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 650 registered members. CaMedia is now under the stewardship of Mainda Kiwelu who is going to create a new website and is planning lots of exciting events for 2010. Fran's last event as chair was on November 12th 2009, at Anglia Ruskin University. A panel of fascinating speakers discussed what the future holds for publishing and how the industry needs to adapt to a changing world. The panel included Mal Peachey from Essential Works, Dr Andrew Winnard from Cambridge University Press, David Williams of The Running Head and Dawson King, CTO of Patients Know Best and former Technical Director for Ten Alps plc (owned by Bob Geldof). Previous events have featured Anthony Haynes of Professional and Higher, who talked about digital publishing and e-books on May 14th, 2009. On Thursday March 19th we had a Survive the Credit Crunch special event with Caroline Lloyd-Evans and Action Coach Mark Featherstone. Before that - in Association with FDMX - was an event on Thursday 27th November, 2008 - Anyone can make a movie! Dave Lloyd, Founder & CTO of Short Fuze Limited, talked about the next generation of tools that use games technology to put animated movie making into the hands of anyone, with Moviestorm. We directed our own film - via audience particpation - during the evening which was great fun. Other recent CaMedia events have included Social Media on Thursday 25th September, 2008, with Matthew Brazil of 6consulting, Publishing to Mobile Devices - on June 5th, 2008 - with Paul Cox, chief technology officer at Roundpoint, and Creating Success: How to set up and run a successful creative sector business, which was on 3rd April. Sally Simmons spoke about her experiences setting up and running the Cambridge Editorial Partnership. You can register to access the website for free. Full CaMedia membership is £5 per year. We collect subscriptions at events.

The site

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 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. The last event - on January 7th, 2009 - was a joint meeting with Refresh Cambridge, featuring one of the top 100 of the Courvoisier Future 500 rising stars - Mohammad Al-Ubaydli who talked about his work on his Patients Know Best electronic personal health records company. The previous event - in Association with FDMX - was on Thursday 27th November - Anyone can make a movie! Dave Lloyd, Founder & CTO of Short Fuze Limited, talked about the next generation of tools that use games technology to put animated movie making into the hands of anyone, with Moviestorm. We directed our own film - via audience particpation - during the evening which was great fun. Other recent CaMedia events have included Social Media on Thursday 25th September, 2008, with Matthew Brazil of 6consulting, Publishing to Mobile Devices - on June 5th, 2008 - with Paul Cox, chief technology officer at Roundpoint, and Creating Success: How to set up and run a successful creative sector business, which was on 3rd April 2008. Sally Simmons spoke about her experiences setting up and running the Cambridge Editorial Partnership. Some other recent events were digital film art and technology by Sarah Gibson Yates; Visual Literacy – the art of implicit communication by Ingrid Birchell Hughes of ideagarden, 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. Other 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).