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.

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 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.

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 Tokyo.

Just seven months old, Alphaville appeared at the awards for the first time, facing stiff competition from the two respected BusinessWeek blogs “Hot Property” and “Brand New Day”. With a growing audience increasingly participating on the site and technology that reaches out to visitors through a daily email and live chat, Alphaville wowed the judges and took the title.

Assanka is proud to be associated with Alphaville and we look forward to introducing further innovative features in the months to come. As it stands Alphaville is a great example of using technology to generate and deliver relevant, high-quality information to readers faster and fresher than ever before. The next generation of Alphaville features will build on this success and cement the site’s reputation as the investor’s first choice for market news and opinion. In a world where every second counts, Alphaville always has the story.

Assanka director Robert Shilston comments:

“FT Alphaville’s recent success is brilliant news for everyone – it confirms our belief that the future of journalism is in the real-time delivery of stories, not the daily press cycle we’ve been used to in the past. Assanka’s technology ensures that the FT Alphaville site is always up-to-date, without needing visitors to refresh their screen, and Markets Live takes this to the extreme — a live chat on the blog — and we know the public like it. We’re delighted that our technology has helped the FT with their recent award”

Having recovered from a few celebratory glasses of champagne on the flight back to London, Alphaville’s editor Paul Murphy is enthused by the partnership:

“We’ve cracked the mould with Alphaville and as a key partner Assanka is vital to the success. We value their insight and with a complex site like Alphaville it’s critical that we have partners willing to go that bit further to keep the wheels on the track.”

Other winners included BBC News Online, ESPN, The New York Times and CNN. Since 1996, the EPpy Awards has honored the best new media services from the newspaper industry. Each year, an independent panel of industry experts selects the top examples of interactive services in a variety of categories. The awards are co-sponsored by E&P and Mediaweek magazines.

With many more ways to trade and new markets opening all the time, investors and other finance professionals are increasingly profiting from short-term positions that do not allow time for digesting news on a 24 hour publishing cycle.

‘Today’ is old news

Markets move by the second, not by the day, and technology can provide the ability to bring real-time publishing to real-time business news. With world class, razor sharp insight and cutting edge technology, The Financial Times and Assanka have created Alphaville: the world’s first live publishing platform for markets news and commentary.

The Financial Times is known globally as one of the world’s leading business newspapers, recognised internationally for it’s authority, integrity and accuracy. Through FT.com, the world’s most popular business website, the formiddable strength of FT’s editorial team finds a global audience on the web.

Combining the technological expertise of Assanka’s Web 2.0 team and a dedicated FT editorial team headed by development editor Paul Murphy, Alphaville represents the cutting edge of real-time market reporting.

As fast as it gets

The Alphaville day starts at around 3am London time, when reporters in FT’s Hong Kong office start compiling the stories that will matter to London’s business community today. By 5:45am, these stories are online and visible on Alphaville’s front page, and at a few minutes to six everything that’s been published so far is sent out to thousands of Blackberries and other handheld devices across the capital, along with many desktop subscribers. The 6AM Cut kick-starts traffic to Alphaville as the City wakes up and the London Alphaville team takes over publishing content.

As traders and investors arrive at work and log on to Alphaville, the team are busy publishing breaking stories and preparing for the daily Markets Live broadcast. Every time a new post is made, it slides unprompted onto the screens of all current users, making Alphaville a genuinely live website – there’s never any need to refresh to get new content. At 11am, it’s on air for Markets Live, a unique markets commentary service streaming real-time text chat to the online audience. Viewers can comment on the unfolding chat as it happens, and their comments are flashed onto the screens of the journalists allowing instant reaction and engagement with the audience.

At midday, the daily report on Credit Default Swaps appears, the first regular report on this rapidly emerging market, and as the afternoon progresses other specialist content includes reports on the movements of key people and positions at the main banks and listed companies.

When the day is over, around 25 posts will have been made by a busy team, and these will continue to be searchable both from Alphaville and FT.com, but at 3am the front page is cleared ready for another day to begin. Murphy’s team are creating content for Alphaville throughout the day, and he’s unequivocal about the experience:

“Frankly it’s fantastic. Some back-office stuff can be clunky, but Alphaville is a dream to use. When you’re a journalist used to an eight hour deadline and suddenly you have to deal with a fifteen second publishing cycle, the last thing you want to worry about is the kit not working. On that score we certainly have no complaints – it’s exactly what we asked for”

Features for no-nonsense users

Like most blogs Alphaville offers RSS feed syndication, on the front page, categories and comments on any post. However, Alphaville supports its time-poor users with extra features designed to get users to the information they want as quickly as possible. All posts are expandable to view the whole content without clicking through. Users can log in and post comments using their existing FT.com user account, avoiding the need to register separately for Alphaville. New content is streamed to the browser automatically so there is no need to refresh. A tag cloud represents the companies whose names are making the news today, and allows instant one-click searches for related stories. It all adds up to a slick experience for users and a powerful tool for the editorial team.

Reflecting on the project and the relationship FT have with Assanka, Paul Murphy is happy to have worked with us:

“We couldn’t be happier with Alphaville, or the service that we get from Assanka. It was rather nice to see an IT project delilvered on time, to budget and to spec. I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending their services”