Posted on November 10, 2011 by Namuli Katumba
This Movember, Ultraspeed’s Talk Digital series is bringing you the wonderful duo of Charlotte Appleton, Creative Director of Cora Media and Yara Gherwati, Cora Media’s Campaign Project Director for Not-For-Profits.
In 2008 Charlotte began helping charities, first in the Caribbean and then in New York, to gain exposure and raise funds through various multimedia techniques. She combines video, editing and photography to represent and promote charitable activity in a moving, accessible way that perfectly suits modern digital delivery methods.
These experiences have led to Cora Media establishing teams in London and the UK, within non-profit communication.
Yara is a trained Jungle Survival expert and has worked on numerous projects in South-East Asia. A regular campaigner for global human rights and environmental issues, Yara also leads workshops at universities on topics such as the tar sands and deforestation. She brings a unique perspective to campaigns and a wealth of international experience to Cora Media’s not-for-profit division.
Cora Media combine media tools to creatively tell a charity’s story: its purpose, past triumphs and aims, as well as emphasising how urgently it needs further awareness and funding.
They are pioneers of digital technology for media delivery formats such as podcasts and webcasting, and using these methods their campaigns have been able to reach international audiences.
Some of Cora Media’s projects include:
*The BBC World Service Trust
*Street Games (The Co-operative)
*The Jason Roberts Foundation
*The Chris Samba Foundation
*REACH Grenada
*Reach and Teach (Midnight Madness)
*Don’t Lose the Music (RNID)
*Race for Life (Funny Women)
*The Liverpool Legends charity activity.
With more competition and – arguably – shorter attention spans, it’s essential to be heard in innovative new ways. Hearing about Charlotte and Yara’s experiences with different charities, and their advice on how best to deploy video digitally, should prove extremely helpful for a charity striving to make work that stands out.
Join us on the 22nd of November at 6:30 pm at The Hospital Club in Covent Garden. As usual the drinks and food are on Ultraspeed – just bring yourself and your questions (and your Movember Mustaches). Please RSVP as spaces are limited to our LinkedIn group.
Posted on July 28, 2011 by Namuli Katumba
With the news looking glum for some high-street and traditional offline retailers, E-Commerce is reaping rewards with growing employment opportunities, the increasing consumer confidence that they will find ‘the best deals’ online and more and more developers jumping on the bandwagon to provide new and improved tools for the industry.
To that end, attention is being turned to how to ensure that E-Commerce platforms are going to be able to reach the new business goals that are now available to them, as well as consistently providing a new, unique, amazing user experience to all and sundry. I in fact, read a great article recently geared exactly towards this but warning of the pitfalls of not managing your platform expansion project without due care.
This post from Get Elastic goes through the ten most common mistakes that teams can make when trying to undertake a rapid re-platforming project before accurately identifying existing or potential problems, requirements and goals. In response to this list, I thought I would offer some nuggets of advice with regards to making sure that the E-Commerce infrastructure is also up to scratch when avoiding such mistakes:
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Posted on June 24, 2011 by Namuli Katumba
>”If you want Elastic Hosting you need an Elastic Budget…”
I can’t take credit for this little nugget of clarity. That goes to Richard Gardner, one of our Support Engineers. But as soon as I heard him say it, the phrase struck (and stuck with) me.
Everyone but everyone is talking about and investigating Cloud Computing / Cloud Hosting / [insert Cloud term here]. But what I’m seeing over and over again is a lot of confusion as to how Cloud will work for you and your business. Or more specifically how it will magically save you money.
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Posted on April 21, 2011 by Namuli Katumba
As you may or may not know I’m off to Australia this weekend for a long (and I can vouch that it is well-deserved) break. As with all holidays of any length, there is always the task of meeting those last minute to-dos at home and at work, which tend to increase your stress levels a teensy bit. Unfortunately, my standard reaction to stress is… to shop. And what better way than online where I can browse in short stints to my heart’s content.
As I’ve noted in previous blog posts, time is of the essence here so the sites where I get fast loading pages, videos of what the clothes will look like as I walk (vital information people) and that have easy navigation will be my constant ‘go-to’. But, it doesn’t stop there - I expect, no actually, I demand as my right, good customer service. In my book it’s practically a crime to provide a product or service to someone and then, once you’ve got their money; ‘Ok thanks, see you later… who are you?’
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you As Seen On Screen or ASOS.com as it’s more commonly known. I’ve been a devotee of this glorious company’s services for almost five years and never turned back. In fact, I can cite multiple people that I have recommended this site to and they have also become firm advocates. Using the example of a purchase I made yesterday (please see the first paragraph detailing my guilty stress habits) I will break down the pillars of their excellent customer ethos in three ways:
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Posted on April 1, 2011 by Namuli Katumba
Social Media Pressure is a modern affliction that comes in many guises. Some people may not even realise they have the SMP. It can take hold when you least expect it but once identified can be easily dealt with. Outlined below are the two poles of SMP. Each is very much its own camp.
The ‘I don’t understand why you’d want to broadcast your whole LIFE in that way’ Camp
This is probably the most typical and readily identifiable type of SMP, which used to be associated with a particular age, demographic, and level of computer literacy. But conversely, and perhaps because of the huge up-take of social media tools when they are first released, there is a slight but noticeable backlash. So this camp now not only includes those who would never want to publish details of their life over the social media web, but also those that have previously been gung ho, all for, full caboodle, engaged in the concept of updating…
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Posted on March 4, 2011 by Namuli Katumba
I was wondering recently if we were becoming more like computers… or, if I was getting really philosophical, whether computers were becoming more like us. It started when I watched one of my favourite episodes of Friends in which Ross talks about ‘interfacing’ and ‘being able to live life as a computer’.
I laughed a lot the first time that I watched this but as each incessant repeat of that episode comes on, I feel like it’s becoming more true to life – or more particularly, my life. I’m not talking about being able to calculate complex pure mathematical problems. More that the terms we use every day to describe the features we want from our computing, online or server environments can be applied increasingly, and appropriately, to our daily activities.
Multitasking = Running two or more programs at the same time on the same single-processor computer.
This is so empirically true of my (and surely everyone’s?) life right now it’s almost too obvious to mention. But take a moment to think about the term multitasking as it used to exist. It used to be deemed as a ‘talent’ or a ‘skill’ that only the gifted possessed. Now, with all our gadgets and cries of ‘there’s an app for that’, we don’t have to work so hard at it.
Example: The other night I found myself using my iPhone to follow a recipe for soup, whilst also using the same device to brainstorm with a friend on career strategy, using the laptop to answer emails, surf Facebook and pay bills, and watching my SkyPlus to catch up on my missed television – simultaneously. I struggle to include all that in one sentence. Yet believe it or not, I was able to satisfactorily achieve all my tasks, although I do wonder if I had done so to my full capability… which brings me onto…
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Posted on February 8, 2011 by Namuli Katumba
For this year’s first newsletter we asked a few of our friends, colleagues and clients to let us know what they thought that the ‘trends’ would be for this New Year, 2011. In hearing some of their thoughts, ideas and hopes for what could be popular in the online realm, it got me to thinking how I wanted to improve myself in an online way. In fact once I got to trying to think of just three, I realised there were a lot of trends, now very much past, that I should really be jumping on (read catching up with!). So I apologise now to those of you who will read this and be screaming at me for not already being part of the movement and I hope that you’ll help me reach my New Year Online Resolutions!
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Posted on November 15, 2010 by Namuli Katumba
‘I can’t even get on’
‘Everything has crashed again’
‘Well that was an entire day wasted…’
Is it just me or has this year been the year of the ‘Great Ticketing Debacle’ with multiple ticketing sales causing ample amounts of grief to the loyal fans trying to see their favourite artists or bands – if you take a look at any form of media: Newspapers, Twitter, Facebook, BBC News, or simply via ‘gossip’, you will see or hear sob stories of hours spent trying to get on to the ticketing home page or that mythical story of the person that managed to get 26 tickets all in one go (this is true actually and how I got my ticket for a festival next year).
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Posted on October 1, 2010 by Namuli Katumba
Ok, so you’ve been tasked with optimising your company’s online strategy, and you’ve got the developers, creatives, financials and marketing team on board. Everything seems to be falling in to place except that you also have to research in to the actual platform that this great new environment/portal/campaign is going to sit… You know this has something to do with hosting, probably you even know that this is something to do with managed hosting. But questions do still remain. How to differentiate between the multitudes of providers out there professing to be THE managed hosting provider for you? How to find something that is going to work for all the diverse people involved? How to find a provider that will fit with the overall company plan?
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Posted on August 31, 2010 by Namuli Katumba
In the ever-moving, ever-evolving industry of hosting there will inevitably be buzz words or concepts that will be leapt on, employed and, unfortunately, misused. Web 2.0, virtualisation, “software as a service” and now “cloud” have all been touted as the next big thing for hosting, concepts that will drastically change the terrain as we know it. It is important to realise though that behind the mists and confusion there are benefits to be drawn from all of these ideas if the end user is able to recognise those benefits they can actually realise and draw advantages from.
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