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 …

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?

FACT lanuch new website, more features, easier nav and a shiny new look? For me the site is an improvement but falls short of the ‘great site’ tag. Navigation is quite simple if not too obvious at the start but there’s too much flat content on black, making it a tad boring to browse. Saying all that, it’s an information site and a huge amount complexity to incorporate under one domain. What do you think?

The annual Google Zeitgeist list has been released this week.

If a measure of the importance of an event is reflected in numbers of searches it receives through Google, then in decades to come the list may well provide social anthropologists and insight into the most important events of that year.

Depressingly enough, the top search terms for 2009 are Susan Boyle, Michael Jackson (in the wake of his death) and Lady Ga Ga. I mean, Christ all mighty.  Global depression, climate …

Lets have a digital winner here! Any ideas? The search for Merseyside’s most innovative companies has once again begun with the launch of the annual Merseyside Innovation Awards. The awards, aim to recognise and reward the use of innovation as a means of boosting growth and profitability.

Soap giant Unilever has made a research and development agreement with Daresbury Innovation Campus, the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has confirmed. STFC scientists will use modelling and simulation to develop new software tools to speed up the development of new and more efficient products across Unilever’s personal care range.

Liverpool design and brand agency GVC has launched a new online retail venture specialising in a range of exclusive Premier League merchandise.
premiersportsgifts.com retails the UK’s only personalised Official Liverpool Football Club 2010 Calendar – the first in a select range of official club merchandise shortly available on the website.

Liverpool Stuart Hughes as designed the worlds most expensive i-phone with 200 diamonds and costing £1.92m. It has taken ten months to make for the anonymous Aussie businessman who commissioned it. Hughes said most of the ten months was spent trying to find the seven-carat diamond used as the front navigation button.

Creative and digital support agency Northwest Vision and Media has invested more than £130,000 into four Merseyside companies through its Regional Attraction Fund (RAF). Well done to games production company Catalyst Outsourcing, digital art production studio Milky Tea, and games company Dou Yi Dou.

Well done to digital marketing specialists Hit Search who have recently added one of the world’s top museums, the Victoria and Albert Museum to its list of clients. The London museum has enlisted the services of Liverpool based Hit Search to aid the online marketing campaign of its retail website, V&A Shop.

Trainee Social & Search Executive – Mando Group
Liverpool based Mando Group is a nationally renowned web design consultancy, with more than 700 web and online development or campaign projects to date. NorthWest Vision & Media will be partnering with them on the i.studio scheme and are currently taking applications for a Trainee Search & Social Media Executive. This is an ideal opportunity for individuals new to the web industry who want to build a career in …

Branding guru Michael Wolff wowed the audience at the 2009 Liverpool Design Symposium with his candid, insightful take on city branding. Mark Jones of local agency Creative Liverpool reports.

NWDA £5m investment into Liverpool’s Baltic District to support area’s growing digital and creative business sector.

Big Chip Award-winners New Concept Gaming has a Trainee Character Animator paid placement available. This is a great opportunity for a recently trained 3D animator to build on their skills with a company directly related to the games industry. The company will be using the Unity engine in their games simulations, so candidates can be skilled in any of the best-known industry standard animation packages.

Location: JMU Art and Design Academy

Date: 04/11/2009

Liverpool Design Symposium is back again delivering an array of speakers, exhibitions and events to delight the most design savvy and creative types.

The 2009 programme features Michael Wolff, courtesy of D&AD as part of the President Lecture Series. The DBA will also be running a session on Effective Design in the public sector led by Peter Mills, Consulting Director at the Team.

Aspiring creatives and …

Northwest Vision and Media is inviting applications for a Trainee Web Developer with Glow New Media, and a Trainee Marketing Assistant with Uniform. Details follow, deadlines 20th and 27th October 2009.

Yesterday morning over 100 attendees gathered at Liverpool University’s Foresight Centre to see Rod Holmes, Lorraine Rogers et al deliver TMP’s assessment of the economic development of the Liverpool City Region.

So what were the key findings and what do they mean for the digital sector?

Well, to shamelessly steal Rod’s patient/doctor metaphor fitting of our surroundings, the patient (Liverpool City Region) is out of the critical phase of illness and making good recovery – but is not off the life support …

Northwest Vision and Media have partnered with Liverpool-based Conker Media on the i.studio 2009 scheme and are calling for applications from talented front end developers. Details follow, but get your applications in quick: closing date for entries is 12pm Mon 12th October.

Facebook was valued at up to £6billion by experts but, until yesterday, had failed to make a cent in profit. Now, after five years and racking up 300million users, it is finally making enough money to cover its costs. The company’s income is on track to grow by 70 per cent this year.

Article by Enda Carey is Head of Games & Digital Content at Northwest Vision and Media. Liverpool has a long history of video game development and for a long time has produced some of the leading games in the industry. From its bedroom developer days through to the multi million pound budgets of today the industry and Liverpool’s role within it has come a long way.Everyone knows the exciting cutting edge work that Sony and Bizarre Creations have been …

The private sector has had a wake up call on their marketing spend at the same time the national news has been flooding the country with the power, profitability and absolute need of the web for business. This type of great industry promotion also creates insecurity for those businesses that haven’t quite got a proper online strategy. Or simply more businesses are accepting in 5 years their business will be very internet dependant and it works better and cheaper than …

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Details follow of the first TEDxLiverpool which will take place at ICDC on Friday 7th August 2009.

What business club websites are the best to profile on? Who gets the most visitors, which is the best site, Google ranking and so on. Purely based on design then Downtown Liverpool in Business for me is the best. Second place, Liverpool Chambers of Commerce and a long way back is Professional Liverpool; the name becomes an oxymoron when you land on the website.

Liverpool’s business clubs play an important role in helping to promote our businesses. They act as a …

The UK’s largest game development community event will be heading to Liverpool in November 2009 in the first Develop Conference to be held in the North.

Liverpool-based New Mind has adopted technology from Microsoft to be used on tourism sites such as VisitBrighton, which New Mind designs.

The photosynth technology creates a 3D virtual map, almost like being inside a video game. New Mind’s managing director Richard Veal said the company is “taking e-tourism into a new era”. New Mind has created such as visitliverpool.com and visitbath.co.uk which are amongst the highest performing sites of their kind, both in terms of visitor numbers and income. …

Liverpool technology company AIMES Grid Services has won a three-year contract to provide an on-site disaster recovery programme to North West training and consultancy provider Sysco Group. The service streams data from Sysco to the AIMES ISO27001 certified data centre facility at Liverpool Innovation Park, ensuring data is backed up off site in real time. AIMES is the lead organisation behind the Digital Inclusion and Enterprise Programme, which aims to transform levels of digital infrastructure in the Liverpool city region …

Rippleffect is one of the fastest growing technology companies in Europe in 2009 and confirms for the second year its outstanding performance to be listed in the Deloitte Fast 500. Rippleffect have had recent and well deserved run of award victory’s and accolades including being short listed for Digital Agency of the Year, ‘Best Interactive Agency at the NetImperative Awards’ and ‘Digital Agency of the Year’ in the recent DADI Awards (Drum Awards for Digital Industries)

BT announces the next generation of super-fast fibre-optic broadband exchanges across the UK, but Liverpool misses out on this much-needed investment in digital infrastructure.

Will the idea of a £5m national training academy to support Liverpool’s games development sector take the first step of learning from those in the industry?

Well done Mando Group on winning this year’s big chip design award for the ‘Liverpool Biennial 08’ website. It’s a great achievement by the Liverpool agency beating off a lot of heavy weight contenders. For me it confirms Mando Group’s position as one of the region’s best agencies.

Funding for Creative Industries.

There is, after much searching, a plethora of pots of money out there. I know this because I have been through the considerable task of leaving no stone unturned in an effort to find funding to launch a new business into the digital media sector.

As the banks bolt their doors and concentrate on re-stabilising and re-capitalising, less and less of their money …