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.