Category Archives: Digital Britain
Startedin – Edinburgh comes to the City of London
The event began with Frank Ross – who Convenes Edinburgh City Council’s Economic Development activities.
It’s about graduates and about computing, academic excellence, spinouts and innovative startups. There are 15 incubators in Edinburgh – Creative Exchange, Carbon Innocation, Techcube; lots of others.
There is a danger that incubators are operating in isolation – it needs to be joined up – so we’ve established the online portal Interspace – to make it easy to do business in Edinburgh.
It’s about quality of life, quality of jobs and quality of city! He pitches the city and he’s proud of it.
Amazon has been in Edinburgh for over 10 years
“We run major chunks of Amazon from Edinburgh” says Graeme Smith of Amazon
And here is what they get up to:
Skyscanner – it’s about the quality of life in Edinburgh
Richard Lennox from Skyscanner – this is how he sees it:
He’s from Carlisle. “I’ve always wanted to work in a global scale technology business”.
Why Edinburgh not London?
It’s not tangible – but it is about the quality of life in Edinburgh.
Here are my more detailed notes and liveblog in Storify
Digital Catapult Centre Yorkshire – SME meeting
We heard about the Catapult’s portfolio of services:
And also areas of focus:
The Fuse Manifesto
To Birmingham for the Fuse Manifesto. But what is Fusion?
We had an Eclipse Break (it’s the featured image).
Cathy Garner spoke about London Fusion:
And the liveblog using Storify is here.
And some more pictures:
Bristol is Open
Bristol is a great place – and there’s always a lot going on. I to the launch of Bristol is Open and here is the liveblog:
Clearing space for thinking and writing
Ppl who do lots of writing, how do you manage email flow? Testing only replying in timed bursts during a few periods/day, save urgent stuff
— Laurenellen McCann (@elle_mccann) November 11, 2014
Here are some thoughts
- Switch off/ log out/ never use browser-based e-mail – the tabs are lurking to catch you
- Switch off notifications, disable e-mail polling etc on all mobile devices – phones and tablets. Set e-mail clients only to gather e-mail when you want (you are weak but will at least be in control)
- Set your main e-mail client (in my case on a Mac PowerBook gathering 11 mailboxes worth) to only collect e-mail once per hour – each hour use GTD techniques to respond to e-mail – if you can do it in less than 2 minutes then deal with it, if not schedule a time to deal with it. Get back to writing as soon as you can.
- Always have your phone on silent – when a call comes in – have a quick look – be ruthless and push it to voicemail. If it’s a client, friend or otherwise important – take the call; deal with it quickly. You will return to writing with more energy. Distinguish between the important and the urgent.
- For writing – use Scrivener – you can chunk up the work to allow for essential interruptions
- Go on long train journeys – buy cheap first class tickets in a quiet coach (often cheaper than standard if bought in advance) and write, write, write. They will bring you tea etc. This is good.
A fantastic opportunity for Bradford
Keynote – Brian Cantor
