Business Junction organised a lovely networking event at a Circus school which is only a 10 minute walk from us. Ronny and I went to learn (or not to learn) some juggling skills, have some lovely Greek food and do a lot of mingling.

It was lots of fun, although I am a natural at being hopeless, but look at Ronny:

What a natural. so where the others in our group, here’s another picture. It was a wonderful way to break the ice, as going into a room full of strangers is always daunting but everybody was giggling and dropping balls and chucking them at each other instead of at their own hand (at least most of us did, unintentionally so) and you felt an instant connection with everyone. Someone even tried to coach me and I think I moved up from totally hopeless to mediocrely hopeless.

Here, Mister Business Junction announces to the group that he is seriously hung-over.

All in all, it was well worth spending the money and more over the time of 2 hours + to mingle with other businesses in Hoxton and Shoreditch – we met loads of interesting ones, ranging from a photographer who shot HRH the Duke of Kent (not literally) to IT firms, branding consultants and a not-boring logistics business.

It is not easy to juggle all the different web design and development projects we are working on at any time, and we have got a great information management system for ourselves where we put useful information about the design projects and what we do and who is meant to do it. But it is lacking a really simple overview page, which should ideally be visual and colourful.

Well, Steffi has found it! It is called the big picture and we are able to create blobs in various colours. So one colour represents me (the Moustique pink of course) and I create as many pink blobs as needed to represent all my management tasks. Another colour represents Neville (a nice and friendly orange, as nice and friendly as he is), and various shades of blue and green represent our other web coders – they chose more sober and cool colours, quite fitting for a web developer, really. And my web and graphic designer ladies are a light shade of warm yellow. As beautiful as their web designs – or graphic designs, as we offer that as well.

So we have lots of blobs that show us which web design or graphic design projects need to be done, and if they are more urgent projects, they are bigger, and if they are less urgent, they are smaller. Cool! I am really excited – finally I can throw all the bits of paper away and just look at once central screen.

Hello again!

It has been a busy few weeks and weekends what with the tradeshow-  and instantly afterwards, we rushed to get the business moved to the other end of town – in this scorching heat! We are now at 77 East Road near Old Street Tube station, and here is what our new set-up looks like:

Many late nights and long hours went into the preparation of our stand at the BNI Members Day on Friday the 25th of June. I hope it was a success – our stand was certainly very well visited and we met Dr Ivan Misner (the founder of BNI) and shook his hand. Now I have nearly finished writing my follow-up emails, am starting to arrange some 121s and then – let’s hope the BNI magic will lead to some lovely new projects for us.

Here are pictures of the day:  http://www.flickr.com/ and here is a picture of us on the stand, as shot by the BNI photographer Peter Mukherjee:

http://www.speednetworkinglive.co.uk/

A fellow BNI friend, Emma from Currency Solutions, let me know that I was there, huge and visible, on the front page of a speednetworking site. I went there last year for my sins for a spree of – well, speed networking of course. It was at the Bstartup fair in Earls Court. I think that they should at least link to the websites of their unsuspecting victims but there is nowhere on the site to contact them… hhmmm…

Unfortunately I had a very sad week this week and have taken quite a chunk of time off. What my colleagues are getting on with while I am away is renewing our customers’ hosting plans if the year has run out, updating web sites, creating leaflets and writing PHP code.

Isn’t it lovely to be ignored by a florist?? They bring you flowers if they don’t reply to your email, yoohee!

…it must be the best thing in the world.

Alison from Pollennation couldn’t reply to my email straight away and I got these instead:

With choccies! Thanks from  Anuschka to Alison from PollenNation

Phew, what a start to this year… a couple of accidents, then we go on holiday and there is an earthquake where we want to go, so we are unscathed but our return is delayed by two days. And then I come back with a big cold to a huuuuge heap of work that has collected while I have been away, of course! So I’m cracking on with it….

We’ve set up a new little project management tool for ourselves. It’s okay but not great – I wish we could just magic one out of the sky, I have been looking for one that does (the FEW!) things I would like it to do but helas. This one is called Feng Office. We shall soldier on trying it out and maybe improving it or hoping for it to be improved by its creators.

Of course it is open source, as everything we work with is open source.

Hello,

Stephy, Jenny and I are back from a nice break. It went down to minus 17 degrees at times in Germany! Airports were a nightmare, I had a 30 hour interlude at Heathrow before I could finally have a nice gluehwein in a German winter wonderland.

I hope you are all relaxed and renewed for a nice 2010, I am sure it will be a great year!

Anuschka