I finally figured out all the technical details, so here’s some pics of our housewarming party last week, albeit a little late!

I’ll shift from our communications focus slightly to share a bit of news that’s made me extremely happy.

As a newcomer to Copenhagen (I’ve been here ten months now) I’m constantly looking for new entertainment and - for better or for worse - find myself comparing Copenhagen to other big cities I’ve lived in: London, Boston, Paris, Washington DC, Moscow.

You can imagine my thrill, then, when I discovered that Copenhagen has reached top-cosmopolitan status! That’s right - it’s now right up there with Paris and Milan. How did this happen? Apparently, in large part due to creative newcomers from abroad. It’s nice to think of Eye for Image’s staff as fitting into this category that’s helping Copenhagen get in a positive global spotlight.

An excerpt from Creative minds are flocking to Copenhagen: “Copenhagen has become a magnet for the creative class e.g. engineers, doctors, designers, researchers and programmers, who are flocking to the Danish capital like never before.”

The article quotes Mark Lorentzen from Copenhagen Business School who argues: “The change in Copenhagen has been tremendous. The capital is now in a class with cities like Milan, London and New York. Highly trained, creative people choose between these cities, and to them Copenhagen has become a place where they would like to live.”

Now I’m even more committed to discovering the creative gems this city holds. After all, the status is recently acquired, so there aren’t as much in-your-face marketing to promote social events as in cities that have had this status for ages. But I think that even in my short time here, there’s been a shift towards an ambiance that resembles other tourism and creativity magnets.

What do you think - is this status award long overdue? Or is Copenhagen still lagging a bit behind the Londons and New Yorks of the world? And finally, do you think the creative class in Copenhagen really is growing? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks to new media commentator Jeppe Kabell for linking to this intriguing post about how a course in business writing led to dramatic improvements for the author.

Written by the creator of the Dilbert comic, Scott Adams, the post urges people to remember the art of simplicity. Advice every writer should take on board.

But the post also got me thinking about why people should try and improve their writing skills.

What is the actual benefit?

We take it for granted here in the office that good writing is something valuable in itself. But what is its value to businesses?

I’ll try and get the ball rolling and then I’ll leave it to my colleagues - and hopefully some of you as well - to fill in the blanks.

I guess the title of this post gives my arguments away! For me, it’s all about clarity. Communicating something, whether it’s the benefits of a new product, or the values of a company, is optimized through clarity.

Simple, easily understandable language should be every writer’s first goal. Striving for that powerful, hard-hitting message can wait. Start simple, and then hone. Often, the most powerful text is the least confusing!

Now, over to you.

Thanks to all of those who came to our housewarming party yesterday.

The sun shone, the food was tasty, and the wine was flowing.

We have plenty of pictures from the event and we will get them posted up early next week.

For now, have a great weekend!

We’re almost ready with our preparations for our big housewarming party later this afternoon.

We’re looking forward to welcoming many of the great friends we’ve made over the past few years - I hope we didn’t forget any of you!

I’ve even brought my trusty camera and i’ll be uploading some snaps which you’ll find on the blog tomorrow - hangovers permitting!

Cheers!

Some of you take pictures, I’m sure.

Some of you might even display those pictures on Flickr, the community photo-sharing website.

Yet more of you might have recently discovered Street View from Google Maps.

Whether or not any of you ticked those boxes, I am sure you are interested in staying in touch with potentially revolutionary developments that might impact your business.

If so, you should check out this astonishing video demonstration of new software from Microsoft - Seadragon and Photosynth.

I won’t go into too much detail, but Photosynth will eventually allow users to explore fully realised spatial models of almost anywhere on earth using pictures and satellite imagery stored on places like Flickr and Street View.

Now, why am I blogging about photo software on a business communications blog?

Well, as The Register hint at in their article about the software, it will eventually lead to a scenario where people will be able to browse their laptop or PDA for images of almost anything they are thinking of checking out, be it a restaurant, bar, business or city.

With Photosynth, they will be able to go inside that restaurant and take a virtual tour before leaving the house!

Businesses take note - the era of ultra-informed choice is here. Those of us not delivering top-notch services, or not paying attention to the rapid pace of technological advancement, risk getting left by the digital roadside.

I was at a meeting the other day – a Danish-born multinational company – when there was an awkward moment of silence. It happened because the English and German country managers had asked that the brand of their company should be “less Danish”.

The Danish managers then asked what exactly that meant. The halting reply came that subsidiaries outside Denmark experienced the management style as “dusty”, “slow” and “bureaucratic”.

Interesting really, when you think about the tremendous speed of fast-developing economies such as that of China. Makes me wonder how competitive Denmark might be in the future – particularly when I also hear a comment from Grundfos’s large Chinese subsidiary say (quoted in Børsen) that, in their opinion, Chinese engineers are better than Danish engineers!

My colleague Anastasya blogged last month about some of the marketing phrases that had amused her.

Expressions like ‘blue-sky thinking’, and ‘reinvent the wheel’ are commonplace in certain sectors of the business world. Personally I can’t stand them. There is a word in English which sums them up for me. . . corny. It means trite, or needlessly dramatic.

Another bugbear of mine is jargon. My one self-imposed rule as a copywriter is ‘keep things simple’. But all too often I encounter text that looks like a set of random words that have fallen out of a dictionary.

It can be quite amusing sometimes trying to deconstruct sentences as obtuse as: “Expediting this value chain requires optimal synergistic leveraging of the entire back-end processing systems.”

OK, I made that one up but the Plain English Campaign has some real-life examples that will make you smile.

Something else I came across this week was Apple’s hilarious corporate jargon lorem ipsum generator.

A must for graphic designers with a sense of humour!