Page 20 - Doing Data Together by The Scotsman

DOINGDATATOGETHER
AUGUST 2019
More than 130 people attended the launch of The Data Lab’s innovation centre at the Opportunity North East (ONE) tech hub in Aberdeen, including the-then digital economy minister Kate Forbes and industrialist-turned-philanthropist Sir Ian Wood, pictured below.
Accelerator Programme: forest management firm Folarity; factoring tools designer AboveBoard, and treasure hunt app developer Walks and
Waterfalls.
Professor Shannon Vallor was named as the first Baillie Giord chair in the ethics of data and artificial intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
Polly Purvis, one of the best-
known names in the Scottish
IT and data community,
retired as chief executive of
digital technology trade body ScotlandIS and was replaced by Jane Morrison-Ross, pictured, formerly chief executive of the Taigh Chearsabhagh museum and arts centre at Lochmaddy on North Uist.
NOVEMBER 2019
Fourteen companies joined the Scottish Government’s CivTech accelerator programme, which is designed to use data and digital technology to improve access to civic services. CivTech is headed by Alexander Holt, pictured below.
Edinburgh-based Cyan Forensics won the PitchGovTech competition at the GovTech Summit for its digital forensic analysis tool to find child sexual abuse material, which is helping to improve the capability of the Home Oice’s Child Abuse Image Database.
The Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal’s Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) initiative made two senior appointments: Ritchie Somerville was named as the head
of strategy after joining from the City of Edinburgh Council, where he was the innovation and futures manager; while
Anna Scott joined as the DDI skills gateway project delivery manager, following her work leading programmes at the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science at the University of Edinburgh.
DECEMBER 2019
The Business Growth Fund invested £4.8m in Dundee-based Waracle, one of the UK’s largest mobile app developers, to fuel its expansion. Founded in 2007, Waracle has more than 140 members of sta spread across Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and London. Duncan McIntyre, chairman of Helecloud, another business backed by the Business Growth Fund, joined Waracle’s board as its chairman.
Visible Capital, a financial data platform developed in Edinburgh, secured £500,000 of investment from TechStart
Ventures and eight individual investors, including Preston Rabl, a co-founder of advertising giant WPP.
The Data Lab appointed five members to its board: David Shaw, director of marketing and customer strategy at Tesco Bank; Innovate UK artificial intelligence expert Zoe Webster; Aquila Insight founder John Brodie; financial services veteran Helen Brown; and data analytics consultant Grant Smith.
JANUARY 2020
Beeks, the Glasgow-based cloud computing specialist quoted on the Alternative Investment Market (Aim), opened its first data centre in Paris, its second in Singapore and its fourth in London as it expanded its network to 15 sites.
Deliveroo began creating 70 jobs for data scientists,
software engineers and other highly-skilled workers in Edinburgh as it expanded its tech hub in Scotland’s capital,
its first such UK centre outside London. The food delivery company had established itself the city in August 2019, when it took over software design and development firm Cultivate. At that time, Deliveroo stated that it would create 50 jobs over the next three years, but accelerated those plans, and unveiled a move from the Codebase incubator centre into its own oices.
FEBRUARY 2020
Jude McCorry, pictured below, formerly business development director at The Data Lab, joined the Scottish Business Resilience Centre as its new chief executive. She replaced Eamonn Keane, who had taken over on a temporary basis during the previous autumn following the departure of Mandy Haeburn-Little.
London-based AND Digital unveiled plans to expand into Edinburgh and create 100 jobs after securing
an £11 million investment from the Business Growth Fund. AND Digital has helped companies including British Airways, Diageo and Whitbread to build digital products.
OPEX, an Aberdeen-based
company that provides data
science and predictive analysis services to a raft of global oil and gas firms, won contracts worth £1m and hired a further ten members of sta.
MARCH 2020
Tech Nation’s annual report revealed that Scotland’s digital technology companies had secured £200 million of
A date with data
The University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute, one of the five delivery hubs within the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal’s Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) initiative, unveiled its new brand, including its vision “to catalyse the transformation of health in society by working with people, populations and their data”.
Edinburgh BioQuarter hailed the role that data could play in helping to diagnose diseases. The health and science campus pointed to the potential for more partnerships between researchers in hospitals and universities and the wider public, private and third sectors.
SEPTEMBER 2019
CodeClan, the digital skills academy, unveiled the first nine industry partners for its centre in Inverness: Capgemini; Football Pools; Lugo IT; Quarch Technology; Scottish National Heritage; Teclan; Tuminds; the University of the Highland and Islands; and Yellow Cherry Digital.
Progressive rock legend Peter Gabriel was among the investors who pumped £1 million into Edinburgh-based Tumelo, which is developing a platform to show customers where their pension funds are invested.
Highlands and Islands Enterprise unveiled a £465,000 support programme to help more than 2,500 businesses through specialist advice and events on topics including data innovation, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things (IOT).
Orbital Micro Systems opened the International Centre for Earth Data (ICED) at the University of Edinburgh’s Bayes Centre.
OCTOBER 2019
The Scottish Government appointed The Data Lab, Scotland’s innovation centre for data and artificial intelligence (AI), to lead the creation of a national AI strategy.
Registers of Scotland and Ordnance Survey welcomed the first three businesses to their Geovation Scotland
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