Recently in News Category

The battle of the malls in Aberdeen is definitely being stepped up.

The opening of Hammerson owned Union Square last year was something of a landmark with several new brands such as Apple and Hollister coming to the city.

Footfall has been impressive and informal chats with some of the retailers trading in the centre suggest they are happy with their numbers.

However the Scottish Retail Property Limited Partnership (SRPLP) - a Land Securities and British Land joint venture - is not resting on its laurels.

It spent £2m in the refurbishment of the St Nicholas shopping centre in 2009 and has just announced a £6m upgrade of the neighbouring Bon Accord centre.

Hot on the heels of its link up with YouTube STV is once again going to the US market.

This time it's a format sharing partnership with Kinetic Content.

The deal means STV Productions will licence original Kinetic shows in the UK and vice versa.

Both companies also intend to work together to develop new formats for broadcast in Britain and the US.

If you haven't heard BAA want to charge £1 for passengers to be dropped off by the terminal building at Edinburgh airport. They say the charge is to pay for improvements to the drop off area. But the amount raised by this charge will surely pay for much more than that. It is just another way to get extra revenue. Surely they must be getting enough from the extortionate charges they already make for parking by the terminal.
I think BAA have done a great job with Edinburgh airport which is world class. But I think to impose a charge when many people are worried about their jobs and income is extraordinarily bad timing and a PR disaster.

There are already a couple of regular social media events in Scotland (such as the New Media Breakfast or Craig McGill's Scottish Social Media Dinners).

The latest to step out onto the landscape is Media140 Scotland which kicks off in Glasgow on Thursday.

Keynote speaker Trey Pennington has drafted up a guest blog piece for us ahead of his arrival in Scotland.

The American, who has 85,000 followers on Twitter, is recognised as a big hitter when it comes to social media uses for business.

So here's what he had to say.

Like many men (and women) I am a sucker for a shiny new piece of technology.

Sleek cutting edge looks, functions I will never use (much less understand) and a fancy name all tick my consumer box.

So when the computer generated design for Aquamarine Power's updated Oyster wave device, pictured above, dropped in to my inbox I really had to share it.

Putting aside the name - Oyster 2 doesn't quite have the punch of Oyster 2.0, Oyster Plus or Oyster Evolution does it? - it is a lovely looking piece of industrial science fiction style kit.

It has been a busy few weeks for the creative folks here at B7 and Insider towers.

Hopefully most of you will have seen the revamped paper (if not check out the e-zine version and compare it to the older issues in the archive).

We think it is a much brighter and bold design which makes it a nicer product to read.

Now we have updated the websites for Business7 and Insider to make things a bit better.

First off a confession as this blog entry may be slightly skewed by my rose-tinted personal experience.

You see I was one of thousands of primary school children taught to ski at the Midlothian Snow Sports Centre - known as Hillend to everyone - in Midlothian so have some quite fond memories of it.

Learning to snowplow, trying to grab the button tow properly, hurtling down the main slope with carefree abandon and laughing hysterically as friends fell over and hit the mat are all part of my childhood.

I'm not alone in having fond memories as a Facebook campaign with more than 26,000 members is dedicated to saving the facility.

Hillend's future, or lack of, has been on the agenda for the past few months with Midlothian Council struggling to subsidise what is now a loss making venture.

Rather than jump in with a kneejerk reaction I have taken a full 24 hours to consider my thoughts about the new logo for the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.

The background, reasoning and blurb about the £95,000 design can be found here.

From a patriotic point of view it was nice Marque Creative beat more than 60 other competitors to win the design brief.

It's not really a surprise the logo has sparked a reaction with grumbles about how people preferred the original bid design to just not being very convinced by the update.

We have dipped our toe in social networking at Business7 and Insider over the past year.

Our Twitter feeds have been quite popular (here and here) and both publications are also on Facebook (here and here).

The next obvious step was to do something on the social network most popular with business - Linkedin.

So that was exactly what we did and a new group for Business7 and Insider readers has been set up here.

When I interviewed Dougal Sharp a few weeks ago he was really excited about the prospect of taking his beer company, Innis and Gunn, to America.

The day after our meeting he was off to see a strong candidate to lead the brand's move into the USA.

Now the contracts have been signed and a new operational arm, Innis & Gunn USA, has been formed.

Dan DeLuca, pictured below, is the man charged with leading the growth there and he comes with an impressive pedigree.