Can you dig it? Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce certainly does!

Can you imagine if everyone could write on street walls? That’s what could happen with DIGital Graffiti. It will enable content originators to write on digital walls using smart phone technology and leave message for others. It’s a simple idea but its effect will be profound.

Digital Interactive Graffiti (known as DIG) is a project to develop a mobile marketing platform to benefit hospitality and retail businesses, and is particularly aimed at cities that attract a lot of tourists who are hungry for information about what to do and where to go.

The main aim is to give the businesses involved a competitive edge and another tool to help them market themselves and let customers know about what they have to offer.

Funded by the European Commission, the project brings together a group of business support organisations with mobile phone software developers from across Europe.

Brighton is one of the cities involved in the project and Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce is working alongside the Chamber of Commerce Barcelona, Chamber of Commerce Naples, Lithuanian Association of Hotels and Restaurants, Bournemouth University, software developers Velti, Niobium Labs and Information Highway Group.

Brighton & Hove Chamber’s job will be to help the software developers by providing feedback during the research and development stages of the project. This will ensure that what is created will provide the most benefit to our businesses, be attractive to users and easy to develop further after the project has finished.

The Chamber is working with a number of other specialist business support organisations including: VisitBrighton, Brighton and Hove Hotels Association, the Tourism Alliance, Unique to Brighton and the Mark Fagan Consultancy, to recruit a group of businesses to help clarify what would help them as well as provide a critical eye.

The project runs for two years but at the end of 2013, businesses will have an opportunity to use the technology.

Chamber director, Sarah Springford said “It’s great to be working with European businesses and organisations and to be part of a project which will bring such tangible benefits to our local businesses. Brighton & Hove has many excellent digital media companies and we’ll be able to involve some of them with the commercialisation of this project."

Brighton is an ideal place to launch DIG because:
•    It has a high level of entrepreneurial talent among residents
•    It has a  large number of independent shops
•    Tourism accounts for a large percentage of the economy with an estimated income of over £400m. The city has over 8m visitors per annum
•    Creative Industries provide 11% of employment in the city
•    The trend is for web services going mobile, as more people browse the internet on their smart phones. 2008 was a turning point when mobile access exceeded desktop computer based access for the first time



Copy by Jill Woolf
CHIMERACOMMUNICATIONS
Public Relations & Marketing Consultancy
www.chimeracomms.co.uk