SCOTLAND’S tech entrepreneurial community received a ringing royal endorsement last week as Prince Andrew, the Earl of Inverness, praised the “amazing quality and energy” of competitors at the first Scottish Pitch@Palace event.
Held partly at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the event – the first of the prince’s “Dragons’ Den” style competitions for start-ups in search of venture funding – saw Connect-In, Spot Sensor Technologies and Topolytics win the chance to compete with UK-wide peers at St James’s Palace, London on November 2. The three companies were chosen by a panel including start-up veterans, incubator heads and specialist financiers.
Gordon Stuart, of Edinburgh-based Informatics Ventures which partnered with Pitch@Palace, said the prince’s team had been “unanimously upbeat” about the “active lively and effective start-up ecosystem” in Scotland.
Informatics Ventures is organising a separate showcase for Scottish start-ups in the capital with its EIE London 2015 event on November 18, a “bootcamp” for which takes place this week in Piccadilly.
Stuart said this was “an opportunity to help companies get noticed in London, which is a very busy scene”.
Applications also open this week for Edinburgh Informatics EIE 16 to be held in the capital in May next year.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here