A holding page has gone up for Acme Climate Action. Much more coming soon.

Daikin Industries Ltd are one of the world’s leading producers of air-conditioning and refrigeration systems. The Japanese company asked FoxLand to develop the website for their latest product - the Daikin Reefer Container Refrigeration machine. This unit maintains the internal temperature of cargo containers using the latest in Japanese technology and quality. So if you’re exporting frozen fish (as one does) from Iceland to Australia or bananas from the Philippines to Britain the Daikin Reefer will keep them fresh. The website went live today.

Our latest project, the Blood Diamond Action website, has just gone live. The website publicises the issues surrounding the film Blood Diamond that stars Leonardo diCaprio amongst others. Working again with Provokateur, the site is backed by Amnesty International USA and Global Witness.

The build of the site was fine. However, our problem was determining the potential traffic to the site. The film will be launched in the US in December and the UK early next year. This will raise the profile of the issue greatly and with it the profile of the site. The potential number of visitors to the site globally could be quite large.

It’s always great to have lots of visitors to a website. But it is, of course, not as simple as that. The website is designed for broadband and includes a 9MB video download. The main Flash-based element is approximately 190k. While these are not enormous files, a large number of global visitors could cause it problems. Even if the majority of visitors don’t download the video, the required bandwidth could become very costly and a surge in visitor numbers could even bring it down.

Our solution to this was to move all the key files to Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), part of Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services use infrastructure that Amazon has already set up for their own products, and are now offering to other companies. Therefore, not only are we tapping into a very reliable system that one of the largest web companies in the world is using, it is also easy to use, very cheap and you only pay for what is used. So if a large number of people visit the site or the expected visitors don’t arrive, it won’t be a problem.

Update: The website is featured in an article in today’s LA Times (16th November 2006).

The Spurt campaign, which we built the website for, is Pick of the Month in November’s Creative Review magazine, the world’s leading monthly magazine for visual communication. Working with Provokateur, the website backed up a press ad alerting readers to a spoof pro-aviation growth organisation, Spurt. Featuring bogus airline big-wig Sir Montgomery Cecil, the ad urged readers to ignore the tree hugging lobby with the motto “Sod them. Let’s fly”. Only when readers visit the site is it revealed that the ad was organised by a coalition of environmentalist groups including Enoughsenough.org, Airportwatch and Greenpeace.

“It gives a great excuse to invite a friend to share a bath” - Alistair McGowan in The Independent talking about I Count, a £3 book about ways you can improve your own personal carbon emissions. Our sometime collaborators at Provokateur designed and wrote the book with Stop Climate Chaos. Go buy it from amazon.co.uk.

Let’s blackout London from 4.30pm to 7.30pm on 4th November. A great idea to commemorate Guy Fawkes (and make a point about climate change).