I’m pleased to announce that as of the 1st of May, Rolled has been acquired by another local Nottingham web design and development company Juno Media. This acquisition means that we will be able to offer much more financial flexibility for social entrepreneurs that we work with, and help more start-up companies as they seek a web presence that they can be proud of when launching their company online.

Juno will also be implementing a lot of the way Rolled works in its day-to-day routine and management of projects. We will be bringing things like social web app integration, RSS feeds, blogs and open source to Juno as the company looks to expand its client offerings for the future.

All of Rolled’s clients, projects, sites and hosting will be moving over to Juno as part of the move and all outstanding proposals and quotes will be met by Juno. This means that Rolled will still be online and will now operate as a social initiative of Juno Media. Enrique Ramirez and David Myers will also be joining Juno as part of the deal.

Unfortunately there is a bad side to the acquisition as Mike Robinson leaves us to join another company. We wish Mike the best of luck in his new full-time job and consider it a shame to see him go. He’s an incredibly talented individual and we’ve not had a single client that hasn’t been singing his praises.

I believe that this will take Rolled to the next level in terms of our offerings to social entrepreneurs and our involvement with them. Dave Wiltshire of Juno shares a lot of this vision and he’s prepared to do what it takes to make it happen. So here’s to the next level for Rolled, and for a prospering Juno Media.

The idea of the SHINE unConerence was to help social entrepreneurs with a variety of topics that they face ranging from getting grants to blogging. These sessions were held by partners and anyone who came forward with a good idea for holding one, user’s would then register on-line and then attend sessions on the day. Being completely unrestricted to one session and allowed to drop in and out of anything they wanted to.

We designed the website in a very short amount of time and put it all into the Expression Engine content management system using Event Brite for ticket management and building our own script to automatically register users that had bought tickets from the site. The end result was a completely automated system for Eudemonic to manage everything within and something we were very proud to hand over to them.

global tolerance are a values-driven communications agency that only works with values-driven clients. They’ve worked with clients such as Gandhi’s grandson, HH Dalai Lama, The Green Party and Wallace & Gromit’s Children’s Foundation. Their services includes public relations & communications, communications training and public speaking.

Having worked with them for several months on this to hone their vision for the site into something their team feels passionately about and loves using, we have had our eyes opened to a mass of new cultures and interesting reads about their work and their clients. It has certainly been fascinating watching through their hours of footage including prime time interviews that they had put up onto their website.

We highly enjoyed working with global tolerance and can’t wait to take the relationship further when working on their client’s projects in the future.

The Pants to Poverty Story is an interesting read, but in brief (from their Bad Pants Amnesty press release):

Established in 2005 by the youth group from Make Poverty History, this dynamic and exciting is a new type of campaigning social enterprise that makes luxurious yet inexpensive fairtrade, organic and sweatshop free underwear. Working directly with farmers and factory workers and only selling through ethical outlets (so no supermarkets etc!!!) Pants to Poverty is working with over 20 universities for FT fortnight and 40 shops and is now rolling out an exciting series of events, new products (including condom pocket pants!) and transformational campaigns and programmes throughout 2008 and beyond. Look out for lots more to come!

While they had quite a nice site before, Pants to Poverty wanted a change. Here’s how it looked before:

Ian put together a simplistic and interesting design, which we developed on Wordpress for rapid production of a fully functional, easy-to-use web site. Working to a difficult deadline, Pants to Poverty’s new site went live on time with no nonsense.

Another triumphant launch! Pants to Poverty had this to say about working with us:

When it came to relaunching our website, Rolled came with high recommendations from fellow social innovators at the Hub.

With wireframes and design in hand, Rolled went beyond web development on the project: they provided extremely valuable advice based on their experience and expertise on navigability, accessibility and marketing, showed great levels of speed and adaptability (to the point of hitting deadlines when they were pushed forward!), while keeping a no-nonsense and transparent approach.

With a very tight budget they were able not only to deliver a great website, but also offer what is too easily forgotten: after care!

We would have no hesitation in recommending Rolled to anyone looking for a first class solution to their web based project.

Rolled supports the excellent work that Pants to Poverty is doing, it’s been a pleasure working with them. See how you can help on their new site or even buy a pair of those sexy pants.

Eudemonic had this to say about who they are and what they do:

Eudemonic is an agency for creative change, learning and communications. We work across organisational development, social & cultural projects, education and events. Our stand of artistic projects are about adding a bit of playful sparkle to everyday life. We are delighted that in less than a very short time we’re making an amazing difference to how organisations, communities and individuals grow.

However, their old site just didn’t do them justice:

Therefore, Richard put together a dark design using illustrations, solid heading fonts and colour coded sections. Rolled took his design and integrated it into Wordpress to provide a usable back-end, so that the Eudemonic team could easily update the site. As soon as everyone was happy, Eudemonic’s new website was given the Rolled seal of approval and went live:

A successful launch without problems or delay provoked Andres Roberts, founder and MD of Eudemonic, to shout out the following comment:

We are delighted with the speed, professionalism and support offered by the folks at Rolled. I’ve already asked them to help on a second project and our new site is barely up.

We are happy we helped in taking Eudemonic’s work further. We look forward to working with Andres, Lizzie Ostrom and the rest of the Eudemonic team in future projects.

We’ll start with our requirements for each position, and then what we want you to send in and where as your application afterwards.

Front End Developer(s):

• Write valid, standards compliant XHTML/CSS to a strict doctype.
• Hand code crossbrowser, hack-free and valid CSS.
• Show strong knowledge on Semantic XHTML structure and accesibility.
• Be able to optimize images and XHTML/CSS code to keep it to a minimum size.
• Take a PSD document and hand code it into a standards based XHTML/CSS site.
• Ability to look at existing sites and suggest improvements in mark-up
• Have it in you to do a fast turnaround if required
• Have examples ready to show us and be prepared to code something of our choosing as a test.

Expression Engine contractor:

• Show strong knowledge of Expression Engine with experience of use in either a commercial or a personal environment
• Be able to optimize and provide maintenance on existing EE sites
• Integrate XHTML/CSS templates efficiently, with examples of your previous work ready
• Make use of PHP as necessary
• Meet or beat deadlines confidently

To apply please send your details over to applications@rolled.at with the following:

• Your name, age and where you’re from
• What experience you have had with the applicable position including live examples and details of how long you have been working with anything that is relevant
• Other knowledge and skills that you may have outside the required position
• Reasons why we should choose you and why you’d want to work for Rolled
• Hourly rate and availability (include timezone and how many hours you’re prepared to work)

I’m looking forward to personally reading through every applicant. Enrique will also be responding to all Front End Development applications personally.

To help raise the number of real Midlands based companies with pages on FaceBook, we’ve created our own page at the URL below:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nottingham-United-Kingdom/Rolled-Limited/20804779240

Anyone can become a fan, and anyone is welcome to become one. We hope it lends towards pages being used more by Midlands based companies.

Happy new year readers, we’re back from our company wide holiday of two weeks over Christmas and New Year and we’re already rolling out some changes.

In terms of staff, Kieran Allen has left due to mutual consent and we’ve now brought Enrique Ramirez and David Myers in full-time. All front end development and design needs will go through these two and they will start immediately. With Mike Robinson coming on board in December, this now makes four full-time employees including myself.

In addition to this we’ve been working with one of the few contractors we use outside of the team, David Pache, to re-brand Rolled At into Rolled Limited. We feel the new logo represents the quality we bring to our clients and we’ve re-launched our main site along side that vision. We will continue to use David Pache for any future client branding work needed and are very happy with what we’ve come out with.

Regarding articles on Sausage Roll, Mike is planning to write a weekly article or two for Sausage Roll starting soon. So if you have anything you’d like him to write about or give his opinion on feel free to e-mail him at mike@rolled.at with your ideas.

I have reviewed four services, and drawn up tables comparing their supported formats and features. Each was to at least have good video quality and be Adobe Flash based, ruling out Google’s YouTube and DivX offering Stage6, respectively. Use the table of contents below to quickly jump to each section.

1. Vimeo
2. Revver
3. Viddler
4. Veoh
5. Comparing The Services
6. Conclusion - Which is the best?

Vimeo

Vimeo comes from folks at Connected Ventures and is known as “Flickr for video”. Vimeo is simple and appealing, offering good quality videos, a 500MB weekly upload limit and even HD content. As long as it fits within your weekly limit, you can upload videos of any length, and even upload them via e-mail!

Once you start uploading, you can change the settings for your video without disrupting the upload. Assign it to an album or channel, give it a title and description, change the privacy settings and more. Once your video is live people can download a copy of your video, if you allow them.

Overall, Vimeo is an excellent service with great quality.

Supported Formats: asf, asx, avi, divx, dv, dvx, m4v, mov, mp4, mpeg, mpg, qt, wmv, 3g2, 3gp, 3ivx and 3vx

Revver

Revver offers a good quality service, with a simple and sleek flash player. There is a minimum duration limit of 4 seconds, 100MB file size limit but no maximum duration limit, you have very decent restrictions on your video sizes.

Revver also supports uploaders with money from ad revenue. Users can select to have pre-roll and inline or ending ads, which will pop-up a small section at the bottom of the screen containing a related advertisement. The ad revenue is split between the creator and Revver, giving users a chance to make a bit of spare cash.

If you’re a video content creator, Revver is the one for you. A good quality, ad-supported, streaming service with little to no fuss.

Supported Formats: mov, mpeg, mpg, mp4, wmv, asf, avi

Viddler

Viddler is an interesting service that, like Revver, offers creators a share of ad profits. While the interface is clean and the video quality is good, Viddler’s frame specific comment feature can clutter up the timeline. Ads and comments are marked on the timeline to be displayed as that frame is played.

Uploaded videos can be up to 500MB in size, the largest of the services reviewed, with no duration limit.

If the timeline clutter from markers doesn’t bother you, then Viddler provides good quality video with the opportunity to earn money from your content.

Supported Formats: avi, dv, mov, qt, mpg, mpg2, mpeg2, mpeg4, mp4, 3gp, 3g2, asf, wmv, flv

Veoh

Veoh is a good quality service that can extend beyond the web. While Veoh’s web videos are restricted to a 100MB file size or 20min duration, VeohTV takes those videos to the desktop and allows increased file sizes and durations. The VeohTV software also provides uploading tools which can pause and resume uploads, should you find yourself on a slow or dodgy connection.

The web player has a clean interface, and the good quality plus desktop viewing options can take your videos further.

Supported Formats: mpeg, mov, mp4, avi, wmv

Comparing The Services

So, how do they compare to each other? Below are two tables for formats and features, giving a quick overview of everything above for quick reference.

Supported Formats

Standard Features

Conclusion - Which is the best?

From my research into these services, I draw the conclusion that Vimeo offers the best quality and cleanest interface. While Revver’s and Viddler’s ad-sharing options are appealing to individual content creators, businesses may find that they wish to have full control over ads supporting their embedded videos. Veoh’s desktop services are great for long/large videos such as an online TV series.

If those features meet your requirements then by all means, go for Revver, Viddler or Veoh, but if you just need high-quality video streaming then Vimeo gets Rolled’s seal of approval.

His team member page describes him as so:

Mike is a Scotsman who hacks Content Management Systems, such as Wordpress, Drupal and Expression Engine, into submission to get your site up and running. He is responsible for taking your design and applying his knowledge of each platform to build a site with all the functionality you require. He’s also the resident tea boy as required..

He fought off several impressive people to get the full-time position and will be starting full-time in January after our yearly Christmas holiday which lasts from the 22nd until the 10th of January.

Join me in welcoming Mike to the Rolled team, may we all look forward to seeing his CMS work produce brilliant client websites in the future.