Or Any Excuse For A Cocktail evening. We invited the worlds press to an evening of Surface, conversations about the future of the interface and fine cocktails (with vodka kindly supplied by our sponsor DQ Vodka).

We had people from The Times, The Guardian, PocketLint, TechFluff.tv, Contagious Magazine, MegaWhat.tv and .Net Magazine. Michelle Dewberry who won The Apprentice even made a quick visit with our friend Ben Way.

All in all a great evening and a good chance to evangalise about Surface and other new interface technologies such as Silverlight and Deepzoom.

Splendid's involvement in the Microsoft Surface product has seen them featured in The Observer at the weekend. The subject being the 40th birthday of the computer mouse. We were asked how we thought products like Surface and other multi-touch devices like the iPhone would affect the way we interact with computers.

"Splendid, a digital innovations agency in London, is one of the first companies to adopt Surface. Paul Bishop, its managing director, said: 'It's much more collaborative and natural and people find it very intuitive."

If you want to get behind the hype and have a play with Surface we are holding a press evening on the 9th December, to get an invite you can contact our press people below.

..Well Manchester!!

Splendid have been asked by Microsoft to present at an event aimed at User Experience Professionals based on our innovative user experience work with easyJet, Aston Martin and ITV.

This is how our session is described "Leave the thoughts of plug-ins and technology stacks at the door, we want to talk to you about how we create a compelling user experience for the coolest brand in the world (that's official) going through real world experiences and showing you the outcome (with no acronyms used along the way)." Sounds good doesn't it??

On Tuesday 18th November Splendid were invited to the launch of Microsoft BizSpark at City hall on the South Bank. BizSpark is an innovative new program that unites Startups with entrepreneurial and technology resources in a global community with a common goal of supporting and accelerating the success of a new generation of high-potential Startups.

Simply put it gives start-ups (assuming they fit certain criteria) 3 years free access to all Microsoft software for development and running a business. As an agency that works with a lot of start-ups we see this as a really valuable boost to companies wanting to create true sustainable and scalable businesses.

The scheme is also available to students under the DreamSpark programe to encourage innovation at every level.

An interesting session was also chaired by David Willets MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities & Skills. He seemed quite clued up and was talking about "innovations clusters" a lot and the theories of Michael Porter (with whom he worked with at the Monitor Group.

Splendid's work with easyJet and Microsoft is being showcased at the World Usability Day in Russia as a great example of innovative but usable user experience design.

The work was done in partnership with Flow Interactive and was part of a series of work to explore how new technology could open up new user experience options for easyJet. The work was also showcased at Mix08 in Las Vegas as well as being one of the launch projects for Microsoft SQL2008.

The project was designed using Microsoft Expression Suite and was developed using Silverlight and Virtual Earth.

Splendid are proud to have been listed number 37 in the 2008 Deloitte Technology Fast 50, a ranking of the 50 fastest growing technology companies in the UK.

The Deloitte awards rank British technology companies in terms of their rate of sales growth. To determine the fastest growing companies, Deloitte reviewed fiscal year revenues over the last five years, calculated the revenue growth percentage, and compared the growth of all the technology companies. Making this list is a significant accomplishment for Splendid.

"Because the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 measures sustained revenue growth over five years, being one of the 50 fastest growing technology companies in the UK is an impressive achievement. Growing the topline enough to make the list is especially meaningful during tough economic times" said Deloitte Technology partner Peter O'Donoghue for the London region. "Splendid deserves a lot of credit for its remarkable growth."

Alex Eicke, Co-founder at Splendid added "Splendid is delighted to be ranked in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50, especially in such turbulent competitive times. This has proved that Splendid possesses an increased ability to compete worldwide in very competitive and turbulent markets.

Photo credit Matt Harris

Last Friday, a few of us from splendid were lucky enough to go down to Brighton to attend dconstruct 08, a user experience conference that attracts experts in the field from all corners fo the globe. The pouring rain was not enough to put a dampener on the day, the impressive line-up didn't disappoint!
I had been looking forward to listening to Matt Biddulf and Matt Jones speak, the hugely amusing Jeremy Keith was a welcome surprise and took home my award for most entertaining! Other speakers included Danial Burka, creative director at digg and Tantek Celik. All of the speakers were very good, some interesting areas were addressed, all that will be very informative to the way we work at Splendid.

A few of our highlights...

Aleks Krotoski, our second speaker for the conference was a gamer. You may reasonably conclude from the name and preoccupation that we were about to hear a lecture given by a male speaker. However she turned out to be an astute female academic who's plight was to unite the world of gaming with the wider network of web designers and developers. She challenged the audience to consider the seemingly endless possibilities if the two somewhat self-serving disciplines combined powers to form an uber Voltron-esque, unstoppable force of interactivity and information. So does the elusive secret to alchemy lay before us? Maybe not, but we could make some freakin cool games such as Guitar Heropedia and World of Warcraftr.

Stephen Johnson talked about the use of information design and social networking that John Snow was able to use to pinpoint the outbreak of the cholera epidemic of London in the 1870's, drawing on this example Stephen was able to demonstrate to us the shear power of the social web and data.... Though we are long time rid of cholera it was the similarity of how such tools used in the physical world ran in such a close parrallel to how we use the social web today... The rise of Geo tagging in todays culture has opened up an entire new variable in which to interact with our environment, a true merging of the physical and online worlds. This information can be used to not only unite the world globally but refine our information into the community, thus help strengthining the networks that make up the world at it's most granular state.

Jeremy Keith was the final speaker at dconstruct.
He choose to tackle the rather large topic of 'The System Of The World' Beginning with a reference to Isaac Asimov's fictional science 'Psychohistory', I was skeptical that Jeremy was going to make a speech relevant to a room full of designers of the Social Web. But I quickly regained my confidence when he explained the science of Network Theory, whether man made or naturally occurring had a pattern of Nodes and Hubs. Hubs being a major connection and nodes being the weak ties in the network. This pattern has been proven through the Six degrees of separation experiment and can be seen alive in Social networking sites such as, Twitter or linkedin. Jeremy summed up giving us the secret formula for creating successfully social networking sites, there are known knowns

All in all it was a very productive and inspiring day, and Stacca got to hug a gorilla.

Look forward to seeing you all out there in the social web

We have been working with Technical Consultant Paul Curtis the Managing Director of unomee and formally Head of Architecture at easyJet.

"I've been working with the guys from Splendid to help them create their own agile development methodology, which fits in with the user-centred design approach that already works really well for them. I previously worked with the team during my time at easyJet so have been exposed to their highly successful design approach first hand as a client.

They wanted to introduce a more formal development methodology given the increasing complexity in the development work they are undertaking, to enable them to provide their clients with a great development experience alongside their well established design approach. I worked with the team to identify where their approach could be improved whilst being careful not to change the aspects that foster innovation and imaginative thinking. The result was an agile framework that ensured the same Splendid experience for their clients, but with more process for the development team to guarantee a quality end product, delivered on time.

The new approach has already been kicked off on one of their major projects, and is already demonstrating some real value. The customer is part of the team to ensure any questions are answered immediately, and by breaking the project down into short iterations, they are measuring progress with the client and demonstrating working solutions for them to test at the earliest possible opportunity.

So what do the dev team think about the new approach? Marco who is leading the development project had this to say; "Since we've adopted the agile approach on a current large development project (more news on this soon), the team have really enjoyed the process - the regular meetings and reviews ensure that the whole team feels part of the process and can contribute"

They will be rolling out this process on all of their future development projects to improve even further the quality of what their talented team produce." - Paul Curtis

It's been nearly a year of waiting but it's been worth it. Our Microsoft Surface unit arrived on Friday and boy was it heavy...

Apart from looking like a prop from Raiders of The Lost Ark, it was a pretty normal looking huge wooden case (as if we get these all the time...). It didn't take long for this packaging to be torn, sorry carefully removed to reveal the Surface unit in all it's glory. One of the most exciting bits is the standard Microsoft mouse and keyboard that comes with the unit.

We then spent some time calibrating the unit and got practicing our gestures, and playing with some of the standard applications on the unit. We are working on some apps of our own so more news when we have finished.

If you are interested in a demo of the new Surface unit then please contact us and we would be happy to show you around this amazing piece of technology.

Well after a long long wait our Microsoft Surface unit is in the air and on its way to us at Splendid. We are all rather excited to get our hand on this new toy, I mean amazing business device...