Firetop

Last Thursday evening it was time to see if my party planning skills matched up to the task of organising the company Christmas do at Guanabara in London (Holborn). With over 300 attendees eating one of six different set menus over two sittings, plus multiple pre-paid drink vouchers to use for the rest of the evening, the administration alone was a major headache! However, the management at Guanabara were exceptionally efficient which made all the difference. I admit to being slightly concerned regarding the unquestioning attitude of the Guanabara staff during the preparations, but as my Brazilian colleague explained “only you British panic over small detailsâ€?… and I think we were pretty well prepared ourselves anyway. (more…)

This week BBC online reported on a survey criticising major websites for not doing enough to make their virtual presence accessible enough for the disabled. However I was puzzled by the BBC’s accompanying photograph of a man in a wheel chair using a computer, this puzzled me because being in a wheel chair doesn’t actually stop you browsing websites however they’ve been constructed. It’s the visually impaired who are affected by this matter, not people without use of their legs. The article went on ‘The World Health Organisation estimates that there are around 600 million disabled people worldwide, which represents about 10% of the world’s population’… OK yes they do, however, the WHO site also says that a much lower 2% of the world’s population are visually impaired. Further research shows that half of this 2% (1% of the world’s population) have cataracts and live in developing countries. (more…)

Eye tracking research studies are available from relatively few web technology companies. EyeTracking Inc are one such US based company, their eye tracking service enables customers to determine where an audience are most frequently looking, and within the context of a website - on screen as they browse page content. Data is obtained by fitting willing volunteers with head gear which, in my opinion, resembles some kind of medieval torture device, or the kid at school who got bullied for having a full head brace! In reality it has to be a bit cumbersome because it contains a series of cameras which track the movements of a user’s eyes as they read web pages. The tracking provides a ‘heat map’ of hot and cold areas of a web page with hot (red) being most read. For companies employing eye tracking researchers the resulting data is massively helpful in planning site layout. (more…)

Mozilla Firefox is clearly the largest rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser; my own recent analysis put its use at 22% of the 3.5 million audience I sampled (up 2% on January 06). However, whilst popular with web users the browser is not making the life of online advertisers (or ad operations staff) any easier. Firefox is Adobe Flash enabled, but only enabled for standard in-page units such as a 728×90 leaderboard or 160×600 skyscraper. Anything that I class ‘enhanced’ rich media’ such as an ‘expand on mouse-over’ format will malfunction. (more…)

For the office, weddings or a black tie occasion I usually buy my suits, however, when you’re getting hitched it’s a bit pointless buying a suit with coat tails, waistcoat and cravat. With my wedding now only six weeks away, a trip to ‘Dapper’ in Dorking was called for at the weekend. A gentlemen’s suit hire shop, Dapper is not a huge store, a simple place with a small range of attire to hire or purchase. At first I was wondering if they did women’s clothing too; a shaven headed lady in front of us was choosing something (then I overheard her girlfriend say she was going to wear a dress and the penny dropped) – very modern for sleepy old Dorking. (more…)