I only discovered last week that the City Garden referendum in Aberdeen has much wider implications than simply the decision between retaining the existing Union Terrace Gardens or creating a new City Garden spanning the Denburn Valley.
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Tags: city centre, City Garden, aberdeen

It wasn’t the creation of Enterprise Areas that surprised me. It was the fact that an Enterprise Area for Low Carbon and Renewables technologies appeared to very deliberately exclude the established global centre for energy technology – Aberdeen.
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Tags: renewables, energy, aberdeen, Scotland

If I was going to open a shop, I would start out by doing some pretty intensive market research. I would want to know what people want. I would want to know whether there was space in the market for my business.
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Tags: aberdeen, retail, city centre

I have a sticker in my study that says “Steve Jobs for President”. I can’t remember who gave it to me, or when. But, the fact that someone produced and widely distributed it, does underline the extraordinary way that Steve Jobs connected with ‘the people’.
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Tags: Apple, business

I read today that 26 million people in the UK are now on Facebook. That’s 41% of all the entire population!
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Tags: social media, Facebook

The recent capture and shooting of Osama bin Laden has provided a reminder of one of the most important principles of supplying information under the full glare of the media spotlight.
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Tags: crisis

I was listening closely as the Chancellor delivered his Budget last month. I had a deadline to produce 300 words for a client’s Budget comment to be published in the next day’s paper.
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Tags: oil, economy, politics

At yesterday’s City Garden presentation, one of the first examples of city centre revitalisation presented by Charles Landry, author of City Making and Creative City, was the Millennium Park in Chicago.
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Tags: aberdeen, City Garden, ACSEF

It seems so obvious with hindsight, but as the new millennium dawned, few of us would have seen the logic of a computer manufacturer producing a mobile device for playing music. That, in those days, was the domain of Sony with their Walkman.
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Tags: business, Apple

For as long as I can remember, people have been predicting the death of newspapers. Firstly, it was the immediacy of radio and television that was going to kill them off. Now, it is the easy distribution of news on internet.
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Tags: newspapers, media, Technology

It would be difficult to find a better example of Aberdeen’s drive to strengthen its role as a global oil and gas technology hub than the Wood Group’s £600 million acquisition of fellow Aberdeen company PSN, announced earlier this week.

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Tags: oil, offshore, aberdeen

I admit to being a bit of a geek. I am excited about the potential of new technology and, whenever there is a new update to any bit of software on my computer, I have to be restrained if I am to resist the temptation to hit the download button.

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Tags: Technology

The desperate news of financial meltdown in Ireland raises the question of how Western European economies, including our own, apparently turned from boom to bust so quickly.

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Tags: economy, politics

I’m following up my previous post with this moving story from Camphill School Aberdeen. It demonstrates how the work of the Camphill Aberdeen charities can make such a huge difference for individuals and for families in crisis.

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Tags: Camphill, charity, community

It was almost exactly seven years ago that Dr Stefan Geider at Camphill in Aberdeen called to ask if I could help with setting up a campaign. What was to follow tested my PR and public affairs skills to the extreme, but I would have been a lot poorer in so many ways had I not risen to the challenge.

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Tags: Camphill, aberdeen, charity, community