About CaMedia ...

CaMedia is a society for people working in media and creative industries in and around Cambridge, CAMBS, UK (not the ones in Gloucestershire, Massachusetts, or New Zealand!). CaMedia is primarily a "real world" organisation, based on speaker meetings, discussion groups, and just plain socialising. The society was formed in 2003 and now has over 400 registered members. The next CaMedia event - on Publishing to Mobile Devices - will be on June 5th, 7:30 pm, Venue Wine Bar, Cambridge Arts Theatre. The last event – Creating Success: How to set up and run a successful creative sector business was on 3rd April. Sally Simmons entertained us with a vivid and engagind presentation about her experiences setting up and running the Cambridge Editorial Partnership. The previous event - digital film art and technology by Sarah Gibson Yates - was on Thursday December 6th, 2007. Before that was Visual Literacy – the art of implicit communication by Ingrid Birchell Hughes of ideagarden, a creative consultant with specialist knowledge in fundraising and not-for-profit communications. She was Creative Director for Oxfam where she worked on Make Trade Fair, Make Poverty History and launched the award winning ‘I’m In’ marketing campaign that to date has brought in 400,000 new supporters. Past events included What's so new about Web 2.0? by JC Allen of Incisive Media and What can XML do for you? by Simon Jones of Studio 24 Ltd. You can register to access the website for free. Full CaMedia membership is £5 per year. We collect subscriptions at events. You can register to access the restricted parts of the site, whether or not you decide to become a full CaMedia member, and we will only send you emails about forthcoming events if you sign up for the newsletter. If you would like to sponsor CaMedia or advertise on the site, please get in touch by clicking on Contact CaMedia, in the left hand panel.

The site

The site is an ongoing project. We have a members' profiles page where you can choose to be listed and receive messages from other members. We are developing a "freelance showcase" section. We won't be displaying any email addresses though, so that spammers won't be able to harvest them from the site. We have a talking points section, a section to post jobs, including "MiniJobs" – all those bits of work that are too small to be worth putting through a recruitment process, and a Shout Box for quick notes to other members.

Speaker meetings

We hold a range of speaker meetings and workshops. We try to vary the topics so that people working in different areas all get something of interest. Our recent speakers have come from such companies as Cambridge Training and Development, Bryt, Black Pig, Selling is Just a Conversation, Small Print Publishing Services, Banson, Bob and Barn, Book Production Consultants plc, Cambridge University Press, Microsoft UK, and the Campaign for Digital Rights.

Social events

Our founding meeting was a party at CB2 back in May 2003. Over 40 people were there and it was a lot of fun. We have been holding a few more social events than speaker meetings since then. Our Speed Meetings (Speed Dating for Business) are always great fun and an excellent way of making contacts.

Your comments

I am always keen to hear your comments and suggestions - just email me (through the contact page).