Channel 4 launched Stand Up To Cancer in the UK last year, working alongside Cancer Research UK, and raised more than £8 million to fund ground-breaking research into treatments of all kinds of cancer.

It was the most successful first year for any UK commercial TV fundraising event.

And Numiko played a part in helping Stand Up To Cancer become such a success, designing and building the robust website for the entire campaign.

It was our responsibility to create a robust website which could handle a phenomenal number of requests – as many as 4,000 page views a second.

The site has since been nominated  for the Partner Site of the Year award in the not-for-profit category. We’re one of only 21 finalists out of a massive 114 nominees. The winners will be announced during DrupalCon Portland, which runs from May 20th until May 24th.

The new five-year partnership with Cancer Research UK will see Stand Up To Cancer back on screens in 2014.

The announcement comes along a spate of new commissions for the broadcaster, including a new eight-part comedy drama series from acclaimed writer Paul Abbott.

Channel 4′s chief creative officer, Jay Hunt, said: “We are continuing to invest in the sort of innovative and distinctive content that only Channel 4 would bring to the screen.

“Last year’s launch of Stand Up to Cancer in the UK exceeded all expectations and showed that we could harness the power of 4 behind a major event that raised millions.

“Our new five-year partnership with Cancer Research UK is a terrific opportunity to build on that success and raise even more for a great cause.”

It was a pleasure to work with Cancer Research UK and Channel 4 on the Stand Up To Cancer project, helping to make a difference on so many people’s lives. We’re delighted at the news that the partnership between the charity and the broadcaster is to continue, and we wish everyone involved the best of luck.

In a TV, online and natural history first, Easter Eggs Live opened up the unknown world of one of nature’s most ingenious inventions: the egg.

From crocodiles to cockroaches, from stick insects to sharks, 99 per cent of all life starts in an egg.

And this ground-breaking multi-platform project gave you, the millions of viewers who logged on and tuned in, the insight into animal behaviour from the hidden world inside the shell.

Working with Windfall Films and Channel 4, we developed a dynamic, highly-social online platform to support live broadcasts and around-the-clock streams of hatching eggs and, latterly, baby animals.

This unique nature experience made use of the very latest scientific equipment, from powerful imaging scanners to super-sensitive microphones, to document the beginnings of life like never before.

For those of you that watched online or on your TV in the millions, it meant you could eavesdrop on reptile heartbeats and listen-in on bird embryos communicating with their soon-to-be siblings and calling out to their parents.

The hatching action unfolded on 24/7 live streams from our Easter Eggs Live website, which launched on Monday, March 25. Three-minute bulletins aired on Channel 4 for the six days that followed the website’s launch, building up to the two live shows which were broadcast over the Easter bank holiday weekend.

All the creepy crawlies aside, this was a technical challenge not for the faint-hearted. Planning for more than 30 live streams from the studio and remote locations, responding to a very fluid production where eggs varieties were still being confirmed right up until broadcast and, of course, designing for the broadcast traffic profile all posed considerable challenges.

But in a very short space of time, we delivered a beautiful, dynamic and highly-usable site, both for users and the online editorial team, who were able to work a non-stop operation to curate the live streams and video highlights, editorialise and participate in the social conversation by interacting with the thousands of fans commenting on the site.

Facebook commenting provided an invaluable social dimension and proved incredibly popular, with many viewers using the social network to name their favourite critters, from Ryan the Gosling to Ant and Duck.

Recognising this huge and growing mobile audience, all of this was built responsively to give an equally-great experience on small screens as well as big. Users could even bookmark links on their smartphones, so they could get egg in their pocket, wherever and whenever they went.

Since Easter Eggs Live streams launched on Monday, March 25, more than 450,000 went online to discover the weird and wonderful world of eggs for themselves, viewing just short of 4 million pages throughout the course of the live streaming.

The viewing numbers peaked during the live broadcasts, with more than 1 million page views each day. The special 60-minute live broadcasts on Channel 4 brought in a combined viewing audience of more than 2 million – not including those who watched on 4oD or catch-up services. And if that’s not a strong indictment that relationships between television broadcasts and websites are an unmitigated success when it comes to capturing the audience’s interest, we don’t know what is.

Of the many live streams available, Nirvana the Shark was the breakout success, receiving 8.3 per cent of the page views alone, totaling more than 328,000. She also became a social media sensation, attracting more than 14,000 Facebook comments alone and specialist groups set up in her name. As Nirvana didn’t hatch during the initial broadcast period, her overwhelming popularity led to the live streams being extended from the initial eight days to a massive 20 days.

When you hear that Channel 4 are going to “do a nature series”, you know it’s going to be something a little different. We were thrilled and honoured to work on Easter Eggs Live, a truly multi-platform experience which was a first in so many ways.

If you missed out on any of the live streams, you can still go back and watch the video highlights over at Easter Eggs Live.

And we wrote all of this without a single egg-pun in sight. So that’s reason alone to check it out.

Well, this afternoon we’re delighted to announce that we’ve been shortlisted for a Acquia Partner Site of the Year award after our work with Channel 4 on the Stand Up To Cancer project.

If you missed it, Stand Up To Cancer was a fundraising extravaganza, raising more than £8 million for Cancer Research UK with help from Numiko.

We were commissioned to build the website for this one-off campaign, which was based around a week’s worth of programming back in October, building up to a live fundraising show hosted by Davina McCall, Alan Carr and Dr Christian Jessen.

Hollywood heavyweight Samuel L Jackson, pop icon Cheryl Cole and comedian Jack Whitehall were just some of the star-studded guests making appeals for donations, encouraging millions of viewers to log on to Numiko’s specially-designed website.

It was our responsibility to create a robust website which could handle such a high volume of requests – as many as 4,000 page views per second.

To date, £8,011,722 has been raised through Stand Up To Cancer, which will be spent on trials to develop new, cutting-edge treatments for all types of cancer.

Numiko has been nominated for the Partner Site of the Year award in the not-for-profit category. We’re one of only 21 finalists out of a massive 114 nominees. The winners will be announced during DrupalCon Portland, which runs from May 20th until May 24th.

We were thrilled to be involved in a project which brings forward the day that all cancers can be cured, and we’re equally as thrilled to have received this nomination.

Thanks to everyone who donated through the site, and you can still log on and find out more about the Stand Up To Cancer project, and watch video highlights of the best bits, by clicking here.

So on that note, I’m excited to say that we have made it through to the finals for the Revs and the Yorkshire Insider Digital awards!  This is what we’re in the running for:

Rev Awards 2013

Lottery Good Causes for National Lottery Promotions Unit has been voted a finalist in the Not-for-profit & Public Service category.

Foxes Live: Wild in the City for Channel 4 & Windfall Films has been voted a finalist in the Website category.

The results will be announced at an event at the Grosvenor Hotel in London on Friday 17 May.

Insider Yorkshire Digital & Technology Awards 2013

Foxes Live: Wild In The City has been shortlisted for Business to Consumer Website of the Year.

Numiko has been shortlisted for Yorkshire Digital Agency of the Year.

The winners will be announced at a ceremony on Wednesday 27 March at the Royal Armouries in Leeds.

Wish us luck!

Here at Numiko, we’re making a website for Nesta that helps young people get started and gives them lots of help, advice and inspiration. We’re developing a logo and a name for this project and we want to know what they think of it. 

If you know anyone between the ages of 11 and 18, please ask them to get involved and help shape the future of digital making.  It’s just a short survey that will take around five minutes to complete.  The more feedback we gather, the better the website will be!

Just click here to complete the form and remember to be honest – we want to know what you really think!

Thanks for your help!

We welcomed Marie, Clare, Col, Bina, Mike and Andy W (our third Andy but by no means any less unique) to the team.

Andy T celebrated a decade at Numiko!  We were joined at his party by some of the ‘old school’ Numikons.  Much fun was had.

We haven’t had any weddings this year, but in exciting news Jaron became dad to baby Jacob in April, and Andy H is due to become a dad again on Saturday 22nd. Good luck Andy and Fay!

We won pitches for new clients including Nesta, Bupa Care Homes, EDF, Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, Leeds University, British Council, CR UK, Windfall Films, British Thyroid Foundation, and our very first US client – Audience Entertainment.

We were shortlisted for a Revolution and a Best Award, and won a BIMA for best mash up and data visualisation. I was cited on a fancy list, but moving swiftly on…!

We’ve been gadding about all over the place this year – we went to SXSW in Texas, Picnic in Amsterdam, to NY with UKTI; and we’ve done lots of speaking at various universities and UX events; and taken part in a couple of BBC Connected Studios. It’s amazing we had time to do any work at all.  But we did!

The launches include…

• C4 Make Bradford British website and tweet visualisation
• Shetland Arts Hansel of Film
• C4 Foxes Live
• Time To Change digital strategy
• University of Leeds Fellowships website
• Film4 Scene Stealers competition
• NLPU Good Causes website
• C4 Fresh Meat website
• Open University Guide to Diagramming
• BTF educational video animation
• CR UK rebrand
• Race for Life rebrand
• BBC Podcast relaunch
• C4 SU2C website
• Walker Morris website

We’ve also handed over two significant BBC projects which should go live next year; as well as carrying out lots of on-going work on various client websites.

All in all, the team should be very proud of all they’ve achieved in what has at times been a challenging year.  I’m certainly proud of them.

The UK Power Part Time Top 50 list has been put together by Timewise Jobs -  the UK’s first specialist jobsite for professional part time roles, with the support of Ernst & Young.  The list was announced in the Financial Times on 22 November and it followed with a celebratory drinks reception the same day at Ernst & Young’s headquarters in London.

Emma is thrilled to have made the list and feels that it sends out an important message to an industry where women represent less than one quarter of the workforce.

Numiko is highly supportive of Emma working a four day week, which allows her to prepare her PhD proposal on establishing social norms around online privacy and boundaries – something that will be highly valuable not just for Emma, but for Numiko and the wider industry.

The new desktop homepage, which  launched yesterday, allows the BBC’s editorial team to showcase selected podcasts thematically.  It also gives them added flexibility to bring archived content back to life – something they haven’t been able to do before.

We also designed and developed a new mobile site for the Podcast Directory service – now known as Podcasts & Downloads.

Our UX team started the project back in March this year, with a workshop to gain a greater understanding of the BBC Podcast audience and the ways different audiences interact with and navigate the content – this formed the basis for the design and functionality for the new homepage.

Check it out:  www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts

It’s estimated that one in 20 people will have a thyroid condition, affecting not only adults, but children and babies. The only information that was previously available online, was very adult-focused. The film delivers factual information in a way that is easy to understand, but fun too.

To view the film, click here.

The festival itself is a really interesting mixture of talks by thought leaders such as Tim O’Reilly and Doc Searls as well as discussions and debates, co-creation labs and matchmaking activities for a range of start ups and SMEs.

We were lucky enough to have been invited along as part of the KTN and Creative England delegation, and were provided with a stand in the Crossover marketplace, an exhibition designed to showcase innovative SMEs and Start Ups and foster ties between UK and Dutch companies.

The companies in the marketplace itself where incredibly varied, with people presenting a range of products and tools they had developed. There was everything from 3D printed shoes designed in the shape of animal skulls to an upright bicycle that looked very hard to actually ride (if the amount of crashes were anything to go by).

As you’d expect there were also a lot of companies showcasing applications and digital products. A common theme (in the marketplace but also across the entire festival) seemed to be a move towards single use applications (the last few months has seen a rapid growth of applications of this nature, with Pinterest probably being the most widely used but also apps like Chirp and Cinemagram to name a few).

By creating customised filters and cutting out noise (Path, for example functions like a combination of your social networks but limits your friends to 150, whereas Pair only allows you communicate with one person) these applications allow you to do less but provide a more engaging experience for the user and allow for a more personalised experience (this is something I think we will see more and more of over the next few years). Where they become really interesting though is when they connect to the network.

The festival’s theme varies each year, with the focus this year being on how connected technologies are allowing individuals to drive change on a personal, technical and economic level. The title for the festival was New Ownership: from top down to bottom up, which I didn’t really take to at first. However, as the Internet rapidly changes our relationship with each other and how we share information, the new sense of empowerment and ownership that seems to be emerging is undeniable.

We’re living in an age of rapid disruption and this trend is happening (probably not a coincidence) at a time when trust in governments and traditional power structures seems to be eroding at a rapid pace.

The obvious results of this (helped along by the democratisation of tools provided by the internetz) is that people are taking matters into their own hands, whether that’s Kickstarter reinvigorating the manufacturing industry and providing people with a space to re-imagine how we use products, a group of Egyptian students banding together to spark a revolution or a 14 year old kid from Arkansas building a nuclear reactor in his parents garage.

This idea of a ‘bottom up’ approach to working was discussed in detail in a talk by Richard Turnbull, editor of Wired Magazine. He told the audience that within the Wired offices they work in the manner of a start up instead of a publishing company in an attempt to “shift entrenched perceptions, acting as the upstarts, the annoying ‘bottom’ who are making noise and causing the ‘top’ to take notice”, which I think is evidenced in their shift from print magazine to multi-platform brand.

However, for me ‘bottom up’ is best exemplified in sites like AirBNB, where the community helps to shape the tool, after all if you don’t have a community then you don’t have a product. Chris Lukezic from AirBNB touched on this during the Social Capital of Collaborative Platforms roundtable, saying the following, ‘as your site grows you need to make sure that it retains a personal feel whilst still allowing it room to expand to a point where it is useful for the community as a whole. Basically we want it to be local but not that local.’

I’d also argue that collaboration is inherent to the concept of ‘bottom up’. Its about creating enjoyable experiences for people to engage with, creating platforms which allow people to play (or work) alongside each other as opposed to competing against each other.  In order to do this we need to make the shift from creating things which are predetermined by want and then shaped into being based on what the medium can do, to a process which starts with what the medium can do and is then shaped into something people want.

That and lolcats. We definitely need more lolcats.