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All articles submitted by » Dan Griffey

Nov10All At Sea

We are now officially all at sea. Well, our clients are, as the team at OC Vision are firmly on dry land, fresh off the ferry from the start of the 2008 Vendée Globe.

With our Volvo Ocean Race clients (Team Russia, Green Dragon, PUMA Ocean Racing) tied up in Cape Town awaiting their restart to Kochi, it is the turn of the solo-ists to take to the seas.

30 IMOCA 60’s left the French port of Les Sables D’Olone yesterday facing 26,000 miles of ocean, solo, without assistance.

British teams have had good results in the last events (Ellen MacArthur 2nd in 2001, Mike Golding 3rd in 2005) and our client campaigns are among the favourites for this, the most closely contested, edition.

OC Vision are providing the full suite of digital services to Mike Golding (www.mikegolding.com) and BT Seb Josse (www.btsebjosse.com). Both sites feature the usual array of news, results, analysis and tracking; Powered by our own Content Server CMS with managed hosting from Virtual Internet, we’ll be following the teams closely, day and night, each and every position report.

Check out the sites, subscribe to the RSS, or sit back and watch the videos arrive via satellite, as the story of this the most classic of adventure races, unfolds over the winter.

Nov05The web keeps elections alive

In the light of the election snowstorm that has been happening overnight (or Tuesday, for our American colleagues) what is emerging this morning is not only a landmark new Black-American leader, and a time for change in the biggest of the world super-powers, but also a time for web technology to flex it’s news muscles.

As we awake in the UK news websites across the world break their traditional layouts to proclaim OBAMA and the Democrat win as a glorious masthead. The Wall Street Journal is even using italics!

Technologies are abound. Brightcove players are sweating to deliver the acceptance speeches to the world audience, and the fantastic BBC iPlayer has it’s moment with a glorious ‘large’ video welcoming readers to the BBC News website.

The New York Times has gone to the cloud. Maybe this was a last minute decision, but they are wholly adopting the use of a CDN (Content Delivery Network, in this case Amazon S3) which is distributing their coloured maps and ’swing’ graphics to news front pages across the world. Latest spot on The Times home page in the UK.

As the internet throbs with the news and waking nations, it’s pretty good to see that web technologies are moving as fast as democracy. Obama himself has used the internet, and some pretty skilled people behind the scenes, to power his win, and it’s great to see technologies often seen as the prevail of the geek-orati in the forefront of news delivery this morning.

NYT Syndicated Map (served from Amazon of course)


Oct30YoDiv News: US Customers benefit from cheaper prices!!

Over at YoDiv.com there’s some good news for our US friends and customers…..

Thanks to the glorious current economic conditions, and the falling value of the pound against the US Dollar, we are, err, pleased to remind our US customers that this equates to almost a 15% discount on our pricing. That means all the usual great XHTML and CSS work for a *really great* price.

Submit your first job in our easy to use studio, and take advantage of better rates!

Oct01Here comes the winter madness…

If you are in any way interested in Sailing / Adventure, then welcome to silly season. A bumper winter of crazy boats, teams and solo adventurers about to take to the seas and head off around the world.

Here at OC Vision we have a legacy of excellent sailing websites, working with Ellen MacArthur, Team ABN AMRO and other solo and crewed adventures.

This winter the two big ones, The Vendée Globe (Solo, non-stop) and the Volvo Ocean Race (crewed, with stops) set off from European ports on their world tours.
And for us that means a bumper set of site launches and new projects.

First to depart, and the focus of this post, is the Volvo Ocean Race, and that means this month we have been launching new sites for the three teams we are proud to be working for.

Our full website launches are www.teamrussia.org and www.greendragonracing.com. Both sites are designed and built by OC Vision, using Expression Engine as their fully featured Content Management / Member Management Systems.

Building on the experience of working with TEAM ABN AMRO in the last race assisting in their media management and distribution, our new site launch for PUMA OCEAN RACING is a custom coded (check back to this blog for the ‘How web built’ article coming soon!) site that manages Video and Image content, allowing hi res media to be downloaded by press and employees.

The VOLVO OCEAN RACE kicks off in Alicante, Spain this weekend.

We’ll be posting about our Vendée Globe team sites in the coming weeeks….

Oct01Go on, Brighten it up…

Last week saw the release of another new OC Vision designed, built and hosted site for DIY giant B&Q.

Following our successful work on B&Q’s Olympic team sponsorship (www.teambandq.com), we were asked to put forward our proposal for the microsite to accompany their forthcoming winter PR campaign.

The resulting website (I don’t think a site this big can still be called a microsite!) features downloadable how-to style guides, interactive discussions and event a chance to submit somewhere for a free B&Q makeover.

Featured celebrity Zoe Ball adds her thoughts on brightening-up on a budget, and will soon be showing us what she did with few quid and trip to B&Q.

Check out the site at www.diy.com/brightenupbritain

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