We specialise in dynamic websites, online stores and E-newsletters.

We’ve just launched toughquestions.org for Bob Eckhard, and london language learning for Stefan Anstis - two smaller sized projects to keep our eye in - it was quite a joy to build some static simple web sites (laced with Google Analytics and some basic Search Engine Optimisation) for a change - Stefan’s design was provided by up-and-coming musician and designer Bobby Cole at catch22media. There’s been a lot more going on than meets the eye but most of the other projects are in-house or not ready for publishing yet.

It was very refreshing to hear the death knell of the brand last night at Iain Curruthers’ book launch, Great Brand Stories: Dyson. Iain had chosen his venue wisely - we were surrounded by the creative output of the psychotherapeutic department at the Regents Park Conference Center - and there were a pleasing number of people from Dyson’s team present for Iain’s independent investigation of their brand.

His talk, and ideas seemed more appropriate to stimulate a lively discussion rather than a book launch and I was itching to discuss his ideas further, although unfortunately we weren’t given the opportunity. It just felt so honest and refreshing to hear and read that despite the marketeers James Dyson remained true to his cause and his ethos. He wanted to know how things worked and wanted his marketing efforts to reflect this and not some vacuous marketing ‘position’. Iain rounded things off by asking ‘When someone spends two hundred pounds on a Dyson how much of that are they paying for the Dyson and how much are they happy to pay for the story of the great British inventor.’

Well according to the Dyson marketeers in the room the Americans are lapping up the concept of the latter. Although apparently Mr Dyson is resisting their attempts to make him wear glasses and a white coat. You can buy the book here from Amazon and read all about the final throws of brand at Iain’s new web site www.encounterbusiness.com. It’s another fully content managed web site built by Asymmetry, this time based on the fabulous wordpress blogging platform.

After the book launch it was off to Unique Digital’s pub, yes that’s right, Unique’s management team own a pub! I must thank the Unique management team for collecting all the faces new and old together at The Albion for a great party.

The internet doesn’t need much more of an explanation than this really:

Some call it web 2.0 but it’s more than that. The proof’s in the pudding.. went to www.clagnut.com (ex-colleague’s site) -> saw eleganthack.com link -> followed it -> saw this video from Kansas summarising what we (all) do online and what the web really is about -> opened up our blogging software (wordpress) -> copied the code from youtube.com into this site -> wrote this -> 5 minutes -> no techie knowledge required.

It took me back to when I was giving a training course at Multimap on XML to some of the client services team. I asked the question what happens when web pages are written in XML that any machine, program or person can interact with.. it was a rhetorical question, not any more: we’re nearly there.