Archive for October, 2007

Byte Night breaks all records

October 15, 2007

Byte Night 2007This year’s Byte Night was the most successful yet with over £340,000 pounds raised by around 270 people from the IT industry sleeping out for the charity NCH.

We were in good company with Martin Linton, MP for Battersea, Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes, actresses Lindsey Coulson and Jenny Agutter, Trinny Woodall critiqued our pyjamas and Sian Lloyd provided a weather report on the evening.

As predicted by Sian, the weather was kind to us with no rain and a pretty mild night for October and the Compound Media team managed to raise more than £4,000 with a last minute surge in donations meaning we beat our target.

I want to say a big thank you to the team and to all our sponsors who gave so generously, we’re already planning how to raise even more next year…

Posted in Byte Night, Charity, Compound Media | Leave a Comment »

ZDNet wins “Best business website 2007″

October 4, 2007

AOP Awards Sometimes, when you are months into a big project with a long time still to go to launch, you wonder if it’s all worth it. Will anyone notice? Was that big idea we had really the right one? What if somebody launches before you and steals your thunder?

Were you were mad to even set out on a path in the first place?

I’m sure we all have those doubts and there were plenty of times in the development of the new ZDNet site that I questioned my sanity.

I say new but in fact it’s been nearly a year since we launched (it’s one year old on 30th October) and last night at the AOP Awards, the publishing industry voted ZDNet.co.uk “Best Business Website 2007″

The judges said: -

“This site has displayed a fantastic use of web 2.0 and is in tune with the user. Really revolutionary, with a thinking behind the site that is streets ahead of its peers”

Amazing really that a site conceived nearly two years ago should be praised for being ahead of it’s time even now. When we started out on the project, some of what we were doing was completely unproven and we had no idea if it would work.

Last night proves that we weren’t mad (well not much) and that we had a vision that has become the benchmark for other publishers. It’s nice to know that somebody noticed as well.

Posted in AOP, Social Media, Web 2.0, ZDNet | 1 Comment »