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My comfort zone had left the building.

Heading out on a cold, dark, Monday evening to yet another Norwich networking event is not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s certainly not mine, and definitely not with the cream of the Norfolk tech sector midway through my first attack of a winter cold in I don’t know how long.

We all do things we think might help us to build relationships in business and gain favours with those people around us that might help to push us in the right direction. Accepting an invitation to the November nor(DEV):biz dinner at The Library Restaurant in Norwich was one of those such occasions.

I had worked opposite The Library for about 3 years and not actually made it into the building. Seeing as I have been known to travel many miles through the most challenging of conditions for some decent eats and beautiful architecture, I wrapped myself up and loaded with tissues, I braved the elements resolutely deciding to be back home and in bed by 9:30pm. I could get through this. I would dine and dash.

When I arrived just after 7pm, there were about 20 people gathered in the bar, discussing all manner of tech related topics I knew nothing about. A quick scan revealed that I didn’t know anyone in the room either. I hadn’t just stepped out of my comfort zone. My comfort zone had left the building. The locks had been changed and the eviction notice was nailed firmly to the front door. As my heart sank further into the 120-year old oak floor, one of the other attendees warmly introduced themselves. With that, so did another and a third asked if I would like a drink. Result!

We moved upstairs to a private dining room for the main event where I got chatting to a number of people from various sectors, not just tech. We discussed work, families and life, as well as the issues people were facing in business. Which, it turns out, is the same whatever sector you’re in.

The energy in the room was very different to other ‘networking’ events I’ve been to. It felt more human and more open, more confident even. This was a group of some of the brightest minds in Norwich. Intelligent and engaging human beings who are passionate about what they do, enjoying dinner together in lovely surroundings. There was no agenda, no selling, just an unpretentious coming together of intelligent thoughts, ideas and the potential for collaboration with a genuine desire to help each other.

Between courses we listened to a personal account from Laura Flood, Lecturer in IT from City College Norwich, about her own journey into tech and how businesses can help and support new talent into the sector here in Norfolk. If Norfolk is going to be competitive, we need to build the right skills base and create the right jobs for our young people that also benefit the businesses that employ them.

Rather than being irritating, the lengthy delay before the dessert arrived at 10pm, provided a welcome opportunity to talk to even more people in the room. These included software engineers, branding specialists, digital agencies, senior business banking staff and even an accountant.

It seems that in the past, fear may have held me back from exploring the vibrant tech scene we have here in Norwich. If my experience of the nor(DEV)biz: dinner is anything to go by those fears are wholly unfounded. This is an area of business, with a culture, energy and group of individuals I would love to work with more.

I really enjoyed my evening. The food was great, the company fantastic and The Library Restaurant is a stunning location. I’m pleased to report that by the time I left, not only was I firmly reunited with my comfort zone, but we’re planning on attending the December nor(DEV)biz: dinner together.

Words: Lisa Vincent

If you’d like to attend nor(DEV):biz, please drop Paul an email on paul@norfolkdevelopers.com

Norfolk Developers: norfolkdevelopers.com

Agile Cambridge, I will be back!

Words by Emma Gooderham

From the moment I walked into the refectory at the Cathedral, ahead of the Saturday night pitches, I felt there was something special going to happen. It wasn’t until the pitches actually began an hour or so later, that I realised exactly what it was.

I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been to Sync The City, despite it being in its fourth year. The idea behind the event it to build a tech based startup in just 54 hours and then pitch for funding at the end. It was these final pitches I had come to see.

Twelve startups waited anxiously for Fiona Lettice, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the UEA, SyncNorwich and Sync The City organiser, to make her introduction to this year’s event. She described Sync The City as The Apprentice crossed with Dragon’s Den, with all the tension and hard work compressed into a little over two days. With this, and the prize of £3,000 in funding on their minds, the twelve groups began their pitches.

When I’d been in the refectory earlier there was clearly some concern about these pitches, but every single one was excellent. I was expecting lots of hesitation in the delivery, having been put together under the pressure of the time limit, but there was hardly any. The styles, methods, number of presenters, etc. for each pitch varied greatly, which helped keep my interest to the end.

By only the second pitch I knew what it was that felt special when I had arrived. It was the sense of comradery shared by everyone who was taking part – a real feeling that they were all in it together, regardless of who won at the end of it all.

There was a clear winner for me – a team called Footprint whose product helped individuals identify all of their data on the internet.

The People’s Prize, as voted for by the audience, went to Unwind, a chatbot intended to help with mental illness.

The official judges, Ian Watson (CEO Start-rite shoes), Chris Sargisson (CEO Norfolk Chamber), Kirsty Jarvis (CEO Luminus PR and Jazz Singer), Juliana Mayer (CEO SupaPass) and Wayne Taylor (CTO Thyngs) chose Lone Safe, a team who developed a system for keeping lone workers safe, as the overall winner.

The runners up were a team called ViaCab who were developing an app for hailing Black Cabs.

The explosion of excitement from the winning team and the audience alike was incredible! After Lone Safe were led off to sign the paperwork for their prize money, and Sean Clark brought the event to a close, they could be heard still celebrating in a side room, excited to be able to make their startup a reality.

Defining what it is to be a machine is tricky to say the least. In everyday terms a machine is something man-made that performs an automated function. Computers are often referred to as machines but they are much more than the limited definition above. Perhaps, instead of trying to pin down exactly what a ‘machine’ is in the 21st century, it would be more pertinent to define what a machine is to us.

Isaac Asimov once described machines as ‘the true humanising influence’. In his mind machines would only be used to perform functions and carry out tasks that make life possible, leaving humans more time to do the things that make life worthwhile. Essentially through their ability to perform mundane but necessary actions, machines would allow us to indulge in every part of life outside basic functions, to allow us to enjoy what it is to be human. From a more modern writer’s point of view, machines have gone beyond their initial point of freeing us to taking us over. Stephen King focuses stories on machines gone mad in our increasingly automated world. In his film ‘Maximum Overdrive’, a classic Eighties trashy horror, any machine with moving parts becomes homicidal. Lawnmowers, Walkmans, vending machines and lorries are all affected by a passing comet’s radiation (don’t think about it too hard, it’s not meant to be taken seriously), come to life and start killing people. The only solution (spoiler alert) is to find a place where there are no machines, hide there and wait for the astrological phenomenon to pass. In the film our plucky heroes manage to find a sailing boat and a completely deserted island in the middle of a lake, but in reality finding a place without the presence of even the most basic machine would be practically impossible. In his book ‘Cell’, King uses the ubiquity of the mobile phone to reset the whole of humanity back to its animal instincts. Anyone who doesn’t have a cell phone at the time is soon killed and eaten by those that did. In his view technology and automation are so pervasive that they can plausibly (forgetting the green comet radiation) be used to cause global disasters affecting the whole of humanity. Not a virus or giant tidal waves, but machines we invented and built ourselves.

Conversely, anarchic cartoon South Park showed us that while we might think we don’t need machines, we still want them, especially when it comes to fulfilling mundane, everyday tasks. Characters in a recent episode complained that they were losing their jobs and being replaced by machines, but when given the chance to work as the electronic assistant ‘Alexa’ in the Amazon Dot device, they found the job so demeaning they quit. They realised that adding items to shopping lists and playing songs on demand were jobs that were beneath human beings and left Alexa to it. Who knew that technology would evolve to the point where an episode of South Park would prove a point made by Isaac Asimov nearly fifty years earlier?

Popular culture and plot devices aside, machines, of any kind, were created for a purpose – to make things better. Either to speed up processes, increase yield, reduce workload; to make things safer, quicker or more accurate. When we see a machine in this way, they become a tool to be used, rather than technology to be relied upon. We choose to use them, rather than to not be able to live without them. Rather than our future coming crashing down on us because of our reliance on our own creations, machines will hopefully become assistants to our way of life and give us more time to enjoy it. As Asimov said “It is machines that will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile.”

Words by Lauren Gwynn