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.