awards

It's award season and time for nominees to gather public votes. Having got your eye in with some thumbs-up, thumbs-down action on the SXSW panel picker, it's time for voting in the Smarta 100 awards and the Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition.

And we're chuffed that our friends and Digital Mission alumni ParcelGenie, Teamly and Zkatter have made it through to the Smarta 100, vote for them, or, if you must the other nominees ;-) - here:

IC tomorrow, a Technology Strategy Board (TSB) initiative has launched a brand-spanking new £25,000 competition for the University of Abertay Dundee to build prototypes to push the barriers of the games industry.

The Future of Games contest is designed to enable small firms to develop prototypes which can be developed into commercial models in early 2012. As part of the hook up with IC tomorrow, developers will get access to content from EMI, Tate, IPC Media and National Geographic.

I'm pretty sure it happens earlier each year, but maybe it's age. Policemen are all looking younger, too. The annual 'vote for me' fest that is the SXSW Panelpicker has opened its doors.

This year sees over 80 panels submitted from this side of the Atlantic from organisations big and small including the BBC, Iris Worldwide, FutureGov, TechHub, BBC, PeerIndex, mydeco, Somethin' Else, Madgex, Clearleft, The Economist and heaps more.

You've got just over a week to submit entries for this year's BIMA Awards thanks to a two week extension, making the new deadline midnight on Friday 26th August.

The benefits of hosting and running an event are obvious. In one fail swoop, your influential speakers will draw in guests who could end up being potential partners, consumers or even investors.

Your event will be the toast of the digital town, elevating your brand in a dynamic way. The only drawback? The niggly fact that everybody wants a slice of the events pie. So what to do?

In such an overcrowded market, strategic planning and promotion can see your event being firmly pencilled into the diaries of those that matter. But navigating the choppy waters of promotions can be tricky for even the savviest of marketers, so we've come up with four easy ways to promote your event.

Following on from our recent post 'Digital Mission: The Story So Far, Future Plans, New Initiatives', for the past few months, we've been busy gathering information from as many of our Digital Mission Alumni as possible, asking how they've been getting on since their first Mission.

As previously mentioned, we're big infographic fans here at Chinwag.  So much so, that we decided to create our own based on our findings.

Combined with a few Digital Mission facts and figures, and some of the results of our survey earlier this year, there's some very interesting and impressive findings, if we do say so ourselves!

Thanks to our friends at Momo London for the heads-up that applications are now open for year's Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition. 

The competition is open to startups from seven countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, Turkey or the United Kingdom) and has a rather juicy €225,000 up for grabs for the leading mobile site, service or applications.