StumbleUponSomething is brewing...
The UK's quirky innovation culture - at once dynamic and loveable, while at the same time maddeningly inadequate - has been taxing the minds of a lot of people recently....
Like in this post, from Tom Coates on Plasticbag.org, which elicited an avalanche of comments and was echoed around the blogosphere:
"...our industry seems dominated by a few moribund and clumsy giants leading a culture that's inarticulate, unadventurous and profoundly constrained. There's something very wrong here.Beers & Innovation was founded on the premise that an open debate on these issues is needed, and with the hope that together we can start untangling some of them...
My main question is this: Where are all the bloody start-ups? Where are the small passionate groups of creative technologists (people with clue) getting together to build web applications and public-facing products that push things forward? Where is the Blogger or Flickr or Odeo or Six Apart of the UK? What aspect of this country is it that confounds these aspirations? And I know that Audioscrobbler is wonderful. I really love it. But eventually you have to ask - is that really all we can do?
So is it a lack of money or a poverty of ambition?"
Now where?
Following on from our lively and successful first Beers & Innovation night on 9th February with Skypes Saul Klein, Matt Ogle from Last.fm and Tom Coates from Yahoo! delegates indicated overwhelmingly that the next Beers & Innovation should focus on user generated content (or user created content if you prefer)
We held a half-day conference on the topic in November last year - so hows the UK doing with innovation and UGC in 2006? Who is doing the exciting stuff and what, if anything, is hindering their potential? And what of consumer created content in the news sphere? How much has citizen media impacted mainstream news and what organisations are engaging innovatively with this medium?
Chair:
Dr Jo Twist, Senior Research Fellow, IPPR
Jo Twist joined the ippr as Senior Research Fellow to lead the Digital Society & Media team in December 2005, having spent five years at the BBC. She started at CBBC Newsround where she was involved in shaping the programmes virtual community and content. From 2003 to 2005, Jo was technology reporter for the BBC News website, covering most aspects of citizen/consumer technologies and participatory media. Before joining the BBC, Jo was a cultural geographer at the Centre for Urban Technology (CUT) at the University of Newcastle. There she completed an ESRC/BT Case Award PhD (1997-2000) on virtual communities and the UK Government's vision for an inclusive information age. Jo blogs and podcasts in her spare time, and contributes to BBC TV and radio regularly. She also writes for a monthly a BBC Ariel newspaper column, Cutting Edge.
SPEAKERS:
Richard Sambrook- Director, BBC Global News Division
Richard Sambrook is responsible for leading the BBC's overall international news strategy across radio, TV and new media. He is a member of the BBC's Journalism Board, reporting to Deputy Director-General Mark Byford. The division contains BBC World Service radio, BBC Monitoring, BBC World television and the BBC's international facing online news services. Previously as Director of BBC News from 2001 to 2004, Richard led the worlds biggest broadcast news operations, producing Radio, TV and Internet services for the UK. He has also edited the BBCs main evening TV news programme and led their newsgathering operations. He began his journalistic career in local newspapers.
Paul Youlten - Founder, Yellowikis.org
Yellowikis has been described as the love child of Yellow Pages and Wikipedia. Created by a 14 year-old Spanish school girl as a place to collect companies deleted from Wikipedia, control for the project was wrestled from her by her father Paul Youlten once he realised the commercial potential of such a system. When news of Yellowikis reached the blogosphere the traditional Yellow Pages industry were very upset by to learn that the most serious challenge yet to their service cost less than £150 to set up. Paul will be talking about the day-to-day realities of user-provisioned information systems as well as the strengths and weaknesses of community based projects. Paul will also talk about BlogCode and StoryCode which generate content from users.
Who should attend:
Anyone who's ever had a good idea and never did anything with it. Anyone who did. Anyone else who cares about these things.
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Comments
dahowlett said:
Beer + Innovation <p>One of the key issues for me is: define innovation? Does it mean all AJAXy +PHP +CSS or does it mean packaging re-packaging apps/tools whatever to meet the needs of business in new and interesting ways? Must RSS be part of everything for example? These are not popular questions among those who think the tech comes first but I'd argue that it is more important to understand what the technology can do for business. That's innovation in my book. so for instance, I like the idea of business infrastructure or what you need to get going in business today. I only know of one organisation that makes a serious effort to do that at utility computing prices. they don't use an ounce of AJAX and their customers don't care. Instead they provide a welter of services for nothing and add value through business support that is much harder to deliver through a technology solution. They're growing at the rate of 15-20% per month. Not surprising. What is surprising is that the champions for this are the 1% of professional accountants who see the value of evolving into something different from the direction their original training would suggest. <br/></p>
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