Paul Mann, Jamie Staff and Ben Robards

As always the Fireflies event was a great night and it was great to see so many new people turn out to show there support. Jamie Staff the British olympic gold medalist even dropped by to show his support and pass on a message of support.

Paul proudly showing off his sponsors company logos.

We wish all the riders well and look forward to seeing them all in Cannes on the 23rd!

If you would like to make a donation to support the Fireflies and Leuka please visit http://www.thefirefliestour.com

Allez le Fireflies!

Photos courtesy of Sylvain Deleu.

This is a project we are very proud off on so many levels.

The Fireflies Tour was established in 2001 by Sandy Watson Scott (then Head of TV, M&C Saatchi) in recognition of relatives and friends’ Battles with Cancer. The five cofounders: Jake Scott, Adrian Moat, Nick Livesey (Directors at RSA Films), Tim Page (Head of TV at Y&R) and Chris Haworth (Ski Instructor) set out to cycle 1,000 km, 18 mountains in just 8 days from Lake Evian across the Alps to Cannes, arriving during the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.

Inspired by the courage it takes to fight Cancer the riders annually tackle the most gruelling climbs of Le Tour de France. Their motto is simple: “for those who suffer we ride”. The Fireflies are committed to raising money for Leuka, a charity formed to support Research & Treatment of Leukaemia at the Hammersmith Hospital, London, renowned as a world leader in the treatment of cancers of the blood.

Each year new amateur cyclists from the ranks of the advertising and film world have taken up the challenge. Thanks to industry Sponsors, to date from 2001-09, the Fireflies have raised an incredible £800,000 in aid of Leuka. 1 in 3 of us will be diagnosed with some type of Cancer in our lifetime. It is believed that Leukaemia is the model of all Cancers and achieving a greater understanding of this disease will help in the fight against All other forms of Cancer.

2010 is the 10th anniversary Tour and to mark this milestone, the Fireflies are aiming to Smash their £1 million target.

Please take five to visit the site: http://www.thefirefliestour.com

If you would like to make a donation to what is in our humble opinion a fantastic charity please click the link: http://www.thefirefliestour.com/sponsor-us/ or here: http://www.justgiving.com/leuka/

“For those who suffer. We ride!”

Stephen is a multi talented developer with a keen interest in the latest and greatest technologies so expect more tech goodness from the Dead Technical team in the near future. Stephen is also our first resident Kiwi but we won’t hold that against him except when the rugby is on.

Welcome aboard Stephen!

http://www.agencyregister.co.uk/

iPhone and iPad are two of those devices and without developing a specific app we needed to find a way for the user to be able to navigate around the page through a touch gesture. jQuery seemed to have answer…

There are a number of jQuery plugins for iPhone specific development. We found this one particularly useful: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/swipe

For further reading there is a good article here:
http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2008/07/10/touching-and-gesturing-on-the-iphone/

We will upload a demo of what we have working in the next few days. So watch this space.

The Fireflies Tour is a charity event in aid of the Leuka charity.

The 10th Annual FireFlies Tour takes place on the 15th – 23rd June 2010. 8 Gruelling days of cycling from Geneva to Cannes, 1000km across the French Alps, All in aid of Leuka. “For those who suffer, we ride”.

We are incredibly excited to be involved and are looking forward to bringing some exciting technology to the site.

To find out more about Leuka please go here: http://www.leuka.org.uk/

The new website will be up soon. Watch this space…

A launch campaign for mobile manufacturer Nokia for its N97 handset, won the first digital out-of-home media X Factor contest at the DOOH Media Summit yesterday (May 6th).

The winning campaign featured constantly updated Reuters and Facebook feeds with compliance and publishing controlled through a proprietary content management engine developed by Dead Technical. The creative work was by Wieden & Kennedy. The campaign ran across CBS Outdoor DEP and XTP formats.

The Nokia campaign beat off hot competition from Virgin Trains and McDonald’s to be crowned the winner of the DOOH X Factor, and was awarded £10,000 of media space from Candi TV after a text vote from the audience.

The DOOH X Factor contest to find the digital equivalent of the iconic billboards from The Economist, involved three agencies presenting a digital out-of-home ad to a reality show-style panel of judges.

Dominic Mills, editorial director of Haymarket Business Media, the ‘Simon Cowell’ of the judges, said the contest wanted to find a digital ad that would live on in people’s memories.

Mills said: “Most of us can name an iconic analogue out-of-home work, topically, the Tories’ ‘Labour isn’t working’, or ads from The Economist or Wonderbra. They lived on in the memory long after the poster has gone.”

This year a two-week spell at the start of August is expected to be hotter than the UK’s highest ever temperature, the 38.5c (101.3f) recorded at Brogdale, near Faversham, Kent, on August 10, 2003.
Read more here.

This is not a Met Office prediction this is a Positive Weather Solutions forecast so I feel pretty confident this will happen. Perhaps Boots, Piz Buin or Nivea would like to sponsor the Chara Challenge or the Dead Technical team?

So the miles continue to go on at a steady rate. I’ve given up my luxury life of taxis everywhere and replaced this with walking. The accountant, bank manager, environmentalists and Boris Johnson will be happy with this, the black cab men of London and Addison Lee not so much. The plus side other than additional mileage as part of my training is that I spend less time sat down and more time appreciating what a great city London really is. We have some beautiful buildings that you really can’t appreciate unless you walk past them or stop to take a look. In one day alone I increased my mileage by 5 miles, albeit without weight but I feel a lot better for it.

My proposed big day of Sunday training ended up consisting of two roast dinners, a long walk over the Army ranges, falling asleep in front of a dismal Chelsea draw and watching too much television. In fairness two programmes could be counted as training, the Gurkhas on Country File and Eddie Izzard – Marathon Man. Eddie Izzard, wow what an inspiration! The guy is more at home in 6 inch heels than trainers yet he managed to complete 43 marathons back to back with only 8 weeks training. Maybe I should invite him to join The Chara Challenge? The Gurkhas were equally impressive with there training on the Brecon Beacons. Some seriously tough terrain in equally tough weather conditions and they were carrying each other! Those guys really are some of the Army’s toughest in my book!

We have been debating within the Dead Technical team what the best filling for the backpacks is. Making up the weight of 35lb (15kgs) can be with anything but it is important it is comfortable once mounted. So far we have tried sand bags (too dense), compost (still a little dense and can smell a bit), bird seed (very dense but easy to manipulate and comes sealed at 28lbs) and finally punch bag wadding. The later two are my favourite at the moment but I guess time will tell what is going to work best. Any other suggestions?

The training for the Chara Challenge continues…

John and I have already started looking at backpacks. All the gear no idea springs to mind!

In all honesty I think we are all looking at hitting 5 miles pretty comfortably as a starting point. Not too difficult is the general consensus but this is in trainers, without weight on our backs and nice smooth pavements.

We will be upping the ante at the weekend with our first runs nearing 10 miles or 2 hours which ever comes first in woodland / on rough terrain. This will be our first sign of how difficult a hurdle we face.

We embrace the Commando spirit… Nothing Impossible!