Speakers & Mentors
James Addison
Mentor
James Addison joined Skyscanner as a Database Developer after graduating from the University of Edinburgh’s Computer Science degree in 2007. Skyscanner is a travel search engine, providing flexible search results to hundreds of thousands of users per day, and is based in Edinburgh’s city centre.
James interned for a year with Sun Microsystems near San Francisco, California, and has technical experience from systems and network configuration up to software development, with a particular focus on data gathering and search. His most recent project at Skyscanner has involved the creation of an experimental ‘ski holidays’ mini-site as part of a small, fast-moving team. While his background is in engineering, he is keen to maintain a broad working knowledge of online business, particularly relating to e-commerce and internet marketing.
Interested in open source and open data, James is keen to take part in and encourage rapid development of services and products using the latest technologies, and stays involved with start-up communities both in Edinburgh and beyond.
Jon Bradford
Speaker and Mentor
Jon Bradford is the CEO of The Difference Engine, an acceleration programme for early stage digital businesses who believe that the first stage of any business is the most formative and can define how a team will evolve. They also recognise that at such an early stage “money is not enough” – the right sort of intensive support is invaluable and the provision of the right mentoring is priceless. The programme is supported by DigitalCity Business, Sunderland Software City and the Entrepreneurs’ Forum and through their combined expertise and experience they hope to make dreams a reality.
Jon has spent most of the last ten years working in and around start-ups; both for advisory firms and venture capital backed start-ups, including an Oxford university spin-out. Jon started his career at Arthur Andersen including a secondment to Melbourne, Australia. Having recently completed the conversion of a Northumberland barn, Jon knows far too much about septic tank than he really cares for! He has enormous knowledge in his field and we are excited to have him on board.
http://thedifferenceengine.eu/
Dug Campbell
Mentor
Douglas (Dug) Campbell is an associate with law firm MBM Commercial LLP, an award-winning niche legal business renowned for advising growing entrepreneurial companies and their investors.
Dug is impressively dual-qualified in both English and Scots Law and he represents technology clients and early-stage investors throughout the UK. Over the past ten years, he has worked primarily alongside start-up companies and sources of early-stage finance, providing advice across a broad range of areas which commonly face many early-stage technology businesses.
Dug is also very enthusiastic in helping to connect entrepreneurs and high-growth companies to sources of finance, from both angel networks and the VC market. In his spare time, he is undertaking a part-time MBA at Edinburgh University Business School. He has experience across a wide range of corporate issues, from providing commercial advice to start-up businesses, negotiating business acquisitions and share sales to reviewing general commercial contracts. We are so excited to have him on board as a mentor as we know his vast experience and advice will be invaluable to our audience.
Scot Carlson
Speaker and Mentor
Scot Carlson is the Country Manager for the US and Canada at the Edinburgh-based, flight-search website: Skyscanner. Skyscanner is Europe’s leading flight search engine, with around 10 million visitors each month and year on year revenue growth of 140%. The company employs 62 people between its Edinburgh and Polish offices.
About the company: Skyscanner is a global brand, offering flight searches in 23 languages and 64 currencies and across over 600 airlines and 670,000 routes. Site traffic is generated from 233 countries around the world, with around 70% coming from out with the UK. About the tech: Starting with an excel spreadsheet of destinations and prices, Skyscanner began as an underground project which grew by word of mouth. As hits to the site rose exponentially the three realised they might have a winner and gave up their day jobs. Putting their own money into the startup they launched the site officially in 2001. The company’s founders wanted the site to work in the organic way people like to think about travel. While Skyscanner can find the cheapest flights for someone who knows where they want to go and when they want to travel, it will also work with the scarcest of information, even just the departure country.
A self-described “media junkie”, Scot Carlson holds an MBA in International Marketing from the University of Edinburgh Business School, where he researched user-engagement strategies for social media communication in the SME sector. He is dual-certified in Google Analytics and Adwords and has a passion for all things “web”. In his current position, Scot oversees Skyscanner’s North American user-acquisition channels, including SEO/SEM/PPC as well as PR and website content.
Rebecca Difford
Mentor
Rebecca Difford is the Company Formation Executive of LAUNCH.ed, a University of Edinburgh programme which provides free startup advice and business support to students at the University of Edinburgh interested in starting up a business. Students, from undergraduates to PhDs and recent alumni, can access one-to-one help from a business advisor on all aspects of setting up a business. LAUNCH.ed supports students with technical, early stage ideas as well as non-technical, near-to-market business ideas.
In the last four years, LAUNCH.ed has helped more than 50 students form their own companies, many of which have grown into successful, profitable enterprises. Rebecca started working for the University of Edinburgh in 2005, working initially for the Edinburgh Pre-Incubator Scheme (EPIS). Prior to this she developed and managed a service offering initial market assessments for small businesses at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
Rebecca graduated from the University of Birmingham in 1996 with a degree in Law and Business Studies and was recently awarded a Masters degree in Marketing, focussing on Market Research for high-tech start-ups. She is Chartered Marketer and member of the CIM, and has a Chartered Institute of Marketing Diploma. Her insight is invaluable to our attendees and are are thrilled to have her as a mentor.
Nigel Eccles
Speaker and Mentor
Nigel Eccles has over 10 years experience in the technology and media industries and his third and most recent startup is FanDuel, a daily fantasty sports game. FanDuel.com lets you play and win at fantasy sports in a day instead of waiting the whole season. Players can draft a new team at any time, and pitch it head-to-head against a single opponent – or a league of opponents – for real money.
The FanDuel team previously launched Hubdub.com which registered over a quarter of a million users and partnerships with Huffington Post and Reuters. Hubdub was covered in Washington Post, Fox News andTechCrunch. In January 2009, the team raised a Series A round of investment from PenTech Ventures which was covered by TechCrunch .
Prior to FanDuel, Nigel was a consultant with McKinsey & Co. and on the board of Johnston Press plc. Nigel’s inside knowledge of online startups is second to none and we’re thrilled to have him on board as a mentor.
Wayne Gibbins
Speaker
Wayne Gibbins, Communications and Partnerships Director at Viadeo, swears by the moto ‘once a geek, always a geek’. After completing a software engineering degree in Manchester he took on a job as a software architect, developing and marketing online project management software. This role gave him experience of working with businesses in the UK, Europe and USA delivering sales, marketing and product development for online software services.
Since joining Viadeo in 2008 Wayne has moved his focus to marketing (although whilst still maintaining a loyal love of all things techie). As Communications and Partnerships Director, he and his team represent Viadeo throughout Europe, online, through social media and other channels including speaking at events, interviews with the press, forming strategic partnerships and generally explaining the business to the outside world.
Wayne lives in London, is an enthusiastic world traveller and a passionate cook.
Dragos Ilinca
Speaker and Mentor
Dragos Ilinca is the cofounder and Customer Developer at uberVU, a social CRM and analytics startup which was the Seedcamp Winner of 2008.
Dragos has been building and marketing web apps and web properties for over 9 years and his experience in building and marketing web-based products and businesses is second to none. His focus has always been on figuring out who the customers are and how to market to them by using the Web.
Dragos would like to help startups with marketing (positioning, copywriting, measurable marketing and analytics), customer development (generating and testing customer hypotheses) and startup business processes.
Kyle MacRae
Mentor
Kyle worked as a technology journalist for ten years before launching Scoopt, the world’s first citizen journalism picture agency in July 2005. Scoopt was an early, successful experiment in social media (before the term was in vogue) and Kyle built an international brand on zero marketing budget. He sold Scoopt to Getty Images in 2007.
Kyle now runs Blether Media and Blether Video. Blether Media provides social media marketing training, consultancy and strategic execution services to businesses and charities, helping them find value in the confusing world of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogging. Blether Video, a sister company, produces low-cost, high-impact videos for the web with none of the hassle and expense of on-location filming.
Simon Montford
Speaker and Mentor
Simon is a serial tech entrepreneur. He co-founded icollector.com, one of the first companies dedicated to trading antiques, fine art and premium collectibles on the Internet. He is now the CEO and co-founder of Vibio. The company has offices in Edinburgh and San Francisco. Vibio is a social commerce application that let’s you share collections of your coolest things with your Facebook friends.
Chris Muktar
Mentor
In 2007, Chris founded WikiJob.co.uk – a website to help university graduates find their way in the world of work. In three short years it has grown to be the largest graduate jobs website in the UK. It now regularly attracts 300,000 visitors a month, employs several staff and is on target to make £500k in revenue this year.
Julian Ranger
Speaker
Julian Ranger has been a successful entrepreneur since he formed his first business STASYS Limited back in 1986.
Julian was responsible for the growth of STASYS to a £17M+ business with 230 staff, with subsidiaries in USA, Australia & Germany, prior to its sale to Lockheed Martin in 2005.
Julian has held many successful positions ranging from CEO to Chairman of some of the most influential companies around today including Lockheed Martin, SocialSafe and DAD Solutions.
Julian has been an active Angel Investor since 2007 and has invested in a variety of technical and software businesses since, some of which are identified at www.jranger.com.
Julian also continues his entrepreneurial activities through his innovation hub, iBundle Ltd (www.ibundle.co.uk), where four web & software businesses are currently being progressed.
Ben Werdmuller
Speaker and Mentor
Ben Werdmuller is CTO of Latakoo, an Internet company providing new kinds of services around video content, and also acts as Geek in Residence at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab.
By the time he was 16, his software projects had already been featured in the technology and financial press. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, he co-founded Elgg, the leading open source social networking platform, and was CTO of Curverider, the company founded to support it. As part of a two-person team with no budget, he brought the software from a standing start to a point where users included the World Bank, and turned Curverider into one of the few British open source companies to attract investment.
He also works as an independent web strategist, helping companies and institutions develop social web applications, as well as evangelising about the future of the web.
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