The husband and wife team behind Edinburgh’s only indoor skate park believe they have come up with the perfect solution for parents of school children looking for a few hours off this summer: extreme sports in extreme safety.

Run by Ken Smith and Natasha Moroney (AKA skate park Mum and Dad) Transgression Park in Peffermill is a family-friendly environment for BMX, scooters, skateboards and inline skates, where complete beginners can learn alongside the best in Edinburgh.

Natasha explains: “The park is constantly supervised, with experienced skaters and riders on hand to keep a close eye on novices. One hour taster sessions and lessons with instructors are available for every level of experience, with each instructor working with a maximum of five kids at once.  The mentors guide newbies around the park, teaching them how to use the apparatus safely – when to go and when to wait.

“It’s not always about learning a new trick but also about learning how to move in an unfamiliar environment and building confidence. Our taster sessions and lessons have proved really popular allowing kids to come down and try out something new and exciting in a relaxed, supportive and safe environment. My own children ride here and, as a mother, it’s very important to me that Transgression provides a secure environment for young people to learn an extreme sport. There’s a real community spirit here, meaning parents know their kids will be looked after and will also have a great time exercising and spreading their wings.”

To mark the start of the school summer holidays, Transgression Park is hosting a hip hop BBQ party and open session on Friday 29th June from 3pm.

The BBQ, featuring music from rap duo Too Many Ts and skills from local skateboarders, BMX and scooter riders on the rails and ledges set up outside, kicks off a packed summer programme of events at Transgression Park, including the Vans Young Guns Series – the 2012 national unsponsored competition – on Sunday 1 July. Focusing on the under 16’s age group ‘Young Guns’ provides a rare opportunity to be talent spotted and picked out for potential sponsorship deals!

Transgression Park was formerly based at Ocean Terminal for three years before moving to its new home on Peffermill Road, the site of the old Jelly Club, in October 2011. The new park is far larger (18,000 square foot with capacity for 100 participants) than its predecessor and retains the best features of the old park alongside awesome new features including a pool bowl and numerous interchangeable rails and boxes. There is also a mezzanine level where spectators have a 360 degree view of all the action.

Transgression Park’s onsite cafe offers healthy food including homemade burgers made with Scottish Beef, fresh pizzas with pureed veg hidden in the sauce, fresh fruit, yoghurt smoothies and salad boxes. Parents can enjoy a gourmet coffee while taking in the skate park action.

Also onsite, Transgression Park’s shop is a leading stockist of all things skate, scoot and BMX carrying all the latest and best brands for scooters, skateboard, roller blades and BMX bikes as well as all the safety equipment and accessories  The shop also stocks spare parts and has a workshop for the repair and assembly of boards and bikes.

Sessions last two hours and cost £8, then only  £2  for every additional hour. Annual membership costs £35 and provides a 25% discount on standard prices.  A full range of skateboards, scooters and BMX bikes are available to hire costing £10 per session or £5 per hour.  Helmets and pads are also available to hire for £1 per session.

At weekends, sessions run for the under 13s between 10am and 12 noon and for the under 16s between 12 noon and 2pm, with lessons available for beginners and improvers. Specialist sessions also run for inline skating on Mondays 8-10 pm, BMX only on Tuesdays 8-10pm and Skateboard only on Thursdays 8-10pm.

Transgression can be booked for school trips, corporate days and birthday parties. The park operates a zero tolerance on drugs and alcohol.

For more information check out www.trangressionpark.com or contact Lauren Cormack.

Look no further!

TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It or Bin It – 28 June 2012 – Way of Life

Are you fed up of those old habits that you just can’t seem to break? The ‘Way of Life’ app offers the means to change any aspect of your life through its simple and flexible monitoring system.

It allows users to track any habit or activity – good or bad – over time, requiring a simple ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ’skip’ choice for the habits users have chosen every day. These choices are displayed on a graph and over edtime it builds up a clear picture of how you have fared and even allows you to share your achievements through social media (if you want to share your flossing record for the last year that is).

It only takes a minute a day to input the information on your habits and it even sets a daily reminder… so you really have no excuse!

‘Way of Life’ is a simple but smart idea and the app has an intuitive interface to make it as easy as possible for the user. There is, however, a sense of novelty which is likely to wear off after a while. Even the best apps cannot keep a user interested forever and ‘Way of Life’ will almost certainly lose some of its appeal after extended use, despite the daily reminders. It is a question of whether you have the willpower to use the app long enough for it to make a difference.

We are optimists so lets give ‘Way of Life’ the benefit of the doubt as it certainly will be useful for creating good habits or breaking old bad ones – to those of us who can stick at something for a little while at least. Perhaps there should be another app to encourage us to use our old apps…

For the time being, we say Tin It!

A highly secure, encrypted vault for logins, passwords and pins, my1login is a cloud-based password manager that enables users to access their passwords at anytime and from any device, with only one login. Simple, safe and free to use, my1login makes users’ online lives faster, easier and more secure.

10 tips for secure development, Net Magazine, 7 February 2013.

How to protect your business and its data, Smarta, February 2013.

Unsecured wifi: big trouble for small business, BM Magazine, 11 December 2012.

10 ways to cut your smartphone roaming costs abroad, skyscanner.net, 12 November 2012.

Scottish tech firm my1login wins place at START technology event, Business7, 11 October 2012.

Free password ’strength tester’ goes live, Netimperative, 7 September 2012.

Find out just how weak your passwords are with my1login’s test page, The Next Web, 3 September 2012.

Grants available to Scottish businesses, SmallBusiness.co.uk, 22 August 2012.

How to create strong passwords, PC Retail, 16 August 2012.

my1login makes password fun & social to encourage secure login behaviour, Yahoo News, 9 August 2012.

Cloudbased password manager my1login wants to gamify more passwords, TechCrunch, 9 August 2012.

Password hacking will continue to escalate following recent attacks, The Wall, 24 July 2012.

Yahoo ‘taking immediate action’ as hackers dump 450k passwords online, Computing, 12 July 2o12.

Password management moves into the mainstream, Business Computing World, 28 June 2012.

my1login review, PC Mag, 24 June 2012.

my1login debuts password protection service, netimperative, 22 June 2012.

my1login seeks cash for password protection, Scotland on Sunday, 17 June 2012.

Password management tools to go mainstream within 12 months, PCR Online, 12 June 2012.

Online hacking password victims were asking for it, Ingenious Britain, 11 June 2012.

my1login shortlisted for a ScotlandIS digital technology award, ScotlandIS, 29 May 2012.

my1login shortlisted for a ScotlandIS digital technology award, ScotlandIS, 29 May 2012.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles, Fresh Business Thinking, 29 May 2012.

www.my1login.com

Edinburgh Assay Office will launch the world’s first consumer online assurance scheme for jewellery – Assay Assured – today at Somerset House in London. Retailers already signed up to Assay Assured include:  Links of London, Ortak, Monica Vinader and Clogau Gold.  The hallmark is the oldest form of consumer protection and this announcement marks a significant moment in its history as the hallmark goes digital.

Over the last five years the online sale of fake jewellery has seen a sharp rise with scam sites and rogue traders on auction sites springing up faster than they can be closed down.  As shoppers cannot inspect the goods they buy online Assay Assured aims to offer the consumer protection against the risk of buying unhallmarked as well as counterfeit branded jewellery.

While more and more people shop online, trust is still one of the biggest barriers to trade. Research by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has shown that shoppers are far more likely to shop from sites they know and trust rather than small independent sites or auction sites. It was the same lack of trust that first led to the introduction of hallmarking 700 years ago as a way to prove the precious metal content of an item.

Scott Walter, CEO of Edinburgh Assay Office explains:  “It is not possible to detect by sight or by touch the precious metal content of an item. UK Hallmarks have provided consumer protection for hundreds of years by guaranteeing the precious metal content in a piece of jewellery.  Today online shoppers have no way of checking whether a piece of jewellery is hallmarked or not.  Assay Assured is a digital solution to an ancient problem and we believe it will provide the protection consumers need online.”

It is a legal requirement that all gold, silver, platinum and palladium jewellery sold in the UK must be hallmarked by one of four independent Assay Offices in Edinburgh, London, Sheffield and Birmingham. Precious metals are rarely used in their purest form but are alloyed with lesser metals to achieve the desired strength, durability and colour. Edinburgh Assay Office has been testing and hallmarking for 550 years.  Today it is the fastest growing Assay Office in Europe, working with some of the world’s premier jewellery brands.

Trustmarks are a well established solution to the issue of consumer trust online with research showing that consumers are more likely to buy from a site with a trust mark as Andy Mulcahy, of the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) explains:

“Trust remains one of the key elements that determine whether a consumer will shop with an online retailer. The Assay Assured scheme will greatly improve confidence in jewellery sites by communicating to consumers that the retailer is compliant with a code of conduct that ensures the products advertised meet industry standards. Increasing trust in retail sites is particularly important at the moment as cross-border trade is really opening up, and making a purchase from a site based in another country is highly dependent on reassurance that the retailer is genuine and compliant with standards.”

The Assay Assured scheme will be underpinned by a strict code of conduct for online jewellery sales, in compliance with the Hallmarking Act and also covering the sale of counterfeit branded jewellery. Before accrediting a site Assay Assured will first carry out an audit of the online retailer and their website. Only if they meet the requirements they will be asked to sign up to Assay Assured jewellery retailer’s agreement.

The agreement will authorise the retailer to carry the Assay Assured jewellery retailer logo on their website. The logo will link directly to a unique secure certificate, which will confirm their authenticity as an Assay Assured retailer. Within the certificate the consumer will be able to link to a consumer focused landing page giving details about the scheme and UK hallmarking.

Although consumers will, in the first instance be encouraged to report any queries relating to the code of conduct to the retailer, the certificate and the landing page will also allow consumers to report a query to Assay Assured about a product, should they fail to resolve their query with the retailer.

Assay Assurance will provide an independent arbitration service for retailers and consumers if a product is suspected of being in breach of the code, if the dispute cannot first be resolved between the retailer and the consumer.

To find out more about Assay Assured visit: www.assayassured.co.uk

For more information contact Sarah Lee.

iWitness, a revolutionary new web application for the aggregation of eyewitness news from social media platforms, launches today.  Developed by New Context in partnership with designers of the application, Adaptive Path, the free web app allows people to explore content from social media services such as Flickr and Twitter by time and place.

iWitness uses geolocation data shared by users to pinpoint the location where a post, photo, or video originated. It allows users to see content from a particular location in real time or by specifying a time range.  It is expected that this will be particularly valuable during emergencies when people look to share eyewitness news across social media channels.

Designed to be easy to use by anyone, if a user knows when and where something happened or is happening, iWitness will show first-person photos, videos, and messages from people there on the spot, integrating diverse media types in one interface.

The web app was beta tested live during development by the news desks of five US national and regional newspapers. Reporters used iWitness in their daily reporting – identifying what was useful, what was not and what else was needed.  New Context worked closely with Adaptive Path to synthesize that feedback and incorporate it into the design, adding new features and shaping the final design.

“iWitness could be one of the most important tools during a breaking news event. Newsrooms are always turning to Twitter to find initial reports from the scene of breaking news and iWitness lets you find those key tweets and photos,” said Sona Patel, social media producer for The Seattle Times.

iWitness was designed and built with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation after Adaptive Path submitted the idea for iWitness to the Knight News Challenge, an open competition for media innovation projects.

Adaptive Path brought New Context in to work on the project because of their track record in balancing the latest technologies with proven methodologies. New Context combines elements of extreme programming with behavior driven development to produce high quality, low defect output.

“New Context was an enormously valuable partner for us on this project,” said Jesse James Garrett, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Adaptive Path, and project lead for iWitness. “Their agile approach enabled us to quickly evolve the design of iWitness to best meet the needs of our users, and their technical savvy helped me realize my vision for the product.”

New Context developed iWitness as an open source application using Ember, a JavaScript framework.  This agile development process rapidly produces functionality with a minimum of waste.  Starting with a series of exercises New Context agreed the domain language, key concepts and features before turning the requirements into a discrete set of user stories.  Each user story representing a distinct requirement that could be understood or developed in isolation.

Mike Doel of New Context explains:  “This has been a fascinating project to work on and we are very excited to see how it will start to influence the news agendas and news reporting.  By using agile methods we have been able to work closely with Adaptive Path and the end user to ensure that iWitness does exactly what they need it to do.”

These agile methods follow short bursts of work that allow for rapid feedback and evaluation.  Developing in two week cycles or iterations at the end of the cycle New Context review the stories developed during the iteration before getting sign off from Adaptive Path.

New Context is an agile company specializing in rapid sustainable development of mobile and web applications.  Since its launch, New Context has specialized in the development of mobile and web applications for both startups and Fortune 500 companies.

Adaptive Path was one of the first design firms focused on user experience and over ten years has worked at the frontier of UX design, working with hundreds of organizations to define experiences for new products and services, strategically evolve existing ones and integrate experiences across channels.  Drawn to complex ambiguous challenges that defy known approaches and best practices.

For more information about the iWitness project, visit www.adaptivepath.com/iwitness.

Launch of Assay Assured, the world’s first consumer online assurance scheme for jewellery, in the national and trade press to raise awareness of the scheme.

Edinburgh Assay Office launches first digital hallmark for jewellery, Master Jewellers, 14 June 2012.

Edinburgh Assay Office launches digital hallmark for online security, Retail Jeweller, 14 June 2012.

Online assurance scheme takes jewellery hallmarking online, New Media Age, 13 June 2012.

Digital hallmarks introduced for online jewellers, The Retail Bulletin, 12 June 2012.

Digital hallmarks launch for online jewellers, The Telegraph, 12 June 2012.

Ancient and modern: Edinburgh Assay Office goes online, Scotsman, 12 June 2012.

Online guarantee scheme for precious metal, BBC News, 12 June 2012.

EAO to launch Assay Assured to protect shoppers, Professional Jeweller, 11 June 2012.

Edinburgh Assay Office to launch online consumer assurance scheme, Jewellery Focus, 11 June 2012.

www.assayofficescotland.com