Working in a fast-moving industry with ever-changing technologies, we feel it’s most important to stay on top of what’s going on outside of our office. It isn’t always enough to read blogs(!), check the latest tweets and read the hottest news, but to also attend an event every now and then in order to gain useful insights and updates from specialists in various digital fields.

So this is what we just did. Catch attended The Future of Web Apps Conference held in London on the 4-6 October. Three whole days of interesting talks by experts! Safe to say, this iPhone app we’re working on for Snazaroo (to be launched before Christmas), will not be our last.

Are you a Web Developer with Drupal experience interested in a job that pays you to work with like-minded technical types on a vast range of web projects? Good! Read on…

You’ll have 4+ years’ solid (post-graduation) professional experience in building commercial sites and have enthusiasm and an aptitude for learning more. Perhaps you are a Middleweight Developer in a larger London digital agency with your eye on taking the next step up to lead a team?

Read the full job spec PDF by clicking here.

If this position sounds like something you think is right up your street then please tweet 140 characters that will make us pick up the phone and call you @catch_digital. Or if you must, send your CV and covering letter to jobs@catchdigital.com.

Recruitment agencies take note: if we’re not already working with you, we’re not interested.

London now has it’s very own craft beer, brewed in Camden Town by the newly launched Camden Town Brewery.

We’re all big fans of beer here at Catch. So you can imagine we’re over the moon to be chosen as their digital partner.

Camden Town Brewery lager, wheat beer and pale ales are now being stocked in various Barworks venues, and having had several taste tests, we can confirm they do brew a very fine pint.

The magic happens in a state of the art brewery underneath the arches moments away from Camden Town Market.

They are trying hard to prove that craft beer isn’t just for people with exceedingly long beards and beer guts. Working with some of the hottest creative teams in New York, the brand is looking sharp and we’re looking forward to cementing them as masters of their craft online in the coming months.

You can sign up to be alerted via email when their full site is going live at their temporary home www.camdentownbrewery.com.

Cheers!

Our website for The Diner has been shortlisted for the 2010 Restaurant & Bar Design Awards.

Rewarding both operators and designers for design excellence, the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards now in its second year and totally independent, is the only concept of its kind dedicated exclusively to design.

With only one month to go, the winners of the Awards, including Best Restaurant and Best Bar, will be announced at a cutting-edge ceremony on 22nd June at Victoria House in Central London.

Through the use of new technologies (including RFID), the Awards event will not only reflect entrants’ creativity, but also offer a unique space where guests will be able to celebrate, relax and network with the leaders of the bar and restaurant design industries.

Attended by both the UK and world’s top hospitality designers, architects and operators, this will be one of the most exciting and innovative events in the hospitality and design calendar.

Fingers crossed. Read more here: www.restaurantandbardesignawards.com

Our friends over at Twin have launched their second issue of their bi-annual style “mook” (magazine/book). The second issue is available to buy online and features the likes of Tracey Emin, Amy Sackville and Christina Kruse.

The Twin website has also evolved and continues to have the regular posts on fashion, art and music. Posts include “Lust for Life”,  “Girl Crush #1: Zooey Deschanel” and “X-Ray Vision” (image featured above).

Respected online creative ezine It’s Nice That have an interview with editor Becky Smith which you can read here.

Head over to www.twinfactory.co.uk and check it all out!

Catch’s SEO specialist extraordinaire Danny is a multi-talented chap. Not only does he play in one of London’s most successful wedding bands at weekends, he has also just been signed up to JLA, the UK’s leading speaker bureau, as a speaker-for-hire on the subject of search engine optimisation.

JLA have a huge range of motivational speakers, after dinner speakers and presenters, of which we’re proud of Danny for being one.

Catch offers a comprehensive range of SEO services in order to help your business rank and convert through the use of conventional on/off page optimisation, and our slightly more off-piste tailored Social Media strategy.

Get in touch to see how we can help you get onto page 1 in Google.

We’re on the look-out for a supremely talented graduate keen to take up an internship in our Client Services department.

Don’t be fooled by the mug, you’ll certainly not be making tea 8 hours a day here at Catch. You’ll be expected to meet clients, help produce reports and brief the design and development team, among many other things.

Why not read the job spec here and see if this internship is for you?

We’re proud to say that we’ve been awarded Recommended Agency status for 2010.

The Recommended Agency Register is an independent organisation that undertakes extensive research, in association with MRUK Research, to identify the most reliable and respected agencies across advertising, design, PR and digital specialists.

RAR surveyed a number of our key clients and asked them to score us in the following areas:

• Creativity and innovation
• Strategic thinking
• Account management
• Overall professionalism
• Value for money

Having scored highly we’ve been awarded Recommended Agency status for 2010. Thanks to our clients for the kind words and a big thanks to all the staff for their hard work and dedication.

Katharina joined the team as a Producer in November, but we’ve only just convinced her she needs a proper introduction on our blog!

She brings with her a degree in media economics and various agency experience the world over from Europe to China, in sectors as diverse as Fashion, FMCG and Travel.

Hailing from Germany, she tries her best to prove that Germany has much more to offer than sausages, admiration for David Hasselhoff and efficiency.

Willkommen Katharina!

We’re celebrating today having been successful in our pitch to become the Charles Kendall Group’s new digital agency.

Established in 1945, Charles Kendall is a complete, end-to-end supply chain management group. With decades of specialist experience, their eight individual businesses includes Charles Kendall Freight, one of the world’s leading freighting companies. The other group businesses are travel, event management, procurement, consultancy, packing, marine and aviation.

A private, family owned business, they’re trusted with contracts valued in the millions by international businesses and organisations including the World Bank, as well as the governments of the UK, US, Oman amongst other countries worldwide.

We’re looking forward to working on positioning them as a global force to be reckoned with in 2010.

We need a Web Designer to join our team with a proven ability in user-centred design.

This job involves designing and building. So only apply if you are a fantastic designer that knows your way around XHTML and CSS!

Download the jobspec here.

Strictly no recruitment agencies.

Here at Catch we are busily creating a fantastic digital world for Twin. Twin is a fashion and arts bi-annual book, created lovingly by Becky Smith the co-founder of Lula magazine. It includes some very exciting contributions from the likes of Ryan McGinley and Miranda July. The book itself is a beautiful collection of writing and photography and well worth checking out!

We’re really happy to be working with the team at Twin to create an online presence for them, that brings all the creativity and excitement from the book online. Along with promoting the book the site will also be a one stop shop for fashion, arts and culture with regular updates from a range of intriguing contributors.

Keep your eyes peeled, as website launch will coincide with launch in early November.

EDIT: The site is now live at www.twinfactory.co.uk

Our website for the UK’s leading speaker bureau and talent agency www.jla.co.uk has won a Gold award at the MIMAs last Friday in the category for best website.

The Meetings Industry Marketing Awards (MIMA) was launched in 2002 to raise the standards of marketing in the meetings and events industry and to recognise the marketeers. The 2009 judging panel was made up of industry leaders from a wide range of businesses including Ogilvy, Honda UK, Aviva and Barclays.

The photo above is of Jeremy Lee, founder of JLA collecting the gold award onstage.

Read our full case study here.

The Catch team continues to grow as we welcome Dan Ashdown onto the creative development team.

With a background in graphic design, product design and web application development he fits right in with the rest of the multi-skilled, multi-talented team.

Originating from Bristol, Dan is a keen sailor and will soon be undertaking his day skipper qualification. Looks like we’ve found a good way for undertaking jaunts across the channel.

We’ve been enjoying working with the world’s most exciting global IT consultancy Thoughtworks this month. Sworn to secrecy, we can’t say anything, but suffice to say it’s global, it’s exciting and it will change the world.

Not heard of Thoughtworks? Perhaps you’ve visited a site they’ve developed, Guardian.co.uk and E4.com to mention a couple small ones.

A super friendly and dynamic bunch, “Thoughtworkers” come in all shapes and sizes, if you are really geeky like us, you’d be star struck by their chief scientist Martin Fowler godfather of object-oriented development and aglie methodologies.

Watch this space.

We’ve been busy this month crafting a new web presence for the original Hoxton hipster hangout, the Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen. Many pretenders have come and gone since the bar opened in the 1990’s, but none have had the longevity brought about by their cutting edge evolving art, music and events programming policy.

Having expanded into the space left by the Lux cinema in recent years, Hoxton now comprises three separate bars, a restaurant and a gig venue. We’ll be putting the site live soon, so get your glad rags on and check back soon.

You know your brand is firing on all cylinders when you have a new website launched one week, and the following week Esquire magazine is rating you amongst the top 10 burgers in the capital.

Always one step ahead at Catch, we’ve known for some time The Diner does the best “sloppy-joe” style burgers this side of the pond (we were regulars long before we were their agency honest!). Now Esquire has blown the cover on our one of our favourite lunchtime spots (just around the corner in Soho), by giving their special burgers their seal of approval.

Read Esquire’s article online here www.esquire.co.uk/2009/07/londons-10-best-burgers.
Read more about how we made The Diner website here.
Visit The Diner website at www.goodlifediner.com.

Continuing our commitment to creating the best possible infrastructure to better serve our clients, we’ve officially become a Rackspace Select Partner.

We’ve worked with Rackspace for the past 2 years and this was the next logical step in our relationship as Rackspace enables us to offer greater depth and breadth of infrastructure options and an unparalleled level of support to our clients.

It comes as no suprise that Rackspace host some of the UKs largest websites including confused.com, cinema chain Vue’s websites, Renault UK,  and even the British Army website.

A few reasons why we chose Rackspace:

High availability and high performance network
With multiple redundancies built into its systems and numerous network providers delivering strictly high performance bandwidth to its data centers, Rackspace provides network performance and availability unequaled by other providers. That translates into maximum network uptime and reduced performance latencies for all of our customers. The data you need is available whenever you need it.

Built to quickly scale to our customers’ needs
Because Rackspace can rapidly scale our hosted environment, we can just as quickly and easily deliver the solutions you need even when our site traffic is abnormally high. It’s more than scaling to address our long-term computing or storage needs. It’s scaling rapidly to meet our unplanned immediate needs. For all intents and purposes, it is scaling on demand.

Backup solutions that ensure our data’s availability
Rackspace works with the industry’s top experts and its own in-house experts to provide flexible and resilient backup solutions for our data. Should any of our hardware ever fail, our critical information can be restored without complications.

You’re secure because Rackspace is secure
Rackspace provides maximum protection of our data by covering all three critical areas of security – physical, operational and system security. Rackspace’s commitment to such comprehensive security gives us the confidence to offer our customers the most secure solutions available.

Find out more at www.rackspace.co.uk

We’re proud to announce that Prime Focus (@prime_focus), one of the largest end-to-end post production services companies in the world, has chosen Catch as their digital partner.

Having worked on everything from Kasabian & U2 pop promos to high-end commercials, and films including Quantum of Solace, Dragonball: Evolutions, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Superman Returns amongst many others, Prime Focus have won multiple awards for their work.

With offices in India, USA and Europe the publically listed Prime Focus are a one stop service provider for producers of advertising, broadcast and feature films.

So to say we’re excited to be starting work with their team in London on a large top-secret digital project is something of an understatement.

Can’t say any more that this I’m afraid… watch this space.

The entry deadline for the Campaign Photo Awards is drawing close. Judges for this award not only include the photographer Rankin but top agency names from the likes of Fallon, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Beattie McGuinness Bungay, Saatchi & Saatchi, Wieden + Kennedy, Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy, TBWA and OgilvyOne.

The awards will the presented at a special dinner hosted by Campaign in September, with the work of all finalists and winners shown in a three day gallery exhibition. So if you’ve got a great shot that was taken in response to an advertising brief then this would be some great publicity.

To find out more and to enter visit www.campaignphotoawards.com.

Here at Catch we are looking forward to likes of Rankin using our bespoke online judging system we developed specially for the Haymarket Media Group. Catch designs, manages and hosts 19 awards websites for Haymarket. For the four most prestigious of these (Campaign BIG Awards, Media Week, Campaign Photo and PRWeek) we also provide a bespoke entry platform facilitating registration, entry upload, online judging and payment.

Photo: Sarah Lee via The Guardian