business & innovation

After last week's successful Social Media Week London brainstorm - we're delighted to announce a SMWLDN Brainstorm Round 2 in preparation for next February's SMWLDN on Wed 7th Dec from 6pm - 8pm in Shoreditch or TechCity, if you're startup-minded (RSVP).

This time, the aim is to focus on how social media is affecting and impacting our day-to-day lives from the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the music we listen to, the games we play, the sport (some of us, ehem) do and our families.

A couple of weeks back I was asked to speak at TechWorld, a conference and expo organised by UK Trade & Investment. This year's event included the addition of the first TechCity Entrepreneur's Festival.

The week-long festival incorporated a bootcamp, access to investors, a giant get-together with Silicon Valley Comes to the UK, pitch training and a pitch competition. In the light of so many overseas companies heading in to London, I thought a whistlestop tour of the UK's digital sector, location of clusters and London, in particular might be handy.

Two heads are better than one. So, 35 must be exponentially better, right?

At Chinwag, we're big fans of building things collaboratively, so we thought we'd really push the boat out for the initial planning of Social Media Week London 2012 (SMWLDN), 13-17th Feb, in case you're wondering.

On Tuesday evening, after an open invite, 35 people gathered at Ketchum PR's offices in Shoreditch to ruminate, dream and scheme on the themes for next year's SMWLDN. Analysing last year's event and taking informal soundings, the group started to explore five starting points:

You love Google.

It's one of those universal tools everyone has a soft spot for. I secretly imagine people who work at Yahoo use it when their boss isn't watching. Who couldn't adore a company who has an unofficial slogan "Don't be evil."

In April 2010 the search giant purchased "PlinkArt." PlinkArt was originally designed to identify works of art once you took a photo of it. The app was one of three winners of the Education/Reference category of the Google ADC2 (Android Developer Challenge 2). Google then purchased them and added the functionality to what we now know as "Google Goggles" - a visual search engine.

The HSBC Business Growth Grant competition is offering funding to help grow up to four deserving businesses. 

They'll be offering up to two £50,000 Growing Business Grants to businesses using innovative ideas to grow within the UK. Two more £50,000 Overseas Trade Grants will go to businesses that have the aspiration and motivation to develop new opportunities overseas. 

Earlier this year in February, led by Chinwag, Social Media Week London included over 110 events, 12 designed by Chinwag and a whopping 95 created and delivered with love by our 54 event partners, including Dell, Dutch Embassy, British Library, BBC, Channel 4, LikeMinds, Viadeo, We Are Social, techMAP, Ogilvy and more.

44% of events were put on by digital, traditional and social media agencies, the rest were a variety of companies, organisations and individuals from all sectors.

8,500 tickets were snapped up and over 8,500 online viewers watched livestreams. Social Media Week London (#smwldn) trended every day on Twitter surfing the wave of tweets across all the events.

It's almost that time of year again - and we're back taking the lead for Social Media Week London, 13 - 17th February 2012.

Square is a company that caught my eye just over a year ago. If you’re not familiar with it, you should be. It’s an iPhone / iPad app that lets you receive credit card payments. The start-up (if you can call a company which transfers more than $3 million per day a "start-up") has recently received investment from Richard Branson and is "looking into international expansion in 2012", this excites me greatly, here’s why...