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December 2007

December 1st, 2007 by Gruden

You may have noticed we took a bit of time with this update. The Christmas rush caught us a bit early, like six months ago… But in the spirit of Christmas, I’ve been a bit more generous with this update, so I’ve got A LOT of stuff to talk about!

China Office
Recently our valiant leader (see, it isn’t Todd who writes these things!) took a visit to the city of Qingdao in the Shandong province in China to talk shop with the Qingdao Software Park. The Chinese were very receptive to his irresistible charm and the work we produce and invited us to set up an office there! …and Todd had a great time as well by the sounds of it!

After actually seeing the park, there was no question about opening an office there. So with the help of Xiaodong Wang (Dong) our new GM for China, we’ll have an office up and running early next year. Dong comes to us from services vendor giant EDS, with an extensive array of diploma’s and degrees under his belt as well as a decade of industry experience. Welcome Dong! Gruden now really is international and will have offices on three continents in January 08!

Qingdao is about a 1 hour flight north of Shanghai and is a really nice beachside city. From all reports, this place rocks… the people are fantastic & the facilities are the best available. But more importantly, it provides a strategic / solid base for our future expansion into Asia.

There’s a number of reasons for the China office and on the top of the list is the access to new talent – we’ll be able to expand our ever growing interactive team and increase our core skills like .NET & J2EE, mobile development and our Flash/ Flex & ColdFusion. We’re also in the process of expanding our services to include 3D animation, outsourced 3D Rendering Services and more enterprise level development with products such as LiveCycle from Adobe.

Disney Dance Off 2
A huge round of applause for the Gruden Interactive Team! Disney Dance Off II (DDOII), launched last month and is getting some major traffic and buzz online…It was a truly epic job for the team, who created & executed a great idea, worked some long hours (BIG thanks!) and with a delivery that went smoothly across Phases 1 and 2.

DDOII is the sequel to the Astra Award winning Dance Off viral game we built for Disney to promote the newly released High School Musical 2 movie (and to get a heap of new users to the Disney site!). DDOII is similar to DDOI, but on steroids! Phase One of DDOII had stacks of new moves added, as well as new music, sound effects and cool special effects like the Matrix effect for your dance moves! Big props to our designer Abe who reviewed real dancing clips to get the routines just right – those late night Rage sessions do work!!! Nice one Abe.

Phase Two was where things got really cool with the inclusion of a multiplayer component; players can now create joint routines together. With two dancers, two routines and some special touches, you can get some pretty funky moves and dance routines down. We’ve also included an area to save routines for viewing and sharing with friends and a leader board to compete against other players. DDOII also sets a standard for online Flash multiplayer gaming by using the latest version of Adobe Flash Media Server and Flash.

The game has been a truly spectacular effort and everyone is ecstatic with what we’ve achieved. (Well done everyone!) Check the game out on the Disney site!

New Zealand Update
Our new GM in New Zealand, Rob Cooke is powering with some excellent projects underway and more importantly a new office! Rob comes to us with a wealth of experience with major brands and companies including PepsiCo, Bridgestone, Nissan, NCR and a number of other high profile companies.

We’re also happy to announce that Gruden NZ is moving to new offices by January 08! The exact location of the new Gruden batcave is still hush hush but we can tell you that it will be in the digital hub of Auckland just off Newton Gully. As you read this, big fat data cables are being laid into the funky new space that Gruden New Zealand will call home for the next few years.

Rob is feverously getting the pieces in place to allow for a smooth transition into the new office, and says “we’re really excited at the prospect of a new home for both ourselves and our clients in the heart of Auckland. We will have new paint and new furniture in place over the Christmas break with our move-in date around mid-January. Then we will have room for our existing team to feel at home, but also room for the new faces we are looking to have join us in 2008. Sweet!”

On the subject of Kiwiland, the Straker, Gruden and Adobe sponsored ‘Web on the Piste’ seminar was a huge success! All of those at the seminar said they will be back again next year! With around 100 high quality attendees, 21 top local and International speakers, awesome sessions, the most amazing location, great social events and some skiing to boot – it really was the best conference of the year!

Check out some of the FaceBook photo’s here. Feel free to “friend” some of the team while you’re logged in too!

Completed Projects

Macquarie Bank is about to send the new GSP Product selector live which sees our work with the Mac Bank team continue over a number of projects. GSP is an awesome Flex based product selector designed to help Macquarie Bank investors understand the many products they offer.

Gruden produced a creative design concept and HTML templates for the core website shell and designed & developed an interactive product selector to showcase the many funds available. The application ties in seamlessly with their backend internal systems, providing live updates and data feeds as they are made.

It’s really exciting for us to see the emerging use of Adobe Flash and Flex based applications & tools in the financial industry. So for those that haven’t heard of Flex, here’s a quick update: Flex enables the creation of high-performance applications that run on all major browsers, to create an exciting & engaging user experience that effectively communicates information in a user friendly way; with the added bonus of slick looking graphic interfaces and dynamic navigation.

Flash is no longer the sole domain of web animation and online media advertising – its proving its effectiveness with industries that once shied away from that type of technology. It allows companies to deliver intuitive interfaces with a higher completion rate than typical languages today.

Colonial First States’ Colliers Banner Campaign has recently been launched. Working together Colonial First State and Colliers are offering a new product called “Colonial First State Colliers Global Property Securities Fund”. The fund was created through an alliance with Colliers International, one of the leading real estate organisations in the world.

Of course, we were there to help with the web & online strategy requirements! We were tasked with creating and presenting high level themes, developing a set of graphic concepts and refining them down till they were just right.

SKYCITY Adelaide is South Australia’s only casino destination and the city’s most exciting gaming and entertainment venue. Gruden was tasked to redevelop the home page and calendar pages to improve the way users navigate to the content on the site. We also reworked the templates to gain an improvement in their search engine rankings & SEO (search engine optimisation). While we were at it we also gave the main SKYCITY Adelaide homepage a fresh look with a spiffy new redesign. Hope you like it!

There’s been some more great work out of the New Zealand office with the GenNet Intranet. Genesis Energy is New Zealand’s largest energy retailer with a diverse electricity generation portfolio and more than 700,000 residential and SME electricity and gas customers..We’d already done some work on their customer support forms and they invited us back to make a few solid changes to their Intranet.

Gruden re-worked the existing Intranet Home Page and redesigned all the screen elements. An important consideration for us was reflecting the Genesis Energy master brand and supporting the public site design, (www.genesisenergy.co.nz) whilst clearly defining each content area to create a uniform visual browsing experience for the user.

We also preformed a few other tweaks and enhancements, like a new search functionality. Previous searches of the Staff Directory within the intranet had taken the user out to an external application. The search facility that Gruden developed and integrated means that users can now login to Gennet and search the Staff Directory without leaving the Gennet site, dramatically increasing site usability for this business tool.

More news to come on this one because of a second phase of the project! Look forward to the update next year!

The good people at Lend Lease selected Gruden again to work closely with head office and 10 of their retail centre locations around Australia. We love working with Lend Lease, and have been looking forward to this project for a while now! Our task this time was to strategically direct the functional requirements and new creative design for the new centre websites – a big project that really needed a strong creative backing to be successful.

The previous Lend Lease Retail websites were developed based on the style of the Lend Lease corporate sites and were launched over five years ago. The aim of this project was to align these sites with the current Lend Lease Retail brand & target audience and to increase the consumer focus & relevance to each individual centre location.

For the project we redesigned the ‘master’ brand website along with 10 centre location websites and to make sure we got it right from the start we conducted an in-depth review which included stakeholder workshops, competitive reviews and technical specifications documenting.

The challenge for the centre websites was to produce a concept that could maintain consistency of the brand across all centre locations, whilst showcasing individual features to each location.

Our fantastic staff!

Of course, in order to manage all of these projects plus much more, we needed to have the right people. We’re growing at a massive rate so we’re grateful to have so many wonderful new (and talented!) faces here in the office – BIG Welcome to Guy, Bernard, Jemma, Melissa, Dong and Adam. (Not forgetting everyone else here in the offices for a truly spectacular year of hard work on great projects with excellent results).

So there you go! A pretty generous update to round off the year. Stay tuned for the next GSpot with news about a huge ShadoCMS driven media site and major Straker release which promises to be a major overhaul with a stack of new features.

We’re also got some pretty nice / big things in the pipeline, so the best way to keep up to date and hear about these new projects is via our new Newsletter! Yes, be surprised! (I am) We’re going to attempt to send out a quarterly newsletter keeping you up to date on Gruden niceties and things that are just cool & that you should hear about!

Lastly before we go, please remember that our Offices will be closed down between Christmas and New Year (starting 21st December through to the 1st of January (AU) 2nd January (NZ).

From everyone at Gruden, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a safe and smashing New Year!! To all of our clients, we thank you for your continued support and belief in us over the past year, we’re all gearing up for delivering you more outstanding results next year!

Ciao!
Guy Incognito.

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July 2007

July 1st, 2007 by Gruden

Welcome back G-spotters!

Okay, okay. I know we said regular updates, and I thought I was so smart with that opening line about “preceding and regular updates” in my last post, but even I’m starting to feel pangs of sympathy for the last G-spot editor. Maybe we shouldn’t have come down so heavy on him for not updating the site so often! Its hard work developing awesome web solutions AND writing about how good they are ;-)

Web on the Piste

So what’s hot this month? Web on the Piste is hot, hot, hot! Well actually, it’ll probably be really cold… but anyway, Web on the Piste is a Rich Internet Technologies Conference scheduled for the 22nd – 23rd of August, 2007 at the ultimate in venues, Queenstown, New Zealand.

Straker & Gruden are bringing world leaders in Rich Internet and associated technologies for 2 days of Flex, AJAX, SPRY, AIR and Flash as well as covering server-side back end technologies such as ColdFusion, .Net, Java, Silverlight and sessions on mobile based content delivery!

With an international cast of speakers including key members from Adobe and Microsoft, the event is a must do for anyone working in or looking to use Rich Internet technologies. Also if you love your skiing & adventure spots, there a stack of activities such as bungee jumping and jetboat rides plus a heap more.

Queenstown is the ultimate winter venue in New Zealand and quite possibly the southern hemisphere and Web on the Piste promises to be awesome! You can not miss this event! Check out the Web on the Pistesite for more info now!

ARIA Awards

It’s that time again! For five years now Gruden has been working with ARIA to deliver the voting system for the Annual ARIA Awards. We’ve been preparing over the last few months to see the process kick off for 2007! We’re in the first phase of the awards which allow the record companies nominate the artists (& upload all assets) to be included in the awards.

Shortly to follow is the actual voting period that takes us right up to the awards night..! Over the years we’ve fine tuned and feature enhanced the platform to deliver an outstanding product that continually delivers. Working this year again with Mark Pope & Susan Robertson, assures that it will be a hugely successful event.

Think Brick

Whats up next? How about a joint effort with our mates across the ditch Tango Communications? The Thinkbrick.com.au website has gone live now; did you know you can get funky pink mortar to go with bright blue bricks on your new place? You can even see a demonstration on the site of how it would look with a cool application we built!

Tango created the design which Gruden implemented on the Straker Shado CMS. I reckon Tango did an excellent job with the bold use of colour and negative space on the site to make it look really special.

Cool Stuff in the pipeline!

We’ve finished some spiffy new templates for a big project Vero has in the pipeline. It’s a bit hush hush at the moment, but as soon as it’s ready to roll we’ll let you know all about it!

Some huge projects are coming along for Disney; one is for the new High School Musical 2 movie that will be hitting the shelves later this year. Also a number of Interactive games & campaigns and all sorts of great stuff is being worked on!

If you haven’t already had a go, we’ve recently uploaded our Paddock Dash game that we created when we opened our NZ office I think it’s very fitting!! Can you beat the high score??

In the next update we’ll be going talking about a few neat projects in more detail, but in summary work is progressing nicely on a Macquarie Bank Flex application for their Global Equity Markets Group. The app will dramatically improve self service, increase awareness of their products and in display this in a rich and engaging way. Full story once its launched!

Our work with Lend Lease continues with the redesign and development of all their retail stores around Australia. Lend Lease are an awesome client to work with and we’re really looking forward to getting things moving with a new upcoming project that will be huge!

New General Manager for New Zealand!

Last but not least I’d like to welcome our new General Manager in the New Zealand office! Rob Cooke..! Rob was previously working as the Group Account Director of TBWA in NZ and has a wealth of talent to offer both the company and the NZ office. We’ve got big plans for the NZ office and with Rob spearheading these; we’re bound to see huge things there shortly!

That’s it for now folks! But stay tuned for the next exciting update which is going to include plenty of new clients and projects including Colonial First State, more Disney projects and no doubt updates on Web on the Piste!

PS congratulations Lindsey! :)

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April 2007

April 1st, 2007 by Gruden

You’ll see that this is the April update of G-Spot, which precedes May, which means this section of the site is getting regular updates again! Its hard not to though, as we have a stack of recently completed projects and fantastic new clients that we’ve been working with, as well as the fact we have a shiny new website to put them on, it would be ‘e-crime’ not to keep you up to date with what’s going on at Gruden.

Allow myself to introduce … myself. I’m ‘Guy Incognito’. The other fellow who was entrusted with these updates has failed to deliver and subsequently he has been demoted. I’d say these updates are my ‘job’ but Grudenites are generally a pretty positive bunch and we actually like coming here to put projects together, ‘it isn’t really work you know?’

So, what have we delivered recently? I’m wrapped to report the big news first. The indefatigable commerce team have worked to the bone and delivered the new, feature rich AusTender application for the Department of Finance & Administration! So what is AusTender??

“AusTender is a whole of government solution that provides a centralised procurement management facility for 150 Commonwealth agencies and 60,000 suppliers. It is also the primary compliance mechanism for these agencies to meet their obligations under Australia’s free trade agreements with other nations.”

This has been a simply spectacular effort from the team over the last year with a huge effort put in by everyone to get the system live and running. The project was delivered in partnership with the Department of Commerce where we essentially rebuilt the system from the ground up. There’s a case study (coming shortly) you can have a read over explaining it in depth or alternately visit the website at www.tenders.gov.au.

Some other big news came our way recently where our good client Disney Channel put us forward for an award… Unbeknown to us until it was in the list of the finalists, the Disney Dance Off campaign for the High School Musical was nominated for and subsequently won an Astra Award for “Most Creative use of Technology” (for a consumer application). Well done to all in the Disney team!

More successes include the delivery of a new design and templates for Sparke Helmore Lawyers, which encompassed a full overhaul of the existing design and new templates for their CMS driven website. Check it out at www.sparke.com.au.

We’ve deployed new sites for Lend Lease’s Hyatt Coolum brand and developed three sub-brand sites, which you can see here. Personally, I’m really impressed with the team’s flash work on these pages, the effort that goes into them is spectacular.

Also launched is a new set of templates and a revised design for ASIC(The Australian Securities and Investments Commission). Working with our partner PTG Global, we helped deliver a solution to ASIC that aims to make it easier for visitors to navigate, whilst reflecting a more contemporary look and feel for the site.

Our friends at Macquarie Bank have launched their new product called ‘Prime CFD’s’ where we designed the site & built HTML templates for them handed to their internal dev team to implement on their CMS. For those traders / investors out there, if you haven’t heard about Prime, I strongly recommend that you check this product out. It’s going to be huge. We’re currently working on another site at the moment and really excited to be involved with Macquarie Bank. They’ve got some exciting projects under development utilising cutting edge web technologies such as Adobe Flex.

I got word first hand from HQ Consulting that “They were expecting something good, but not that good!” and plenty of praise for our approach to project management to avoid all the unnecessary stresses of lack of communication on projects like web development.

Other success includes the office getting a PS3 at last – Thanks directors, the team loves it..! While we’re talking ‘team’, I’d also like to take the opportunity to introduce some new members, Joel: ColdFusion developer and challenger to Mark’s self imposed title of ‘Gran Turismo King’. Judy: ColdFusion specialist with a multitude of skills in other technologies. Esmond: Gruden’s best dressed developer with years of CF experience under his belt. Deniss: our newest Flash specialist who’s wrapped that he’s ‘finally getting paid to do what he used to do for fun at home’ and Fiona: project manager extraordinaire! Welcome guys and girls!

It’s a bit worrying actually, we only have a few seats spare but we still want to fill them with talented people here in Australia and abroad in our New Zealand office. So if you’re out there let us know! Check out what we’re currently looking for on our Jobs page.

There’s some big news in the pipeline that I’ll be sharing with you next month… So till then!

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March 2007

March 1st, 2007 by Gruden

So how about this??! Its already 2007… Crazy Stuff! But it must be a special year…. Yes, it’s only taken 10 years, but we’ve finally re-designed our website!! Hope you all like it – I think it shows you all a little more of what we do?! Just quietly, I think our old website stood the test of time pretty darn well – let’s hope that the next redesign isn’t as far off as the last…

As you could imagine a lot has happened since the last edition of G-Spot, (sorry guys.. soooo late). Unfortunately I felt that the update had to coincide with the “launch of the website”. So you know, I was saying “Ohhh well, we’ll just wait till the new website’s up before I announce that…” – so lots to talk about now!

Anyway, our NZ office is now well established with some great people working over there with some even cooler clients! We’ve recently launched a new sign up process for Genesis Energy and we’ve also re-designed Fine Wine Delivery Companies new Budget Wine website called ‘Best Wine Buys‘. I reckon it looks pretty damn sexy and apparently it’s been very successful with a huge increase in orders being placed on the site…! Nice..?!

There’s also a number of new projects currently under development in EnZud, which will see us designing and developing some new RIA’s, websites and marketing campaigns for a number of new & high profile clients.

Our government work is powering along with a number of new departments coming on board. Work on the new Tenders website for Commerce and DOFA is getting close to delivery with a heap new functionality and features. We’ve also started working with ASIC & FIDO on a number of new initiatives. Bits and pieces from the Department of Corrections, DITR and Privacy NSW are also underway.

The Disney team have been pumping out some really cool stuff lately with some big wins and great results from our campaigns, games and concepts. One of these is the new Dance Off game that we created for their new hit movie called High School Musical. This was a huge success and is now being rolled out throughout the rest of the Disney world websites – a first for Australia!

The new look Disney.com.au website went live recently, so make sure that you check that out and while you’re there, also have a look at the new Disney Desktop that was recently launched. The desktop is a site within itself where we deliver stuff (sorry) to the kids! Lots of cool and exciting projects on the horizon for Disney, so make sure you visit the site regularly!

We’ve been developing a number of new widgets for both Yahoo!7 and Disney, now we’ve got a few of those under our belt, we’re pumping out more all the time for other clients. We’ve also launched a heap of new sites, some of which are; Jackson’s Landing & Twin Waters for Lend Lease; redesign for Pharmaxis, Menulog, myrate; development of a statistical reporting application for Betfair client; Pymble Ladies College, Woolloomooloo Catering and a heap of other stuff..!

Under development at the moment is a new site for Macquarie Bank, redesign for Sparke Helmore’s website (which sees our legal clients grow), a new product site for Chandler McLeod; an intranet redesign for Lend Lease; development of a new Intranet for Hardi Nursing Homes; Lend Lease Shopping Centre’s online re-branding and a heap of other stuff that I’m sure you really couldn’t care about..!

But one last thing that I have to mention, is the release of the NSW Government Website Style Directive. Gruden was part of the consortium, where we provided HTML templates, consulting and pretty much anything development related was provided by Gruden.

“So what is it? From the horses mouth: “It is intended to create a consistent and user-friendly experience by standardising key elements to assist the public in getting the information they need fast”.

In short, it means that all NSW government websites need to meet this directive and ensure that their own sites are designed, structured, accessed and built in what is provided in the guide. For more info, here’s the official website.

So everyone, I’ve probably exhausted you all with boring chit chat, but all I can say is go check out some of the stuff we’ve done (links above) and hopefully that’ll more entertaining that my ramble here!

But before I go? lots happening in Gruden land these days and we’re constantly looking for good people to join the team, so if you or if you know of anyone that would fit the build at el Gruden – please get them to get in contact with us! We’re continually looking for new staff and paying way too much in recruitment fee’s..! Hence for setting up this page!

I’m not sure about you guys, but Christmas is a distant memory that only feels like a few weeks ago. It’s now coming to the end of the financial year and the next G-Spot will be way over due by then..! lets hope you hear from us before then?!

Till next time!

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