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?"
RSS Frontiers...
RSS (standing for both Really Simple Syndication and Rich/RDF Site Summary) has gained traction over the last year and is now filtering into the mainstream of information and news distribution.
Emerging markets for RSS appear to be corporate communications and marketing, and multimedia (MRSS) content distribution.
Both feed readers (aggregators) who can pull your RSS feeds together and newly emerging RSS marketing agencies are now springing up in the UK and Europe, and more exploratory development is also underway.
So who's doing what, what are conditions like for a UK-based RSS start up and what likely trends can we discern from the impact of RSS on UK media and business to date? How have things moved on since June 2005 when Guardian Unlimited's director Simon Waldman said: "readers want control"? Can the UK ecosystem support or sustain innovation in this sphere? And what can RSS do for your online content, marketing or business?
Come along, hear from practicioners and experts in the field and have your say.
SPEAKERS:
CHAIR: Michael Nutley - Editor, NMA
Michael Nutley has been a business journalist for twenty years, covering a number of areas including software, telecommunications, construction and leisure. He took over as editor of New Media Age in July 2000. As editor he maintains a strategic overview of the entire new media sector, from both a client and a service provider perspective. Hes also particularly interested in online advertising, interactive TV and the transformative effect of interactive media on organisations. Before joining NMA he worked for a year as associate publisher of Centaur Business Intelligence's portfolio of marketing titles.
Ivan Pope - Founder & CEO, Snipperoo
Ivan started his internet career as publisher of The World Wide Web Newsletter in 1993. He sold this to Future Publishing and became the consultant editor for the launch of .net magazine in 1994. After inventing the Cybercafe, he co-founded Webmedia which went on to become, briefly, the leading UK web design and build company. While at Webmedia, he founded the worlds first domain name company, NetNames. NetNames was sold in 2000 to Nebenefit and Pope joined the board of this LSE listed company. A short lived incubator, Pregenensis followed, after which Pope retired to Brighton to look after his two small children. He is now out of retirement with a six month old startup, Snipperoo (blog). Snipperoo is a widget management product that holds out the promise of a Universal Widget. Within five years, we will be living in a widgetised world, he predicts, and Pope hopes to be at the centre of that world.
Peter Nixey - Founder, Webkitchen
After two years of Computer Vision research in the Oxford Medical Vision Lab, Peter setup Webkitchen. He has since developed an AJAX content management system, and Eventsites - a mashup using no serverlogic and only AJAX and web services. His main pursuit, Deeptag, is an RSS client designed to use the format as a means of broadcast messaging. He is currently growing a business around content managed websites in order to fund the team required to take Deeptag to production.
Richard Edwards - Co-founder, MyZebra
Richard Edwards is co-founder of My-Zebra, the desktop delivery platform. From an original idea back in 2004, Richard (and Rob Eberstein) developed the concept to market readiness and they now have several blue chip clients, including Maxim Magazine and Skys At the Races channel. Prior to My-Zebra, Richard was Trading Director, GlaxoSmithKline, managing the Lucozade & Ribena brands in the UK.
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.
To be kept posted on all future B&I nights, sign up for the fortnightly NMK Newsletter (just drop your email address into the third box down on the right hand side of this page).
See the Beers & Innovation 1: UK Start-up Culture outline.
See the Beers & Innovation 2: User-Generated Content outline.
See the Beers & Innovation 3: Web Services & Mash-ups outline.
Read the Beers & Innovation 1: UK Start-Up Culture report
Check out the Beers & Innovation blog
About Beers & Innovation:
This is the fourth in an ongoing series NMK are producing, with each Beers & Innovation focusing on a particular key issue for / sector of the UK's innovation and technology scene. The next one will be announced soon. Regular updates and relevant discussions can be found on the blog. For enquries about this or future B&I nights, email deirdre.molloy@nmk.co.uk - we welcome all your comments, ideas and feedback!
NB: Payment for this event is by Switch/Maestro or Credit Card ONLY. Please select this payment method on the booking form. Thank you.
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