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.

What makes a successful collaboration? Tom Hall,  head of partnership at Pearson, spoke at Digital Shoreditch today about the key factors which make a partnership a success.

The list was determinded as part of  Connecting the Dots, a project born after Pearson’s experience with the new Plug and Play platform where users are able to play with content and put their own touch to the company’s products.

According to Hall, the operation was not “brain science”. Respect is extremely important, and people need to enter a deal with “a sense of admiration for the person you’re going to spend your time with”. Communication is also key, and a good collaboration should be like a good marriage. As long as you’re still talking to each other at the end of the day, you’re doing quite well.

A factor that can tell a lot about the state of a partnership is a meal out with your new co-worker. “If you can’t sit down and have a meal with someone you’re working with, it’s not a good sign,” said Hall.

Pearson also push the idea of “opening the gates and letting people in”. Hall admits that users may say things you may not agree with, but they have the power to translate a message in an innovative and fresh manner. But crowdsourcing also means having to deal with copyright matters, and Hall recommends a creative commons license or a refunds system to give users something in return.

But what about new, small companies? Hall found that the size of the company doesn’t matter, and that partnerships between large business and start-ups are just as successful as two established brands working together. Starting a partnership is a laborious process however, and “you need to have a solid network,” Hall recommended. He told Digital Shoreditch Daily that going into a partnership “is just about talent spotting; looking around for companies you’d like to do something with, approaching them, and explaining why.”

To start a successful collaboration, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. “Is the end goal common? If it’s not, then maybe you should think about doing something different,” added Hall.

The key ingredients of a fruitful partnership:

1. Respect
2. Talking is a good thing – pick up your phone, turn Skype on, and reply to texts
3. Being open does not mean letting your guard down
4. Technology is an enabler
5. Pizza and a beer
6. Size doesn’t matter
7. Let the crowd in

A lot of people are really keen on big numbers, be it for their websites, blogs,  Twitter followers or  Facebook friends, people like big numbers.  For many this implies a huge audience of followers.

The question however is: What are you actually going to say to them?

Costas Michalia, creative director of Crab Creative said it was important to first understand the audience. While most people who start businesses think they should get advertisement space on Google and Facebook, before they even talk to their customers. But this is really is not the way to go, he said.

“Think about how you react when you see another ad on Facebook or on Google or email… think about the brands that are shouting at you rather than the brands that are talking to you.”

Michalia said the way to go is to use stories.  These connect the masses to the ‘you’ since stories make people listen and great stories people always want to share.

Traditional models do not work because there is no real connection between the cutomers and the service providers.  To be most effective at your business it is key is to know your market.

There are so many people trying to talk to the same people that you want to talk to, and for users to separate a gem from all the noise, there has to be something unique and personal for them in your message.
“Does it have heart? Yes make it.”  If the idea has merit then discuss it … make sure that whatever you are doing has a uniqueness about it

Since the mid 90′s Costas Michalia has worked on several digital projects exploring the connection between online and offline consumer habits. In 2005 he founded Crab, a digital agency which works at a strategic level, providing creative content and joining the dots between offline disciplines and online channels to help extend reach,  stickiness and value for clients.

And so to the final day of Digital Shoreditch 2012. Summit is aimed at the owners of businesses in the Digital Shoreditch community – the movers and shakers who make this corner of London the special place it is. As ever, we lay out below a menu of delights from the day for you to sample as you wish.

First up is the keynote from Digital Shoreditch organiser Kam Star, then Mat Law of AnalogFolk looks at how to integrate digital technology into real world marketing – some great, real world examples to inspire you here. How do you take a message and turn it into a game?

Next, Colin Strong, the managing director of NOP Technology, takes lessons from jam sandwiches when he asks: How do you take a message and turn it into a game? His session deals with the best practices for games designers when it comes to working with non-profit enterprises.

The future of digital branding is next on the agenda when Clifford Boobyer, managing director of Firedog Creative delivers a session on effective branding for start-up enterprises.

As new apps come onto the market, each one cleverer and more sophiscated, they are changing the way we live our lives – checking relative prices as we shop, giving real time transport information, helping us navigate urban spaces and keep in touch with our friends and families. In a session entitled ‘Who called the cab? Or how apps change the everyday’  James Temple and Ilia Uvarov,  from creative agency, R/GA, will explore some of the challlenges and opportunities.

The day will also contain a host of other presentations on a wide variety of themes: new terminology and genres in house music, collaborative working, pop up films, leadership, the global digital economy, crowdsourcing funding, sustainability and legal issues surrounding creativity.

One of the highlights of the day will be the announcement of the winners of the Race for Apps competition, a crowd sourcing exercise among the local digital community, which was aimed at visitors to London for the Olympics.

Categories include: finding your way ar0und, making connecti0ns with like minded people, citizen journalism, fun and games and, naturally, a ‘wild card’ section.

The Government should take a look at the popular Angry Birds online game to learn how to communicate better with the general public, the Digital Shoreditch conference was told.

 The simple game, in which animated birds are used to kill pigs, has been a massive success and can be played on computers and phones.

 The Government needs to learn how to make communication with people enjoyable in the same way, Chris Quigley, chief executive of digital company Delib told the festival.

”’By making things enjoyable, you can get them to engage more. Its not about just telling them things, its about giving them things to do,’’ he said afterwards. He added: ‘’Its about challenges, not just telling people ‘have your say’. It’s about engaging with people.’’

Successful games like Angry Birds usually had five common factors: repetition, reward, collaboration, feedback and interaction, all of which engaged users, he said.

 Delib, which is based inBristoland describes itself as a ‘digital democracy company’ has devised online projects for Governments all over the world.

 In Britain, it has worked with the Department of Energy on a climate change campaign and developed budget simulations for local authorities and crowd sourcing exercises for central Government spending programmes.

 Quigley said: ‘’These all deal with complex and important issues in which it is important to engage people. But you can learn from casual games like Angry Birds to improve that level of engagement.’’

Testing the technology. Pic:Gamelab

Motion sensitive technology developed first for gaming devices is now being transformed into programmes to help severely disabled young people, the Festival was told.

 The project, at London Metropolitan University follows the licensing for commercial use of the Kinect technology used in Microsoft’s Xbox360 games console and on Windows PCs. The technology responds to gestures as well as speech.

Jonathan Hassell, of the Gamelab at the University, said the project was still in its early stages but was expected to become available by late next year. It is partially funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

He said: ‘’It is about re-wiring the technology to create products that enrich peoples lives. We prefer not to talk about whether this is a game or an assistance tool but maybe something that combines both. And we are possibly look at a range of projects.

 ‘’Disabled people have been used to working with really clunky technology, but we can change that. People can play a game, learn some skills and then use those skills to communicate with their carers or friends.’’

The project uses an avatar, Boris, who responds to a basic vocabularly of signs and is already being tested by a range of people with disabilities and their carers.

 Speaking afterwards he said those who could benefit were people with multiple learning difficulties, suffered from conditions such as autism or even older people who had suffered disabilities as a result of a stroke. ‘’They want education, employment and, most importantly, independent living. We can help give them that.’’

 He cited the example of sign language used by deaf people as the way in which a ‘gestural language’ could have wider implications.

 New technologies and ideas can develop different uses in different evironments, he told the audience: ‘’Look at the Siri software n on the iPhone 4S, which allows people to make spoken commands to the phone. That comes from helping disabled people use computers but was originally developed by the military.’’

Online games are not just about having aimless fun, rooting users to a keyboard for hours on end. They can be highly educational, engage people in science or help them confront the big issues in life, like life and death. They can help Governments get their messages over to the public and assist disabled people to communicate with their carers and friends. Those were the messages given by a number of speakers at day 11 of Digital Shoreditch, which was devoted to the idea of Play and featured sessions from a wide range of companies and developers working in the games industry. You can read our round up of the day’s events at Digital Shoreditch here.

Martha  Henson, of the Wellcome Collection,  part of the Wellcome Trust charity,  said millions of people had played online games they  had created, but at the same time enjoyed an interactive learning experience. She told us: ‘’There is a real appetite for these kind of games which are educational. And yet fun. But when people are playing them, they learn as well.’’ Henson, multi-media producer for the Collection, which is based in central London, cited the examples of two educational games which it had developed. High Tea, which was a historical game about the growth of the opium trade under British colonial rule in China had been played 3.5 million times while Axon, developed to promote an exhibition about the Brain, staged by the Collection, had been hit 4 million times. Around 14 per cent of players had clicked through to Wikipedia in search of more information after visiting the game.

She said that although many of the games players who had accessed through games websites had been young males, other portals gave a more even gender balance. Henson, said the Collection, which is now working on a game for smart phones, had no commercial interest in the games: ‘’It’s not about selling things – its about encouraging public engagement with science.’’

Phil Stuart, the creative director of Preloaded, the Shoreditch based games company which developed Axon for the Collection told the audience that they “make games for a purpose”. He said: ‘’We really believe the best games can be educational and that can make the game more powerful.’’ The company was commissioned by Channel Four to produce a game called The End to make people think about death and mortality. It followed research which showed that two-thirds of teenagers had no faith. The game had been played three million times, with each player spending two hours on average. There had been more than 280,000 educational click-throughs, said Stuart. Preloaded has also produced games for the BBC,  the Tate, the Arts Council and the Government.

Kam Star, Chief Play Officer, kicks things off with the Keynote, The Rise & Rise of Play. Kam will be looking at how games and playful interactions are evolving and identifying the biggest opportunities. Clay Ewing, games designer at DataPlayed asks “How do you take a message and turn it into a game?” and identifies best practice for working with non-profit organisations. And is game design an art, a science … or simply a secret? Chris Lowthorpe, PhD researcher at Abertay University, explains how to make the gaming experience better by design.

Phil Stuart, creative director of Preloaded leads a talk on the power of “games with purpose”, tackling issues such as drug abuse, death and mental illness. And Martha Henson of the Wellcome Collection debates how games can inform education in the snappily titled How we got millions of people to play our games and learn stuff.

Please don’t kill me! takes an interesting slant on the narrative of games – and how brands like LEGO have changed the game, by allowing players to win not lose. TV was once the young kid on the block, but has seen its thunder stolen by the proliferation of other media in the past decade or so. But TV was the genius in finding and developing huge mainstream audiences – and keeping them loyal. In Telefication – what games can learn from TV, we take lessons from the granddaddy of media. And while you’ve got the telly switched on – don’t just sit there, tweet something. TV Beyond the Hashtag looks out how we can turn a passive TV audience into active online fans. How do you find and build that community?

Omaid Hiwaizi

The internet needs to develop ideas to create human social networks to avoid the risk of a society harmed by too much time online, a leading creative digital agency has warned.

Speaking at Digital Shoreditch, Omaid Hiwaizi, planning director of SapientNitro, a marketing and creative design agency based in London, said it was important to develop online ideas that had a social aspect.

He said it was important for use of the internet to be balanced, citing a University of Lausanne study which showed that both non users and heavy users of the internet inclined towards depressive illnesses.

He said: ‘’Getting the right balance is key. [The study shows] heavy users of the internet at more than 2 hours a day showing a considerable increase of incidence of depressive illnesses – perhaps due to lack breadth of real world experiences and deep friendships.

‘’The study also indicates that non internet users show a similar increase – perhaps because of feelings of exclusion, as social conversation, content and experiences have increasingly moved online. Moderate internet use appears to correlate with better mental health.’’

That was why his agency has developed a range of marketing ideas which had a social element – a vending machine that responds to whether the customer is smiling, an online community devoted to people with an interest in trainer designs and a project to encourage people to climb mountains around the world in groups.

He showed a film of a two-year-old using an iPad. ‘’This is child that cannot write yet, but can navigate his way around an iPad. He’s going to be an expert in this by the time he is grown up and that is going to have to make us change the way we operate.’’

Speaking after his presentation, he said: ‘’We need to make the digital world more human and social. We need to be more life enhancing, to make life better.’’

Silicon Roundabout. Pic: Torcello Trio

The fertile area around Old Street and Shoreditch in eastLondon provides ‘incredible opportunities’ for digital creativity, one speaker told Digital Shoreditch.

Speaking at the Brands-themed day, Chris Wistow, the commercial director of music website Last.fm said there was a ‘clear benefit’ from the ‘eco-system’ provided by the hundreds of digitally related businesses in the area.

Much of this derived, he said, came from casual social interaction  when developers, coders, data specialists and designers got together to ‘’hack and eat pizza with very little sleep.’’ He added: ‘’The social element strengthens the culture.’’

Charting the growth of the area, Wistow said that Last.fm had been one of the first digitally related companies to move there in 2006.

In 2008, when the Old Streetroundabout had first been dubbed ‘Silicon Roundabout’ a survey had shown there were 15 digital related companies. This had grown to 85 in 2010, according to a Wired survey and exploded to about 1,100 currently listed the Government’s TechCity initiative. This year alone 800 companies had sought space in the new complex being established by Google.

He said working with nearby companies had helped Last.fm develop its ‘scrobbling’ system for listening to music, create a new brand logo and create a portal for showcasing emerging and unsigned music on its website.

He said ‘’It is a privilege to be part of this scene – and we have only just scratched the surface of what is possible.’’