Second Codeworks Ignite event started at the Marthas Bar. Image by Peter Atkinson, courtesy of Codeworks.

Codeworks bosses see a bright future for the Ignite events as an inspiration for the North East digital sector.

The second Ignite event, which took place last Thursday, attracted a buzzing group of local digital and creative professionals to the Vermont Hotel in Newcastle.

Emilia Flockhart, Communications Executive at Codeworks, said the event completely exceeded the organisers’ expectations and received excellent feedback.

“Everyone seemed to have had a great time, saying it was both fun, inspiring, and entertaining”, she said.

Platform to shine

The Ignite format features 5-minute talks about participants’ personal or professional passions. One talk can have a maximum of 20 slides with each slide displayed for 15 seconds then automatically advanced.

To spice things up, the speakers were pitched against each other with the only woman speaker taking home the prize for the winning talk. Jo York, from Ki Media, charmed the audience with her talk about web usability through the eyes of her mum Sue (thus titled ‘Sue’s-ability’).

Jo York delivered the winning speech of the evening. Image by Peter Atkinson, courtesy of Codeworks.

According to Emilia, the value for the creative companies and fledgling entrepreneurs is huge.

“Having a platform that allows you to stand up in front of your community and talk about something you are passionate about is vital for getting your name and ideas out there”, she said.

Vibrant community

One of the biggest appeals of the Ignite events is that they attract people from different roles and from all sides of the sector.

According to Emilia, that’s the key in creating new collaborations and building meaningful relationships which will have longevity.

“There is such a vibrant and active community online with North East businesses and individuals talking together, and it is great that this is backed up by so many opportunities to meet in person”, she said.

Seven years of digital

During its seven year history, Codeworks has been through turbulent times.

CEO Herb Kim addressed the challenges posed by the tough economic climate in his finishing talk which, incidentally, was also delivered in the Ignite format.

According to Emilia, a big thank you goes to their members.

“Our members are definitely what drive us forward”, she said.

“Codeworks has always been a not for profit organisation here to serve the community, and we will continue to remain exactly that as we go through the process of becoming a CIC (Community Interest Company).”

“We believe our members know and trust that we will continue to help put the North East on the international digital map, whilst creating experiences that will build and gel this very special community.”

Arabic Web Community Manager
Location: Cramlington
Salary commensurate with experience

Palringo are seeking an Arabic language journalist or similar with interest in community management to manage our Arabic web community.

Palringo will be launching a web property aimed specifically at our Arabic audience. The ideal candidate for the management of this website will have journalistic, editorial and community management skills.

Duties will include writing content for the site, marketing and promotion in Arabic speaking regions, setting targets, analysing and recording metrics and community management.

Desirables:

• Wide experience of writing for the web or print
• Experience of online marketing and promotion
• An interest in, and a basic understanding of social networks, and computing technologies.

Apply with CV and covering letter to Emma Jones: emma@palringo.com

Software Support Role
Location: Cramlington
Salary commensurate with experience

Palringo are looking for an enthusiastic individual, with a calm, patient demeanor, and excellent inter-personal skills to work on its support desk. Due to our huge online community in the Middle East we require this person to be fluent in Arabic, ideally a native speaker.

Duties will include the answering of support emails, liaising with members of the development team to pass on and helping test our software and describe bug reports.

Desirables:

• Wide experience of different mobile phones, operating systems, and mobile applications
• An interest in, and a basic understanding of social networks, and computing technologies.

Apply with CV and covering letter to Emma Jones: emma@palringo.com

Palringo is a popular group messaging service with a massive global community. With more than 11 million users sending billions of messages each month, Palringo allows anyone with a mobile phone, PC or Mac to chat with all their friends, regardless of location, device or network.

Users around the world are embracing Palringo to send Push-to-Talk voice messages, texts and pictures, indicate presence, and to create chat groups with as many as 2,000 members. Palringo seamlessly integrates with existing third-party IM services such as Windows Live Messenger®, AIM, Yahoo!® Messenger, Google Talk ™ and Facebook Chat.

Herb Kim at the Thinking Digital Conference 2011 last May.

North East’s flagship tech conference creator Herb Kim expects the new WIRED event to really make its mark on the European tech calendar.

“WIRED Magazine is already hugely popular for people in the IT and digital industries”, he told NMM.

“A conference will allow them bring to life some of the amazing stories that we read about every month. I think it’ll be a hugely important new conference in the European tech calendar.”

The people behind the magazine

At the event, Herb is most looking forward to meeting the people behind the magazine.

“I’ve met David Rowan in the past and Ben Hammersley has spoken previously at Thinking Digital 2009, but it’s all the other writers, subeditors and staff who help create WIRED that I’m hoping to see and meet.”

“And of course, WIRED will undoubtedly be bringing along some fantastic speakers, technologies and new ideas for us to marvel at and consider.”

TDC12 preparations well underway

These experiences might well spark new ideas for the next year’s Thinking Digital Conference, to which preparations are already well underway.

“Thinking Digital 2012 is going along great”, Herb said.

“We’ve sold-out all our Preview tickets and so we’ve already got 150 signed up to attend and a dozen speakers.”

“I’d love to be able to devote all year to just preparing for it and hopefully that’ll be a reality at some point in the future.”

WIRED 2011 Together with 02 takes place at St Pancras Renaissance Hotel on the 13th and 14th October. Find out more on the event website.

The move will make Slideshare content better available to Apple devices as well as more accessible to search engines.

The HTML5 revamp also means a speed upgrade for the site and, as part of the work, Slideshare is also boosting its metadata.

According to the SlideShare team, all content submitted in PowerPoint or Word formats will be rendered into HTML5 “flawlessly”.

To make sure users with an older browser version can access the content, Flash will still be supported ‘behind the scenes’.

The Next Web's Hermoine Way met Startup Sauna crew memebers in a sauna. Click on the image to watch the interview on the TNW's website.

The Finnish startup accelerator programme Startup Sauna is on the lookout for the entrepreneurial elite in Finland, Russia and Northern Europe.

The name, unfortunately, is only metaphorical.

In Finnish culture, the sauna is seen as a place where thoughts are clarified and new visions are found.

“In Startup Sauna, the selected teams are theoretically thrown into a scorching hot sauna, with our Coaches adding up the heat and throwing more water on the stones”, the founders explain on their website.

Startup Sauna is a six week long programme based in Helsinki. The best teams are chosen through Startup Sauna Warmups and the best teams will get a trip to Silicon Valley to meet investors.

So far, more than 80 startups have come through the non-profit programme.

Since Angry Birds launched Finnish company Rovio to global success, the startup scene in the country has been buzzing.

In November this year, Finland will be hosting Slush2011, which aims to be the biggest startup conference in Northern Europe.

The Next Web’s Hermoine Way met four Startup Sauna crew members in – you guessed it – a sauna. Watch the interview on TNW’s website.

Becoming the first drinks company to trial ‘f-commerce’ in the UK, Magners is using the social platform to sell a limited edition of its special range of blended ciders.

Each pack, priced £10, contains one bottle of each of their new flavours – spiced apple and honey; spiced apple and rhubarb; and pear and ginger – plus a special edition bottle opener.

With their Facebook push, Magners joins an array of companies looking to take advantage of the social media giant’s global dominance.

Fashion brands such as French Connection and Best Buy, have been leading the way in f-commerce and, earlier this year, clothing retailer Asos became the first UK brand to have a fully transactional Facebook store.

Another brand to have trialled f-commerce is ketchup king Heinz while Heineken has also hinted on Facebook selling experiments in the near future.

Vocre, developed by translation company myLanguage, enables iPhone users to translate their speech into a foreign language.

“It’s like asking your friend down the street ‘How would I say this in Spanish?”,  founder and CEO of myLanguage Andrew Lauder said.

Vocre includes colloquialisms and slang to make communication as authentic as possible.

The developers are using crowd-sourcing to continually improve the accuracy of the translations.

To converse in another language, users simply need to speak into their phone then flip it around to play the sentence back translated.

The app currently supports three dialects of English along with Spanish, French, Italian, German, Chinese and Japanese.

While the technology behind the app has been won praise, the pricing model has failed to impress – $0.99 will get you only 10 translations.

That means both parties will get to say only 5 sentences which, on second thoughts, can be a blessing for those who like their conversations short and sweet.

WIRED 2011 takes place on 13-14 October at St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in London. Full price tickets are £1495 (+ VAT).

Book your ticket here. Enter code ‘WNMM10′ to get your 10% discount.

Tickets subject to availability.

The talks on the two-day event will fall under a range of themes with top industry speakers contributing to each.

The themes are:

The future is here – The birth of the digital age;
Mind hacks – How to improve ourselves;
Ideas bank – Brain food and provocations;
How people connect – Future of communications;
Play – The importance of sound;
Design thinking – Immortal design;
Digital world meet physical world – Atoms are the new bits;
Test lab – toys, gadgets, demos;
Infoporn – Racing on real time data;
Lab notes – The physics of time reversal;
The natural user interface – Computer vision;
Social future – Giving people the power to share;
Disruptive business – The agony and the ecstasy of being an entrepreneur.

Taking place on 13-14 October at St Pancras Reneissance Hotel in London, WIRED 2011 looks to establish its place as one of the must-attend tech events of the year promising to enlighten, intrigue, inspire and provoke discussion.

The full agenda, including details of the talks here (PDF).