Our February meeting was well attended with some new faces

Thanks to everyone who came and welcome to all our visitors!

We made a couple of announcements that are worth repeating here

1) We have enrolled the group in the O’Reilly user group scheme. This gives us discounts on book purchases, access to review copies of books and potentially authors as speakers. There were catalogues available on the day as well as a sample book on C#.

2) Leading on from this – benefits. As well as the O’Reilly discount we’re starting to gather a couple of other offers that have been tailored for the group – these are for members only so are on the password protected benefits page on the AMITPRO site

3) TCA Conference – The Trade Channel Association has an event coming up in Leicester. If you’d like details about the event or membership to the TCA get in touch with us

4) We forgot to mention this on the night but you can now send money to AMITPRO via paypal@amitpro.org. This is for anything that may require a payment such as subscriptions. There are also buttons on the site for doing the same thing

Onto the speakers!

We had two very contrasting speakers this month but they both gave great presentations

First up we had Rick Shingler and Leigh Trojanowski from DataWreck

DataWreck, based in North Staffordshire, are primarily a data recovery company

They provide a free analysis, followed by a no obligation quote with a no recovery – no fee policy

Their focus is on home users and small businesses and they have a full price list on their website

As far as SBSC members go, they are looking to work with partners and either offer a commission on any referrals or are happy for partners to white label the service to offer to their clients

Rick and Leigh also gave us some great insight into what happens to a hard drive once their process starts including some pointers on some common physical problems a hard drive can suffer from

They also helped dispel some myths about hard drives and data recovery

• Fridge Freezers are BAD for disks
• Disks AREN’T vacuum sealed
• Good software isn’t free
• Hitting a hard drive really won’t make it work again

DataWreck are also expanding their business into other areas with data destruction, digital forensics and recycling new services that are launching soon

There was time for a quick demonstration of how flash memory in USB pens can be recovered before showing us some of the more interesting jobs they have had to deal with including recovering data from a USB pen that a dog had swallowed!

Rather them than us I think!

All in all it looks like a great service that is within a price point that will fit with the type of client our members work with so I’m sure DataWreck will be called on in the future

Thanks to Rick and Leigh for coming and also to Paul Dadge of PC Paramedics for recommending them

You can download the slide deck Rick and Leigh used HERE

After a short break, next to speak were Wayne Farrington and Chris Taylor from BrightFox solutions

Brightfox are a Coventry based web design company (Also on Twitter and Facebook)

They have been trading just over a year and have sold over 150 websites in that period

Their team consists of people who specialise in specific areas such as graphics design, coding, project management and marketing

This means any web site project is dealt with by team of people and each person can can just focus on what they do best

This means the project manager will stay in touch with the client and ensure the they are happy and the graphic designers and coders can get on with putting the site together

Each site comes with a CMS which has been custom designed by BrightFox so that once a site has been completed the end user can make their own changes. The CMS also keeps a track of the last five edits so their is no danger of loosing data as any changes can be easily reverted

All sites have a fixed price and they have a-la carte style menu where the user choose any extras they need so they know exactly what the the cost will be

The subject of search engine optimisation was covered with some best practices such as making use of Google local and ensuring your content is actually relevant to what you do so that search engine can index you correctly!

As well as doing brochure style websites they are also capable of producing bespoke web applications such as e-commerce enabled site and holiday booking sites given as recent examples

Wayne also talked about some examples of how their sites have specifically impacted their clients businesses

BrightFox are also looking to work with partners on a referral/commission basis or as a white labelled service

The work they are doing looks great (check out their website for examples) so I’m sure they’ll be working with some of members soon

We’d like to thank Wayne and Chris for coming along and speaking to the group

The slide deck used for the presentation is available for download HERE

Also in attendance were Gavin Gardener and Leigh Odell from Accredit UK (also on Twitter) and they introduced themselves to the group with a view to speaking at future meeting

Thanks again to all who attended

We look forward to seeing you in March!