As part of the CDIT Open Studios week this year we are opening our doors to anyone interested in finding out how digital companies do it! In fact, being located at The Dock we are one among a whole ecosystem of small and exciting start-ups. That is why we have decided to organise a whole day of events as part of The Dock Open Day, where you will have the opportunity to meet and interact with some of Brighton’s brightest! All the events are free and you may attend one, two or all of them if you want. Come and see us then!

Day 1

BrightMinded - Business Start Up For Little or No Money,10.30am – 12.00pm  

Starting a new business can seem a daunting task but it needn’t be an expensive one. In this talk BrightMinded will share their experience of many of the online technologies available to smooth and simplify the process. From setting up email and creating a web page to global collaboration there are many great tools available which allow you to focus on the day to day business rather than establishing infrastructure. We’ll also explore how Brighton’s innovative business spaces like The Dock can accelerate and support those first few steps..

Amplee  – How to marketing your business using social media and other tools, 1.00pm -  2.00pm

Join Mary-Ann Johnn, online marketer, at the Dock in Hove to hear her useful advice on using social media as a cost-effective means of marketing your business.

If you’re a start-up, small business or student, feel free to come along to find out more about using social media to create awareness and new business.

This one hour session will aim to cover the following;

• Why social media for your small business?
• Working out which social media platforms to use
• Setting up your business presence on social media
• Using social media platforms to drive traffic to your new website
• Using Twitter & LinkedIn for new customer acquisition
• Managing your social media platforms with ease

BrightMinded – Open Source Web Frameworks: Web Development with Kohana, 2.30 – 3.30pm

If you are like us you will look for that piece of technology that is best suited for the project at hand. As a webapp developer this means that you probably get to play with a lot of different frameworks each emphasizing a certain approach and playing on the strengths of the underlying language. For our last project we have used the open-source, PHP-based, object-oriented framework called Kohana and in this talk we’d like to introduce it and discuss what we’ve learned.

This is for anyone who has been using a different PHP framework, or for those of you who are thinking of switching to PHP webapp dev and don’t know where to start or if you just want to geek out for an hour! You don’t have to but if you are the hands-on type of person feel free to bring your laptop with an *AMP stack ready to go so you can try things yourself!

Day 2

Jido Control- 3D design & printing workshop with Inventor Fusion (For Mac)  10:00am -12:30pm

If you would like to learn to design your own 3D objects ready for printing this workshop will give you the tools to get started. All you will need is a Mac running OS X 10.7 or later with a 64-bit processor and download Autodesk Inventor Fusion from the App Store (Free Download).

You will be shown basic modelling to create simple geometric objects that are printable using our RepRap Pro 3D printer. During the day we will have our RepRap Pro printing an example for you to see what can be achieved.

Product Development with Little or No Money 14:30- 15:30pm

Following on from Brightminded’s talk “Business Start Up For Little Or No Money”, by Dan Cowan, we take that notion one step further and show how a small business can take an idea and develop it on a tight budget.

Using open source software and readily available hardware we show the process from concept to design to prototype.

Date:   Wednesday 25^th September & Thursday 26^th September

Register here:        

Day 1- Morning:                   http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/7589457271
Day 1- Afternoon:            http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/7647244113
Day 2- Morning:                   http://jido3d.eventbrite.co.uk/
Day 2- Afternoon:                http://jidocontrol.eventbrite.co.uk