Results tagged “Birmingham” from Birmingham Post - Business Blog

Welcome policy makers, journalists, influencers, opinion formers....in short, everyone that the City of Birmingham has always wanted to get to see our city........and love it.

Well here they are, thousands and thousands of them. The Conservative Conference is indeed causing excitement.

And I know that Birmingham will not let itself down. And here is a countdown of some of the greatest things about this city which they will love:

1. The bill will not arrive before you have finished your coffee after dinner

2. The ICC is actually a world class venue

3. Authentic Baltis

4. If you ask someone for directions, people will be happy to help

Ok over to you, what else will they love?

After writing a couple of months ago about Creative Republic I thought it about time I went along to an event. So last night I showed up at the Michael Wolff Masterclass in the so-new-the-paint's-still-wet Fazeley Studios in Digbeth. Wolff himself had to pull out at the last minute which was a shame but in his place we had Stef Lewandowski taking us through a presentation he entitled 'Birmingham Ambient Creativity Audit'.

Actually, the northern team might just scrape through on penalties - but you be the ref.

I started this little bit of research because Gordon has brought his Cabinet to Birmingham today.

It should be excellent news. But how well placed is the city's PR machine to reap the benefit?

Given that ninety percent or more of journalists will start their research on the internet, I thought I'd check out the critical websites...

If Birmingham City Council is busy briefing the media about our great city on the back of the Cabinet meeting, it doesn't show on the web site. That's a great pity.

There is a sort of silver lining - in that our great northern rival doesn't fare much better.

Actually I can hear some of you, particularly those of you that are on the same social networks as me or that I happen upon as result of my work. I can hear you loud and clear and you've got lots to say about this city and how it values or doesn't value the arts and why what you do matters. What I can't hear is the voice of the organisation that's been set up to represent you collectively. Or to put it another way: what's the point of Creative Republic? If they're the voice of the creative sector aiming to make it "stronger, louder and more effective" then why does it all seem a bit quiet out there.

The library here at Birmingham City University is a model of efficiency nowadays. It emails you on the day that your books are supposed to go back and then lets you renew them online when you realise that you haven't looked at said books since the day you got them out. So it is with The 1952 City of Birmingham Development Plan.

This is as dry a document as you could hope to find. I got it out last November as I was pondering what earlier incarnations of the Birmingham Big City Plan had looked like. Given that the inner ring road is now widely recognised as a mistake, where's the document that outlines why it was needed in the first place. How clearly was the case made for it, how emotive was the language used? But since late last year there seems to have been little public discussion of the new plan as Stef Lewandowski has noted on this site. No wonder I'd let it drift.

But I've done the reading on this now and despite the rather plain, austere layout (this was 1952 after all - at the end of the Age of Austerity) the 1952 plan is by far the more exciting document. In fact it has what the new charter document lacks, it has tangible facts to get stuck into and major post-war problems to deal with. If you like, the new one's all theory where the 1952 plan is all practice.

Sometimes the longer you spend in a creative job, the harder it becomes to actually keep on innovating. Over time, you find that your ideas are just becoming rehashed versions of things that have been done before or that you've become so entrenched in your day-to-day routines that you just can't remember how to think outside the box any more.

What's more, because everyone in your industry is most likely reading the same magazines as you, browsing the same Sunday papers, watching the same TV shows, and exploring the same websites, chances are that even when something does spark off an original idea, a dozen other people have just seen the same thing and are now beavering away on projects pretty damn near identical to yours.

So what the hell do you do about it? Jack it all in and work in a factory? Cryogenically freeze yourself until a time when your hackneyed ideas suddenly seem ironically retro? Bury your head in the sand and try to ignore the whimpered cries of your inner muse as it slowly shrivels up and dies?

No. Just get yourself lost.

Not, I'll admit, the headline I had envisaged when I said that I would do a report on what happened at MIPIM, but this is a remarkably gossip-free follow up to my previous blog.

Instead, here's a genuine statistic for you. We are apparently the 55th most liveable city in the world. And don't just take my word for it. Mercer Human Resource Consulting (who appear to specialise in placing international executives in the city of their dreams) have done the research.

So, and taking some names from the list which meet the (admittedly arbitrary) test of "places where the Pembles might like to go on holiday", Brum is already a better place to live than LA, Rome, Miami, Hong Kong, Prague, Budapest (which managed to survive Mrs P's hen weekend last summer, so is clearly made of stern stuff), Dubai, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth.

Now, if I am honest, and despite being a huge fan of Brum, I think that's already a pretty remarkable list. But, my surprise notwithstanding, the independent experts at Mercer reckon our overall quality of life is better than that in some pretty fantastic cities.

And here's the ambitious bit. At MIPIM, Councillor Mike Whitby announced Brum's plan to hit number 25 on the list. Assuming everyone else stays in the same place in the table, this would mean that rich executives are going to turn down their postings in Dublin, Honolulu, San Francisco, Adelaide, Brisbane, Paris and New York (as well as that large conurbation on the banks of the River Thames) in favour of Broad Street, Brindleyplace and the Balti Triangle. To support this goal, there are plans to invest a further £17 billion in our city, including £193 million on the new library alone, and all of the investments are to have a "distinctive Brummie feel" (whatever that is).

So, and with apologies for ending with a question, what do we all think? Is it a realisable goal or pure pie in the sky? Speaking personally, I would love it to be the former.

Firstly, I want to point out that a proper digest of this year's SXWX interative festival is in the pipeline and secondly I want to apologise for this rather epic blog post.

The thing is I really want to convey what struck me as one of the biggest revelations at this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas: Technology accelerates gossip so fast it's out of date before you even get to blog it.

My epiphany came during the now infamous Mark Zuckerberg keynote event where the Facebook CEO became the subject of probably one of the worst-received interviews in recent history at the hands of Newsweek journalist Sarah Lacy.

Many of you who follow tech news on the web would have seen the video clips of the disasterous keynote on Youtube and many of you may be wondering what all of the fuss was about. We'll nothing I have seen online conveys the sheer hostility of the crowd that day and this was something I really wanted to convey in my blog.

Unfortunately I was hamstrung by two factors. Firstly, I was caught up in a wave of mob hysteria that amplified this barely remarkable event into something approaching a war-crimes trial. Secondly, my decision to delay writing my post until the next morning meant that the legion of Twitterers, live bloggers and industry gossip-mongers present at the interview had practically burnt the hype out before Lacy had even left the stage.

So much so that I decided it wasn't worth publishing the post after all.

In hindsight, however I thought it would be pretty interesting to revisit it now the storm has blown over just as an example of the wacky zeitgeist that swept the blogosphere over one 24 hour period in March 2008.

Well, that's day one of the South by Southwest interactive festival under my belt and what a day it was. I sat in on some great sessions, met one of my digital heroes , interviewed an absolute new media legend (video to follow) and partied with a load of robots in a field at the Make Magazine party.

In fact I did so much stuff that I can't even begin to blog it all, but two sessions in particular struck a chord with the thing's I've been working on recently in broadcast new media.

A casual visitor to Chez Lockey tonight would be forgiven for thinking that I was in the middle of clearing up after a major break-in.

In fact I'm in the midst of an epic packing session in preparation for Friday morning when I'm due to hop in a taxi at sparrow's fart a.m. bound for BHX where a big shiny plane is scheduled to whisk me off to sunny Austin, Texas.

No, I'm not about to give up my new-found love of blogging to join the rodeo, I am in fact off to the South by Southwest interactive festival (or SXSWi for those of you with a vowel aversion), the biggest, geekiest tech-fest on the planet.

And in the true spirit of interactivity, you get to have a say in what I see and do at the conference as well as following the action via an ambitious experiment in collective reporting.

A few months ago, I attended a briefing for a broadcaster's new commissioning round. Representing a particularly progressive department in a notoriously forward-thinking channel, the commissioners were adamant that they were going to hammer the multiplatform message home and decided to invite an equal number of traditional TV indies and new media production companies to come along and explore how they could combine their efforts.

I think they were hoping to usher in a shining new era where telly luvvies and the new geek army would fall hopelessly in love with each other and skip off merrily into a brave new world of hybrid media together.

What they got instead was more akin to the Sharks and the Jets from West Side Story.

Hi, I'm Nick and for the past 12 months I've been occupying the strange twilight zone that exists between traditional TV and the worldwide web.

Having begun my career in television development, churning out daft ideas for TV shows on a daily basis, a year ago I landed a job in the New Media department of a TV Production company and suddenly found myself catapulted headlong into the middle of a digital revolution. Broadcast television and the web are colliding and intertwining like never before and, as a New Media producer, I guess it's my job to try and weld the two bits together as seamlessly as possible.

The thing is that's easier said than done.