Mando Group supported by Vision+Media are offering a fully paid traineeship. This is a great chance for coders with existing skills ASP .NET, C#, CSS and XHTML, but less than 12 months’ prior paid experience in the industry to work with one of Liverpool’s leading digital companies….

FACT’s commercial services arm has launched its new website at www.mites.org.uk. Despite their excellent brand rep and formidable track record of FACT, we’re all left slightly underwhelmed by the lack of content.

Two of New Mind’s websites, www.visitlancashire.com and www.visitwinchester.co.uk have been shortlisted in the ‘Best Use of Social Media’ category for the 2010 Travolution Awards.

Leading Liverpool-based web design agency Mando Group has rebranded and re-launched its new corporate website with a radical departure from the corporate cool.

After the design community’s reaction to the London 2012 logo, the mascot was always going to be a difficult job. But UK agency Iris has just unveiled not one, but two characters for the Olympic and Paralympic Games: Wenlock and Mandeville. Both are clearly of the digital age….

New business secretary Vince Cable has given the strongest hint yet that “popular” regional development agencies (RDAs) in the north and Midlands could survive the raft of public sector cuts due to be announced by the Treasury on Monday…

Liverpool design and publishing agency The Design Foundry has reported three account wins. The agency has been appointed to look after the PR of bespoke central heating provider Warmer Heating, which has bases in Merseyside and the North East..

Liverpool PR agency Active Profile has announced a 54 per cent rise in first quarter sales after a series of new contract wins. The company, which is run by Insider 42 under 42 alumnus Anna Heyes, has secured new work from the likes of Liverpool Science Park, Mason Owen and EA Technology Ventures during the period.

News from netimperative today on the collapse of London-based i-level: one of the UKs largest independent digital marketing agencies, which has gone into administration after losing a large contract for government advertising…..

Five websites have been shortlisted for the Tasty Website award at this year’s Big Chip Awards. The panel of judges set aside the sites they considered to have the ‘wow factor’….

On Thursday 6th May the Roses Advertising Awards 2010 will be taking place in Manchester and for anyone who can’t make the event we will be broadcast live from the event.

Web development and marketing agency E-blueprint has been tasked with building and managing the Liverpool Innovation Park’s (LIP) online brand.

Warrington start-up business Qualoria, which specialises in producing software to connect research, development and commercial organisations, was officially launched at the 2010 Bio International Conference in Chicago on Monday….

Liverpool PR agency Think Publicity is to launch its Faces promotional staffing agency in London, six months after setting up the Liverpool operation. Faces provides promotional street crew, hospitality staff and leafleters to support any campaign and has so far worked with clients including Grosvenor and the Isla Gladstone Conservatory..

Animation production company Carbon Digital, which last month received a £30,000 investment from creative and digital support organisation North West Vision and Media, has relocated to larger offices..

Manchester-based digital agency Elevator is on the verge of being acquired by a large London-based agency, strongly believed to be Saatchi & Saatchi.
A deal between the two agencies is yet to be officially confirmed, but The Drum believes that Elevator’s staff have already been informed of the move. If a takeover deal is confirmed with Saatchi & Saatchi it will no doubt feed furious speculation about the London behemoth’s plans in the north.

Choice Online, a Liverpool internet consultancy, has partnered with Merseyside training organisation Clearer Thoughts, Google, Enterprise UK, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, BT and e-skills UK in an initiative to get 100,000 businesses online…

The organisers of Liverpool’s showcase at the World Expo 2010, which starts in Shanghai on 1 May, have revealed details of how the city’s pavilion will look. The £1.1m stand has been designed by BDP Architects and Liverpool design agency Uniform.

The Insider Young Professionals Awards took place at the Lowry Hotel on 22 April. The event is one of the few times when our up-and-coming talent is let out to play by their bosses and celebrate the important role played by employees early in their careers…

Liverpool PR agency Ubiquity has secured a series of account wins. The agency has been appointed to handle the marketing and PR for bar chain Baa Bar and education charity The Ariel Trust, and has also been retained for this summer’s Brouhaha International Festival 2010. Head of agency Joel Jelen has also been appointed as PR and marketing co-ordinator on the Merseyside committee of property and construction network, the Forum for the Built Environment.

Liverpool-based digital agency Rippleffect has announced the launch of the new website for housebuilder Redrow.

Liverpool advertising agency Finch has won a six-way pitch to handle the marketing activities of luxury tour operator Seasons in Style. The brief includes the creation of a new range of brochures highlighting the range of Seasons properties available. Finch will also launch a new advertising campaign in the autumn across key consumer titles.

Paul Beacall, managing director of Seasons, said “These are challenging trading conditions, so it is important that …

Liverpool Science Park is hosting an event later this month aimed at the digital sector, to encourage collaborations and idea sharing.

Through a series of 90 second “elevator pitches” company representatives will talk to delegates about their company, what they do and their key skills, so that the audience can see if there are any potential business opportunities, link ups or outsourcing opportunities.

Organisers hope that it will …

Liverpool Sound City line-up is shaping up to be one of the most sought-after tickets on the festival circuit with Gil Scott-Heron, Paloma Faith, Ian McCulloch, Delphic, The Maccabees, The Fall, British Sea Power, My Passion, Speech Debelle, Wild Beasts, Field Music, Los Campesinos!, The Blackout, Wave Machines, The Sunshine Underground, Hot Club de Paris, Ian McNabb and Chilly Gonzalez to name but a few confirmed as playing the festival.

With …

Almost 40 fund managers from across the UK have bid to run four new venture capital loan funds for the North West.

The Northwest Development Agency (NWDA) has announced that the £184m Northwest Venture Capital Loan Fund (VCLF) has received 39 expressions of interest. These are likely to include Liverpool-based Alliance Fund Managers (AFM) and Yorkshire Fund Managers (YFM) who are currently operating the £10m interim VCLF.
When the VCLF is fully up and running later this year it will include a …

Uniform, a Liverpool design consultancy, has created a new brand for the city’s RopeWalks area. The company was awarded the contract in February by The Creative RopeWalks Stakeholders Group, including representatives from The Mersey Partnership, Liverpool City Council, local businesses and residents.

Uniform said its new branding seeks to capture the “history, eclecticism, diverse offer and vibrant character” of the area.

The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment says the area, …

Roses Advertising Awards 2010 – Print Nominations

On Thursday 6th May the Roses Advertising Awards 2010 will be taking place in Manchester and for anyone who can’t make the event we will be broadcast live from the event.

Liverpool creative agency Switch Media has been approved as a BBC supplier. The agency was accepted as an approved supplier to the BBC for new media commissions following a vetting process. 

Commercial director Aaron Bimpson said: “It is an exciting time for Switch Media and we hope to be working with the BBC on new media commissions in the very near future.” The agency won a gold award at the Fresh …

The £7.5m Capstone Building at Liverpool Hope University’s Creative Campus has opened. Supported by £6.5m funding from The Northwest Regional Development Agency and Higher Education Funding Council for England, were present at an opening event that incorporated a concert and awards ceremony.

 Steven Broomhead, NWDA chief executive, said the new building would help to support skills development in the region.

The Capstone Building is a project which has been in development …

Office Share – Bank of England – Castle Street

Creative Liverpool is looking for a synergy business to office share its prestigious head office in Liverpool city centre. This is a prime business address and a very cool office space, very competitive rates for the right company. Old Bank of Englnd Building, 31 Castle Street, Liverpool, L2 4GL.

Liverpool digital agency Mando Group said today it has secured software giant Microsoft as a “strategic client”. The agency, which has been a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for the past two years, will work with Microsoft to produce an innovative user experience application utilising the company’s Silverlight, Sharepoint 2010 and Bing Maps. Mando managing director Ian Finch said: “Silverlight and SharePoint are core technologies for us, so it’s fantastic to be developing with them directly with Microsoft and gaining crucial …

Warrington-based digital marketing agency Latitude, valued at £50m when it changed hands just over two years ago, was sold for less than £1.1m after it went into a pre-pack administration in January. A newly filed administrators’ report reveals that equity investors lost nearly £40m in the collapse of Latitude Group Ltd (LGL) and Barclays, its bankers, lost £4.62m. Latitude, a search engine optimisation specialist, was bought back out of administration by its previous owners Vitruvian Partners, a London-based private equity …

Fibre optic internet is an essential service for the growing digital and creative sectors in Liverpool and across the region argues Kate Simpson in the cover story of February’s NW Business Insider.

Liverpool Innovation Park operator, Space North West, appoints Steve Smith of Liverpool Vision as chairman of its Advisory Group.

Those Mando chaps keep churning out top notch work. I had a good poke around Mando’s latest delivery, the Penketh website,. I was encouraged to read that the client – a Liverpool based office products suppliers worked with the agency over an 18 month design and development process.  This serves as a good reminder to all those client-side, that these sort of large scale sites cannot be ‘knocked up’ quickly. Presumably with a client such …

A quite humorous video has popped up on YouTube since the iPad was launched last week. All credit goes to ‘midnightblade’ who has cleverly dubbed a clip from the 2004 German film ‘Downfall.’

It discusses that the Apple product will become a failure, nothing more than an ‘oversized iPod Touch.’ Please be warned, content of the video is of an explicit nature and in a ‘tongue in cheek’ manner. Please do not view if you …

The announcement today of the departure of Jim Gill, the Chief Executive of Liverpool Vision, is one which raised a few eyebrows. Although unsurprising as he made no secret, privately or in public that retirement was looming. So what should the digital sector hope for in his successor?

Jim’s leadership of Liverpool Vision has been an undoubted success, delivering genuine results to the City Region, even through the dark and difficult days of the last 24 months. For the Digital sector …

Apart from being the mail order catalogue of choice for Wile E Coyote in his harebrained schemes to get that roadrunner. What is ACME?  I know from the website that it’s the body that supports the creative sector in Liverpool…ect ect, but in all honesty I really don’t see it out there day to day.

Now unless I’m missing something, and I’m happy to be proved wrong, what is it actually doing?  Apart from the occasional random poorly designed e-newsletter  (which more often than not carries last months …

I read with interest the news emanating about Latitude’s problems and its left me slightly confused. Their funders Barclays are believed to have lost several million pounds as a result of a pre-pack administration but the business says they are doing great, so why the call in from the bank?