Our Headlines
- FabriQate is now an approved Golden Key International Alliance Partner
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Continuing our dedicated service to the luxury and hospitality sectors, FabriQate has now been welcomed into the Golden Key International Alliance as a Digital Media service provider. This is a continuation of our ongoing relationship with Les Clefs d'Or (Golden Key) across their luxury hotel brands affiliates.
We are privileged to be approved and recommended by Golden Key as a Digital Agency to its International Alliance and hotel partners across the globe and we are already servicing several of the hotel brands with new and innovative Mobile and Digital Solutions (see note about our iQoncierge platform)
- 3 Projects, 3 Continents, 1 Day
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FabriQate launches Ancient Treasure Ships campaign for National Geographic / Fox followed soon after by the launch of the new site for KFC with Interactive features and just after that, the iPhone Video Content delivery app. 3 projects. 3 technologies. 3 continents. 1 day!
We are very pleased to have started these three key relationships for FabriQate. Once again, this demonstrates that despite being a boutique agency, we are very comfortable working across timezones and are very international in our mindset and approach.
FabriQate goes global... (a bit)
- FabriQate releases industry's first JavaScript AdverGame
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FabriQate created, developed and launched a JavaScript-only AdverGame for the feature film It's a Wonderful Afterlife (Icon Films, April 2010).
- FabriQate on Bloomberg TV
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FabriQate on Bloomberg TV
Meet Manav Gupta, co-founder of FabriQate, as he was interviewed by Bloomberg TV on the changing scene of Digital Media in China and overall comments on Web 2.0. See the whole footage (and a sneak look into our China office. Manav is the third person interviewed, scroll to end if needed) here: http://blog.fabriqate.com/2010/02/fabriqate-on-bloomberg-tv.html and also at: http://short.fabriqate.com/BloombergFeb2010
- Guardian Article on FabriQate Virtual internships Get on by logging on
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Virtual internships: Get on by logging on
For many students, finding the time and money for an office-based placement can often be prohibitive. So are virtual internships the answer?
Carlene Thomas-Bailey The Guardian, Saturday 16 January 2010Mira Khoury, 20, a final-year student at Royal Holloway, University of London, is doing an internship with an international digital media agency. Except, instead of running around the office making tea, she is at home on her laptop, signing into her company email account to find out her work for the week. Khoury is one of a rising number of final-year students and graduates undertaking virtual internships.
She started working initially as an office-based intern with the digital marketing firm FabriQate in September last year having heard about the internship via the website Enternships.com (a site where graduates can sign up for internship placements with small businesses. A FabriQate client as well). After an informal phone interview she was invited into the office to begin the placement. When her three-week internship came to an end, she wanted to stay on, developing her skills.
"Being a virtual intern gives me flexibility around my studies; I couldn't maintain a full-time role like I did during the summer," Khoury says. "Now, I intern by checking my emails and seeing what projects they need help with, from emailing clients to working on PowerPoint presentations, and researching new projects."
With office resources scarce, businesses are beginning to embrace web tools, such as Skype and instant messaging, to seek out graduates willing to work for them from the comfort of their own homes. Those keen to build up work experience are in turn signing up for virtual internships, using their PCs and mobile phones to gain entry into the world of work.
Journalism graduate Yazmin Malcolm, 21, runs an intern blog called I Was Just Thinking. She works virtually, writing for online magazines: "I sought out virtual opportunities by replying to posts on [journalism newsmail] Gorkana and other media sites. Writing online is a great way to display my writing skills to potential employers."
Rajeeb Dey, Oxford graduate and founder of Enternships.com, believes that in the current jobs market, all experience is valuable.
"Graduates need to be innovative about how they gain experience," says Dey. "Also, thanks to the global economy, a company in India might want an intern in Britain to offer company support, which would be a great opportunity for a graduate."
Another benefit of this new trend is to make internships more accessible. As Becky Heath, chief executive of Internocracy – a social enterprise campaigning to improve internships – points out, virtual internships can be a useful way for graduates based outside London to pick up new skills.
"In the past, if you were a graduate in Liverpool or Manchester wanting to intern in London, you would have to find someone with a spare sofa," Heath says. "This is a practical alternative."
Virtual internships offer benefits for the employer too, such as cost-cutting on office space. Businessman Fabio de Bernardi has two remote interns working on social shopping site Wishpot.com. "We aren't in a position to employ staff, so I advertised for virtual interns who were self-starters, with an entrepreneurial spirit," he says.
De Bernardi oversees a graduate who is studying for a master's in marketing and sales based in India, as well as an undergraduate studying in Birmingham.
"I keep in touch with both the interns via a weekly catch up on Skype," he says. "With the range of online collaboration tools available, communication is very easy."
However, De Bernardi admits there are also benefits to having an intern in the office. "Explaining the procedures to one when he was office-based was a lot easier than doing it via a video conference," he says.
There are other reasons to be wary of virtual internships. Heather Collier, director of the National Council for Work Experience, fears the new trend could cause graduates to lose out. "They can learn bad habits because there is no one there to advise them. Also, how is the intern being reviewed or assessed if the boss isn't watching?"
The question of pay is another important factor, says Collier: "If graduates are taking on any type of internship, they should be paid the minimum wage. Virtual internships may be another excuse for employers not to pay."
Internship payment is still a grey area. A spokesman from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, says: "We encourage employers to pay a wage that reflects both the value of the intern's contribution and the level of training and support offered by the employer, but ultimately graduates will need to weigh up the potential benefits of an internship offer."
Rosy Rickett, one of the founders of website Interns Anonymous, is worried that employers will see virtual interns as "an opportunity not to spend money, rather than seeing the intern as an employee whose job satisfaction should be viewed as a valuable investment. Also, there can't be much chance of the intern learning new skills if they are sitting at home, isolated from the office working environment."
However, for Khoury, working virtually has been very successful: "It shows I'm a self-starter, focused and can apply myself even when I'm not in the office. It opens up a lot of doors and is a great learning experience."
Article sourced from Guardian, January 16th, 2010: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/jan/16/virtual-internships-log-on
- Sunday Times talks to FabriQate about Ecommerce
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How to untangle selling on the internet
Simply rewriting the tags and straplines on your home page can turn browsing visitors into paying customers
December 27, 2009, By Andrew StoneA few simple changes to Jamie Wallace’s website resulted in soaring sales for his business, Granny-jacksons.co.uk, which sells Scottish confectionery to homesick expats.
The move from a simple home-made website to a slicker retail operation was inexpensive, said Wallace. “The appearance of the original site was amateur and messy. It looks much sharper now, with more welcoming web pages, and the site is more internationally focused.”
Thanks to these changes and creative marketing, Wallace said, online sales have grown to 50% of total sales, up from 5% when he started the business in 2007. Wallace, 30, runs the website part-time from Glasgow. Sales this year should be about £20,000.
Will Sussman saw bookings rise almost overnight when he revamped the website for Meribel-skichalets.co.uk. “I made silly mistakes on the original website, such as white print on a blue background,” he said. “We changed it to black on white, made it all much clearer, got a new logo and spent money on nice images.”The chalet holiday company, set up in 2001, saw swift results. “In less than a week I had phone calls from customers saying they were booking because they loved the website,” said Sussman, whose UK base is on the Isle of Wight.
The changes he and Wallace made show the importance of the virtual shopfront, yet many small firms are unaware of simple and inexpensive ways to boost sales, said Aneesh Varma of FabriQate, a digital agency.
Studying your site traffic is a good place to begin to identify simple improvements, said Varma. “The most important first step is to evaluate where the customers come from. Are they arriving by word of mouth, via the search engines or from direct links through an ad campaign?”
Website analysis tools, such as Google Analytics, can help to do this as well as identify what is deterring potential customers, he said. “It will show you things such as the bounce rate, when people enter your site and then leave right away, and the abandonment rate, when they start filling the shopping cart and then leave. It may show people getting lost on page three, for example, which lets you know that you need to redesign it.”
Simply rewriting the tags and straplines on your home page can turn visitors into paying customers, said Varma. “Perhaps you are driving people away by asking for their date of birth or other information you don’t really need. Making the customer journey easy and obvious is important. Usability is paramount. If users get confused, you have lost them.”
Testing ideas for your site is useful. “Get family members or friends to play with the site. Are there things they can’t cope with?” said Varma.
Wallace imagined his site as a real sweet shop before he began his redesign. “I think in terms of shop shelves, not categories. I asked myself what products should I put on my shelves and which products do I want to be most prominent?” he said.
Simple improvements should not be difficult for anyone with a website built on a content management system, said Varma. “The latest systems don’t require special coding knowledge. You should not need to contact your IT guy to make small changes.”
Creating richer, more in-depth content is another way to improve sales, said Varma. “You can show all of the product label, add images and include all the information that comes on the box.”
Marketing services are getting cheaper and in some cases are free, said Wallace. “Mail Chimp is a good campaign management tool and is free to use for mailings of up to 500 customers.”
Tabitha Potts, the founder of Mimimyne.com, an eco-friendly childrenswear and toy retailer, has grown website traffic to 3,500 hits a month since launching last year.
She recommends listing a business in Google’s Local Business Centre. “It’s a good way to attract local searches. I also use Google Base, which gives you the chance to create links to your site with images and product descriptions. It’s a bit of a bore listing your products and names but it gets you up the Google rankings.”
Potts, who is based in east London, is looking at more proactive marketing: “I’ve seen discount coupons work well for other people and I am planning to introduce my own. You should be tweeting vouchers and passing them to your newsletter subscribers and Facebook group.”
Wallace recommends regular visual updates. “Having different themes — using Christmas banners, for example — shows you are up to date.”
Good salesmanship can work online as well as in the high street, he said. “The customer experience is so important. Using creativity and having fun is not something we do enough. I wrote a Scottish sweetie poem on my blog that I think reminded Scottish expats of what they were missing and gave them a sense of who I was. Over the next four weeks sales rose.”
- FabriQate hosts TED xGuangzhou
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FabriQate is proud to organize and host TED xGuangzhou. TED stands for "Technology, Entertainment and Design"
Check link below for streaming updates and speeches from:
Seth Godin, David Feng, Jeff Lyndon, Lonnie Hodge, Manav Gupta, Jose Rueda, Jon Phillips, Hans Rosling and more...
TED is your conference. TED is a platform for some of the world's best minds to come and share their stories, their experiences, their ideas. This is your opportunity to come, listen, participate, learn, apply and improve.
http://www.tudou.com/home/tedxgz/ - FabriQate co-founder in UK's Young Interactive Entrepreneur 2009
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FabriQate is proud to announce that its co-founder Aneesh Varma has been included in UK's Young Interactive Entrepreneur 2009 . We are very happy and would like to congratulate Aneesh and wish him much more in his future areas.
More news to follow!
http://www.creativeconomy.org.uk/UKYCE/NewsDetails.asp?ID=42&NewsID=82
- FabriQate receives KnowledgeConnect 2009 Award from LDA
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FabriQate is very proud to receive the KnowledgeConnect Grant Award from London Development Agency (LDA). This is for our work in the area of Digital Media for the movie industry and we intend to grow this section of the company.
Thanks for all your support. And we will keep you posted!
- FabriQate nominated for HSBC Startup Star Award 2009
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FabriQate is proud to to announce that it was nominated for the HSBC Startup Stars Awards in the Main Category for 2009. We are very pleased that our work and ethics in the industry have been recognized well. Here is the content of the news article about us coming out:
FabriQate Limited
FabriQate is an international digital media agency, catering to businesses from start-ups to major corporations, and specifically focusing on the developing web and mobile applications for lifestyle, media, sports and hospitality sectors.
As young business owners, FabriQate's founders decided to set up an experienced Board of Advisors made up from successful entrepreneurs, professionals and business leaders, to lend them credibility - these 'friends of FabriQate' have been very crucial in their recent breakthroughs with London 2012, UN and major international brands.
The company's core service of digital media marketing is designed to convince their clients to diversify away from using traditional print and television media in their marketing efforts by going digital.
FabriQate is run by its two business partners, located on two different sides of the world. Aneesh Varma is based at the company's head office in London, whilst Manav Gupta is based in Guangzhou, China, where he manages the in-house technology production team.
The two locations, with their 8-hour time difference, effectively allow the company to operate 32 hours a day, giving them a distinct competitive advantage!
FabriQate also has two client executive teams, based in London and New York, who manage a variety of accounts, as well as generating new clients. In fact, over 90 per cent of the company's business has been achieved through referrals and recommendations from previous clients.
The company currently operates in four separate territories in the UK, China, India and the US and recently added its 40th staff member to the global team.
- FabriQate announces the release of TasteOfFamily.com
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TasteOfFamily.com is social networking website targeted at 1st and 2nd generation users. TOF allows users to build family genealogy trees, interconnected networks, family stories, recipes and photos. It was built in a record 23 days of development and has been very successful with its launch group. TOF was built with a very unique application of the FabriQate PHP LAMP platform, Qantum?. Using a modular development, we were able to use APIs for Kontura, Picnic and Video to enable sharing and user upload. It’s hosted on AWS EC2 servers and computation grid of S3. FabriQate was involved from the start in every aspect of design, architecture, layout and development. We also underwent an extensive testing period and user-based feedback improvements. Currently we are adding Phase 2 of functionality as the site has show tremendous growth. Site is live at TasteOfFamily.com in beta with the study and focus group tests. FabriQate is working on the phase 2 rollout functions for a wider international release. The scalability of Qantum has been successfully demonstrated as well with 99.999% uptime.
- FabriQate receives recognition from Redcliffe Capital
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Redcliffe Capital is a technology-sector (Telecom, Enterprise IT, FinTech, Digital Media) focused corporate finance advisory boutique focused on growth and venture capital projects across in India, UK
- FabriQate is proud to announce that its now a benefactor
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FabriQate’s mission is to be a world-class company in each of its spheres of operations. To achieve this goal, we focus relentlessly on our business principles and constantly innovate which are fundamental to everything we do. It also means to be a responsible net citizen and we have been constantly a promoter of open source technologies and initiatives, Wikipedia being one of the ones we very actively support.
- Recognized as a digital media service provider to 40 UN
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Press Coverage: "A company based out of London has been making waves on the interactive marketing scene. Started by two guys with a vision to ‘just build the web of tomorrow’, FabriQate has started working with some high-profile clients creating significant properties on the web.
They seemed to have a lucrative niche since the larger marketing agencies typically have steered away from this area having focused on traditional forms of marketing. Looks like the Q in their spelling, which they insist signifies the first letter on the keyboard, yet something overlooked – is true of their sector as well.”
- Karmagate, New York, April 2009
