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I (honestly) never tried to bribe people someone to name check Caffeinehit. That would (of course) be very unprofessional and improper! Anyway, big thanks to Justin Davies @ NinetyTen for dropping our name on this video.

Channel 4 has just launched an exciting ideas based website - 4ip. The press release from the NinetyTen website is below.

Caffeinehit did the design for this, so we’re pleased to see that it’s live and are looking forward to seeing what happens with it in the future. Anyway, on with the press release…

Channel 4 Launches 4iP to Create New Digital Businesses with Help from NinetyTen

London, UK | October 15, 2008: NinetyTen has created the ideas submission system at the heart of a new Channel 4 venture which will stimulate public service digital media across the UK. The new venture, called 4iP (4 Innovation for the Public), officially launches on October 15th.

4iP will allow anyone to submit new digital business ideas at www.4ip.org.uk. 4iP will then uses the expertise of Channel 4’s digital team to fine-tune the ideas and turn them into viable businesses.

In the first stage, the ideas are reviewed by Channel 4’s team of digital managers who will suggest ways in which the ideas could be improved upon. The second stage will take some of the stronger ideas further, and use the knowledge base of Channel 4 to help build a financial and business plan around the ideas. As the ideas pass through 4iP’s network, the ideas will become more and more robust, with the strongest ideas coming out the other end with support from Channel 4.

Marcus Page, IS Business Development Manager from Channel 4 commented: “With 4iP we are being pro-active in finding original interactive media products & services, as digital platforms become increasingly important. NinetyTen’s expertise in creating the ideas submission system was a key element in the overall creation of the 4iP website and over the last few months we have been impressed by their hard work and expertise.”

David Atkins, CEO of NinetyTen said: “4iP is a great way of harnessing the creative potential that’s here in the UK, so it has been a great project to be involved in. As we have experienced in the last few months, more and more businesses have started to understand that social networking technology like ours has become a fundamental part of their business - it is not just a nice-to-have any more.”

NinetyTen is a specialist provider of social media technologies that can be incorporated into new and existing digital media. The company was formed by an experienced team of technology entrepreneurs who have all founded and run a number of successful video, telecoms and digital businesses.

About 4iP

Announced as part of Channel 4’s Next on 4 strategic blueprint, 4iP is a major new initiative to encourage innovation on digital platforms, which aims to re-invent public service media for the digital age. A collaboration between Channel 4 and a series of regional development agencies and funding partners from around the UK, the editorial focus will be on working with the best talent, both individually and within digital production.

Over the next two years Channel 4 and our 4iP partners will be investing up to £50m in content and services which will help it deliver public purposes on new platforms, in new ways, for new audiences.

Well, it’s official! Caffeinehit has a new recruit, Alen Mujezinovic our new Senior Developer is heading up all of the development adventures over here at Caffeinehit Towers. SO, if you need ANY development work, social networking applications - anything, Caffeinehit now has the capability to do anything and everything you could possibly want.

We’ve tempted him over from the (slightly) chillier climbs of Zurich. Expect to see some seriously exciting stuff from Caffeinehit before the year is out…

Anyway, Alen. Great to have you on board… Can’t wait!

PS: A massive thanks to Kieran and the guys at Playfire, I seriously owe you some drinks!

FINALLY, I can blog about it!. It’s been on the cards for some time now but finally Kindo has merged with MyHeritage. Now they can boast a user base of over 25million people, not a bad jump in traffic there guys!

I’ve been working as the ui designer for Kindo since December 2007. They’ve come on leaps and bounds, taking on some of the more established genealogy websites (Geni and Genoom). The Kindo team is unlike any other group of people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Dedicated, passionate and above all a true pleasure to work with. They really do deserve to bask in the glory of what they’ve achieved AND to get excited about what they’re going to accomplish in the coming months/years.

WELL DONE GUYS!!!

Here’s the official press release from the Kindo website:

The first time we met Gilad, the founder and CEO of Myheritage, was in early 2007 – a few weeks before we released the first public version of Kindo. Gareth and me were invited to have lunch with him in Soho in central London, and went there with the objective of learning everything we could about the “enemy”. This proved to be pretty naive, since Gilad is much too nice to be called an “enemy”.

But there we were: A Swede, a South African and an Israeli, all with very different professional background and life stories, talking about the future of families online from very different perspectives. I didn’t expect this, but we found that we had much in common. We shared the same ideas and vision for what we wanted to achieve with our businesses, even though our approach was far from similar.

Kindo had set out to build a site that would help you interact with the family that is around you here and now. We were trying to come up with tools to help you share information and communicate with the people that matter most to you right now. MyHeritage on the other hand had developed amazing technologies to help you find out everything about your family’s history, and had spent years perfecting these technologies. Ultimately though, what interested us both was the opportunity to help families discover more about who they are and their past, and use the web to bring them closer together.

As Gareth and I travelled back on the tube, we talked about how nice it would be to be able to offer our own users the same tools as MyHeritage already had. What really got us excited was their SmartMatching Technology, which matches people in your family tree with 250 Million other names, and suggests who you might be related too. We liked that. We were also jealous of Gilad, since he got to develop features for 25 million registered users - slightly bigger than our own user base…

During this summer, we’ve been thinking long and hard about the future of Kindo, and what the best option would be for taking Kindo to the next level. The more time we spent with Gilad as well as the rest of the team in Israel (not to mention the very loud rooster that runs around in their campus), the more convinced we all became - we’ll be better off together.

So we join the MyHeritage family because we share the same vision and values (as families should), and because we think that we can build an amazing product together – bringing real benefits to families around the world. This is what we’re planning to do over the next years.

Well, I missed it - Caffeinehit’s (official active) 1st birthday. I realised that I left MTV on 6th July 2007, although I didn’t start ‘working’ until August 16th 2007 but I guess my official freedom was 6th July so that should be the date.

Anyway, what a first year it’s been. It’s been great, so thanks to all my fab clients and my amazing grilfriend for her support.

Roll on year 2! Let’s see what happens…