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It’s been a busy and productive Autumn at Global Beach. We have had several good new business wins including some really interesting customer experience consultancy for Canon, a new global redesign and content management system for a British company called Pacific Direct and a design consultancy piece of work for a pureplay online PR business called PressLoft.
The recruitment of an experienced new Project Manager and a Business Development Manager has allowed me to concentrate on delivering the numbers we had forecast for the year and with our year end coming up in January we are looking to be slightly ahead of forecast which we can all be proud of.
I delivered our vision for 2010 at the last Board meeting which was received well. We will continue to concentrate on the areas that have been our core competencies this year, business planning & analytics, great creative and technical competence of which more later…
speakTECH inc and Global Beach Group (UK) announce a strategic alliance to provide end-2-end digital marketing, eCRM, and design and build web services. Having worked closely together over the past 12 months, Global Beach will merge their Irvine based team into speakTECH’s Orange County Office with immediate effect to provide a fully integrated range of digital services to speakTECH’s growing client base.
Aaron Sloman, President and CEO of speakTECH said he was excited to continue speakTECH’s Creative and Digital Agency Services expansion, “I am excited about the prospect of bringing in-house some very capable people who’s expertise and experience will be extremely valuable to speakTECH’s clients”.
Global Beach Inc Managing Partner, Matt Passey will take on a senior management role within speakTECH and will lead a number of their key client accounts.
Clive Jackson, Founder and CEO of Global Beach Group commented “this is the right move for Matt and the team, he is an extremely capable guy and I am grateful for his diligent and professional management of our US business over the past 7 years. I know he will enjoy working with Aaron and wish them all the very best “.
Just a quick post from the train using my newly configured Sony Vaio P (the tiny Sony netbook) running Windows 7.
Peter bought this earlier in the year but didn’t get on with it because it was just too slow to do anything useful on. He’s now upgraded to a macbook air (it’s a hard at the top isn’t it!) so I thought I’d have a play around with this.
The initial idea was to stick Ubuntu on it as a few others have done and after some messing about with USB keys (this thing’s got no optical drive) we configured a PXE boot server and got it to boot from the network and install Ubuntu – result!
Well, more of a no score draw really… Initially the display doesn’t run at the almost impossible to see 1600 x 768 so you have to do some play\ing around as detailed by Richard Walker on his blog. Once that’s all up and running it’s ok but the display is painfully slow and video’s are just unwatchable. Not so much of a problem in itself but combined with the fact that suspend/resume and the HSPDA/GPRS modem don’t play ball meant that Ubuntu was for the bin.
I was tempted to try OS X but apart from the fact it’s not legal, I suspect lots of pain and a result which is no better than Ubuntu (and probably worse).
So, back to Windows it was. A word of warning here: Do not suspend the machine halfway through the ‘recovery’ process! Obvious really, but after waiting 2 hours for it to complete I wanted to go home! The result was a machine that booted into Vista, displayed a message that system configuration couldn’t complete and then restarted. Booting to safe mode didn’t solve the problem either.
Anyway, to cut a long story shorter, some more playing around with PXE and the WAIK resulted in a network boot server that wouldn’t quite install Windows and a 4GB USB key that wouldn’t format anymore (sorry Peter). Trying to make a bootable USB key with the Win 7 ISO should be easy but for some reason it just wasn’t.
Then on Wednesday there appeared on my desk something that looked like it had been made in a shed 10 years ago from components bought in Maplin. In actual fact it was an external USB optical drive, dusted off from the ‘archive’ of our CTO. 2 minutes later and I’m installing Windows 7 and we’re cooking with gas.
Well almost. You have to do a fair amount of hacking around to get everything to work as detailed in this great windows 7 install guide and I had to download a different WAN card driver from option but so far so good. I’ve got a vodafone SIM in the slot and it all ‘just works’.
It’s not rocket fast but it’s still a pretty impressive device, I’m now on the tube and literally put it in my pocket for the walk between the mainline and the underground, it’s that small. If only Apple would make something similar my life would be complete!
Next stop, install some real software, configure my Macbook for VNC so I can leave it in the office and remote into it from this, oh and swap the hard drive for an SSD – that should speed things up a bit.
As summer school holidays are approaching, May bank holidays have come and gone and with the amount of “out of office – on holiday” emails I am getting you would expect things to slow down a little over Summer. Unfortunately (well fortunately) – which ever way you look at it, not here at Global Beach.
In the last week we have launched 2 new websites and 1 new application for one of our most active clients Terrence Higgins Trust.
THIVK (www.thinkHIV.co.uk) – Our new website for gay men which busts a few myths and points out some solutions for HIV and testing. Including a full clinic finder offering the facility to narrow results dependent on your needs.
Mambo (www.mambo.org.uk)- Mambo has been developed by THT, it’s the healthier lifestyle magazine for Africans. Global Beach has helped to move the Mambo community online – our new website with blogs, sexual health information, and Aunty Fola. And soon to be added a Professionals area designed to help professionals who work with African communities.
Online Counseling (http://www.tht.org.uk/howwecanhelpyou/needhelpnow/onlinecounselling/) – Initially funded for a pilot period by the Department of Health for gay and bi-sexual men, online counselling service is now open to everyone. It gives you the chance to explore whatever is concerning you, from relationships problems to your sex life. The counselling takes place in a number of ways through email and instant messaging (chat).
I am quite excited about just how much we have got going on with all our clients… but on the flip side I reckon I will be more than ready for my holiday at the end of August!
The worst bit. Waiting for a decision. As my wife said to me this morning it is like asking someone out. All that nervous anticipation with a touch of dread.
I feel we did a good pitch and managed to get a sense of us across well. We all came out liking them a lot and wanting to work with them. If I could cross my toes I would!
Apparently I, like Web 2.0, am old school and past it. So say my designers. Apparently we should now be talking about the coming internet.
Really? I thought it was about using the best tools for any job. Whether these happen to be a Blog that allows a company or individual to express opinions, a website to sell or tell people something, a forum that allows people to interact or some careful pre-planning that allows a site and it’s content to be found easily by search engines is not important. What is important is using the right combination of tools for the job. Intelligent Interaction.
And while I’m ranting let’s not forget children (designers) that Social Media isn’t a new phenomenon. Oh no. Interactive forums have been around for years. Facebook etc. just put a pretty face on them.
Check out our Triumph Pitch site if you don’t believe me and take some time to browse the many forums. Old school. Yes please…
We didn’t get the pitch for the Youth Trust we were going for last week which was pretty gutting for the whole team as it was a lovely project and we’d done some really great work. The client handled it really well and said it was one of those horrible calls where she only had positive things to say, which she knew wasn’t any consolation.
Hey we made it down to the last two from six and it was really close. Well done team and we will learn lessons for our next one.
As you may have read I am in the process of finalising the new business plan and vision for the agency. The Chairman sent me a clipping with a quote from the Bentley Chairman over the weekend. It read “We have to deliver what our customers are looking for and not create technologies which are then searching for customers that want them”. Not a bad mission statement for all of us…
I have been head down on a new project for Bentley which we are presenting today. And like the last time I added a post on here what a beautiful sunny day for a presentation in the countryside!
As well as this I have been working on our new business plan and more recently our mission statement. I have had a habit of using that old movie line ‘if you build it they will come’ in many of my internet ramblings over the years and I tried it again yesterday only to have Stuart rightly cross it out.
The world has, of course, moved on since I last ran an agency. It is now much more about developing an idea and then working within all of the different channels where people will interact with that idea. Viral, social, online, mobile etc. I am slowly starting to distil this into a mission statement we can be proud of and hang our virtual hats on.
So without further ado, a first airing…
Intelligent Interaction
We help our clients manage their brands in a digital world
Consumers now have many ways of interacting with a brand. Knowing how to retain an influence over this interaction is where we come in…
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