Posts Tagged ‘Digital Birmingham’

2010/11 was a busy year for the Digital Birmingham team where we delivered key objectives within our four key working areas; Succeed Economically, Sustainability & Climate Change, Digital Participation & Engagement and Raising the City’s profile, as well as the office move of course! 

Please click on the document below to view our project highlights from 2010/11 and also a snapshot into the 2011/12 priorities.

We thank all of our partners and colleagues for all their support in 2010/11 – we look forward to working together and forging new relationships in the year to come.

The Digital Birmingham Team have a new home!

Following an organisational move into the Development Directorate of Birmingham City Council, the team are now based at 1 Lancaster Circus, Birmingham. B4 7DG.

This repositioning is good news for the team, providing greater alignment to the City’s economic, sustainability and digital inclusion agendas. This will enable us to play a key role in integrating the opportunities and benefits of digital technologies into the city wide and LEP strategies, policies and delivery plans.

Safer Internet Day is organised by INSAFE in February to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world. Each year hundreds of events are organised to raise awareness about online safety issues.

For more information about SID, how to get involved and set up your own event, please click here.

A European project designed to monitor and change the behaviour of households with regard to their energy usage has clocked up some remarkable results in Birmingham.

Over a twelve week period, the homes taking part in the trial, run by Digital Birmingham and Family Housing Association, saved over 10 tonnes of CO2, with some households saving around £35 per month in electricity costs.

After monitoring their results for just one week, the average household in the Birmingham trial cut their energy usage by eight per cent. Research at the end of the 12 week trial showed that the number of people always turning off their lights when they leave a room, unplugging chargers from the mains, never leaving appliances on standby and boiling just enough water for one person when they use a kettle had, on average, doubled over the period.

To read the full press release, please click here.

Birmingham’s ‘Looking Local‘ service developed over four years ago by Digital Birmingham, is part of a nationwide initiative to make local authorities easier ot access and is alreadt available via interactive digital TV, PC, Wii, online and via standard web-enabled mobile phones.

Birmingham City Council services such as housing, waste collection, street reporting and transport can now be accessed via an iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, with the launch of a brand new free app.

The new free-to-download app gives residents the functionality of the TV and web applications, with options including finding out about bus and train services and searching for jobs and health information as well as Council services.

Birmingham’s Looking Local TV service, available on Sky and Virgin Media, is the country’s most popular with 126,000 hits per month and a number of unique features including online school admissions.

Here’s how you can access Looking Local:

- via the dedicated iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch app: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/looking-local/id409806455?mt=8
- on web-enabled mobile phone at www.lookinglocal.gov.uk
- on Virgin, press the interactive button, select ‘News and Info’ and then select ‘Looking Local’
- on Sky, go to channel 539 and press RED
- on the Wii or PC, insert www.lookinglocal.gov.uk into the browser

Silver Surfers’ Day is the biggest, national campaign to promote use of digital technologies by older people. It is run by Digital Unite and was started in 2002, this is the ninth annual event.

On Silver Surfers’ Day Digital Unite support people and organisations all over the UK to open their doors and give local older people a taste of what the digital world has to offer them at a Silver Surfers’ Day Event.

Anyone can become an Event Holder – if you’re already working with older people, if you are passionate about supporting them to be digitally literate, then this is an event for you!

For more information and to find an event near you, please go to the Digital Unite webpage.

Arif Latif, Donato Esposito, Anna Latif

Digital Birmingham’s ‘Digital Business’ campaign, in partnership with the Birmingham Post, was set up last year to support a business to improve its standing in the community by improving its communication channels, use social networking sites to advertise and get feedback from its customers and attract new ones.

More – Digital Busy-ness!

We invite event management companies to tender for the Beyond 2010 event on 20-21 October, at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham. The full invitation is below with all the contact details you need.

More – Beyond 2010: Invitation to Tender

Another successful event organised by Digital Birmingham saw 50 local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) explore how using social media and web 2.0 could help them stimulate demand.

More – Businesses learn how to stimulate demand using online chatter