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I (honestly) never tried to bribe people someone to name check Caffeinehit. That would (of course) be very unprofessional and improper! Anyway, big thanks to Justin Davies @ NinetyTen for dropping our name on this video.

Well, I thought that it was about time I did a post (of sorts).

Things have been slightly odd here as of late. If there is such a thing as a credit crunch it really doesn’t seem to be affecting us (touch wood) as it has done some other companies I know. So we’re finding ourselves going through the same busy peaks and troughs that you get with work coming in, the peaks and troughs are just magnified. One minute you think “oh shit, there’s nothing to do”, the next thing you know it’s “oh shit, how are we going to turn this lot around!?”.

Fortunatelty though we now have Alen here who has been working tirelessly on Gighit and fine tuning the Caffeinehit website. I’ve just got back from New York, the original reason was for FOWD, a real disappointment (compared with FOWA). Luckily there were some very interesting meetings after that which made the trip worthwhile, watch this space in the coming weeks.

So… If you hadn’t gathered there really was no reason for a post today, I just felt that it was time to post something! Either way, there’s some very exciting stuff in the pipeline so make sure you check back soon…

Channel 4 has just launched an exciting ideas based website - 4ip. The press release from the NinetyTen website is below.

Caffeinehit did the design for this, so we’re pleased to see that it’s live and are looking forward to seeing what happens with it in the future. Anyway, on with the press release…

Channel 4 Launches 4iP to Create New Digital Businesses with Help from NinetyTen

London, UK | October 15, 2008: NinetyTen has created the ideas submission system at the heart of a new Channel 4 venture which will stimulate public service digital media across the UK. The new venture, called 4iP (4 Innovation for the Public), officially launches on October 15th.

4iP will allow anyone to submit new digital business ideas at www.4ip.org.uk. 4iP will then uses the expertise of Channel 4’s digital team to fine-tune the ideas and turn them into viable businesses.

In the first stage, the ideas are reviewed by Channel 4’s team of digital managers who will suggest ways in which the ideas could be improved upon. The second stage will take some of the stronger ideas further, and use the knowledge base of Channel 4 to help build a financial and business plan around the ideas. As the ideas pass through 4iP’s network, the ideas will become more and more robust, with the strongest ideas coming out the other end with support from Channel 4.

Marcus Page, IS Business Development Manager from Channel 4 commented: “With 4iP we are being pro-active in finding original interactive media products & services, as digital platforms become increasingly important. NinetyTen’s expertise in creating the ideas submission system was a key element in the overall creation of the 4iP website and over the last few months we have been impressed by their hard work and expertise.”

David Atkins, CEO of NinetyTen said: “4iP is a great way of harnessing the creative potential that’s here in the UK, so it has been a great project to be involved in. As we have experienced in the last few months, more and more businesses have started to understand that social networking technology like ours has become a fundamental part of their business - it is not just a nice-to-have any more.”

NinetyTen is a specialist provider of social media technologies that can be incorporated into new and existing digital media. The company was formed by an experienced team of technology entrepreneurs who have all founded and run a number of successful video, telecoms and digital businesses.

About 4iP

Announced as part of Channel 4’s Next on 4 strategic blueprint, 4iP is a major new initiative to encourage innovation on digital platforms, which aims to re-invent public service media for the digital age. A collaboration between Channel 4 and a series of regional development agencies and funding partners from around the UK, the editorial focus will be on working with the best talent, both individually and within digital production.

Over the next two years Channel 4 and our 4iP partners will be investing up to £50m in content and services which will help it deliver public purposes on new platforms, in new ways, for new audiences.

Well, it’s official! Caffeinehit has a new recruit, Alen Mujezinovic our new Senior Developer is heading up all of the development adventures over here at Caffeinehit Towers. SO, if you need ANY development work, social networking applications - anything, Caffeinehit now has the capability to do anything and everything you could possibly want.

We’ve tempted him over from the (slightly) chillier climbs of Zurich. Expect to see some seriously exciting stuff from Caffeinehit before the year is out…

Anyway, Alen. Great to have you on board… Can’t wait!

PS: A massive thanks to Kieran and the guys at Playfire, I seriously owe you some drinks!

FINALLY, I can blog about it!. It’s been on the cards for some time now but finally Kindo has merged with MyHeritage. Now they can boast a user base of over 25million people, not a bad jump in traffic there guys!

I’ve been working as the ui designer for Kindo since December 2007. They’ve come on leaps and bounds, taking on some of the more established genealogy websites (Geni and Genoom). The Kindo team is unlike any other group of people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Dedicated, passionate and above all a true pleasure to work with. They really do deserve to bask in the glory of what they’ve achieved AND to get excited about what they’re going to accomplish in the coming months/years.

WELL DONE GUYS!!!

Here’s the official press release from the Kindo website:

The first time we met Gilad, the founder and CEO of Myheritage, was in early 2007 – a few weeks before we released the first public version of Kindo. Gareth and me were invited to have lunch with him in Soho in central London, and went there with the objective of learning everything we could about the “enemy”. This proved to be pretty naive, since Gilad is much too nice to be called an “enemy”.

But there we were: A Swede, a South African and an Israeli, all with very different professional background and life stories, talking about the future of families online from very different perspectives. I didn’t expect this, but we found that we had much in common. We shared the same ideas and vision for what we wanted to achieve with our businesses, even though our approach was far from similar.

Kindo had set out to build a site that would help you interact with the family that is around you here and now. We were trying to come up with tools to help you share information and communicate with the people that matter most to you right now. MyHeritage on the other hand had developed amazing technologies to help you find out everything about your family’s history, and had spent years perfecting these technologies. Ultimately though, what interested us both was the opportunity to help families discover more about who they are and their past, and use the web to bring them closer together.

As Gareth and I travelled back on the tube, we talked about how nice it would be to be able to offer our own users the same tools as MyHeritage already had. What really got us excited was their SmartMatching Technology, which matches people in your family tree with 250 Million other names, and suggests who you might be related too. We liked that. We were also jealous of Gilad, since he got to develop features for 25 million registered users - slightly bigger than our own user base…

During this summer, we’ve been thinking long and hard about the future of Kindo, and what the best option would be for taking Kindo to the next level. The more time we spent with Gilad as well as the rest of the team in Israel (not to mention the very loud rooster that runs around in their campus), the more convinced we all became - we’ll be better off together.

So we join the MyHeritage family because we share the same vision and values (as families should), and because we think that we can build an amazing product together – bringing real benefits to families around the world. This is what we’re planning to do over the next years.

I posted this idea on Twitter the other day and as @DrewPreston pointed out, it’s actually not a bad idea. So, if there are any entrepeneurial students, homeless people or someone with just too much time on their hands and access to a moped, this really could be a good thing for you.

OK. So my office in Kings Cross is annoyingly far away from Starbucks. I know, you should support local business and not power the corporate monsters BUT their coffee IS the best. However, other times I’m working in Blackfriars - Starbucks every four doors.

SO, the proposition is that you can phone a number 0800 STARBUCKS or login to www.getmeafrickinstarbucks.net and order a Starbucks for delivery (you set up an account and add some credit). It then puts you in touch with your local caffeine dealer who (using the GPS on his iPhone) it then sends him a message asking for you to deliver your favourite Grande Latte to address X.

They price up the cost of the Latte by say £1 and hopefully it’s still hot by the time it gets to you. It could also be a great opportunity for other local businesses to advertise with the caffeine dealer, personalising those funny cardboard wrap-arounds with local adverts.

Anyway. Can someone please do this? Remember, you read it here first. I’d expect free delivery. Thanks.

Yammer.com is a Twitter style messaging system but for corporate communications that’s just been announced as the winner of TechCrunch50. The concept itself is very simple and it the business model is equally as simple. You pay $1 admin access for every user you have on your Yammer network. Keep in mind that they had 2,000 companies (10,000 people) sign up on the first day along I’d like to think that they’re on to a winner…

I guess as with all these things it will be a case of waiting and seeing. As with all new things on the web that generate a decent amount of buzz and hype people just want to try it out. As the first 3 months are a free trial we won’t really what the user traction is going to be like until the new year.

Anyway, why this post title? Doesn’t it make perfect sense for something like this to be incorporated into Basecamp or something similar? It would be perfect! I guess that this could be something that 37Signals have up their sleeves but it would make perfect sense to update their current messaging system with something that’s a bit more fluid, like Yammer.

The other runners-up at TechCrunch50 are: Atmosphir, FitBit, Grockit, GoodGuide and Swype (any more web 2.0 names anyone!?)

That’s right, the world of photo tagging and automatic facial recognition appears to be a little bit closer and dare I say, a little bit scarier.

MyHeritage have developed a funky product that allows you to upload all of your photos and then the system automatically groups photos.

So, say for example you upload a family album which has photos of you from when you were 4 all the way through to the present day the system will (with a little bit of learning) be able to match you in all the photos and in turn tag them for you.

Anyway, it’s a seriously exciting product with endless opportunities for the future. I guess it’s just a case of seeing how they develop it. Good job!

Ahhhh… how Captain Pugwash never fails to amuse me. Speaking of which in the Metro this morning there was this rather amusing article about a billboard advertising Portsmouth Dockyard.

It goes to show just how wrong you can go in advertising! Anyway, here’s the article…

Royal Navy tourism bosses have been forced to remove a billboard - after sniggers that it appeared to show two sailors doing something a bit rude.

The billboard, advertising tours of Portsmouth Dockyard, has a photo portraying the heat of battle in Nelson’s day.

But drivers passing it in Winchester, Hampshire, thought of a much naughtier alternative.

A dockyard spokesman said: ‘It was put up in all innocence and no one here realised what it looked like until it was pointed out to us.’

Source: The Metro

I have been messing about Ubiquity for the first time today and what a nice, intuitive suprise it was!

After a very simple and easy install I was up and running. I must admit this isn’t something I could see less tech-savvy people using, but I guess that’s not really who it’s aimed at. The way it enhances the web and integrates with all of your web applications is really interesting, something very ‘different’.

I guess the next big question is what the uptake will be like from developers and web services. It has the potential to be one of those web applications you wonder how you survived without before.

Download it here and have a go yourself.