Last night, four Numiko girls went to Leeds’ first ‘Girl Geek Dinner‘. After a bit of networking and lots of finger food, we settled down for the talks, the first of which was from Girl Geek founder Sarah Blow - via a video post. In the post, Sarah challenged all Geeks to think about how we can change the technology industry to encourage more Girl and Guy Geeks into the industry; taking into account the disputes between what people consider IT and ICT to be, and what it actually is.
To inject a level of science into the debate, Sarah Blow went to a primary school in London to ask the kids what they thought IT was. The answers in summary were that they thought it was basic word processing and perhaps a little programming. There was no comprehension of such things as Facebook, Myspace, their computer games etc, having anything to do with IT.
A brief discussion at Numiko threw up that when people think IT, they usually think number crunching, and, mostly due to they way they were taught maths at school, they write IT off as a potential career as they’ve been put off by previous experience and lack of awareness as to what IT actually is.
It was clear that syllabuses (syllabi?) in schools should be adjusted to take account of the changing online digital and interactive worlds and the career opportunities presented as a result - summed up by Clare who said she would never have connected the job she does now (web developer) to anything that was taught at school, including IT.
The second speaker - who was there in person which was a bonus - was Lydia Machell who ‘was inspired by early ringtone formulas’. Needless to say we were a little hesitant, but it turned out that early ringtones had in fact inspired her to develop something which transcribes standard print notation into Braille for blind musicians. I can’t seem to find anything on Google (after a very quick search) worth linking to, but if you want to conduct your own search try ‘Prima Vista Music’.
The last and final speaker was Lorna Mitchell who encouraged us to ask questions, and be proud, not scared by being representative of the minority.
All in all, a great evening with inspiring and informative speakers!
Numiko worked with Lion Television and the BBC to deliver the online side of their new flagship project Britain from Above. The BBC1, 2 and 4 show features some amazing footage, visualisations and insights into the workings of the nation. We especially like the GPS tracking of air lanes, mobiles and taxis…. Check the site out!
Also quietly revolutionary is the bleeding edge functionality to be able to take BBC videos with you from the site and embed them yourself.
Numiko has been nominated for ‘Digital Agency of the Year’ at the DADI Awards 2008!
The DADI Awards are open to all digital agencies, creative agencies, media owners or clients who work within the digital field, who are based outside of London’s M25, so we’re really chuffed to be in the running for this well recognised award.
The winner will be announced on 31st October at the Royal Armouries in Leeds, so once again, keep your fingers crossed for us!
To find out more about the DADI Awards, click here
Speaking of awards nominations, Numiko have been shortlisted for the Digital Agency of the Year Award at the DADI Awards 2008. The shortlist was decided on via a ‘lively client/peer nomination process’ which is exciting. Shortlisted nominees are announced on Friday 1st August so keep your fingers crossed for us! Click here to find out more about the DADI Awards…
…have been out for ages, but I’ve only just spotted them. There are some wicked ideas there, and loads of really clever visuals. See them here, and keep an eye out for the Phil Collins Kit Kat one, it’s great…
New promo for the upcoming Kubrick season on More 4 - I saw it on TV the other day, and was really impressed. It’s one long tracking shot through a recreation of the set and cast of The Shining, from the POV of Kubrick himself. Really cool attention to detail, even down to shooting the whole thing with one of Kubrick’s favourite lenses; it’s one of those things you can watch over and over again and keep finding new things…
And of course, no post about The Shining would be complete without a link to Shining - rom-com re-edit goodness!
MocoNews have posted a summarisation of a report claiming that “Digital and mobile advertising revenues are expected to increase 12-fold to about $150 billion worldwide between 2002 to 2011.”
This has been nicely spliced together with a report on ‘Young mobile users’ of which “…35 percent of 16- to-35-year-olds would use more ad-funded multimedia messaging services (MMS) if those services were offered for free or at a discount.”
With figures like “18-35 demographic group currently consumes 56 percent of mobile media content” it’s easy to see why so many marketeers are desperate to crack mobile marketing in this category. The idea of sea saw marketing, where users pay for content by accepting advertisements alongside it, is something of the norm for the iGeneration. So does it work? Are we be able to create a meaningful relationships between brands and consumers simple by offering loyalty rewards that the consumer actually wants? Is this the holy grail of permission marketing, or is it simply just more noise? I guess we’ll have to wait until we get to the crazy Arthur C. Clarke world of 2010 before we really find out.
Within Numiko we spend a lot of time collaborating on documents in groups, such as specifications, task lists and research docs and proposals. I know a few people have raised issues internally with collaborating on MS docs.
We have a central file server but opening documents and being met with a ‘this document is locked for editing by Mr X’ is a bit annoying. (We don’t have a Mr X at Numiko, although I wish we did!)
In the past have dabbled with sharepoint to allow collaboration on documents but it seemed slow, and for what we actually wanted it seemed a bit of overkill.
Whilst Google docs offers a kind of answer for simple docs, there’s some issues with then getting the doc back to the office format and there’s still something that make me slightly nervous about working completely online. Our internet connection is pretty solid, but you know what I mean…
Microsoft have launched a beta of office Live Work Spaces which we will be trying out:
It looks pretty good for what we need- multi-authored docs that can be edited and shared from one place.
Also surrounding collaboration and sharing of documents I’ve being falling in love with Onenote. It’s a really good, well thought through application, yes written by Microsoft!
When it comes to real-time collaboration, think a bit like a document jamming session Onenote rocked with its ‘livesharing’ session. Me and Tom used it at the BBC Innovation Labs and it was great to pull thoughts, ideas, links, images together in one place.
Neil and I went down to @Media in London for Thursday and Friday. And it was good, despite the slightly weird hotel we stayed in, complete with paintings of slightly scary naked women in the hall.At the conference, meanwhile, there was a good line-up of people to present or speak on panels, and between us we saw quite a few really interesting presentations. And my feeling that all presentations sould contain at least one lolcat were reaffirmed. Read all about it below the fold.
