Adland Santa is a giant Secret Santa game that we’ve created at Pirata for all our clients – and potential clients – across the UK advertising industry. Essentially it works the same as normal Secret Santa, except that the name draw is randomised across all the companies.

Individuals sign up using our iPhone App and the website displays a live activity feed and – later in the game – photos of all the presents received (submitted via the app) and how they are rated by the lucky recipients.

We won’t be revealing who bought for whom, but we will be pulling out some statistics such as whether Creative Directors’ presents are rated higher than those from Technical Directors, and which agency sent the most gifts.

Tech stuff

The iOS application requires iOS 4.3 or higher, though takes advantages of some of the iOS 5 interfaces such as the integrated Twitter functions. The web services and website are built on top of CodeIgniter running on a Cloud-based LAMP server, dedicated for the campaign.

One of the most satisfying and memorable tasks on my engineering degree was to make a digital clock using a quartz oscillator, a breadboard, some seven segment displays and a load of NAND gates. Powered by a battery, the finished product hung on my bedroom wall for six months or so before eventually breaking down when one of the many hundreds of wires got pulled out and I was unable to remember where on earth the hell it was supposed to go. With hindsight, I should have laminated or shrink-wrapped the whole thing.

12 years hence…

For a few months the digital clock on platform 13 at London Bridge Railway Station was broken, so in place of the familiar digits one would expect it flashed up unrecognisable symbols. This reminded me of the challenges faced building that clock at university, and was also faintly reminiscent of the self-destruct device in Predator. So I decided it would be fun to re-create the effect as a mini web app.

A few months after that I had a few hours to kill on a long-haul flight so I created Timeless. It has no particular purpose other than serving as an exercise in object-based JavaScript programming, which I happen to find enjoyable.

http://timeless.adeweb.co.uk/

I developed this e-commerce website for a friend’s joinery business. They had the basic problem of having to deal with with lots of orders and enquiries by email and over the phone, so wanted an online shop to sell their mouldings to a mostly trade customer base.

I originally intended to use an off-the-shelf shopping cart system, but his business sells hundreds of products, each of which can be ordered in continuous rather than discrete quantities (e.g. 12.5 metres). And each of which has a different minimum order level. I couldn’t find an affordable system that supported their requirements.

Not having personally built an e-commerce site myself before, I looked at a range of PHP frameworks. This being a relatively small site I opted for CodeIgniter, which was pretty much a delight to work with. It was also simple enough to build a CMS / store admin tool that allows the company to manage their store’s inventory. For payment I integrated PayPal’s Website Payments Standard with the in-site shopping cart.

Intentionally very “trade” in style (so as not to look too expensive) it’s probably not going to win any design awards, but from a technical point-of-view I’m very pleased with the result. It’s a fast and effective website.

WRP Timber Mouldings »

The Pirata Boat Race

At Pirata we’ve just launched The Pirata Boat Race, which you can see at the top of this post. It’s a Flash game with a difference – because you can play it with up to nine other players, and each player controls a set of oars using their iPhone or iPod Touch running our Boat Remote iPhone application.

We’ve brought mobile, Flash and server-side development together to create a truly cross-platform experience — probably the closest you’ll ever get to playing a Flash game on your iPhone!

You can read more about it on the Pirata Blog, or watch our entertaining and informative video:

At Pirata we designed developed the new McLaren website, working to a creative brief set by Work Club to create a uniquely McLaren experience for Formula 1 fans.

As Pirata’s Technical Director, I oversaw the development of the website by developers Kenneth Kufluk and Alex Gemmell. One of the key challenges was to create an infrastructure to deliver live telemetry from the team’s cars on the track to the web browsers of potentially thousands of concurrent viewers. The site also provides a live commentary from the drivers, pit-wall and mission control.

There’s too much to cover in this post, but if you’re interested in what goes on behind the scenes, Kenneth has written up a substantial amount of related technical notes on his blog, the first part of which is here.

http://mclaren.com/home

This is our latest piece of work at PIRATA – a collaboration with BBH London for Britvic / Robinsons. On the site the user is guided by Robin Heuser (world-famous panto producer) to put on their own panto at home.

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes that I won’t bore you with here, but suffice to say it was a great team effort involving lots of late nights and weekends over the course of just over a month.

Check it out, and while you’re there don’t forget to make your own poster, download it and stick it on your fridge.

http://www.putonapanto.com/

Working with This is Real Art, Pirata created this site for Pinchgut Opera in Sydney. The site, programmed in Actionscript 3, is an interactive visualisation of the characters in the opera and their relationships by way of dynamic points and lines in 3D space.
Visit the site »

At Pirata, we created this site for James Cooper’s Celebrity Ping Pong magazine. The basic idea is that James interviews celebrities and interesting creatives, while playing Table Tennis – sorry, Ping Pong – against them. Visit the site »

At Pirata, I was lead developer on this Flash microsite, which highlights the gaming capabilities of the Nokia N85. Visit the site »

Working with Jamie Watson, I developed this promotional microsite for Navman’s new Sat-Nav product. The site was developed in ActionScript 3 using a framework that enables dynamic re-skinning to support a forthcoming launch of the same product under the Mio Technolgy brand.

Visit the site »