Presented by Julian Sykes (Brands Director), Hoffi's brand workshop is perfect for developing an understanding of branding and how it is integral to your company.

During the morning Julian will discuss examples of what branding is, what it is not and why having a good brand is valuable for your business. Covering what the key ingredients of a good brand are, concentrating on how to use your brand to position itself in the marketplace.

Agenda

When: 9am - 12pm, Thursday 31 May 2012

Where: Enterprise House, Cardiff Bay, CF10 5LE

If you would like further information on our seminar, please contact Julian on 029 2048 7941 or e-mail shwmai@hoffi.com to book your place.

Please remember places are limited, so please remember to book early!

Today will mark the first ever performance from National Theatre Wales that will be streamed free over the web, whist being performed in front of an audience in Haverfordwest, Cardiff and Connah's Quay over the coming weeks.

Over the past 6 weeks we have been working closely with Native HQ's Tom Beardshaw and Kinura to develop an online stage and booking system for National Theatre Wales' eighteenth show 'The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning'.

For the series of streamed events we developed an online booking system mimicking that of a real box office to provide virtual tickets or reminders for the events, along with what was labeled as an 'online stage'. We pulled together technology from Kinura and content produced by Tom, so that online theatre goers are not only able to spectate, but join in through chat, twitter and lots of extras that will send you through Bradley's life online pushed to the user during the play.

The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning is the perfect choice for National Theatre Wales to premier online streaming, due to the 24 year olds relationship with the online world.

Bradley Manning is a United States Army soldier who was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of having passed classified material to the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks. He was charged over the following months with a number of offenses, including communicating national defence information to an unauthorised source, and aiding the enemy. Source: Wikipedia

You can see the show free several times over the coming weeks, if you would like to find out more information or to book your free ticket for the live stream, please visit http://nationaltheatrewales.org/bradleymanning/ and don't forget to share the link!

Earlier this month, I headed down to Swansea on the train to attend a mobile marketing strategy workshop set-up by Software Alliance Wales, presented by Rob Thomas a social media and mobile expert who heads up the Gloucester based arm of the American WSI marketing franchise.

It was an interesting morning with a mixed audience crossing over between private and public sector; those with no knowledge to those who were quite experienced in producing digital content for mobile devices. Rob hit us with some hard facts from Mashable about mobile users and content deployment, followed by an overview of quite a few tools and techniques that could be used by businesses to market themselves online. Includeing Mobile Websites, Local Search, Location Based Marketing, Mobile Advertising and Apps.

Local search or So|Lo|Mo (Social Location Mobile Marketing) took up quite a chunk of the morning, and Google places taking the limelight given that its soon going to be serving most of our search results on mobile devices. With Google automatically syncing business data from other sources for those not claimed their space on places, I can understand why Rob kept the topic alive for a chunk of the workshop. And I must admit when I returned to the studio, I claimed Hoffi's space, two weeks on I'm still waiting our verification code coming in the post.

However, the workshop felt a little bit like a sales pitch, with lots of data collection for WSi e-marketing and I was surprised that only a little information was given about a businesses online reputation. I understand that its important to be aware of what's possible, but some information could have been given towards managing the process and at least explaining that some of these will not be right for all businesses. Don't get me wrong each business is different and there needs will be different when it comes to choosing the correct tools for convey a brand digitally, which would be difficult to explain in a morning and rightly that's where consultancy fees to people like us and Rob come in. But, even just the slightest statement surrounding this would have placed an understanding that brand communication channels need to be chosen and used carefully.

I did take quite a few things from the workshop; Google Places being the main, but also an understanding of the needs and wants of business in Wales to take on and produce mobile content to either market or provide more flexible services for their customers, slightly swayed as people opted to be in a mobile strategy workshop, but refreshing all the same.

Its that time of year again when we have to say Penblwydd hapus to ourselves and divulge our age, but maybe you can guess how old we are? We would also like to thank all our customers, colleagues and friends over the last ...... years!

Yesterday Carwyn and i attended a seminar by Ken Blakeslee a consultant from Web Mobility Ventures, Ken's a self proclaimed mobile fanatic and has specialised in the area for many years. It certainly came across in his talk, with is passion and eagerness to explain mobile technologies available to deliver content in innovative ways. I've been intrigued by Augmented Reality since Julian showed me some of Moving Brands work a few years ago, I've even played with a little using flash and some open source libraries, but I've not even scratched the surface; not even as a user of AR. Ken spoke about some AR examples that are available to us through products that we buy, like Marmite, KitKat and Walkers crisps, but until last night I was unaware of. So today I downloaded the Blippar app for the iPhone and just about scanned everyone's lunch from Cadbury's Dairy milk through to Heinz ketchup and discovered some games and no so great recipes hidden in AR.

Another of ken's examples was Esquire magazine back in 2009, when a whole issue was produced with extended content in Augmented Reality. It was a great evening presented by Software Alliance Wales and Dinamo Productions, one of hopefully many more that I'll attend.

Over the last few months we have been working with Cynnal Cymru-Sustain Wales to develop their digital brand experience. Utilising the open source content management system Drupal, we worked with Cynnal Cymru to produce a core set of tools that will allow their online brand to grow overtime, yet remain open and allow for flexibility should they require to change in the future.

Its still very early days in the development and positioning of Cynnal Cymru's online content, but we have good ground to grow from... www.cynnalcymru.com

Earlier this year we helped Eco Design Centre develop an understanding of how they can share their data, convey confident communications about who they are and what they do as an organisation. Concluding with a number of 30 second ads made by the Eco Design Centre team, which was great because it really got the whole team thinking about who they are and what they do as an organisation.

Following on from the strategy project we have been working with the team over the last month or so to design and develop a new website that will allow them flexibility to explain their services, relationships with private, public and educational sectors and give them the tools to publish all that rich data online.

You can visit the website and find out more about Eco Design Centre at www.ecodesigncentre.org

We've worked closely with National Theatre Wales since their first year launched in November 2009, developing their destination website and working with their digital channels. More recently, over the last couple of months we have extend our work into their online community.

Originally developed and maintained by Native HQ, the National Theatre Wales community has been produced using Ning, a social network platform. We were asked to develop the style and format of the tools provided by Ning in order to enhance the user's experience of online community. Working with established platforms, such as Ning will always bring constraints, conflict and issues surrounding compatibility following technical workarounds that are needed to develop the online tools to fit in with the community and National Theatre Wales' brand experience. It was important that these technical challenges did not take precedence over the brief, the user's experience was the main issue in hand.

With National Theatre Wales and Native HQ, we identified core areas and functions within the community, which were already in existence through the tools provided by Ning, but not easily identified by the users. Working with National Theatre Wales brand guidelines, we developed a series of graphical elements and colour distinctions where these Ning tools were broken down and became instinctive navigational elements for users.

The redeveloped community was pushed live early Monday morning, followed by some minor teething problems and will be officially announced to National Theatre Wales community in the coming days.

You can view and join in with the National Theatre Wales community at http://community.nationaltheatrewales.org/ or take a look at National Theatre Wales' forthcoming performances at http://nationaltheatrewales.org/

Since January we have been working closely with Cardiff Business School and Cardiff University's Web Services Team to design and implement a content managed website for the school.

Cardiff Business School is ranked second in the United Kingdom for its leading research. With over 150 faculty members, the school educates over 2500 students each year from over 120 countries, so it was imperative that the website was produced to be as flexible as possible, but with simple navigation and a clear design.

Before we began working with the Business School, their exiting website was managed by a select few, through a large number of Dreamweaver templates. Which is great for smaller websites, but with a website of this size it could only be described as madness, giving us a headache just thinking of the complications.

With well over 5,000 pages of content we proposed to simplify the management of content using our old favourite: Drupal (an open source content management). After a comprehensive planning stage we were then able to produce a robust multilingual website that can be updated by multiple members of staff, allowing for the website to updated instantly and securely. The site has slowly launched over the last week and its already receiving great feedback from the school faculty.

Its going to be great to see the website develop overtime as the Business School staff take control. Visit their new website at http://business.cardiff.ac.uk

In preparation for our forthcoming screen printing marathon we popped over to Printhaus on Tuesday afternoon for our induction.