Assanka is delighted to announce that FT Alphaville has won Best Business Blog at the prestigious 2007 EPpy awards in Miami, Florida. FT Alphaville is developed, maintained and hosted by Assanka for the Financial Times, and features up to the second, cutting edge business journalism from a dedicated editorial team based in London and [...]
Round the houses
Indexing 10,000 properties an hour, and serving over a million queries a month, OnOneMap is property search for people who like to get stuff done. Forget ten results per page, try three hundred – all precisely plotted on one map. Started as an in-house project by an Assanka developer, OnOneMap provides a great showcase for [...]
Instant market insight
Reporting on financial markets has changed little over recent decades. The rumour mill may have moved from the dining rooms of the City’s finest eateries to the mobile and blackberry, but ultimately the efforts of the markets reporter still result in a daily digest of what’s moving in the marketplace. Despite the improvements [...]
The Business of Risk
This week, the Japanese stock market suffered a serious blow when a trader accidentally sold 610,000 shares in J-Com, a recruitment company, for 1 yen (half a penny) each. The scale of this error becomes apparent when you realise that the broker concerned had intended to sell only one share, for 610,000 yen (£2,893).
Oops [...]
Ghost Writing
The human brain is fantastic at filtering information. So good, in fact, that almost all of what you see is de-prioritised and instantly forgotten to make room for stuff that’s deemed worthy of further scrutiny. This happens online as well – is your message getting through?
You may remember the film Mercury Rising, in [...]
Press 1 for World Peace
Does anyone remember a time when mobile phones were used for talking to people, and very little else? Now, the humble handset is the centre of our digital world, and firms are racing to exploit the enormous potential of the numerous revenue-generating opportunities available. Whether it’s texting for Live 8 tickets, voting in [...]
Dragons Alive 2005
A team of Assanka staff and friends raced for the second year in the Twickenham Dragon Boat racing competition, part of the annual Twickenham Festival that takes place every June. We didn’t do quite as well as last year, but we like to think it’s the taking part that counts.
Last year we teamed up [...]
Cultural Accessibility
Accessibility isn’t just a standards exercise. With a potentially global audience, firms need to consider the extent to which their selection of language, colours, symbolic graphics and layout relies on the popular perceptions of a particular cultural group.
HSBC has a very entertaining TV ad in which an American businessman is taken out for a [...]
Assanka first for PHP certification
This month we are celebrating a clean sweep of certifications for our PHP development team, which means we have submitted to independent testing by Zend, the PHP company, and they have given us their seal of approval.
The traditional nature of the open source community is that there are always a lot of new entrants to [...]
Educational Giant
Furryelephant is the new, exciting way for students to learn about physics the right way. A former physics teacher invested a huge amount of time in creating the perfect digital learning resource, and then we created the perfect delivery system.
To get the obvious question out of the way first, ‘furryelephant’ was born out of [...]