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

I told a customer of ours that “es schneit” and as he is a photographer and sits in his dark room in his dark cellar, he didn’t know what I meant and had to call his wife. Now he says it is schneiting and asked whether we’d continue working on his web site or go out and play. No play for us! Stephy and I just squeezed our noses excitedly against the window and are now back – I am doing the design mock-ups for our photographer’s web site, and Stephy is doing the HTML coding for our architectural psychologist customer. But we put a cheesy Christmas CD on!

Wow, if that isnt a reason to go twitter straight away: Read about Wine Library’s success.

Ooh, this is useful:

Do I simply raise January invoices at 17.5%?

The short answer to this question is almost invariably “yes”. But if you have a lot of invoicing from early December to catch up on, then supplies made before 17 December will be subject to the old rate of VAT. This is because for most types of supplies the “basic tax point” is the date on which the supply was actually made, and if an invoice is raised more than 14 days after the basic taxpoint then the taxpoint reverts to the original date of supply rather than taking the invoice date. So if you are up to date with your invoicing by the time you take your Christmas break, then no problem at all.

You can read up on this here.