codegent

It hardly seems any time at all since we were toasting our third birthday but another year has past.

Business folklore suggests that 3 solvent years proves you have a viable model and a market for what you do. Beyond that its all about what impact you make on your industry.

With that in mind, our objectives over the last year were to continue to strengthen the team with some senior hires, build our own brand and work with ambitious clients who want to push the boundaries in their online campaigns. It is all part of our ultimate ambition to become an aspirational agency.

It's a tough goal and we will keep on working towards that but picking up quality hires like Matt (creative director), Jenny (project manager) and Aidan (web dev guru) to name a few, add a lot to our constantly improving team. Clients such as the V&A, Skechers, O2, BBC, CBS Outdoor and Cartoon Network certainly help the portfolio section stand out as well. Sadly we can't even mention a few of our other biggies :(

Codegent also seems to be getting loads of press which has been a fantastic boost to HR and new biz. It's funny as I don't think any of us are exactly PR darlings, but long may it continue!

So anyway, an enormous thank you must go out to all of our great clients, friends in the industry (Susie at NMA - you're a star!) and of course, our wonderful staff.

Better get back to work now, we have even bigger plans for year 5 :)

Boomerang (part of the Cartoon Network) asked us to create a site to promote the new series of two of their children's TV shows: 'My Spy Family' and 'Life with Derek'.

In response Codegent designed and built Ask the Cast (www.askthecast.co.uk). The idea was to get children to engage with the characters by allowing them to upload videos of themselves posing questions to the characters in the shows.

Using our FilePipes system, which allows users to easily upload videos either from a webcam or from their phones or videocam and then encodes to flash on the fly, children can record themsleves asking the question and submit it to the site.

Codegent has a wealth of experience working with user-generated content and young people. For Boomerang, we introduced a parental consent stage to uploading the video. Users can rate videos but cannot write comments.

The site has only just been launched and video questions are appearing on the site as they are approved by the Boomerang team.  Once the best questions have been answered, the TV characters will answer them online and on the TV shows.

This is a great example of online and broadcast content working together to create a fun and engaging experience for the audience.

YouGov and Centaur have produced a survey which shows the lack of confidence in the government's ability to legislate in the digital space.

Local government too, the survey suggested, is falling further behind in the area of e-government than central government. But is this particularly surprising?

Our industry is changing so quickly and it will always be hard for someone within government (especially local government) to be at the cutting edge of the newest developments. Which makes it all the more curious when we get invitations from Wandsworth Council (even though we pay Council Tax to Lambeth) to various business seminars that are designed to help entrepreneurs.

Not saying we couldn't do with a bit of advice now and again, but I wonder what the neighbouring council's civil servants believe they can teach us about our business. It would be interesting to know how many of them have actually run their own business. To be fair, I haven't ever been to one of their seminars so I can't judge.

What I think would be more useful for government is to not treat fledgling businesses like adults from the day they are born. When we started we had nothing: no grant, no investment, no bank loan, not even an overdraft. If these things were easily available from the government we didn't know about it. We had to raise the money to get us going ourselves and live off whatever we made after that. It was hard work and enormously rewarding at the same time. But every year we have operated, the biggest single earner in our company has been the government. Each year we have paid more in corporation tax than we paid to our highest paid employee.

When you know how every pound that you have earnt has been sweated over, it seems harsh to face the end of the year with a financial penalty from HM Revenue for your success. Now we're a bit older and wiser, we can take a bit of taxation on the chin, but in our early days it would have helped us grow faster and with more certainty if they'd cut us a bit of slack.

Given the choice of paying local authorities to teach us about being entrepreneurs or holding onto a little bit more of our tax in the early days, I know which one would have been more useful to us.

We recently re-launched Meet the Author's interview site as Authors' Lounge TV.

The site had been around for about 5 months and had built up a decent following from the blogosphere. It made sense as fans are quite likely to write about exclusive video interviews of their favourite authors.

With bloggers in mind we introduced a few cool social bookmarking and embedding tools to help syndicate the content around the web, as well as overhauling the look and feel so it felt more like an Internet Television Channel.

In the two months since re-launch the traffic has tripled on average and the number one source of referrals are indeed blogs, with natural listings on Google a close second. Well you have to chuck in a bit of SEO haven't you?

Most of the industry are predicting a breakout year for the mobile web in 2008.

For a long time, the mobile web has been unpredictable, costly and low on user take-up. The majority of campaigns I have previously worked on with any serious mobile element have just scraped the surface, tapping into popular SMS and MMS services.

So what is encouraging us to use our mobiles online?

Apple's iPhone, released in late 2007, has made mobiles very sexy again.

If you haven't heard of it (welcome back to Earth, the wall is down and the cold war is over) the iPhone is a revolutionary device that unites your calls, contacts, email, music, camera, web browser etc in a dynamic, touch-screen, curvy-edged box.... and regular people are using it in droves!

For many reasons it would be wrong to confuse the iPhone with most mobile devices, especially if you are considering building a mobile site, but it has finally united the idea of phone and web working together properly.

It's not just the technology that has pushed us. Major websites, search engines and social networks such as YouTube, Flickr and Facebook have placed mobile services at their core, tempting unsuspecting users into an ever-connected virtual world.

Location Based Services

We have been using Google Maps and Sat-Navs for a while. It makes perfect sense to be applying all this thinking to your mobile. Needless to say the iPhone already does a lot but what about the rest?

In 2007 Nokia acquired a mobile advertising firm and a leading navigation system company. It isn't hard to see where they see things going. The benefit to marketers is easily delivered, relevant, geographically contextual content to end users.

Open Platforms for Applications

It's not all about browsing! 2007 really brought home the possibility of the web app, widget, mashup etc. Vista followed the Mac's lead and introduced desktop feeds for your local weather, football scores, status updates (the list goes on forever) and we all became RSS junkies. Adobe launched AIR and iGoogle followed suit so even your default homepage can tell you everything about anything you want.

But what about the mobile phone? Geeks have been hacking the operating systems on their phones for years but there have been no open standards available for developers to really use the core features of a physical handset. Until now!

The Open Handset Alliance Project launched Android, an open, free mobile platform which is being supported by some heavy companies such as Google, Motorola, LG, Samsung and T-Mobile to name a few. Expect that to be supported as standard in most future handsets.

Apple decided to open up the iPhone Developer SDK last week so we can look to develop intelligent bespoke apps that can fully interact with the handset soon!

Mobile Web Standards

There has been a degree of convergence in web standards for mobile. XHTML-MP has become the default industry-supported language for the mobile web. Page load and the multitude of various screen sizes still need to be taken into account when designing but at least the code is behaving itself!

Codegent Mobile

So we thought after all that talking we should show you something. We have built a simple version of our own site for your viewing pleasure.
www.codegent.com/mobile/

Or you can navigate to it using your mobile barcode scanner on the funky looking graphic below. You will see these dotted around everywhere soon. The Japanese have been using them on outdoor advertising, business cards, print ads etc. for years. But don't feel too left behind, they also have robotic dogs that clean their flats whilst they micro-sleep :)

Geek out.

The codegent team have been bouncing off the walls the last 2 days thanks to a sugar infusion of very tasty cupcakes, courtesy of our new hosting friends at ultraspeed.

The way to a man's heart is through his stomach and not through cold-calling. Rackspace et al... take note! :)

When it comes to opinions, we've got plenty! And none so more than our creative director,  Mr. Matthew Jukes :)

Today New Media Age have published his diatribe sorry, whitepaper, on the declining numbers of facebook and the future of the social web. It's a genuinely interesting read and will certainly get you thinking, you can download it here.

We're pleased to have won some work with the V&A. More details to come, but we're going to be using some funky technology to provide an interactive feature that we haven't seen anyone else do yet. Exciting stuff!

Watch this space....

We have recently launched The Nutrition Program, a new website to help people understand more about what they’re eating and how nutritionally balanced it is. You can create and save recipes and diets as well as generate graphs to show detailed nutritional analysis.

To build this we used an up and coming technology called Flex, which is basically Flash with a heavy data requirement. And it looks pretty as well!

Using Flex our developers can build more functional Flash applications, including lots of data and math, without excessive coding lead times. This means the app can look slick like a Flash site, be highly interactive, easy to use and can also perform complex data analysis and comparison.

As testament to this wonderful technology, and our wonderful new site ;) we have been featured on Flex.org, which showcases new and interesting Flex sites. Check us out at - http://flex.org/showcase/

One of our clients, Cat Le-Huy, otherwise known as "Diz" has been arrested in Dubai for allegedly smuggling drugs. In reality, he claims that all he had were legal sleeping tablets that can be bought over the counter.

We've known Cat, who is head of technology at Endemol, since we started working with them on a variety of projects about 2 years. Cat is a great guy, very very smart and respected by the techie dudes within Codegent. It's a total outrage that he is still being incarcerated whilst it appears there is no evidence of any laws that have been broken.

This seems really surreal until you delve a bit deeper and see the ridiculous reasons they have given for holding foreigners in prison in Dubai. One guy was sentenced to 4 years because they found poppy seeds on his clothing which had fallen off a bread roll he had eaten at Heathrow Airport. Another had 0.003g of cannabis stuck on his shoe - according to an item on the BBC website.

Codegent regularly flies people to Asia, and Dubai is a common stop-over point. We can't risk any of our guys getting caught up in this nonsense so any flights that land in that country are now strictly off limits for us.

To find out more, visit the Free Diz website

To add your support, join the Free Diz Facebook Group