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Tuesday 6th July 2010 may have gone unnoticed by many people as just another Tuesday (apologies to those for whom it’s a major anniversary!), but for the development of Digital Britain it was something of a milestone.

This date is when it became officially impossible to buy a new analogue TV set from a UK retailer. With the final analogue TV switch-off scheduled for 2012, clearly the change had to come some time and apparently last month (June) no sale of an analogue TV took place anywhere in the UK. (more…)

Great news for employers and employees in Yorkshire and the Humber! We have an amazing offer for you through the train to Gain Enhancement Fund which is designed to help your business stay competitive. You can book onto our programme of  quality specialist  digital, creative and project management  courses  and pay only 40% of the list price. There has never been a better time to access our best-sellers such as PRINCE2, Adobe, Apple Pro Apps, iPhone and Agile courses.  To date over 600  individuals, working for 300 regional businesses have already taken advantage of this offer to improve their skills, productivity, and overall effectiveness.

Update 5th August :  We have approximately 30 places left under this current offer. We’d advise contacting us on 0113 812 1725 if you are planning to book for an Autumn course.

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We had a two great speakers for last night™s Leeds Girl Geek Dinner at The Loft, which had been planned as part of the Leeds Web Festival LSx09. The weather wasn™t great for the barbecue we had ordered but that didn™t seem to matter too much. For this event fifty guests had bought tickets, again, we had a good cross-section of the Leeds digital and creative scene. It was good to welcome Melissa Sheriff from AQL, and Janine Jacques. We also had some new graduates who came along courtesy of tickets sponsored by Digital 2020 - thanks to Teresa Colley, Tara Hainsworth, Malhia Mahmood and Michelle Lee for coming along, hope you can come to the next one and we wish you the best of luck as you start your exciting adventure into the sector! Through an introduction from  Sarah Blow from London GGD,  Nick Halstead, founder of TweetMeme came along - he was in Leeds for the Carsonified event the next day.

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We’re really pleased that our new iPhone Apps developer course is running, starting on 20th July. There’s such a growing interest in mobile apps, and the associated business opportunities, that this seemed a logical development for us to complement our Apple Authorised Curriculum portfolio, and our Open Source for Business Android developer course. Apple don’t currently offer authorised developer curriculum, so we are using materials from About Objects, who have been running their courses in the States for a while now. The course will be delivered by Dave Verwer from Shiny Developments. Dave has developed a number of Apps so is well placed to deliver the course. That’s something that we believe really makes a difference.

The three day course is aimed at people with some programming experience and is priced at £995. The actual language you may have used before is not important. We’ll be using iPod Touches on the course; each delegate will be supplied with one to use during the course.

Its amazing how mobile apps are taking off - the opportunities for business, marketing and personal use are endless, as Apple recently demonstrated by announcing the billionth download from the Apps store. We aim to provide our clients with opportunities to take advantage of these developments by bringing new courses such as this to our centre in Leeds.

What have I learned at Thinking Digital? There™s a lot here and its only lunchtime on the first day. We arrived yesterday afternoon to attend Thinking Digital University. I got the Techbus up from Old Broadcasting House, which was great fun. This was a seriously well-equipped bus “ wireless, coffee, kitchen with fridge and sink, TV and best of all great company. (more…)

We’ve just heard that the NTI has been successful in our bid, submited in January,  in response to a call from the Higher Education Funding Council for Universities propose how they could contribute to finding ways to support groups affected by the downturn. (more…)

For  Ada Lovelace Day the subject of my blog post is Lynette Willoughby.

I met Lynette in 1992. It was my first day in a new job and I as feeling pretty unsure of myself. The first person I met that day was Lynette. She took me for coffee and that was the beginning of our friendship. She is an amazing person, a true friend. She helped me get to grips with my new job as a university lecturer, passing on her experience, offering moral support and encouragement, as well as sharing her expertise in teaching computing.

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I spent Saturday 7th March back at the office, so to speak, when nti Leeds sponsored Think Visibility here at Old Broadcasting House. This conference was organised by one of our coworkers, Dominic Hodgson, aka ‘The Hodge’. Dom is very much into SEO and had managed to gather some top names in the key specialist area of increasing visibility for this innovative conference. (more…)

Geoff Gifford and I attended the Innovator ‘09 awards at Leeds Town Hall on Thursday 5th March 2009. We were pretty excited/nervous/pleased to be shortlisted in the Innovation Catalyst award for our coworking space here at Old Broadcasting House. Surprisingly the digital sector wasn’t well represented as from what we can gather it was just NTI Leeds that made the shortlist in any of the categories. This doesn’t represent the true picture of what’s happening in our region in the digital area. Maybe people are not applying as they are just too busy innovating and working on getting business to fill out the application. (more…)

Photocamp Leeds on 28th Feb 2009 was the second Photocamp event organised by Jon Eland and friends. This was another sellout “ over 100 digital photography fans spent the day at this unconference which had an amazing range of workshops “  taking portraits, using Aperture, portraiture, working models, personal creativity, my 365, strobism to name a few. (more…)

Saw this post via a Twitter message today, and was quite inspired by the whole idea of 1,000 women pledging to publish a blog entry on 24th March. Here’s the pledge:

“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.”

At the time of writing 112 people have pledged, so there is still some way to go but plenty of time to get to the desired number.  There were 70 women at the recent Leeds Girl Geek dinner so Leeds could help towards the target in no small way.  Suw Charmin-Anderson is behind this idea, find out more at http://findingada.com/ 

For me, 2008 has been the year I have really got in to Twitter. I started around May, when I was at a conference in Lausanne.  It was such a hot topic of conversation that I felt uncomfortable that I wasn’t using it. Other people were incredulous at my lack of knowledge about this microblogging site (micro what?) and what really shocked me - yes ’shocked’ is not too strong a word - was how conference delegates were greeting each other like they were greeting their bestest friends ever, and yet later it transpired that it was the first time they had met.  But they had formed a friendship via Twitter. Over a drink in the bar at the conference, I did meet a guy who speculated that really it is Americans who love  Twitter as their culture means that they can talk endlessly and unselfconsciously about themselves, whereas Europeans are far more reserved. I wasn’t too sure about his theory, (more…)

A hectic few weeks came to fruition last night at the Leeds Girl Geek Dinner.  The Loft creative events space is a really stylish venue,  the food was tasty, the speakers thought-provoking and informative, and best of all, there was great company.  Seventy people came along for the second Girl Geek Dinner, from organisations covering the diversity of the sector in and around the city, such as Brahm, Numiko, Fuse8, Swamp, SimpleUsability and Zolv.

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I was really impressed by the PHP NW conference on Saturday. There were 180 people that came along for the great line up of speakers. For a conference of this quality, the price of £50 was pretty good value for money. nti Leeds were there as a sponsor, so we had a stand and also provided a mini-bus from Old Broadcasting House over to the conference venue for Leeds based delegates. We met lots of great people there. It was good to meet MadeByPi who are from Leeds. I have been hearing a lot about them recently and they were flying the flag for our region at the DADI Awards in October. Also had a good chat with Matt from Leeds based web design and development company Kilo75 .

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Sheffield is the nearest location for the recently-announced Creative Suite 4 Tour. The event, on 13th November is aimed at:

Graphic designers, print professionals, production and layout artists, web designers and developers, interactive designers and application developers, cable and network broadcasters, post-production professionals, corporate and event videographers, independent filmmakers, visual communication trainers and educators. (more…)

Just got back from two days at the Apple hosted conference for their Authorised Training Centre partners in Barcelona. This was my first time at this annual event, and as you can probably imagine it was fantastic. It was great to see John Moores, our Logic trainer, pick up his guitar with the rest of the Apple band at Thursday’s gala dinner.  Maybe we should  get him to bring his guitar with him to Old Broadcasting House when he comes back in December? Over 200 delegates attended from training centres across Europe. There was some news about new products. Max OSX 10.6 or Snow Leopard will be out next year and the good news is that there will be an upgrade exam so we will still be able to offer 10.5 courses knowing that clients can easily upgrade their certification.  Certifications are now available in iLife and iWork, I guess we need to consider whether these will be popular - any thoughts?

Friday 10 October 2008 saw the launch of Light Night. Determined to experience the highlights of the event, Klanging Banging kicked off the night with the launch of The Granary Wharf canal side sound installation. Following the balloons down to the Kirkstall Flyboat there were drinks and live acoustic performances to lead into the journey around the installation. (more…)

Its hard to believe that a whole year has gone past since we moved in to Old Broadcasting House from our former base in South Leeds.  So now seems like a great time to get our new site up and provide more of a flavour for what we do here to our site visitors. (more…)