How-Do Weekly Wrap - February 17 - Stephen Alexander

Friday 17 February 2012

Another week and the controversy surrounding the BBC’s move to Media City UK goes on. Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think there’s has been a week where there hasn’t been a story on How-Do about the move.

This week we had the Daily Mail claiming that the BBC had paid out a staggering amount of money laying off staff only for half of them to actually accept positions in Salford.

The BBC was able to refute these claims but the story also served to highlight that seemingly the rest of country has no idea what or where Salford even is, with the Telegraph embarrassingly thinking it is somewhere in the Midlands. It’s only two hours away from London but, let’s face it, Salford may as well be on Mars as far as the rest of the UK is concerned.

However, there continues to be plenty of exciting things going on in the North West, an example of which being the BBC holding the world’s largest TV showcase in Liverpool, as well Gabriel Byrne filming in the region.

We’ve noticed firsthand the increased media investment in the region - First Internet’s offices are located in Hale village and we have to fight through at least one film crew a month to get to the newsagent!

In spite of the current climate investment in the region and our industry is still evident and the £475,000 investment in MymCart, a mobile commerce web app, follows the trend First Internet has seen in client needs and requests.

Investment in mobile development has really come into its own and many of our new clients are requesting mobile apps and mobile versions of their sites as a matter of course when redeveloping their online presence.

Google are keen to increase their mobile web presence also with the beta testing this week of a mobile version of their Chrome browser. Google Chrome is fast becoming the browser of choice. Having taken over Firefox as the second most popular browser in December of 2011 it now has 29% of the market share, showing a definite shift in the market.

Finally, Clear Presentations has announced some great news, with the company making it through an eight-stage pitching process to produce the North West Construction Awards for both 2012 and 2013.

Other construction news this week has seen the announcement that Middlewich-based company Pochin Construction has won eight contracts within the last six months, culminating in an amazing £55m boost for the company. An upturn like this in the recession-hit construction sector can only be good news for the North West’s media contingent.