Friday Linkfest: Starting a business in Scotland?

I’ve run across several young entrepreneurs lately who are starting up businesses in Scotland (well, Edinburgh specifically). I keep mentioning the same resources to them, so it’s about time I put it all in one place.

• EPIS at the University of Edinburgh is a great opportunity to get started with a safety net. A loan from Scottish Enterprise, office space and hosting within the University, access to academic resources and mentoring, and tons of help and advice to boot. The programme won’t be accepting new applications for much longer, so get in fast.
• Scottish Enterprise is a fairly hard nut to crack. There’s a lot of support available and I, at least, found it hard to research online. The easiest way to get a rundown of the grants, co-investment and support (mostly financial) available is to get in touch with a human being; you might need to go through Business Gateway, who are dubiously helpful.
• PSYBT, if you’re under 25, is a nice source of very practical advice (eg. a bookkeeping course) as well as grants and loans.
• If you’re doing something disruptive with digital media, 4iP could help. They’re worth contacting to hash out ideas as well as to try and get financial backing.
• 38minutes is 4iP’s social network, which is a great one-stop place to find out what events are on and what’s hot in the world of social media. For example, it tells you about…
• …Edinburgh Coffee Morning, every Friday at Centotre. I am notoriously bad at going to this, but if you want to hobnob with social/digital meeja, startups and web devs, it’s the place to be. You might also enjoy…
• TechMeetup, now in both Edinburgh and Glasgow flavours. A monthly hackerfest with the odd spinoff gathering and a mailing list that cool stuff occasionally floats across.
• If you’re interested in more structured events, Informatics Ventures often throw great educational and networking-heavy events, from courses to expos. Recent highlights have included Guy Kawasaki and Doug Richard.
• A shameless plug for a new site started by startup types here: StartupCafe (which, when I visit it, has as its first post a listing somewhat similar to this one!). Any site with a competition to win pancakes is good in my book.
• Related, Edinburgh Uni’s E-club and Launch.ed — both a little dormant now due to the end of the academic year — are good organisations with great people. Events, networking, advice, support, etc.
• And, totally unrelated to the above, Hacker News is an excellent morning read, and applying to Y Combinator’s funding rounds is a very educational process. There are a couple of Edinburgh startup types in its irc channel (#startups on freenode) and others from the UK.

Enjoy, and do let me know if there’s more stuff I’ve missed!