News Round Up: Liverpool Vision, Google, social media, David Cameron

Google is talking with makers of educational software to help build a marketplace for online learning programs, an industry whose value may approach $5 billion, says Business Week. The world’s largest search engine is seeking to lure more educational developers and is stepping up efforts to generate revenue from the project according to company executives. That could provide a new growth stream for Google, which gets most of its sales from search advertising. The company already works with U.S schools, providing free word processing, e-mail and spreadsheet programs to students and teachers. Now it wants to help outside developers sell applications to educators.

Power of social media means Film studios will play safe with 2011 releases

The Telegraph predicts that 2011 will be the year of the sequel, with film studios increasingly anxious about the speed and power of social networks. Reluctant to take risks during the economic downturn, studios view social networking websites as a way of undermining publicity drives and driving people away from bad films. The flood of sequels will also be fuelled by a deal made this month between the Miramax studio and movie moguls Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Studios have taken note that the highest grossing film of 2010 in the US was a sequel, Toy Story 3.

LDP Legal: Lawyers plan new marketing office for legal Liverpool

Liverpool Daily Post reports that Liverpool could have a new legal marketing body by the end of 2011. Norman Jones, the city’s new Law Society president wants to set up an office whose sole function will be to champion Liverpool’s lawyers to the rest of the country and beyond. He is working with the city’s regeneration body, Liverpool Vision, to set it up. It could follow the example set by Leeds Legal, which was established in 2006 to sell Leeds’s legal expertise to a wider market.

Move over Nudge Unit - UK Government eye up ‘networks’ to influence public behaviour

THE buzzword for politicians in 2011 will be ‘network’, suggests the Telegraph, meaning an end to David Cameron's ‘nudge unit’ - the Cabinet Office's behavioural insight team. The unit was set up to look at how the public could be prompted into making more sensible decisions, boasting seven full-time staff and an annual budget of £520,000 according to the paper. However, economists are warning that ‘nudge’ is becoming increasingly complicated by how people and institutions are influenced by others around them, and interact with their networks. Are social networks now going to be ‘officially’ used to influence or monitor voters?