Justice’s great new video for the song DVNO. According to band member Xavier de Rosnay, “DVNO” stands for “Divino.” de Rosnay states, “In every suburb of the world, in every city, there’s always a nightclub called El Divino… Clubs where you have to wear like a white shirt to get in.”

A beautiful piece created by Japanese motion graphics agency ‘wOw’ for Tokyo Design Week

What an insane first couple of months!

We always knew we were going to have to hit people with incredible creative to snare their interest, but the response we’ve had to our technical, usability and accessibility skills have been outstanding as well!

We’ve cultivated some great relationships with a few agencies and new clients, and over the last couple of months we’ve been working on:

•    Design
•    Development
•    Branding
•    Accessibility, Usability and SEO consultation and project work
•    Google, Yahoo and OSX gadgets
•    A Multi-lingual Design-rich XML-based Flash CMS site

Throw in some work for an international charity and you start to get a picture of how busy we’ve been over the last two months.

We’ve been steadily organizing everything for the company as well, including setting up our new offices! (details to come)

A very interesting article in the Times about the increasing number of people working outside offices armed with only a laptop and a mobile phone.

“If your ‘job’ entails loitering in coffee shops, armed with only a laptop and mobile, then you’re part of a brave new world.”

On the front page of a recent issue of the Financial Times, their Telecoms Editor, Andrew Parker wrote an article stating that more users are surfing the Internet with the iPhone than all of the other Internet ready mobile phone devices combined.

One of the biggest criticisms of the iPhone is that it’s only 2.5G and not 3G. Even though the iPhone currently only has 2.5G (Edge) data connectivity, research by British iPhone provider, O2, shows that iPhone users access far more data than Nokia N95 users, which has 3G data connectivity and is currently the iPhones largest competitor.

And I understand why! The iPhone makes it so easy to surf the web, access email, and with other integrated data-reliant technologies, such as YouTube, iTunes WiFi, Widgets and Google Maps, it’s no wonder iPhone users are using more data than all of the other mobile phones combined.

While working at a previous agency, I had to test websites on numerous mobile phones – I brought bespoke/tailored mobile web solutions to that agency and I took great care and pride in making sure all our websites worked on all mobile devices… Largely because one of the directors at that agency loved telling clients about this specialty of ours and then whipping out his mobile phone and showing the client their website in its mobile incarnation. I should point out he always had the very latest mobile phones – he once spent £500 ($1000) on a Blackberry 8800 just months after already upgrading his phone, purely so he could trump me by getting the 8800 first.

But I digress – having spent a lot of time testing websites on numerous mobile devices, it’s safe to say, most of them are pretty bad in their attempts to display websites. The Blackberry 8800 was abysmal; unbelievably painfully slow, regularly crashed back to the main menu and the navigation system was temperamental at best. The Internet browser on Nokia mobile phones also remains very slow and still imperfect in its attempt to display websites as they display on desktop computers. Various devices use Mobile Opera, but I haven’t seen many devices make good use of this browser yet. Also, I don’t really rate the desktop version of Opera, compared to its competitors, despite Opera’s attempt to be more compliant with accessibility guidelines.

In fact I rate Sony Ericsson’s mobile Internet browser more than any other (other than Safari on the iPhone) purely because they’ve taken a no nonsense approach in stripping a website of its layout styling, but kept enough CSS styling properties so developers could make sure that the website displayed remains ‘on brand’ (assuming they code their websites for mobile devices, which most don’t) meaning that on the most basic level, providing the website is coded properly, it will display and remain perfectly readable on a Sony Ericsson mobile phone.

And since a well-coded website should look like a well-formatted word document when stripped of its styling, this is exactly what you get when browsing on a Sony Ericsson mobile phone.

However, having been subjected to a week deep in the English Countryside with nothing but 56k on the desktop and Edge on my iPhone, I have to say, even though Edge isn’t as fast as 3G, Safari on the iPhone does such an incredible job of optimizing websites whether you’re on Edge or WiFi, that it’s still a pleasure to use and vastly superior to any other attempts at producing an Internet browser for a mobile phone.

With Safari on the iPhone, Apple have set the bar so much higher than anything that has preceded it, that its difficult to imagine how other major mobile phone brands are going to catch up, without developing close relationships with Mozilla and the Firefox team themselves.

One of the most important things to acknowledge about Safari on the iPhone is not just that it’s a great Internet browser for a mobile device, but that it is beautifully and seamlessly integrated with the rest of the iPhone’s technology. Most other mobile phone brands promote their products via specs alone:

- 5 Megapixel Camera

- 8 GB Memory

- Web Browser

- Email Connectivity

- 2.6” Display

Whereas Apple has promoted the iPhone via the X-factor of its ergonomics and ease of use. This was an absolutely brilliant move by Apple in a world where there are still a lot of technophobes out there, Apple has made everything about this cutting-edge technology as simple for human consumption as possible – people are not only not afraid of the technology in the iPhone – they want to use it!

Another brilliant move by Apple are their adverts which show everyone how to use the iPhone – even if someone wouldn’t originally know how to use the iPhone without some instructions, they do now thanks to all of Apple’s adverts and promotions showing them exactly how most of the major functions in each of applications work!

So if another mobile phone brand really wants to catch up to Apple, they are going to have to make sure that they not only have the very best applications, but also that they seamlessly interact with each other and are very easy to use. Personally, I would love to see Sony Ericsson team up with Mozilla Firefox to see what they could come up with.

However, since Apple is currently so far ahead of the game, it seems they obviously have a very bright future ahead of them, and the potential of the iPhone with its touch-screen display is virtually limitless.

Apple will clearly have some money to burn after a projected 5 million iPhones sold by January 2008, and I’d like to see them buy Skype. It’s recently been devalued, Ebay is currently looking for a buyer and it’s a bargain! With over 100 million users, static phone numbers and VOIP connectivity – this would be an incredible move by Apple! I’m waiting for Skype to become available on the iPhone when the iPhone Software Development Kit is made available early this year. It would be great to use my Skype account with my iPhone – why pay 20p per minute for calls when you can pay 1p for land lines or 2p to mobile phones via Skype! Or even make free calls to anyone on your Skype account!

In its very first venture into the mobile phone market, Apple have changed the world in one fell swoop and will influence and most likely shape the mobile phone market in the future. Hopefully they’ll have some good competition from the likes of Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson, but I can only see this happening if these companies innovate and not just replicate the technology in the iPhone. To me, Sony seems like they have a huge competitive advantage in their ties with the film, music, game, entertainment and technology sectors of their company, but we’ll have to see whether they can bring that all together into a single device – it is definitely not going to be an easy task, but a fantastic achievement if they could pull it off.

As for the mobile Internet market – there is no doubt that there is going to be a huge boom in mobile Internet users with mobile advertising revenues projected to rise over 500% from $2bn now to $11bn by 2011, according to the research firm Informa. And since more users are using the iPhone to surf the Internet than on all of the other Internet-ready mobile devices combined, it looks like Apple will be leading the revolution. Come on Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, etc – we want to see what you can do!

It’s going very well so far and our clients, old and new, show a lot of respect to us because of our passion for our work, our reliability (something that according to many of them seems to be sorely lacking in this industry) and… the results! Sanjit and I are not salesman, so it’s good to know clients will keep coming back to us and personally recommend us to others as two uniquely talented and reliable people with a great work ethic, who absolutely will get the work done when they say they will and to a first class standard as well. It takes a lot of stress away from everyone involved if people simply know that the work is in good hands.

Get in touch if you’d like to be a happy client!

Our original plan was to spend the first few months building our brand, let everyone know that we’re available, cold call, etc - we saved enough money to survive for a few months.

On our first day we ended up on a train to the South of England to pitch for a project. Four days later (after we already obtained a few smaller projects) we found out that we won the pitch and the project started. The interest in us seems to be growing and the news that we’ve left our last company seems to be spreading.