Archive for May, 2009

Chocolate Delight

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Creme Eggs

Looking after our customers has always been a top priority for us and to say a big thank you for all our hard work, Steve, of Singleframe Media, sent us a treat to help us pile on the pounds.

He sent a whole box of Cadbury Cream Eggs to head office, which were all troughed within seconds by the hungry hordes at Dpi towers.

We were all over the moon when the box, complete with the note:

“Just a little thank you to all the guys for the hard work and the support over the past year! Kind Regards Steve Fairhurst Singleframe Media”,

Thanks Steve – not only did you help us fill our faces, the lads were so stuffed they couldn’t leave their desks to take their lunch break ;-)

Being-Digital ‘09 – June 9th, London

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Sun Startup Essentials

Being-Digital ‘09 – June 9th, London
www.being-digital.com

Being-Digital ‘09 is just under 4 weeks away on the 9th June at the CBI Centre, Centre Point, London.

There is a packed programme lined up with speakers, panel sessions, interviews, roundtables, and some of the most innovative early stage companies that will be demonstrating throughout the event. Its aim is to make it a highly valuable and enjoyable day for the 250+ executives, entrepreneurs & investors who will attend.

Contributors this year include: Simone Brummelhuis – thenextwomen.com, Rory Sutherland – Ogilvy One, Doug Richard – School for Startups, Justine Roberts – Mumsnet, Charles Cohen – Probability, and many more great people – please see the website for more details: www.being-digital.com

Also expecting around 40 innovative Demo Companies and for those seeking investment there will be an “Angels Den” in association with www.angelsden.co.uk where companies seeking early-stage funding will be pitching to active angel investors.

For registering through a partner, there are special discount prices available:

Demo Company discounted price of £295+VAT (down from £395). Packages include 2 tickets, main stage pitches, a dedicated space in our demo room for the full event, and a chance to pitch to Angels Den (limited places) – please contact team@mashupevent.com  quoting discount code SSE for more details.

Standard Delegate discounted price of £195+VAT (down from £245) accessible here:

Entrepreneur Delegate (limited amount only – for startups, sole traders and small businesses) discounted price of £95+VAT (down from £125) accessible here:

If you want more information and wish to see the full speaker lineup and testimonials from other companies please click here.

SuperMonday is on a Tuesday!

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

This month Culture Lab will be hosting Super Mondays, a strong and vibrant community of IT enthusiasts based in The North East of England who meet up once a month for a range of IT user group meetings and some unstructured discussions.

Register Now >

The event will start at 18:00 with tea and coffee and demonstration of several of the innovative technology projects including the ambient kitchen and surface computing.

At 19:00 we will then go upstairs where we will hear from the following speakers:

1.    Patrick Olivier – Cultural Technologies

Patrick will talk about the work of his lab at Newcastle University on cultural technologies and human-computer interaction.

2.    Jayne Wallace — Meaningful Technologies

Jayne is a post-doctoral researcher in the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University and has been developing her practice of digital jewellery design as a means of exploring how we can use digital technologies to create objects that can hold more significance and meaning for us than mobile phones and the usual gadgets. Jayne will talk about her methods, designs and how the space for digital technology design is much wider than we might at first think.

3.    Andrew Waite — Honeypotting with Nepenthes

Andrew has been running a Nepenthes honeypot for over 12 months. During this time has has collected over 800 unique varients of malware. Andrew will bring you through how he did this and more importantly why!

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS MONTHS EVENT IS BEING HELD ON A TUESDAY!

This months event has been sponsored by Northern Film and Media.

Software Review – CannyBill

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

By Rob Mason, robmason.org

About Rob Mason

By day Rob is a top eCommerce professional for the largest banking group in the UK. By night he builds standards compliant websites.

Sponge Project is a trading name for Rob Mason and is all about web design and email design with web standards and accessibility for Tewkesbury. Rob a firm believer that a quality website starts with the bits the user cannot see, which means he looks after the mechanics of the websites as well as the aesthetics.

Software Review – CannyBill

I don’t often do full reviews of kit I use, merely quick recommendations for the ones I like. However for CannyBill, I feel I need to make an exception. Made by Geordie’s (so made in the UK), this is one of the most user friendly and well tough-out billing systems I’ve seen. It’s been built with web designers in mind: Invoicing and billing software for businesses, web designers and ISPs. The key tenets of their design approach seem to have been simplicity and functionality.

Registration and setup

It has everything you’ll need and getting started is a breeze. The registration process is quick and easy, meaning you are up and running in a matter of minutes. The free package is perfect for a new startup, which is the version I currently use, giving you up to 5 active clients, to which you can send a maximum of 10 invoices. Additional licence types mean you can make the system grow with your client base and the cheapest is still a reasonable £9.99 per month, giving you unlimited invoices to 25 clients.

Setup is done off the back of registration and involves nothing more than entering your detailed business and preferred payment details. Simple customisation allows you to add a company logo to all invoices allowing that personal touch. Built-in templates are available as standard that give you some good initial flexibility for the admin pages, invoices and order forms, but can be extended either through downloading third party ones or making you own.

To be honest the almost unlimited flexibility of templates could put some people off and you could spend a very long time editing in order to design you very own billing experience – something I personally don’t feel the need to do. A logo will suffice for me, but knowing you could get down and dirty with the design is nice to know.

New customers and invoices

Client setup is a simple process of adding their details to the system. Invoices are equally easy – choosing payment terms, type of payment, VAT and login information for their client portal. The latter of these is a very powerful feature, meaning that your client can basically login to see their invoices and payment details at any point. It’s all secure and again carries through your template/design choices.

The only downside that I can see is the inability to add multiple contacts against a client. It assumes that you only ever have one person to deal with at a given company. Not a show-stopper, but the option to link to contacts under one company would be a useful feature.

Reporting

Not a feature I’ve used very much or need to at this stage, however if you have many clients and lots of active invoices each month the reporting system can provide a quick snapshot or detailed view of outstanding invoices, payments received, outstanding payments and suchlike.

Conclusions

Simple is the way I started and simple is the way I will finish. This is a very easy to use and simple system – but don’t let the simplicity fool you. It’s high grade, professional and more than capable of matching your business’s immediate and future needs. My advice – try CannyBill now.

Introducing Tradingeye v6 – E-commerce for Everyone

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Tradingeye v6

After almost a year of development, testing and refinement, the latest release of the standards-based online shopping cart system www.tradingeye.com is finally here, and available for purchase.

The reboot of the award-winning software brings many new user-requested features, such as language packs, an Ebay feed, a new zone-based postage system, many extra shipping promotions, and both Google and Yahoo XML site maps for search engine submissions.

http://www.tradingeye.com/feature-list.php

As well as a completely redesigned admin panel, this latest release of Tradingeye adds multiple image galleries, a reworked navigation system and a new one-page checkout process, allowing even easier online shopping for your customers.

Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, Managing Director at dpivision.com Ltd., the Newcastle upon Tyne-based software development team behind the product states “Version 6 offers a lot more than the highly-regarded version 5, and will appeal to a much wider market. We have built on the success of version 5 and added many more features to benefit not only retailers looking to get into e-commerce, but also web development companies.”

For more information of the software, check out the all-new www.tradingeye.com site, where you’ll find out all you need to know, including a full feature list, live online demo, and our revised pricing plans.