Type Cast

Today sees the launch of a new site aimed sqaurely at the home renovation / decorating market.

MyDeco.com, from the founders of lastminute.com Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane-Fox, is an intermediary service which aggregates home furniture and decorating products into one site. But calling it a simple intermediary is selling it desperately short. There are some really cool features in there which should make it a complete one-stop-shop for everyone from those looking to get some ideas on which sofa to purchase to those looking for a complete ‘changing rooms‘ style makeover.

Just some of the features on the site include…

• Decorate your room virtually by uploading a photo and applying colour and virtual wallpapers
• 3D modelling, allowing you to create a look from real products in your own room photo
• Buy the Look, where users can buy a specific look for a fraction of the ‘real’ price with similar, but less expensive products.
• Get expert tips and advice from leading designers

Underpinning this, and more, is the fact that the entire site is ’socialised’. Everything is ratable, rankable, commentable as well as a cute little feature called ‘not my style’ which helps to build your taste profile thus allowing you to find people with similar likes and dislikes to you. Mix in some blogging and groups and it’s the virtual hub of neighbourhood gossip on home decorating. Dodgy furniture makers beware - your product’s failings will be shouted form the roof tops.

In fact, I have more than a passing observer’s interest in this. Back in the mists of time at Interesource (February 2007) we did some work with MyDeco to help define and architect the social aspects of the site. We did a whole bunch of Photoshop worked up wireframes which they took and branded up. No doubt loads of it has changed since last summer. I only glimpsed at the private beta on a couple of occasions last autumn, but it was great to be part of that start up scene in the early days - it was like 1999 all over again, rented office space an’ all. As for the team, they were great to work with. By the very fact that many of them were ex-lastminute.com, a lot of them had worked together historically and so this thing was always going to work.

I’ll follow MyDeco closely, hell I will probably even register. I wish them all the very best.

Shane Richmond over at The Telegraph has blogged about the demise of Interesource. They obviously had all sorts of problems with the hosting arrangements for the blogs and My Telegraph when the administrators rolled in. Good to see things are back up and running normally. I think part of it might be down to the fact that an ex-colleague, and the guy responsible for Interesource’s CMS platform on which ran the aforementioned services, James Higgs is over at Telegraph towers. 

At the beginning of November this year I found myself in a position that I hadn’t encountered for five years - since the end of the .com bubble. Redundant. The old company for which I worked went into administration with about one days notice for all 30 or so staff.

Interesource was a great place to work. A lot of very intelligent and often opinionated people gathered together under one roof producing some of the best work of our careers and helping shape the new web landscape.

We built sites such as DoggySnaps.com and MyTelegraph, campaign sites for the Conservative party (which got top billing on the Sunday evening iTV news), ProblemSolved.co.uk as well as a plethora of sites for leading UK charities and blue chip multinationals.

Anyway, what’s done is done, time to move on. Though not getting paid for October will take a little longer to get over.

The good thing is that, as far as I know, most of my ex-colleagues have found gainful employment either at other agencies or starting up on their own. That’s testament to the talent at Interesource that just one month after the demise of the firm no one is struggling for work.

As for myself, I’m back in the Creative Director’s chair spinning plates at a digital marketing agency, Pancentric. We have a great number of clients and I’m developing some of the accounts to embrace social media, as well as evangelising internally about all things digitally social. We have a very strong SEO offering and it’s interesting approaching the social media beast from a more marketing and brand awareness perspective.

Anyway, here’s to the future. I hope I’ll get chance as some point to work in such an environment with such a crowd of people as Interesource.