Stuart Varrall of Fluid Pixel has won the coveted DediPower Digital Award 2010. The trophy was presented by Rt Hon Stephen Timms, MP, Minister for Digital Britain, at a special ceremony in London, last week.
Fluid Pixel, a business offering innovative applications, games and interfaces for mobile phones, the web and desktops won the first prize worth over £50,000, after entries from across the UK flooded in. The Rt Hon Stephen Timms, MP, Minister for Digital Britain, Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), handed over the DediPower Digital Award trophy at the European e-Skills Week opening UK conference on Monday 1st March. He said: “It is always a pleasure to recognise and see business ideas rewarded, and e-skills week is the perfect background to learn about new and innovative ideas.
In 2008 we (Enterprise UK – or Make Your Mark as we were known back then) published ‘The Future Face Of Enterprise’, a collection of viewpoints. We asked over 50 entrepreneurs, business people, industry experts, social commentators, academics what they thought would shape the future face of enterprise in the UK.
Two years later and we’re now collating views and opinions for the Enterprise Manifesto - which is intended to inform politicians and policy-makers of what the enterprise community thinks they need in order to flourish in today’s challenging times.
I wonder how many of those original view points still stand today?
Today marks the launch of the third ‘If we can, you can’ Challenge, a region-wide competition set to re-ignite and celebrate North East England’s entrepreneurial spirit.
The Challenge calls upon any individual who is thinking of starting a business, running their own business or looking to grow their existing enterprise to enter the Challenge and log on to tell their story – adding to a growing online community of entrepreneurs, each at different stages of their journey. The campaign is built on the Entrepreneurs’ Forum’s well established principles of peer-to-peer support, where personal stories and guidance from experienced current business owners help nurture budding and existing entrepreneurs.
Does the Enterprise Village have a fertile garden?
1. Escape to the Garden of England
Having pulled myself from my desk, various meeting rooms and the ever present threat of a fatal email avalanche I made time to visit an Enterprise Learning Partnership (ELP) meeting at Fulston Manor School in Sittingbourne; hosted by the impressive Karen Fingland and Rebecca Dighton
No more ivory-tower pondering, time to see how teachers in Kent are nurturing budding entrepreneurs of the future. Is the enterprise spirit blossoming in the Garden of England?
Yesterday saw the penultimate week of the Newcastle University Careers Service NU Enterprise Programme. A six week intensive course giving students and graduates a whirlwind tour of everything you need to know to start your own business with guest speakers from some of the region’s most successful entrepreneurs.
This session was the turn of multi award winning marketing guru Geoff Ramm. Some call him the Peter Kay of marketing; his stories are legendary but best of all he gives away beer in his seminars! Don’t get carried away now; it was all in the name of marketing trivia!
There were some confused faces around the Nissan Manufacturing Plant yesterday as their site was invaded by a Polar Bear! Lucky for them this one was harmless and in fact wanted nothing more than to tell them all about Global Warming and protecting the environment.
Percy the Polar Bear is the main character in a series of locally set books developed by Northumberland Church of England School. The books use familiar local surroundings to hammer home the importance of looking after the places we love living in for the next generation.
Inspired by Global Entrepreneurship Week a group of UK entrepreneurs have decided to sell the world’s first 24 Hour Start Up on ebay! From 12.00 today a yet to be created business was listed for sale that will continue to develop over the next 24 hours.
Nonsense London and White October have given themselves a day to create a business from scratch. A crack team of sleep-deprived entrepreneurs. creatives, designers and developers will be conceiving, designing, developing and branding a web-based business. which they’ve listed for auction on eBay.
It is a common misconception that you need to have a great, unique idea before you start your business journey. In actual fact, you don’t.
Allow me to use the analogy of a doctor to illustrate. A doctor will go to medical school for perhaps 6 years or more. The first years of study will entail learning all about medicine, the human body, biology and patient care. In fact, aspiring doctors will learn every fundamental area and principle of medicine during that time. It is only in the final years that doctors really start to know what they want to specialise in. They spend the first few years learning the fundamentals.
North East school children were working hard yesterday thinking of innovative ideas to market Newcastle United football tickets for Grade C matches during the long winter months in the Championship.
Students at King Edward VI in Morpeth were busy coming up with Loyalty Card schemes, competitions, concerts, BOGOF offer ideas, all in order to answer the brief set by Sam McLoughlin in his Enterprise Academy Challenge!
Children in a number of cities across the UK are taking part in this challenge to come up with the most creative ideas to market and sell tickets to the matches which traditionally don’t sell out, whether this is due to poor opposition or during the run up to Christmas.
What do you get when you mix some generous local business owners, some inspirational enterprise coordinators, some very tolerant teachers and a whole bunch of enthusiastic school children? Well in Wansbeck; it’s called the Make £5 Grow Challenge and it’s all part of the Wansbeck Enterprise Education Network’s Global Entrepreneurship Week festivities!
This year around 50 local businesses are sponsoring hundreds of school children £5 each and they have just 4 weeks to make as much profit as possible. Sounds simple!
Today I met Lindsey Dunn from the Wansbeck Enterprise Education Network at Guide Post Middle School in Northumberland for a unique meeting between 25 teachers and a host of local business owners. This was the first meeting of many between the two parties as they embark on the Global Entrepreneurship Week Make £5 Grow Challenge.
The project sees school children aged 7-17 from the Wansbeck area given £5 to either go it alone, or work with friends to turn their £5 into as much profit as possible. The money has been donated by nearly 50 local small businesses all keen to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit in their young people.
Gary’s Social Media Count is a real time visualisation of social media’s ever-bubbling growth. Spend a few seconds staring at these flickering stats and you’ll realise why few entrepreneurs can afford to ignore its potential.
Since starting at Enterprise UK I’ve found myself wondering what an entrepreneur actually is. Talk to most people about entrepreneurs and they’ll talk about money, business, Dragon’s Den, Microsoft and even Reggae Reggae Sauce. They’ll come back at you with names like Alan Sugar, Peter Jones and Richard Branson. But what do all these people have in common, and what sets them apart from everyone else?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines an entrepreneur as ‘a person who sets up a business or businesses’ but this flat description undersells the value of entrepreneurship, failing to capture its essence.
Is the recession demarcating class divides in ‘Middle Britain’? On the one hand you have recession-proof Guardian readers lauding the miracle of frugality that the recession is bringing – cycling and recycling is King and they rejoice that the world has seen its senses and buys organic. On the other, we have the ultimate harbingers of the recession – the aspiring lower middle classes who have been unfairly characterised as ‘buy now, pay never’. Cheap credit – and in particular credit cards – are now a social pariah.
We here at Make Your Mark love to chat: exchanging entrepreneurial ideas, swapping inspiring stories, and occasionally asking for a nice cup of tea (milk, two sugars) – the commotion never stops. But why should we have all the fun? Click along to our Make Your Mark webchat at 1pm today (Wednesday) to chat with Arnold Sarfo-Kantanka, Director of Operations at Elevation Networks, who will giving us his views on how to find and make the most of networking opportunities. Feeling bold? Ask a question! Pop along to the website – http://bit.ly/xUkyx – and submit your questions in advance.
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