Our first event of 2023 is going to be a WORKSHOP (which means you getting involved - don’t be shy) on Thursday 10 March. It will be at the new IDEAS FACTORY (thank you NUA for hosting).
Tom Wood from Foolproof (and one of the original Hot Source founders) will be helping facilitate the evening - thank you Tom. And Norwich City Council’s economic development team have kindly offered to sponsor the wine afterwards.
You can see the RSVP list on the Hot Source Meetup group here.
Our theme will be: Norwich - the prototype city. This is based on an idea that Dan Banks (from Axon Vibe) pitched at SyncTheCity in November 2015. It stems from the fact that Norwich is a great place to start-up and scale-up your business - particularly if it is a tech or digital creative enterprise.
We want more people to know this - and we want to build a welcoming community that will support entrepreneurs (in any sector) who set up businesses here. One way to do this is to make it easier for them to find real world testers of their products and services.
There are plenty of survey sites. However, it is much harder to find volunteers who will turn up in person to test your new app, website, wearable tech or even (in view of the agri-tech and food science businesses on Norwich Research Park) your new super-food.
The Proto Norwich team at SyncTheCity developed a (prototype) website that acted like a dating agency between volunteer testers and local businesses looking to try out ideas. You can see the rough demo built for the competition here: http://protocity.meteor.com/. And you can see the ‘slick’pitch to the judges here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2OzGV8h-Lc.
We did not win the competition but we did get a lot of support from the local community - so we think this is an idea worth pursuing (in some form).
NOTE: Because this is a workshop and because we will hold it in the Ideas Factory - places are limited to about 42 people.
Please only book if you a) will definitely make it and b) are genuinely interested in the project. We would like people with experience of running a business or working on product/service development. However, enthusiasm is the critical requirement.
PLEASE UPDATE your RSVP - yes or no (sorry - no guests, please ask them to register individually).
Remember to follow @HSNorwich on twitter for updates - and join our LinkedIn group for discussions.
Kind regards
Your Hot Source Team
PS: If you are already a member of the SyncNorwich SLACK group, you can join the ProtoCity channel here https://syncnorwich.slack.com/messages/protocity/.
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