This week's Turing Fest is one of the biggest events of the year for Edinburgh's booming tech sector. Scottish Business Insider's Kenny Kemp tries unwraps the Turing code for success by meeting a cross-section of those attending in a series of interviews today.
The techie chairman
Iain Mackay, chairman of Criton , an intuitive app builder for the hospitality industry
He worked at executive level with All-Hotels.com, Kwik-Fit, Wolfson Microelectronics and has 10 years in private equity across Europe. He is a non-executive director and former chairman of Pufferfish. In May this year, he joined Criton, created by founder and CEO Julie Grieve, who set up the firm in 2016.
Grieve, who was managing director of Abbey Business Centres, worked in property management and tourism and was a board member of Women in Tourism.
“From a tech scene point of view, this is the most exciting place in the country. There is no other hub like Edinburgh, including London. It’s a small city and it is concentrated. It is very well networked.’
“The level of innovation is high. I look at the current state as the way micro-electronics were in Scotland 10 or 15 years ago. There used to be only Wolfson and then competitors started coming in and now there is a whole ecosystem of about 1,000 to 1,500 employed in semi-conductor design.
"When I started in Wolfson, there were 50. So the software industry is becoming like that. It doesn’t matter what sector, it is all technology. The advantage is that people can move between sectors within the technology bringing different things into different areas.’’
“The Turing Fest is a brilliant event and it is really helping put Scotland on the global tech map.’’
The Turing Fest, Build. Grow. Lead is dubbed Europe’s leading cross-functional tech conference, continues today with its main two-day conference, with key speakers including Chris Messina, inventor of the hashtag. He was lead developer at Uber and worked at Google.
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