twenty four hours previous i had just finished presenting my new presentation about social media to a small room of around ten people - we had three speakers and i felt the day went extremely well.

it's been quite the blur this week with two presentations, very different back to back with the NTU 3rd year students first and the nottingham business owners after.

the new users going out into the workplace and others looking at ways to communicate their existing businesses in a very managed social media way.

i put a lot of work into these two new presentations and they drained me a lot - the pay off thou is that i can start february with two presentations to do a voiceover with and stick up on the new website when i do the switch over.

this is a good thing. i'm also very keen to get the sponsoring project up, trying to raise an initial £400 to mobilise the .tv domains on the apple platform as a series of different word press applications that allows me the luxury of pushing updates across the whole network.

mildly frustrated that i have hit feb without transport and the ark but these things are sent to test me. at some point i have to sell a certain amount of my soul to the devil to get the funds or find the right people to invest in me to make it happen.

i've even decided about going to southby because of my passion to make this happen and that's well not like me. it would have been my fifth year in southby and it is always fantastic in some trippy way. not this year.

i'd have loved to have gone and taken a lovely micro thirds with a lovely low light lens and just wandered around bar to bar documenting but i have to keep my eyes on the prize.

my daughter turns five in may. five years, i cannot continue to be flippant about her unknown future if i was not here. i'm always aware of my mortality after visiting the town of phil campbell.

which reminds me, i should be working on that website. crap, i'm gonna be busy next week..

quicklink | cleantech 1st event signup

i managed to catchup quickly with nick gostick from the new cleantech centre near the jubilee campus today and the home of fibrecamp II.  we got our paperwork so we are all set!

if your interested in coming tomorrow, still some places at £50 a head for half a day, should be an interesting group of people - small, but perfectly formed for a first event.

quicklink | blast out test on the bike on bambuser

finally had the cash to be able to get this mount.  it's overpriced but i wanted to move forward on the idea and start the ball rolling with the bandwidth in a box concept for extra bandwidth for mobility for events and conferences.

the idea originally was to install two cameras and some heavy duty wifi connectivity with a stack of external aerials on the roof to drag in the cellular signals so we had a good solid constant stream but with lack of reception from car companies we started with what we have -- a bike! :)

if you are a car company, leasin or otherwise we are looking for a smart car sized (electric ideally) motor that will do 10,000 miles in that year driving three times a week a rough total of about 400 miles a week.  you can send me a tweet with hashtag #transport in it to get some information back about what we are doing -- just send that to my twitter account @philcampbell

we are happy to rent, lease or something from around £99 up to say £150 per month but we are looking to give it back after the year is out.  i simply have no use for a three year contract on car as i'm happy with using rail and public transport not having a car now for over two years.

anyway, back to the bike! ;) - had a successful first stream out to the jubilee campus and the second fibrecamp premises.  i'm doing a presentation there tomorrow, i did one yesterday with the ntu students (i did it in css3 with impress.js to be flash) and so went to grab an interview with nick gostick on audioboo.

i'm not sure why the stream dropped on the way back maybe i caught something inside the case or something or the camera screen went off.  i need to do more testing to see what the problem was there and i've reported it to bambuser because when it dropped the connection after 45 seconds of starting recording (i did'nt noticed till i was nearly back to the studio) it stopped all together so i had no locally recorded video stream on the phone to upload as a complement after which was a bit annoying.

that said, i discovered a bunch of new tagging features on the website when i got back to the desktop that allow for timed comments on the video (see top picture) so that means you can jump to certain sections.  i have a plan about grabbing streamed event video and piping that to another service to do all kinds of things.  i've been wanting to get streaming again.  

expect more of this stuff now that i have the mount.  next is to build a decent lightweight mini bandwidth in a box (bag?) to see if we can improve on the speed and quality of the connection (wifi via cellular router with more redudancy involved) as we had it set on medium today -- i'm also thinking that the new iphone4s with the new sony based camera will handle the low light better so i'm looking to source one of those badboys too.

a happy first test run thou.

morning.

it's 11:11 on the saturday morning as per usual - i'm reflecting on a january that seems to have just raced by, at this pace we will be rocking up to december again! :)

i'm heading over to get ella this morning as my usual saturday morning trip over to burton, it's actually the only time i actually wanna visit the place.

i guess you just get used to a place, in some ways nottingham has that effect on me sometimes. i've been spoilt from some of the places i've travelled across the globe and i've still got places to see.

still not got transport and that's one of the most important things that is playing on my mind at the moment but the calendar is certainly filling up for the months of feb and march for work which is a 'good' thing.

january is full of reviewing and testing and speaking. i'm going to be reviewing the first year students work so far on prototypes of the nomad jacket on the 26th at the nottingham ntu and then on the 29th i'm doing a lecture to the 3rd year multimedia students about social media as they are heading out to the 'real world' to show their stuff.

some reality shocks planned there to be honest. early feb sees me doing a speaking session at the new base of fibrecamp two the cleantech building near the jubilee campus in the ng7 district regarding community building using social media.

i really need to come up with a plan for flight casing equipment, would be easy to drop in for a few days a week instead of having kit there permanent - i guess we could leave some lights there.

had a good meeting (lunch) with celialacy from lincuplive which is a 100+ person conference at the end of february in lincoln. i'll be helping manage the student social media team of 12.

getting them into position and coming up with a plan to cover the venue as much as possible for a remote audience. i guess i'll have to hire a suit for that then if we are getting the five star usual lincuplive treatment.

quite excited about that job actually. i've been busy trying to re-work some of my presentations for the 29th/2nd using a new presentation style using impress.js (it runs in the browser - certain browsers that is) which uses css3 transforms to move things around a canvas - it's a bit of learning curve and could really do with a builder but once i have my structure it should be easy to duplicate that style for all my presentations.

i just need to see if it can handle pictures and videos like i want else i have to go back to keynote. i quite like not having to have plugins and such like and i've been thinking i can make some interesting infographic style videos with music and voiceovers - something i could spread on wistia, vimeo and youtube with transcripts too.

we had a meeting the other week about co-tender as well. an idea about working together on projects and stops the 'kicking off tyres' from people wanting web projects but have no idea what they should be asking for.

it's a really useful (basic) service that will email all potential workers on the project regarding elements they can do on that project. i've yet to send out the first newsletter because i'm waiting on the lab-media guys to get back to me regarding the grid/widget - we will probably use that as the infrastructure of getting information back regarding a person.

i'm really behind on newsletters. i'm not really feeling the mailchimp template system i'm using at the moment, the campaign monitor one looks better to build templates with but then the features and layout are not as good as mailchimp. torn.

i really need to start bringing in additional advocacy work over these next few months to speed up the development of the 3x3/widget grid.

i really want it to be supporting about six api's and maybe have something that natively works as a plugin for wordpress as well - to do this i really need to up the monthly payments to labmedia and at the moment on the income i have (which is not a lot believe it or not because of the way i live right now) it's hard to get much done each month.

lastly talking about wordpress i have a stack of sites for the nottingham area that need themes but i'm not in the position to get them started by getting some decent woothemes stuck on them until they can start to bring their own cash in, as some one said the other week 'until they start to wash their own face' - i love that expression.

i'll get a license for some themes over the coming weeks and start to plug them into buysellads and start to flyer nottingham to get the students blogging.

i have a plan. i have many plans ;)

• social media networking new year with fresh new studios and websites makeover (fibrecamp.tv)
• the iklip ipad/ipad2 mike stand for use with teleprompter now in studio (fibrecamp.tv)
• Daily Dose Social Media Tip of the Day - Get visual! (jcsocialmarketing.com)
• Nottingham's workplace parking levy increases by 3.2 (bbc.co.uk)
• 5 Tips for a Social Media Crisis (hightalk.net)
• Social Media for Non-Profits Conference to Empower Charitable Organizations (jhnconnect.com)
• The Importance of Social Media in the Business World (graceabonillo.net)

quicklink | the nottingham cleantech centre launches!

The GreenTech Business Network would like to announce the launch of the Nottingham CleanTech Centre (NCTC), the first incubator in the region dedicated to accommodating and supporting start-ups and small companies involved in clean technologies.

exciting!

something very close to my heart is the merging together of social media, ethics, technology and enviromental issues.  we have the ability to make our voices heard, the ability to do the right thing by the products and services we offer and the technology processes advancing and superlative speeds that we can make subtle changes to the way we engage with our enviroment.

my whole ark project is focused around what a single person can do not only to live more sustainable but redefine what a new fresh life looks like whilst still utilizing technology to improve the relations and contacts around us to be able to live in a digitally connected world with those assets around us with the internet doing the heavy lifting between it.

indeed the ark will use a lot of technology but in an optimized way, it will look at power and need over want, utilizing elements of the cloud to interact with at a glance without too much thought of taking time out to focus on the creation of the content but more of a virtual intergrated element of my day to day life -- taking social media and using it as a barometer or social ping to the people that lie between the studio and the off the grid enviroment. 

so it fills me with great pleasure to be in a potential hub of startups who are using clean, green technology focus to build out products, systems and ideas.  for me, it feels like a bit of a nirvana space and makes the last year of rounding out ideas with fibrecamp one the catalyst leading up to this new space.

what makes 2012 more exciting is the possibility quite quickly of fibrecamp III located in ghent in belgium as a european headquarters and makes spreading the idea of hyperlocal media based studios servicing the five or six blocks around it's area a real interesting hot pot of digital outreach with the businesses being more than just a partner graphic on a website.

it sparks regular interaction bringing down the potential 'head down desk' mode i see from so many companies when it comes to building out services.  sharing, in the business space is as much a requirement as it is for the social realtime world we live in.

i have a really good feeling about the cleantech centre in nottingham, we are going in at ground level, at the rebirth of a space and a refresh for a building that is already bought, it's owned -- it's not rented or has potential of being problematic -- it's a blank canvas of sorts with the potential to foster some fantastic green tech stars of nottingham and the midland arena.

best of all we get to help them understand the world of social media and create media around some of the exciting concepts and processes these green tech companies have which will obviously feed a foundation of topics for the ark project in 2012.

it's a perfect fit.  we can't wait to get started! :)

• Predictions for Cleantech in 2012 (environmentalleader.com)
• A Cleantech VC Who is Unconvinced of Man-Made Climate Change (cleantechies.com)
• Nottingham City Council budget consultation phase 1 (seaadvocacy.wordpress.com)
• Invest in Nottingham train officially unveiled (rail.co)