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.

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. 

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...

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!

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.

Sees EIS Platform connects startups and investors. The Platform prides itself on being ‘the meeting place for startups and investors’ who are ‘looking to participate in the Seed EIS Scheme’. 

In other words, if you’re a techy and you think that you’ll be ready for investment in future - or perhaps you’re going on your investment rounds now! - it’s well worth hooking up with the people from Seed EIS Platform. They have all of the advice that you’ll need and a whole bunch of contacts. So please drop into Club Workspace for a sandwich on Thursday 20th, at around 12:30. 

SEIS enables investors to benefit from tax-savings if they invest in startups. Consequently, if investors are benefitting from investing in startups, then the startups benefit too as investors will be more likely to part with their money. I won’t go into the finer details of the SEIS Scheme now, but please check out this vintage blog of ours which was all about the launch of SEIS.

If you’d like to come on the 20th and are new to Club Workspace, not a problem! All are welcome. If you’d like to learn a little more about Club, please find me (Ben!), and I’ll give you the guided tour. Until then, please see this map so you can find your way to our Clerkenwell Club. We’re downstairs!

The Creative Pioneers Challenge is a competition jointly run by Tech City, The Metro, The IPA and Creative SkillSet. The job of The Challenge is to discover the next generation of creative entrepreneurs. Their website unashamedly states that the purpose of the competition is to find young people who are full of ideas, who are tech-savvy, and who don’t mind getting up bright and early in the morning with a belly full of fuel. Or, in their own words, they want people who ‘can do, can code, and can start’.

Going on what we witnessed at Club Workspace on Tuesday night, the competition has had fulfilled its goals. There were just over 20 young people in-situ, and they were all brimming with ideas and energy. 

The purpose of Tuesday’s session was to undergird the Creative Pioneers’ bright ideas with a sound understanding of business planning. Although some of the creative entrepreneurs had experience in business, others were treading on virgin fields when it came to the finer details of business preparation.

Andrew didn’t go into the minutia of business planning - for a detailed runthrough, please see this vintage blog of ours - instead he set out the foundations for a solid business plan, and helped the collected audience get their heads around the purpose of a business plan.

Do You Understand Your Business? 

An interesting point that Andrew made was that before you write your business plan, you need to know your business. This sounds like a silly point to make - of course you know your own business, it’s yours isn’t it? To counter this point, Andrew asked everyone in the room to describe their business succinctly: it was an eye-opener for many! 

Ask yourself these questions to shape your own impression of your business: what does you business do? What ‘need’ does it fulfill? How big is this need? Who are your customers? If you sell food - your customers aren’t just everyone, they’re people within a certain area, and are they vegetarian?! 

Also, how big is your market? A good way to think of this question is by thinking in terms of distance: how far can your product travel? Who are your competition? Who’s doing what you’re doing? What makes your business different to theirs? What is your USP? Is it you?!

More questions! How much money will your idea make? Over how long? What needs to happen next to put the wheels in motion? Who is going to execute the idea? You or a team? Why are you great, and right for the project? Why is your team great, and right for the project? What do you want to happen in the end? Who do you want to sell to? As the old adage goes, don’t start a business unless you know who’s going to buy it! In other words, consider your acquisition targets long before your startup. 

Sections

After you have finely-tuned your understanding of your business using the questions above, you can then tackle your business plan. Before we relay the ‘sections’ that Andrew suggested that you include in your BP, we shall pass on this advice from Mr. H: your business plan is not inflexible, it is a document that can change and adapt. Don’t be afraid to revise your plan, in fact, actively redress your plan every couple of months. 

The suggested sections for your Business Plan are as follows: Executive Summary - everything that you are about to say, in miniature; The Opportunity - the problem that you’re solving; Business Solution - the solution to said problem; Market Overview - how many people can you sell to, and who are they?; Competitive Analysis - who else is doing what you do? Why are you better? Marketing and Sales - any marketing campaigns that you have planned; Three Year Financial Projections - profit and loss, potentially a cash burn prediction too; Details of Team - who are your guys and why are they the best guys? Expected End Result - what happens when you are a success! 

Thank You

Thank you to Andrew Humphries for bringing his Creative Pioneers into Club Workspace - it was a pleasure to meet them and to host such an interesting and informative event. From everyone at Club Workspace: the very best of luck to all of the Pioneers! 

The very last action of the StartUp Games was the ‘Club Workspace Barbecue’. To clear up one misnomer, the cooking per-se wasn’t performed downstairs at Club Workspace, as we hear that naked flames and basements aren’t a marriage made in heaven. Instead, we decamped upstairs to our gorgeous courtyard space.

The Clerkenwell Kitchen - our fantastic and award winning neighbours - did all of the hard work. They sizzled the sausages and flipped the steaks. As ever, they did so with aplomb. One of the StartUp Games competitors took to the Twittersphere to announce, “if Heineken did bbqs, they still woundn’t be as good as yours!” Why thank you, Neil Ricketts, that brings a tear to the eye - but I’m sure that Carslberg’s ad agency aren’t quite so flattered!

But that’s enough about sausages and tv - here’s who left the competition victorious! As you may know, as victors, they also left with 6 months free Club Workspace membership! The winner was... Versarien! Versarien won the overall prize at the StartUp Games. Tuizzi came second and MediaDevil took the bronze. Two of these triumverate of startup talent come from the UK, with Tuizzi putting in a strong showing on Portugal’s behalf. This is a great sign for the UK, and also for the rest of Europe, who were strong and ran our guys very close.

Thank you very much to all of the StartUp Games competitors, you have been a joy to get to know. Thank you to Andrew Humphries and to Oli Barrett for the effort they put in to planning the StartUp Games, and to Tech City UK and StartUp Britain for their support. The final word must be another congratulations to Verasien! See you soon at Club!

As you will have seen in our previous blog, Club Workspace is delighted to be working with the StartUp Games. We’re providing prizes and a bbq venue, amongst other things!

The StartUp Games was launched on the twelfth floor of the impressive Team GB House. The event handily coincided with the launch of the Paralympic Games. From this high vantage point, the StartUp Games competitors were able to observe the world’s paralympians take to their stage.

Dan Crow of Songkick

There were several speakers on show at the StartUp Games’ launch night. After Andrew Humphries and Oli Barrett - stars of stage and screen - had warmed up the crowd, Deputy Mayor of London for Business and Enterprise Kit Malthouse gave an address that had the audience rippling with laughter. It was Dan Crow, however, the CTO of the internationally successful app Songkick, who stole the show. 

Dan spoke about his experiences in tech, and about how Songkick, a brilliantly original app, has taken the world by storm. Needless to say, the large audience listened intently to Dan, as he removed the lid from his box of tricks. 

Dan’s first tip was this: Events and meetups are extremely important for entrepreneurs of all kinds. Even if you have achieved massive traction online, there’s no substitute for getting out there and meeting likeminded people. You never know who you’ll meet at a meetup. You could come out of a two-hour session with an armoury of new users, new brand advocates, or new testers.

‘The internet allows you to go global from day one’, Dan continued, ‘you can reach everyone everywhere.’ Dan, of course, practices what he preaches with this particular axiom. Songkick demonstrates that there is no need to be parochial with tech. If your idea is relevant to the world at large, then do all you can make it go global.

Dan then echoed the sentiment of our friend Bob Dorf by declaring that techies should use customers & users to test their products. Testing is all important when creating a new app or online service. It would be a waste of your time and money to develop something that is difficult or cumbersome to use. Who can tell you if your app needs some tweaks? The users.

The last piece of advice that Dan shared was about entrepreneurship in general. He explained that ‘entrepreneurship is not about ideas, it’s about execution.’ Dan explained that it is more than likely that someone, somewhere has an idea that is very similar to yours. Your job, as an entrepreneur, is to execute your idea better than anyone else. 

Thank you

Thanks to Team GB House for letting us all in, to Andrew, Oli and Kit for opening the show with such panache, to all the StartUp Gamers for being so keen, and, of course, to Dan for sharing his wisdom.

Club Workspace looking forward to working with the StartUp Games in several ways. Firstly, we are offering a Club Workspace membership to the winning startup! As you know, Club Workspace is growing at a stunning rate that reflects the power and vibrancy of the London startup scene. We’ve got a handful of new venues due before Christmas, and more to follow soonafter. We can’t wait to welcome the StartUp Games champion to the Club.

Secondly, we’re running 10 minute ‘Energiser’ talks in between sessions on Thursday 30th. This means that we’re returning to Hackney House! During tomorrow's visit, we'll spread the world about Club's plans to make a bigger mark on the capital, to all of the StartUp Games competitors about Club.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we know that all work and no play makes Jack a dull startup. Therefore, we’ve teamed up with our neighbours, The Clerkenwell Kitchen, in order to host the Friday evening barbecue. After three days of hard competing, the ‘Very British Barbecue, hosted by Club Workspace’, will enable the ensemble of international startups to let their hair down, with the courtyard at the Clerkenwell Workshops providing the perfect backdrop. Nothing says startup fun like sausages and sun.