Need somewhere with free wifi, reasonable coffee and like-minded nomadic creative types?

The GIST Lab opens its doors every Friday morning for an informal end of week gathering. On Friday 12th,  though, they’re staying open all day for folks travelling up to Sheffield for Interesting North.

Join us at CollaboLab to bounce ideas, share thoughts (and) experiments and to hatch plans with folks who are interested in getting stuff done.  Meet likeminds and foster new collaborative relationships and projects.

Sign up here –> http://collabolab101112.eventbrite.com/

These are some of the designs that they’ve come up with so far…

It’s an excellent new magazine site focusing on media, art, technology, culture and everything that those subjects touch. So far, articles have covered the mobile revolution, serious games, transmedia storytelling, digital strategy and brand behaviour.

Exactly the kind of areas that will pop-up often during Interesting North.

Imperica are going to be running a short series of Interesting North articles featuring a handful of our speakers. In Paul’s words, we can look forward to “great debate, fascinating stories, and intellectually robust interviews.”

We hope that this relationship will pull out some of the most intriguing ideas, concepts and issues facing us today, whilst touching on some of the content that will be presented on November 13th.

The first article is a fantastically funny and entertaining conversation between Toby Barnes and Marcus Brown touching on futurism, disappointment, possibility and the importance of Mr. Benn. Put the kettle on and go read it now.

I’m absolutely thrilled at the prospect of such high quality, valuable content being developed together, and am really keen to support a great new project.

Read some of the great articles that are already up and follow Imperica on twitter.

More about Imperica:

“Imperica is a new site which is at the intersection of digital creativity. Covering brands, marketing, culture, art and tech, it “mashes up” all of these disciplines and more, creating something which chronicles where all of this amazing stuff is going. Our articles are designed to be intellectually rigorous, editorially robust, and based on people – not products. We hope that you enjoy Imperica, and we’re always keen to hear from people and organisations that we could cover in the future.”

However, it’s not all bad news.  That £20 you’d put aside in your sock drawer for Interesting London?  You can use it to buy a ticket to Interesting North instead…

They’ll look something like this (only white), we hope:

Now if that’s not worth getting out of bed for on Saturday 13th November, what is?

They’re all the same person: Marcus Brown.

Marcus is currently doing the most interesting stuff online right now, creating the finest ‘transmedia’ stories and social media satire you are ever likely to come across.

From a liver and Prokofiev-loving twitter-stalker teling dark tales across London, to his journey Around The World In 80 Toilets and real bots, Marcus is gorging on and satirising our willingness to expose every little detail about ourselves.

Marcus will be speaking at Interesting North about something very personal to him. It is guaranteed to memorable, inimitable and bloody marvellous.

You’d be a terrible fool to miss out. Here’s a link to book a ticket, I advise you do.

Robert Shearman works as a writer for tv, radio and the stage. He’s just finished a ten episode treasure hunt novella – with each globetrotting chapter providing a riddle that leads the heroes to another destination, and the readers to the next instalment the following week. Fun, mayhem, and sword swallowing ensues!

But he’s probably best known for reintroducing the Daleks in the Hugo-nominated and BAFTA-winning Doctor Who episode starring Christopher Ecclestone…

Tom Armitage writes, designs and develops for the web, and thinks quite hard about many things best described as “new media”.   He’s enjoying talking/thinking about rules and mechanics and why it’s these things that make things gamelike, and not scoreboards…

Mike Wallis thinks that cake is far more interesting than just a tasty comestible; the structure, how all the different elements interact, and the history of how cake came to be are all interesting topics.

You just thought it was something tasty to eat with a cuppa, but when you think about it cake can illustrate religion, psychology, molecular biochemistry and engineering, as well as being something tasty to eat with a cuppa.

Eliot Fineberg is a freelance doer-of-internety-stuff at Friday (yes, that really is a company. In that London, can’t you tell?) He’s going to talk about Wikiality & Journeys Into The Surreal…

James Boardwell does design and research at Rattle, and being run over by a taxi hasn’t put him off bikes and riding. He’s going to talk about push bikes, single speed, fixies and fads…

There’ll be more speakers announced in the weeks to come – and if you’ve got something that you’re passionate about, there’s still slots going.  Sign up with our magic I-want-to-talk-at-Interesting-North internetomatic form thingy…

Things we’re still looking for at the moment are:

• sponsors – if you want your name in lights (well, alright, maybe not actual lights, but you’ll certainly get thanked profusely) we’d love to hear from you.  Offers of cold, hard cash are always welcome, but so is sponsorship-in-kind – particularly if you’ve got schwag you could offer. T-shirts, mugs, irritating furry bobbly things with eyes – all would help to make the schwag bags fun.  Come to think of it, if anyone wants to offer bags for the schwag we’d love to hear from you…
• speakers – there’s at least 15-20 speaking slots to fill, and there’ll be a mix of 10 and 20 minute talks.   Subjects so far range from cake, to Lego, to why ladies shouldn’t gallop – so if there is a theme, it’s interesting.
• AV – Cutlers’ Hall is a big venue, so we’re going to need decent projection and PA facilities – and it would also be great if it could be filmed for posterity as well.  Professional AV is a little on the spendy side, so this is a shameless plea for help with kit and expertise.

In the next couple of weeks there’ll be a snazzy new design for this site, and more details of speakers will start to appear – so check back soon…