We’ve gone all glitzy and glamorous and partnered up with Britain’s Number One Theatre Website Whatsonstage.com to sponsor the 2012 WhatsonStage.com Awards. The awards are completely voted for by the public with more than 46,000 theatregoers voting each year.

The 12th annual Whatsonstage.com Awards season kicks off with an exclusive Launch Party at Café De Paris on Friday 2 December and culminates with a star-studded Awards Ceremony and Concert at the West End’s 1100-seat Prince of Wales Theatre on Sunday 19 February. The Awards gala concert will be streamed live so people can tune in from all over the world.

Watch this space for more news and follow @whatsonstage on twitter and via the hashtag #wosawards.

We spent quite a lot of time this summer working with our friends at Baskerville Design on a project to make a newspaper via the super fantastic Newspaperclub.

We decided it would be fun and perhaps a little different to the usual route companies go down of producing glossy brochures. And yes, we could have put stuff on a USB stick or streamed a presentation about ourselves too, but you know, we do lots of that digital sort of thing – and at the end of the day, people do still like tangible reading matter. I do anyway. I’m just not into Kindles or iPads for reading books. For me, whilst I appreciate the amazing possibilities of technology, there is something about the musty smell of paper, the inky typos and the authenticity of the original object. I am often found with my nose in a book. Plus it’s nice to mix the analogue and digital when you work in digital media and spend a lot of time looking at a computer. But anyway, back to the point.

Newspaperclub has been going for a few years now and their service is really simple. They have loads of inspiring case studies on their blog. All you do is upload a PDF of your design (and they have helpful templates if you need ‘em). We uploaded the master copy, paid our cash, and a box of papers turned up 2 days later. Brilliant. We are very happy with the result.

We’ve been giving our newspapers out at events and showing them to our Mums and that, but if you want one, just let us know and we’ll post it to you with a funky kinura badge too if you’re nice :) Or you can download a PDF version below.

We even made a kinura-branded newspaper stand by buying an old one from a cute little post office in Suffolk (via eBay) and laboriously removing all the Telegraph logos and replacing them with our own vinyl letters! What a palaver!

In the spirit of a paper ‘less’ world, you can also download a PDF version. It’s all good!
Download the PDF of Kinura’s Newspaper here.

@newspaperclub

The video and podcast we made are now online giving a brief insight into the decision making and technical processes involved in creating this wondeful app, which is a fine example of how a poem that is nearly one hundred years old can be brought to life by an intelligent creative and technical team pushing the boundaries of working with new platforms.

Anatomy of The Waste Land iPad app – Faber & Touch Press by Arts Council England

Faber Digital worked with TouchPress and IADT to develop the app – and in the video and podcast you will find out just how much thought was put into every aspect of the interface and content.

The videos for the app were produced by the team who also produced the BBC Arena film on T S Eliot.

There was some discussion during the event of how the shooting style chosen for the app content perfectly fitted the format, being quite simple but also really high quality. The app features a great performance of the entire piece by one of my favourite actors Fiona Shaw and loads more expert video perspectives on the poem, filmed in partnership with BBC Arena, including contributions from Seamus Heaney and Jeanette Winterson.

You can also watch a video demo of the app on YouTube:

At C&IT’s conference in London yesterday Rob Davidson of Westminster University gave an engaging talk on the changing face of events. He talked about research being published into trends towards virtual meeting environments, rss feeds, mashups and moblogs. Although he confessed he didn’t actually know what some of those things mean :)

Here’s a quick summary:

• Participation and interactivity is increasingly what delegates want.
• There’s a trend towards trying to incorporate some kind of ‘social legacy’
• ‘Generation Y’ want shorter presentations and they want ‘infotainment’

If you want to know more about this he said you can download a free report from http://www.eibtm.com/

Haymarket’s Event and C&IT magazines have launched a new site, Virtual Venue Visit, showing the first in a series of specially commissioned event venue showreels. Following research which asked corporate conference organisers what they really wanted to see online from venues, they produced a number of short films and interviews which are tailored to meet the key needs of event planners and buyers rather than being just a one-way marketing tool for suppliers.

Paul Twite, publishing director of Event and C&IT said: “The filming is designed to bring out the character of each venue while answering the main questions raised by event buyers and planners in our research. The Virtual Venue Visit has huge potential for future rollouts.”

Kinura filmed and produced the video, developed the flash video site and players, and provides global streaming with detailed user statistics. You can also read a case study about online presentations we have worked on for Haymarket here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2008/nov/10/society-of-editors-events

Nice to know there’s another web video guru out there. Check out his blog: http://rosenblumtv.wordpress.com/