Sharing Awareness,  MKFC Stockholm College  and MKFC Stockholm Folkhögskola team participated in seminars and workshops at SIME Stockholm  together with thousands of others entrepreneurs, companies, NGO:s Non profits and for profits.

The opportunities in the digital arena keep developing and creating business, entertainment, political turmoil and unparalleled opportunities for the ones in the know. During two action-packed days SIME Stockholm will be your guide into new insights, concrete business opportunities, tools and the smartest brains from the international digital arena.

12-year old Puck – founder of Puckipedia – was one of the many draws at SIME 2011: “12 year old wiz kid on stage: I can see people in their 30s looking uncomfortable – including myself (picture and text from the SIME blog)!

Two days of learning

The seminars was about the latest news how ICT and business develop with international perspectives. The business experts pointed out the importance that NGO take more responsibility to learn more about the business part of financing NGO work. It’s important to have a plan how to cooperate with companies. Companies stressed that it’s important that the NGO:s have clear strategies, plans and not only to focus on to collect money but rather do the work there experts in – to make the world a better place.

It becomes more and more important for NGOs to be social online and to be up to date with what business and ICT development . This is important to do better and clearer marketing and be more visible.

Representatives from the business said that many leaders in businesses still don’t want to relearn and be active with their employees and customers online. They let this over to the communication department in their companies rather then make it as an integrated part of the way of companies work. In some extent we think this was true for the non profit discussions. Much emphasise was on using ICT to collect money and marketing for the NGOs but less on how to make the organization more effective with the use of ICT.

The founder for Skype told about the importance of creating a team with passion and different competences. To dare to be curious, search for solutions and dare to receive feedback from customers, which was something he thought was important to make the business better. Customers today want to have access and right to create solutions so the services can be better and more effective.

NY times, Al-Jazeera and BBC team told about the importance of communicate and integrate social media and ICT tools in their productions. To communicate through peoples interest in their subject or journalism, was something that opens the doors to broader journalism. The role of TV needs to be more adapted after the consumers needs. Most people today look at content on their “second screen”. It was a lot of humour in Al-Jazeera and at the same time there is news in it! Integrate humour with facts! It can also stimulate learning!

Games and learning

It was sessions about games for different age groups and different purposes. Many marketers was intreseted in Gamification to engage their audience, some thought this was just a buzz word and other thought it’s the future of commercials. Gaming is also interesting for learning, most games are not directed for learning but games as SIMS and World of Warcraft has a deep dimension of learning. There was also new examples of games directed to girls 8-15 years which is a quite new age group for online games, a company had built about a horse game similar to World of Warcraft that they called World of Horsecraft. In this game the players can interact with other players/girls who play all over the world ! The games has a fantastic potential in the globalization in education!

The days gave updates on what is going on in the ICT world. We see that we already are working on these fields. It was interesting to learn about what is going on in the business, NGO and their connections to ICT!

Read more about the conference on the SIME blog