Northern Lights

This Spring+Summer look to be a bumper collection of tech industry events in the North; regional geekery seems to be snowballing...

• 10th May: Northern Exposure - a games conference organised by industry consortia in Yorkshire and the North East (I was due to keynote here).
• 13-20th May: Sheffield's international festival of digital arts, Lovebytes, just closed out a few days ago.
• 22nd May: Manoj Ranaweera's third OpenCoffee event in Manchester sounds like it's picking up a growing community of people in the North West.
• 22nd May: Regional Development Agency, Yorkshire Forward's just closed entries for Big Idea, a contest to find+fund a regional entrepreneur; one of the judges is my old colleague Ajaz Ahmed.
• 23-24th May: Ben Dalton's invited me to the VIP Evening for Leeds Met's Undergraduate Showcase for their Innovation North faculty. The show opens to the public tommorow.
• 24th May: OSS Northern Way is holding its first discussion, bringing together entrepreneurs, regional development agencies and universities to promote the use of open source software across the Northern Way.
• 26-27th May: This weekend will see the first BarCamp Sheffield event. Seventy people sounds like an amazing turnout for the first event, particularly securing sponsorship from Cisco, BT, Tiscali and others. I love that they have a steel welder in their logo!
• 31st May & 12th June: North West 'grassroots geekery' community GeekUp will be holding a pair of meetups in Liverpool and Manchester over the next few weeks.
• 14-15th June: Next month Katz Kiely's Just-B will be holding the 2007 edition of B.TWEEN at Bradford's National Media Museum.

So all this is telling me to get my ass in gear on Carbon's Northern Blog Project, OpenCoffee Leeds and potentially a BarCamp event for Leeds too...watch this space :)

Comments

[Manoj Ranaweera]

Imran, you will be amazed to know the followings:

11/06 - www.startup.co.uk in Manchester - nothing to do with me except I will be attending
12/06 - at DIC - i-techpartner - 30 companies pitching. edocr might be one if we get our act right. Let me know if you want to pitch
14/06 - NW's premier startup event hosted by none other than moi! with KPMG sponsoring venue and food. Ajaz Ahmed being the keynote speaker with loads of others coming from all over the place. www.nwstartup20.co.uk

Isn't that an amazing week. There are lot more other events taking place that you or I may not have heard of. A campaign needs to be run to get everyone to use upcoming.org, the easiest way to track these events. If you know anyone at Yahoo, pl do influence them.

LV is hosting pitching events every 2 weeks, whilst these are private events, there is lot to learn from those who participate.

[Imran...]

Thanks Manoj - I'm actually planning to launch a regional blog with a bunch of writers from across the North soon too. We wanna be a little broader than entrepreneurial and startup culture but also bring in a lotta the digital arts, R&D and videogames stuff happening across the North too :)

Like to be involved?