foster community, to lobby for governance, and to build great products and services (Angus Fox, Multizone Limited, @nuxnix)

140 second demo/presentation

Show and tell, 140 seconds countdown. Dont go over!

    *
    * @ollieparsley - Hootmonitor
    * @benoitx - Spotify.Chart.info
    * @rem - Snapbird

      Sign up on the night or DM @nuxnix to secure your slot

A special Guest industry luminary in person or via hi tech real time high definition conferencing

    * We could tell you who, but we’d be lying..

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer presented a step-by-step narrative on how he built his company in three years to $170 million target for personal finance giant Intuit.

In a moment of nonchalance, Patzer, who spoke at the Juice Pitcher event, hosted by TheFunded.com and Vator.tv, admitted to Adeo Ressi, the founding member of The Funded, that he sold Mint for cash to Intuit, so it didn't matter to him what happened to Intuit's shares.

Everything a brand needs to know about twitter and real-time social media*

* but was afraid to ask

Media140 London

We explore the effects of twitter and real-time social media on agencies, marketers and brands, looking at how platforms such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and AudioBoo are disrupting, challenging and changing traditional media and advertising. Focusing on customer engagement, how to make sustainable profits and build loyal communities.

In partnership with Contagious, Revolution and IAB the event will bring together brand strategy, creatives, ad agencies, media planners, media buyers, PR agencies and publishers to share and understand the disruptive impacts of real time social media on their industry.

We have a veritable collection of industry speakers including Tom Bedecarre, Gareth Jones, Jess Greenwood, Lloyd Salmons, George Nimeh, Robin Grant and Amelia Torode amongst others...

Its that time of the year, Twestival - and this year its time to get down to Manchester.

SIGN UP HERE FOR A TICKET NOW

Plans for the night itself

Looks like things are shaping up nicely for MancTwester Local on Sept 10th at House9 Bar. I reckon it will be a top night. This is what’s in store to help raise money for St Ann’s Hospice

6.30 - 7.00            Arrive and drinks

7.00 - 8 30            Auction  (Prizes include - Dual Signed Hurst & Peters England 1966 Anniversary Shirt, Nintendo Wii,  high quality alcohol and makeup)

8.30 – 9.00           Magic acts around the tables courtesy of Magic Man Clive

9.00 – 9.30           Tim Bradbury - Manchester comedian fresh from the Comedy Store.

9.30                      DJ Marv Speakman on the wheels of steel

Come along and make Manchester part of the global phenonema that is Twestival.

So I need you to push this out to all the small businesses, peeps in Manchester and make it happen.

So you are going to Future of Web Apps and wanted to know where to meet all the coolest people, hang out and chill in between sessions, talk to like minded people on technology and business ?

Well come down to the Sun Startup Essentials room and make the most of all the great things we have to offer:

** Win a Weekend for two at a Marriot Hotel - courtesy of weboo.biz

**Audioboo will be doing live Boos from the room, so come and give your views of FOWA live

**Tweetmeme team will be there, with the FOWA and Sun Startup Essentials Channel with all the live tweets and feeds.

**James Proud from Giglocator will be around, giving a Uni session talk and discussing his new startup, at the old age of 18 !!!

**Best Before will be unveiling a new product, enabling mixing of video and audio through a touchscreen - this is lots of fun and so cool.

**Wii Guitar Hero - be the best and win a prize....

**Special presents to help get you through the day.

So lots going on, lots to do and see, come and meet the Sun Startup Essentials team, MySQL guys and hear how we help startups all over the globe reach their dreams.

Getting quickly and easily from A to B has become indispensable in today’s mobile world. However, travel planning is often time-consuming, tedious and does rarely pay attention to CO2 emissions. routeRANK chairman Jochen Mundiger decided to address this problem and his start-up now offers an innovative solution for travel planning.

With the routeRANK travel search engine, people do no longer have to search individually on a multitude of websites and compare different flight, train or car journeys in order to find the best route. They can simply type in their departure/destination location and the date and, in a single search, routeRANK finds and ranks the best possible travel routes by integrating rail, road and air connections from multiple stations and airports in their locations. Users can sort these results according to their priorities such as price, travel time and CO2 emissions.

Once people have found their ideal travel route, they can book their tickets directly with the corresponding travel providers by following the link “Buy tickets”.

routeRANK also helps users with finding a hotel in big European cities. A click on “Find your hotel in…” directly leads to the hotel search on bedfinder.com.

However, routeRANK does not only help people with finding the best travel route more quickly and easily, but also addresses the need to reduce CO2 emissions. People are often not aware of the amount of CO2 emissions they produce through their journeys. Therefore, for each connection found, the Swiss start-up’s web application calculates CO2 emissions and makes environmentally conscious travel possible.

The current focus is on European travel; however airports and flight connections outside Europe are already integrated into the platform.

For an example, click here for the website of search results for a trip from Bern to Berlin:

http://www.routerank.com/search/bern/berlin/.

In addition to this public version on www.routerank.com, routeRANK also offers custom developed versions of its software to corporate customers and organizations, for their internal use or use on their own website, with applications in both travel and logistics. For example, see the Travel Helper developed for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), and the Nokia Green Explorer at:

http://travel.panda.org.

http://greenexplorer.nokia.com/greenexplorer/about.html.

The B2B versions differ from the public version regarding the features the client wishes to integrate. The WWF Travel Helper does for example not show the prices of journeys, but focuses on CO2 emissions and lets people offset their carbon footprint.

We hope routeRANK will make travel planning easier and help to reduce CO2 emissions.

August 8th - London - More Details and Tickets HERE

The Tomorrow's Web Conference brings youth and technology together in London on August 8th. It's the first of it's kind to hit the UK and is already set to be a truly unique and exciting event, with over 9 hours worth of planned speakers, panels and startup pitches, you can see why.

Learn from the entrepreneurs and innovators of tomorrow, find out what they're thinking about current and future topics on the web. Sun Startup Essentials is the key sponsor of this event because we believe that the next wave of true technology shifts and changes is coming through the schools and universities as we speak, these young people will change our lifes, how we interact and solve problems in a different manner.

So take time to come and hear what has to be said, debate and interact and add your thoughts to this great conference.

As you may or not know Sun Startup Essentials helps support the startup community across the globe and we do this through various communal events and participate wholly in these. Recently the team behind FOWA, Carsonified decided to put together a two day workshop for FREE for 8 startups to help them get going, understand more how to run a successful business and gain some new knowledge, and all this being held in their offices. One element that I love with a passion in this startup environment is the amount of support the community gives each other, and Carsonified always give so much, are so helpful and friendly to everyone it is great to see, Carsonified we salute you.

If you want to see what happened, learn more and see why Sun Startup Essentials sponsored the food and drink for this amazing generous amount of time donated by Carsonified go here http://carsonified.com/blog/carsonified/young-and-kicking-ass/

Win the chance of an industry placement, attendance to BBC workshops and the chance of a BBC placement

Find out more


The BBC wishes to continue to build the best experiences to audiences and wants you to help them

Are you just about to graduate and need a hand up on the first run of the career ladder?

Are you one of the rare breed of talent that combine fantastic software skills with creative flair?  Can you apply object-oriented programming to web based technologies like flash or Java?

Do you want to develop the next generation of immersive technology / content experiences?

We are seeking Britain’s top 5 graduates - if you answered yes to all the above questions and are brimming with market shaped ideas, then post your idea to the TV Platforms Project

Read the full brief

Enter Your Idea

DEADLINE 31st August

BBC Future Media TV Platforms team is at the forefront of designing products that combine this world of broadband and broadcast and this team is also heading to Salford in 2011

If your company is looking to access the best new talent in the UK, email us at info@just-b.com with North West TV platforms in the subject line

North West b.TWEEN TV Platforms is a project between BBC, Just-b, NWDA, Northwest Vision & Media, Skillset 

What is AudioBoo ?

AudioBoo is a website and iPhone OS application designed to allow users to post and share sound files on the AudioBoo website. AudioBoo was developed by UK based BestBefore and partially funded by Channel 4 and was launched in March 2009.

AudioBoo allows iPhone users to record and playback digital recordings up to 5 minutes long which can then be posted on the AudioBoo website where users have their own pages or channels akin to Twitter or Youtube. These recordings are referred to as 'boos' and photos can be added to the boo from the iPhone library along with a title. You can either capture this Audio using a iPhone or dial a number using a standard telephone and push you boo back to the website, either works simply.

As with any startup, there are costs in technology, development and infrastructure which Ive asked AudioBoo to explain why they have used Sun Startup Essentials programme to get them through the painful few months of costs but also to look at how we are helping them with introductions to Enterprise's and overall PR and marketing.

Overview of current AudioBoo setup

We’ve got two Sun Fire X2200’s through Sun’s Try and Buy scheme - it’s been really useful to experience the high standard of build and features of the Sun Server hardware before we made any commitment.

Try and Buy has helped due to its no cost upfront, we get to test and work with the systems for two months before we make the decision to buy and invest in these Enterprise class servers, but what was surprising was the aspect of the cost as its through Sun Startup Essentials the pricing is aimed at companies like ourselves to help use best in class hardware at low cost pricing.

ZFS (File System)

This was the obvious choice of file-system and the initial reason for us considering the OpenSolaris platform before we had even considered Sun hardware.
By using ZFS, we know that any data we store on the servers is, for all intents and purposes, “safe” from silent hard disk corruption and even a single drive completely failing. On top of that, we know that any corruption that does occur is reported and in most cases automatically and transparently repaired.

Being safe from run-time corruption and hardware failures is one thing, but we also need to make sure we’re prepared for more serious disasters. We were relieved to find ZFS's flexibility really simplified our backup routines. We’ve integrated instant snapshots of the live file-systems into a series of surprisingly simple scripts, meaning all of our data can be incrementally backed-up at a block-level.

Reading the long feature-set of ZFS I wasn’t looking forward to what I had presumed to be a steep-learning curve to master it’s configuration and day-to-day operation. I was pleasantly surprised when I found the command line tools were straight-forward, well documented, cleanly and consistently presented and - as far as I can tell - designed to prevent you from (easily) doing any harm.

This all takes a huge load off our minds; we’re really confident about the security, performance and flexibility of this next-generation file-system.

xVM and Solaris Zones

We originally wanted to deploy our web applications onto physical linux machines and currently have a deployment geared towards Linux. xVM enables us to virtualize the immensely powerful hardware in a sensible and scalable manner whilst taking advantage of Sun's other technologies, such as ZFS for storage, and maintaining the same linux operating environment for the production code we are used to.

Having got off the ground with xVM, I've been drawn to the idea of switching to Solaris Zones as a virtualisation platform, spurring our efforts to to port our production code and deployment routines to OpenSolaris. This has which has had the surprising benefit of allowing us to take advantage of OpenSolaris components such as the Service Management Framework, simplifying day-to-day management and DTrace, which is able to easily probe and profile the production environment in an entirely new way as well as removing the inherent overhead of xVM which must run multiple kernels in parallel.

Crossbow

We were testing the environment using a pre-release build of the OpenSolaris 0906 platform to take advantage of the new Crossbow network virtualization technologies, part of which creates a single 3Gbps aggregated link between the two boxes using three of their gigabit network adapters. On top of this link we can then create flexible VLANs providing isolated, virtual private networks between the virtual machines running on each physical machine. The low technical and administrative cost of configuring the VLANs means we can carefully isolate groups virtual machines based on their function, limiting the impact of compromise or failure of any individual machine.

Summary

In summary, AudioBoo decided on a OpenSolaris platform before trialing the hardware, then due to the advantages in OpenSolaris around Dtrace, Crossbow, etc has meant less cost in overhead of managing the infrastructure thus releasing time and effort to actually do what is required, develop the application and build the business then throw in the FREE TRIAL and low cost acquisiton costs of the hardware has meant increased uptime as well.

This is before we opened discussion around the global PR we can create, the introductions at a high level to companies AudioBoo wished to talk to in order to enable them to speed up discussions, and this took place without AudioBoo even committing to purchase anything.

So AudioBoo we love you, as you see how Sun Startup Essentials can help you grow as a business but also how Sun technology can help reduce you costs dramatically and enable you to focus on your core passion, which is Booing.

Techcrunch article on AudioBoo

Do you worry if your site will be able to scale quickly and cost effectively if the number of visitors rapidly increases? Are you looking at ways to minimise spend on capital purchase of hardware? Are you considering using cloud services but concerned about the flexibility, performance, reliability and security of your platform?

Then this free web presentation is for you! Join us for this hour long web seminar to learn about the experiences of Peter Brownell and David O'Dwyer as they successfully deployed The School of Everything social networking service using MySQL on Amazon EC2.

The presentation will cover aspects of the technical challenges of using 3rd party cloud services, the benefits realised once these challenges have been overcome. If you are considering cloud services as a way to manage parts of you web infrastructure then register for this presentation today!

WHO:

• Peter Brownell, CIO, School of Everything
• David O'Dwyer, Lead Consultant, SupportFour

WHAT:

Dr Clonelove: How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud web presentation.

WHEN:

Thursday, July 16, 2009: 14:00 Western European time

The presentation will be approximately 45 minutes long followed by Q&A.

WHERE:

Sign up here NOW

WHY:

To find out how School of Everything used Amazon EC2 to provide scalable web services.