The main focus of the role will be to meet sales targets by way of introducing new clients, projects and partnerships. Using established relationship management techniques, you will handle sales negotiations and manage the pitch and tender processes under the strategic guidance of the MD and the Senior Management Team.

In addition, you will be responsible for the leadership, management and motivation of the New Business Sales team, and recognise and nurture talent in the department.

The salary for this role is around £40,000 with benefits.

If you feel that you are a proven relationship manager and have experience in a relevant field such as web, and you would like to work with some of the brightest minds in the North, then why not email us your application?

How to apply:

To apply simply email your CV to personnel@technophobia.com. Please ensure you quote reference TP-SMM-127.

Closing date: 17th May 2010

TechnoPhobia operates under a strict ethical policy of equal opportunities for all. There are no age barriers and applications are encouraged from both men and women. Applications from those who meet all the specified criteria will be welcomed.

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What isn’t all that clear is what the benefit is for the hijackers. Unlike an email phishing attack, they are not taking over your PC in order to use it in a denial of service attack, or in order to steal your credit card details. They merely get to speak on your behalf. It doesn’t take too long for your twitter followers to notice that the tone and content of your tweets has changed and that it’s probably not actually you tweeting. So why would they want to send out a lot of inappropriate messages to people? I guess spammers have their own justifications.

The thing that did become clear is that we are still a long way from everyone understanding how to manage their own security. None of the people caught out by this phishing attack noticed that the faked twitter login was not on a twitter.com domain and was not using https. This is not their fault, we have reduced the visibility of these things – when was the last time you noticed the https padlock in your browser’s status bar and even our financial institutions sometimes inadvertently encourage us to provide sensitive information to sites with domains we don’t know.

On top of this users really don’t understand the control they have over access even when it is given to them. The additional security provided by Twitter OAuth, which lets you give permission to other applications to post on your behalf, becomes a security risk when people don’t realise that this control must be managed and monitored. This great post from Terrence Eden explains more.

Digital Ski 2010

Work hard, play hard has always been a pretty good adage, shame that I seldom get the chance to do the latter… until last week that is.

So it was with this in mind that Harry Worsnop, one of our account managers, and I attended the recent Digital Ski event organised by Econsultancy. The 5 day event was held in the bustling village of St Anton, perfectly positioned in the Arlberg ski area of Austria. Now in its fourth year, Digital Ski is the online marketing industry’s very own not for profit social/networking event and provides a great opportunity (er, excuse?) to go away with clients, colleagues, contacts and friends for a few busy/relaxing/drunken/productive/active days on the slopes.

And the event provided all of the above.

Following the initial day when the visibility was poor, days 2, 3 & 4 were amazing; miles of open piste and glorious sunshine. This year’s event comprised 27 great characters in total; a mix of skiers and boarders, geeks, marketers and techies. It was an exhilarating mix of activity and talking tech.

Our hard play culminated in Apres Ski @ The Krazy Kanguruh, (anyone who has been there will know it!) and ended up with Harry, in a moment of creativity fuelled by enough jagerbombs and instant margaritas to sink a battle ship, dancing on the tables with his shirt off…!

Needless to say we had a great time and met some good people, and our ready for our next challenge…bring it on!

Most content management systems concern themselves with managing the production and publication of content – getting stuff written and published. But as we now believe that content is just something to talk about (see item#6) surely content management tools should also help manage the conversation around each piece of content and the impact of that conversation on the content?

So I believe a full lifecycle CMS should include tools that:

1. show the content creator/owner how many people have used the content
2. show them what the users’ intensions were when the used the content (what they searched for to get to it, what else they looked at, what the last page of their visit was, etc)
3. where the content was shared and how many people responded to the sharing
4. any other information about the shared responses such as time and location info (see a bit.ly example)
5. what the context of the sharing was i.e. ‘this is a really insightful article’ or ‘lies, damn lies #fail’
6. when the content was shared in a commentable forum (a blog, a forum, twitter, etc), what the comments to the original message were
7. opt to re-aggregate the conversation (comments) from a forum where the content was shared back into the comments on the CMS

Much of this information is already available in our analytics reports, but it does not seem to be joined up to the content and presented to the content author in a way that allows them to adapt, amend and improve the content. Surely this is how content management should be in a world where content has a life after publication?

This last point overlaps with the Salmon-protocol a little, but I’ve a feeling that Salmon is going to take a while to get adoption.

There is a great service available from backtweet that could do much of the heavy lifting around tracking the sharing and commenting of the content for us, but the available plugins and widgets seem to be aimed at showing the conversation to users rather than content creators/managers.

I think there might be some justification for a Google Analytics/Backtweet/Lucene based mashup to bring this information into the content creation interface.

How much value would tools that help manage the conversation add value to the CMS?

Your thoughts are welcomed.

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Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

The new website allows supporters to pledge to write a blog post or take part in other activities promoting the achievements of the women in technology and science who have inspired them. The website will pull together all of these tributes in a mash-up on the day, 24th March 2010!

The first Ada Lovelace Day was held on 24th March 2009 and was a huge success. It attracted nearly 2000 signatories to the pledge and 2000 more people who signed up on Facebook. Over 1200 people added their post URL to the Ada Lovelace Day 2009 mash-up. The day itself was covered by BBC News Channel, BBC.co.uk, Radio 5 Live, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Metro, Computer Weekly, and VNUnet, as well as hundreds of blogs worldwide.

Amelia Thorne, Director, TechnoPhobia announced: ‘I am delighted that TechnoPhobia is supporting Ada Lovelace Day.

As a woman who established a digital agency back in 1995, it is very disappointing, 15 years later, to be working in an industry where women are still underrepresented. Whilst women’s use of web and social media is equal to that of our male counterparts we form only 20% of the digital workforce and even less so when it comes to opinion leaders and influencers on and offline media, on blogs, forums and at conferences.

Perhaps it is due to a general female tendency to nurture rather than more aggressive self-promotion or that our relatively new industry is still in some sense subconsciously seen as an extension of engineering that has typically been a male orientated domain? The role of women in senior positions within the workforce can be extended to any sector but I am delighted that TechnoPhobia is able to support Ada Lovelace Day and in doing so address the balance of promoting women in technology.

I would encourage all women working in Technology and our male colleagues (where might your daughters be working in 10 years time?) to get involved, even if in a small way. Ladies, don’t be modest about our achievements, we deserve as much recognition, encouragement and support as our male colleagues and if we want the web and technology to reflect our influence it is up to us to be our own role models and make our voices heard,’

Ada Lovelace Day organiser, Suw Charman-Anderson, kindly said, “Technophobia’s support has been invaluable in getting the Ada Lovelace Day website ready for launch. From helping me refine the brief to coming up with creative solutions that fit seamlessly with the tech I was already using. They have been innovative, helpful and happy to explain any technical points that were unfamiliar to me. In short, a joy to work with.”

We all kind of knew that device would be for media consumption that it would be a great computer for non-computer users, or for people who want another device for specific tasks, for reading magazines, browsing in bed, watching video on the train, etc.

My disappointment comes from the opportunity has not been grasped to make a tablet for content creation. The touch screen is such an expressive way to interact with a computer, better still if the screen can be shared/displayed. I want to be able to prototype a web interface, to record and edit video, visualise my source code, arrange documents into the right order.

As Stephen Fry quite rightly suggests, these things will come and we should commend Apple for bringing iPad to market and showing the world what might be without keyboards.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

We are in the final stages of design and build of the new Ada Lovelace Day website that allows supporters to pledge a blog or activity promoting the achievements of women in technology and science who have inspired them and will act as a mashup to follow the event on the day, 24th March 2010!

As a woman who established a digital agency back in 1995, it is very disappointing, 15 years later, to be working in an industry where women are still underrepresented. Whilst women’s use of web and social media is equal to that of our male counterparts we form only 20% of the digital workforce and even less so when it comes to opinion leaders and influencers on and offline media, on blogs, forums and at conferences.

Perhaps it is due to a general female tendency to nurture rather than more aggressive self-promotion or that our relatively new industry is still in some sense subconsciously seen as an extension of engineering that has typically been a male orientated domain? The role of women in senior positions within the workforce can be extended to any sector but I am delighted that TechnoPhobia is able to support Ada Lovelace Day and in doing so address the balance of promoting women in technology.

I would encourage all women working in Technology and our male colleagues (where might your daughters be working in 10 years time?) to get involved, even if in a small way. Ladies, don’t be modest about our achievements, we deserve as much recognition, encouragement and support as our male colleagues and if we want the web and technology to reflect our influence it is up to us to be our own role models and make our voices heard!

“Gordon Brown said to me, ‘How should the UK make the best use of the internet?’ and I replied that the government should just put all of its data on it,” Berners-Lee recalled. “And he said ‘OK, let’s do it’.”

This is very modern attitude with the colloquial name JFDI that I’m not going to expand on a corporate blog and last year saw in quick succession the cabinet office announcing that Sir Tim would be coming on board to deal with this issue, another design document and a dribble of information about a site to be called data.gov.uk.

Why is any of this important? Well from a purely economic view we have already paid for this data with our taxes and making it available can only lead to opportunities for innovation around it. From the opposite end of the spectrum, niche uses of data that would never find traction in a departments budget can be created using one of the plethora of mashup toolkits and put online for no matter how small an audience and it is impossible to predict which of these could be found to be useful and grow to national prominence. In the middle ground the day to day operations of a lot of businesses will be transformed if this trend expands to the heavy plant of data sets the Postcode Address File and the Ordnance Survey’s map data.

There is no doubt that these developments along with similar initiatives elsewhere, most notably in the USA, that these are exciting times for those of use that get excited about data and its online applications. This year will see whether government can be truly convinced that data is king so selling us our own is counter productive and that if you truly love it you should set it free.

^[1]even if it is still on occasion confused with other uses of the term semantic on and about the internet