Birmingham Social Media Cafe

November’s Birmingham Social Media Cafe is this week (Fri 26 Nov) sponsored by bmibaby. Should be a good one.

• Jobplot – A creative industries talent/jobs/opportunities board for the West Mids. Get you/your company on there if you work in design, new media, film, etc.
• Hackitude Birmingham – 10 to 12 December 2010 – “In conjunction with Culture Hack Day which is taking place in London over January, we want ideas to improve how we consume culture in Birmingham and the wider Midlands, or problems: gaps in our digital grid, that can be filled with the right data or the right amount of brainpowe
• Screen WM – Setting the record straight – Jason Hall sets out the effect 4iP’s had in the West Mids
• West Midlands Music Pilot – “This is a music archive site developed for and with the British Library. It features new music from the West Midlands of all genres.”
• Talis Nodalities Magazine – About – “Talis has launched a magazine called Nodalities that bridges the divide between those building the Semantic Web and those interested in applying it to their business requirements”
• In Cahoots blog – They have a blog
• Staffordshire software company plots growth after Midven funding – “Connexica Holdings Ltd, based in Stafford, has attracted an investment of £250,000 from Midven’s Exceed Midlands Advantage Fund – the £18m fund financed by LDC and the European Regional Development Fund”
• Game Central, the West Midlands’ games network marks its one year achievements and calls for more support for the UK games industry – “Game Central – the regional games network for the West Midlands – marked its first anniversary at the Gaming and Digital Technology event at Birmingham Science Park Aston today as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week”
• LHM Media sees 47% improvement under new chair – That’s ‘chair’ as in chairman
• Made Media » Made in London – “we’ve opened an outpost in Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell”
• Screen WM – Driving innovation and excellence in screen media : News – “West Midlands companies are invited to join a ‘creative mission’ to SXSW 2011″
• Two Global Hackathons – Sign up now! – Blog – Digital Birmingham – “A combined Birmingham Open Data Hack Day and RHOK will be held on December 4th, hosted at Faraday Wharf, Birmingham Science Park Aston, Birmingham”

Got any news that we missed? Add it in the comments or tweet it to @BirminghamSMC.

It’s not long to the next get-together. Same time and place as usual:

Friday 26 November 2010 from 10am to midday

Downstairs at the Coffee Lounge on Navigation Street (map)

Everyone’s welcome, but especially people who are interested in how we organise, share, produce, profit from and/or enjoy media of any sort. There’s no sign-up, no tickets and no formalities – just come along, grab a drink and have a chat with some likeminded people.

If you want to let people know that you’re coming then please do so on Facebook/Upcoming/in the comments below. If there’s something in particular you’d like to talk about then you can flag it up in advance in those places too.

This month the teas and coffees will be sponsored by bmibaby and, if I’m not very much mistaken, we’ll be joined by their managing director, Julian Carr.

bmibaby have been making some interesting moves with social media, with Free Flight Follow Fridays and Twitter Q&A sessions with senior management, so picking their brains about the whys and hows could be very interesting.

• Social media a closed book for many Midland SMEs – Survey results from the Forum of Private Businesses
• Image Tagging in Flickr Survey – “The survey is part of a funded PhD project at the University of Wolverhampton” Only takes 5 mins and you can win a Kindle or iPad
• Switch to rebrand IET Connect – “Birmingham agency Switch has been appointed to rebrand IET Connect, the Benevolent Fund of the Institution of Engineering and Technology.”
• Ticket Factory shines on Take That strategy – “Clever use of social media enabled Midlands-based national ticketing agent The Ticket Factory to smash its own sales records”
• Urban Coffee Company in Birmingham launches iPhone app to take customer orders – “A coffee shop in Birmingham’s business district claims to be the first in the UK to launch an iPhone app that customers can use to order their favourite cuppa”
• Hello Birmingham we are Stoke! Scale of two cities – carlplant – “Here’s my take on the digital art scene in Stoke on Trent”

Got any news that we missed? Add it in the comments or tweet it to @BirminghamSMC.

Thanks to everyone who came down today for another good morning of meeting and chatting.

There were lots of new people too – I spoke to Francine, Jason, Jas and others but there were plenty of others besides. A couple of new folks said that they’d felt a little daunted before coming downstairs but were glad they did and would be back again next month. That’s always good to hear.

Kate Cooper was there too, asking people what they feel optimistic about – photos and audio from that are being posted on the New Optimists Facebook page and on Flickr.

The next event’s on Friday 26 November and will be sponsored by the kind people at bmibaby. Rumour has it their managing director, Julian Carr, will be joining us too. Listings and info will be up very shortly.

For now, you can see some pics from the event on Flickr and I’ve collected together a few of the tweets using Storify:

More links for yourselves:

• Entering the Final Week @ Trident Digital Village Project, Democracy Week « – Good summary of the project that’s up for a TalkTalk Digital Heroes award
• Slides from Hello Business discussion | daveharte.com – “They show the results of a workshop that I attended in Berlin earlier this year where representatives from a range of European cities mapped out the relationship between industry/trade bodies and creative and cultural policy-makers”
• Tiny word bombs of colour and noise « Edge Trinkets – ‘Last weekend I experimented with running a live running blog from the genre smashing Supersonic festival”
• Made Media builds new-look Jazz FM site – “Made was responsible for building the site while London agency Measure Design worked on its design”
• Mast installed as 4G trial takes place in Birmingham – “The high-tech communication installations have been mounted on a building in Birmingham Science Park Aston as a test-bed for assessing the potential benefits to the city of a 4G mobile network”
• full range birmingham – Google Search – Cheeky SEO or fair game?
• Birmingham’s Hello Digital week hailed a success – Birmingham Post – ‘Hailed a success’ is a phrase that always amuses me
• MyTime, Our Times – jaseanton.com – “I’ve been to three very different events since I moved to Birmingham to study social media and yet all of them – ‘Hyperlocal Govcamp’, ‘Hello Digital’ and ‘The Lost Voice of Mental Health in Birmingham’ – were all concerned with improving services for people”
• Why has nobody commented on my status update? on Vimeo – “Craig Gilman, Digital Youth Adviser for Birmingham Diocese, Church of England talks about facebook and social networks”
• How Birmingham’s tech scene stacks up – West Midlands ICT Cluster – “the real gap emerges when we come to finance. There is almost no private finance available in Birmingham. We have angel groups, we have private equity companies, we have Venture Capitalists but none of them understand Tech”
• Clusta gives Cheryl Cole an online makeover – Birmingham Post – “Birmingham digital agency Clusta has worked with Polydor on the new-look Cheryl Cole website”
• Alternative Reality Gaming | Stickee – In a series of ‘client guides’

Got any news that we missed? Add it in the comments or tweet it to @BirminghamSMC.

Bit late this week, but here you go:

• Paper on Advantage West Midlands’ Digital Media Cluster | daveharte.com – “It’s had a wide distribution via email to the various business/public sector bods who were doing the LEP lobbying but I suspect it’ll never get formally published anywhere so I thought I’d dump it on here”
• New apprenticeships launched in creative sector – Birmingham Post – “Noel Dunne, director of Creative Alliance, an organisation which aims to support and develop creative talent, said: “The new creative and digital media apprenticeship will help employers attract talented young people to their organisation”
• Engaging Visitors Through Social Media – Notes – jon bounds – Jon’s notes and links from his session at Hello Digital
• Birmingham in world’s top 21 ‘intelligent communities’, says global thinktank – Birmingham Post – “Judges said that Birmingham City Council and NHS Birmingham East and North were delivering innovative telecare and telehealth programmes in conjunction with private sector technology manufacturers and the third sector”
• Jobs in the Meeja | Mind over Matter – Ian gives a few of his top tips for getting a job in the media (although most of it applies to pretty much any sector). Worth a read
• Bull Ring digital screen contract awarded to Ocean – News – THE DRUM – “Scottish Widows Investment has awarded the contract to maximise revenue income for the full-motion digital screen located at The Bull Ring in Birmingham to media owner and digital screen specialist Ocean”
• Chemex chooses graduate start up agency for online marketing – News – The Drum – Nice win for Studio Bonito
• Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Notes on BirminghamCouncil website post mortem – The website wasn’t great and it turns out the Post Implementation Review didn’t get it all right either
• Birmingham City University’s Marketing Challenge – A 5-day programme where you’ll “develop a marketing product and campaign strategy in answer to a live brief you will be set on Day 1″. Free entry, aimed at final year students/graduates/post-grads and there’s a prize of £800
• Royal Television Society Midlands 2010 Nominations – And the nominees are…
• The BIMA Awards : Finalists – Maverick and Mudlark are both up for awards. Didn’t spot anyone else from around here

Got any news that we missed? Add it in the comments or tweet it to @BirminghamSMC.

Some links for y’all:

• Big Button | Work | Web & Interactive | James Martin iPhone app – “Built totally in-house by Big Button, the app features over 80 searchable recipes with step-by-step instructions and great photography”
• Vote for walkit.com – thegoodwebguide.co.uk have nominated walkit.com for an award. Give em a boost here
• Rare Vintage: Part One | Edge Magazine – “To mark Rare’s 25th birthday, we visited the company’s sprawling estate in Twycross, barely ten miles from where it first began”
• Birmingham Post – Public services to get a digital overhaul, Tory conference fringe event told – A write-up of the Screen WM-hosted event
• Birmingham Post – Soshi Games nets Screen WM investment – “Screen WM has invested an undisclosed sum in two products developed by Soshi Games through the Digital Media Fund”
• FLUID | Top 50 Design agency – Computer Arts have been saying nice things about Fluid. Did anyone else from around here make it into that list?
• Doodle: Hackitude 2010 – Dates are being discussed for the next Hackitude

Got any news that we missed? Add it in the comments or tweet it to @BirminghamSMC.

• Launch48 Birmingham Entrepreneurial Event – Weekend – “The Launch48 Weekend is a fast paced experience, encouraging participants to learn, network and collaboratively create a new and exciting web or mobile application”
• Substrakt website refresh – Autumn 2010 – Blog – Substrakt – “I’d like to start by introducing some important decisions we’ve made when redefining our online presence”. Substrakt explain their own website’s redesign
• Say Hello – “We’ve been catching up with Chris Unitt, the producer behind Say Hello project, News Dash, which launched last month”
• Introducing NHS Local to hyperlocal sites in the West Midlands | Talk About Local – “We are delighted to host a guest post from Carl Plant, Stoke-on-Trent social media and community hero now working with NHS Local”
• ‘Making it findable’ – the creed of the hyperlocal blogger | Podnosh – “Yesterday I spent the afternoon at Hyperlocal Govcamp West Midlands, a gathering of hyperlocal bloggers, local government officials, and people involved in open data”
• SocMed WM – Social Media Surgeries in the West Midlands – “Free advice “surgeries” run by local social media professionals”
• Birmingham Post – Daden creates 3D lab for University of Leicester – “Birmingham Science Park-based Daden is creating the virtual lab to help students at the University of Leicester as part of a project addressing the limitations of teaching in working laboratories”
• Is blogging the new rock ‘n’ roll? – Jez Collins – “On the surface, Birmingham has a small but very active and visible blogging scene”
• The Social Gas Podcast — Google Docs | We Share Stuff – “Join We Share Stuff for the second episode of our new podcast”. Interesting name…
• Screen WM – Channel 4 Online announcement – “4iP, Channel 4’s digital co-investment arm which completes its pilot phase next month, will be merged into existing Channel 4 teams”
• Hacks and Hackers Lichfield announced! – Lichfield District Council Open Data – “we’ve teamed up with ScraperWiki, an online tool which aims to make working with data more open an collaborative, to organise a Hacks and Hackers day in Lichfield”

Got any news that we missed? Add it in the comments or tweet it to @BirminghamSMC.

Lots of good news this week – big hires, big projects, big funding wins. Who cares about the grotty weather?

• Fanning the flames of GovSpark | Podnosh – A government website knocked together in (well) under 48 hours – “Josh Hart coded like a lunatic and the talented and calm Ryan Dean-Corke of Substrakt sorted out some visuals for us.”
• Birmingham Post – CivicoLive receives funding boost from creative fund – “CivicoLive secured the investment from venture capital fund Creative Advantage Fund with the help of the Entrepreneurs for the Future (e4f) programme at Birmingham Science Park Aston (BSPA)”
• Freestyle Interactive swells account management team – News – THE DRUM – “Joining the business, which is the largest digital specialist agency in the Midlands, are Mark Tennant, Angel Gibbons and Paul Thomas, all of whom are joining on the back of several new business wins”
• New website commissioned to promote Westfield Shopping Centre – News – THE DRUM – “A new website is to be developed for Westfield shopping centre, having appointed Birmingham creative agency Tomorrow People to handle the project”
• AHP picks Rhubarb for Birmingham home – News – THE DRUM – “AHP Design has opened its office in the centre of Birmingham’s creative quarter”
• John Dean named creative director of Clusta – News – THE DRUM – “Dean joins the Birmingham-digital agency having worked at Saatchi & Saatchi and WCRS before launching Addition Marketing. Also joining are Emily de Groot, previously at M&C Saatchi and Proximity, and FullSIX’s Neil Brice”
• “Up to” 40mb/s broadband for central Birmingham « D’log – “BT has just announced fast broadband upgrades for central Birmingham”
• Début | Update September 2010 – What they’ve been up to in the past month
• Logging on With… for Hello Digital – Interview with Raj Mack, head of Digital Birmingham
• Cecelia Ahern AR Campaign | Stickee – “We have just launched an Augmented Reality campaign for Harper Collins’ best selling author Cecelia Ahern”
• Birmingham Post – Birmingham City Council spent thousands hunting software that didn’t exist – How many thousands? 300 of them. That’s impressive

Got any news that we missed? Add it in the comments or tweet it to @BirminghamSMC.