In her new role, Cunningham will lead the 250-strong, 14-office agency to grow the company and augment its global public relations services with marketing communications, creative and content, and digital and technology products to create a world-class global integrated marketing and communications services firm.

Cunningham will report to Tim Dyson, CEO, Next Fifteen.

“I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to take the reins of Bite at this incredibly interesting and pivotal moment in the history of the company.  We’ve all worked hard to build a great global agency that can help our clients win in the marketplace,” said Cunningham.

In January 2012, Cunningham took on the then newly-created position of president, Bite Communications North America. In that role, she quickly motivated and inspired the Bite team in that region—while bringing a significant background of marketing in the high-tech sector to the agency.

Known as an entrepreneur at the forefront of marketing, branding, positioning and communicating new waves of innovation, Cunningham has played a key role in the launch of a number of new categories, including video games, personal computers, desktop publishing, digital imaging, RISC microprocessors, software as a service, very light jets and clean tech investing.  She has more than 30 years’ experience in creating and executing marketing, branding and communication strategies that advance corporate reputation, increase shareholder value and accelerate growth.

One of the highlights of Cunningham’s career includes driving Apple’s PR during its early years, and working with Steve Jobs on the launch of the original Macintosh and his NeXT and Pixar ventures.  Her work during that time was recently featured in Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography of Apple founder, Steve Jobs.

Cunningham also has deep experience in running and leading agencies.  She launched her own firm, Cunningham Communication, which she grew to more than 250 practitioners with offices in North America and Europe.  The firm eventually was sold to Incepta, now Huntsworth, as Citigate Cunningham in 2000. She then founded brand strategy agency CXO Communication before serving as CMO at ecommerce company Rearden Commerce.

Cunningham serves on the following boards: The Aspen Institute, CEO, the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST), World Presidents Organization (WPO) and ZERO1: The Art & Technology Network, an organization she founded in 2000 with the mission to shape the future at the intersection of art and technology. She also was a long-time board member of the Computer History Museum.  Cunningham is an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow and holds memberships in the Arthur W. Page Society, TED and Women Corporate Directors. Cunningham received a B.A. in English from Northwestern University and resides in Palo Alto, California, with her husband, Rand Siegfried, and their two children, McKinley and Cormac.

About Bite Communications

With 14 locations around the world, Bite Communications, a Next Fifteen Group company, is an integrated marketing communications consultancy with a proven methodology that helps clients develop differentiated positions, build digital footprints and win in the marketplace.  Our business- and tech-savvy communication professionals work with companies who are innovating in their fields, disrupting markets and changing the world.  For more information, please visit: www.bitecommunications.com

For more information,
contact Steven Brewster, (415) 577-8851
steven.brewster@bitecommunications.com

###

We were able to get an exclusive interview a few weeks back from Dan Toffey (@dantoffey), a community manager at Instagram, and we asked him a few basic questions about the ways businesses can leverage the company’s offerings, the die hard Instagram community and the app’s global reach.

Straight from the source: Instagram intends to reach new audiences and bridge cultural divides.

Tuesday morning, Robbie, a writer at Saturday Night Live, was sitting in the lobby of my hotel watching television coverage of the storm with nothing but a pen and a piece of paper.  She had been staying in a hotel down the road that lost power (most have) and came down to Hotel Chandler where both  power and coffee were abundant.  After watching me do my emails for well over an hour, she asked if she could borrow my computer to get online and tell her family that she is alive and well.  My little Mac Book Air was hers for the next 20 minutes.  She then offered me two tickets to Saturday Night Live.  Wow!  It was a very human moment for both of us and it felt great to be a part of the human race, in it together.  In that moment, I did something that mattered.

That’s what Bite is all about. Doing things that matter.  We are skilled professionals striving to get market dynamics to work in favor of our clients who need differentiation, or awareness, or customers, or market share, or lift.  Our role is to help them with press relations, or positioning, or website development, or customer acquisition, or whatever they need to succeed. Our clients are special in that they are working extremely hard to disrupt markets and innovate in their fields.  Our role is to be there for them.  It’s more than hourly billings for us.  It’s about taking part in changing the world.  It’s about using our skills and expertise to help someone else do something that matters.

My vision has always been to redefine public relations to be truly a strategic component of business and to offer services that matter for companies in their quest to change the world.  I want to address the entire marketing lifecycle from strategy to planning to execution because that’s how we can make a difference for these companies.  As the new CEO of Bite, I feel that there is an amazing foundation here to do that and I am truly excited about the opportunity to lead this company as we are poised to become a global marketing services firm and do our part to change the world.

I’ve been asked lots of times over the years why I have stayed so long with Next Fifteen.  And, having spent over 20 years at Next Fifteen with 5 years at Text 100 and 17 years at Bite, I guess it’s a fair question!  The reality is that I’ve stuck around so long because I have consistently been given new and fresh challenges that have been both motivating and stimulating. That, and the fact that I’ve been lucky enough to work with some truly inspirational people, including the Next15 Board of Directors, Matthew Ravden and Aedhmar Hynes, since I first walked in the door at Text 100 back in June 1990. Luckily, I’ve had more highs than I care to remember although there have been one or two painful lows (to be clear for the conspiracy theorists out there, the latest low is not linked in any way to the news in this blog!) but overall the journey so far has been immensely fulfilling.

I’m now at another point in my career though when I have been presented with a new opportunity within Next Fifteen.  Partnering with two other long term Bite colleagues, Paul Mackender and Dan Sands, I’m going to start a new international business for Next Fifteen in January which is focused on creating actionable, high value insights for clients.  It’ll mean utilising rich data and digital expertise, traditional research capabilities and deep market experience to help clients drive amazing marketing campaigns.  It’s a challenge and a change that I’m really excited about.  Having discussed the new business with Tim Dyson at Next Fifteen for some time now, I’m also anxious to finally get started!  However, it does mean that my time as CEO of Bite is also going to come to an end.  Having been a co-founder of Bite back in May 1995 and having led the business since August 1998, this is a highly emotive move for me; I’ve been lucky enough to have been an integral part of the team that has grown the business from the five people that started it in a serviced office in Richmond to the 300 people who work for it today across 15 offices.  And the thing that I am proud of the most is that so many of Bite’s alumni have gone on to forge amazing careers within the marketing industry, across the world.  I’m also pretty pleased that the business retains the character and personality that defined it back in 1995 even now it is so much larger.  In short, its culture has endured.

So what of the future?  Well, I’m delighted that I am able to hand over the reins of Bite to a truly amazing marketer and communications professional; Andy Cunningham.  For those of you that don’t know who Andy is, take a look at her bio here.  And for those of you that have read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs,  she’s the lady who is referenced on numerous occasions throughout the book.  Quite simply, Andy has an amazing pedigree and we’re lucky to have her in the business.  Andy came on board in Bite North America about a year ago and has quickly driven change and impetus through our business there.  She mixes a strong set of values with a brilliant consultancy mind and is also very commercially astute.  This is a rare mix in PR and comms people!  In short, Andy is all the things that the next CEO of Bite needs to be.  Most crucially, she absolutely gets the direction that the communications and marketing industry is moving in.  So she understands why we have been on a journey to diversify our skill base, add deeper digital capabilities and drive more strategic engagements with our client portfolio.  And she is the best person to now go on and accelerate Bite’s transformation into a truly integrated marketing and communications consultancy.

While I may no longer be CEO of Bite from January next year, I’m delighted that I’ll be retaining a seat on the Bite board and I look forward to being an enthusiastic supporter and advocate of the business as Andy takes over as CEO.  So, to conclude, another chapter starts for me and also for Bite but I’m convinced the future looks more exciting than ever.  I can’t wait to embrace it.

How are these two things connected?  What the heck does quantum physics mean to the tech industry?

Quantum physics has the potential to offer us almost unlimited computing power, and that means the potential disruption of e-commerce and secure communications worldwide. Imagine if every key used to encrypt communications and commerce was instantly and invisibly breakable by anyone with a quantum computer. Much worse stuff than this could happen. For example, rather than having to use subterfuge to break Sony’s Playstation, or spend weeks or months of compute time breaking it with brute force computing, a quantum computer would calculate the key almost instantly, laying bare a large corporation’s most valuable assets in minutes.

To understand all this, it’s best to start at Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment from 1935 (that link is to an excellent 60-second New Scientist video, by the way). Part of the thought around Schrödinger’s proposition is that, simply by examining a quantum experiment, we affect its outcome. What Haroche and Wineland have done – or rather, are edging closer to – is being able to observe just such an experiment – or, if you’ve just watched that video – they’d be able to observe the cat’s state and work out if it was alive, dead or in another state entirely. Schrödinger’s cat is a good entry point, but it is well worth asking a physicist to get a better understanding. Prepare for a long conversation, because the cat thing barely scratches the surface.

Why should we care? Well, transistors, the basis of all computing power nowadays, have two states – on or off – which translate to two binary values – 1 or 0. There are some fairly hard limits to the power, density and capability of transistors covered rather wonderfully by Moore’s Law. Quantum mechanics – and quantum computing – gets around this restriction twice. It allows the creation of many parallel states; if you’ve watched the video, or had a drunken pub discussion with a physicist, you’ll know that this equates to lots of cats that are both alive and dead at the same time. What this means is many, many tiny transistors, with many, many potential states, not just 1 and 0. Secondly, the transistor density growth rate defined by Moore’s Law goes out of the window.

The end result of this is – potentially – tiny computers with infinite processing power – imagine Google and Facebook’s datacentres sitting on your mobile phone for starters.

In reality, the first users of quantum computing are likely to be governments that can afford it, and who have the most to gain from, for example, being able to break secret codes at will.

The problem with all of this, of course, is that unlimited codebreaking power means that every single thing that uses public keys to encrypt stuff – banks, online retailers, music providers, governments, businesses, human rights campaigners, terrorists and pretty much anyone that needs to keep information hidden – is suddenly open to scrutiny. That means buying stuff over the internet is less secure than before, and keeping conversations confidential is impossible.

This also means that there will likely be a two-tier internet, composed of those that can afford to create (or buy – although how trustworthy that would be is debateable) quantum encryption keys. Because quantum computing also allows the creation of even more powerful encryption – but only for those that can afford it.

London – October 24, 2012: Bite has appointed Waggener Edstrom’s former Head of Digital, Jon Silk, to its board of directors.

Jon will provide consultancy on strategic digital communications across Europe. He will be working with the agency’s heads of content, creative and client services to develop further truly integrated digital marketing and creative campaigns for clients.

Jon’s appointment forms part of Bite’s drive to further build its expertise in developing and implementing full service digital marketing and communications for clients, from site design and build to online marketing and social media engagement strategies.

“Jon’s role will be to be at the forefront of Bite’s client-focused strategy and he’s going to play a key part in unifying our approach across Europe by working with our specialists to deliver bigger, better, and bolder campaigns,” said Kath Pooley, MD Europe at Bite. “Our commitment to hiring people who constantly challenge clients and who bring an external, credible and unique perspective has really paid off this year. Beyond Jon’s sheer experience, knowledge and consultancy skills, I also know he will be a great team leader and a large personality in the Bite London office.”

Jon Silk said: “Bite is in the middle of a transition that will set a new standard for integrated brand communications, and I can’t wait to join such an ambitious and innovative team. The expertise the agency already has in place across all sectors and disciplines is impressive, and I look forward to working with everyone to play my part in the company’s next phase of success.”

Jon’s appointment follows a significant ramping up of Bite’s content team, made up of ex journalists, which recently included the appointment of Mike Harvey, formerly technology correspondent and features editor at The Times, and Justin Pearse, editor of New Media Age.

“Clients today demand content and digital expertise to be at the heart of their marketing strategies and Bite has responded by embedding these capabilities into our DNA,” said Pooley.

In the past week, the Consumer team has spent time getting to know our clients’ audiences better. By achieving a greater understanding of what motivates, excites and inspires them, and what does not, we can do a more sophisticated and accurate job of reaching them and engaging with them through the content we create.

In particular, the team working on Spil Games attended an evening of focus groups with parents in central London. For Spil, we’ve been tasked with reaching the ‘tween’ demographic (that’s youngsters aged 8-12) to spread the word about Spil’s library of free games designed for desktop and mobile play – a safe environment where this age group can have fun, learn new skills and act out their future lives. The groups took place in a specially kitted out suite where we could unobtrusively listen in and observe from behind a tinted window. By hearing directly from groups of UK parents about the habits and preferences of their children and their own roles as the gatekeepers of their children’s online activities, we were able to gain invaluable insight into the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to raising ‘tweens’ and growing up as one in the UK today. It’s a fair few years since I was one, that’s for sure!

Granting us the perspective of an ‘outside eye’, we heard about the parents’ experiences of entertaining their children, and their hopes and fears when it comes to ‘getting it right’ as a parent in this internet era. The opinions and feelings we heard will be of great use to inform not only the PR and marketing efforts moving forward, but also to influence the bare bones of how the product is literally developed in the future.

A main point I took away was the tension that exists between wanting to protect their children and seeking to provide them with the independence they need to become confident, functioning individuals. This is what makes online games where ‘tweens’ can act out a career or save up ‘money’ to manage and spend ‘shopping’ so popular – they create an alternate reality which is both fun and developmentally stimulating. The parents we heard from were particularly concerned about negative influences from celebrity culture and the media which they felt contributed to an ‘old before their time’ syndrome. A balance definitely needs to be struck here. What was great to hear was that many of them have heard their children talking about aspiring to be the next big Olympic athlete as a result of London 2012.

The learnings from the evening reiterated to me the huge opportunity that this age-group represents for the gaming industry. The girls of ‘Generation Z’ wield nearly £30 billion in spending power and they consume, on average, a phenomenal 7.5 hours of media every single day, two hours of which are spent on a mobile device. It also emphasised just how carefully publishers need to be when catering for them.

If I were to create a check-list for games publishers (and to refer to as our campaign progresses) it would look something like the below:

• Keep your finger on the pulse of trends. There’s no other age group quite like it when it comes to fast-changing fads
• Always remain aware of the parents’ point of view and include them in your strategy. Parents need to be kept in the loop with easy to find terms, privacy policies and jargon-free language
• ‘Tweens’ are notoriously hard to please and will be your biggest critics – maintain high standards of quality and provide regular updates to games such as new levels or bonuses to create sustained engagement
• As a generation of digital natives, tweens are tech-savvy and highly connected. With 50 per cent owning smartphones, mobile and social is their bread and butter so should be at the forefront of activity

If you want to take a look at some of the games in Spil Games’ portfolio, which averages about 200 million unique visits per month, then take a look at http://www.girlsgogames.co.uk

The things is, the evening actually had all the elements of a great night out – camaraderie, free food, a great London location, random 80s actresses and best of all, a cause. It even had dressing up, which anyone in journalism or PR will tell you always means a great night out.

Bite UK handles the media outreach for Byte Night, the IT industry’s annual sleep out in aid of Action for Children (AfC), and every year we enter a team of sleepers. This year the evening started well. Having almost doubled our fundraising target of £2.5k, Kath Pooley’s promise to don a onesie for the evening was called out, much to her consternation. Frantic trips to Millets and Primark resulted in all 10 team members outfitted in fetching adult sleepsuits, with varying degrees of sartorial success.

London is known for many things – its multiculturalism, its history, its riots and its intricate tube etiquette. But it is the rain that continues to define this great city in the eyes of the rest of the world. The relentless, beating rain. Sideways rain, drizzly rain, heavy rain, this-is-soaking-through-to-my-pants rain. On Friday night we saw all these types of rain and more as one month’s worth of the stuff fell across London in an evening. This is what would greet us as we prepared to spend the night sleeping outside.

Having registered and deposited our already moist belongings in the cloakroom, Team Bite UK took to the floor and made like Cisco (we networked…..little IT in-joke there for our regular readers, love you guys). Speeches from AfC’s Ken Deeks and event host Addison Gelpey brought home exactly why we were about to do what we were about to do. 100,000 kids sleep rough every night, one in three of whom will attempt suicide while one in seven experience physical or sexual assault. Suddenly, in the face of these sobering statistics, the Elvis onesie seemed a little….churlish.

So imagine our delight when 80s film star Jenny Agutter, Patron and supporter of Byte Night for 11 years, weaved her way through the crowd to come and say hi to the Bite crew (and when we say weaved, we mean almost forcibly dragged by overexcited Bite men). Genuinely impressed with our dedication, Jenny (yes…”Jenny”) stayed long enough to discuss her film past with Nick, debate the surprisingly high auction bids with Kath, and sip wine straight from the bottle with Elijah. It is a long way from her starring roles in Equus, Logan’s Run and of course, Child’s Play 2.

Having searched and found every single conceivable way to postpone the inevitable, Team Bite eventually ran out of ideas and decided to move the fun outside. We collected our kit, consisting of tarpaulin, survival bag, brolly, hoodie, water bottle and delightful night cap (steady), before heading outside. Kath Pooley and Lou Waller proudly bagged us a prime spot under a massive tree (the base of which later flooded), promptly ensuring that we all got covered in massive rain drops. Never ones to grumble, we laid out our groundsheets (which all got soaked), arranged our sleeping bags in our survival bags (which all got soaked), placed our belongings in plastic bags under the umbrellas (which still got soaked anyway) and opened the wine (which didn’t get soaked, but turned us all into old soaks anyway).

It says a lot about the marketing, PR and IT professionals of London that despite the biblical rainfall we still all managed to have a good time. Pizzas were auctioned off at midnight, drinks shared liberally, and free tea and coffee drunk by the gallon. Team Bite passed the evening socialising, networking and befriending. At points the rain was so heavy that the only thing we could do was laugh. Once we were finished laughing, we did the only realistically conceivable thing that 11 slightly drunk Biters would do: we danced to South Korean viral pop hit Gangnam Style in our onesies in the light of Tower Bridge in the pouring rain. See video below:

Come 2.30am most of us could stand it no more and we began to attempt to get into our sleeping bags. By this point the rain was relentless, heavy and very, very wet. Not many of us escaped with dry sleeping bags, and indeed a couple of Biters had to pour the water out of their sleeping bags just to get in. Trying to sleep in damp, nylon onesies as your survival bag fills with water and the cold buffets your face is not an easy task.

This is the real reason Byte Night 2012 was so miserable. While we were all extremely tired, cold, wet, muddy and a little unhappy, all of us got to go home to a warm shower and cosy bed. In that moment as dawn broke and, irritatingly, the clouds parted, each of us was acutely aware that there were thousands of children out there on the streets who had just gone through the same night as we had, except had no warm bed or hot shower to go home to.

It vividly brought home exactly why we were raising money. Trying to survive through those conditions every night must be exhausting, dangerous and heinously depressing. We barely managed one night, and I cannot imagine how anyone could tolerate or survive more than that. It made for a sobering thought as we wrung out our onesies and dried our pants on the radiator.

We should also mention at this point the fantastic achievement of two fellow Biters, Patrick and Barry. These two brave souls volunteered to take part in EXTREME Byte Night, pledging to visit every site around the country participating in the event in 24 hours. Not only did the boys manage it, they completed it in stylish pyjamas and managed to document their epic journey via Tweets and blogs. You can find a record of their epic achievement here.

Thanks to everyone who donated, supported and took part in Byte Night 2012. Never before has active fundraising made us so fundamentally aware of the value of organisations like Action for Children.

YouTube announced Monday that it would be live streaming all of the 2012 presidential debates. As President Obama and Governor Romney (and moderator Jim Lehrer) battled it out, I had it pulled up on my laptop as well as my TV. I was immediately impressed by the quality and relatively small delay in the video feed, but the myriad of resources available on the YouTube Politics Channel is what really blew me away. Not only did the video site provide the live stream in a partnership with ABC, but they also delivered commentary from their own political team as well as that of eight other major news organizations.  On top of all that, the channel featured a live Twitter feed on the right side of the screen with an option to show tweets from the selected news organization as well as all tweets including the Twitter debate’s hashtag.

It is widely agreed that physical newspapers are obsolete as a timely and efficient medium of news consumption. And up until this point many have argued that if it were not for live news and sporting events, TV too might be quick to follow in the footsteps of paper and ink. However, with this summer’s 2012 Olympics being live streamed by YouTube, and NBC offering groundbreaking digital and social integration with live broadcasts, and last night’s comprehensive live online coverage of the debate, I would argue that TV just took a shot to the chin.

TV will likely maintain its role as a gathering point in homes to share live experiences with friends and family. Just as newspapers and books continue to be printed and enjoyed by many, so too will great television content. YouTube’s broadcasting of the debate will not replace viewing on TVs; instead it provides a new experience and avenue to engage in real-time with live content. This ability to engage is what clearly separates digital content from its TV forefathers. Twitter, BuzzFeed, Politifact and countless other websites allow people to participate in global discussions, fact check candidate’s statements and get instant expert analysis. Decades ago, TV reached out and delivered real world events to the masses, and now the masses are able to digitally return the favor. It should be noted that much is being done to integrate the Web with traditional TV, and we will surely see exciting developments in the future Smart TVs, etc.

As we move through October, I encourage you all to take advantage of this opportunity to stay connected to live debates no matter where you are or what device you’re using. Here’s a quick guide to the 2012 digital presidential debates!

Upcoming Debate Times:

October 11 at 9:00 p.m. ET (Vice Presidential)

October 16 at 9:00 p.m. ET (Presidential)

October 22 at 9:00 p.m. ET (Presidential)

Where to Watch:

YouTube’s Election Hub

ABC News’s YouTube channel.

CSPAN’s live-stream – For those looking for something clean and commentary-free.

Xbox Live Election Hub – Where users can watch and respond to live polling questions

Where to Engage:

Twitter #debates – For the latest news, analysis and witty commentary

Facebook – Bringing all the politicians and pundits together in one Newsfeed

BuzzFeed – For the lighter side of the debates

PolitiFact – For the whole truth, and nothing but the truth

As part of The London Design Festival, Tent London is one of the largest design trade shows that takes place during the London Design Festival each September. In its sixth year Tent London had over 200 international exhibitors, showing the very latest in contemporary interior products – furniture, lighting, ceramics, textiles, materials and accessories. Regarded as the most cutting-edge and progressive trade exhibition during the London Design Festival, there were over 19,000 international trade buyers, media and design savvy consumers from 44 different countries at the four-day event.

Offered the opportunity by a friend to help out, I managed to get down on the Thursday and Saturday for a bit of mingling with designers, exhibitors and media from around the world.

Working on a stand alongside exuberant French designer, Nathalie Lete, whose work has been coveted by everyone from Disneyland to Chanel, I was given insight into this quirky designer whose work has been described as being, “naive and poetic, sometimes strange”.

In one discussion about her curious “boucherie” range which includes steak rugs and children toys made out of meat parts (yep, you heard right) she explained how she was inspired by traditional French butchers who used to hang their meat in shop windows with flowers as decoration. Reminiscent of the juxtaposition between the beauty and sadness that she felt at graveyards, Nathalie was inspired to create a whole range of products which contrasts meat with flowers. You really do have to see it to believe it, so a few photos follow below.

Image from Designboom.com

Image from Designboom.com

I also met designers from both start-ups and established companies alike, including the CEO of Joseph Joseph, (those funny folding chopping boards), the guys from Mix magazine, the colour, design and trend magazine that forecasts colour, materials and product trends for the next quarter, and a rather odd man who claimed to have designed the “world’s strangest speaker” as voted for by What Hi-Fi. The whole incident was so bizarre that unfortunately, the product name escapes me.

I also met a number of retailers and e-tailers including the Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director of Dalani and a couple of bloggers who are setting up shop after seeing how e-tail is booming with the likes of made.com and fab.com.

Whether you know them as e-tailers, e-commerce or social shopping sites, this new approach to commerce, which reaches out to consumers online through a hybrid of social and content, is believed to be the future of consumerism. In an age of hyper-connectivity, whereby the voice of social media is so strong, it is essential for brands to reach out to their audience in new ways, be it through content, imagery or film. Something I think these sites do brilliantly.

As it is impossible to ignore in a socially networked world, it is also important for conversations to take place across a vast array of digital channels, both established and emerging, to achieve maximum audience engagement. Having previously attended an event on “The Future of Fashion: Tech Trendsetter” run by General Assembly which saw speakers from three start-ups discussing the future of online shopping, it is clear that we are looking at start-up e-tailers becoming more and more popular in 2013.

All in all, it was interesting to experience a totally different world, and meet some truly inspiring designers whilst getting some trade-fair experience under my belt. Although I have to say, being on your feet for 15 hours straight definitely taught me that I could never work in retail.

Image from qupin.cc

Now for the best bit – two days at a trade fair and you didn’t honestly expect me to come home empty handed? Ok, so I couldn’t afford that £11,000 sofa but instead settled on purchasing a pack of “party snails”. Designed by Taiwanese start-up, SoulFun, party snails ensure you never have any trouble when trying to locate your own glass at a party. Now their biggest ambassador, I can confirm that it is true, everyone needs a party snail.

* For those of you who don’t know, we have an HR initiative in the UK which gives Biters the opportunity to get out of the office for two days a year and do something to enhance their career or lifestyle, be it work related or not.