The Godiva Festival’s new website was launched last week as preparations for this year’s festival begin to gather speed.

The new site includes a wealth of web 2.0 technologies including streaming video, user galleries and blogs. Additional functionality including streaming audio, podcasts and a community forum will also be made available in the build up to the big day.

The festival itself takes place on the 3rd – 5th July at War Memorial Park and the site will provide visitors with key festival information via a comprehensive “Godiva Guide”, but will also act as a social hub for the Coventry community throughout the year.

Dave Wright, Marketing Executive at CV One, had this to say of our work:

“Working with HeadRed has been extremely rewarding. Not only were we impressed with the very high standard of their work, but also their commitment and dedication to the project.

Their customer service has been second to none, with all staff being extremely responsive to queries, dealing with them in a very polite and helpful manner. It has been a pleasure working with HeadRed, as they have clearly understood our needs, and exceeded our expectations on both the Godiva Festival and Create Your Coventry websites.
We certainly will consider them for future projects.“

Visit the new site at: http://www.godivafestival.co.uk/

Hailed as a potential rival to search giant Google, new computation knowledge engine “Wolfram Alpha” has gone live to the public.

The new system was invented by British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram and is aiming to change the way people use online data.
Instead of presenting a list of third party websites where one can find the data they require, the engine provides users with direct answers to queries by grabbing data from databases and consulting feeds of relevant information.

Wolfram Alpha can be asked known facts, such as the height of mountains, or be asked to generate new information such as up to date figures for a nation’s GDP.

Dr.Wolfram does not want the engine to be referred to as a direct competitor to Google. Instead, he describes it as a way for people to get more out of the information on the web.

“Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime.”

Time will tell how influential Wolfram Alpha will become. Will it change the way we view the web? Or will it be yet another case of the emperor’s new clothes?

Try it for yourself at: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Article source: BBC Online, 26/05/2009.

There’s a big rumour doing the rounds at the moment that Google are on the verge of securing a deal to acquire the Internet’s new golden child, Twitter.
The price hasn’t been confirmed but one can only assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.

Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based partially on overvalued Facebook stock. Google would be paying in cash and/or publicly valued stock, which is equivalent to cash. So whatever the final acquisition value might be, it can’t be compared apples-to-apples with the Facebook deal.

So why would Google want Twitter? Industry experts have been arguing for some time that Twitter’s real value is in search. It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn’t even have a horse in the game.

If the rumours prove to be accurate, then it would be a brilliant deal for Google – the value of Twitter is only going to go up over time. And it will be Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s second sale to Google – they sold Blogger to them just five years ago. But there’s one big question – where’s Microsoft in all this? Letting Twitter go to Google only hurts them, badly, in the long term search game. This is an asset they need to be competing for aggressively if they have any hope of playing more than a bit part in the future battle for search supremacy.

Evidence continues to mount that despite our slowing economy the web continues to be a key driver of both survival and success.
Research by Internet firm, Easynet Connect, has revealed that nearly half of small firms believe the Internet will be the most important tool to help them survive the recession.

The study showed that many small businesses are using the Internet to cut costs. Almost three quarters of respondents said they will use the web to boost their business profile, while 58% said they will use the Internet to break into new domestic and overseas markets. These findings have been supported by the statistic that over 6,000 small firms are joining micro-blogging website, Twitter, every day with the vast majority doing so to cut marketing costs and help further promote their business.

In other news, online sales were up by 13% in February when compared to the same month in 2008, according to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index. It seems that more and more consumers are using the web to help their money go further.

The Conservative party yesterday implemented an audacious online ambush of Alistair Darling’s budget, with the aim of buying up Google keywords and directing internet users to its “live rebuttal” of the chancellor’s speech.

The Tories plan was to buy up budget-related Google keywords as the chancellor mentions them in his speech from 12.30pm, in an online advertising campaign the opposition dubbed a “live rebuttal” of the government’s economic plan for the coming year.

Their strategy was so that when web users entered budget-related keywords into Google’s search engine, they were instead directed towards online ads for the Conservatives. These ads in turn linked them to the Conservative party website and their response to Darling’s budget.

“We understand that it’s important for us to serve up our views in different formats, and Google is one of the first places people go to when trying to find information on a given subject,” - says the shadow culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt.

“Gordon Brown’s budgets are notorious for not revealing what is in the small print, so we will be using Google pay-per-click to help people see the real impact of the budget on their family finances. This is a perfect example of how political parties should be using the internet – to present their arguments to the public and help inform the debate.“

Article source: The Guardian Online, 22/04/2009.

Only a week after the UK version of Google’s Street View was launched there are now calls to close the service down from disgruntled members of the public.

In news released today a formal complaint regarding Street View has been sent to the Information Commissioner (ICO), which cites more than 200 reports of persons identifiable via the service.

After its much-vaunted release last week the street-mapping facility has come under heavy criticism from Privacy International. Indeed, it has been forced to pull a raft of images after receiving complaints from the public.

In the days that followed its launch the furore over the new system failed to dissipate and this formal lobby marks a major stumbling block in what has been a multi-million dollar project for Google.

The official line from Google’s spokespeople is that anybody who is unhappy with their data being captured can “opt out” from the system, although they are refusing calls to pull the system altogether.

Expect this one to rumble on for some time, but in the privacy vs technology debate the outcome of this case could prove a defining moment moving forward.