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Last night was the launch of SkillSwap Gloucestershire, hosted by Gloucestershire Media Group. Based on the same successful formula as Brighton and Bristol, the evening brought together creative media types, digital tech types and a couple enterprising business types.

The venue was kept nicely informal at the Beehive in Cheltenham and expertise was provided by the Kevin Hapeshi (University of Gloucestershire’s Head of Computing), though in keeping with SkillSwap most of the expertise was dispersed among the room and freely contributed by all. It was a good launch evening, and the ambition of swapping skills between two fairly disparate groups is noble (and needed). The two main coordinating groups brought a balanced mix of people in the room but the working title for the evening was a bit vague, perhaps future events will have a tighter focus.

Lets see what future swaps bring.

Exploring a new (to me) social network Taking IT Global.

Based in Toronto they’ve got the usual global presence but with a more social awareness and personal activism angle. Interesting to see how this develops and the relative attention spent between all the different networking stuff going on.

The revolving doors of senior executives are just as active at Young Enterprise companies as at Fortune 500 ones.

In something of a shock move last week, StylEco decided to unseat one of their MD’s. Written warnings had been given, the HR policy had been followed and despite some dissenting voices the motion was carried. All a bit traumatic, made the more so when I discovered that the reason that MD wasn’t present was because she was at a family funeral, just after Christmas.

As their Business Advisor I was aware that some rumblings were afoot in the ranks but this is a very energetic group and getting to consensus and decision in a 1 hour meeting sometimes means calling a halt to discussion. Which can make you unpopular.

This week she appealed the decision and was voted back in with an overwhelming vote of confidence. Some things you have to nip in the bud, others are best left to play themselves out. The vote of confidence will also help both MDs re-imposed their control over the meeting and company.

As part of the learning that the mini-crisis caused, a new seating plan was enforced that helped to break up some of the noisier clusters.

The other big news on the agenda was the Valentines Trade fair in Bristol Galleries (Wed, 6 Feb if you’re in the centre of Bristol). Along with making sure they would have enough stock of their best selling eco-friendly bags and purses, they are planning on introducing two new lines - cushions and sets of fridge-magnet letter tiles made from old PC and laptop keyboards.

Quite a bit of time was spent discussing uniforms and logos (seems to be a recurring theme this year) and the meeting finally concluded with a reasonable plan in place.

I’m always staggered by the amount of research that Sam’s doing. This has always been on her CV but never very public.

So I’ve finally persuaded her to put some of the more recent links up here.

As well as published work, we’re going to try and keep a running track of articles, posters and presentations that are in draft or submitted but not yet accepted. Obviously we won’t be able to go into full details before publication but hopefully there will be something that will give a flavour of what she gets up to.

Should we ever get around to some joint research or non-clinical stuff there will be more to talk about openly.

Enjoy.

Research is always fun to do. Part of that is figuring out how to actually accomplish what you want to do. However the bit which all bosses want are the outputs. After a considerable amount of trawling through medical notes, patient interviews, postal surveys and then data analysis, I and several doctors have written and submitted five abstracts to the British Association of Oral and Maxiollfacial Surgeons annual conference.

Of course submission does not equal acceptance. So now we have the waiting game. To fill this time we are concentrating on producing articles for publication in peer review journals. Watch this space to find out our success rate and where the abstracts and subsequent articles can be read.

We put a submission in but were unsuccessful so well done to everyone.

There’s an interesting mix of ideas. Personally I can’t wait to see what HMC and Aardman come up with on Ani-mates. Harmonize sounds like a hyped-up Treasure Hunt or Challenge Annika and I’m sure that Power-to-the-People has been done several times before including the chap that lets you control his Christmas lights in aid of Celiac, amongst others. I like the idea of Happy Packages, so long as it doesn’t degenerate into Facebook poking everywhere, all the time; but then maybe that’s what makes most people most happy most of the time…

I’m not quite sure what Swarm and Happy Town are out to achieve but I’m sure it’ll be interesting. Full list on the Media Sandbox site.

More news to follow, plus each project has it’s own project blog / journal to watch.

(Disclosure; I’m working with a Heliotrope, on their new product, Prelude, that we think addresses some of the challenges that Akhtar discussed relating to building individual, group and community understanding.)

I was up in London on Monday evening at the SMARTLab at an invited talk by Dr Akhtar Badshah - Senior Director, Global Community Affairs, Microsoft Corporation. Prof Lizbeth Goodman and her team have completed a review of the Boys & Girls Club of America programme ClubTech (funded out of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential programme). There wasn’t a whole lot on that (except that it was generally found to have been a good thing). There was a short video summary (3 min YouTube link) but that was very high level and a bit marketing orientated.

Akhtar talked freeform, no slides but they were video’ing so hopefully there will be a video up shortly. It was quite a wide ranging talk, starting with the premise that if you teach a man to fish he’ll survive, but if you stop there, he’ll only eat fish - how to do you get to economic growth (take the fish to market, etc)? And how can ICT support this?

Akhtar was really interested in the intersection between the bottom of the middle of the economic pyramid and the top of the bottom. That was where he (and by extension Microsoft) saw scope for economic development and corporate philanthropy.

The very bottom of the pyramid is the domain of the NGOs, and health is greatest limit on bottom of the pyramid sustainable growth. If there was a theme to Akhtar’s discussion it would be building economic engines for growth in that intersection between the middle and bottom parts of the pyramid. Unlimited Potential is about developing relevant, affordable, accessible products.

Akhtar recognised that everyone that wanted to use Vista in the developing world probably was, and was using a pirated version. So there was no point donating licenses since it was already ‘free’, Microsoft was having to justify other value added propositions to give people the economic engine that would then provide the justification for paying something to Microsoft. As an example Akhtar pointed to the Cell phone business models - pay as you use for Vista (Flex Go). He’d didn’t go into details so it was hard to see quite where the value-add was.
It was a very wide ranging talks with examples from across the globe where Microsoft are working.

Somebody else asked the question about building community and understanding through ICT. Akhtar didn’t really answer but hinted at a lack of models on how to use technology to facilitate building understanding and sense of community (other than wikis and blogs about which he was largely dismissive for lack of quality). I didn’t jump straight in as others had questions but did approach Akhtar straight afterwards to discuss Heliotrope, we’ll see where that leads.

With all the furore at the moment over Facebook, Scoble and Plaxo, OpenSocial, data-portability, etc. it was refreshing to get an email from Nick at NDK Group asking to hook up and do some old-fashioned linking between our sites.

Turns out he popped his name into Google and a post I wrote a few months back came up. I then checked out his LinkedIn profile, and we hooked up there also. Nick is probably the most inspirational, and informative speaker I’ve heard on building rapport, understanding the person you’re with, and moving to common agreement; but then his is a qualified hypnotist! Although focused on sales in the presentation/events I attended, I’m pretty sure that any negotiation process would benefit from his approach.

For all the wonderousness of the automagical technology, rapport ultimately depends on human connections. And business depends on rapport (with perhaps the exception of commodities trading).

Roll on next Monday when I’m up in London building some more human connections (and hopefully some rapport) with the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute folks. Akhtar Badshah (Senior Director, Global Community Affairs, Microsoft) is talking about sustainability and the next generation of creative technology tools.

Any questions I should put to him?

Got a bit overwhelmed with some work on another project, but spent a great hour or so with Sarah Baddley from Common Purpose on Friday.

She’s putting together a new programme  and we were discussing innovation, entrepreneurship, Bristol and the West of England. The most obvious (and recent) entrepreneurial success that came to mind was Ryan Notz at www.buildersite.co.uk and his success at SeedCamp.

I also mentioned Venture Hacks and their series of fantastic entrepreneur-friendly posts on how to get a term-sheet together and how to negotiate with VCs and Angels.

We also touched on the SWRDA creative industry strategy, the Creative Economy Programme and some of the work that South West Screen has commissioned.

Lastly there was the new National Coordination Centre for Public Engagement between UWE and Bristol.

Sarah also pointed to the Equity Fingerprint which her father set up; I just found again on my del.icio.us links from 30 May last year - nothing is ever lost or forgotten on the web!