Wednesday 19 January 2011

Creativity central?

We've been spending a little bit of time thinking about the creative industries in Warrington and wondering which elements were the strongest? We know that the music scene around the town has always been pretty strong and that there's been a whole heap of IT companies start-up.

But, where do you think the strengths lie? And, also, are there any areas which you think are under-catered for? Do we have a load of web developers and not enough companies to cater for them, resulting in talent-loss from the area?

Oh, and while we're here, remember the next WAc meetup is on Thursday 27th Jan at The Lounge. It is, as always, free to come down and if you're working or studying in the creative industries, stop by and say hi.

Sunday 9 January 2011

A new year brings...

It's the first blog post of 2011 and it's timed, none too coincidentally, to coincide with the scheduling of the January Meetup. For those interested, it's on the 27th January at The Lounge again and if you're working in the creative industries around Warrington, it would be great to see you.

After the "tricky second", and tricky it was owing to -10c temperatures, Christmas and the most snow I've seen in a while, the next instalment should be great. We've got the talk-spot assigned to Alex Kelsey, Interaction Designer at SDG (who bring you Littlewoods and Very amongst other things) and drinks provided by NeverCenter

Anyway, enough self-promotion, this blog is about how we get this group off the ground and the wider digital sphere. It's been an interesting few months since we last posted and there's been increasing interest in WAc, which is great and we've managed to have a couple of excellent meetups, so all going well there! As with all things, it's been tricky to keep the momentum going but there's definite demand for the group! The WAc Jobs twitter stream also continues to go from strength to strength, so if you're interested in looking for jobs in the creative industries, why not follow and see if there's anything of interest going on?

We've also had the wikileaks scandal ongoing, which is impossible to miss and probably something worthy of discussion at the next event, when beer can be deployed. The rights and wrongs of this are beyond probably warrant an entire blog post and is probably covered elsewhere already! Interesting to see that twitter has been subpoenaed by the US government about access to Assange's details. Definitely something to keep an eye on there.

Closer to home, we've seen some changes at NW Vision + Media and the announcement that the NW Fund for Digital and Creative is now open which hints at the growing confidence and output in the creative industry in the north west. I also had the chance to pop down to MediaCity UK over Christmas and have to say, it's looking great! So, 2011 looks like it's going to be a great year with some extremely interesting developments. Look forward to it!