Archive for the ‘Virtual Birmingham’ Category

The dates for the Birmingham Open Weekend 2010, part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, have been confirmed as 23 - 25 July 2010.

As part of Cultural Olympiad, Say Hello, Aston Pride, the BBC and Digital Birmingham will be on hand to showcase the Digital Time Capsule where you, the people of Birmingham, will be able to record and upload your memorable moment in the form of a video, an image and/or audio file etc.

Come and join the team in Victoria Square on Friday 23 July 2010 from 10am - 4pm and be a part of Birmimgham’s digital journey!

Hello Digital is back! Birmingham’s first digital festival returns this week with its one day Business Conference - 21st October 2009 @ Millennium Point. Want your business to be more competitive in this digital world? Then you can’t miss it.

More - #HD09

It’s taken me a while to write about Timetric after I saw Andrew Walkingshaw present their software with Emma Mulqueeny at Local Gov Camp last month.  Essentially, Timetric is a set of web services which allows you to do a number of nifty things with datasets.

Yeah, really.

As their name suggests their raison d’etre is “graphing, tracking and comparing the movements of data over time”. Which is a subject both interesting and, like a lot of statistics, much abused. One of the things that I really like about Timetric is that they reference the source data they construct their graphs from. More - Timetric: Letting you tell a story

Birmingham Photospace is a bunch of people volunteering their time because they want to establish a space for photography in the city.  Earlier in the year they organised the Anything but Selfridges competition to find an image that “best represents the Birmingham we live and work in”.  So long as it wasn’t of Selfridges.

On Saturday just gone they held their first public event, a Flashswap at the Vaad Gallery in the Custard Factory down in Digbeth.  The premise of the event was that you brought some prints along that you were happy to swap and “hung” them in the gallery (there was Blu-Tak provided).  In the early evening we went back and viewed the exhibition, then on the word we all went and placed a sticker against the prints that we wanted to take home with us. More - Flashswap event

Google Maps

As someone with an unfortunate combination of a terrible sense of direction and the complacency to assume I’ll somehow find the way (not to mention the common male trait of being reluctant to ask for directions), online maps have saved me many an hour of aimless wandering around unfamiliar areas. Any tool that helps me to spec a place out must, then, be a Good Thing. More - I can see your house from here!

Logo for Spotify

It seems as though the coming-of-age for any new Web 2.0 start up nowadays is its first security scare.  Spotify, the new online music sharing application, had theirs a week or two ago when they announced that a flaw was discovered back in December which could expose users’ passwords.  The company have reassured paying customers that their bank details are still safe.

I’ve been enjoying using Spotify for a while now, after jumping on the LastFM bandwagon a little bit late.  The features that make it distinct are that you do not own the music, just the access to it; its free, although a subscription removes the advertising and it has a large store of music with blindingly quick searching and access to the tunes. More - Have you been Spotified?

Twestival , or Twitter Festival, was an idea which originated in London last year.  Then, people who knew each other online through their Twitter communities organised a social event to raise money for local homeless charities.  Yesterday, Twestival events were held around the world to benefit Charity: Water a non-profit organisation funding small scale water projects in developing world countries.

Birmingham Twestival was held at Poppy Red in The Arcadian.  It was a very well attended event which has raised £1519.  It also shows that when people meet online nowadays it has become a lot more natural to then meet up in real life, something that has also been evident in Birmingham with the success of the Social Media Cafe. More - Birmingham Twestival

2008 saw a lot of movement around the opening up of public data and particularly in relation to location based services using that data.  We’d already seen some positive signs with the commission of the Power of Information report back in 2007 and last year saw the innovative Show Us A Better Way competition.

It was very interesting to see that all five ideas which Show Us A Better Way are hoping to help develop are ones which use geographic data, especially as there have been so many issues with public sector bodies “misusing” Ordinance Survey data and derived data.  Anybody interested in this would find it useful to take a look at the Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign.  Of course, a cynic might think that the whole competition was devised to apply pressure to open up OS data to public bodies. More - 2009 - A Public Sector Data Explosion?