Technology Archives | Page 8 of 15 | Bristol Creative Industries

Our creative and digital industries are facing a critical shortage of developer skills right now, particularly when it comes to Web3 developers, with Web3 developers only representing 1% of worldwide devs. Yet there’s so much potential for positive, disruptive change. Collectively we need to up-skill our teams to realise that huge potential.

Simpleweb is hosting a month-long virtual festival throughout October to help to demystify Web3 and see past the nonsense. The goal is to onboard the next generation of Web3 talent across the UK. Similar to a hackathon format, they’ll be helping agencies, developers and UX teams learn the fundamentals and begin their Web3 journey, using a range of Web3 tools and best choice blockchains.

Participants will learn about Web3 and its benefits to help build expertise and extend product & service offerings, and agencies can enter individuals or teams who will be able to work together and bring their collective knowledge back to share with others. They’ll also receive an NFT certificate of completion, as well as get the chance to win a number of prizes across different categories. It’s free to join, and could contribute to agencies’ CPD efforts as well as innovation endeavours.

Another opportunity for us to pull together to put Bristol on the map, supporting our creative and tech talent and building an even stronger community. Why wouldn’t you?

Access Creative College, Condense and LocalGlobe have teamed up to offer Bristol students a Metaverse Development Scholarship to bring more diversity to tech.

Access Creative College, the UK’s leading games, music and media college, metaverse specialists Condense and venture capital fund LocalGlobe are offering up to eight fully funded scholarships to start in September.

To coincide with the launch, leading Bristol artists Lebo, Dread MC and Badliana were invited into Condense’s cutting edge metaverse environment on 26 July to perform.

Using a state-of-the-art 360-degree camera rig constructed by Condense, the three artists each stepped into a virtual landscape to record their own performance. It is the creation of these virtual landscapes and their live-streaming capabilities which Access Creative College are now offering the chance for students to study.

Jackson Armstrong, executive head of marketing at Access Creative College, commented: “What better way to celebrate the launch of this new scholarship programme than by having some of Bristol’s brightest upcoming artists perform in the metaverse, which our scholars will be working to produce.”

Kicking off in September, successful scholars will learn how to stream live events into one of the world’s most exciting new technologies, the metaverse. The successful applicants will take part in a 12-week programme, full of rich and intensive study, completely funded through the scholarship.

Jackson Armstrong continued: “When it comes to board positions within leading tech companies in the UK, the statistics are deeply concerning with the lack of gender split and those from ethnic minority backgrounds.

“We’re excited at the prospect of helping to change that through this new scholarship programme and we’re currently on the lookout for applicants to apply online.”

Fully-funded intensive metaverse course

Scholars will learn digital graphics, 3D modelling, photogrammetry and textures, realtime VFX, plugin integration, in game/venue scaling and enhancing virtual worlds, enriching virtual worlds, interactions, spatial sound, player movement and networking basics.

James Tong, head of people at Condense, added: “You should apply for this scholarship because while everyone has a story to tell, not everyone has the same opportunities in life.

“This is an incredible opportunity to carve out a career in engineering and metaverse content creation. It’s a 12 week fully-funded intensive course, so you will meet other people with similar interests and ambitions, and it could even lead to a permanent job with Condense.”

Applications for the course are now open, and can be made through Access Creative College here.

Successful applicants will receive:

This month’s Women in Business episode features an interview with Sue Turner OBE, founder of AI Governance Ltd, and one of the first people to be certified as an Artificial Intelligence auditor by the For Humanity organisation. Sue sits down with Sophie Harris, Head of Marketing and New Business to discuss the power of AI for businesses and how to utilise Artificial Intelligence ethically.

Women in Business Artificial Intelligence special – Episode 12: Sue Turner, AI Governance Ltd. video here.

AI is becoming pervasive across all levels of business activity, from HR to enterprise planning and decision making. And it’s widely accepted that most company boards are ill-equipped to understand the implications it has for their business, let alone create a governance framework for its use. Sue is at the forefront of raising AI ethical awareness and helping boards to navigate the governance minefield.

As marketing professionals, we’re trained to attract and convert customers with the right message, at the right time, in the right place. We analyse, we strategise, we plan, we create and we optimise to achieve commercial growth.

AI does this at scale – analysing, optimising and making autonomous decisions at speed. Autonomy is the key word here. AI learns as it goes, analysing huge datasets, testing multiple creative variants across a vast network of interconnected digital profiles. Its prime objective is acquiring and retaining the right customers as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible – across the entire customer journey. It does whatever is needed to meet the objective it’s programmed to fulfil, and it does so in real time.

The results can be impressive. Here are just a few examples. But bear in mind that these case studies have been written to promote the use of AI. In reality, we believe there’s still a considerable amount of human intervention and management involved, as brands are understandably cautious and AI is still finding its feet.

Vanguard Institutional, one of the world’s largest investment companies, used the Persado AI language platform across their LinkedIn marketing activity. The platform identified the phrases that resonated with customers and delivered messages with the right formatting, tone and call to action to increase conversion rates by 15%.

The American Marketing Association used the rasa.io natural language AI system to automate the curation, placement and subject lines of articles, to create personalised newsletters for their 100,000 subscribers. This drove a significant increase in traffic to their website, and an engagement rate for their newsletter of 42%.

Adobe generated an extra $10 million in revenue by using the Drift AI chatbot to guide website visitors through their content and hand off conversations to a human in a call centre.

Dutch online retailer Wehkamp, used the natural language AI of Wordsmith to convert the structured datasets of their 400,000 product lines into search engine optimised product descriptions in their own brand tone of voice. This enabled the company’s copywriters and editors to shift their focus to creating advertising and content to attract new customers.

So, with the promise of results like these, why isn’t every business jumping on board?

The answer is simply human nature. Business people are cautious. We like certainty. We like data to support our own decision making. With AI, we don’t know for sure what will happen until we try it, and we’re devolving the decision making to the machine.

We may dip our toes into one part of the process. Programmatic display advertising, for example, or predictive big-data analytics. But applying AI across the whole marketing process seems a way off.

It’s the same caution that drives our relationship with autonomous cars (pun intended). We’re relatively comfortable with automated cruise and lane control yet giving complete control of the car still seems scary – even though we know that pilots regularly do this on the planes that carry us through the skies.

So are we right to be cautious? In short, yes. Hence the need for AI governance to address the concerns around, for instance, bias and privacy.

AI governance audits are encouraging the disclosure of differences in the data a system has been trained with and the data it finds when it’s working. A diverse universe of training data is advised to eradicate bias in practice across all dimensions: gender, race, politics, location etc.

On the face of it this sounds like common sense. But the case of OpenAI’s natural language processor GPT-3 exposes the flaw in this thinking.

Backed by funders including Elon Musk and Microsoft, the GPT-3 API is already used by companies like IBM, Cisco and Intel, and the engine is embedded into solutions like Pencil who already have over 100 customers including Unilever.

Backed by tech giants and increasingly used by large global brands, GPT-3’s learning dataset has been the whole of the internet. It’s powerful. And yet there are already a growing number of ethical concerns about it.

Despite its power and huge internet-wide learning dataset, tests have shown it still fails some simple common-sense reasoning tests. It also has a problem of bias. A recent research paper from Stanford found that in 60% of cases GTP-3 described Muslims as violent, and wrote about Black people in a negative way.

These problems don’t seem to be isolated to GPT-3 either. A research paper from the Allen Institute for AI found that they applied to nearly every popular AI language model, including Facebook’s RoBERTa software.

Clearly, there are many bigger brains working on these ethical problems than mine. But it has led me to ponder some very real ethical dilemmas for us as marketers.

On the one hand, we’re deploying fast-learning machines with the objective to grow our businesses. They do this by testing and learning from the behavioural data they encounter. They’re pragmatic. They’re not programmed to change the world, but to exploit what it finds to be true.

On the other hand, we’re driven by the objective of our western sensibilities to change attitudes and behaviours by portraying our brands as inclusive and accepting of diversity.

The dilemma for our governance of AI machines in the service of global brands is how to direct them when these two objectives come into conflict.

Do we instruct them to show diverse imagery and use inclusive language in regions, cultures or segments of our communities where they don’t resonate with the audience or deliver commercial results? Or do we let them pragmatically deliver an ever-evolving hyper-personalised version of the brand with a core purpose, tailored to the sensibilities of whoever it encounters?

I don’t have the answer to these questions. But it’s important our industry and the practice of AI governance addresses them now, in these early stages of evolution. Even now, we can see AI engines being embedded and replicated in other systems, and applications being swiftly adopted.

The danger is that any bias or ethical conflicts programmed into the DNA of these early engines may be hard to stamp out as they replicate and grow into interconnected ecosystems.

If we think things are moving quickly now, this is nothing to where the experts predict it will go next. Imagine an AI system designed by another AI system with the objective of being better than itself. Science fiction? It’s already happening. The DeepMind project has developed AlphaGo, an AI-powered machine, to play the game ‘Go’ – thought to be one of the most challenging board games in the world. Not satisfied with beating the world’s top players, they used AI to create a version that beat itself.

We’re excited to share that we have launched a new academy, starting with positions for Junior Developers and Digital Marketing Executives.

Our Academy days make the interview process more inclusive, interesting, and (hopefully) fun!

Spend the day with our mentors, participate in activities with other guests, and show us why you’re a good fit for being at Torchbox.

There will be a baseline of knowledge and skills required depending on the role you’re applying for. The full criteria is included in the specification.

We have been officially recognised as a ‘Great Place to Work’ by being awarded the sought-after certification.

Great Place to Work’s mission is to “help organisations create exceptional, high performing workplaces where employees feel trusted and valued”. Through the Certification process, they capture valuable employee feedback and details about the practices that make workplaces unique.

As part of this employee feedback, we were absolutely thrilled to report a 90% overall trust index from our team.

But what do the team actually say about working at cxpartners?

Come on – we’re a team of research consultants! Of course we love quantitative data, but we’re obviously going to go and gather a little qual too…

“cxp is a great place to work since we practice what we preach – it’s an empathy driven workplace”

“There are no egos at cxpartners. From my experience that’s very unique. It means you can be you. You can feel comfortable sharing your ideas with people who really value your thoughts and really listen.”

“We have such a supportive culture with space for everyone to have an opinion and speak up”

“It’s such a friendly and passionate team at cx, a diverse mix of skillsets working well together to really make a massive difference to our clients”

“Flexibility, support, adult to adult relationships, everyone’s proper passion for their subject, feeling connected, feeling heard, having permission to bring my whole self to work without judgement, total kindness of all the people here.

“I’ve only been here for about 6 weeks, but so far I’d say the people! Everyone’s super friendly and welcoming.”

“What I love about working at cx is being empowered, having opportunities to develop my career, learn from awesome colleagues and that being people-centred is lived and breathed here. Oh and there’s some fun projects too!”

“I think the best thing is that we’re not expected to be robots – we can be ourselves, and when we need support, it’s there!”

“Today’s pod catch up demonstrated one (of the many!) reasons cx is a great place to work… a bunch of lovely human beings asking brilliant questions on subjects that matter and just generally having insightful chats!”

Join us!

Not only are we a Great Place to Work, but we also have some pretty great benefits too, including:

We offer ‘remote-first’ working, with offices available in London and Bristol, and are currently recruiting for:

However, if you’re keen to join the team but your skillset doesn’t quite match the roles above – get in touch, we’d still love to hear from you.

Bristol-based web design and development agency, Unfold has just launched a brand-new events series, Below the Fold. The series centres successful business people, giving them a platform to share learnings from their journeys. Hosted by Unfold’s founder, Harry Cobbold, these events aim to educate and inform attendees with insider knowledge and tips for success.

The first episode in the series will see Gapsquare’s Zara Nanu taking the guest seat, with Harry interviewing her on Gapsquare’s recent acquisition and what it takes to build and acquirable business.

You can catch the event on 10th February 2022 from 1.30pm – 2.15pm. All events in the series will be held virtually via Zoom for the foreseeable future. If you can’t make the date, you can register in any case and you will be sent the session recording following the event.

After almost a year of a basic holding page, Noughts & Ones have launched a new low-impact website as they look to further establish themselves as the go-to Shopify agency for planet-friendly ecommerce brands in 2022.

The new website was born of their own Conscious Development™ framework, which guides (and will constantly evolve) all aspects of the Shopify stores and JAMstack websites they deliver.

Further to case studies on projects for incredible conscious brands such as fussy, OceanSaver and Hunter & Gather, the new Noughts & Ones website also serves as a platform to educate and spark conversation around the very real concern of digital sustainability.

Putting their website into “Super-Eco Mode” not only switches the site into even-more-efficient design mode, but also showcases tips on reducing the environmental impact and carbon footprint of websites.

While website development used to be the domain of software engineers and technical whizz-kids, the latest low-code/no-code solutions allow a much broader range of people to produce eye-catching, modern web applications. Heck, they’re even responsive too.

You no longer need to hire a developer to create a website, tools such as Bubble.io, Adalo, and Webflow (we’re a partner by the way) give you all the tools to create first-class websites and applications without the need to write any code. So it’s a great hit for marketers with tight budgets. Simply upload this image. Move that one. Drag this copy over there. Click publish and – BOOM. Website.

More often than not, today’s websites are more than just copy, image and text.

So what happens if you need to integrate your site with something else – say a payment platform, or a web API? What if you need to bring in a data source from a back-office system?

Some of these low-code/no-code solutions include e-commerce options (Webflow is one example), and you can do a fair bit with Zapier. But truly, these features won’t always meet all your requirements.

If in the future you think you’ll need more complex data APIs, tracking or marketing integrations on your site, you may want to look for something more structured…

Traditionally, Drupal CMS has been rigid. It had fixed templates and allowed little-to-no flexibility for content editors. But this has all changed with Drupal 9.

Drupal 9 has been built with flexibility in mind, and when combined with specific modules (for example Layout Builder and Paragraphs) it allows a much greater degree of freedom for you to create the pages you need.

Although, you may well still need some help from a development team or a site builder, depending exactly on your requirements. Once you have it set up, the flexible-layout-world is your oyster!

Layout Builder is included out-of-the-box with Drupal and can be used to create dynamic templates for any given content type.

By using Layout Builder, a content editor can build up a page using any number of defined components, e.g. images, text, and banners, and arrange them in any number of section configurations – for example, in either single or multiple columns.

Almost anything within Drupal can be positioned into a layout. You can drag things around and change a page’s blueprint completely from one page to another.

And if you have a list of documents you need to include on-site, site builders can define a document list block which you can then embed on any page. And, this can all be closely linked to the design using pattern libraries, where individual components, made up of atoms and molecules, can be tied to the components that are added through the layout builder.

More and more of our clients need flexible layouts. And that’s why, at P+S, we’ve combined several different modules into a Drupal ‘profile’.

This profile includes all the modules required to create a low-code/no-code site using Drupal, which can be rolled out for a comparable cost to Webflow.

The benefits of using a system like Drupal is that once you have it in place, you then have many more options for integrations with other web services due to its framework and server-side code flexibility, and your website can grow and evolve to meet your future requirements.

Acquia, who provide enterprise products, services, and support for Drupal, are also addressing the demand for low-code/no-code by developing the Site Studio project.

This enterprise level tool, included with their Cloud Solutions offering, allows you to build a Drupal site and theme it with no developer involvement at all. So developers can concentrate on more complex technical tasks, such as integrations and APIs.

Site Studio allows you to define and build a theme and components all entirely from Drupal’s interface. Once complete, your content editors have the freedom to create their pages using the drag-and-drop interface of the layout canvas.

When choosing your next platform for your marketing requirements, it’s important to think long-term and consider how they might change.

So, while low-code/no-code solutions are excellent for crafting websites in short timescales, if you need your website to grow beyond hosting more simple content, Drupal may be a better fit long term. And it may not necessarily cost you much more.

As Webflow and Acquia partners, and an experienced Drupal agency, P+S are in a unique position, and can help you decide which solution is the best option for your business.

Talk to us about your next project today, email [email protected] to arrange a no-obligation chat.

Having worked closely with the Epilepsy Society for the past few months, we’re delighted to announce the launch of unFlash, an AI-powered tool that detects and helps prevent the spread of flashing images on social media that in turn could trigger seizures.

The first-of-its-kind plug-in allows specific users to report examples of flashing images that appear on their Twitter feed, which are then captured as part of a dataset used to train a Machine Learning model.

unFlash’s aim is to eventually teach the AI how to effectively detect and block media that falls within the photosensitive range. This would prevent harmful imagery with the potential of triggering a seizure in people with photosensitive epilepsy from being shared online.

“Social media is a global platform, and the only true way to protect people from seizure-triggering content is to turn off the tap at its source. That’s why we are so grateful to the team at Gravitywell for their commitment to developing unFlash. We are hopeful for what the AI can contribute to the protection of people with epilepsy online.

However, small companies such as Gravitywell who have donated their time to protect people should not burden the responsibility of protecting Twitter’s users; the social media giants must be held accountable for protecting vulnerable people with disabilities on their platforms.” — Epilepsy Society

The new ‘Intro to Game Art’ short course will give you an insight into the world of game art, exploring the range of roles and essential skills needed to get you started when exploring a potential future career in game art. There is a host of exciting modules that your tutor will guide you through, including: 

  Planning and producing work to a design brief. 

Working in the games industry

Fully-funded intensive metaverse course

Successful applicants will receive:

But what do the team actually say about working at cxpartners?

Join us!