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.

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.

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!

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….

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

Jump over to the great little Twitter app – DivVoted.com – and follow the simple instructions to vote for your favourite most loved Web Applications. Vote every day and check back here where we’ll be blogging about more YoDiv and DivVoted related FOWA greatness as the event approaches.

It’s an excellent book and a must read, and meeting him really adds to the whole understanding. He’s a great guy.

I should have written a blog about how great the dinner was (thanks to Ryan Carson for the invite), but things have been busy here with the launch of www.divvoted.com and some great client sites.

However, yesterday Mr. Ferriss turned up in a video interview with Robert Scoble, and reaffirmed how key some of his principles are to the ways in which we run our businesses.

At the core of his thoughts, is the measurement of the value for the work you put in. Being an agency, this is key. We measure, and bill, time from our creatives and developers, and have fixed a value for this.
This value reflects not only on our work, but also on the way our clients work with us, and there are some key points that could help in the saving of time. The problem of course, is how to educate, but hey, that is why we have a blog(!!).

You can watch the full video below the jump, but here are the key points:

• Make things better. Decrease the inputs and improve the quality of the outputs. Simplify (and in his case outsource) the objectives and the ways that they are delivered.
• Clearly define the objectives. Spend more time on this and the whole process will be much much quicker. In his words: “Massive action without clearly defined objectives is a form of laziness.”
• Email. Use it wisely. Learn how to use email effectively and for the correct purposes. Do not generate email for the sake of it. Restrict it, and value each email, thus making each email really matter. The same goes for checking / acting on email. Don’t sit at your desk checking email simply to ’simulate forward motion’; if you are doing this, you are treading water.

There is so much more in the book and the video. Check it out yourself, we’ll be thinking more about the purposeful use of time, and the tools (email / IM / Basecamp) we use with our clients.

Here is the full video from FastCompany.tv

Twitter is a *massive* microblogging service that let’s you post updates of 140 characters from web, SMS or IM. There are loads of creative uses of Twitter (a plant that tweets when it needs watering !) and here’s a new one.

www.divvoted.com

Designed and developed in less than 4 days by the team here at OC Vision, DivVoted.com is one of those great in-house projects that let’s you really flex the development muscle. We needed a site that was agile and quick to build, scalable (hey, it could get busy) and cheap to run. We knew that with our range of skills we could deliver all of this (and a great design, thanks Wez) in a short time while still keeping the client projects running.

DivVoted.com is:

• Built on Ruby on Rails, a great agile framework that lets you build dynamic websites quickly. We have been learning this for a while, and are getting pretty good at creating funky sites.
• Talking to the Twitter API. API’s let you talk to other websites to get data. The Twitter API is a way of our site reading timelines, sending messages and storing ‘Tweets’. We have to do this in a clever way using a queue so as not to overload Twitter.
• Using a database. For this project we chose MySQL – had to keep the costs in check.
• Hosted on MediaTemple. Media Temple have a great ‘Grid’ of servers, which allow our sites to run efficiently at a low cost, and scale to meet demand.
• Using ‘Cloud’ services. We use cloud computing services from Amazon AWS to grab the thumbnails and store some images. This saves us resource and therefore cost.
• Using jQuery, neat Javascript framework with some great effects (try hiding the island).
• … and finally. Built by the talented and brilliant people of OC Vision.

So why not show your favourite sites some love; DivVoted is great for showing off your latest designs, or checking out other peoples votes for inspiration.

OC Vision worked within the boundaries of Government standards to develop the XHTML and CSS, allowing the in-house web team to plug the delivered templates into their own Content Management System.

OC Vision were challenged with designs, not typical for a Gov agency, that needed to be compliant to the latest website standards.

Our customers are often sailing, and racing on the seas covered by the MCA, so it’s nice to see our work delivering to an often undervalued emergency service.