The Engage Invest Exploit event put together by Edinburgh Informatics on Wednesday 12 May 2010 : a summary.

At the Informatics Forum building there was an enthusiastic audience to listen to pitches from six startups, with panel discussion on each from potential investors, including Anil Hansjee from Google, and Andrew Nutter from Balderton Capital.

Pitching companies

• M Power World (microbial fuel cell development)
• Factonomy (software development tools technology)
• Spinsight (applying vision analysis to sports coaching and statistics)
• Mobile Acuity (product recognition using mobile phone camera as input - no barcodes required)
• Satsis ( mobile phones location indoors with 5m accuracy)
• Inquisitive Systems (fraud detection)

Big news for another exhibitor, Vibio (secure sales portal system, like Ebay) - they signed a deal for $1m of funding with Archangels, a Scottish angel investment syndicate.

At the after lunch panel session I was one of four Ann(e)s on the Expert panel - exhibiting considerable experience in science, technology, investing and small company success. Prof Macrae moderated. Audience questions were dominated by the issues around intellectual property, use of patents as a proxy for merit by academic funding bodies, and the consequences for university spin out companies. As @ewanmcintosh tweeted "Very little in internet startups has to do with defensible IP. It's about doing something great, quickly & dominating mkt".

Exhibiting companies who found me to say 'see this' included

• Codeplay (programming tools for multicore processorts)
• Podfather (a delivery tracking system like FedEx or UPS use, delivered as a service )
• Blackford Analysis (technology for analysis of huge datasets, originally developed for astrophysics, applicable to oil&gas, 3D medical scans, and other parametric modeling problems)
• Trivault (de-duplication of encrypted data, backup, recovery)

The day concluded in the underground bar at Revolution on Chambers St, where I caught up with Tom McCallum, Scott Allison, and Maciej Zurawski (Musemantik).

References

Updated to add link to 10 minute video compiled from the day's events

Investor list
Exhibitor list
Preliminary meetings
Vibio deal
Michelle Rodger's summary
Mark Littlewood, BLN blog post

Cunning Systems evaluates product and service ideas in computing and communications. If you would like to discuss an idea, contact us at info@cunningsystems.com

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