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! :)

Related articles

• 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)

what a week.

this week has been absolutely nuts and i’ve not really been able to get adjusted to the jet lag from flying back from sxsweco last week which was great but i’ve not really had time to decompress from and i have media still yet to post which is frustrating.

more frustrating is not checking the keying of the video for this week so we have some ugly artifacts so we decided to rip the audio instead and give you some pictures to look at because the video was pretty poor with the green screen bleeding through - i’ll be more on point for fibrecamp activity next week as i gel back into things and regular gym attendance.

http://fibreca.mp/podcast-pcmupdate-for-week2-of-october-from-f by posted email about pcmupdate weekly catch up - week 2 of october (mp3) what a week. this week has been absolutely nuts and i’ve not really been able to get adjusted to the jet lag from flying back from sxsweco last week which was great but i’ve not really had time to decompress from and i have media still yet to post …

quicklink | fibrecamp hangout

seeing as google+ is now going open to the general public it seemed about the right time to make a fixed fibrecamp studio google+ hangout virtual space.

so basically all i’ve done is taken the fixed url link for the google hangout and made it a bit.ly pro link (i have a custom domain linked to my bitly account) which means i can give out a quick link for people to come and hangout in our virtual fibrecamp. i’m trying to come up with a way to get other camera shots appearing in the room but at the moment i’ve just got one of the logitech cameras hooked in.

will dropped in via android phone as well after scanning the qr code but he had to select joining the room in a certain way - i had no idea that you could join a hangout on a mobile device and thought it was on the huddle you could do that so i’m looking forward to seeing how that will work with iOS enabled devices soon as i currently use the ipod 4th gen for all my tweets.

i’m thinking that some kind of combined bambuser stream captured event broadcast into the room could make for an interesting experience.

so seeing as i have a chunk of dead time and i’m reasonably awake this morning (i’m on a train) i thought i’d give you a bit of a catchup on all things studio.

the whiteboard paint from muraspec
so we have not managed to apply the paint yet, after much going back and forth with ideas of how to prep the wall and ventilation of the space we have decided on making panels that we can retrofit onto the wall. that way we can paint them all in a location that has plenty of air and do a nice clean job.

prepping the cabling v2
i’ve just purchased a bunch of new cables and connectors for the studio in preparation for getting a mixer unit for the studio. currently we have a twin XLR mixer that works ok but it could be better. the mixer we want to get even has a compressor so that should tidy up the quality a lot.

the carpenter is visiting soon
as part of the wall area where the white erase paint will be we are having a custom one piece wooden slim desk that will wrap around the side wall and allow for three booth style areas.

we got given three machines the other day for this but we might revert back to a single headless system that runs a cybercafe software that can feed these three machines (to keep the power requirements down)

g4 tower, hdmi and new hd screen
we are really chuffed in that we got given a free g4 tower the other day for the studio space. i’ve actually wanted to take it home to use as a blogging machine but it maybe used as a vnc terminal to start and stop wirecast remotely - we also got a new hd ready 21” monitor for the main desk which has an hdmi input.

oh and talking about using VNC.
if you have upgraded to LION OSX then you will need to provide your username and password instead of just the screen share password as in leopard.

testing out boxee box finally
as the new screen has a hdmi input it means we will finally be able to give the hardware boxee box a spin and ultimately give us time to decided how our boxee application is going to look. i’m very keen to get an app running as soon as possible for fibrecamp.

still in the process of redesign
i did start on redesigning the main site but i’m still not happy with certain elements and i’ve had some clashing with jquerytools and posterous so i’m having to revisit those - also very keen to get our fibrecamp.tv domain up so a new design is being styled for that.

an outside interest in fibrecamp
more major news for fibrecamp is that we have a proposition of a business partner for the space. this would mean making fibrecamp a limited company and allow us to bring in other companies clients - the money input is welcomed to go to the next level - we are very keen on maintaining the ethos of the space however so are embracing it slowly.

more news soon! :)

http://fibreca.mp/the-recent-updates-in-the-fibrecamp-studio-sp by posted email about so seeing as i have a chunk of dead time and i’m reasonably awake this morning (i’m on a train) i thought i’d give you a bit of a catchup on all things studio. the whiteboard paint from muraspec so we have not managed to apply the paint yet, after much going back and forth with ideas of how to prep …