A look back at 2009

This year has been rather eventful for me as I continue to forge ahead in my digital ventures. Although I like to think that most of it went to plan, there are a number of things that are worth remembering.

Canary Dwarf started the year with a bit of a green tinge. I put forward the company for a environmental award organised by Moray Council. The bid largely highlighted the power-saving programme we have in place due to our heavy technology load. The use of efficient power supplies and energy management software and hardware won us a commendation, and I collected my certificate from MP Richard Lochhead at a ceremony in the Moray College, Elgin.

In February, we launched our ecommerce service with a commission from a local craft bakery, As U Like It, which started us on a successful partnership with a software company in Australia. Their ecommerce software was one of the best we had tested and by the end of 2009, we had put five such systems into place for local businesses in Forres with catalogues raging from a handful of products to over 40,000.

May was the month a long-held dream came to fruition. As a former chief sub editor and web editor for local newspaper publishers Scottish Provincial Press, I was keen to explore and demonstrate how news and technology could work together. As social media networks began to take a grip on society and printed newspaper sales continued to dwindle, the time was right to launch Moray Firth Live, a news aggregation service which publishes links to news and information from the Highlands, Moray and Aberdeenshire. By distributing links through social media, we were able to create a push news service which didn’t rely on a website alone to publish content.

We also produced our own content and in particular, a series of very successful videos featuring local events and news. While the video content was made available through Moray Firth Live, we also created a dedicated video news channel, MorayFirth.TV which will be further developed in 2010.

An extra member of staff came on board to make this project feasible alongside our day-to-day web consultancy.

In September, our efforts with Moray Firth Live were rewarded when social media expert, Craig McGill, listed us as one of the top 50 tweeters in Scotland for our use of Twitter to distribute news and information.

Then, in November, Moray Firth Live was put in the running for a national award. Pitched against 39 other entries including Channel 4, Moray Firth Live walked away with the GoldenTwits award for Information Service.

In October, I successfully pitched to write a column for woorkup.com, an internationally-renowned creativity blog, run by the sleepless blogger Antonio Lupetti from his home in Rome, Italy, Antonio, who has built his blog alone over several years has now amassed a readership of over 30,000 people round the world.

But 2009 was not without its failures and disappointments. We lost the opportunity to work with the RSPB when it’s tender for a service to map GPS logs from red kites was awarded to an in-house team.

We also made errors of judgement with new clients who abused our trust. This led to us now ALWAYS asking for a deposit and getting them to sign a contract.

But as December draws to a close, we look forward to starting 2010 with a full order book. Canary Dwarf will launch seven new client sites in January and February. Moray Firth Live will reach further into the community, and MorayFirth.TV will become a household name (we hope).

And we will launch two new sites of specialist interest.

Textology.co.uk is a dedicated SMS application site which marks a partnership with leading SMS networks. As a standalone service, Textology will build and manage bespoke and core applications for businesses to make use of SMS services such as text appointment reminders, voting, promotions and fundraising. We will launch this site with our first SMS app uFlirt, an entertainment service for nightclubs and venues.

Geone.ws will support my specialist interest in geolocation, the technical provision of location data through files and social networks. Geo is the next big thing and 2010 is probably the year it will explode. There are hot issues surrounding geolocation, not least that of privacy, so I will be following these closely with interest through Geone.ws

We are also working with a press photographer to create a picture agency website, and a tourism website to develop an events database.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all customers, friends and followers for supporting Canary Dwarf throughout 2009 and may I wish them a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year