Is that a Jeroboam of champagne in your pocket or are you just pleased to see us?!!

Last night codegent scooped the FITC Award for Motion Graphics for our work with 40|30 at The Gherkin.

We beat off some really strong competition to win this award as we were short-listed with Coca-Cola and Warner Brothers so a huge congratulations to the codegent team for an amazing job – it makes me really proud!

Next up: the Webbys! You can help us put our trophy cabinet under further strain as there is also People’s Choice Award - you can cast your vote at http://pv.webbyawards.com. Our nomination section is Website » Ballot » Marketplace » Restaurant or click this link to go direct (you have to login first).

I'm off to iron my tux...

Wow! We are one of only a few UK based agencies to be included in this year's prestigious Webby Awards for our work on 40|30 at The Gherkin.

Hailed as the "Internet's highest honor" by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honouring excellence on the Internet.

"Nominees like Codegent are setting the standard for innovation and creativity on the Internet," said David-Michel Davies, executive director of the Webby Awards. "It is an incredible achievement to be selected among the best from the nearly 10,000 entries we received this year."

In a similar vein to our FITC Award nomination, we also eligible to win a Webby People's Voice Award, which is voted online by the global community. From now until 30 April, you can cast your vote at http://pv.webbyawards.com.

Our nomination section is Website » Ballot » Marketplace » Restaurant or click this link to go direct (you have to login first)

I can't believe it's the second time I am asking this in a month but if you could take a few minutes out to vote for us then I think you improve your chances of a place in Heaven ever so slightly :)

It's an amazing time for us right now and I cannot think of a better way to celebrate our 5th birthday on 1 May! We are so proud of the team that worked on this project.

We fly out to Toronto on Monday for the FITC awards...

Have you ever seen an ad on the tube and continued to think about it once you've got out of the station? What is it that is likely to make you carry on thinking about an advert? And are we more likely to retain the message if we've been exposed to it longer?

We've just created a small site with our client, CBS Outdoor to demonstrate the concept of "dwell time +" in advertising on London Underground.

The concept is that for the large 48 sheets on the Underground, the "dwell time", ie the time that spend looking at the ads whilst waiting for their train is such that people are able to get more engagement with the ad itself. This is an experiment to see if dwell time can be enhanced by giving people a thought-provoking question to consider.

The posters are around for 4 weeks, with an online response mechanism for people to react to what they have seen on the Underground.

www.timetoconsider.co.uk

Last night we had the pleasure of taking out some of our wonderful clients from Youth Music for a night of good old fashioned campness.

We have had the pleasure of working with Youth Music for over 4 years now working on some really exciting projects with them, most recently Music Is Power and Underage Festival a competition giving teenagers the opportunity to perform at the Underage Festival this summer.

So when we heard that Priscilla - Queen of the Desert, the cult Australian film had just opened at the Cambridge Theatre in London - it was too much of a good opportunity to miss. There is a small taster of the experience in the video above :)

It turned out that we were all slightly under dressed for the night!? But a great time was had by all and we ended the night with cocktails - just because it seemed the right thing to do!

A great night, perfectly summed up by Dulcie from Youth Music

"I've vowed to make sure I have more sequins and leopard skin in my life now"

I think we could all live by that motto - Mark?

The following email snippet was joyous music to our ears...

Congratulations!

You are one of the finalists for the FITC 2009 Awards!

Your project: 40|30, The Gherkin, 30 St Mary Axe
Has been nominated in the Category: Flash Motion Graphics

Our Awards show is on April 27th in Toronto and it will be during the show that the winners will be announced. So good luck!

To say we are a bit pleased would be an understatement. It's a great honour to be shortlisted at the awards for such a major flash event but we are up against some pretty stiff competition in Coca-Cola and Warner Bros. Fingers firmly crossed!

But you can help!

In addition to the formally judged categories there is a people's choice award - you could do us a massive favour and vote for us here. We will love you forever and ever if you do!

Last week we launched Vikki Chowney's offical blog to coincide with her work at the G20 conference. It was also a great excuse fo us to further hone the new framework we have been developing here at codegent for the past 2 years.

Built in ColdFusion, but in a Rails style, the framework enables our developers to build up a system where core functions that the majority of websites use can be called from a central code store. It means that when innovative new work is done on a project that knowledge can be gathered and added to an ever improving system.

To give you an example Vikki's blog includes these cool new features which we can now use in future projects as standard:

• An Ajax based comments system that dynamically pulls user images from Twitter or Gravatar with a neat way of quoting other user's comments and responding
• A spam filter integrated with the Akismet anti-spam service
• Enhanced Social Bookmarking
• A dynamic content tagging system that I genuinely believe is the most intuitive I have seen
• An online image cropping tool so CMS users no longer need any photoshop skills to crop, resize and optimise images for the web
• A rich media system where users can either upload their own video for encoding on the fly, self-record through their webcam or embed a clip from YouTube or Vimeo

And much, much more! Check it out - www.vikkichowney.com