creativity & innovation

Today’s Digital Consultant Links for December 8th

These are my links for December 8th from 11:47 to 12:57:

Creative Entrepreneurs e-book – Interesting publication about creating a 'global microbrand' as a creative entrepreneur – focusing on your key passions and creating partnerships to make that happen. The first half is personal pre-amble, the second half has a few good take-out nuggets of wisdom.
Give Your Marketing a Nudge: Exclusive Interview with Nudge Social Media – Not very revealed but useful interview with Nudge, social media consultancy, on their predictions for 2010. Building Facebook apps and games still a sure fire tactic for increasing awareness, engagement and also sales. Includes a few recommended networks to target for different countries and interests.

These are my links for December 3rd through December 4th:

Crowdsourcing business documents – Spudaroo is yet another crowd-sourcing website, but this crosses contest with Elance, by asking writers to submit articles, blogs and business plans against a client brief and the client selects a 'winner' to pay a set fee too. As a professional writer I worry about this trend: the marketplace is great for clients, but exploits out of work freelancers by getting them to complete work they are likely to not get paid for and making a skilled profession into an 'X Factor' style competition.
GooTube mulls fee-TV streams – Looks like Google's YouTube are looking to cut a deal to charge folks $2 to stream a TV show fresh off telly just once – yet the iTunes model is a download-to-own model for a similar price. Four years on since I last worked in IPTV, it's the old chestnut again of DRM and how people want to access and keep content. My bet is that the free-to-stream is the only model viewers will stomach (unless for 'premium' content like football matches), but download-to-own, following the DVD model, will have some legs – but maybe only very short legs.

These are my links for November 24th through November 26th:

Accidental Leaders programme – Yorkshire Launch – Inspiral, a creative and digital consultancy I work with, have teamed up with Swedish creative innovation leaders Hyper Island to bring their Accidental Leaders & Managers programme to Yorkshire businesses. This is high end specialist training for growing businesses (they've also been delivering the programme in the North West) that has been highly recommended from reports I've heard. They're doing launch events 9-11th December featuring Swedish nibble, yum!
Hundreds of media professionals awarded TV multiplatform training windfall – Skillset are offering training bursaries worth up to £800 for a whole range of courses relating to cross platform production, financing and management – many of them geared towards TV and film producers.

These are my links for November 23rd from 19:10 to 20:14:

Entrepreneurs: Stop Innovating, Start Minnovating – Forget big scale change and disruptive innovation, start 'minnovating' small ordinary changes to make big business differences
North West: Europe’s Second Largest Media Hub – Obviously a wishful thinking rather than reality title (and with an odd soft porn-esque cover), this brochure gives an overview in case studies and numbers of the North West creative sector, with an emphasis on the investment and all those opportunities that the funders keenly hope will come out of MediaCity:UK.