Category Archives: London

Happy Birthday TimeOut London! 40 years of young news

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September 1968 – September 2008: Time Out celebrates its fortieth anniversary. Tony Elliott was just a Keele University student when he launched Time Out with the £70 his aunt gave him for his twenty-first birthday. Now he is sixty-one and the chairman of a multimillion-pound empire. To celebrate this success the main story this week covers the forty most famous Londoners in this anniversary edition (today in the shops for £2.95).

Time Out is quite simply the best resource to find out what’s going on in London. It’s a weekly listings magazine, famous for its cultural reference value with listings for film, theatre, fashion, literature, restaurants, clubs, parties, festivals and events – tailored to each city. It expanded from the London edition to cities across the globe. It has established a worthy online presence to provide its readers with news and useful information that constitutes twenty-three different city editions.

You can find Time Out everywhere: London, Chicago, New York, Paris, Beijing, Dubai, Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Cyprus, Moscow, Athens, Singapore, Saint-Petersburg, Bucharest, Almaty, Jerusalem, Kiev, Mumbai, New Delhi, Abu Dhabi, Sydney, Shanghai and Barcelona, and from 2008, also in Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong. Every edition is unique and rich with event listings, complemented by articles, typically featuring celebrities appearing in one of the listed events.

40 years, 52 covers per year and 86,000 copies for about 374,000 readers every week: Happy birthday Time Out!

Free theatre tickets for redundant bankers!

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If you’ve recently lost the security of employment under an investment bank and your highly lucrative job has turned you into one of the thousands of well-qualified investment bankers looking for another similar position then don’t panic; Andrew Lloyd Webber’s to the rescue!

As a recently unemployed banker you can claim free tickets to The Sound of Music and The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat from now to 15th October. And the Telegraph.co.uk reports the Andrew Lloyd Webber’s words: ‘Both The Sound of Music and Joseph are feel-good shows and I thought that free tickets might offer some respite, albeit for a couple of hours, for some of those people who have sadly lost their jobs in the current economic upheaval’.

Interestingly the offer depends on the theatre-goer bringing along the P45 issued from they’re recently folded bank employers, the very piece of paper that embodies their redundancy and the demise of their secure livelihood. Can you imagine all the recently fired bankers brandishing this piece of paper in public amongst their ex-colleagues in the queue for the theatre… we think not. I’m sure the column inches devoted to this offer (such as this blog!) will serve to publicise the shows even more. As such this promotion should clearly be noted for its value as a stunt marking Webber’s unfailing business savvy rather than a legitimate offer for those it is purporting to be targeting.

The 10 best London songs!

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Good afternoon. Today we want to distract you from the tumultuous economic instability with something a little more cheery…

Here are our 10 favourite London Songs!

  1. God Save The Queen – Sex Pistols
  2. Streets Of London – Ralph McTel
  3. London Belongs To Me – Saint Etienne
  4. Down In The Tube Station At Midnight – The Jam
  5. Primrose Hill – John & Beverly Martyn
  6. London Is The Place For Me – Lord Kitchener
  7. Waterloo Sunset – The Kinks
  8. London’s Burning – The Clash
  9. London Town – Light Of The World
  10. For Tomorrow – Blur

Do you agree with our choices? Tell us your opinion. Time Out (the best London magazine) seems to disagree. See what they suggest and tell us what you think.

Enjoy!

Lehman Bros & Co: a black monday

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It was a tough morning for many going to work in The City today; it’s Monday and it’s a black day for the Market. The fourth-largest U.S. investment bank has gone bust and all the front pages are dedicated to what could be the largest scale bankruptcy in history. Bloomberg.com explains in detail what is happening: “Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. succumbed to the subprime mortgage crisis it helped create in the biggest bankruptcy filing in history. The 158-year-old firm, which survived railroad bankruptcies of the 1800s, the Great Depression in the 1930s and the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management a decade ago, has filed a Chapter 11 petition with U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan today. The collapse of Lehman, which listed more than $613 billion of debt, surpasses WorldCom Inc.’s insolvency in 2002 and Drexel Burnham Lambert’s failure in 1990.”

Unfortunately the crisis is not limited to the Lehman collapse: the Bank of America has brought Merrill Lynch, and Wall Street is in crisis. Thetimesonline.co.uk says: “London woke up to discover that, overnight, two of the biggest pillars of Wall Street had either collapsed or passed into new ownership, the world’s largest insurer was forced into an emergency restructuring, and 10 banks put together an emergency fund to lend to any other ailing banks”. This bad news will probably not come as a surprise to many. But the problem is serious and involves all the Markets and a huge numbers of bankers, who can’t predict anything about their future. “One New York observer (thetimesonline.co.uk goes on to say) estimated that 40 per cent of Merrill’s workforce, or 24,000 people, could be out of a job. The situation at Lehman will inevitably be much worse”.

But, as Douglas Adams would say, Don’t Panic! “This is undoubtedly the worst banking crisis since the 1930s, but traders shouldn’t panic and start to sell shares of other leading banks. It doesn’t make sense. American, British and other global banks  are cooperating to make the transition as smooth as possible”, said Allister Heath, City A.M. editor.

Travel by flight or by train… shall we stay in London this weekend?

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Good afternoon! Here we are on Friday, hurtling towards the weekend, with a quick update from London. Some bitesized pieces of the latest news specially selected to provide you with some good topics of conversation and some useful advice. To start off, here is some travel news! Maybe the summer is over, but there are still a lot of us that are waiting for our holidays and maybe are planning some travel right now. Maybe you need to organize some business travel… What is the best thing to do? Organise by oneself, booking and checking every detail or rely on a travel agency?

Airtravel with low cost airlines has had several problems in the last few weeks: shortly after the Spanish crash of last August, a Ryanair flight from Bristol to Barcelona-Girona had to make an emergency landing after loss of cabin pressure. And on the 11th of September another Ryanair flight (from Dublin to London) had to make an emergency landing shortly after take off at Dublin airport and oxygen masks were dropped into the cabin, leaving all the passengers afraid or their lives, but safe.

But today something different has happened: thousands of British travelers were stranded, because one of the largest tour operators collapsed under pressure from high fuel prices and a sagging economy, reports Ap, and the Timesonline.co.uk explains: ‘thousands of travellers were left stranded overseas today after XL Leisure, Britain’s third largest tour operator, collapsed and BA’s chief executive predicted that another 30 airlines would go out of business before Christmas’. At the moment at least 67,000 passengers across the globe are left waiting to be brought home…

Travel by train could be a good solution: the British train services are good and on time (well…mostly. ed.). But from yesterday we were cut off from the continent. Bbc.co.uk says: ‘thousands of passengers hoping to travel through the Channel Tunnel face further disruption after a fire on a freight train. The tunnel is closed after the fire broke out about seven miles from Calais on Thursday afternoon. Firefighters say the 16-hour blaze has now been put out. And unfortunately the opinions about the re-opening of the tunnel are divided: will the tunnel open tomorrow or in two weeks?

We shall see. Maybe this weekend it’s better to stay in London: the weather won’t be so bad and the city offers a lot of ways to escape from the boredom! A suggestion! Don’t miss the Thames Festival!

Blackout at the London Stock Exchange

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In a time when communication via the World Wide Web is paramount, we are all aware of the frustration when our internet connections fail. Often the result is having to wait to be able to check our email. Today we saw what happens in the instance of mass connection failure on a far larger scale: ‘Trading on the London Stock Exchange was halted this morning for the longest period in over eight years because of a connectivity issue’, says the Timesonline.co.uk.

Before 9am, Europe’s oldest independent exchange suspended all the connections, leaving the traders without prices and completely unable to buy or sell shares. Technicians failed to re-connect for seven hours, and they still don’t know the real cause of the problem. This was the worst incident of this kind for UK trading in more than eight years.

Last year, in November, the London Stock Exchange had to close its bidding for a similar problem, which left traders without live information for more than 40 minutes. But the largest failure is still that which shut down the entire exchange for eight hours in the April 2000. Today the problem coincided with a rally in European stocks and a surge in the trading volume following the U.S. Government’s decision to take control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, underlines Bloomberg.com. About 352 million shares were traded before 9am in London today, more than double the length from the same period last week.

In a moment thousands of screens froze; all the computers connected to the British system were affected by the blackout, leaving City traders desperate and angry. The London Stock Exchange attempted to calm its customers by giving accurate details of the situation, emphasis on ‘attempted’. Traders were left infuriated without given a valid cause or timescale for the problem.

The total opportunity cost of today’s disaster has yet to be calculated. The incident has highlighted that connectivity is still a serious issue to combat in today’s online world otherwise we risk compromised freedom at home and the suspension of the FTSE 100 for most of the working day!

Google Ads and Pay Per Click: What are they and why you should use them?

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Let’s get straight to business today with GOOGLE ADS!

Have you ever noticed that some Google results on the very top of the search results page have a subtle yellow background? That’s because they are payment positions called ‘Sponsored Links’. They are one of the several online ways to promote your business, and arguably one of the best because provided your keywords have been selected carefully, you can be at the top of the list. Think about this: if you want to find something, the first thing that you do is type a couple of words into the Google search bar. Google occupies more two-thirds of the search engine market so being on the first page of a Google search makes all the difference to your success, because you can reach people when they are actively looking for your product or service.

The AdWords cost-per-click pricing is cheap and easy to control, because you only pay when people click on your ad. Unlike more traditional adverts; you can measure its results highly accurately, easily amend it and only pay when a prospect clicks on your advert, rather than being charged on page impressions. There are two main categories of Pay per click (PPC) campaigns: keyword and content match. The first category involves the display of advertisements on search engine results pages, the second one, instead, involves the display of advertisements on publisher websites, newsletters and e-mails.

Why you should open a Google AdWords account?

– You can promote your business specifically to your prospective customers.
– You can save money (it’s very cheap), in comparison to traditional advertising.
– You can manage it easily.
– As a customer of the Made Simple Group you are entitled to a FREE £30 Google advertising AdWords voucher.

Number of women in top jobs falls in UK.

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Let’s talk about America for a second… Sarah Palin, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate fired-up her audience last night when she spoke of her intention “to serve the people” and how Barak Obama lacks the necessary maturity to lead the country. And John McCain believes in her. Coupled with the high profile of a certain Mrs. Clinton, women in the States are progressing into powerful roles within society.

In the mean time we discover the opposite for this country; the number of women in top jobs is decreasing. Today the Equality and Human Rights Commission underlines that professional women who want to reach the top are encountering much difficulty. Why? Not because of a lack of talent or ambition, since many believe the presence of women at the top is the solution! Katherine Rake, Director of the Fawcett Society that campaigns for women’s rights, tries to explain: “Rather, women in every sector of the workforce face unjust hurdles throughout their careers, and those hurdles are even higher for ethnic minority women. This is a fundamental matter of fairness and justice for women. And it has consequences for the whole of society. With so few women in power, the UK is wasting a colossal amount of talent and all sectors are impoverished as a result.”

In 2008, do women have to fight for their rights as hard as they had to in the past? Can we follow the example of America? Comment below and let us know what do you think.