The Hebe Week In Pics

Last weekend it was our friend Matt Maudes birthday and feature film premier!The whole Hebe Team and friends went!Applause for the Left Eye Blind feature film which was very entertaining!Film snacks ;)The birthday boy with one of his pressiesOld school ticket machine @ The Showcase CinemaNow we have a superhero phoneWe also met up with Josh from ICS and Freya to talk new Jamaica projects!I discovered MORE low fat poporn, it deserves a spot for the amount i eat daily!We also hit LCA Graduate Fashion show(blog post coming) and caught up with Marketing Leeds and the LFS Girls!Caught Shang Ting interviewing a foxy guy(you know i had to do the joke! As bad as it was ;))Another pair of Lee's crazy kicks!I went along to the Leeds Loves Food Bus Tour. Mmm cakes from Cooplands!Chicken and peppers from Casa MiaLeeds Grub and Ebsnare talking fruit! While Phil Kirby is thoroughly enjoying the bus tour info!And finishing off with a lovely photo of Matt and our Simon! See you next week!

Adam Tensta - Scared Of The Dark Video

As regular readers of the blog will know: We love Adam Tensta! We love him not only for his music but for his ability to regularly produce kick-ass videos. Check the video above for his latest: Scared of the Dark (w. Billy Kraven)

Some of our friends have worked with him on videos for Dope Boy and Back Before You Know It but this new video takes things in a different direction and feel (as does the music on his new album) and we think it is cool. Check out another of our posts here, where we have a chat with Adam and look at another video from the new album (Like a Punk!) 

Standby for more Tensta / Hebe news coming soon!

Yorkshire International Business Convention 2011 - some reflections

On Friday I was invited by Marketing Leeds (thanks guys!) to attend the Yorkshire International Business Convention (YIBC) in Harrogate. I have to be honest and say that, until Marketing Leeds extended the invite, I had never heard of YIBC.

I also have a second confession to make - despite the fact that my previous encounters with Marketing Leeds have involved interesting and interested people, and the opportunity to make new connections was a part of my decision to go along, the real draw was the key note speaker - Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the (British) inventor of the World Wide Web.

There are lots of things I could say about this event, many good and some not so good (like the fact that there is nothing remotely international about it). What I want to focus on here, however, are the opportunities missed by the way the event was, or wasn't curated, and to share some thoughts about what the organisers might do in future years to create something more... well, meaningful I suppose.

For information, and in addition to the aforementioned Berners-Lee, the 2011 YIBC speakers were Roy Walker (comedian); Terry Hill (Chairman, Arup Trust); Monty Hall (former Royal Marine turned tv presenter); Caroline Marsh (property developer); and Harry Grasham (Look North presenter) in conversation with Andrew Strauss (England Cricket Captain).

'Winners: Inspiring people, inspiring people' was the theme of this year's YIBC and looking over the list of speakers one thing seems clear, the event aims to inspire by programming speakers who can offer the business community a different perspective on things by talking about their achievements. This is what happened but, with the exception of Terry Hill's neat presentation about the impact of employee ownership, all speakers forgot something quite crucial - to form a link between their insights and the needs of business today. For me, this made for a rather uninspiring event.

A conversation about the immediate needs of Yorkshire businesses did take place just after lunch when a panel discussion was held between the Chairs of the three regional Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). Fielding questions from the audience, the Chairs reflected on how the region adapts to life after Yorkshire Forward; the role of LEPs; and how the high funding thresholds in the new regime translate into support for Small and Medium Enterprise (SME). Listening to this conversation I started to wonder, if these were the immediate concerns of the business community, what would the event be like if the speakers responded to them.

To illustrate what I mean, I want to offer an example using Sir Tim Berners-Lee's address. Let's say that, instead of retelling the story of the creation of the internet (which was fascinating to a technophile like me, but perhaps not critical to business - I overheared a handful of people expressing this sentiment) Berners-Lee talked about networks and 'network culture'. Let's imagine that he had been prompted by the organisers to reflect on how network culture can benefit an ecosystem like Yorkshire's business community. One of the things he might choose to talk about is 'resilience', a term always on the periphery of conversation in business today. He might talk about how resilience, as used in systems theory, is a term that describes how a system (a regional economy, for example) adapts to cope with a disturbance in the external environment (the closure of Yorkshire Forward, or the restricted access to funding for SME's, for example). He might point out that most systems (I'm taking a bit of poetic license here) adapt by cutting out 'redundancy' (capacity that is spare) which in turn cuts down 'requisite variety' (narrows a system's options - if you don't have spare capacity it might be harder to spot and exploit new opportunities, or to take risks, for example). He might go on to highlight that the ability to network computers has done something very interesting in this context - rather than one computer's processor reaching capacity and slowing down a process, it can borrow redundant processing power from another computer on the same network. As a whole, the network can cooperate to ensure that the system is fulfilling its maximum potential. To bring it back to business, and the physical world, Berners-Lee might challenge the regional community to think about how bigger businesses with spare capacity (financial or otherwise) can cooperate to speed up growth, perhaps by creating space for risk in the SME sector by increasing their 'requisite variety'. In this way the speaker would be inspiring action. Personally, I'd have found that more meaningful to the future development of our business than listening to Grasham and Strauss talk about the uncertain future of test cricket.

In his opening comments the convention's organiser, Mike Firth, had referred to the event "cutting its cloth". This was translated, by some of the people I met, to mean that they had not been able to afford an ex-president or mega star as the keynote speaker, as in previous years. I was left feeling that, if this event is to be scaled back in future, the organisers need to think less about the who, and place much more emphasis on what speakers have to say, that's of relevance to the convention's audience.

I think the fact that a third of the audience left before Berners-Lee took to the stage illustrates a disconnect between the industries of today and those of tomorrow. This was further emphasised by the arrival of two groups of college students and colleagues from a number of the region's key digital agencies precisely as Sir Tim took the stage. With this in mind, I also think something the organisers might want to consider is how they engage with people from emerging, knowledge-based industries, across the region. For our part we are here and always happy to help!

The Hebe Week In Pics

We headed over to Manchester for the Hyper Island launch partyThe Hebe Team taking a stroll around the Northern QuarterShang Ting and Stacey the tourists!In Hyper Island, Can you guess who's shoes they are?Inside Printworks, ManchesterShang Ting goofing around in Papa G's, ManchesterShang Ting is snap happy in the train station; no more trains for us, train drivers suck!Shang Ting and one of our old friend's art in Manchester Papping the Papper!Back in Leeds, yesterday it was Mentos central! This was a Mentos train dancing in the street!And the streets were filled with musicians!Spotted: New Pizza Express on Albion Street, what do we think? A nice view of Round Foundry and Temple Works

Creative Cities - Leeds in Barcelona Conference

This video, posted on LeLook's website earlier this week, captures the energy and direction of a panel discussion between a group creative people, brought together on the first night of this year's Leeds in Barcelona, as part of a conference hosted by IED (Istituto Europeo di Design).

Chaired by our very own Lee Hicken, the conversation centred around the idea of a "creative scene", comparing the current situation in Leeds and in Barcelona, and reflecting on the conditions necessary to realise the potential of a city's creative people.

Despite popular myth I wasn't playing DrawRace on my phone throughout the discussion and was listening intently and making some notes... I just happened to be making them on my phone... long live Evernote! I've published them below, to give people an overall sense of what was said, but this is just an interim thing until the edited recording is ready to be published - this should be ready in the next few weeks.

Chair: Lee Hicken, Director of Hebe Media (Leeds)

Host: Jürgen Salenbacher • Academic Director at IED Barcelona

Panel:

• Imran Ali • New Technologies Expert, Consumption trends
• Juan Antonino Ávalos • Spanish Fashion Designer
• Chidy Wayne • Spanish Fashion Designer and Fashion Illustrator
• Dom, de Dom Dick & Harry • English Fashion Designer
• Giuseppe De Luca • Singer of ICS (iCallShotgun), visual artist

- Introductions

- Jurgen reflects on creative cities

- Creative economy needs creative education

- Reflecting on what has happened in the economy, the crisis is also a transformation of an economy driven by machines to one driven by ideas

- Creatives helping to develop new forms of economy

- Providing a platform for creatives to develop their ideas

- Technology supporting creativity

- Without the right circumstances it's impossible

- Imran talks 'bleeding edge' emerging technology, post-digital economy and the city is a platform for new technologies

- What some people think of as distractions are the real business of the city

- The city is a lab for creativity, enabling efficient prototyping of new ideas

- Through non-conferences cities are developing a digital cultures along side the creative ones

- Dom on life as a fashion designer in Leeds - Leeds is not London or Paris and this enables a level of safety with which to experiment

- Cross fertilisation of ideas between music, fashion, art that is underpinned by the social scene

- Diversity breeds creativity

- Tolerance is an important factor in collaboration

- The economic transformation - from industrial to knowledge economy

- The need for accountable creativity - in economic terms (emphasised by a drop in employment, in Barcelona)

- Technology as a way of spreading ideas

- Cities and their unrealised potential

- It is important that support comes from all external forces, not just education

- Talent moves where the opportunities are

Conversation moves on from creative cities to creative education:

- Lee asks some questions about training

- "You learn to learn - when you crack that you can teach yourself anything."

- Not about going to school - it's about motivation

- Positive thing about a design school is the infrastructure, the resources, the test-bed (safety, low risk space)

- Need to update and optimise education to meet skills needs in industry

- Imran talks about Orange and MIT Lab as a template for a new kind of education

- Imran talks about user designed 'bar camps' as a useful tool / catalyst

- Sustaining connection so when you want people to cohere you only need to make a phone call

A full recording of the conversation, along with other material from Leeds in Barcelona 2011 will be posted here soon.