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shinya kimura @ chabott engineering from Henrik Hansen on Vimeo.

Our new light turns night into day.

A mate of mine recently asked for some audio book recommendations and I gave him a list of some I have listened to recently which left some kind of impression on me. Here they are...

• An Utterly Impartial History of Britain: 2000 years of idiots in charge. This book is hilarious and a fascinating historical account of the last 2000 years of Britain. If only my history teacher in school was as engaging!
• If you liked Impartial History of Britain then you will enjoy his follow on: An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain: or Sixty Years of Making the Same Stupid Mistakes
• James Caan's book 'Real Deal' was surprisingly enjoyable and read by him.
• Shadowdivers – Awesome story about a lost German U-Boat discovered in the 90’s by some divers of the coast of New Jersey.
• I loved the Girl With a Dragon Tattoo trilogy. Read by Saul Reichlin which is a performance in itself.
• Every second counts (Lance Armstrongs second book) good to listen to before the Tour de France. He is a bit of a hero of mine so really enjoyed this book. His account of the Mont Ventoux accent is epic!
• I've just downloaded The Accidental Billionnaires about zuckerburg. haven’t listened to it yet but should be interesting.
• I read Three Cups of Tea and loved it (I hear the audible version is well read too). Also, check out my review of this book.

Enjoy!

Greg Mortenson’s 1993 attempt to climb K2 in honour of his sister who died of Severe Epilepsy ended in failure and nearly killed him. As he took a wrong turn on the decent completely lost and without his porter he ended up in the tiny remote village Korphe deep in the Karokoram mountains. Having noticed there was no school and how keen the kids were to learn he vowed to help the village and promised to return with the tools and money to build a school.

With all the odds stacked against him including a fatwa, extreme weather, lack of funding and distrust from certain local Muslim leaders he overcomes all of these and starts and builds a charity called the Central Asia Institute which is responsible for helping thousands of girls and boys get an education.

Three Cups of Tea follows the story of a Greg Mortenson as he takes the concept of helping people to a completely new level. As of 2009 his work has built 130 schools and helped 51,000 kids in the remote regions of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan to learn to read, write and understand other cultures.

The story shows a side of the Islam community that is often left out of mainstream media and publications. The passion of certain characters to do good for their people and the drive to promote an open outward looking and caring society is touching.

The mission Mortenson along with his colleagues at the CAI have set themselves is to “bring peace and hope to the region: One child at a time.” Through education the CAI teach an awareness of other cultures in a region desperately in need of this concept.

This book is a must read if you are interested in getting a deeper insight into the widely misunderstood and misinterpreted religion that is Islam. The lengths people go to in this book to help educate the young females to allow them to prosper is a far cry from many of the books you will read critical (and accurately so) of the way other Muslim communities operate. It is a refreshing and optimistic point of view.

The book's title comes from a Balti proverb: "The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family..."

Fascinating, heart-warming and inspirational.

Recently we were nominated for an award in the Smarta 100 list and won an entry. This is quite an accolade and to appear alongside companies I have admired for years as being top notch innovators is quite an honour.

I was an early adopter of zopa.com and still have an active account with them called HarrowBank. Also I used audioboo when it first launched and believe they are a company that identified a unique proposition and kicked ass in the execution. Graze.com is another fantastic company which launched a very unique product at the right time. I have been a huge fan of Ryan Carson’s Carsonified for many years attending the my first FOWA back in 2005 and not missing one since. Smarta.com have done a great job in compiling some fantastic businesses. There are many more amazing companies in the list I admire and get inspiration from. Thank you Smarta!

Having been nominated we were identified by one of our competitors who believed we did not deserve our place on the list. He looked our numbers and growth (and got them wrong) and believed our direct competitor in the UK www.childcare.com deserved a spot over us. He accused smarta.com of not doing enough due diligence and quoted the “founders blog” (this blog) on old screenshots and registration numbers. You can see our response here. I think competition is great and this kind of behaviour certainly keeps things interesting. We are on tenterhooks as we wait for a response and will you keep you posted on any updates!

So if you think we deserved it then vote for us here as the smartest of the smarta100.

P.S. Given he mentioned my blog in his rant it has given me motivation to write a post – I have been a bit lazy on this front of late. :)

UPDATE: We have had a response to the thread on the smarta site. This person is clearly hung up on numbers. The fact is we now have over 45,000 users on our site 26,000 of whom are childcarers - so very nearly doubling since 2008. Also worth noting smarta looked at all the sites out there and chose us not childcare. It was only after they chose us did they interview and write the story. At no point did we lie in order to get into the competition.

We haven't had a chance yet to respond as we have been extremely busy running a kick ass company. But we will because its good fun :)

I saw this article on smashing mag today. Stunning images from India.

It's good..... It's pretty good

On Tuesday of this week we relaunched the new Little Ones website. It was a joint collaboration effort between Deflux (a New Zealand based agency) and Sunware. Deflux were responsible for all the creative and branding work and Sunware transferred the psd's onto the existing platform.

The need for rebranding little ones was simple. We had to take the brand from appearing as though it is a mumpreneur type business to a serious and established bi-lingual nanny and domestic staff agency. Little Ones has been running 6 years has 7 experienced consultants specialising in different languages. Their clients are celebrities, royalty and high wealth individuals. The old brand did not reflect this.

Deflux took a very detailed brief and worked with us through an iterative design process to get the logo exactly right. We needed something serious but not too corporate which also reflected the USP's of the business. Not easy. We are extremely happy with what we ended up with.

To get this level of service from a UK based branding/design agency would end up costing you 10's of thoushands of pounds. For the rebranding, Site redesign, business cards and other stationary cost us several thousand New Zealand Dollars.

It was an absolute delight working with the team at deflux. Being in opposite timezones we would submit feedback during the day and they would have something to show us first thing in the morning.

I would strongly recommend using deflux for any design (print & digital), web job you have.

Logo

The gold and black is a serious feel compared to the old green. The two kids keep it playful while being surrounded by the number 1 in all the languages Little Ones specialises in.

Website

The brief was to maintain the same site structure but bring in new imagery and style guide based on rebranding. Huge improvement.

www.findababysitter.com has appeared in the site inspection section of the New Media Age. They gave us a 68/100.

Content 14/25

Usability 20/25

Branding 17/25

Monetisation 17/25

So definately room to improve there but we did get some great feedback. And compliments like; "The site screams simple". "It's a useful and simple-to-use site"

looks promising :)

Wikitude Augmented Reality: WTC - Its not there but its there from Wikitude on Vimeo.