Following the success of Camelot's first ever 3D game, Public was asked to create another - Letter Quest. We're very pleased to announce that this is now live and even more impressive than the hugely successful Fortune Hunter we created at the start of the year.
national-lottery.co.uk/player/gaming/
We are please to announce the launch of environmental charity Global Action Plan’s new corporate website. This forms part of a wider strategy of Public to help GAP bring together their diverse digital offerings both in terms of a consistent look and the platform they exist on. The corporate site is used as a hub to showcase the different projects GAP is running in schools, businesses and the community.
www.globalactionplan.org.uk/
Public are very excited about the launch of the new Staying Alive Foundation site this week. The site adopts a brand-new look and feel, reflecting the colourful new brand image of the Foundation, and is based on a bespoke Content Management System allowing our client to easily update and publish content. The aim of the new site is to communicate the great cause supported by the Foundation, maximise donations and provide all information about the Foundation to the site visitor in an engaging experience.
http://foundation.staying-alive.org/
Public is proud to announce the launch of Staying Connected, a brand-new social networking site created for the Staying Alive Foundation. A few months back, the Foundation briefed us to create a non-public online destination where their grantees could communicate amongst each other, exchange ideas and share resources. Using open-source social networking platform Elgg, the site offers a great amount of functionality to its users. The Staying Alive Foundation is part of MTV's social responsibility organisation and gives out grants to inspiring young people who are undertaking great initiatives throughout the world to fight HIV and AIDS.
www.stayingaliveconnected.org/
Congratulations to our Technical Director Tim Whitlock who is currently riding the wave of social media notoriety with his newly launched application, Twitblock. Twitblock is the awesome new application that scans and filters your Twitter followers and names and shames the spammers and the bots leaving your Twitter account untarnished and wholesome. It’s a phenomenon and everyone should have one.
www.twitblock.org/
Public was asked to put together an Augmented Reality demo for an article we published in the current addition of Netmag. Our flash team collaborated with illustrator Rob Chiu to create the demo that can be viewed with flash player and a webcam. Just to make it that little bit more innovative we built in functionality that allows you to interact with it. You can have a look by clicking here…
Public is very excited about the launch of the first phase of the EcoTeams project for Global Action Plan, a leading climate change charity. We are working with GAP over the next few months to redevelop their online communications with a view to helping them grow their audience and achieve their targets of helping reduce UK carbon emissions laid out in the Climate Change Bill. For more information on the first instalment, click here…
Six months ago NBC Universal asked us to come up with a game idea to help them launch their new games centre on the SciFi UK website. The brief required something simple, something contagious and something that will get users coming back for more. Desktop Blaster is an Adobe Air app that delivers on all counts.
www.scifi.co.uk/desktop_blaster/
A slightly belated welcome to two new members of staff, Laure and Ursula. Laure joins Public from Good Technology where she was Senior Account Exec on Audi, Microsoft and Xbox. Ursula joins Public as Production Manager and has recently arrived from geekIT in Melbourne Australia.
Public have clocked up another National Lottery Instant Win game launch this month with the release of Skull & Cashbones. The £2 game follows the recent release of Cloud Nine and with many more games in the development pipeline is part of a very busy period for Public and Camelot.
Never ones to shy away from a brief that represents a significant technical challenge, we were pleased to grab the opportunity to work on a collaboration between MTV and K-Swiss to help promote the K-Swiss Classic trainer. The project was a strong test of our 3D modelling and Flash skills, but the results show it was well worth the effort.
You can catch Public in print this month by picking up the latest copy of .net magazine. Our senior developers have been doing some great work in getting the most out of Google Analytics and were kindly asked by .net to write it all down and commit their experiences to a feature. If you need to know more about Analytics, then you can get in touch with us directly, of course.
www.netmag.co.uk
We at Public are very proud of our ongoing relationship with The National Lottery, and this month is a very big month with the release of no less than three Instant Win Games: Pinball Payout, Gold Mine and 7 Times Lucky. Over the last four years Public has produced over 50 games for The National Lottery, generating thousands of winners across the UK.
We are very pleased to announce the launch of the ‘Yes to Safe Sex’ campaign in conjunction with MTV and The Body Shop. This latest campaign follows on from the recent launch of the Staying Alive website, which Public produced with MTV. The site is the third successive fundraising campaign between MTV and The Body Shop and aims to promote safe sex in several countries across the globe.
Public this week launched a new Microsite, in association with The Cartoon Network, Yoplait and Dreamworks, to support the release of the animated film Monsters Vs Aliens. The flash microsite is part of the Frubes website Frubetopia, which is a gaming portal and competition site for children in partnership with The Cartoon Network.
The developers at Public have been crying out for a forum to share ideas and innovations for a long time and we are happy, therefore, to present to you ‘The Lab’. Our industry thrives on new ideas and innovation and key to this is the ability for creatives and developers to share ideas, code and all manner of experimental work so the whole online community can benefit.
We would like to have a voice out there. We would like to contribute, become involved, share what we learn and find useful and maybe even inspire others in the process. Our hope is that The Lab will be our playground, the place where we turn the ideas in our heads into reality and where we experiment with all the new and exciting technology available to us. But most of all we hope it is where we get feedback from people like you.
As the Tom Tom Club stated in their electro-style, synth pop classic ‘Wordy Rappinghood’, words are indeed working hard for you. We strongly agree with their sentiment and with this in mind we have created a new toy for making and sending messages to us, or whoever you want. As with any interactive toy the pleasure is in playing and creating, so go ahead and muck about as much as you like. Messages submitted to us might make it on to the gallery but we thought you might want to make messages to send to your friends and share the love. If you are struggling and can’t find the letter you want put your mouse pointer on a letter and hit the letter you want on your keyboard. That’s the only tip we can give you. Word!
Wednesday 26th November saw the re-launch of the hugely important Staying Alive Campaign and Foundation sites. The new portal offers a variety of innovative new features presented in an extremely accessible way and with World Aids Day (1st December) just around the corner from the launch there was no room for error. Needless to say we were all extremely pleased to see the site fully up and running in time for such an important day.
Then you will already be aware that we have launched the new Public website. Obviously, this assumes that you have been here before and, if so, welcome back. If not, then just plain welcome. After many long discussions, we decided that it was time for a lick of paint. We have been very busy since we originally launched some years ago and wanted to better show what we’ve been up to and where we are heading. So, we finally have a finished product – we hope you like it. Please feel free to look around and, if you need any help, just ask us and we will happily answer your questions.
We are very pleased to report that we are currently working on a redesign and rebuild of the MTV Staying Alive website. Staying Alive launched in 1998 and is a campaign that challenges the stigma and discrimination against HIV / AIDS and also teaches young people how to protect themselves against infection. Staying Alive is doing some extremely important work in keeping young people informed about HIV, and we are very happy to be working with them.
Every now and again, a brief drops through the Public letterbox that makes our eyes widen and hands go clammy with expectation. The words ‘Lego’ and ‘Star Wars’ are enough to make any nostalgic, middle-aged, wannabe Jedi salivate, and that’s just what happened when TMI asked us to develop an interactive storybook to support the launch of a new range of Lego Star Wars products. Three weeks of Lego and lightsabers about the office is about as good as it gets. We just hope they don’t ask for the lightsabers back…
As the winter evenings draw in and the lure of an open fire and a good book grow ever stronger, we are reminded here at Public that December is our birthday and, this year, we will be four years old. A time to reminisce, of course, and a time to look forward to the coming year and all it will bring. Can’t think of what we would really like as a birthday present, but we would happily settle for book tokens if you are feeling particularly uninspired – or you can just drop by the office and take us out for a beer if you prefer.
Glad to say that after a few months in production the new version of www.thesite.org is now live. Looking at it now we are very pleased with the results and our thanks goes to Youthnet for choosing us to partner with them on this project. The site is absolutely crammed with information and advice for young people and it gives us an extra hit of satisfaction to know that what we have designed and built is actually doing a huge amount of good in the online community.
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