“Coming from the sticks” sounds like a cute and endearing term to most people who spent their childhood swinging from street to street in the urban jungle of ‘Downtown’; those who believe that The Meadows in Edinburgh really depict a meadow – street lights and all. But not this guy – for I was not blessed with the bright lights of a capital city during my early years, I have been lucky enough to find my school of life located in a suburb of Aberdeen.

But the big city lights drew me in. Having packed my bags and said my goodbyes at the platform, National Express took me to my summer home, Edinburgh. And I’ve not looked back.

Who wouldn’t enjoy a morning walk to Hot Tin Roof HQ that passes The Castle, takes you along Princes Street and finally across George Street with a view of the Forth? The opportunity to rub elbows with the up and coming business men and women of Edinburgh, converse with the editors of newspapers, and find yourself waist deep in the facts and figures of computing concepts that would blow your mind is excellent fun and never dull.

But maybe it’s the little bit of the teuchter (pronounced tju-ch-ter – word used mainly for Northern Scots) in me that has enjoyed the peace and quiet of walking up Calton Hill, standing on the National Monument and looking over the city the most this summer.

Saying that, I prefer it to Arthur’s Seat because once you walk down the tarred path, there’s an adjacent bus stop. Maybe this city bug is getting to me…

Anyway, now it’s time to forge on with my latest projects, before grabbing a coffee on the way home.

Until next time, Edinburgh.

Announcing half yearly results today of £500K, Edge Testing is forecasting an annual turnover of £1.2m in year three. Since its launch at the end of 2007 the award winning IT company had already achieved a strong revenue growth rate from £170K in year one to £500K in year two.

Edge Testing is a powerful independent force in software testing, working with some of the UK’s leading public and private sector organisations including Heineken, Historic Scotland and Ignis Asset Management.

This month sees the company open its new headquarters in Maxim Business Park to accommodate its growing workforce, now standing at 12. Maxim is a £330 million development, the UK’s largest speculative build, aiming to attract 8000 jobs to North Lanarkshire.

The company has also completed a full rebranding exercise, part of which includes the re-launch of its website which can be seen at www.edgetesting.co.uk.

Earlier this year, Edge Testing won Best New Business in the Lanarkshire Business Awards 2010. This award is for businesses less than three years old that demonstrate a high degree of entrepreneurship and vision for the future, with the potential for further growth in turnover, profits and employment levels.

Founders, Susan Chadwick and Brian Ferrie, are respected as two of the UK’s leading experts in software testing. It is their strong personal reputations in the industry that gives Edge Testing a competitive advantage and has allowed the company to buck the trend of recession, having launched just months before the collapse of world markets in 2008.

Susan Chadwick, Edge Testing’s co-founder comments: “We are incredibly proud of what we have achieved in three short years and it is thanks to the whole Edge team and our focus on service excellence, thought leadership and our unique solutions that has helped us, not only to weather a stormy market but to prosper. We are very excited about the future and what we can achieve for software testing as an industry and the IT sector as a whole in Scotland.”

Edge Testing ties software testing to business strategy and directly affects the achievement of business objectives. Technology and sector independent the company has a broad client base and is able to target all markets. Again this has meant it has been well placed to ride the difficult economic environment of its early years.

The Edge Testing business model takes a holistic and business focused approach to testing, supported by an ethos that ‘prevention is better than cure’ and recognising that cost to fix increases exponentially the later in the project lifecycle that issues are identified. It is these potentially extraordinary levels of cost that Edge Testing addresses – enabling clients to decrease overall project costs and time to market. In essence testing pays for itself.

Software testing is still a maturing industry and Chadwick and Ferrie have led a movement to establish a community of software testing professionals that can share best practice and help shape the growth of the profession.

RMD Power and Cooling is to work with Scottish further and higher education institutions following the decision by APUC (Advanced Procurement for Universities and Colleges) to adopt the North East Universities Purchasing Consortium (NEUPC) framework agreement for the supply, installation and maintenance of UPS equipment.

RMD is the UK’s leading independent specialist in integrated power and cooling solutions and APUC’s adoption of the agreement means that it is now approved to supply all Scottish and English universities and colleges. The company, based in Alloa, has existing agreements with the five English higher and further education consortia: NEUPC, NWUPC, LUPC, SUPC and CPC.

The original agreement was signed with the NEUPC in 2008. Three suppliers, including RMD, were approved to install, maintain and supply UPSs following a full EU compliant tender process.

John Smykala, RMD Power and Cooling’s Managing Director, comments: “We have worked closely with the English purchasing consortia since 2008 and I am happy to be embarking on a new relationship with APUC. This is a significant milestone for RMD and it reinforces our reputation as one of the UK’s top suppliers of Uninterruptible Power Supplies.”

“RMD has grown considerably over the past few years and our depth of experience and independent status ensure we provide great value and meet the needs of each and every client.”

The purchasing consortia were established to simplify and improve the procurement process for higher and further education institutions.

Louise Burke, APUC communications manager, says that the agreements are an important means of ensuring that universities and colleges get value for money.

She explains: “APUC’s core vision is to work jointly, as one team with member institutions, to maximise the contribution that advanced procurement makes to Scotland’s investment in teaching, research and knowledge transfer. We aim to enable institutions to deliver as much as possible with the funds that they have available.”

From small server rooms to large data centres, RMD is the only company of its kind in Scotland and one of only a handful in the UK. From initial design through to installation and long-term maintenance, it creates state of the art data centres.

Digital communications agency CIVIC is to launch a digital assault on the use of snares in Scotland as part of Advocates for Animals’ forthcoming campaign for a snare-free Scotland.

CIVIC will use digital media to harness public support in the charity’s fight to ban the use of snares to trap animals and will build on the charity’s ethos: HumanKind. AnimalKind. OneKind. The appeal will also target MSPs in the run up to a vote on the Wildlife and Natural Environment Bill in the Scottish Parliament planned for late 2010.

CIVIC’s emotive and challenging campaign will raise awareness of the extreme suffering caused to any animal caught in a snare. The first part of the project will include a regular interactive email newsletter sent to thousands of subscribers and a campaign site.

CIVIC will also create a series of animated viral emails aimed at winning over hard-to-reach demographics and will advise the charity on the use of social media to create noise and raise funds.

Greig Tosh, CIVIC’s Managing Director, says: “Snares are cruel and distressing to the animals they trap and I believe this appeal will make a real difference when our MSPs come to vote. Public opinion is already weighted against the use of snares and our campaign will aim to mobilise support for Snare Free Scotland.

“Our team consistently creates innovative, high quality work and this, coupled with our technical expertise will be key to the success of the viral aspect of this project.”

Advocates for Animals is Scotland’s leading animal protection charity, established in 1911. The snare-free Scotland appeal  fits well with its OneKind campaign, which is designed to build a base of supporters who want to see fundamental improvements in the treatment of animals in all areas of life. The campaign prioritises public engagement in challenging lifestyle, attitudes and behaviour.

John Robertson, Advocates For Animals Communications Officer says: “Snares are cruel and indiscriminate traps that cause immense suffering to wildlife such as badgers, foxes and hares and also to domestic animals such as dogs and cats. The Scottish Parliament will be debating the Wildlife and Natural Environment Bill later this year; an opportunity for us to become a snare-free Scotland, so we need to build up a movement of people that can effectively lobby their MSPs on this issue. 80% of the Scottish public are against the use of snares but in 2008, the Scottish Government ignored the public’s wishes and voted against introducing a ban.”

“We want to engage the public and believe that CIVIC can create a positive and compassionate campaign that is urgent and inspiring. We were really impressed by how prepared they were – they did their homework on us and created a very detailed and creative outline proposal for a digital campaign. I believe people will love using the applications CIVIC are developing and I look forward to working with them over the coming months.”

CIVIC is an independent creative digital communications agency with major experience in the public and private sector. Using what it calls “creative technology”, CIVIC blends design with cutting edge digital expertise in order to apply strategic branding thinking to websites with the technical ability needed to make that thinking come to life.

To find out more about the Snare Free Scotland appeal, please visit http://www.onekind.org/get-involved/campaigns/snare-free

Flexiant, the cloud software and services company, announced today it is to offer CohesiveFT’s cloud overlay, VPN-Cubed®, on Extility, enabling secure virtual private clouds.

CohesiveFT’s product suite, developed from decades of enterprise management experience within a cloud-oriented engineering organization, directly addresses the needs of the cloud user. VPN-Cubed will provide Flexiant customers with enhanced networking tools including static addressing, end-to-end communication encapsulation and encryption; as well as the use of normally cloud-prohibited protocols, complete topology security and control in third party infrastructure.

Traditionally launching on the cloud meant giving up control over addressing, topology, protocols and communication to deployments was carried out over the public internet. With VPN-Cubed users take control with static addressing for virtual machines using VPN-Cubed managers as virtual routers or switches, allowing use of popular enterprise protocols for service discovery, and encrypting all communications between virtual machines and the datacentre using the user’s existing extranet device.

Tony Lucas, Founder of Flexiant comments: “We are delighted to be partnering with CohesiveFT – we have a great deal of respect for this innovative company and the products it has developed. The core technologies of both companies complement each other and combined provide an end to end cloud computing solution that is pragmatic and agile, providing a real opportunity for data centre owners to drive down operating costs and reduce capital expenditure.

“VPN-Cubed offers everything Amazon Web Service’s Virtual Private Cloud (AWS VPC) does but addresses its key weaknesses by offering customer control and market interoperability. Additionally, VPN-Cubed has been developed from a software rather than hardware perspective meaning more rapid feature development and easier integration with existing systems.”

One of only three independent public cloud providers in Europe and five world wide, Flexiant launched Europe’s first cloud platform, Flexiscale, in 2007. Extility, Flexiant’s licensed virtualised cloud platform, launched earlier this year effectively enabling hosting providers to compete on an even playing field with global market leaders of proprietary rapid provisioning infrastructures.

Extility offers a viable alternative to the cost of developing a cloud computing platform in-house. Licensees generate substantial savings and reduced energy consumption slashes operating costs and shrinks carbon footprints.

All the benefits of real-time server estate management are delivered to end users through Extility’s unique user interface and API. Users can shape server requirements to meet fluctuations in demand, allowing provisioning and reconfiguration of servers in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days.

Extility’s licensees see substantial capital expenditure savings, streamlining of technical resource and progressive efficiencies in server utilisation, allowing them to achieve business acquisition and profitability targets. This in turn enables them to offer Extility’s unified platform at a realistic cost.

Importantly, in times of challenging margins and market fluidity, sales gestation periods are dramatically shortened through accelerated delivery timescales, so reducing time to invoice and to attaining positive, profitable cash flow.

CohesiveFT has been providing enterprise-grade virtualisation and cloud products since 2006 (Elastic Server® and VPN-Cubed). Its early participation in the market provides it with the expertise to help enterprises understand the real benefits of cloud computing from assessment through to deployment. Elastic Server, a multicloud virtual server, will also be available soon on Extility.

Award-winning PR agency Hot Tin Roof has appointed undergraduate Andrew Raffan to its 2010 intern programme, as the agency expands its workforce following a series of high profile account wins including Flexiant, Edge Case and Civic.

Andrew joins Hot Tin Roof, one of Scotland’s leading specialists in high tech PR, in the second year of its intern programme. Successful recruits are taught how to handle the media, write tight copy and communicate clear messages in a hands-on environment, providing them with a launchpad for a career in the PR industry.

Having been involved in journalism since his teens as HighlandLeague.net’s staff reporter for Inverurie Loco Works FC, Andrew has also trained in radio broadcasting. It was this passion for journalism, online media and broadcasting which proved to be the deciding factor when choosing to return to higher education and study a degree in journalism, igniting his interest in PR.

When starting his internship, Andrew said: “I began the year wanting to gain further work experience over the summer, but being given the opportunity to work with Hot Tin Roof has exceeded my wildest ambitions. The innovative training methods they use will no doubt shape my future. This will provide me with an invaluable perspective of the industry before I return to my studies in the autumn and I cannot wait to become part of the team.”

Hot Tin Roof provides media relations, reputation, event and crisis management for business and consumer sectors with clients including Money Dashboard, RMD Power and Cooling and User Vision.

Money Dashboard has announced the appointment of Sarah Whitehead as Product Manager. This latest appointment supports the online personal finance website’s commitment to simplifying money management and improving the user experience.

Sarah will lead the product management team and will be working closely with users to ensure that the application meets their needs and expectations. She will be responsible for the product roadmap which will include new features, functions and versions, all of which will be based upon the feedback received from the Money Dashboard users.

After completing a postgraduate degree in Computer Science, Sarah has spent many years working in the IT industry which has provided her with considerable experience of customer engagement and product development.

Whilst working for her last employer, ESRI UK, Sarah was heavily involved in product promotion and development, liaising with customers to meet their requirements. In her most recent position, Sarah focused on improving the customer experience through feedback and research and was also responsible for the management and development of the multiple corporate websites

Sarah comments: “It’s incredibly exciting to be involved in a company like Money Dashboard so close to launch and I am enjoying the variety of the role. Working with a start up is exhilarating and challenging in equal parts and I’m really looking forward to getting stuck in and speaking to our users.”

Ends

For more information contact: Lucy Smith :: 0131 225 7880 :: lucy@hottinroof.co.uk

Thursday 17 June 2010 :: 7pm – 11pm :: Edinburgh Sports Club, 7 Belford Place, Edinburgh, EH4 3DH

JCI Edinburgh is aiming to raise over £500 for the Barnardos Caern Project at a charity quiz night in the capital on Thursday 17 June.

Edinburgh’s brightest young business brains will be pitted against each other as they compete to be crowned JCI pub quiz champion. Competitors will pay £5 per person to enter, there will be a prize for the winning team and a raffle will raise extra funds for the charity.

JCI Edinburgh is part of Junior Chamber International, the worldwide personal development organisation for business people in their 20s and 30s. It holds numerous social and fundraising events throughout the year and offers a stimulating range of activities to enable members to develop communication, presentation, leadership, project management, networking and business skills.

Simone Medonos, JCI Edinburgh’s Communities and Environment Director, is organising the event and is hoping to see lots of new faces on the night.

She says: “One of the most important things about JCI is the opportunities it creates to meet new and interesting people. That’s why we encourage non-members to come along to events like the quiz night and find out what we have to offer while having fun and raising money for a good cause.”

For an annual fee of £80, JCI members can access a wide-ranging programme of events, training and social opportunities. A voluntary organisation, JCI also has a long history of charitable work and fundraising. Recent local projects have seen members volunteer at the Grassmarket Mission, a drop-in service, helping to cook meals free of charge for those who need it most, as well as regular blood donor events.

In 2010, JCI Edinburgh is committing its resources to fundraising for the Barnardo’s Caern Project. Meaning “a little bit”, Barnardo’s Caern project, provides short-term residential breaks in Edinburgh and support at home, to children and young people with a profound learning disability and who may also have severe physical and emotional problems.

Kenny Logan, President of JCI Edinburgh explains why the organisation nominated the charity:

“We are a local organisation so wanted to choose a local charity and the Caern Project is responsible for a lot of valuable work in our community.

He adds: “We have already raised over £1200 for the Caern Project this year, through an incredibly successful Burns Night supper and Ceilidh. I hope that by diverting our energies to one local cause, we can really make a difference.

Funds raised by JCI Edinburgh could be used in a variety of ways by Barnardo’s Caern Project including: outings for the 35 children and young people, specialist toys for children with disabilities, specialist sleep counsellors or gardening materials for the sensory garden at Caern House.

JCI Edinburgh will raise even more money for the charity in July when five of its members face their fears at a sponsored glass walk at Edinburgh Zoo.

To register for the quiz or find out how to sponsor a glass walker, please email simone_medonos@jciedinburgh.org.uk. For more information about this and other JCI events, please visit http://www.jciedinburgh.org.uk or contact JCI Edinburgh President Kenny Logan: kenneth_logan@jciedinburgh.org.uk.

ENDS

For more information about this story, please contact Lucy Smith :: 0131 225 7880 :: lucy@hottinroof.co.uk

Yes it’s been a busy old time at the Roof lately. And as a result we’re looking for a special someone to join our team over the summer.

Interested? Then read on:

Social Media and PR Intern

• Do you love social media?
• Are you a news junkie?
• Do you want to break into PR?

If you are active on all social media channels, have a burning passion for news and have to be the first to discover the next big thing. We want to hear from you.

Hot Tin Roof is a dynamic, ambitious and independent PR agency. Fast and furious, we create iconic reputations for pioneering UK companies. We have a powerful reputation for getting results offline and online for our clients.

Creative, intelligent and determined, we run our campaigns with skill, imagination and honesty. Our absolute loyalty to our clients, the energy and the gritty single-mindedness with which we tackle every campaign is the secret to our success.

We are currently looking for a social media and PR intern. This role will integrate online and offline PR.

The person we are looking for should be:

• creative thinker
• plain talker
• great writer
• news junkie
• internet savvy
• good fun
• massive energy
• obsessive attention to detail
• unflappable
• multi tasker
• enthusiastic with a passion to learn

The intern will work for two months over the summer with a view to being recruited at the end of the internship.

Key responsibilities:

• manage companies online presence
• maintain website content
• update blogs, social networks and forums
• distribute press releases
• research and engage with relevant blogs, websites and forums
• implement online partnership strategy
• conduct research
• general office administration
• assist with PR campaigns
• maintain and update our databases
• copywriting
• research
• produce documents, briefing papers, reports and presentations

This is the perfect opportunity for an enthusiastic person to get hands on experience and work at the cutting edge of online PR in Scotland.

Please send covering letter and CVs with your favourite film, book and icon to to cat@hottinroof.co.uk by Friday 18 June 2010.

Interviews take place w/c 28 June 2010.

Internship starts 12 July 2010.

FreeAgent Central has launched an official affiliate programme for non-members following the runaway success of its Evangelist scheme for subscribers. The eagerly anticipated affiliate programme already has a waiting list of 20 companies ready to sign up.

Affiliates and Evangelists earn a one-off reward of twice the monthly subscription fee for each new referral – up to £50 – or an ongoing 20% share of the subscription payments from the new member.

Before becoming an Evangelist, members earn 10% off the FreeAgent subscription price for every referral and once they’ve referred 10 friends, subscription is free for life and they become an Evangelist. The top four FreeAgent Evangelists have already referred a total of 156 new members.

Ed Molyneux, FreeAgent CEO explains: “From the very early days of FreeAgent we have been thrilled by how happy we make our customers! Our subscribers genuinely want to tell the world about us because we make such an immediate difference to their business.

“Now we want to give something back to those ‘evangelists’ and also to help spread the word further. We are very excited about how powerful this affiliate scheme is and the impact it could have on our subscriber numbers.”

A growing number of proactive users are now using FreeAgent free of charge, and you can see John O’Nolan talking about it in his video testimonial here. It’s a win-win situation: users get FreeAgent for nothing and FreeAgent gets more customers.

Users don’t become Evangelists automatically so to sign up please get in touch and find out more. To find out more about the Affiliate programme get in touch here.

FreeAgent Central has made joining the affiliate programme as painless as possible and signing up can be done in a matter of minutes.