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  • Think and a Drink

    Thinkandadrink
    Last Thursday I was invited by Gareth Rushgrove to speak on a panel at Codeworks’ Think and a Drink event in Newcastle.

    Each month Codeworks orients the evening around a theme of interest for the (paying) audience…this month, the focus was on Web 2.0 & Business with a pair of talks from Gareth Rushgrove and BT’s Chief Web Services Architect, Paul Downey. Both talks largely focussed on Web 2.0 in general, rather than a particular focus on business or enterprise – that’s OK, maybe I misunderstood the brief 🙂

    The panel session – which also included Hedgehog Lab‘s Sarat Pediredla – was much more broad ranging, exploring disruptive innovation, startup culture, routes to investment, consumer technology’s impact on the enterprise and the positive impact of that on productivity.

    Some highlights included…

    • Meeting Codeworks’ CEO, Herb Kim for coffee just before the event – Herb has a really interesting background and seems to be making quite an impact with Codeworks’ role as a publicly-funded shepherd of the industry. I’m not sure how Codeworks compares to the MDDA or CSY, but they certainly put bmedi@ and Leeds Media to shame.
    • A cute demo of mojo from Paul Downey.
    • Meeting Sunderland-based Dutch entrepreneur, Dirk Kok of IsMyMusic.com as well as Codeworks’ PR & Comms Manager Lewis Harrison and Aoife Ross.
    • A couple of guys who wanted me to explain how money could be made from social networks and open-source; I explained that I didn’t feel Facebook had longevity and that companies like Amazon, eBay, Google and countless startups are minting money from the utilisation of open source to create new value 🙂

    My general impression is that the North East seems to be where Leeds and Manchester were perhaps in late 2006 and where Sheffield and Liverpool are right now. There’s a lotta energy and optimism but Newcastle’s tech+creative+digital communities are just starting to get a feel for how to find each other and collaborate; I’m pretty sure meetups like Refresh Newcastle, Think & A Drink and the upcoming Thinking Digital conference are only gonna make this a whole lot easier.

    —

    It’s easy to forget that the four other cities of the North are all handily arranged along the M62 and M1, less than an hour’s drive from each other. The North East is maybe physically more distant, but that could help avoid an echo chamber effect and lead to some distinctive digital culture for Newcastle and its neighbours.

    If the M62 corridor can evolve into the North’s Silicon Valley, perhaps the North East will be its Seattle or Portland 🙂

  • Tweetstats

    TweetstatsTwitterstats is a useful find from Fred Wilson, via Carl at Ensembli; enabling a Twitter user to visualise the usage patterns, simply by entering their screenname.

    So what do the stats tell me about my own use…

    • May, October and January appear to be my peak usage months; not much to be inferred here other than I seemed to get in the habit around Spring last year.
    • My twitters are largely concentrated in the afternoons and evenings of weekdays, sent overwhelmingly using Twitterific and less so by text message.
    • Unsurprisingly most of my direct messages are to Tarique, though I’m curious why friends like Aaron are low down that list; this may be due to the fact that Twitter’s one of the few communication services I use that most of my friends don’t, but my family do!

    It’d be useful to see sparklines of this data on a Twitter profile page that then clicked through to Twitterstats. Actually, more useful would be to visualise the aggregate usage of the entire Twitter userbase…

    Thinking about the nature of relationships within my Twitter social network, I think it’s safe to say they’re largely polarised around looser ties, than close friendships (for which I have other channels such as IM) and close family…though I think the large concentration of family members here is kinda a blip and not typical of Twitter usage.

     

  • OpenCoffee Leeds {February}

    Table I don’t get it. When I promote OpenCoffee we get a smaller turnout than when I don’t…fortunately, I didn’t this month and we had a buzzing and vibrant mood with over thirty people dropping in thoughout the course of the morning! I guess it was a Super Duper Tuesday 😉

    Some of the highlights included…

    • A great chat with Everything Ability‘s Tom Smith about his experimentation with songbook services and most notably his impending role as an entrepreneur-in-residence with a VC firm he’s been helping out. Tom’s instantly likeable and I have a feeling anything he creates will be too.
    • Jeremy Jarvis of Brightbox, a newly launched Ruby-hosting company in Leeds and offshoot of Reflex. Jeremy’s also the guy behind Leeds Ruby Thing, who’re holding their inaugural event tonight! Another meetup for the Leeds geek community – woot!
    • I didn’t get a chance to talk to the guys Leo and Dave from Kensei Media, who’ve just moved into Old Broadcasting House and are developing a media platform that promises to ease the pain of developing rich media sites for developers and designers.
    • Fiona ? from Simple Usability had just moved into town and it was great to welcome her into the city’s tech community. Originally from Glasgow, Fiona previously worked on usability issues for a San Francisco based company, from the Dominican Republic! But she’s actually happy to be back in the North and surprised at the vibrancy of the community 🙂
    • We finally managed to tempt Gavin Sweet out to OpenCoffee. Gav hired me into Freeserve back in 1999 as an Assistant Producer and I always saw him as Freeserve’s engineering and technology brain; more CTO than the real CTO, someone from whom I’ve learned a great deal and have immense respect for. Gav’s now part of the NetStart team as Chief Information Officer, helping to scope and build out a crowdsourced platform for new technology ventures in the region.
    • I had a really great chat with Stuart Childs, a student from Leeds Met; apart from people related to me (Mohsin!) we get very few students to OpenCoffee and that’s a real shame. OpenCoffee should be a springboard for design, computing and marketing professionals wanting to break into the creative and digital industries by networking. Stuart however saw this opportunity and is excited by the various meetups and groups blossoming across the City. He’s currently working on some digital arts installations that’ll be on show along the waterfront, we’re hoping to provide some coverage for that with the impending launch of dot:north 🙂
    • Though Westhawk‘s Tim Panton intended to do a demo, we actually spent quite a big chunk of the morning talking about telephony, innovation and Macs! Tim has some great ideas on innovating telephony and voice services by exploring multi-modality in user experiences; this is exactly why we snagged him as a keynote speaker for Emerging Communications 2008 in Mountain View, California next month! We also talked a little about the Manchester tech scene and our mutual friends Yuuguu…Tim showed me the superb Twiddla, an entirely web-based Yuuguu-like service that has me a little worried for our favourite Mancunian startup…
    • Finally dragging out my good mate Paul Key, drummer for local band The Good Die Young
      and THE BEST DESIGNER I’VE EVER WORKED WITH!!! Paul and I have a great
      design partnership going back almost seven years, together with Ian, we worked on a bunch of R&D design concepts including Fingertip, a portable 3G hotspot, Vlume,
      wireless grids UIs, a broadband phone and a bajillion other concepts. I
      miss working with ‘Key’, so fingers crossed there’ll be a little more
      of that soon…

    Stay tuned in the next few weeks for…

  • You Go Girl!

    Girlgeek

    Maz, Linda and I started talking about a Leeds chapter of Sara Sarah Blow‘s Girl Geek Dinner a few months ago as a response to the modest turnout of women at tech/geek meetups in Yorkshire. We’d planned to shoot for January, then February filled up, so we figured March.

    But we’ve been beaten by Valerie do Delonibus!

    The North’s first Girl Geek Dinner is due to take place on 12th March in Manchester. Seriously, Valerie’s been thinking about this for some time and thanks to an introduction by Manoj, we all figured it’d be great to collaborate and run Leeds and Manchester events together. I hope we’ll be able to follow Valerie’s inaugural event with a GGD in April or May but I’m sure she’s gonna put together a great evening and I can’t wait to go 🙂

    You can find out who else is attending at the Facebook group or register at the official site.

  • Going Solo

    Goingsolobadge150pxsquareStephanie Booth was the first person I met exclusively through Twitter. Steph met my friend Ian at a conference last year, she mentioned her grandmother was from Leeds and Ian suggested we meet next time she came to visit her family from Switzerland.

    As a prolific blogger, and someone with an emotional bond with Leeds, Steph’s someone I’ve tried to stay involved with the city’s burgeoning geek culture. When she told me she had a new venture in mind, I couldn’t help be curious.

    When she explained she was getting into the conference game I offered to help with a little advice and experience from my work on Design+, ETel, eComm and BarCamp Leeds.

    I’m really stoked to see Steph announcing her first conference Going Solo – a one day symposium on freelancing – in Lausanne this coming May. It’s gonna be an insightful and fun day set in a beautiful location with a lotta good advice. Yay Steph! Please bring Going Solo to the UK sometime soon too 🙂

    UPDATE: Steph is speaking at LIFT08 this week.

  • Leeds City Centre Vision Conference 2008

    VisionconfLast Thursday I braved the howling winds and driving rain to attend
    the 2008 edition of the Leeds City Centre Vision Conference, at the invitation of the city’s Chief Economic Services Officer, Paul Stephens.

    Upon entering the main hall, I felt immediately out of place as the only person not wearing a suit – though I found later that the gallery above was full of students exiled from the main floor 🙂

    Badge

    The 300+ delegates were largely made up of the great and the good of the property development sector, local/regional government and large employers…ranging from Harvey Nichols, the BBC, Arup and Balfour Beatty to KPMG, to the universities and a handful of media outlets.

    It’s a shame that the conference was invitation-only – this in a single stroke excluded a diversity of talents and perspectives, leaving the city’s future concentrated in the hands of BigCorp with no representation from grassroots groups, citizens, indeed even elected officials!

    There was perhaps a great opportunity here to unlock the schedule with a parallel unconference, opening the agenda to broader commentary and input as well as surfacing important ideas in an environment that seemed to lack bold thinking.

    Though the roster of speakers included the city’s chief executive, it’s civic architect and also the director of city development, by far the most engaging and thought provoking were those with an internationalist perspective, able to comment on Leeds’ place in the world and its emerging regional and international rivals; the city’s made great progress, but its unguided and lacking vision. Each speaker held great hope for the city but warned of short-termism in planning the built environment…some notable quotes included…

    • ‘look to define outcomes not projects’
    • ‘to date, Leeds has been practicing Urban Dentistry’
    • ‘we need a city park!’
    • ‘we need a tall place to see the city from – like a space needle’
    • ‘more tree-lined streets’
    • ‘be able to rent a bicycle when I arrive at the train station’
    • ‘the city’s full of full-stops, gates, blocked paths’

    Perhaps the most notable discussion was from Wayne Hemingway who (rightly) acknowledged the city’s transformation, but argued that it lacked ambition, vision, an attention to detail (iconic pavements, not towers!) and the guidance of the city’s creative class, noting the absence of an organisation such as the South Coast Design Forum. Hemingway’s talk raised some eyebrows, but I felt it carried the necessary boldness to shake the delegates up a little…

    WaynehemingwayI wasn’t able to stick around for the workshops in the afternoon, but I’ve a feeling they weren’t particularly inspiring or productive. Prior to the event I offered to articulate a vision of Leeds as part of a Silicon Valley style hub of startups, coworking and creative+tech culture…just one possible vision to encourage debate; not a solution, just a scenario. I didn’t get a single response.

    I hope some of the day’s material will be shared online – particularly speaker presentations, delegate profiles and (if they exist) videos of the day’s talks. It’s too important a discussion to remain behind closed doors.

    One very encouraging sign was a brief chat with Paul Stephens – he felt the initial event had to cater to large organisations but was very keen to move onto a broader base of representation; my suggestions of an unconference track, discussions on municipal broadband and helping some of the Civic Architect – John Thorpe – work find a way online as a kind of ‘digital civic map room’ enabling citizens to direct the city’s futures.

    All in, my expectations were low, but the conference was thought provoking and holds some promise to start some interesting discussions 🙂

  • Y: The Last Man

    YthelastmanLike many late 80s geek teenagers I was consumed by adult comics and graphic novels such as The Dark Knight Returns, V for Vendetta and Watchmen; many of which have been recently re-released as gorgeous hardcover ‘Absolute’ editions by DC’s Vertigo label.

    I missed out on many of the long running series at Vertigo,  with just a handful of compilation editions purchased over the last few years (I kinda grew outta comics…)

    However, in the last few weeks Vertigo has begun to offer the first issue, of some of their seminal titles, as downloadable PDFs editions, including series such as Y: The Last Man,
    Death (The High Cost Of Living) and
    Saga Of The Swamp Thing.

    Though some way from Scott McCloud‘s vision of ComicsML and digital publishing, a dumb, static PDF is good enough. I hope Vertigo are bolder and begin to offer full editions of their works; I can imagine an Amazon Kindle or OLPC XO loaded with a ton of remixable and quotable comics 🙂

    Last night I read the thought provoking first issue of Y: The Last Man – Unmanned – on my
    MacBook, wondering if what Kevin Kelly recently termed ‘generative values of embodiment‘ could yield a renaissance in comic publishing.

  • OpenCoffee {January}

    OpencoffeejanuaryWow, I’ve been lazy…real lazy. It’s three weeks since the first OpenCoffee Leeds meetup of 2008 back on 8th January and I’m just getting around to a round up of that morning’s events…

    • Trina Garnett of All About Joe and I have been talking on and off for a few months, but this month we managed to persuade her along to OpenCoffee. Like myself, Trina recently exited Orange to go solo, though she was part of the Ananova acquisition, rather than Freeserve. Trina’s new venture, a multimedia communications agency, looks to be well served by her experience at FT and Orange.
    • Channon Powell of Leeds Learning Network, Leeds Met’s Linda Broughton and I got into an interesting discussion on the educational merits of OLPC‘s XO computer and associated learning programme. We got to talking about how the XO was actually useful in developed economies as well as the developing world; coincidentally, OLPC America was launched just a couple days after OpenCoffee!
    • The University of York’s Maz Hardey & Linda Broughton had a side discussion about plans for the Leeds’ first Girl Geek Dinner…I’m hoping we’ll see some announcement soon – maybe March?

    I’d hoped to see Freeserve’s co-founder Rob Wilmot, Ian Green as well as Digital Therapy‘s Simon Jones, but they were unable to attend for various reasons…

    We’ve settled into a comfortable 25-30 people each month, but it’s something I’d like to improve upon with a few tweaks to the format over the coming months…perhaps a Vagueware-esque OpenCoffee+Coworking Day at OBH, might see a few demos, so be sure to sign up…

    —

    OpenCoffee Leeds {February} will take place on 5th February, 10am to 12pm at Loftart…be sure to let us know that you’re coming 🙂

  • (Dot)Northern Snippets

    In the run up to the launch of dot:north, here’re a few more events and snippets from across the country’s favorite compass direction…

    • The next few months sees a pile up of BarCamps across the North of England and Scotland too with definite plans now announced for BarCamp in Edinburgh and Manchester and planning starting for Newcastle and also Sheffield‘s second camp. We’ll be making a decisions about Leeds soon, most likely aiming for an early Summer event to avoid the traffic jam and take advantage of the great weather 🙂
    • Last week saw a screening of Abstract Fear at Old Broadcasting House; with a bunch of upcoming evening talks and further screenings, the North’s first coworking space is warming up a great programme of creative and digital events.
    • Last week’s GeekUp Leeds played host to the launch of NorthCast, NorthCrew and NorthPack, respectively podcast, collective and blog-aggregator covering developments across the region. Kinda a rival to our own plans for dot:north and kinda not; the fact that people are bootstrapping coverage of the region – and indeed, looking at the region as a whole – is good news for everyone…watch out for Manoj Ranaweera’s expanded NW Startup 2.0 in coming weeks too.
    • Manoj’s programme of events in the North East continues to draw plaudits with last week’s edition of North West Startup 2.0; catch local VC, Ed French’s impressions here… Next month, Manoj will be hosting Mobile 2.0 on 21st February in Manchester…the speaker lineup will include Ed and my old boss and mentor, Dr. Norman Lewis; I’ve been helping Manoj out a little behind the scenes with speakers and themes…
    • Last Thursday saw the Manchester Digital Development Agency host the city’s first WordPress User Group and later today Paul Robinson’s remix of coworking and OpenCoffee will take place…sadly I had to drop out, but I’m really liking this idea and plan to pinch it for met:space! Paul’s also one of the brains behind BarCamp Manchester 🙂
    • Next week, I’ve been invited to attend this year’s Leeds City Centre Vision Conference by the city’s Chief Economic Services Officer, Paul Stephens. Paul’s been a champion of Leeds’ digital industries with his support for Leeds Media and the now defunct eHQ Leeds; I’m hoping to impress upon the delegates the notion of Leeds as one of a half dozen hubs of an emerging digital ecosphere across the North.
    • Jennifer O’Grady, formerly of Brazen PR has just completed her garden leave by launching her new agency, Democracy PR – named for emergent forms of media democracy. Jen’s collaborating with other regional digital marketing, and media-casting experts, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes of these micro-JVs 🙂 Her more from Jen at YouTube…
    • In a couple weeks time Venturefest Yorkshire will be holding its annual event at the York Racecourse on 6th February; Leeds Met has kindly asked me to join their table at the evening reception, along with Enterprise Ventures’ Ed French and Plusnet’s Dean Sadler.
    • Gavin Holland, Orange UK’s former design team manager, based in Leeds has gone indie with his new venture Freeman Holland, a Manchester-based creative consultancy. Gav and I used to run Orange’s Design Futures research programme together, including some experimental product and services designs along with a design conference – Design+. Expect to see great things from Gav and his partners.
    • Holbeck Urban Village‘s Round Foundry in Leeds is holding an evening networking event, Future Work, to help introduce ‘directors and staff from the cream of creative design agencies,
      technology companies and arts practitioners’
    • Last, but not least – two weeks from today is the February edition of OpenCoffee Leeds, complete with a handful of demos 🙂

    So wow – if I didn’t live here already, I’d wanna move to the North – the Pennine Parallel is taking shape – now all we need is a fucking Apple Store in Leeds!

  • Crudy Giuliani…

    …is ‘Ready‘.

    A hateful, cynical and manipulative movie trailer (‘…a people perverted’?) or a political ad from a candidate who could only get a 6% election erection?