We had a great Mashup Manchester inaugural gathering on 18th October at Sun Microsystems, Sale, Manchester. The session was started by none other than David Terrar, who is one of the three people who inspired me to start blogging in mid April 2006. David has become a familiar face at many networking events taking place in London as well as within the enterprise blogsphere. David spoke of BBC, SAP and Pfizer as three case studies, and how they have leveraged web and enterprise 2.0 products to give new life to collaboration both internally with employees and externally with stakeholders by these three organisations.
Simon Grice, another key figure in the London networking circle spoke of how watching TV and movies is changing rapidly. Simon spoke of his latest love, testcard.tv, which is an aggregator for TV and movies. His quest was that people are changing the way they watch digital content, may that be a movie, comedy or news. More and more prefer to watch whenever they want it from wherever they are – not tying themselves to a cable TV provider or traditional content provider. Through his aggregator service, Simon is making content accessible to the mass.
Unfortunately, two days after the event, Simon had to put his site under maintenance mode after CEO of TVLinks was arrested for breach of copyrights. This is clearly an area that require much debate. As far as I can see, Entrepreneurs such as Simon provide another revenue channel for content providers. Rather than shutting down services such as TVLinks, the content providers ought to engage in discussion to understand how extra revenue can be generated for their content through these new distribution channels, which will soon outstrip the traditional broadcasting methods. Those who embrace change and progress will be the great brands of tomorrow – those who decline to engage will become the brands of the past and soon be forgotten.
Lee Strafford spoke about Project Sahara, and how the concept has evolved over the last couple of months.
In the second half, three companies presented their solutions as case studies demonstrating application of user content to deliver value added services to improve our lives, both socially and professionally. You will also have the pleasure to meet some of these companies at the forthcoming BarcampLeeds. Will cover BarcampLeeds in a post later.
Here is a collection of photographs courtesy of Simon Grice. And below is a collection of what bloggers have written about first Mashup Manchester:
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Paul Robinson of Vagueware: Manchester Mashup* – Paul has now taken the role of organising OpenCoffee Manchester
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Stewart Townsend of Sun Microsystems – Manchester Mashup
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Tom Cheesewright of Book of the future – Mashup: North West Tech Booming
If you have attended the event and blogged about it, please let me know the link to your post, so that it can be added to above list.