2008

Ultraband – high speed broadband for Nottingham city?

This week I went to hear a presentation in Nottingham by a project a little closer to actuality that the recent 2012 Design Capital bid I recently blogged about.

Ultraband is a public sector non-profit partnership led by Connected Nottingham whose current mission is to create a high-speed broadband ring hooked around central institutes in Nottingham (including Broadway and Biocity). The network will enable businesses with high speed broadband needs, particularly in the media industries around Nottingham’s Lace Market, to access high fibre pipes to ail the curent creaking, high capacity broadband network which will be essential for the productivity of businesses in the future.

According to a survey they conducted which you can still fill out online (and you probably should as they’re basing their findings on just 23 responses currently) 71% of Lace Market businesses were unhappy with their internet, and had problems with bandwith and connectivity that prevented service delivery – including outsourcing rendering projects.

If the Lace Market wants to become a creative hub, competing with the net access offering of other European regions like MediaCity Salford, Amsterdam and Paris is essential.

The service would be operated on a non-project co-operative basis, which is how many Scandinavian high speed networks have been established. However it’s subject to approval of an EMDA bid which could become a longwinded process. Director Peter Goodwin was keen to point out that if we didn’t reach a decision on moving forward within a year the opportunity would be lost and with it competitive advantage for Nottingham.

I don’t know too much about this kind of technology and the pros and cons, but from speaking to others it would seem that high-speed is available already – though price may be an inhibitor. A rep from BT was also vocal about a network run by “over enthusiastic amateurs” – assuring us it’s not about the fibre in the ground which already exists but the support and connectivity provided by the service provider.

With Virgin’s announcement of a rollout of 50Mb high speed broadband for the very affordable £51 month, I’m still left confused as to whether we are missing out on an opportunity to do something radical that addresses a market failure (which is, or should be, after all the point of Regional Development Agency money) or whether the market is actually already advancing in serving the needs of the few for whom ‘big pipe’ access is an imperative.

Yet any infrastructure that makes Nottingham more appealing to incoming investors and retains the high tech businesses we have could be crucial in survival. But what is it we need most right now in the recession – the telecoms networks or the business networks?

Ultraband are also keen to raise awareness and garner views about the project in the inner-city Nottingham business community. A blog strategy perhaps?

Nottingham – World Design Capital 2012?

I went to a small shindig last night at ChinaChina restaurant organised by Nottingham Ambassadors (City Council) and Invest in Nottingham, to raise profile for the city (in his introduction Simon Green, the city’s council’s Director of Sustainable Development was to keen to point out this was the whole of Nottingham and it’s professional community, not just his local authority’s boundaries) in a bid to become the next city of World Design Capital, which in 2008 is currently Turin.

Mr Green solicited our answers on a postcard – but scant was revealed at this stage of what emphasis the city’s bid would take – or indeed what the benefits would be to us as business owners and practitioners (or will we, like the City of Culture bid, be in position to leverage in more European cash?).

Further probing on the World Design Capital website says the award is for:

“The vision of the World Design Capital project is to promote and encourage the use of design to further the social, economic and cultural development of the world’s cities.

The designation provides a distinctive opportunity for the selected city to showcase their accomplishments in attracting and promoting creative industries, as well as demonstrate how government and industry work in concert with educational institutions, designers and its citizens to revitalise and reinveint the urban environment.”

A laudable aim, but initially my thoughts were:

1. What design industry?

2. Is the city actually offering any systematic, public support to the design sector – or just riding PR off the back of its well-coutured coat tails?

Spot the cynical consultant. Then after some reflection, and a chat with the lovely Debbie Bryan, a designer of exquisite knit wear and booches and resident of creative incubator The Hive, Nottingham is indeed brimming with design success stories – from pioneering computer games developers, great branding, web and design agencies of national calibre (like Souk Digital and Studio Output), a raft of homeware designers and most significantly the fashion industry, put on the map by local guru Mr Paul Smith – who says publicly he is backing the bid alongside other bid brand Speedo - now spinning off a clutch of gifted textiles, fashion and designer-maker names – many graduates from the great design courses at Nottingham Trent University.

Indeed, gatecrashing the fasionista club RSViP night after, quite a show of quality design people were showcasing there work in fashion, homeware and art.

Yet for me the buck stops at how the city (and region) is supporting and promoting its creative and design sector – and thus I fail to see how Nottingham could make a shortlist, despite a talent pool up with the best of England’s bigger cities.

As a starter-for-ten in the nearby, not especially design noteworthy Birmingham, the city supports the Plus design festival and Rhubarb Rhubarb international photography exhibition, alongside newer initiatives like Hello Digital digital film and media showcase. Not to mention Fused mag’s affordable art markets at the Custard Factory and a plethora of media, craft and arts events and exhibitions in between. Many are run commercially or altruistically – yet many are given some seed (or bush-like in some cases) finance or marketing clout from public institutes like Business Link, Arts Council, Marketing Birmingham and Birmingham City Council.

The Council’s official press release on the city’s bid state’s we need to consider several areas for the bid, including: our proposed programme of events, design in schools, regeneration and architecture. This seems quite geared towards architecture and the built environment to me, and as such perhaps Nottingham has developing some interesting work here in recent years.

Someone recently commented to me that Nottingham city officials expects the creative industries to happen without investing in it. Big capital bids like developing Broadway cinema, New Art Exchange and Nottingham Contemporary art gallery run contrary to this, but from my own experience of working in creative regeneration, projects need to be about much more than buildings and institutes, revenues need to flow through to support the fine grain of the creative city – which includes public spaces, networks, events, showcases, training and business support – either through European funding, regional funding, local funding from business rates or capital-turned-into-revenue endowments like the Bristol+ Creative Industries endowement fund I helped to set up with Bristol’s Watershed Media Centre in 2007 (though I’m disappointed that for a digital insitute they seem to be suprisingly unaccountable online as to how the £300K annual revenue is being spent or can be accessed – any further heads-up on the latest greatly received in comments).

And in this respect I fear Nottingham is many furlongs behind other English, let alone European cities. However, I do think events like this are important in starting to galavanise the design community – in all its depths, shapes and sizes – and wider creative business sector to discuss our own strengths, opportunities and maybe do something about promoting it ourselves.

And who knows, perhaps Nottingham Council will put their money where their mouth is and commit to a significant event or series of activities to promote local alongside international design talent and start to put Nottingham on the international map for design – and with it attracting some very necessary tourism and inward investment.

What do you think are our odds for success?

Amplified 08 – connecting the dots in the social media maze

Yesterday I went along, like the rest of the Twiterrati, to Amplified 08 at the HQ of NESTA. Amplified is the new brain child of NESTA and Toby Moores (founder of Sony game Buzz whom I recently interviewed for a fascinating piece ‘in the mind of the serial disruptive innovator’ for a project for Creative Sheffield). It bills itself as a ‘network of networks’ that connects people from around the country who are developing leading-edge thinking in using social media technologies.

Around 200 people were there from a surprisingly broad range of disciplines – teachers, media producers, techno geeks, citizen journalists - a mix of ages and personalities but with a strong male bias. A fairly lose structure of discussions made for a somewhat chaotic space – having been to the OneMedia open space conference recently I found the sheer volume of people here a bit unwieldy to really have useful conversations – but in general the spirit and the ideas were full of vibrancy and excitement to connect and share ideas, and it was nice to put some names to faces and meet new folks outside of my usual digital media bubble.

The sessions were as diverse as the attendees, but tended to focus on changing the world a bit by changing a bit of the world, and what web tools can do to enable that. I popped into quite a few – some were really useful like Online Video, others a bit unstructured and meandering so I think it pays for session curators to be a bit better prepared to present their ideas to help focus the discussion. There’s probably a learning curve here and some delegate education needed on how to successful do open space or semi-curated events like this so people get the best out of it. We were all told to tweet after each session so there are heaps of tweets you can trawl through here.

On the whole I found it probably a bit too ahead-of-the-curve for my own more commercially focused practice (yes, me is un-cool consultant) – and sometimes I wonder if it’s best to go to ‘what you know’ where you can contribute and learn more or to throw yourself into the least relevant and known subject to see what you can learn. I did a bit of both – maybe at the next one I’ll throw myself into the deep end and go to more of the blogging-will-change-the-world instead of is-home-taping-killing-music sessions I usually choose.

I bumped into Toby then next morning at Tuttle London – many of the Amplified Individuals were somewhat muted after a night of boozing. Whereas I went over to a church hall in Leytonstone to film a pop video dressed as a school mistress (I kid you not – coming soon!) til the wee hours instead. Toby says the next step is to hold regular networks across the country to start to connect the dots – with sessions in the Midlands, South Coast, London, the North and maybe other places too. Hopefully the Amplified network will somehow will feed into my own plans to improve the connectivity and networking of creative thinkers in my hometown of Nottingham.

Future of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, Nov 20

De Montfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies, lead by the rather wonderful Sue Thomas, a visionary digital narratives Professor, hosted another conference shindig this week focused – the Future of Creative Technologies. Quite a few big name academic speakers here, like Lev Manovich and Howard Rheingold.

Sadly, I found the debate this time just too academic and too technology focused rather than focusing on the aspirations and business opportunities of new technologies, which was a shame as the IOCT seminar in June on the future of social media was really quite visionary. Perhaps not for me – I was suprised that the delegates were almost entirely academics, and mainly from De Montfort itself thus not particularly great for networking.

A few take outs:

Content Workshop

Sue Thomas discussed her theories around ‘transliteracy’ – literacy across multiple channels, platforms and time scales beginning with Socrates who believed writing was an aid not to memory but to reminiscence. Transliteracy looks at how networks and individuals connect using different forms of media, but is also concerned with the ‘gaps’ between the networks where people are not connected to any specific groups. There is a role here perhaps for ‘amplified individuals’ (yeuch term…loudmouths perhaps?) to be allowed through the door to join the dots between groups, like old inter-tribe rituals.

Our attempts at drawing our own networks were hilariously messy and diverse – mine had arrows everywhere, linked by cities or ‘objects of interest’ as I believe all networks and groups of people are. We discussed that information supply isn’t as much a ‘data overload’ as a filter failure – we need guidance from authorative and trusted sources in our network.

This was taken up by Jim Hendler‘s talk on Web 3.0 – semantic search based around creating data sets and open APIs to allow collaboration, giving the example of a user-created wine recommendation list mixing up catalogues of wine with guidance. Or DVPedia - a mashup of Napster data on song and artist titles in a wiki format. In an era when more pictures are already uploaded to Flickr than all catalogued objects in all of the world’s museums, we are now creating an open archive of billions of cultural objects – but to be useful they need to be well catalogued (particularly through better meta-tagging) and openly available for re-use.

Howard Rheingold‘s presentation on the Social Media Classroom I think deserve study for another day or at least a homework class. He is developing an online classroom resource and teaching guide to enable teachers to teach participatory media literacy – which usually just happens after school. The pictures of a huge hall full of kids on laptop is awe-inspiring; sadly I think the reality given limited ICT budgets in British state schools means that chalk and learn teaching is likely to continue for some decades to come.

EM Media Producers Forum 20th Nov – Uncovering Digital Distribution

It’s unusual that an event on cross-platform and digital distribution takes place on my doorstep, and more so in the very lovely surroundings of The Walk Cafe, Nottingham’s creative-friendly answer to The Ritz for tea and cake served with a knowing old fashioned charm. And so to The Producers Forum, part of a series of events aimed at East Midlands film, tv and digital producers organised by screen agency EM Media.

A gathering of a few dozen producers – mainly film types but a few advertisers, games developers and consultants too – discussed the changing nature of distribution in the digital age. Lisa Trnovski (2am Films) and David Shear (Revolver) discussed their new horror Brit Flick Mum and Dad – apparently the first film to be released simultaneously on all formats – cinema, TV, DVD, digital download and pay-per-view -(although I seem to remember the same claims levied about Road to Guantanamo) which has caused some consternation amongst indie cinemas who see digital as cannibalising their pay-to-see local business – including the present Chair of Nottingham’s Broadway cinema.

Shear claims the strategy makes sense for the indie distributor in allowing one ‘hit’ to promote the film in all formats to achieve significant scale from a small promotion budget – and allows the producer to get paid quicker. Landmark deals from big studios like Harry Potter‘s simultaneous cinema launch with Sky on pay-per-view (ONLY $50!) are closing the typical 16 week cinema to DVD/digital window. Yet it’s small indies who are able, partly through necessity, to push the envelope in developing innovative and immediate forms of distribution – particularly for niche audience films.

Up next, Joel Kemp from Outso, a true success story of redundant ex-Climax studio developers making good by moving into outsourcing and recently the creation of virtual worlds, including Home for Sony Playstation. MixM8 is their own in development virtual world for music, where artists can create fan zones, give live concerts, and even create unique MP3 tracks and virtual items for sale. They’ve already got the ultra-hip Scroobius Pip and War Child on board. This is an exciting development and opens up genre and sector specific activities within virtual worlds (which are currently something of a scrum ground for unfocused selling of tit-tat and hard to target consumers) which is quite possibly the (long-term) future of social networking.

I was somewhat disappointed by the general discussion from the panel (which also included Michel Peters from Content Republic, Jason Burrows from Together Agency and Suzanne Alizart from EM Media) which took a somewhat narrow film-maker focus as to the limited possibilities of self-distribution. It’s a subject I’m currently researching for my Masters, but Michel Peters in particularly adamantly believed there was little possibility in producers to self-distribute and aggregation was the way forward – believing that even all the major UK cinema chains working together would be unlikely to yield a profitable digital distribution business as a web-based model needs to have global scale and negotiate at least rights across a continent.

This certainly seems to have been the case so far with the music industry where major retailers have failed to launch viable digital businesses. Yet I felt the panel failed to grasp that digital does mean direct contact with your customers, where aggregating data can be a long-play but can lead to greater independence and sustainability. I certainly know from my days at an indie TV producer than we were able to sustain a seven figure e-commerce business through early investment in online through creating our own community.

Jason Burrows believed the challenge is maintaining interest in the ‘information economy’ where the new buzz and product finds it harder than ever to get noticed – guerilla tactics are needed to reach the multi-tasking generations.

Andrew Cooper, chair of Broadway, believes we need to capitalise on the ‘zeitgeist’ Nottingham now has for film makers – where some producers claim they can noticed more becuase they are from Nottingham, in much the same way bands from Sheffield benefit from the ripple effect of The Arctic Monkeys et al.

I found the discussion high level and useful, but the network needs to start bringing together other senior media practitioners other than film people to move the discussion up a gear to get really interesting.

But of course, most importantly, cake…

Em Media cake

EM media cake going...

EM Media cake going..going...

Ultraband – high speed broadband for Nottingham city?

Nottingham – World Design Capital 2012?

Future of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, Nov 20

Content Workshop

EM Media Producers Forum 20th Nov – Uncovering Digital Distribution

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