We’re looking for developers with great Drupal knowledge and the php/mySQL, XHTML/CSS skills to be a great all-rounder.

We have a couple development positions open:

• middleweight Drupal developer (full job spec here)
• junior graduate Drupal developer

We have developed Drupal sites for some of the UK’s (and the worlds!) largest companies including these recent ones:

www.primefocusworld.com (they worked on Avatar!)
www.iq-student-accommodation.co.uk (great fun on this project!)
www.steerdaviesgleave.com (multi language global site)
www.wates.co.uk (the UKs leading construction company)

We’re interviewing immediately, so please do get in touch on jobs@catchdigital.com with the following:

• this completed questionnaire, rating yourself out of 10 (for a whole host of technologies and other random things)
• salary expectation
• availability for interview
• availability for start

Basically, you’ll be doing open source web development with a heavy Drupal slant, work in a team with other creative/technical people and be able to make the role your own if you’re senior, or learn form the best if you are a junior.

Recruiters: We have an approved PSL. We do not discuss recruitment on the telephone with any agency not on our PSL. To be considered for our PSL you need to send over your details to the same email address as above, and WE’LL call you. Don’t call us. Sorry to be a pain, but you know how unscrupulous some of you can be. (Not you reading this, am sure you’re lovely).

No remote working.

RAR has compiled a list of the 50 independent digital agencies in the London area.

Agencies are rated across criteria including client service, creativity and value for money.

RAR’s system also measures key areas such as growth, gross profit and turnover per employee, key indicators in terms of profitability and efficiency.

Doing well in all the above, I am please to say we’ve snuck in at number 47 this year!

Grab next month’s edition of The Drum to see the list published in its entirety, or check it out now online.

Highly recommend getting yourself a copy of the excellent Photosynth app for your iPhone.

Clearly I am no professional (as you can see from the quick studio shot), but the speed at which it allows you to create a half-decent 360 panorama is impressive.

Check out how the pros use it at www.photosynth.net.

The editors from the definitive guide to all things internet related Mashable have compiled a list of 10 websites they think are poised to really break out in 2011.

They have listed some that are relatively new and foresee reaching mainstream attention next year, and others that are slightly older they think will finally hit the big time in 2011.

We’re excited to see that our favourite CMS Drupal features on this list. We’ve been banging on about the merits of Drupal for over 2 years now, and in that time have produced some of the UKs largest websites using this fantastic framework, including sites for Prime Focus, Wates, Charles Kendall, Pension Corporation – and not to mention 27 websites for Haymarket including the Campaign and Revolution awards websites.

You can read Mashable’s list here http://mashable.com/2011/01/03/websites-to-watch-in-2011/

If you’d like to know more about how we can use Drupal to help your business call me (Jonathan) on 0207 494 3554.

Make a fresh start in 2011 and befriend us on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr (if you haven’t already), and we’ll see you there!

It’s not often I get featured on the BBC News website (read: never), let alone in the company of Liz Hurley and Shane Warne.

However, today I have found myself and my future wife featuring as the 4th most popular story on the website today extolling the virtues of Social Media – specifically announcing my recent engagement to the world via Twitter, in an interview I gave yesterday.

Read the article here: www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11986826

What a better way to celebrate the great year we’ve had by heading off to Madrid to celebrate Christmas in style. We had a cracking time, helped by leaving a freezing -2 degree London, and arriving in the Spanish capital to a sunny 17 degrees.

It all went by too quickly and the recovery from our 3 days of jamon eating and cerveza drinking is only just beginning!

Take a look on our Facebook page to see our photos.

A recent post over on the Digital Buzz Blog has a great infographic on the “Meteoric Rise Of Twitter”. Slightly US centric, but nonetheless interesting in proving the credibility of the network which many wrote off as a fad as little as 12 months ago. The numbers don’t lie, with a reported 55 million tweets per day in April of this year Twitter is here to stay.

While it’s been widely reported by the naysayers that Twitter is nothing more than a vocal minority of users creating the majority of the tweets, these numbers work hard to prove that while this may have been the case once upon a time, it’s no longer par for the course.

We’ve been on the bandwagon from an early stage, and have been touting its brand enhancing potential to all our clients for over 18 months now. While initially it felt a bit like an uphill battle, our current roster sees all our clients agreeing with the potential that harnessing Twitter as a platform with which to have meaningful engagement with the public has.

If you would like to find out more about how we have help made Twitter work for them, please get in touch.

This morning saw members of the Catch team attending a breakfast at The Lansdowne Club, put on by our client JLA, with digital whizz kid Josh Spear, one of the most influential digital marketing strategists (and certainly the youngest at just 25 years old!).

3 years ago Josh founded the digital strategy firm Undercurrent in New York and is now advising some of world’s biggest brands. His consultancy specialises in creating strategies for deeper, lasting online relationships, and acts as a think tank on the influence of technology on human behaviour.

If you’d like to attend the next “Speakers breakfast” or to peruse JLA’s database of Motivational Speakers, After Dinner Speakers, Cabaret and Dance Bands, Conference Speakers, or Presenters take a look at www.jla.co.uk.

We headed off to Bloomsbury Lanes for bowling, hot dogs, beer and free Whiskey(!) earlier this week. There were a variety of bowling styles on show, with Rory’s smooth efficiency, Matt’s through the legs backwards technique and Joanathan’s unrefined but deadly bullets (Yes, ‘Joanathan’, the staff down there might be lovely but they sure can’t spell).

With a game won each by Jonathan and Owen we moved on to left handers and spin bowls under the guidance of Rory, who claimed to be very knowledgeable on the subject.

All in all there seems to be plenty of talent just waiting to be tapped here at Catch, perhaps you will see us in a second appearance at the 2012 Olympics. We’re already dead certs for the Foosball following our Friday night post-work/pre-pub training sessions here in the office.

The final touches are being put in place at our new Soho studio. As you can see from the photo above our new studio is very nearly ready (read: it’s a building site and this photo was taken pre-sweaty builder invasion).

Our new address (from w/c 12th Oct) is:

Studio 5 & 6
10-11 Archer Street
London
W1D 7AZ

Our main telephone number will remain the same, 0207 494 3554.

We look forward to welcoming you soon.

It has been a long time coming, but here is an edited version of our ukulele team building night.

You don’t have to play the Uke to work here, but it helps.

With several staffers individually twittering away in the office (@k0ng, @omcateer, @jonsm1th to shame but a few ) it was only a matter of time until we got around to promoting our own official company Twitter page @catch_digital.

Recent tweets include video footage of The Great Soho Monsoon of July 7th 2009, our Cannes winning clients, the state of the web mapped onto the Tokyo subway system and Michael Jackson’s arcade.

Come follow us @catch_digital

Augmented reality has arrived with a bang on the internet over the last year or so. Basically augmented reality can display computer generated graphics in real world environments on your computer screen. The latest developments have seen it implemented with the Papervision 3d library, which itself made a lot of Flash developers suitably excited when it first appeared. This means you can place 2d and 3d objects into a real enviroment captured via a webcam. Because of open source libraries, its webcam support and its mass use online Flash has become the easiest way to implement augmented reality apps.

We’ve had fireworks, monsters and helicopters, then things got a bit more interactive for example this groovy Xbox controller example and one that displays live information from twitter.

But recently its started to be picked up some digital agencies and developed into some cool stuff for brands. Three of the best examples are the Baseball collectors cards that double up as 3d baseball characters, the Toyota iQ site with its rolling car  and the mini catalogue that shows you a scaled 3d model of the car.

It is nice to see a new technology picked up by brands so quickly, and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of these at the moment. Topps for me is the best implementation so far, as its adding value to existing products. I hope one day that instead viewing all this on a computer screen it will be projected onto glasses so the user sees it all from their point of view as that would be very cool.

UPDATE: Someone has already done some augmented reality gaming with projection glasses. Check it out.

Always nice to get a bit of recognition from people you respect. Somehow one of our email templates for Ferrier Pearce got into Campaign Monitors “best designs” gallery.

See the entry in their blog here. http://www.campaignmonitor.com/gallery/entry/2348/forefront/

Thanks for the mention guys, not to mention the traffic :)

Much fuss has been made of Alan Yau’s stylish new restaurant Cha Cha Moons. Can the man do any wrong after Satsuma, Busaba Eathai, Hakkasan, Yauatcha and Sake no Hana?

After the sheer opulence of our Christmas bash at Yautcha (more 1000 year old egg congee anyone?), the foodie in me was keen to try it out, and having a small Chinese contingent at Catch HQ what better excuse to go check it out and see if it up to their high standards – that and it being just around the corner.

So was it any good?

Personally it was a bit too much like Wagamamas with a Gok Wang makeover for my liking.

Chic it is, Yautcha it aint, but then I am a fussy foodie. Give me Chinese Experience (lunch only) on Shaftesbury Avenue any day.

Being recognised as “amongst the best web design companies around the globe” by Web Hosting Search, was certainly an unexpected surprise. We’re not sure who they are, but
it’s nice that they recognise us. We’re very envious of the main URL’s Google Pagerank!

One of the funniest TV spots of recent times in our opinion, slicky done with a great tag-line. Partly CGI, partly real-action puppetering(?!) I can’t decide.

Looking forward to being put out my misery when they release “the making of” on the official website.

The site we’ve been working on for a while has been featured on killerstartups.com. Apparently we “intend to be the corrective to all generic dating spaces”. Well we wouldn’t know about that, but we definitely know it’s slowly beginning to take over! Great to see the site being featured, and it’s a very favourable review. Though doesn’t the guy realise that it’s all free for now? The site doesn’t charge yet! We won’t put that live till there’s lots of members to make it worth paying for. And how did we know that it was listed on killerstartups.com? We saw it while
trawling through Google’s updated analytics package. It rocks! Every website should use it.