We agreed terms for a new (much larger) office space this week, which we’ll be moving into at the beginning of June, so more items on the to-do list

We’re not fussy about syntax, so PHP or Ruby (both even!) are suitable, what we’re really after is someone who knows how to structure good, lean and testable code and just “gets” patterns like MVC. We’ll teach you Ruby. You will need a very good knowledge of JavaScript and the famed HTML 5 though, our projects are very cross platform in nature and this is a key aspect of that.

We’re in the process of relocating to a nice new office space in Macclesfield, a 20 minute train trip out of Manchester, and you’ll need to be able to work from there.

Salary isn’t fixed yet, we’re open to being impressed.

We’re a growing company, with a loyal client base who enjoy working with us. We believe in being nice, having fun, and doing things that matter. We’re huge coffee geeks, food obsessives and have the most eclectic taste in music you’ll ever come across.

If you like our work, and fancy working on some exciting, high profile projects that set the bar, please email us!

With last night marking the fourth of our Digital Edge meetups, a group that’s now exceeding 60 members, we wanted to step things up a little. Our previous get-togethers and show and tell session had proved very successful, but there’s a real thirst for knowledge transfer in our adopted home town. We answered by launching the first Digital Edge presentation night, code named “the Edge Sessions”.

What a way to crack it off too, with Volker Hirsch taking time out of his incredibly busy life at RIM to give an inspiring talk on what mobile means and why it’s important to absolutely everyone producing digital media.

Reach, context and personalisation featured heavily, which really resonates with us. Our latest projects have incorporated a range of different personalisation mechanisms, from finite geolocation, connection speed and social status, whilst targeting a huge audience, concepts which Volker managed to encapsulate in a thoroughly engaged presentation.

As always, it was great to catch up with everyone and welcome even more new faces along. Many thanks go out to Inca, which proved to be a fantastic venue and will be the future home of Digital Edge. Next month we’ll have another guest speaker along, giving the digital community of Macclesfield more food for thought.

Also beneficially, the bulk of the “heavy” work is handled by a centralised API, proving cost effective for the client as we were able to turn the port around in less than a week.

Get it on the market place now »

The question is, how do you quantify the “adventurousness” of someone’s location? We came up with an algorithm that leverages the users proximity to a growing database of landmarks like mountains, forests, lakes, swamps, etc along with the users altitude to respond with an according discount.

The app passes the users current location to our API to work the discount out and also facilitates them requesting a coupon code via email. The coupons can be redeemed at any Toyota dealer, and the customer can walk out with a brand new Rav4 at a potentially fantastic price.

For the dealers to validate the coupons, we built a responsive admin tool, allowing them to use any device (small screen or large) to enter coupon codes and find out the necessary details to validate the coupon and discount. The same admin tool provides Toyota’s marketing department with statistics on the success of the campaign, how many discounts have been issued and the total value of claimed discounts.

Both the app and the admin tool are multi-lingual, with Dutch, French and English versions available.

We’re chuffed to finally be able to talk about the app and can’t wait to start seeing people using it. Meanwhile we’ve begun work on a range of equally exciting projects for BIC, Women’s Squash, a global pharmaceutical brand and a popular milk shake. Stay tuned for more updates!

Get Adventure Discount on the App Store now.

Our goal with delivering the press office was to eleviate the load that the comms team experience when dealing with the press. Traditionally they’d receive phone or email requests and have to deliver releases and assets like photography and video manually, a laborious task that doesn’t need to exist.

So we set about creating a digital press office, where photography and video can be uploaded in their raw state, and are then trimmed and resized suitably. HD video is automatically encoded for web playback, an epic task in itself. Journalists then simply have to sign in, and can use a comprehensive range of criteria to filter assets and find whatever they need. We migrated all Sport Englands existing content too, so it really was a smooth hand over. Sport England can now add new Press Releases (which can be easily linked with related assets) and journalists can be notified via email or RSS. They can even subscribe to filtered feeds, allowing for them to only request notifications of new items matching specific tags or search queries. No phone calls or email requests necessary.

All new content is automatically pushed to their Twitter and Facebook account too, providing journalists with 2 more channels to stay up-to-date and helping Sport England garner attention. We even added powerful analytics, so SE can gauge just how effective their press assets are.

Finally, to make things even more effortless, we added in functionality for Sport England to receive and republish content coming from the governing bodies (~ 40) that they fund. This enable Sport England to more effectively showcase how their funding is being used, and also gives the NGBs a strong channel for promotion and increase in reach.

Take a look

• Dan Donald, Ben Olden, Marc Remblance, Volker Hirsch, Andrew Kirwin, Pete Cain, Andrew Doyle, ADOmedia and the guys at Matmi all made us feel super welcome on arriving at our  newly adopted home, top guys who really know their stuff!
• Everyone who came to the first and second Digital Edge (too many to name, but you know who you are!), for proving that Macclesfield has an outstanding digital community.
• Everyone at CoffeeFix for fuelling us with beautiful caffeine… Here’s to an equally epic second year Gareth!
• Tokyo Digital, Six Two, Happiness Brussels, BirdDog, Empire, 2020 and all the other agencies that have given us plenty of exciting problems to solve over the past year.
• Our fantastic ongoing clients like The Crooked Well, Swalcliffe Park School, Steve Gerrard, Magma Poetry, Spin Software and The ETTA.
• Stef Lewandowski, Spencer Gallagher, Jake Grimley, Zach Inglis, Joel Sudworth, Andy Pearson, Tom Martin, Darian Moody and Pete Coles for all the advice and critique they’ve provided the past year.
• Every single supplier that’s worked with us over the past year, nice people helping us make happy clients.
• All our Twitter friends for great and stimulating conversations.

It’s not a full list of everyone we owe thanks to, but it’s a good taste. Here’s to making 2012 amazing together!

First things first, we’ve heard that the Press Office we developed for Sport England will be going live this week. The subdomain’s not been sorted, but you can take a look here. The Sport England Media Centre is built on top of the same engine as we developed for ETTA, but made to look integral to their main website and also automatically pull in content from the Governing Bodies that they fund. We’ve already migrated all their old content, and hope that the super-easy-to-use admin will ensure the Press Office becomes a vital tool for Sport Englands comms team.

We’re currently heads down on a new Rails project for the mighty Universal Music, a project that’s seen us scraping YouTube, The Guardian and a host of other third party sources to create a connected directory of all their artists. It’s a tight deadline, but we’re up for the challenge!

We’re starting a project for BIC next week, a competition engaging student artists with the brand that’s set to be incredibly high scale and will certainly benefit from our knowledge of scaling WordPress…

Our second app for Toyota has been accepted into the iOS app store, we’re just making a bunch of tweaks to the admin system before that finally goes live. It’s a fantastic looking app with a great concept behind it, we really can’t wait to show it off.

Our beautiful site design for the cool guys at Spin Software will be launching in January, we’re just putting the finishing touches on this side of Christmas. It’s a great looking site, and makes fine use of Gill, so keep your eyes peeled!

Finally, we’re very pleased to announce that we will be redesigning the website of the Women’s Squash Association. It’s set to be another great sports lead project and should suit our skillset down to the ground.

It may be advent, but we’re certainly not winding down for the holidays just yet. Hope everyone else is enjoying this winter weather, here’s to a great end to the year.

Last week, a project we’ve been working on with Tokyo (top guys!) went live, Christmas in November for Cartoon Network. We built the API that the flash front end sits on, serving hundreds of thousands of page views and capturing tens of thousands of registrations in the first week alone! The project was rolled out across Scandinavia, so we had to quickly devise a way to efficiently roll the site out in 3 languages. We did it, seemingly effortlessly, and from start to finish, the project was turned around in less than a month. Great work by everyone involved!

We also submitted our latest app for Toyota Belgium (working with Happiness) for app store approval. This week we’ll be preparing the Android version for submission to the market place. It’s a great looking app and has some beautiful interactions, all powered by an elegant API. Coupled with a killer concept, this should be an incredibly successful campaign!

Both the Christmas in November and Cartoon Network APIs were built on a slim PHP framework we’re developing. It’s close to Sinatra in it’s approach to routing and callbacks, with great support for daemonised processes (akin to Rake), whilst being heavily focused on high data throughput. It’s working well and handling a mass of data on both projects.

Alongside that, we’re about to start a great project for Bic, providing a high scale backend build for a campaign lead by the talented guys at Empire. We really can’t wait to see the design direction for this!

Last Thursday, Chris also took a trip down to London to discuss a cool project with the guys at Fiction, alongside Six Two, for a very cool band that will hopefully be kicking off this side of Christmas. He also met with the fantastic guys at Bird Dog to discuss collaborations and we’re sure more exceptional work will come from that.

Finally… Marc and Chris met with Richard to discuss the feasibility of a hack/coworking space in Macclesfield. The discussions were hugely positive, and we’d love for anyone else interested in such a space to get in touch.

The turnout was fantastic, peaking at 35, which was a truely pleasing result, so thanks to everyone who took the time out of their Thursday evening to come down and say hi. The Snow Goose, our generous hosts, had a great buzz as people were mingling and chatting. Everyone felt friendly and approachable, and it was great to see plenty of new connections being made, as well as old friends enjoying catching up.

In the Abstraktion office, we’ve adopted the unofficial tagline “Community, not competition”, and it was great to see this transpire in real life. People were openly talking about all the great things they’re up to, and how they can involve each other in these projects. There was a wide and impressive range of skills on show and a true diversity to the group, I’m sure this will prove complimentary going forward.

We setup the Digital Edge on the hunch that Macclesfield could develop an incredibly strong digital economy, and become a destination for media startups. It has everything to offer fledgling digital and creative companies: fantastic scenery; strong commuter links with Manchester, Birmingham and London; affordable and abundant office space; some fantastic bars and cafés; All that was missing was an awareness of the wealth of talent the town holds, which is where Digital Edge has come in nicely, showcasing all the exciting digital activity in the area.

Here’s to Number 2 and the many exciting things that will come!