Archive for Uncategorized
Harry Metcalfe to Lead Sessions on Web 2.0 and Public Consultation at G2010
Posted by: | CommentsHarry Metcalfe will be chairing a discussion on how web 2.0 technologies are transforming the process of public consultation with citizens. We’ll be announcing his panel members shortly.
Harry is the founder of The Dextrous Web, a startup founded to help organisations – mostly in the public sector – get things right on the web. The Dextrous Web’s clients include The Cabinet Office, The Central Office of Information, The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and Guardian News & Media.
Harry is also on the boards of the Open Rights Group, an NGO which campaigns to protect and preserve our digital rights, and the FreeLegalWeb, a community interest company with plans to make the law easier to find, read and understand.
He is particularly interested in making public sector information discoverable and resuable, reforming copyright law, making the public consultation process more transparent and accountable and strengthening the Freedom of Information Act.
Web 2.0 Overview
Posted by: | CommentsIt was a real pleasure to spend the last two weeks in the Bay Area (any excuse to get to San Francisco, frankly). However, as ever, the Web 2.0 Expo was inspirational. Some wonderful speakers, the company of some great companies, and luminary keynotes from Google, Microsoft, O’Reilly – among many others.
My friends and colleagues over at FRONT have done a great job describing the Web 2.0 experience and Paul May’s photos are among the best of the Flickerstream’s.
Hop on over to FRONT for the round-up and wrap-up of Web 2.0 Expo.
Gov 2.0 and Web 2.0 Expo
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One of the best keynote sessions at today’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco was the interview of Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation by Tim O’Reilly .
Sunlight Foundation is focusing on making government more transparent through Web 2.0 tools. The fact is that in the US (never mind the UK) too many government departments spend too much money on web site development that delivers too little in terms of understandable information.
This means that valuable information that should be in the public debate is hidden. It’s a kind of web obfuscation caused by bloat and poor user interface design.
Ellen mentioned that the Sunlight Foundation often produces ‘alternative’ web sites that present government data in much better, more visually understandable ways. The result is that the alternative sites – often built for peanuts compared to federal budgets – become much more popular that the ‘official sites’.
The Foundation also challenges the vastly inflated costs associated with official sites such as Recovery.gov - that has a massive budget of multiple tens of millions of dollars. Why such budgets in a Web 2.0 world?
The Sunlight Foundation is a non-profit organisation that is shaking the processes by which governments provide citizens with information. We need its equivalent in the UK.
Conversations, 26th March – Speakers
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Please note this event is by invitation only. If you would like to be invited please use our contact form. Registration is from 6.00pm and the event starts at 6.30pm for invited guests.
Conversations: OneAldwych, 26th March, 2008
See below the fold for Interviewee Bios…
Paul McKeever, CEO, FRONT
Paul co-founded FRONT with Jamie Neely in September 2000 and has an incredibly diverse role leading the team there. He’s involved in every project through the senior supplier role, which means ensuring that projects are progressing towards expected outcomes and that things are going well in terms of quality and timeliness.
Paul is a professionally qualified project manager (Prince2 Practitioner) and is working on a research project to complete a Master’s degree based on the idea of co-creation of value (some of the theory behind how online communities create value).
Peter Vlachos – University of Greenwich
Peter Vlachos, BA (Toronto), MA (Toronto), MBA (East London), PGCHE (Greenwich), MCMI, FRSA, MCIM, FHEA is a Senior Lecturer and MA Programme Leader in the Department of Marketing, Events and Tourism, Business School, University of Greenwich. Prior to this he spent over 20 years working in the field of corporate and cultural events in the UK and Canada. He will be discussing the relationship between live events and social media in the marketing context.
Anne McCrossan, Visceral Business
Anne’s areas of expertise are business strategy, organizational change, brand marketing and customer and employee engagement.
Her career has included time with Saatchi & Saatchi and The Brand Union at the forefront of marketing during the last twenty years, advising a wide range businesses around the world, across every sector.
Her company is called Visceral Business. Actually it’s more of a network.
She’s an active member of www.triiibes.com, Seth’s Godin’s online community that’s rewriting the rules of strategic marketing and organizational development.
Jeremy Brown, CEO, Sense Worldwide
Jeremy Brown is the founder and CEO of Sense Worldwide.
‘Why don’t we convene a bunch of creative thinkers and doers from around the world, get them to tell us what’s going on out there and collaborate to develop new things?’ he said.
‘Good idea’ they all replied.
Jeremy is the protagonist, the horn blower, the evangelist… the one who doesn’t make the tea much. He has a habit of huffing when things aren’t going right; and when things are going right he gets a bit over excited. He’s been doing Kung Fu for ages, we’ve seen the bruises but no one’s seen him in action. He also has a nice collection of textured blazers.
Prior to all this Jeremy’s had flirts with planning in advertising agencies, running design companies and various management consultancy positions.
Matt Rhodes, Head of Client Services, FreshNetworks
Matt Rhodes is head of Client Services at London-based social media agency, FreshNetworks. One of the founding members of FreshNetworks, Matt oversees the production, management and analysis of branded online communities for brands such as BSkyB, British Telecom and UK leisure firm Butlins. He has a background in market research, customer experience and strategy consulting, specialising in digital innovation and product and proposition development.
Matt runs both professional and personal blogs and is a prolific author of social media best-practice articles for a range of publications both on and offline. He is a regular speaker at Web 2.0 and research conferences across Europe, most recently appearing at ESOMAR in Dublin and Online Information in London. He has also appeared as a social media marketing expert on Sky News and BBC radio.
Mark Adams, COO, Conversation Group
Mark is Chief Operating Officer of the Conversation Group. Mark has spent nearly 20 years in technology marketing and 10 in corporate finance. He co-founded the global technology PR firm, Text 100, which grew to become Next Fifteen Communications, owner of other marketing communications operations such as Bite and OutCast Communications, and which is listed on London’s AIM stock market.
He is now a Partner with Pembridge Partners LLP, a UK-based finance and investment firm specialising in the media, internet and creative sector where he has served as non-Executive Director and advises on M&A and MBO transactions.
Steve Loynes, Head of B2B, Chameleon PR
Steve Loynes is head of the b2b technology practice at Chameleon PR. Steve has been delivering innovative campaigns within the b2b technology sector for over ten years. His experience is drawn from agency and in-house roles, providing strategic and creative PR programmes for clients including Microsoft, Motorola and Orange.
He is one of Chameleon’s leading consultants on conversation and the use of social media.
Gemma Cocker and Nick Donnelly, Founders, tweetieandthebrain.com
Gemma and Nick are Co-Founders of Twitter Consultancy tweetieandthebrain.com
Gemma is a London based singer/dancer/actress and freelance XHTML & CSS tech geek whereas Nick is a Twitter Marketing Specialist, Developer, Traveller and Snowboarder who loves photography.
Both will provide an insight into the world of Twitter – what works, what doesn’t and why a social media strategy is all-important in business.
Jeffrey Peel, Interviewer – Managing Director of Quadriga Consulting
Jeff Peel is a researcher, consultant and marketing strategist. He is the author of a book on Customer Relationship Management and has conducted research based marketing consulting assignments for clients including Microsoft, BT, 3Com, IBM and many others. More recently he has applied his knowledge of social media marketing and MR techniques to build relationships with consumer marketers hoping to tap into the brave new world of social media and Web 2.0.
Jeff has run his own consultancy for the last 7 years and was previously Head of Marketing for CRM software firm Amacis (now part of ATG). Prior to Amacis he held senior roles at Response Analysis Corporation and Roper Starch Worldwide in Princeton, NJ and at Research International in London.
Protected: Private Post Web 2.0 Marketing Presentation Deck
Posted by: | CommentsCompany becomes member of Alliance, providing unified access to dynamic subscriber and service data… [Client Media Release]
Barcelona , June 2nd 2008 – Mobility Data Systems (MDS), the systems and data integration company, has today announced that it has become a member of the SDP Alliance. The Alliance offers pre-integrated service delivery platform (SDP) components that reduce the costs and risks associated with SDP deployment.
Flexible service delivery platforms are essential for telecommunications service providers in terms of offering better customer experience, new service roll-out, strong customer engagement and maximized revenue per user. MDS is responsible for architecting and pre-integration the SDP Alliance solution and maintaining the SDP Alliance Test Lab.
MDS is one of a new breed of agile data solutions players that has built particular expertise in enterprise information integration. At the heart of the MDS approach to data integration – the biggest challenge in most SDP projects – is the idea that change is constant. Agile systems allow service delivery platforms to adapt over time to facilitate new service delivery and the business models to maximise return on investment (RoI).
According to Colm Hayden, MDS’s Chief Technology Officer, “Our Agile Data Integration Framework is the integration glue right at the heart of an SDP deployment. Our view is that hard-wiring components together in a Service Delivery Platform is a flawed approach and has caused many operators to become locked in to what effectively becomes an inflexible and highly proprietary platform. What may have started out as a means of servicing the business becomes a liability.”
He continued, “We have developed a dynamic data broker for the SDP Alliance that unifies access to consolidated subscriber and service data. After all, such data is the focus of all the key enablers of a mobile and Web 2.0 SDP –including personalisation, search and targeted advertising. Each component needs to have common access to critical subscriber and service data. Our agile framework makes this key data available to all components and can accommodate new functionality in the SDP by having an open API right at the heart of the system.
“Flexibility and future-proofing is optimised while lock-in and hard-wiring becomes a thing of the past. Our resource oriented architecture is a natural part of a SOA-based SDP. Our REST-based data federation means that the addition of new data sources and applications is a simple configuration task.”
Colm Hayden will be presenting at IIR’s Evolving Service Delivery event (Mon 2nd June 2008 to Thursday 5th June 2008 at the Hotel Fira Palace, in Barcelona). Now in its seventh consecutive year, IIR’s Evolving Service Delivery Platforms Conference 2008 is widely recognised as the telecom industry’s leading forum on SDPs and service architecture. The SDP Alliance is a silver sponsor of the event and will be holding a SDP and Telco 2.0 focused conference on June 5th.
About MDS
Mobility Data Systems was established in 2004 and provides software and solutions to telecoms and enterprise customers – with a particular focus on enterprise integration challenges. The company has applied its unique technology to various sectors including telecoms, financial services and government. The company is headquartered in Northern Ireland but has operations in Eastern Europe.
http://www.mobilitydatasystems.com
About The SDP Alliance
The SDP Alliance is a collaboration of five companies that collectively provide a fully integrated, product-based approach to the service delivery platform (SDP). Alliance members include Aepona, Changingworlds, Cibenix, MDS and OpenNet.
The key components of the SDP architecture provided by these member companies cover the following:
Secure and open access to core network capabilities
Intelligent personalised navigation for content discovery
On-device portal solutions
Agile data integration
Transaction management
The SDP Alliance offers a pre-integrated, product and SOA-based SDP that reduces the costs and risks of SDP deployment.
Further information can be obtained from http://www.thesdpalliance.com/
Protected: Presentation Download (Web 2.0 Marketing Seminar)
Posted by: | CommentsQuadriga Re-Launches Mail Distiller
Posted by: | CommentsQuadriga Consulting has just completed a major re-brand and re-launch assignment for Mail Distiller, the UK based malware protection and email continuity firm.
The project involved the development of an entire suite of new product collateral, web site and blog, video based product demos – and other sales aids. Quadriga has also been retained to manage ongoing SEO and PR work for the firm.
Further information can be found at www.maildistiller.com

Social Networking Research & Intelligence: Blogs and social networks are merging into one category these days. For example, what’s the difference between a Facebook Group microsite and a blog? Both contain content, both have discussion trails, both have communities of interest. Blogs have become more like social networks as social bookmarking has become more important, and the social bookmarking sites themselves are beginning to look more like social networking sites. Then throw feeds from one platform, into another, and everything is mixed up. Enter the social networking ecosystem.
