Past Work – Entranet

Having joined the company when it was 10-strong, I set up and ran the Interactive Channels division of Entranet, a Sunday Times TechTrack 100 company and the third largest new media agency by turnover in 2001 (c£14m). Over a three-year period the division grew from three to 16 staff, generating over £1million pounds in its last 18 months. In early 2000, we developed and deployed five of the first applications to be launched into Telewest’s ‘walled garden’ service. These were for Eagle Star, Axa, Newcastle Building Society, Cosmos and Yorkshire Building Society.

The team went on to develop enhanced TV services for Zurich Financial, PPP (part of the Axa Group), Standard Life and Legal & General amongst others.

Taxi!

Summary
Created over a period of 8 weeks in late 2000, Taxi! is a multiplatform interactive city guide. George, the puppet taxi driver, is at your beck and call to drive you round major European cities – offering you the chance to shop, buy theatre tickets and generally have a good time.

Built by the Interactive Channels team at Entranet and launched in January 2001, TAXI! was the world’s first entertainment based format developed with interactive elements and e-commerce capability, offering video-on-demand and interactive shopping.

Financial transactions are conducted seamlessly through the viewer’s remote control and set-top box, with web and kiosk channels used to support certain purchases. A host of major brand names, including Goldfish, DaimlerChrysler, The Really Useful Group and Warner Bros Cinema, participated in the development of TAXI!.

Objective
TAXI! was created to stimulate the production of creative solutions by digital TV platform providers, production companies and broadcasters, and to illustrate the potential of iTV to major brands, while show-casing the talents of the Interactive Channels team headed by mindhouse’s founders.

Approach
Taking viewers on a tour of several European cities, TAXI! uses an entertaining format to front a sophisticated digital commerce offering, demonstrating both the marketing and technology potential of this emerging interactive channel.

The London tour is conducted by ‘George’, a Spitting Image-style puppet driving a black cab. For the journey, the audience can choose George’s mood – grumpy, rude or happy – according to their preference. As they are being taken around the sites, viewers are presented with opportunities to buy theatre and cinema tickets, order car brochures or apply for a credit card.

Implementation
The technology that underpins TAXI! is OpenTV middleware, the world’s leading interactive television operating platform, enabling interactive TV programmes on 37 digital cable, satellite and terrestrial communications networks in over 50 countries. The directors of mindhouse developed TAXI!’s technology solution, brand strategy and programming concept.

To see an edited highlights package from the service, click on the flash player below:

WilliamsF1

In 1997, I managed the development and overall design of the WilliamsF1 web site.

Winner of the Autosport Award for best F1 web site, the website was built upon WilliamsF1’s key brand values – Innovation, Leading Edge and Technically Superior. The target market was sponsors, the press and fans. Updates from each of the races were posted within an hour of the race finishing, allowing press and sponsors to read post-race interviews and download high-res images from a secure partner area of the site.

MAD (Multiple Access Devices)

In 1999 Sun Microsystems asked Entranet to devise a solution for online voting to offer to its clients in local government. Such was the success of the project that, in 2000, Tomorrow’s World demonstrated the MAD (Multiple Access Devices) voting platform running across eight consumer devices, including: Mobile; interactive TV; Kiosk; Web; PDA and Sega Games Consoles.

Entranet had already demonstrated the system to the Scottish Executive and Camden Council, as well as the government’s Central IT Unit (CITU).

To watch the Tomorrow’s World clip, see below:

The Health Channel

After reading an article in today’s Guardian newspaper headed: “Coming soon: the shopping channel run by drug firms”
(http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,,2084394,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=4) I dusted this off. In 1999 we were asked to create a pilot for a television show featuring advice on health. Axa, the insurance company, wanted to trial TV as a channel to market allowing them to offer viewers the chance to find out more about various health-related problems. In addition, the chance to offer direct links to allow viewers to purchase medicines and heath coverage was integral to the project. the results can be seen below. if anyone from Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Novartis or Procter & Gamble is watching – we’ve done the work for you

Tweet this...