blog

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	SKYCITY Adelaide
Disney Dance Off 2	Genesis Energy
New Zealand Office	Lend Lease
Macquarie Bank	Staff Updates
Colonial First State	Christmas Updates

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.