Archive for December, 2008

This year, Pancentric decided to share it’s Christmas Tree with the world. Rather than have a traditional tree in our office, we made a virtual one.

First we commissioned a metalworker Adam Laurence from the wonderfully named “One Little Girl & A Can Of Gasoline” to produce a tree shaped structure. Then we grabbed a bunch of LCD screens from around the office to hang on it. Alex here opened up an old PC and put as many graphics cards as we could in it (who would have thought that it would be so hard to find working PCI graphics cards?) After some swearing and a lot of grief he managed to get x-windows running across all of the screens, (this involved re-compiling the windowing system without xinerama, thank goodness for Open Source and the Freedom to modify). So now we had the basic hardware up and running.

Next, Laco and his gang started work on designing and programming the tree. Working with the geometry of the screens they created a pixel perfect flash animation to run across the 6 screens on the tree!

Of course we weren’t content with just that, so a camera was sourced to put this onto the web. The 1st effort used a standard webcam effort, not good enough I’m afraid, the limitations of custom plugins, and the low refresh rates made it look rubbish.

So, we started again this time with a domestic camcorder, this is connected to a PC and the raw video feed is transcoded into h264 and pumped up to a server on the internet. The server then puts the h264 video into a Flash wrapper and streams it out to the end viewer. If nothing else this was a great proof of principle/concept for us as it means we now have the capability of doing mass video streaming – which is nice.

So all that remained was to record some “fun” clips for out 3pm broadcasts, put the flash in a good looking page, design an email etc. and away we went.

We’ve taken it down now and hope you all liked it.

A Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2009 from us all at Pancentric.

Whilst browsing the Brand Republic website today I was very pleased to find an article detailing Pancentric’s latest digital campaign for Petplan.

The 12 days of Xmas campaign featuring of all things, 12 daily emails provides Petplan customers with exclusive Xmas content, including a selection of funny/cute and altogether sickly videos of animals. Xmas gift ideas, and the chance to win one of three daily prizes.

Brand Republic were even kind enough to detail the success of the campaign to date. More than 500,000 comms, with a 30% open rate and 50% click thru rate.

To read said article, follow the link below:
http://www.brandrepublic.com/Discipline/Marketing/News/869973/Petplan-launches-12-Days-Christmas-campaign/

Famous at last! Made my Xmas that!

A lot of the IT bits and pieces that we buy end up coming to me as they are often ordered in my name. As a result I am constantly being teased by intriguing looking packages, that turn out to be replacement hard drives, or cunning little cables or other such ephemera.

Just the other day I received a package in a big padded envelope from someone I didn’t recognise so started opening it up to see what it was, imagine my surprise when this is what I found inside it.

Beautiful Package

Well that doesn’t look like any kind of IT related package I’ve ever seen, so I said to my colleagues, no it must be for me. So I opened it up and looked at what was inside.

Opening the package

Hmmm, what was that carefully wrapped in bubble wrap? A brooch, a medal, a badge of honour? Only one way to find out…

All is revealed

Aha! It’s a processor, I should have guessed. It transpires that it was ordered from e-bay to upgrade an old box and somehow it was wrapped in this lovely little box.

The message being that a bit of care and attention to presentation makes a huge difference in perception. I was intrigued and surprised and it made a big enough impact for me to remember the seller (and we still have the box!)

We have been hard at work recently adding more and more integration capabilities to Enabler, Pancentric’s email marketing platform.

We have been integrated with web sites for quite some time now, either via APIs or through embedding email Form Builder forms as sophisticated data collectors in web sites.

We are also integrated into Salesforce.com, this is in final tests at a client site and is going through the Saleforce accreditation process.

The latest integration is with Dolphin Dynamics travel industry solutions. This is an “The new end-to-end solution harnesses customer and market information residing in Dolphin’s booking management module” or so they say.

All I know is that this strategic partnership with one of the leading lights in the Travel industry shows the quality of the Enabler product and underlines Pancentric’s commitment to drive innovation through integration.

See the press release at http://www.dolphind.com/script/site/page.asp?artid=192

I am sure that there were many, many, many hours of discussions, focus groups, high level marketing summits and other activites carried out at Dolce & Gabbana when they were planning to name their new The One perfume derivative “l’eau the one”

Sadly, it seems that no-one tried saying it repeatedly. A classic case of not thinking about how people work and think. It probably looked really good on the boards, and had lots of really creative “thinking” around the proposition and the lifestyle statements.

But how many people are going to buy, or look forward to receiving, a bottle of “loathe one”.

‘Laugh, Learn, Make and Play’ is what the Cartoonito, channel, encourages their viewers to do. Well we are doing ‘Research, Analyse, Recommend and Measure’ to SEO their web site.

Now, the heavily animated Cartoonito website is built almost entirely in Flash, great for its core audience of pre-school children less good for the search engines. So watch this space for hints on how we achieve high rankings for this site.

Read the ‘official’ news at www.pancentric.com

p.s. Am I allowed to say that I don’t like Barney? Probably not.

After the budget and the change in VAT rates we are starting to get to grips with the implications, like other SMEs. I am not going to discuss the rights or wrongs of the change, but how it affects my business directly.

We have a responsibility to both ourselves, and our clients to get this right and to implement it smoothly.

First we have to ensure that our Extranet (that creates our invoices) can handle both rates, it needs to handle both as a lot of our work is lonf term and spans the changeover period. This means that we have to issue credit notes for some of our work at 17.5%, and re-invoice at 15%. We also have to audit every project that runs across the change and determine how to account for it.

Client sites tend to be easier as there is more clarity about when the good/service is delivered, so it is a matter of checking every site that shows VAT and changing them. Oh and changing means getting the site out of the repository, scanning it (mostly we know where stuff is fortunately) making the changes, testing, and then putting it back into CVS to migrate it to a live environment. All in a few days. We will have people working over the weekend to do this.

All in all a significant overhead to the UK economy, and a distraction when everyone is aiming for cost savings, efficiency gains etc. in the recession.

Ho, hum.