Chinwag Team's blog

If you're in the mood for a change or want to try a new direction, this is the place to be.  Below are some of our Featured Jobs, if nothing takes your fancy, there are plenty more opportunities to be found on Chinwag Jobs.  Happy hunting!

This blog post about Email Campaigns is brought to you by Dylan and Stream:20, who are recruiting an Email Consultant, see Chinwag Jobs for more information.

Would you turn up to a first date with a spare set of house keys to hand over?  Or immediately launch into conversation about which school to send your future children to?  Hopefully not.  There's a time and a place and that certainly isn't it.

Our friends at leading games community GameHorizon are planning a shindig in London-town on 2nd Dec to celebrate the Best of British games featuring the legendary Ian Livingstone.

We fluttered our eyelashes and they've kindly given us a couple of tickets to give away to this networking event. As well as the talk above, the evening features a pub quiz, show reel of the best in British Games and a spot of food'n'drink to keep the wheels oiled.

There's two tickets up for grabs. To get your hands on one, simply fill out the form below.

Win a much sought-after ticket to this year's IAB Engage conference. The theme of Engage 2010 is Supercharge Your Brand.

Join an audience of 600 smart-talking, quick-thinking marketers to watch presentations from industry leaders including Yahoo!'s Carol Bartz, Spotify's Daniel Ek, YouTube's Bruce Daisley, researcher and broadcaster Dr Aleks Krotoski and comedian Jimmy Carr amongst a glittering array of speakers.

To win a ticket, just send fill out the form below and you could be the lucky recipient of a ticket to IAB Engage 2010. Or if you can't wait (and tickets are almost out), why not book now?

We've got together with the lovely team at Mobile Cloud Computing Forum (1st Dec in London) to offer 10 lucky Chinwaggers free tickets for this year's conference at RIBA in London.

The conference will provide a full perspective of mobile cloud computing and SaaS from business value through integration and implementation and the emerging trends in the industry. Just fill out the form to enter the competition.

Two new conferences arrive in London in November with the world of online gaming firmly in their sights. The Social Gaming Summit and Virtual Goods Summit take place on consecutive days at Chelsea Football Club in West London.

To set the scene with a little real-life game, we've got together with organisers Rising Media to run a competition to win two tickets to the Chelsea vs Fulham home game on Tue, 9th November.

Organised by UK Trade & Investment's Japan experts, the mission to the Tokyo Games Show (TGS)  will include expert briefings, company visits, British Embassy reception, networking events as well as the stand space, meeting room access and delegate access to the Tokyo Games Show.

The Tokyo Games Show is Japan’s main annual computer games convention, which last year saw 185,000 visitors and over 180 exhibitors (including 92 from overseas). TGS 2010 is expected to have more visitors this year with an even more international focus.

When the UK UPA (UK Usability Professionals' Association) listed their careers event on Chinwag's events listings, we asked UK UPA Head of Professional Development, Leslie Fountain, to share her insight.

Our annual June Careers event this year was more than just about which employer had the flashiest displays or cupcakes. Our attendees weren't concerned with how many goody bags they could get, this year we got really serious, enter Speed Dating...

With all the coverage, hype and hyperbole, it's hard to believe it's been less than a month since the iPad hit UK stores.

Whilst the debate rages on whether the iPad is the saviour of the publishing business, a game-changer or merely an hors d'oeuvre until Android Pads arrive, they're flying off the shelves.

Want to get your mitts on your very own piece of shiny Apple bling? Visit the Online Marketing Show and give your digital knowledge a whirl in the Digital Genius Quiz sponsored by Propel London.

The quiz covers general knowledge of the digital space, and contains a series of challenging questions about the internet, web advertising, and new technology.

Compiling Chinwag's digital events listings is a great way to see the huge number of events supporting all aspects of the digital industry. One discipline under-represented is UX (user experience to the uninitiated).

So, when Nick Cochrane from Zebra People, got in touch about their new event UX People (22nd March), designed specifically to support people working in the user experience field, our ears pricked up and we asked him for more info...

What is UX People?
UX People is a new, one-day user experience conference which will be held in London on March 22, 2010. It is a unique day of presentations and workshops designed for UX professionals. Attendees will develop practical knowledge and new techniques which they can implement in the workplace the very next day.

Top UK Firms Selected for Prestigious US Digital Mission

PRESS RELEASE: London, UK, Thursday 21st January 2010

Forty of the UK's leading digital SMEs have been selected for the second annual Digital Mission to South by South West interactive (SXSWi), one of the world's leading conferences for interactive media taking place in Austin, Texas from 11-17th March 2010. Established in 1994, the conference provides an opportunity for the Digital Mission companies to attend hundreds of conference sessions and networking events.

The successful companies were chosen from over 120 submissions by an advisory board of industry experts drawn from the UK community including: VC's, export specialists, legal experts, journalist and industry pundits, to take part in the Digital Mission to SXSWi.

The companies selected for the Digital Mission to SXSWi '10 are:

• Amberlight
• Audioboo
• Blueleaf Digital
• Brainient
• Codegent
• Codility
• Cube Interactive
• Face Group
• FreshNetworks
• GigLocator
• Howard Baines
• Illumina Digital
• KMP Digitata
• Likecube
• Little World Gifts
• Littleloud
• Mendeley
• Mobilized
• MOFILM
• Moonfruit
• MusicMetric
• Nsyght  
• oneDrum
• Orange Bus
• PageDo
• Pixeco
• Plug-in Media
• Qhub
• Rummble
• Silence Media
• Skimlinks
• Slicethepie
• Smidgn
• SubHub
• TweetJobs
• UberVu
• Vibio
• Videojuicer
• Wolfstar
• WorldTV

Detailed information and contact details for each company is available from the official Digital Mission website: http://www.digital-mission.org/sxsw10-companies

We're proud to have Dominic Sparkes, MD of interactive community management company Tempero, as today's guest blogger.

As soon as you start talking about child safety and the internet, a number of issues start to appear. Socialising online is now firmly a part of modern living for young people and as a growing medium it's inevitable marketers will want to engage their audience via the mediums they are using.

The government is taking online child safety seriously and rightly so. They recently set up the UK Council for Child Internet Safety  and have provided guidance to the industry to enable self-regulation. This has left the marketing industry responsible for navigating a complex web of guidance and law when executing online campaigns which children may encounter.

The massive stimulus packages used by governments around the world to head off the financial crisis seem to be working their magic, with a light smattering of positive economic stories.

But what are the opportunities for digital SMEs? How does a small firm take advantage of the opportunities of global trade? A series of 12 free workshops across the UK will help firms understand the opportunities as well as provide insight on how to take advantage of them.

An interesting invite popped through Chinwag's virtual letterbox this morning: an opportunity for a spot of networking with some of the top brass from China's mobile and ICT sectors.

The visit sees representatives from government agencies Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), China Academy of Telecom Research (CATR) and Hong Kong-based mobile value-added service provider, Mtel Ltd visiting London, Cambridge and Edinburgh on a trip organised by UK Trade & Investment as part of the Enabling Innovation Intiative to build stronger links between industry in the UK and China.

The three events are scheduled for:

• London (Science Museum), 7th July 2009
• Cambridge, 8th July 2009
• Edinburgh, 9th & 10th July 2009

This series of posts about Ecommerce is brought to you in conjunction with Vodafone, who are currently recruiting a Head of Ecommerce, see Chinwag Jobs for more information.

Working in e-commerce is both challenging and stimulating. From a career that was an almost unheard of niche a decade ago, it has evolved into an expanding universe of work possibilities. There are almost as many different types of role as there are jobs around, each has its own challenges and skills requirements. Today's seasoned e-commerce professional is part geek, part business person, part designer and more besides.

With the move from mortar to clicks and the emergence of mobile e-commerce (Nokia has also just invested $70M in Obopay), it is clear that there are increasing job opportunities in the space, despite the challenges in the economy faces. The skills required to stay ahead in the e-commerce space are broad, and still rapidly evolving. Hoping the skills that got you this far are going to enable you move on, or even stay where you are, is a risky strategy. Continual personal development is the name of the game.