Archive for the ‘Compound Media’ Category

Byte Night a great success

October 6, 2008

This years Byte Night was certainly the biggest and early indications are that it will be the most successful yet raising even more than last year’s £400K total. It was also the coldest I can remember with the temperature down to 2 degrees so everyone earned their sponsorship money although it did stay dry for the night.

Once the photographs start coming through I’ll be posting proof that we were all there, in the meantime, here’s what early morning in central London looks like to Byte Nighters.

It’s not too late to donate even though the event is over so if you’re still interested in boosting the total further then simply click through to the Compound Media justgiving page.

Posted in Byte Night, Charity, Compound Media | No Comments »

Byte Night 2008, bigger and better than ever

September 19, 2008

It’s that time of year again and October 3rd will see over 500 people sleeping out in locations around the country in aid of Byte Night. The largest event will be in London where we’ll once again be camping on the Mayor’s lawn on the banks of the Thames. This year, the Byte Night Local concept has spread to Reading, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Manchester where local teams will also be braving the elements.

It’s the IT industry coming together to help combat youth homelessness and we’re once again proud to be the largest single fundraising event for Action for Children who recently re-branded from NCH.

It’s still not too late to join us if you want to take part in a great evening, alternatively, you could just sponsor me to be cold and wet for one night of the year.

Posted in Byte Night, Charity, Compound Media | No Comments »

Your family nominated for AOP Award

September 10, 2008

Hot on the heels of our gong for “Best Landing Page” at the APA Creative Awards, the Your family site has been nominated for an AOP award in the category of “Best launch”.

Great to be recognised at the digital awards, the one everyone wants to win.  We’re up against some prestigious competition in The Guardian, IPC, Channel 4 and Hearst digital but who knows after last years victory for ZDNet?

Whatever the outcome, it’s always a great night out and a chance to catch up with all the gossip in the on-line publishing world.

Posted in AOP, Compound Media | No Comments »

Your family site wins first award

July 9, 2008

APA logo

Well, how surprised were we last night when at the APA Creative Awards, the new Your family site beat the likes of Tesco and BA to the “Best landing page” award?

Very! that;s how…

Only a few weeks after launching the site, we’ve already won our first award which is great news and bodes well for the future.

The Redwood team were all very excited and much champagne was consumed with the added bonus that the NSPCC team were in attendance too to see the victory. The party went on until late and it’s fair to say that the office is quite subdued today although everyone is admiring the nice shiny trophy.

Posted in Charity, Compound Media | No Comments »

New “Your Family” site live

July 3, 2008

Today we signed off the final bugs on our biggest project to date, launching a new parenting advice site for the NSPCC to supplement their “Your Family” magazine. It’s been a labour of love for sure (see my silicon.com column) and over a year in gestation but it’s live and working and looking great.

It’s a really clever mix of “Heat” styling but full of very high quality parenting advice all backed up by a team of experts at NSPCC. It’s a crowded market but the high level of trust endowed by the NSPCC brand should see us carve out a niche in the sector. We’ve got articles, videos, product reviews and loads of suggestions for family days out now that the summer is here.

Needless to say there are a large number of people to say thanks to for making my fist major site build a success. All the editorial and account management team at Redwood who write the content, NSPCC for the opportunity to do the project and the guys at Squiz who built the site on their open source MySource Matrix CMS.

In building the site we’ve invested heavily in the platform and hosting so that now we’re able to provide a fully hosted, enterprise level CMS. This is ideal for smaller publishers who want to get on-line without the expense of software licensing and hardware purchase. Look out for a further announcement about the launch of the “Compound Enterprise Platform” soon.

In the meantime, if your kids won’t eat their tea tonight or go to bed on time without a tantrum, take a look at www.yourfamily.org.uk and see where you’re going wrong…

Posted in Charity, Compound Media, Content management | No Comments »

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 | No Comments »

Compound Media sponsors top award

September 26, 2007

CNET Awards presentationOn monday night I was at the CNET Networks UK Business Technology Awards at the Hilton in Park Lane to present the award for the IT Services Technology Project of the Year. It was a close run thing between the top names in the banking sector with the eventual winners being ABN Amro for their London message hub project.

It was a very enjoyable evening hosted by John Simpson, the BBC foreign affairs correspondent who shared several “interesting” anecdotes from his times with such differing personalities as George Bush and Colonel Gadaffi who apparently always conducted interviews from a distance in fear of being assassinated (surely not by the BBC?).

It was the first time Compound Media has sponsored anything like this and it was great to see such a big turnout with over 600 guests at the event. We also raised over £4000 for Byte Night during the evening.

Posted in Byte Night, Charity, Compound Media, Events | No Comments »

Googling yourself

February 14, 2007

Google logoLast year, I started blogging on ZDNet.co.uk as part of the launch of the Community features as I thought it was only appropriate to practise what you preach. At the time, my visibility to Google was pretty limited so it was an interesting experiment to see the power of the ZDNet brand at work. I’d never really understood why bloggers would want to associate themselves with a brand rather than going it alone and being independent.

However, ZDNet’s standing with the Google algorthm as a trusted provider of content means that the weight given to my blog there far outweighs any that I could achieve as an independent blogger. As a graphic example of this, I wrote this post back in November when I first started out about how my Google ranking increased dramatically after a few weeks. Today after steady, methodical posting (at least one post per week) I reached the heady heights of a page one Google ranking if you type in “Mike Barrett“.

Today sees the launch of my new column on silicon.com about the transition from CIO to consultant. What will be interesting to see is the relative rankings of ZDNet, silicon.com and this independent blog.

Posted in Blogging, Compound Media, Search, ZDNet, silicon.com | 2 Comments »

Compound Media is born

January 9, 2007

36-compound.gifSo the big day finally dawned when I left the corporate world and started my own business. 1 Jan 2007 at 00:01, when everyone was celebrating, I was tucked up in bed asleep in preparation for the task ahead. Actually that was more a combination of beer, wine, a long day and residual tiredness kicking in from staying up all night at the very long goodbye party before Christmas than preparation but…

Why leave CNET? It’s a great place, full of great people and fantastic memories for me. It was probably the hardest career decision I’ve ever made (in the past I’ve been “helped” to decide!) but this is a very interesting time for the media business and my chance to use the skills I’ve acquired in the past 6 years with Silicon and CNET so Compound Media was born.

Very rarely in one’s career are you in a situation where there is such a shortage of practical knowledge in the area you that specialise in. Publishers are still struggling to build robust, scalable, integrated on-line systems. That was the case for the traditional publishers in the Web 1.0 era but is increasingly true of the on-line publishers as well as we embark on the Web 2.0 revolution where the users take control and we have to build applications rather than web sites.

So what of this blog? My first task is to carry out some research. Researching the platform, product development and business process issues facing publishers in these turbulent times and investigate the myriad of new technologies and companies that aim to address these problems. I’ll be blogging on what I find as I carry out this research, new and interesting technologies around search, content management, reporting systems, user generated and social networking platforms.

So if you come across anything that you think is interesting/new/out of the ordinary on the web, send me an email and you may even get blogged about here.

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