London to Brighton: hills, hills and more hills

Team 'Refreshed' valiantly endured some severe saddle ache on Sunday to complete the gruelling 54 mile (mostly uphill) London to Brighton Bike Ride.


We also managed to pester and spam enough people on Facebook to raise well over £1500 for the British Heart Foundation.


With 27,000 other riders we faced a 12 mph headwind, some extensive bike traffic, an 800 ft hill and a little bit of cramp. All in all it was hard work but strangely quite fun at the same time...

Here's a few pic's from the day:



Team Refreshed heading off, everyone queuing and queuing...and queuing.




Dan, Simon, Martin and the cop from YMCA



Simon, Gareth and Martin enjoy ice creams at 830ft, racing to the finish and our official driver (thanks Charlotte!)

Google Universal Search Arrives

Google.com is now sporting a crisp new look following the launch of its Universal Search system, also dubbed ‘Google 2.0’.

Now when you receive search results rather than the traditional long list of other Google services that ‘may’ be relevant to your search, results from these other verticals are blended straight into the web results, for example searching on ‘ronaldinho goals’ returns mostly Youtube, Metacafe and Google Video results and you can even view them from the search results page! This blending has been happening for some time with local searches and improvement to the interface also means you are shown additional Google vertical links that are relevant to your search.

For example my search on ‘president bush’ now returns web, news, image & video vertical links:

In comparison to a search for ‘sopranos’ will return web, news, blogs & groups:

Universal Search is only available on the US version right now but expect it to be coming to your local Google search very soon. Results can be blended in from web, news, video, images, local, blog, groups and book search results. The interface is the result of Google’s challenge to return all useful content types for any specific query and represents several attempts at doing so!

Internet World Video Interview

At the recent Internet World exhibition at Earls Court in London, I gave my thoughts on the development of the industry as well as what makes Refreshed Media good to work with. Check it out below:

Bournemouth Live! goes live!

The Bournemouth Live! website officially went live over the weekend. As part of our sponsorship of the week long festival we completely overhauled the site with some great design work from the creative team and some excellent new functionality courtesy of the development team.

The Bournemouth Live! festival is set around four free outdoor stages in Bournemouth from the Square to the Pier as well as music events in venues, hotels and churches all over the town.

The organisers at Big Bear Events have developed the festival over the past couple of years and we love being involved with something that has such a positive effect on the town.

It runs from the 24^th June to the 1^st July. So visit the website, plan what you want to see and then get yourself down there!

www.bournemouthlive.info