Our mission is to make accounting for GHG emissions and ecosystem changes accessible to all organisations, including business and government, through web-based services that distill our knowledge and experience. To get a feel for the kind of technical work we do, you can watch my presentation at Montréal-Python 24.

We are presently on the lookout for a junior/intermediate developer position, based in Montréal (Canada). This is an immediate opening.

Ideally, you are know at least some of:

• - Python (you’ve completed at least 1 complex project in python)
• - Django (you know the basics: writing templates, models, views, making queries)
• - Linux (you’ve installed, configured, used a linux distribution, ideally debian/ubuntu/mint)
• - Frontend development (you can do all the basic stuff in HTML/CSS/JS)

We’re not expecting you to be an expert in all of this, but if you have a few of those points and are very smart, please apply!!!

You *must*:

• - have a good sense of humor
• - work well in geographically disconnected teams
• - have good communications skills in English
• - deal well with receiving a vague problem description, and take matters in your own hands to make sure it gets solved to everybody’s satisfaction with limited resources

The challenges are numerous and great, in all areas – infrastructure, backend, algorithms, database scaling (we have billions of rows in our ecosystem databases), frontend design and implementation, etc. We really need you!

In terms of perks, Ecometrica is a great place to work at. Schedules are completely flexible – I want you to get things done, and if you’re not feeling it one morning, go for a bike ride and work later! If you’ve got deadlines one week and really crunch it, go skying for a couple of days the next week! How you work and solve problems is also flexible, and you’ll get a Mac or Linux laptop, your choice (i’m assuming you won’t be choosing Windows).

We provide a nice open office, unlimited coffee, tea and snacks, once-a-week team breakfast or lunch, and we’ll often open a beer or two on friday afternoon while finishing the week’s work. You’ll get to visit the other office from time to time. Good options package. And of course full health coverage. It’s like working for a startup, but a startup which is already in the black and has lots of paying clients, so much less stress – we’re here for the long run but you get to join while the company is still relatively small (less than 10 in Montréal, 25 total). Salary and vacations will depend on your experience, but will be competitive.

The team is great, too. You won’t be simply working in a dev team, you’ll also be working with amazing, fun, very bright scientists both in Montréal and in Edinburgh. The 3 co-founders are all scientists, there are simply no PHB around to ruin your day!

You can send your CV to jobs@ecometrica.com. But even better, send us links to sites you’ve built, projects you’ve completed, repos on github or bitbucket where you’ve contributed or are the lead developer, your Twitter stream, or anything else that makes sense.

Our mission is to make accounting for GHG emissions and ecosystem changes accessible to all organisations, including business and government, through web-based services that distill our knowledge and experience. To get a feel for the kind of technical work we do, you can watch my presentation at Montréal-Python 24.

One thing you might notice if you look at our web presence is a definite lack of coherent and professional UI/UX design – that’s where you come in!

We are presently on the lookout for a UI/UX designer, based in Montréal (Canada). This is an immediate opening.

Ideally, you are very-well versed in at least some of:

• - Graphic design: you can create basic assets
• - User Interface design: you make them pretty!
• - User Experience design: you make them fun to use and intuitive!
• - User Flow: you make sites that guide users towards their goals
• - User Interface implementation: you don’t just draw these things on paper, you’re able to implement them in HTML/CSS/JS
• - We have lots of expertise on the backend and the “magic” (making things do what we want them to in JS/CSS/HTML), but we need someone who can pitch in — not someone who throws a big mockup at their colleagues once they’re done.

We’re not expecting you to be an expert in all of this, but if you have a few of those points and are very smart, please apply!

You *must*:

• - have a good sense of humor
• - work well with geographically disconnected teams (our development team is in Montréal but the company is equally split between Montréal and Edinburgh, Scotland)
• - communicate fluently in English
• - deal well with vague problems; taking matters into your own hands and solving them to everybody’s satisfaction, with limited resources

The challenges are numerous and great, in all areas. We really need you!

In terms of perks, Ecometrica is a great place to work. Schedules are completely flexible – I want you to get things done, and if you’re not feeling it one morning, go for a bike ride and work later! If you’ve got deadlines one week and really crunch it, go skiing for a couple of days the next week! How you work and solve problems is also flexible, and you’ll get a Mac, Linux or Windows laptop, your choice.

We provide a nice open office, unlimited coffee, tea and snacks, once-a-week team breakfast or lunch, and we’ll often open a beer or two on Friday afternoon while finishing the week’s work. You’ll get to visit the other office from time to time. Good options package. And of course full health coverage. It’s like working for a startup, but a startup which is already in the black and has lots of paying clients, so much less stress – we’re here for the long run but you get to join while the company is still relatively small (less than 10 in Montréal, 25 total). Salary and vacations will depend on your experience, but will be competitive.

The team is great, too. You won’t be simply working in a development team, you’ll also be working with amazing, fun, very bright scientists both in Montréal and in Edinburgh. The 3 co-founders are all scientists, there are no PHBs around to ruin your day!

You can send your CV to jobs@ecometrica.com. But even better, send us links to sites you’ve designed and built, projects you’ve completed, your portfolio, your Twitter stream, or anything else that makes sense.

Carbon footprints can be measured by the amount of carbon dioxide or other carbon compounds emitted into the atmosphere by the activities of an individual, company and country. In 2007 the government launched the Carbon Reduction Commitment/Energy Efficiency Scheme, aimed at improving energy efficiency and cutting emissions in large public and private- sector organisations, which are responsible for around 10 per cent of the UK’s emissions. Whilst this scheme is not just about the management of carbon emissions releated to information and communications technology, an increasingly important question is how organisations of all kinds can reduce their carbon footprint while their digital footprints are getting bigger.

Read the full article by Aasha Bodhani of E&T, the magazine of The Institution of Engineering and Technology – featuring expert comment by Ecometrica Operations Director, Gary Davis – either online at the following link, or the full print article via PDF below.

Digital footprints are growing >

Ecometrica has been working with Natmags to monitor their emissions profile since 2008. During this time, Natmags has seen its overall emissions reduce consistently every year due to undertaking formal carbon accounting on a recurring basis, generating reduction plans and taking action – specifically taking steps to reduce their electricity, landfilled waste, air travel and hotel stays.

Read the full case study below:

London, 11th January 2012 – The Highgate Tech Fund today announced that, after several months of detailed due diligence, agreement has been reached to close the third investment in Fund 2. Highgate Tech Fund (HGTF) has invested in Edinburgh-based company Ecometrica, a leading Greenhouse Gas Accounting and Ecosystem Mapping business providing Software as Service (SaaS) applications. Ecometrica are a team of leading greenhouse gas experts and the solution is already being used by some of the largest companies globally, including RSA, National Express and Petkim (Turkey’s largest petrochemical company). The Ecometrica solution, named ‘Our Impacts’, is a Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) accredited web platform and is built on extensive research and content. ‘Our Impacts’ provides an easy to use carbon accounting system for all businesses that automates the calculation of greenhouse gas impact and enables them to identify areas for action or accurately calculate carbon offset.

Carbon accounting is rapidly becoming a requirement for many large and mid-sized companies around the world and is a pre-requisite for most Corporate Social Responsibility programmes. This trend was boosted by the recent Durban Agreement (12/2011), in which 190 countries committed for the first time to cut carbon emissions (individual country targets are yet to be agreed). This means that countries will need to impose reductions in carbon emissions on businesses within their country. One of the keys to cutting is to know how much carbon each business is emitting, ‘you cannot manage what you can’t measure’, is the famous quote (attributed to a number of people including Peter Drucker) or perhaps more accurately ‘what gets measured, gets done’ (attributed to Tom Peters). ‘Our Impacts’ enables businesses to measure their carbon impact and use accurate information to put strategies in place to reduce carbon output, or where reduction is not possible, offset their carbon impacts.

Ecometrica started life as a consultancy business in 2008 to provide GHG accounting and ecosystem monitoring services to FTSE 100, Fortune 500 businesses and governments globally. Recognising that this business model was not a scalable one, Ecometrica has developed a cloud-based solution that embeds many years of consulting expertise and knowledge, plus unrivalled data quality. The Highgate Tech Fund investment is part of a round of funding that will be deployed to grow global sales and marketing and for further product development.

Andrew Muir, Fund Co-Chair, said: “We are delighted to have made this investment. Ecometrica is a perfect company for our fund, with solid intellectual property, operating in a high growth market, demonstrating a clear proof of concept and some early stage, big brand customers already paying to use the product. We have identified Ecometrica as having the best potential to become a market leader in this space. Success will come from growing the customer base globally and adding new SaaS products to the portfolio.”

Richard Tipper, CEO Ecometrica, added: “We were impressed by the Highgate Tech Fund team, they have all succeeded in the software and technology space and the expertise that they bring to the table in addition to the investment gives us the confidence to accelerate the business to success.”

Highgate will take an active role in Ecometrica via a board seat and will use the inherent expertise of the fund team to work alongside the business to support success on an on-going basis. Highgate expects to make at least one more investment in Fund 2 before closing this fund to investors in April 2012.

-Ends-

Notes to Editors:

Highgate Tech Fund
Highgate Tech Fund 2 is the second fund from the combined team of Highgate Associates and Enterprise Corporate Finance. The Fund was founded by Andrew Muir and Ken Nelson both serial tech sector entrepreneurs with more than 25 years of experience successfully creating, building and exiting software and tech companies. Highgate Tech Fund was created in the government ethos of EIS to support investment in to early stage British based tech companies. Highgate Tech Fund invests in the best early stage software companies that have a need for investment to support fast track growth for an existing proven product. HGTF is also unique that it does not charge fees to investors and only makes money when companies within the fund make a successful exit and then only after 6% annualised has been returned to the investor. This ensures that the interests of the fund management team (all tech sector experts) are aligned with investors, unusual in the EIS and VCT Fund market. Highgate Tech Fund 2 opened in November 2010 and will close on April 4th 2012. The target is to have 4 or 5 good quality investee companies within the fund at that time.

www.highgatetechfund.com

About Ecometrica
Ecometrica is a company of world leading specialists and experts in greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting, ecosystem services, climate change policy, remote sensing and web based programming. With offices in Edinburgh, Scotland and Montréal, Canada, Ecometrica has unrivalled experience in the development and application of all major standards for GHG accounting, ecosystem change measurement and monitoring.

The mission is to make accounting for GHG emissions and ecosystem changes easier for all organisations, including business and government, by making our expertise available through a comprehensive range of web-based and professional consulting services. Whatever your business, we make greenhouse gas accounting and ecosystem measurement easier.

www.ecometrica.com

About Our Impacts
Our Impacts is the CDP-accredited greenhouse gas accounting service that brings together world-leading carbon experts and extensive research databases, all delivered through a flexible web-based platform. With its unique carbon calculation engine and full quality assurance process, Our Impacts is the natural choice for definitive, powerful and flexible greenhouse accounting.

www.ecometrica.com/our-impacts

Uncertainty is the estimated amount or percentage by which an observed or calculated value may differ from the true value. Uncertainty is usually expressed as a range of values and the probability that the true value falls within that range. For example, the uncertainty for a company’s annual GHG emissions may be expressed as +/- 30%, at the 95% confidence level (i.e. there is a 95% chance that the true value is within a range 30% above or below the calculated value for annual emissions).

Using the uncertainty assessment in Our Impacts

The uncertainty assessment in Our Impacts gives an indication of the relative uncertainty associated with activity data (depending on whether the data is actual or estimated) and the emission or conversion factors (depending on whether the factors have more or fewer built-in assumptions), and can be used to reduce uncertainty by encouraging reporting companies to improve the type and quality of data collected. The uncertainty score for an assessment can be reduced by:

1. Providing actual data rather than estimated data.
2. Providing data for the whole assessment period rather than extrapolating data.
3. Increasing the level of detail provided for emission sources (e.g. specifying “small”, “medium” or “large” vehicle rather than “average”).
4. Providing transportation data in energy, mass or volume units for fuel consumed rather than providing data for distance travelled (as calculating emissions from distance travelled requires an assumption about fuel economy).
5. Providing energy consumption data in energy, mass or volume units rather than providing data for energy costs or floor area occupied (as calculating emissions from cost data or floor area requires additional assumptions and conversions).
6. Providing waste data in mass units rather than by volume or number of bin bags (as calculating emissions from volume data requires an assumption about the density of waste).

The uncertainty assessment is best used as a tool for improving the type and quality of data provided rather than as an objective measure of the amount by which true GHG emissions differ from estimated GHG emissions. Click below to read the full paper:

The chosen individual will have many different responsibilities, which can in general be lumped into “chaos wrangling”:

• designing and implementing office procedures
• planning business travel
• office purchasing (furniture, supplies, food, equipment)
• coordinating meetings
• answering calls (though we have a very low volume of calls to the main number)
• coordinating with the Edinburgh office
• act as liaison for some inter-office accounting
• miscellaneous tasks to help free key personnel’s time
• possibly some product testing
• be Ecometrica’s face to visiting clients
• organizing PR and internal events
• communicating with staff on company updates
• …

We are looking for someone who is highly organized with great multi-tasking and time management skills, has very high System D skills, excellent computer skills and a strong work ethic. The ideal candidate is smart, fun, gets along well with everyone, presents herself/himself well, and has excellent written and spoken English skills – written and spoken French is also highly desirable. Past relevant experience would be a plus, but is not required – the above skills are much more important to us than past experience.

We’re looking for someone for the long run: please don’t apply if you know it would be an in-between job for you. While the position is part-time for now, at 3 days a week, it will probably grow to full-time in the near term. We strongly believe you’ll fall in love with the fun team we have here, and the folks in Edinburgh, and that you will love working here as much as we do.
Schedules will be fairly flexible, so if you prefer working from 9:30 and not 8:30, that’s fine. We provide very good health insurance, including physiotherapy, massages or travel insurance.
Please send your application to jobs@ecometrica.com as soon as possible.

Ecometrica Operations Director and Chief GHG Analyst Gary Davis spoke at the event, explaining how to set the scope and boundaries for carbon accounts and discussing how is it being done, how it could be done, and how it should be done.

You can see Gary’s presentation from the conference by using the link below.

Ecometrica is a company of specialists and experts in greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting, ecosystem services, climate change policy, remote sensing and web based programming. We have unrivalled experience in the development and application of the major standards for greenhouse gas accounting and ecosystem change measurement.

Our mission is to make accounting for GHG emissions and ecosystem changes accessible to all organisations, including business and government, through web-based services that distill our knowledge and experience.

To get a feel for the kind of technical work we do, you can watch my presentation at Montréal-Python 24.

We are presently on the lookout for a senior developer position, based preferably in Montréal (Canada), but potentially in Edinburgh (Scotland) if the right candidate is located there. This is an immediate opening.

Ideally, you are very-well versed in at least some of:

• - Python (e.g., you know how metaclasses work, or how a large list will allocate memory upon the next append)
• - Backend Django development (e.g., you know querysets inside out – how and when they query the database, how their internals caches work)
• - Linux Infrastructure (deployment, security, etc.)
• - Cloud environments (we’re on AWS)
• - Frontend development (you can do magic with javascript, HTML and CSS)
• - Testing, both frontend (using e.g. windmill) and backend (python unittests)
• - Frontend design (usability, visual design)

We’re not expecting you to be an expert in all of this, but if you have a few of those points and are very smart, please apply!!!

You *must*:

• - have a good sense of humor
• - work well in geographically disconnected teams
• - have good communications skills in english
• - deal well with receiving a vague problem description, and take matters in your own hands to make sure it gets solved to everybody’s satisfaction with limited resources

The challenges are numerous and great, in all areas – infrastructure, backend, algorithms, database scaling (we have billions of rows in our ecosystem databases), frontend design and implementation, etc. We really need you!

In terms of perks, Ecometrica is a great place to work at. Schedules are completely flexible – i want you to get things done, and if you’re not feeling it one morning, go for a bike ride and work later! If you’ve got deadlines one week and really crunch it, go skying for a couple of days the next week! How you work and solve problems is also flexible, and you’ll get a Mac or Linux laptop, your choice (I’m assuming you won’t be choosing Windows).

We provide a nice open office, unlimited coffee, tea and snacks, once-a-week team breakfast or lunch, and we’ll often open a beer or two on friday afternoon while finishing the week’s work. You’ll get to visit the other office from time to time.  Good options package. And of course full health coverage. It’s like working for a startup, but a startup which is already in the black and has lots of paying clients, so much less stress – we’re here for the long run but you get to join while the company is still relatively small (less than 10 in Montréal, 25 total). Salary and vacations will depend on your experience, but will be competitive.

The team is great, too. You won’t be simply working in a dev team, you’ll also be working with amazing, fun, very bright scientists both in Montréal and in Edinburgh. The 3 co-founders are all scientists, there are simply no PHB around to ruin your day!

You can send your CV to jobs@ecometrica.ca. But even better, send us links to sites you’ve built, projects you’ve completed, repos on github or bitbucket where you’ve contributed or are the lead developer, your twitter stream, or anything else that makes sense.