Summit – Final day LIVE

By Catalina Albeanu, Digital Daily Reporter

Summit is a day dedicated to the community. For its last day, Digital Shoreditch aims to bring together local business owners and innovators and to give them the opportunity to network and discuss.

The day will be buzzing with talk of new ways to connect and collaborate with consumers and companies alike and how various industries have embraced the new technologies. We will also find out the winners of the Race for Apps competition, a crowd sourcing exercise focused on London 2012, so keep checking back for updates from our Digital Daily reporters.

You read our blog from the bottom upwards. You  can also follow us on Twitter at @digishoredaily and hashtags #ds12 and #dscity.

18:00 – The 2012 edition of Digital Shoreditch is coming to a close with the announcement of a future event offering a life-changing opportunity for a start-up to win £1m, with the condition to move their HQ to London. Keep an eye out for that! Thanks for reading and for sticking with us to the very end of the festival.

17:55 – Audience member says that trying to bring together local entrepreneurs is like trying to organise a bunch of cats. It’s just not gonna happen. They only care about their own brand.

17:50 – Sections of the map in a bit more detail. Amazing work!

17:41 – This canvas will turn into a map of Shoreditch, the Digi way:

17:36 – Dowson tells the audience that there’s an enormous human system at work, and it includes the internet folk. The digital media eco-system in London in 2012 is busy. “If you are a start-up and you are lonely, you will die”. The more you talk, the more you learn, the more you do.

17:31 – Unless people make money out of Digital London, it will die. “Our business models are being validated by hard cash.”

17:29 – Dowson tells the audience that 30% of graduates come from overseas and that they should “keep on coming”.

17:27 – Ian Dowson, principal of William Garrity Associates Ltd, takes to the stage to explore how deep knowledge is regenerating Digital London.

17:15 - Dan Sutherland, CEO of Carrenza, says we no longer need a server in the corner of the room. We can now use the Cloud, Google docs, etc. The Shoreditch Network allows start-ups to access connectivity and to benefit frm the services it brings.

17:03 - How can Digital Shoreditch be sustainable and contribute to the local community? Evans mentions New City tech, job creation and education. Shoreditch is still a preferred location of digital start-ups, but it’s not isolated, not an island.

17:00 - Prof. Graeme Evans from Brunel says that Shoreditch is part of a regional and global cluster in his “Digital Economy: East Meets West” talk. However, “Silicon Valley is not a good or appropriate model for Tech City post-Olympics.”

16:58 - Cooper summarises: Business clusters work when talent is available, the right conditions are there, and the spark is present. We as people work together to grow. When we’re apart, there is no common goal. In digital, we’ve come together to make it happen.

16:56 - If people want to work remotely and don’t want to be part of the team, maybe they’re just not interested in what your company actually does.

16:54 - Cooper gives the Festival the three elements of a successful business cluster through a fire analogy: the spark – business spirit, oxygen – the condition for business, ie venture capital, and the fuel – talent.

16:49 - Jay Cooper, managing director of BLOOM Worldwide, talks to the audience about business clusters and why they are relevant in the current climate.

16:37 - Watson tells the audience more about what Dennis Publishing did right and what they did wrong during their tablet app adventure. Right: they got involved fairly early, they got their staff to contribute, and they didn’t shy away from challenges, such as managing subscriptions. What went wrong: they didn’t invest enough in apps, and didn’t develop their own technology enough. But in the end you get the pleasure to say “I made this!”.

16:30 - Alex Watson, head of App Development at Dennis Publishing, takes to the stage to talk about the pitfalls and pressures of tablet publishing.

16:00 – Coffee and networking break, maybe with a slice of cake on the side.

15:50 – Iris Lapinski (@irislapinski), CEO of CDI Europe, says we need to make sure the dog eats the dog food; that there is a real need and a market for our product. She also doesn’t recommend a “funny team” with part-time execs, and tells the audience that businesses need to be prepared for technological change, as it happens exponentially.

15:43 – Simon Willison (@simonw), co-founder of Lanyrd.com, has three tech commandments for the Festival. Ship early, ship often, and make it easy to ship. Effective shipping can also improve your product, not just customer service; bug reports from users are important. Lanyrd also has a mascot – the “Ship It” hamster.

15:25 – ‘Agile’ is the word du jour. Work with small pieces, rapidly built, that you put in front of customers to get quick and useful feedback.

15:23 – Azeem Azhar (@azeem), founder of PeerIndex, tells the audience that you have to plan for failure. You need to be prepared to change things as you go along. In the past, software was built like a cathedral. If it takes two years to hit the market, it will be obsolete by its launch date as the world has moved on. It would be like finishing a cathedral hundreds of years after you started construction, in a world that is now mostly atheist and has no need for churches.

15:15 - Tech Commandments talk starts, a panel discussion about the main rules of incorporating tech in business.

13:00 Lunch break. We shall be back soon with more updates from the final day of DS12.

12:45 – “How to have a creative idea?” – Dave Birss, founder of GetAdditive.com,  says “there is nothing new, there is no such things as a new idea”. Birss also said that there is a very fine line between inspiration and plagiarism. “It’s not where you take it from, it’s what you do with it”. He also advises us to write everything down, from things we enjoy to the problems we have. Who knows, you may find it easier to look at things from a different perspective. Tips? “Keep pushing until you are blank and then take a break,”  says Birss.

12:25 – “How to be Pixel Perfect” – According to the Digital Shoreditch brochure, this session aims to “give pixels the care and attention they deserve”. Matt Gypps, designer for ustwo, tells the audience that pixels are the building blocks of all visual design. ustwo believe in inducting all their designers into the school of pixels with Pixel Perfect Precision.

12:10 – “Welcome to the Party”
Windahl Finnigan, head of user experience at Capgemini, tells us that game changers are not manufactured and do not follow a process. Finnigan says that we are moving from the information age into the creative age.

12:00 – Through Connecting the Dots, Pearson have established the seven key principles of a successful collaboration: respect, communication, being open but not letting your guard down, technology as an enabler, a meal and a beer, size doesn’t matter, and the importance of letting the crowd in. More about this in a separate post, stay tuned.

11:55 – Tom Hall, head of partnership at Pearson, says “we need to talk about collaboration”. Pearson have set up a platform called “Plug and Play”, where they made their content available to users, who can now play around with it. Hall says it was “an amazing experience to watch other people’s take on something that we thought we new everything about”, and that Pearson have been constantly surprised by the result. This inspired them to start Connecting the Dots.

11:54 – Why do tags work so well? Because they’re about stories, and if you’re building a brand you need to tell your story. Users will be more connected with your brand, and Hawn says “if there’s room in your story for their story, it will happen a lot faster”.

11:52 – Tags became a way for bands to decide who should tour with them, says Hawn.

11:47: The tag “<3″ is one of the most popular on the website, and has been used over 27000 times, which shows that people tend to relate to music emotionally. Tags are also used by music fans to communicate with each other, sometimes even to argue over their preferences. And as with any online community, they’re sometimes inside jokes; the tag “Brutal Death Metal” has Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up as a top video.

11:46 - Last.fm relies on tags to organise music much more than on genres. They don’t edit tags, they let them grow “feral”. Our relationship with music is much more complicated than genres make it seem, and people have tagged music as “guilty pleasure”, or simply “<3″.

11:44 – Hawn used to work for Universal Music and thinks that the record industry might be changing, but the music industry overall isn’t getting smaller. “We now live in a very crowded musical world”, he says. Hawn also tells the audience that piracy is the least of the artists’ worries, they just want to be listened to and to gain exposure.

11:41- Noise By Numbers – What’s a tag? Are Joy Division atmospheric or depressing?
Matthew Hawn (@jukevox), leader of the product team at Last.fm, talks to us about how the use tags. Last.fm is a “sophisticated speed dating” service for music lovers. They have over 100 million tracks in their database and it took them over 10 years to get to this point. Last year they had 11 million scrobbles (tracks users have listened to) – that’s over 71,ooo years worth of music.

Future of Fashion – How can technology enhance and accelerate fashion start-ups and companies?
11:40 – Speaker Jonas Altman, enterprise business director at London College of Fashion, tells us that fashion is no longer about consumption, but emotion and change. If the film and music industry were sceptical of technological change, the fashion industry is learning to embrace it.