At Venturefest 2010

On Tuesday afternoon I drove to the York Racecourse, to set up our stand for the "Virtual Runner" project at the Venturefest 2010. We had received funding from the Yorkshire Proof-of-Commercial-Concept Fund from 2009-2010 and had now been invited to show our progress at this event, together with other funded projects. The A0 poster which the organisers had prepared for us looked quite good. Met with Rod there, not much to setup. Later I drove to Staples to get 150 handout colour prints which we would give away to visitors of our stand.

On Wednesday early in the morning I picked up Abe and drove to York again. Unfortunately the "Networking Breakfast" was only for the delegates, not for the participants, so we went to the cafeteria and had some breakfast there. Abe had worked throughout the night to do some last fine tuning of the software, and I too had not much sleep: I did a few tweeks of the project website. Added a database so that we could collect email addresses for a potential mailing list.

There was slight frost outside that morning, around zero degree Celcius, but the roads had been clear. However, many people took longer than usual, as there was some traffic on a few of the country roads around York.

We ran the software the whole day - not a single crash. We showed it to many people, got valuable positive feedback. There were many who really wanted to use this system and its envisioned future implementation.

Later in the evening Rod and I were invited to the Awards Dinner, where a few prices were given to projects and entrepreneuring companies. Nice conversations, and interesting people. A very busy but positive day!

During the day there were some snow flurries falling down, but only about 2 cm. The roads were clear again, but traffic drove slower than usual, being cautious just in case.


Abe, Rod, and Tony at the Virtual Runner stand