Pod1 Blog

More than 30 people came together over beer and pizza to talk Magento yesterday evening, at Brilliant’s office in Shoreditch. I spoke about Magento and PCI compliance, and what we’ve worked out about the Magento Payment Bridge so far. There is a range of opinion (understandably) on this topic, and I’ll write another post that covers the field soon.

Jon spoke about our experiences building a multi-lingual (English and Arabic) Magento site, and all the support Magento gives the developer and the retailer in that area: again this is something we will write about at greater length soon.

Hannah spoke about Magento’s theme building capabilities, and the ability of Magento to fall back on default themes, which means developers don’t need to build an entire theme every time they create a website.

In the “any other business” part of the agenda, there was some good discussion about scaling Magento to large websites, and the use of cloud versus physical hosting.

There was a lot of discussion throughout, in fact, and we’re definitely going to host another event, probably in October. If you’d like to be added to the mailing list for an invitation, please email magento-meetup@pod1.com

The discussion ended with a brief chat about what we love and hate about developing with Magento. There are lots of loves, of course, but the things picked out as concerns or niggles were:

• Updates to community edition often breaking the website you’re updating
• Varien can be quite hard to get information or feedback from
• Performance, though it has improved a lot with recent releases
• The CMS not being as good as Drupal or Wordpress – it has one box for formatted content not flexible, structured content pages
• The need for a really good technical user guide
• The performance of the software running the forums

It’s important to be balanced about lists like this, and it’s widely agreed Magento is a great improvement on any of the alternatives, but it wouldn’t have been a proper developer meeting without the gripes!

The numbers are so high for next Wednesday’s meet-up we’ve decided to move it to Brilliant, our sister agency in the Pod1 group. If you’d like to attend, please email magento-meetup@pod1.com for all the details.

Beer, pizza, Magento, geeks… who could ask for more?

The Magento developer get-together on July 28th is filling up fast, so please email us at magento-meetup@pod1.com if you’re planning to come.

It looks like there will be talks about best practice theme building, internationalisation, PCI compliance, and the different versions of Magento you can now use (Community, Professional and Enterprise). If you want to talk about anything else, or lead a discussion, let us know in an email or a comment to that post.

The event starts at 6:30pm, there’s beer and pizza, and it’s in Westbourne Park, 2 stops from Paddington Station.

Gave this presentation at the Ecommerce event held by Figaro Digital on Wednesday. Lots of pictures, very few words….

It looks at new and emerging trends that are changing the ecommerce landscape. Take a look:

Areas covered include:

- Ecommerce Platform
- Crowd Commerce
- Online/Offline
- meTail
- magCommerce
- mCommerce
- Distributed Commerce
- Social Commerce

Pod1 are hosting a get-together of Magento developers at 6:30 pm on Wednesday July 28th, at our offices in Westbourne Park, London W10.

The plan is to have a series of short talks, with discussion and Q&A between each, but it’s also a networking opportunity for Magento developers to talk to each other. We have some ideas for topics we’d like to discuss, such as:

• Best practise community module development
• The differences between community, professional and enterprise editions
• Multi-channel eCommerce with Magento

But if there are topics you’d like to hear about, or speak about, please drop us a line or make a comment on this blog post.

There will be beer and pizza: the essentials for any developer get-together.

Please email magento-meetup@pod1.com if you’d like to attend, speak or suggest a topic for a talk.

Very clever and unique banner ad campaign from Uniqlo to promote end of season sales.  The campaign fostered both blog & customer relationships and had unprecedented success.

Great to see this sort of activity on the net again…more please!

For Marc’s birthday, the NY office decided to be creative. Instead of purchasing cupcakes as we usually do for special occasions, we decided to bake them ourselves. Two recipes were divided between two teams for a friendly battle of the cupcakes. Team 1 was Catherine and Hannah – Red Velvet cupcakes with Cream Cheese frosting, and Team 2 was Nia – Margarita Cupcakes with Tequila Frosting.

Marc was pleasantly surprised (especially with the relighting candles courtesy of Anna!), presented with a card signed by everyone in the office. Happy birthday to Marc and great job girls!

Snippets from the creation process:

The recipe for the Margarita Cupcakes with Tequila Frosting were found on eatthecookie. (FYI: The secret to creating a light and fluffy cake is to whip the egg whites separately till it becomes a frothy white heap, and then folding gently into the batter.)

Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting:

Thanks to everyone who has confirmed their attendance at our Social Media Seminar on Tuesday 23rd March.

Some information about the day:
Pod1’s Mark Blenkinsop will begin with an introduction about the many different definitions of social media. Anthony Lukom and Hakan Thyr will follow this up by addressing the question of its relevance, particularly in E-commerce.

Fergal O’Mullane and Emma Griffin’s talks will focus on the nuts and bolts of the issue: the use of tools to deliver content and monitor social media strategies. We’ll round this off with a question and answer session via Twitter (#Pod1SocialSeminar) with all our speakers.

A little about our speakers:

Mark Blenkinsop, Head of Search Marketing, Pod1

As the job titles suggests Mark is responsible for all things relating to Search Marketing within the agency with a particular focus on SEO and Social Media. He joined Pod1 in April 2006 with a view to integrating SEO into the agency’s’ offering and the result nearly 4 years later is a healthy client list and an expanding department. An avid interest in digital marketing with a decidedly ecommerce bias has definitely been a plus.

Anthony Lukom, Director, 33 Seconds

Anthony is currently heading 33 Seconds, a media consultancy business which specialises in Social Media. Clients include ATC Management (who work with artists such as Radiohead, Kate Nash) and BD, a creative agency, where they act as Social Media Strategists (clients include Mars, Coke, Nintendo and Cineworld).

Previously he was MD for MySpace UK for two and half years as well as European Head of Business Development. Before that he was at AOL Europe for over 7 years as Head of European Business Development, Head of Search and ran a company wide product innovation project based on Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

Hakan Thyr, International Partnerships Director, Bazaarvoice

Håkan has 13 years international business development experience from the IT industry with companies ranging from high-growth start-ups to established industry leaders. He has a special passion for companies that succeed by rewriting the rules of the industry. Håkan holds an MSc in Civil Engineering from Chalmers University of Technology.

Fergal O’Mullane, Director and Co-founder, 10CMS

Fergal is a director and co-founder of 10CMS and is primarily responsible for strategic business development. Fergal has worked in the digital media space since 1999 with a particular focus on retail and consumer brands and he helped form 10CMS in 2006.

10CMS is a leading provider of rich interactive merchandising for retailers in the UK and US, client experience includes LK Bennett, Anthropologie, Heal’s, Jimmy Choo and Clothing at Tesco among others.

Emma Griffin, Meltwater

Emma was part of the initial set-up of Meltwater’s Social Media monitoring arm, MBuzz early 2009. In less than a year, MBuzz has now grown to consist of 13 offices spread from California to Hong Kong with over 50 employees and from start-up to one of the most recognised Social Media monitoring providers globally.

Starting as a Sales Consultant in Meltwater News’ Dublin office in March 2007, within a year Emma moved to South Africa to help grow the operations in Cape Town. Within two years of being with the company, Emma led the set-up of our Meltwater News operations in Accra, Ghana.

Emma carries her competitive nature through to her pastimes and has competed for her country in Football, Basketball, Swimming and Lifesaving surfing! She also enjoys Yoga and is an eager cook! Emma holds a 1st Class Master Degree in International Business.

See you on the 23rd!

We are holding a seminar on social media strategies for our clients and potential clients:

If you are interested in attending please contact:  flora.malein@pod1.com

Pod1 have teamed up with Westfield London to design a microsite that promotes Westfield’s Spring/Summer 10 Fashion campaign.

“The Greatest Fashion Show on Earth” campaign, run in conjunction with the Sunday Times, is a series of fashion events held at the centre throughout March. The site provides a portal for event information, ticket booking and email sign up. The site also provides value-added content such as key trends for the season, goody bag giveaway’s and styling tips.

As the fashion events occur, rich media content and event imagery will be added to the site for users to browse.

The main catwalk shows will be held on the 19th and 20th of March 2010, and will feature over 700 luxury and high street fashion brands.

Check out the site here http://londonfashion.westfield.com/