When we set up Assanka way back in 2003, we had a hundred quid and wanted to do cool stuff with web technologies. In the nearly nine years since then, we have taken on a huge variety of challenges, for an equally diverse range of clients, many of whom have become firm friends along the way. We’ve tinkered, experimented, hacked, built things that couldn’t be built, done things that couldn’t be done, broken stuff, fixed it again, and made it better the second time.

And we’ve grown too, with thirteen people now making up the exceptional group of engineers who call Assanka home (not forgetting Shadow the dog, of course). Together we built the UK’s first map based property search, and in doing so almost got our client sued by the British Government. We introduced Londoners to live blogging in 2008 for the mayoral election coverage in thelondonpaper, and for readers of the FT our tools power virtually all the social media, interactive data and charting, live chat and blogging features you’ll find through FT.com.

We also picked up three Webby Awards, as well as accolades from the Association of Online Publishers and Editor and Publisher Magazine.

Since our first involvement with the FT over five years ago, we’ve always been impressed with the organisation’s willingness to take risks – with new business models, new technologies, untested suppliers – and then measure, evaluate, learn and improve. There is no pressure to go with the flow, instead, conventional or currently fashionable ideas are challenged and questioned. The culture inspires people to innovate, both in terms of content and delivery, and the pairing of some of the world’s finest writers with an open minded approach to getting that content to readers makes for an excitingly potent combination.

It seemed natural for the FT to make the leap to advanced web technologies and HTML5 for publishing on mobile devices in a way that matches the effortless usability of native apps, and we were proud to be able to make that happen. The launch of the touch optimised FT Web App for smartphones and tablets actually changed many people’s views of what web apps were capable of, and we hope might have inspired more people to tread the same path.

Now, we want to do more, and with many exciting goals on the horizon, we were delighted to accept the FT’s offer to give us a new home. We’ll also shortly be unveiling a new identity and a new site which we hope will become a useful resource and a destination for developers who want to engage with the FT.

Assanka has always produced very bespoke solutions for individual clients, and we’re working with those clients and a number of carefully selected partners to ensure they continue to get a great service from a new supplier. We’d like to express our deepest appreciation to them and the many others who have made Assanka what we are today.

Here’s a flavour of what you get from the new FT web app, and remember this is built entirely using web technology, with no plugins or native code:

Assanka firmly believes that the craze for native apps is a short one and we are already seeing it on the wane. Native apps, which need to be distributed via a proprietary app store controlled by an operator or device manufacturer, also suffer from being restricted to the platform for which they are built, necessitating an almost complete rewrite for each different platform. Maintaining separate, functionally equivalent apps for Android, iOS, Blackberry OS6, Playbook, WebOS AND Windows Phone is an expensive and time consuming business, something that major publishers realise only too well.

Native apps have other limitations too. Web technology has matured over 15 years to provide a rich set of tools for making web applications that are open, accessible and linkable. The very ethos of web development is that it is fundamentally an open platform, inviting integration, connecting, linking and sharing of information. Native apps construct a silo around themselves and operate in their own artificially constructed world. Everything in that world may be beautiful and the user experience may be dazzling, but the value is locked into that container.

Native apps will always have a place on mobile devices, particularly for applications such as gaming where the performance demands are high and graphics requirements are intensive. Games often also take advantage of features such as accelerometers which are not (yet) available to access from web applications. For apps that need to take advantage of bleeding edge technology and offer exceptional performance, native code is still a good option. But for news and magazine publishers, the tide is turning.

We were given a great opportunity by the Financial Times to create an app that would set the standard for publishers looking at HTML5. In the process, we solved entirely new technical problems, and we’ll be putting up a lot of detail about some of the engineering that enables us to achieve such a high quality user experience in the browser over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, Steve Pinches, FT’s lead Product Development Manager, is happy with the result:

Together, the FT and Assanka teams have created an impressive product and one that has positioned the FT at the forefront of mobile development in the publishing industry. The initial feedback on the app from FT readers has been extremely positive and we look forward to rolling the app out to a broader range of devices and platforms.

Being first to the punch is always newsworthy, but we’re delighted by the coverage the app has received. As I write this a couple of hours after launch, we’ve seen some great stories in Techcrunch, the BBC, paidContent, Newsonomics, Reuters, the Washington Post, and the Guardian, and that lovely chap Rory Cellen Jones at the BBC tweeted about it, prompting a storm of retweets and a lot of enthusiasm for the app.

The FT is offering free access to FT.com via the app for the first week, so head on over to app.ft.com on an iPad or iPhone to check it out for yourself.

No keyboard, no mouse, and no stylus equals a completely new approach to designing user interfaces and user interaction. Some have been slow to accept this, hence the continued existence of hybrid devices running Windows or Linux, but once you’ve experienced a device that is designed from the ground up for touch input only, you quickly realise that this is where your business needs to be if you’re going to give your customers the ease of use that they crave.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab was the first device to really challenge the iPad’s dominance in the touch-only tablet market. It’s smaller, at only seven inches to the iPad’s ten, and runs Android 2.2 (Froyo), an operating system really designed for phones. In fact, you can use the tab as a phone, though you look a bit ridiculous doing so.

We were given a great opportunity by the Financial Times to create an app that would ship pre-installed on many Galaxy Tabs. The FT already has some excellent, award winning iPhone and iPad applications, but these are native, and not portable to non-iOS devices. Our philosophy is that when innovation is as rapid as it clearly is in the mobile computing world, it’s not wise to get locked down to a single platform, no matter how awesome it is at the time, and developing separate native apps to the same standard of quality for every platform is mind numbingly expensive.

So our approach was to build a very thin native Android app that can simply download content and store it. This provided us with a reliable offline storage capability, and something to distribute through Samsung’s application gallery. Beyond that, the app was simply a container for some very advanced HTML5 magic, with sliding, zooming, and revealing animations all implemented in Javascript.

This enabled us to deliver an app that would not only delight users of the Galaxy Tab on launch day, but was ready and waiting when the Blackberry Playbook and Motorola Xoom and other upcoming tablets came along as well. Building an app using open web technologies provides the best platform on which you can more easily customise an experience appropriate to each new device that comes along, allowing rapid development and extremely quick entry into the market with something that is already a polished product.

Another benefit of using web technologies is the ability to update the app proactively. Users don’t need to go to the app store to download a new version that provides extra features – we can simply serve it directly to their device. When we release new behaviours, users get the update almost immediately.

When the app has the ability to be used offline, we had to consider carefully the problem of analytics. It’s easy enough to collect usage data on a website where you can easily send a notification to a tracking service, but when a mobile user is busy browsing pages with no internet connection, we have to store a history of their browsing, and upload it when they next go online.

Steve Pinches, FT’s lead Product Development Manager, is a big fan of this approach:

Using HTML5 we have been able to build a dynamic FT.com web app that can be tweaked to operate across a range of platforms and devices, starting with Android. This is an important step in being able to offer FT readers a consistent experience, no matter where or from what device they access FT content from.

The content available through the app comprises all the major sections of the FT, including award-winning high quality video content with the latest updates on markets and interviews with high profile CEOs each morning. Users also benefit from being able to analyse key metrics in a comprehensive markets data service, and keep up to date on movements in their personal portfolio.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations is the professional body for the PR industry in the UK. With around 9,500 members, it produces policy, guidance, training and recognition for PR professionals.

In recent years, the CIPR has faced challenges communicating online due to having a somewhat dated website, with a plethora of pages, difficult navigation and no search facility.  As an organisation at the centre of the communications industry, they realised that they could do a lot better so invested time and energy into revolutionising their online services, starting with a more ‘cutting edge’ website that they (and their members) could be proud of.

The problem

This is what the old website’s home page looked like:

Infrastructure was an area that needed urgently addressing due to lack of measurement.  With no realistic idea of how much traffic the CIPR’s sites were receiving, nor how users were interacting with it or what they were looking for, it was impossible to plan or allocate resources effectively.

Because pages were hard to update, events calendars were published for entire year-long periods and members simply had to put up with trawling through information about events that had already happened.  There was no search engine, frames made it hard to link directly to important resources, there was no consistent approach to navigation or style, and much of the functionality was simply broken or unreliable.

We went to work.  Our first priority was to reorganise the CIPR’s online content and develop a new site map built around the needs of the user, not the internal structure of the organisation. Workshops were organised with all the institute’s departments, compromises were made and people began to think about how they could help users achieve their objectives, in a truly cross-departmental way.

A quiet revolution

Taking a member and visitor focused approach, we helped orchestrate a step-change in the way the CIPR communicates online.  With a massive archive of content to migrate, it was not practical for the CIPR to review all of it, but we coached editorial staff and produced training packs and guidelines to help them identify where content could be improved.  The CIPR’s new army of web editors were thus empowered to write useful, engaging, well linked and well structured content designed for the web.

It’s been a big change.  Staff were used to submitting update requests to a web team – who would then take days to process them.  Now, all the CIPR’s departments and groups are engaged – producing and publishing high quality content in a decentralised way, all under the supervision and moderation of a web administrator, a central controller of structure, standards, style and tone of voice.

Events: Always something happening

We placed a big emphasis on events and education offered by the CIPR. It was clear that along with making much of its revenue from hosting training events and qualification courses, events are also seen by members as one of the most important functions of the institute.  Event-related content is changing all the time, so we need to help members make time critical informed choices about the events that they want to attend and courses they want to take.

The CIPR’s new website has an events database with several easy ways of finding events, and a course finder with a database of approved courses cross-referenced with the events tools to enable a member to find a course, then see all the upcoming instances of that course that are in the events calendar.  Instant booking is powered by a partnership with the excellent Eventbrite ticketing service.

Find a course, find a date, make a booking.  Suddenly, finding and booking events with the CIPR is a breeze.

Connecting business, creating business

The institute also has a central role in connecting the industry.  Members looking for specialist help and advice on particular projects turn to the CIPR to help them network with other members, and businesses looking for a PR supplier are equally likely to want help to find the partner they need.

The CIPR website contains a constantly updated database of all the institute’s members, searchable by any member, and automatically synchronised with the main membership system. Members can also opt to have their profile displayed on a public directory that is visible and searchable by the wider public.

Exclusive members-only content

Much of the content produced by the CIPR is valuable policy research or best practice guidelines that are only available to members.  Previously this content was published in the ‘members area’, the only way in which the old website could provide limited access control over certain pages of the site.

The new site allows the CIPR to protect any page, in any section, and to set a variety of access rights, including restricting access to particular special interest groups as well as the membership as a whole.   Invitation ’teaser’ pages both encourage membership take-up, and remind existing members of the value of their membership.  There are no ‘access denied’ pages – any page the current user can’t access is simply an opportunity to invite them to join.

That said, we don’t forget search engines, which are allowed unrestricted access to the site to index all the content fully.  All the CIPR’s pages are now fully findable through Google as well as our own Google-grade site search engine.

Seamless video, seamless audio

The CIPR now boasts the ability to support rich media publishing of audio or video content, seamlessly integrated into any page.  A wealth of podcasts and video interviews is promised as the institute gets to grips with its new-found publishing capabilities.  Days after launch the first audio has already been published: a six minute interview with Katie Delahaye Paine that perfectly showcases how easy and enjoyable it is to listen and interact with rich media on the new CIPR site.

Measurement and analytics

We planned every measurable aspect of the new CIPR site with measurement in mind.  We use the awesome Google Analytics to track page views and visitor sessions, but more importantly we use GA in an intelligent way to get the very most we can out of the analytics tools it offers.  CIPR can therefore easily report on searches performed on the site (and so add resources to better serve the most popular searches), find broken links, track visitor pathways and measure conversions on event bookings.

The result

We’re not done yet, and a phase 2 will bring another revolution in social media integration, but for the moment, the CIPR can be justifiably proud of a great new front door for the world.

Of course, you need not take our word for it.  We didn’t solicit any testimonials from the CIPR, but they’ve kindly given us permission to reprint the following quotes from emails that they send us during the project.

Thank you for the excellent job you have done for us on our new website. I know it hasn’t been easy and there have been a lot of people involved, so thank you for your patience and taking the time to explain to various team members what has been going on.

You are a team we have every confidence in – thanks for restoring our faith – I never thought I would see this day!

A million thanks to you and the team for going beyond the call of duty in so many areas. Fantastic support and fantastic delivery – thank you for bearing with us!

Since we are talking about the PR industry here, a quick search of twitter will show that no-one is short of an opinion, and in the week since we’ve launched the new site, hundreds of tweets confirm that the membership agrees with the CIPR that the new site is a job well done.

A few weeks ago we donated a batch of computers to a local youth project in North London (after securely deleting all the data on the hard disks). They’ll be used to train youngsters in basic IT skills and then donated to their families to get them online.

And finally today we’ve reclaimed a not insignificant portion of our floor space which has been occupied by a massive HP A3 laser printer that is so solid it requires at least three people to carry it. The lucky (and hopefully very strong) recipient is a residents group in Finsbury Park, who are going to use it to print leaflets and posters for their community projects.

Paul, from the group, sent us an email explaining what they’re about:

We recently planted an mini apple orchard (6 trees), and hoping to do a spot of guerilla gardening to transform a currently horrible looking wall that runs the stretch of the estate.

We often need to print either 30-40 posters or about 160 leaflets or possibly both to ensure residents know what’s going on. We don’t currently have a printer of our own, so we “make do” via various means, but it means we can’t print big (A4 is too small for a poster) and we can’t print while we’re at one of our meetings. With an A3 printer on-site, we can create posters/leaflets during the meeting, print and distribute while everyone is already there in one place. It will make a massive difference.

It’s nice to know it’s going to a good home.

Donating large pieces is a great way of clearing out surplus or obsolete office equipment. If you have stuff you’re about to throw in a tip, try finding a local group who could benefit from it, or post it on Freecycle.

Any system has to have the features you need – it needs to correctly classify transactions, ensure funds are apportioned to the right portfolios in precise quantities and know how to choose and apply formulas for calculating rates of return, for example.  But we can’t be satisfied with a system that simply does all this stuff competently.  After all, someone – a lot of people, actually – are going to be using it to enter transactions and do a thousand other administrative operations every day.   No, we had to create something that was a joy to use.

Adnum is what we call the fruits of those efforts.   A web-based system designed from the ground up with our mantra of successful software design – faster, simpler, more accurate, more reliable.

You don’t have to wait while Adnum processes your thousand item reconcilliation.  It will just get on with it in the background and let you know when it’s ready.  More likely, it’s already ready, because Adnum knows when to reconcile, and keeps up automatically.  Meanwhile, you can get on with other things.

Staying alert to possible typos and mistakes is a tiring job for someone who deals in numbers all day long.  Now you have a friend who never gets tired.  Adnum knows the current price or value of every tradable asset, and while it will let you get on with your work undisturbed by constant ‘are you sure’ prompts, if you key something that doesn’t seem rational, Adnum will query it.

Navigating around Adnum is simple, logical and fast.  IOMAFIM’s Russell Collister uses it every day:

What can we do faster? Produce valuations, reconcile cash and securities, amend stock descriptions, correct errors. Just about everything is simpler, from accounting to contract note production, and yet Adnum gives us features we never had before, such as online client access, automatic stock recs, and auto balancing inputs.

Adnum is more reliable thanks to secure, highly redundant, data centre based hosting. We take care of hardware, software and data. All you need is reliable and fast access to the internet. Thanks to close integration with custodian banks, it’s also more accurate. IOMAFIM can produce fully reconciled daily valuations for online viewing in a tiny fraction of the time required with their previous system.

The ‘bridge’ between security statements from our custodian and Adnum makes the reconciliation process fast and accurate.

We’re almost ready to unveil screenshots and demos of Adnum, but for the moment we remain in a private beta phase.  To join in at a significant discount to our final pricing, get in touch today.

We started the year by developing a new site for thelondonpaper, a ‘freesheet’ newspaper here in London produced by News International (also home of The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and The News of the World).  The team at thelondonpaper were keen to tap into our expertise in optimising workflows and page load times – which meant we got to spend some time making the site one of the fastest loading big media sites in the business.  One of the things we really like to do is spend time making things faster, and the more we speeded up the site, the higher the traffic figures soared.  Unfortunately later in the year the advertising slump finally took its toll on the paper, and News International closed the title in September.

In the spring FT Alphaville won a third Webby award in New York, for its combination of cutting edge tech and equally cutting edge journalism.

Our summer was filled with exciting new developments for the Financial Times, along with equally exciting developments for one of our founding partners, Robert Shilston, who got married in August.

With our help, the FT relaunched its mobile site, sourcing and publishing content from all the FT’s news operations, as well as providing near-live markets data, with mobile optimised graphing and charting.  Despite the difficulties in tracking hits from mobile devices, we delivered a site that is able, for the vast majority of visitors, to remember their login, preferences and settings, and even the correct global region where they normally carry their phone.

We also started to trial a new system we’ve been working on to help wealth and fund managers to operate their business and track their clients’ assets and portfolios.  A parallel run with the system we were replacing had to be cut short after the client’s staff found ours to be so fast that using the old system was painful in comparison.  That system is called Adnum, and you’ll be hearing much more about that in 2010.

It’s surprisingly difficult for a group of people that make their living telling other people how to make the most of the web to practice what they preach.  Thankfully, this autumn we set about the belated task of redesigning the Assanka website.  We’re not quite done yet, and we’re holding back some of the more original features until we’re good and ready, but we’re pretty happy with how it’s turning out.  We welcome feedback, so let us know what you make of the new look (or even the code, if you insist).

It’s been a year to remember here at Assanka.  We hope you had a great year, and indeed a great decade, and have many exciting things ready to challenge you in 2010.

We’re excited to have the opportunity to introduce best practice to many different and varied aspects of the CIPR’s online services, many of which have not developed significantly since 2000, and we will be launching a raft of updated services to CIPR members in 2010.

We are delighted to say that last night, FT.com won ‘best mobile site’ at The Association of Online Publishers Awards in London which celebrate the very best in UK digital media. The judges said that m.ft.com was

clear, clean, easy to use, with good use of personalisation while staying true to the brand. A thoroughly effective mobile site.

Assanka has been involved with the development of FT’s online services since 2006, and it’s fantastic that this, our first foray into mobile, has resulted in such a prestigous award. We took an uncompromising approach to developing the FT’s new-look site for mobile users. We knew that FT readers are big fans of Blackberry, and increasingly they’re also browsing on iPhones. The range of browser capabilities, particularly when you factor in corporations rolling out custom configurations to all their Blackberries, is daunting.

We developed a set of interchangeable templates that mapped to various device capabilities, to suit the CSS and HTML rendering peculiarities of the various mobile browser technologies. Another challenge is charting. On some devices, we have quite a high resolution available, and can include charts and graphs with plenty of detail. On devices with smaller screens, we serve the same chart at a different size with less detail, to give the user a similar quality of experience and ensure that the graphic is well sized for the reader’s handset.

Finally, thanks to cookie support on many modern handsets, and the co-operation of many network operators that helpfully provide tracking data to us as they pass on the user’s requests to our servers, we are able to log in mobile users and attach their FT user account to their handset. This enables readers to customise their homepage, displaying their portfolio stocks and customising the regional focus of their news stories.

Overall, the site has been a big success, and a good couple of kilos of glass now says you don’t even have to take my word for it. Grab your phone and head over to m.ft.com and judge for yourself.

In fact Alphaville was named winner of two Webbys – the judges’ award and the ‘People’s Voice’, both in the Best Business Blog category.

Paul Murphy, editor, said:

It is a real thrill to win both Webby honours in our category and we’re grateful to all those who voted for FT Alphaville, and left such kind comments.

Those comments were publicly available prior to judging, and demonstrated the incredible strength of feeling in Alphaville’s devoted audience, a notoriously hard-nosed and hard-to-please demographic. Alphaville attracted more comments than all the other nominees combined.

I went to collect the award in New York with Paul and Alphaville’s editorial team:

Considered the “Oscars of the internet”, the Webbys are the leading awards honouring excellence online, across websites, interactive advertising, mobile and online film and video. The awards, established and decided by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, are now in their 12th year.

The latest awards received a record 9,500 entries from more than 60 countries and winners will be honoured at two ceremonies in June, held in New York.

Founded in 1996, the awards are also known for a five-word limit on acceptance speeches. Past headline-grabbing speechmakers include Al Gore (“Please don’t recount this vote”), Beastie Boys (“Can anyone fix my computer?”), and Prince (“Everything you think is true”). At the moment the Alphaville readers seem undecided on the best line for the team to deliver when they collect the gong but the suggestions are pouring in.

Despite having a London focus, Alphaville has become world renowned in the financial community for sharp analysis and insight, lightning fast reactions and breaking major stories first. Viewers have come to know that if it’s not covered on Alphaville, it’s just not worth knowing.

Never afraid of controversy, the blog has been the subject of a High Court injunction brought by Northern Rock, and has even faced legal challenges over the use of the word ‘portacabin’. Whether you like what you read or not, it’s undeniable that FT Alphaville is essential reading for anyone working in financial markets.

We’ve always had our sights set on a Webby for FT Alphaville so we’re absolutely thrilled that the site has won both awards. It’s a great endorsement of both the fantastic content and the live blogging platform we developed for it.