Workspace tenants Metro Broadcast shine at The Sparkle Ball

Metro Broadcast moved to Kennington Park Business Centre at the end of 2012 and are now fully settled in our new premises and very busy with events and conferences following a great start to 2013.

Metro is an event production and audio-visual service provider.  We produce live events all over Europe but for this blog entry we thought we’d focus on an event we produced recently that was a little closer to home, in Vinopolis, next to London Bridge.

The Sparkle Ball was a fundraising event organised by the UK branch of the Akshaya Patra Foundation, the world's largest non-governmental organization providing food for over 1.3 million deprived school children across India.

Metro were commissioned, along with Vinopolis, our partner, to provide all production services for the Ball, including sound and video as well as specialist rigging and lighting for the event.

Both Metro and the Operations team at Vinopolis worked very closely with the Foundation's UK representative, Dipika Khaitan, and renowned fashion designer, Anamika Khanna, along with her coordinators in India, to make the event a success. 

Akshaya Patra and Anamika Khanna were determined to create a 5-star VIP event as all attendees were highly prestigious and distinguished personalities from both London and India.

We liaised closely with their lighting designer to create the look and ambience required by Anamika Khanna and also took full technical responsibility, as well as part of the logistical responsibility, for the entire evening, including taking partial control of what was a very flexible running order.

We’re delighted to be part of the thriving business community that is here at Kennington Park Business Centre.  We would be only too happy for you to come and have a look round the premises and meet the team, so please get in touch if that is something you’d like to arrange.

Welcome to our #NewClub @ Kennington Park!

The doors of our third Club Workspace location are now open! As you may have heard, we’re growing really quickly here at Club Workspace. Our two existing venues have been playing host to some of London’s most exciting startups and entrepreneurs since June 2011, and we have now added a third venue at Kennington Park. Any questions, please drop me an email!

This modern and vibrant venue is nearby to Oval tube station, and neighbours with the excellent PureGym. The Kennington Club Workspace is also situated within a wider business centre, as are all Club Workspace locations. This benefits Club Members as it immediately enables them to network and collaborate with established entrepreneurs and SMEs. 

The Kennington Park Club Workspace is the first of three new Club venues that will be up and running before Christmas! One new Club will open at Enterprise House, which lies on the South Bank just behind the Oxo Tower; and another will be located at the stylish Barley Mow Centre. But we’ll tell you more about those later.

Want to Visit the New Club? CheckIn on FourSquare for a Free DayPass!

Do you want to try out the new Kennington Club for free? We’d love to show you around. If you’re an entrepreneur, freelancer, startup or other independent professional who thinks that Club Workspace may be the right choice, your free day pass is waiting for you. This will enable you to use the space for a day with full membership benefits - from wifi access to free tea and coffee. 

All you need to do to access your daypass is go to the Kennington Club Workspace, CheckIn on FourSquare and follow the simple instructions on screen.  

#NewClub 

When you’re there, please give us a tweet! Tell us what you think about the new Club Workspace by tweeting @clubworkspace using the #NewClub tag. We’ve used the tag to tweet blogs, events and pics so far, so please check it out. 

Thank you all for reading, and see you soon. 

#NewClub - PreLaunch Pics

Club Workspace number three is less than a week away! Monday 24th September sees the doors of Club Workspace @ Kennington Park swing open. The KP Club will be our third venue, and its opening will mark the beginning of an exciting period of growth for Club Workspace. Prick up your ears startups & entrepreneurs: before Christmas there will be five Club Workspaces in London. As well as the Club Workspaces at The Clerkenwell Workshops, The Leathermarket and at Kennington Park, there will be new coworking locations at Enterprise House and The Barley Mow. 

If you’d like to keep in touch with the developments here at Club, keep checking Twitter, Facebook and the Blog for the #NewClub hashtag. Everything to do with our new venues will be united by the tag! Until then, feast your eyes on these exclusive pre-launch pics of the new Kennington Park Club Workspace. 

Excuse the lack of chairs - they will be in place before next week’s launch! But check out our lights - I, personally, am a big fan. I don't know if I did this beautiful space justice with my iPhotography, if you'd like to come down and see the space for yourself, please email me.

 

Picture the scene: you’re at the new Club Workspace. Your back is towards the chic glass frontage, there’s natural light flooding in, what do you see? The picture above will give you a good idea. Just add a few more people & laptops... 

The groove in the desk above is lined with plug sockets. There’s loads of table-space available & there’ll be more than enough elbow room too. The new space has been designed to make coworking and collaboration as easy as possible.

Above is the view for the far corner of the new Club Workspace. You can’t see it all, and that’s because our new location is bigger than our current two Clubs. 

Another thing that's worth sharing, if you’re in the Kennington or Oval area in October, get your phone out, and have a look for Club Workspace in the FourSquare Specials...

#MemberShowcase: Startups & Entrepreneurs at Club Workspace Doing It Their Way

Once every couple of months, Club Workspace hosts a rather unique members night. We invite all of our members to one of our Club locations for a drink and a chat, and to share their latest news. The last bit is what puts the ‘showcase’ into #MemberShowcase. Members are invited to take to the stage and to chat about their business. Members share their latest forays in the worlds of tech, entrepreneurship, development, and starting up, for example.

Last night two Club members seized the opportunity to rock the mic. First up were Digital Binx - a social media agency who specialise in making the arts & culture sectors go social. Following them was Folissimo, an incredible online service that could revolutionise how those with a visual portfolio - photographers, designers etc. - store their work online. 

Digital Binx 

Club members Hassan Mirza and Gemma Phelan are the two social masterminds behind Digital Binx. After introducing themselves, the dream team presented a case-study about one of their social campaigns. The campaign in question was for the Art School Awards, or should we say: the #ArtSchoolAwards! 

The establishment behind the Art School Awards were having trouble creating and stimulating online interest in the project, so they consulted Digital Binx. Hassan and Gemma shared a few of the things that they did to help the Art School Awards over-achieve all expectations!

A particular success was the social-voting system. As the format of the Art School Awards was a competition, the team at Digital Binx realised that a quick and engaging way to encourage the online community to interact with the Awards was by implementing social voting. Not only did Digital Binx make online-voting possible, but the process they used was particularly clever and rewarding for the brand. Each time a social vote was cast, a branded tweet was sent by the voter. In the end, 4123 branded tweets were sent during the duration of the campaign. Each of these tweets contained a positive message about the #ArtSchoolAwards, used the hashtag, increased brand visibility and, of course, encouraged more tweeters to vote. 

As well as the voting system, Digital Binx also created blogs, videos and other engaging content which enabled interested parties online to keep up to date with the awards. This storified content was not only informative and attractive, but also stimulated further online conversation about the awards.

Folissimo

After Digital Binx’s duo had soaked up a justified round of applause, Club member Campbell Morgan took his position. Campbell came to Club with the intention of having a membership for ‘about a month.’ In a couple of weeks he could add the finishing touches to his idea. That was seven months ago... 

Folissimo, Campbell’s excellent online service, offers professionals who have a visual portfolio an attractive, personal space on which to store their portfolio online. Campbell admitted that, of course, there are other online platforms out there that allow photographers, video creators, graphic designers and the like to store their work in the Cloud, but his is better. 

Why is it better? Several Reasons. As Campbell’s video explains - please see the video! - Folissimo is quick and easy to use. Before Folissimo came along and smashed all the boundaries, if you wanted a personalisable, attractive, unique online space upon which to both store and display your work, you would need to pay a webdesigner, or you’d need a proficient knowledge of coding. 

Folissimo takes the most simple elements of personal computing - drag and drop, file-creation, uploading etc. - and allows you to populate your Folissimo page using these basic functions. Not only that, you can chose and customise the theme of your page, so your Folissimo page can be (almost!) as attractive as your work. 

One last thing: If you want your Folissimo page to be your bona-fide website, then you can transplant your ‘Folissimo’ url your own URL - as long as you own it, of course!

Thank You

Thank you to Digital Binx and Folissimo for presenting, and a massive thank you to everyone who came along. So many members were getting involved on Twitter, too. Fellow members @Aniboxx, @PrintMyPixel & @zest_tech were in the thick of the hashtag action, alongside the two presenters and our good selves!

Mobile Creatives: How To Transfer Data via Sound & Mobile Game Buildling Tips!

On Wednesday 12th of September, the good people of Ubinow brought their ‘Mobile Creatives’ event into our Clerkenwell Club Workspace venue. Ubinow, a mobile tech company local to our part of London, were confirmed as one of the UK’s Top 50 Mobile Innovators, by Mobile Entertainment 2012. Their intriguing and informative event lived up to this impressive accolade.

The format was simple: two expert speakers gain the stage, and chat about what they’re doing with mobile tech. 

Patrick Bergel - Chirp

Patrick Bergel, a self-confessed sound-geek and cofounder of Animal Systems, told the gathered audience about taking inspiration from nature, about his ‘anti-future’ philosophy, and about Chirp. 

Patrick claimed that people who work in technology and app-development are too hasty to pose their creations as ‘magic’ or ‘futuristic’. Patrick thinks that this approach is bad form, as it alienates the userships of an app or device. Tech that poses as ‘magic’ deliberately evades understanding on behalf of its users, therefore it isn’t terribly inclusive. The tech therefore stands atop an unscalable mountain, with only a coterie of geniuses privy to its secrets. 

Patrick wants to kick over the statues, so far as this tech-idolatry is concerned. He wants users to understand the device they’re using. He wants them to be able to have a more literal, perhaps-physical understand of the data that their mobile phone, for example, is transferring to another like device. 

To kick off this philosophy, he reminded everyone that ‘data is physical’. Whether it be semaphore, smoke signals, morse code or a text message, Patrick explained that data can be understood as a commodity. Patrick also drew on Jakob von Uexkull’s ‘Umwelt’ philosophy, which theorises that animals live inside data-systems, too. Ergo, JvU’s theory of biosemantics argues that data-systems aren’t a purely human phenomenon. 

Why was all of this important? As we need to understand and use these data-systems that preexist mobile technology by, perhaps, thousands of years. Chrip, an amazingly clever app, embodies this approach. 

Patrick explained that different types of data-transfer systems are measured in distance. For example, they can operate over ‘the last three feet’ - transferring images, messages, links and the like to your friends who’s sitting with you; or over ‘the last ten feet’, usually this distance implies that your mobile device is acting like a game-controller and is interacting with a larger screen, such as a television. 

Chirp is a ‘last three feet’ P2P data-transfer app that enables users to send stuff to eachother using the medium of sound. Sound! Information is encoded in short bursts of sound - Chirps. When you ‘chirp’ your friend, the chirp is decoded their side and they are left with a lovely picture of your face.

We wholeheartedly recommend that you download that app and give it a go. You know when an app is going to be good, when it forced you to re-understand an ornithological verb. See: ‘to tweet’. 

Dimitris Doukous - Unit 9 

Dimitris came to ‘Mobile Creatives’ to tell us about what Unit 9 have been getting up to. Unit 9 create mobile gaming solutions for brands. 

Dimitris explained that brands take mobile-gaming extremely seriously. Games are a great way to hold customers’ attention, and to prolong their engagement with your brand. Moreover, games can tempt users to go in-store, or to travel to certain places. If a mobile-game utilises foursquare and incentivises gamers to check-in to unlock bonus content or a prize, then any improvement in footfall could be attributed to the success of a branded game. 

These location-based & branded games can also include a social element. A branded Pirate Game created for Captain Morgan urged users to create crews of shipmates. Additing a social and, perhaps, competitive element to a game can serve to increase engagement on behalf of consumers with a brand, and, ultimately, a good game can increase brand advocacy. 

Another game that Dimitris shared with us was the Pizza Hero iPad game that Unit 9 created for Dominos Pizza. Check it out. 

It was so good they Dominos ended up recruiting top-gamers as pizza chefs!

Thank You

Thank you from everyone at Club Workspace to Patrick and Dimitris for sharing such interesting information, to everyone who came along to Club for this first time, and, of course, to Ubinow for organising such a terrific event.