WebGL - see it in action! (one for the techies)

As keen and conscientious developers, we are always looking for new and more efficient ways of creating our sites. Cool and fun is a bonus. A while ago I briefly talked about WebGL and since I have had a bit of free time I thought it was time to revisit this.

To remind those who lack an eidetic memory / don’t read out blog and aren’t avid techies, WebGL is an attempt by the Khronos Group to develop a cross-platform API to bring the functionality of OpenGL to the web.

It is backed by browser manufacturers Mozilla, Opera, Google and Apple, albeit only in pre-release software thus far. It gets rid of the need for any additional plugins and allows hardware accelerated graphics rendering (where available, in theory software rendering is supported otherwise). Unfortunately, it does still rely on the presence of OpenGL on the target system. A more thorough list of the pros and cons of the WebGL can be found here.

Now, returning to my point (much rejoicing), I have been evaluating /experimenting with WebGL recently. Some time back, I did a lot of work with OpenGL using C++, and then C#, for which NeHe Productions was invaluable; indeed my research suggests it is still a heavily used resource and well worth checking out.

In spite of my super human ability to forget information almost immediately, I have still found myself comparing development with my previous experience. WebGL is an odd beast – it is a low level api, and has no fixed function support. This, combined with the relatively slow speed of JavaScript (the language used to invoke theWebGL functionality) has meant that a project must be approached in a very different way. Without getting too technical, in OpenGL, you would use the wide array of functions available to achieve what you set out to do (initially at least), whereas WebGL requires that you split out some of the calculations to be processed in parallel on the graphics card in the form of Shaders rather than using JavaScript.

This multifaceted coding approach is especially odd compared with Flash development, for which I tend to prefer to mix drawing on the stage (my artistic needs must be satisfied somehow!) with the application code. Like everything else, once you have the right mindset, it is relatively straightforward to create simple examples; indeed for anyone interested I would recommend http://learningwebgl.com/blog/as a good place to start. The lessons offered adhere broadly to those on NeHe, but help introduce the complexities inherent in WebGL development. To give you an idea of what is offered, below is a very simple demo built upon several of his tutorials that I created while first looking into the subject. It’s worth reiterating at this point that current browser releases won’t yet be able to display this – only those with pre-release builds need apply (if you are interested: http://nightly.mozilla.org/ is where I got my test one).

These complexities won’t make any difference to the user, though; indeed the lack of a plugin should eventually make the experience a smoother one overall. It will allow accelerated 2D and 3D graphics to be easily delivered in a cross-browser format without placing the onus on the user to download additional plugins or software beyond the browser itself.

That said, in addition to the previously linked cons, it is worth noting the lack of a proprietary, compiled format does mean that users who choose to can pick apart your WebGL app to see how it works – unless satisfied with JavaScript obfuscation, sites that are very concerned with the security of their proprietary code should maybe look at another solution. Ultimately though, the value of what your site offers should ideally mean more than the way you deliver it, so this shouldn’t dissuade people from considering WebGL when the spec reaches fruition (hopefully later this year).

This will ONLY work if you have a pre-release version of the new browsers. If you fancy have a go at our spinning cube game, download a pre-release version here. For those without the pre-release version of the browsers, there's also a screen capture of it below.

Click within the Cube box to make it work!




Nick Nawrattel
Head of Rich Media

Liverpool F.C. website reviewed in New Media Age's site review

Today's New Media Age (NMA) reviewed www.liverpoolfc.tv in its site inspection, awarding it a very respectable 76/100.

NMA's Anna Richardson reviewed the website, giving it a score of 20/25 for content, 17/25 for usability, 19/25 for branding and 20/25 for monetisation.

The site, which was developed in conjunction with Liverpool F.C.'s in-house development team has been a great success since launch breaking several previous records - you can read more about that in a previous blog post.

You can read the full site review on the NMA website, but you'll need to be a subscriber.

Bluhalo/GyroHSR is an NMA Top 100 Digital Agency

Another year and the results of the renowned NMA Top 100 Interactive Agencies report were revealed at another memorable event last night.

Bluhalo/GyroHSR came in as 19th in the top 100, ranking as the 11th largest digital marketing agency in the UK. The industry as a whole has grown by 10% on last year's figures, demonstrating that despite difficult economic times, the industry remains buoyant. The growth, likely to have been bolstered largely by reallocations of marketing budgets to digital marketing, thanks to its measurability and ability to accurately measure ROI, bucks the general economic trend of the country and pays testimony to the hard work committed by the agency sector.

You can read the results summary here, with the full table appearing in tomorrow's edition of New Media Age.

Jocelyn Kirby
Marketing & Business Development Manager
Twitter @JocelynKirby

Is Marketing Now Part of the Digital Agency World?

The web is now so much more than a marketing channel. In today's very digital world, it forms such a large part of an organisation's communications, that it really cannot be seen as something to be dealt with as a separate entity. Yet, rather surprisingly, many organisations still treat digital as a separate beast entirely.

I have lost count of the number of conversations I've had where the digital team and the marketing teams work independently of one-another, often seated in different parts of the building, or sometimes in a different building altogether! Yet, this seems crazy. When the digital world is now so much part of our everyday lives, are these organisations' marketing teams missing a trick?

The internet is where a large proportion of our social interactions take place, on sites such as Facebook and Twitter; it's where we often discuss, showcase or incubate our passions - think Flickr for photographers, Etsy for creative arts, online gaming - the list is endless; it's where we conduct our business networking on sites such as LinkedIn; it's where we learn about everything from industry advancements to how to bring up our children... you get the picture. Over the next couple of years we're going to find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between our on and offline lives.

So if all this happens online, why do many organisations still insist on having a separate digital team and marketing team? I think it can largely be attributed to the organic growth of digital, beginning as a niche channel, often viewed as a very techincal discipline (which to some extent it is) which required specialist digital knowledge. As the importance of digital grew, so did the digital team, separately from the marketing team.

Yet with the obvious prevalence of the online channels in today's marketing strategy, are marketers now doing enough to harness the power of the internet?

The importance of an integrated marketing strategy has been clear from the day we coined the phrase 'marketing'. Send out a consistent message through multiple channels and the overall benefits gained are more than single channels of communication executed independently. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We all know this. So what can marketers do to harness the true power of digital?

The first big step towards this is understanding that digital is no longer a separate discipline. Marketers should be versed in both on and offline marketing. If you have a big team, use specialists of course, but the over-arching view should be FULLY INTEGRATED. Yes, some campaigns may run offline only, and some may run online-only, but the overall view should be consistency across ALL channels. By investing in a campaign which hits the target audience at every possible touch point (and online there are many), the results could be astounding. It's just a shame that we don't see more of this.

Digital is not scary. It's amazing! It's a marketers dream - it's trackable down to the minutest detail, you can even track brand sentiment (that's another post entirely), ROI is easily calculable, your target audience can be engaged in two-way conversations, implementation and roll-out can be comparitively instant, multi-variant testing of campaigns can be done at the touch of a button. But possibly most importantly, the digital world is becoming increasingly entwined with our offline worlds - think iPhone apps like MapMyRun, Nike Plus, numerous augmented reality apps. As this merger continues, the importance of a multi-disciplined marketing team will become increasingly apparent. As will the importance of an integrated agency that really is an integrated agency. Bluhalo is lucky enough to be part of an integrated agency network - GyroHSR - where we work as a truly integrated team, harnessing the magic of digital and the power of offline media.

Jocelyn Kirby
Marketing & Business Development Manager
Twitter @JocelynKirby

Ford Releases Its Social Media Guidelines

Ford, often considered one of the more forward-thinking brands in social media has published its social media guidelines for staff, releasing bite-sized tips and pieces of information via Twitter and other social media properties.

Similarly to Coca Cola (more on that here), Ford has kept its guidelines simple and easy to understand, ensuring maximum buy-in from staff and demonstrating its commitment to the communication channel.

The guidelines key messages are based around honesty, clarity, awareness, respect and good judgement - they sound like a recipe for the perfect human being!

You can read the full explanation below:

Ford Social Media Guidelines

Jocelyn Kirby
Marketing & Business Development Manager

Bluhalo Joins .Net Awards Panel

The .net Awards celebrate the best in web design and development, and are brought to you by the world's best-selling magazine for web builders - .net. The 16 categories for 2010 range from Design Agency of the Year and Mobile Site of the Year through to Community site of the year.

Bluhalo's very own Dan Steele and Alastair MacMichael have been invited to join this year's prestigious judging panel, alongside the likes of some of the best-known names in the industry such as Google, Yahoo! and TweetDeck. You can view the impressive line-up by visiting the .net awards judges page. With this many industry experts reviewing entries, it is clear why a .net award is one of the most sought after in our industry, and you can certainly be sure that the winners are going to be well-deserving of the accolade!

The awards are currently at the public voting stage, so if you'd like to voice your opinions on the best of digital this year, you can vote now by visiting the .net awards voting page, public voting closes on 12th October.

Dan Steele, a developer at Bluhalo and previous contributor to .net magazine said "It was a great honour to be invited to be a judge in the awards, I can't wait to see the shortlist!"

Alastair MacMichael, Bluhalo's Managing Director, added "I'm really pleased to have been invited to join this year's panel, the current nominees are so interesting, I think the results of the public vote will be a close one with many nominees worthy of a place on the shortlist. I very much look forward to being involved in the judging process."

Final winners will be announced on 19th November.

Jocelyn Kirby
Marketing & Business Development Manager

Cassandra from Facebook- not just a pretty name!

Everyone has heard of MySQL and others of its ilk – chances are you talk about nothing else at family get-togethers. Like most database solutions, it is optimised predominantly for reading, the idea being you write your data infrequently but read often (the classic content managed website model). While this model can obviously still be used in the development of the plethora of multi-write social websites, giving as it does a nice balance of performance and ease of use, it isn’t necessarily the ideal solution.

One emerging alternative is an open source distributed database management system called Cassandra. Originally developed and open sourced by Facebook in 2008, Cassandra is a second generation NoSQL top-level Apache Software Foundation project. NoSQL, originally a relational database management system accessed via a Unix shell, is becoming an umbrella term for data storage solutions that don’t follow the traditional relational model. This broad term does mean that the various solutions don’t exactly match up, so what does Cassandra provide?

It is a cluster database providing a structured key-value store with eventual consistency, without any single points of failure (it has no central master). This means that it’s extremely fault tolerant – if any one of the identical nodes fails, another will take its place. As well as this high availability, it also provides write and read scaling – as more nodes are added, read and write throughput increase linearly without interruption.

This all sounds very good, but as with all web technologies, it is best employed carefully – these benefits come at the cost of many of the tools often associated with a traditional database. Nevertheless, when used in the right situation, it can offer a reliable and proven solution as demonstrated by Facebook, Digg, Twitter and others. A discussion of when to use Cassandra is available here.

Outside the project page (linked above), more information can be found here, with a discussion of various NoSQL solutions (including Cassandra) available here.

Nick Nawrattel, Lead Multimedia Developer (wearing his programming cap)

UK Sports Network Event

This Tuesday, the 10th of August sees a return of the UK Sports Networking evening at the Sports Bar And Grill at Marylebone station in London.

On 17th May I attended my first UKSN event. Going down to the basement things were quite literally hotting up. I was astounded by the number of people already chatting away to each other. All credit to the event's organiser, Daniel McLaren, who had persuaded 120 people to attend a relatively new event on a Monday night.

Daniel passed me a champagne bucket & suggested I collect the competition entries myself. Our VIP box at Tottenham Hotspur, (Bluhalo built their website) means I was lucky enough to have 2 tickets to offer the lucky winner on the night.

Going around the room, what a fantastic mix of people! I met someone about to sail around the world, someone with a virtual golf machine, a presenter from Sky Sports, corporates looking for sports sponsorship, fellow sports marketers, merchandisers, software providers, lawyers, the PA, the FA and a few familiar faces along the way.

I have high hopes for this Tuesday’s event where Bluhalo will be once again offering 2 VIP tickets to a Tottenham Hotspur match. If you work in sports I’d definitely recommend the event.

I will finish the post with some words from Daniel McLaren:
“The London Sports Networking event is becoming a firm fixture in the calendar now after our last one back in May attracted over 130 people on the night. This one promises to be even better with great attendees coming from all areas of the sports industry in London. Co-hosting the event with Lewis Howes from www.sportsnetworker.com gives us a fantastic reach with over 30,000 people in our combined groups not to mention websites, Facebook and Twitter! If you are free on Tuesday night and want to meet some great people then make sure you don’t miss out, come on over”

If you fancy coming along, you can buy tickets here.

Laura Hannan
Business Development Manager

Liverpool F.C. Smashes Web Records

July saw some huge successes for the Liverpool F.C. website, with fans from all over the world logging in to keep up with the latest news, which included a new manager and a new number 10.

By the close of the month, LiverpoolFC.tv had smashed all previous web records, welcoming more than 4m unique visitors to the site, who enjoyed more than 85m pages - what a July! Previous records hadn't even come close to this astounding performance, with past top performance levels for a single month at 65m pages views (in 2005) and 3.4m uniques (in 2009).

The site, which was designed and built by Bluhalo in partnership with Liverpool F.C.'s internal development team, is one of the most popular sports websites on the planet. The news article which reports this huge achievement also notes the importance of its fans in achieving this success; "Thanks to all of you who visited Liverpoolfc.tv during July for continuing to make the official website of LFC one of the most visited football sites on the internet."

Jocelyn Kirby
Marketing & Business Development Manager
Twitter @JocelynKirby

Bluhalo's Farnborough Airshow Event Roundup

Friday saw our bi-annual Airshow event take place, with some fantastic and very un-typically British sunny weather following a more traditional wet morning, which at one point did leave us slightly concerned about the afternoon's event and running to gather as many umbrellas as we could find!

We had a great turnout, with many clients, contacts, partners and suppliers arriving to enjoy the gorgeous weather, great company, delicious food and most importantly, the breathtaking flying displays of some of the world's most impressive planes.

My personal favourites were the Blades, defying gravity with some rather heartstopping aerial acrobatics; and of course the impressive Airbus, showing us that big, can also be agile - although I'm still not sure how it manages to land in Farnborough airport!

Our charity raffle in aid of Cancer Research UK added a bit of extra fun to the day and raised nearly £300 for the charity too - massive thanks to Sequel for donating a Guess watch and to our hosting partner DediPower for donating the Amazon voucher. Thanks also to everyone that came to share the day with us and who bought raffle tickets.

Many of our guests were also plane enthusiasts and keen photographers - there were some great shots captured by Andy Piper and Benjamin Ellis; and not at our event, but with shots as good as this, certainly worth a mention - a local photographer's record of the Airshow.

Alastair Macmichael becomes Bluhalo Agency Head

Following the recent departure of Bluhalo's Founder, Spencer Gallagher, Alastair Macmichael has taken over as managing director.

Alastair joined Bluhalo, GyroHSR’s pure-play digital agency, in May 2010 from 20:20 (formerly GraphicoDMG) where he headed up work with clients including Pepsi UK and its sub brands, London Eye and Britvic. During his eight years at the agency, he had responsibility for driving the agency’s digital strategy and most recently held the role of director of business development.

The appointment is designed to further enhance Bluhalo’s global footprint plans and support GyroHSR’s global offering. Founded 11 years ago, Bluhalo was recently named a top 10 digital marketing agency by New Media Age. In the UK some of its largest clients include Liverpool FC, Technicolor and Blackberry/RIM.

Commenting on the appointment, GyroHSR CEO, Richard Glasson said; “Alastair joins Bluhalo with a truly impressive pedigree in the digital world, and will further strengthen our expertise in this core discipline. Digital business accounts for over 40% of GyroHSR's world-wide revenues. It's an area that we continue to invest in, and in which we expect further strong growth. I'm delighted to welcome Al to the company”.

HTML 5 - the conversation continues

The web seems to be saturated with talk about HTML 5. Many people know what HTML 5 is – it’s the next big thing! It’s a new technology that does everything and destroys Adobe Flash! It makes computers run faster and does the tea run - a-mazing! Unfortunately, this isn’t all necessarily quite true (although I still have hopes the tea run can get sorted in a later revision of the spec).

There is no doubt that there is a lot of anticipation for what HTML 5 will bring, with Google, Microsoft and Apple all touting it as the way forward; however the term is being increasingly misused leading to it “becoming the next overloaded term” as Michael Mullany describes it here.

If one were to be pedantic about it, as our blog has touched on before, HTML 5 is simply a revision of the HTML spec. The core HTML 5 changes that will be user-visible include the canvas (allowing graphics to be rendered to the screen), audio and video tags. Under the hood, there are also a number of semantic additions and new mark-up to make html code cleaner, accessibility features, a drag and drop API, user-editable content and content caching directives.
It is also necessary to combine a number of other tools that fall within what some are calling the HTML 5 family in order to produce all of the demonstrations that have been emerging from proponents of the technology. Chief among these is CSS3, which is again not yet a completed specification (it is in fact a number of developing sub-specifications). As well as the expected improvements (like rounded corners, improved layout control, borders and backgrounds), CSS3 also includes a number of features such as 2D and 3D animations for boxed content; in fact a lot of what some people think is HTML 5 is actually CSS3.

Another technology that is instrumental in building up the HTML 5 family portfolio is Web Storage. As the name suggests, this basically offers both temporary and persistent local storage allowing for the development of sites that can continue to function even if connection is lost.

Other technologies that fall within the HTML 5 family include Geolocation (i.e. making the users location more accurately available by using WiFi towers and GPS to augment existing IP address detection), Web Workers (allowing the web site to become threaded to better allow the browser to schedule rendering while taking advantage of multi-core CPUs), and Web Sockets (allowing asynchronous client/server communication). More about these technologies can be found in Michael Mullany’s article linked to above.

Most of these specs are in various stages of development, meaning that features can be dropped as well as added before they are finalised (for example, a file upload progress component is currently on thin ice). In spite of this, there are web pages being built using the latest draft versions of the spec (links to which can be found here).

There are also a number of technical demos that are being released. One series of demonstrations recently released by Apple displaying what can be achieved via the HTML 5 suite of technologies can be found here.

As impressive as these demos are, some feel this is misleading the public with regards to the HTML 5 browser availability – upon attempting to view one of the Apple demonstrations, unless you are running Apple's own Safari 5, an error message is displayed stating the necessity of this browser. The reason this has been divisive is that rather than necessarily being a true indication of ability (or lack thereof) of your browser, it is something that is artificially enforced by the site simply by checking your browser agent.

Part of this may be due to the presence of vendor prefixes (browser specific versions of the implementation), meaning that this open standard is not yet truly open. However all is not lost - most recent browser releases support the HTML 5 family to varying degrees, as detailed here, or perhaps a bit more recently and simply here. As the specification is more firmly established, these vender specific implementations will disappear and the open implementation that is envisioned will emerge.

So with the use of javascript (or jQuery if you prefer) making far more sophisticated interaction possible, does this mean we no longer need Adobe Flash? While this may well change over time, right now Flash is still a useful way to get rich content to the many people who already have the plug-in installed – advanced effects or intricate interactive web apps are more easily constructed in Flash.

Also, some features such as multiple file uploads are just not yet available (hence Google's Gmail still relying on Flash for its file upload feature). Hulu, who recently released the US equivalent of the BBC’s iPlayer, opted to use Flash saying that HTML 5 was just not ready to meet their requirements (read more here).

Nevertheless, HTML 5 is a convenient shorthand for a very powerful and exciting family of technologies, and while it is not yet suitable for every project it is something we are all considering, and one for which we have high hopes!

Nick Nawrattel
Lead Multimedia Developer

More on Adobe & Apple...

On April 12th, rumours started circulating (eg IT World's article) that Adobe was considering legal action against Apple for opting to disallow cross-compiled applications. (My brief summary of that can be viewed [http://bluhalo.com/blog/view/292/cs5-apple-vs-adobe).

One might wonder on exactly what grounds such a lawsuit would be based. Indeed, it’s quite possible that Adobe’s lawyers wondered the same thing (assuming there was truth to the rumour in the first place) given that nothing has since emerged on this subject.

In fact all went quiet until Adobe announced (read the BBC article here) that they were going to cease development on the iPhone packager, with the company instead focusing on Android. In a move that came as a surprise to some (read the Register's Apple on Flash) Apple head honcho Steve Jobs subsequently released a document detailing his views on the subject (which can be read here). He lists a number of points ranging from the proprietary nature of flash, security, battery life and the speed with which the third party software would be updated as justification for his views. The result of this was a 2 percent drop in Adobe shares.

You could be forgiven for expecting a retaliatory response from Adobe; instead they announced (more at The Register) that they were working to implement new API calls available on Snow Leopard to hardware accelerate video in Flash. Given that fairly simple tests indicated that the lack of hardware acceleration was the only reason the video performance of flash fell below that of the HTML setup touted by Steve Jobs, this has the potential to reduce the belief that flash is a performance hog (for video anyway).

Hooray, Apple and Adobe are friends again. What could possibly go wrong now, right? Well, Apple is developing their own Flash alternative for providing Rich Internet Applications. The easily spelt Gianduia was first introduced last June, but is likely going to resurface at this year’s World of WebObjects Developer Conference. Gianduia was written in Javascript and has actually already been used by Apple Retail (read more here from Apple Insider).

It is still not plain sailing for Apple however. It has now emerged that the US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are “locked in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple’s new policy of requiring only Apple’s programming tools.” (read more at the NY Post)

This reiterates that Adobe were not the only ones unhappy with Apple’s decision. Indeed, the same article states some are now choosing to finance apps compatible with all of Apple’s competitors, rather than just the iProducts. Although Apple tend to be quite dogmatic in following their roadmap, I can’t help but wonder exactly how much public pressure it would take for them to change their minds…

Nick Nawrattel
Lead Multimedia Developer

Web Accessibility and Website Law

Websites started out as very simple text which was accessible to everyone, provided they had software to interpret the contents. In the last ten years, websites have altered dramatically to include movies, Flash and dynamic content, such that the job of the software reading the website has become a great deal more complex. The disabled could easily be overlooked in designing and building websites, however this would be an unwise decision since there are laws in many countries to protect them.

The UK Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 states: “It is unlawful for a provider of services to discriminate against a disabled person in refusing to provide, or deliberately not providing, to the disabled person any service which he provides, or is prepared to provide, to members of the public and also in failing to comply with any duty imposed on him by section 21 in circumstances in which the effect of that failure is to make it impossible or unreasonably difficult for the disabled person to make use of any such service”

And further the law states that rules apply in the following scenarios:
Access to and use of any place which members of the public are permitted to enter; access to and use of means of communication; access to and use of information services; facilities by way of banking or insurance or for grants, loans, credit or finance; facilities for entertainment, recreation or refreshment; the services of any profession or trade, or any local or other public authority.

Most websites fulfil at least one of the above conditions – whether it be buying an item or communicating to friends. Mostly though, lawsuits have been targeted at websites providing a public service; after all if one site doesn’t provide access, another will.

The basics behind making a site available to all haven’t changed all that much over the years, most importantly the developers and designers need to bear in mind the various disabilities there are and how they will be gaining access to the information available...

People with disabilities may for example want to increase font size, have their own styles or be unable to use an alternative to Flash or Shockwave. In each case, alternative content / functionality should be available so that no loss of user experience occurs. Testing the site by using focus groups is the ultimate check, and testing services are offered by charities including RNIB, AbilityNet and Shaw Trust.

Sources/Further reading:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2005/ukpga_20050013_en_1
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/resources/access/disabled.htm
http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/

Alex Rigg
Developer

Bluhalo's Spurs site gets NMA site of the week

We love working on the Spurs website (http://www.tottenhamhotspur.com/) - it's a great site, with a wealth of top quality content.

NMA landed on my desk this morning, and to my (and the Bluhalo team's) delight, the Spurs site has been awarded site of the week.

With an impressive 88/100, scoring 22/25 for content, 22/25 for usability, 21/25 for branding and 23/25 for monetisation, we're delighted, to say the least. A lot of dedication and passion went into the redesign of the latest version of the Spurs website and we're really pleased to see our expertise and efforts rewarded!

To view the full article, visit the NMA website.



Jocelyn Kirby
Marketing & Business Development Manager
@jocelynkirby

Space Exploration Network Launches New Website

Bluhalo is pleased to announce the launch of SEN.com, the website of the Space Exploration Network.

SEN is a space television news network whose purpose is to gather and distribute news and information on space. The website provides a central location for current news, features, content and space-related resources.

The website, designed and built by Bluhalo aims to engage a diverse audience and features latest news, SEN TV video area, a wiki, forums and a photo gallery – with focus placed on user engagement and user contributions to the wealth of highly focused and original content. The website aims to achieve 1 million users within the next 2 years.

The vision of SEN is to promote interest in space; raise awareness of the reality of humankind and Earth in the universe and through raising awareness provide a different perspective to human conduct and the government of life on this planet; educate and encourage consideration of the physics, economics, laws and government of space and to create a community in which people can learn, debate and share information about space.

Charles Black, Founder of SEN commented “Bluhalo have done a fantastic job creating an innovative site that is very contemporary in terms of both design and technology. The site encompasses a range of leading technologies for video, pictures and user generated content. Bluhalo have also developed a highly effective Content Management System that enables SEN to manage the site content and subscriptions. I am already discussing future developments for the site for phase 2 of SEN's business plan which will include e-commerce capability for online subscriptions. We are looking forward to continuing our relationship with the Bluhalo team.”

Paul Windust, Project Manager at Bluhalo for the SEN project added “Charles Black has a passion and knowledge of space that is impressive and contagious. Working on this site has been a pleasure for the whole team and we’ll enjoy watching it grow and be proud that we had a hand in this exciting project.”

Jocelyn Kirby
Marketing & Business Development Manager
Twitter @JocelynKirby

Bluhalo Selects DediPower Managed Hosting

PRESS RELEASE: Bluhalo Selects DediPower Managed Hosting to Create its Own Private Cloud

Reading, UK – 28 January, 2010: Bluhalo, one of the UK’s top 10 digital marketing agencies, has chosen DediPower’s managed hosting solution to create a private cloud, spanning USA to Europe, capable of delivering greater capacity, performance and availability at a lower cost; across its entire portfolio of high-profile websites including BlackBerry, Liverpool F.C., Sky, Sony and NFL UK.

The new solution will also help shape Bluhalo’s go to market strategy. According to Managing Director, Spencer Gallagher, “The private cloud strengthens our market position by making our services more agile, efficient and scaleable. This enables us to continue to target even higher-traffic clients with richer-featured sites at highly competitive costs, allowing us to expand our business into new strategic areas.”

Bluhalo specified DediPower’s leading edge virtualisation solution following an extensive review of its existing managed multi-server hosting system; which was proving increasingly inflexible and expensive to run. With its more powerful, responsive, and efficient platform, DediPower has already helped the company boost capacity and achieve significant cost savings.

Simon Green, Head of IT at Bluhalo comments, “DediPower not only provides access to the large scale, high performance servers required to deliver our private cloud but also the customer support and operational flexibility that is central to our requirement. DediPower’s response and delivery is excellent – they react quickly to requests and handle system changes without lengthy processes. Consequently, sites can go-live at very short notice, which is vital for many of our projects.”

He adds, “Scaleability is also crucial for our business. While all sites experience demand peaks and troughs traffic on our broadcast, consumer brand and sporting sites can go through the ceiling, particularly during specific promotions or events. In the past, we had to set-up additional server capacity to accommodate these fluctuations, which incurred even higher costs. With DediPower’s virtualisation solution, our sites use our private cloud to access dedicated capacity on demand, instantly - no matter how large their requirement is. This alone represents tremendous cost savings for our business.”

As the UK’s leading developer of sites for sporting organisations, Bluhalo builds digital presence around some of the country’s most popular sports events. Prime football sites have been among the first to feedback on DediPower’s improved hosting performance. Tottenham Hotspur, for example, can now handle four times as much traffic as it did before, while NFL UK, which, at times, struggled to cope with web demand during matches, can now accommodate peak traffic easily.

Craig Martin, CEO DediPower Managed Hosting states, “We are delighted to help Bluhalo reduce its operational costs and experience a better service for themselves and their customers. Bluhalo is perfect for virtualised managed hosting – they are unusually good at what they do and demonstrate exceptional technical as well as creative innovation. They run tidy and efficient applications that utilise cloud clusters to best effect; this has allowed our platform to deliver optimum performance at a fraction of the cost of their previous system.”

DediPower prides itself on delivering support with passion. It offers one of the best service level agreements in the industry today. This is crucial when it comes to implementing an entirely new hosting platform.

Green concludes, “With DediPower, the transition has been very smooth. They have pulled out all the stops to make it seamless for our clients who have effectively benefitted from a system upgrade at no extra cost. We look forward to exploring new opportunities – such as integrating other IT functions into the hosting platform - as our relationship continues to evolve. "

To find out more about DediPower, visit www.dedipower.com.

Meet Bluhalo's Twitterers

Ok, so Twitter's popularity continues to grow, with user numbers still growing at an impressive rate, and unlike much of the digital social landscape, not fuelled by the youth of the world.

A great source of information, news, research and a great way to network and keep in touch in your professional as well as personal life, Twitter certainly seems to have it all.

So would you like to meet a few of Bluhalo's Twitterers?

@Bluhalo

Had to have a mention really! Includes useful retweets and updates of the latest news, views and information from Bluhalo.

@spg4

Bluhalo's Founder and MD. Spencer tweets about everything digital, with great insight into the future of digital.

@vimal78

Bluhalo's Business Development Director. Vim tweets include a combination of the latest tech info, digital trends and the comings and goings of the agency.

@jocelynkirby

Bluhalo's Marketing Manager, Jocelyn's tweets cover the latest digital marketing news, views and research as well as the latest happenings from the Bluhalo team.

@kunji

One of Bluhalo's longest serving employees, Kunji tweets on the latest of the web. If you want to find out about the hottest new sites online, Kunji is the one to follow.

@pete_white

A member of Bluhalo's digital creative team, if something creative is worth seeing, Pete will be tweeting about it.

So there you have it, an intro to Bluhalo's dedicated twitterers. We are of course (almost) all on Twitter here at Bluhalo, but those mentioned above are the key contributors to Bluhalo's Twittering. Enjoy the show!

Truly Global Domain Names - a long overdue revolution

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers have finally deemed it appropriate for Russian, Chinese, Arabic and other, non ASCII languages to use domain names represented by local language characters. To put it simply, Latin based characters will no longer be essential in making up domain names.

Currently, more than 50 percent of the current total of 1.6 billion Internet users speak languages that aren't Latin-based, according to widely used estimates.

I know that I would have been incredibly disgruntled had it been necessary for me to use Chinese language domain names whilst surfing the web for the years since it’s birth up until now, so I imagine that for these millions of users, this is an incredibly important and long overdue movement.

Tina Dam, ICANN’s Senior Director of Internationalized domain names, heralds the movement as “the biggest technical change to the Internet’s addressing system – the Domain Name System – in many years.”

Having undergone many revisions, the final proposed implementation plan for the Fast Tracking process has been published and is due to commence today ( November 16th ). The Fast Track process has been introduced as a mechanism to introduce a limited number of non-contentious internationalized country-code top level domain names. These sites would include sites such as governmental and territory administration sites.

I look forward to seeing how the implementation plans unfold!!

Anya Gooch
Account Director

The Digital Cream Floats to the Top

I was lucky enough to be invited to judge some creative awards the other day – not just for digital, but for all channels – TV, radio, DM, SP, POS/instore and digital. Having worked in most of these at one time or another, it was good to see some other media than digital again. Good, but a little underwhelming.

Some of the work in other channels was good, most of it was ok, and some of it wasn’t so great. But it was in digital that the work really sang. All the judges agreed that digital was the most hotly contested category, by a long way.

I remember reading in one of the trade press magazines in 2006 that digital accounted for just 5% of most companies’ marketing spend. Judging by the production values of some of the entries, either marketing budgets must be massive these days or marketing directors have been persuaded to part with more cash in return for some truly excellent and engaging brand experiences.

Ewan Gee
Creative Director