‘Thank You Big Chip and Thank You Tony’

Nigel Collier, Managing Director of Skylab:  www.studioskylab.com

“The Big Chip awards were the first awards event we had ever entered. We started the business in 2005 and were flying under the radar for a while, while we built our offering and client base and eventually, we decided to start engaging with the outside world more to raise our profile.

On the night, we were really pleased just to get nominated for the Most Innovative Technology award. We didn’t win that category, which was fine but it was totally unexpected when they announced the winner for one of the biggest prizes of the night, the Anthony Wilson Original Modern Award. Someone on our table from another company had to say to us, “Isn’t that you guys? Hadn’t you better go up?” We were stunned into silence and then outright confusion as we just weren’t expecting it at all. We thought our night was already over. In fact, it was so unexpected and we were so surprised that David Logan our Technical Director had already left to make the drive back to Leeds to collect his young daughter from the baby-sitter and we had to phone him as he made his way along the M62 to tell him the good news!

It was a big moment in the history of the business but very special for me for personal reasons:

When I was at University in 1994, I was one of the first people in the UK to make an interactive CD for their final degree project. Very fittingly, the subject was the pioneering Factory Records. I interviewed Tony Wilson and Ben Kelly, the architect of the Haçienda and over time built a really good rapport with Tony.

The CD had an interactive Filofax (or FiloFaç as I called it) with the entire Factory Records catalogue listed, album covers, artwork, videos (including Madonna’s first performance at the Haç), interviews with key people and when I eventually finished it and showed it to Tony he said, “I’m going to take this to London Records. This is going to be huge!” He was so enthusiastic about it and I became so caught up in that enthusiasm, such was the passion of the man. Needless to say it didn’t go to London Records and it wasn’t huge… but it didn’t matter. I had my moment and my memory that still drives me to this day. Tony was an inspirational character and to have the award in his name is a personal achievement as well as an achievement for the studio. I have wonderful memories of that time and it’s special to me that the award was given in his name. I would like to make a special and personal thanks to Yvette Livesey for her kind comments that were passed forward to us when we received the award.

It’s thanks to Tony that I even ended up with a degree, let alone being in a position to co-found Skylab, a digital studio that specialises in online and moving image.

I think winning the award shows the great value in investing in R&D. The website we entered for the Big Chip awards was for the Round the World Yacht Race. The budget was limited and didn’t match the true potential of what the site could be, so as a company, we took the rather brave and unusual decision to put our own money into building the site to allow it to reach its true potential. We had faith in our own production and R&D abilities, which eventually paid off. William Ward the CEO said, “In creating the official website for the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, Skylab has successfully delivered a world-class solution through innovative creative thinking and cutting edge design and technology.” For a small company of 7 full-time staff, it demonstrates the true potential of the studio and the power of investing in R&D at this important time in the history of the internet.

Creating the website naturally brought together both halves of the studio, online and moving image, into one perfect blend. I think it was a winning website because viewers could really immerse themselves in the race. The website featured a very powerful content management system that delivered news, video interviews from the middle of the South Atlantic featuring crew from the 10 separate yachts, satellite phone calls, podcasts, blogs etc.

Not only that but from scratch, we invented an interactive ‘race viewer’ that enabled us to track each yacht’s position and journey via a GPS device onboard. The GPS device sent the signal to satellite, to shore, to our servers, we worked some magic and then the resulting location was mashed up with Google and plotted on a Google map, so website viewers could see the location of the yachts 27/7. A very powerful and comforting tool for family, friends, race organisers and fans alike. For each of the 10 yachts, the race viewer showed longitude, latitude, course over ground, speed over ground, distance to leader, distance to finish and distance travelled in 24 hours. This data was also integrated with Google Earth enabling you to do rotate a 3D map of the world, allowing you to fly around the yacht’s position in the middle of the ocean, overlaid with cloud coverage and weather reports.

The website and race viewer was a very original and modern piece of technology which brought the previously static brochure-style website and the whole race itself to life. Our technology has implications for the transport industry such as haulage firms tracking the location of lorries, taxi companies, shipping companies tracking their fleet etc. The implications for this invention are significant and importantly helped to position the race as a very innovative brand.

The website was a massive project for us. It was nine months in development and the race itself lasted another nine months, required constant updating during the event 24/7. The whole team showed a real sign of commitment to the project, even working on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve to support the 10 crews as they travelled 35,000 miles round the world, albeit at 4am in the morning!

We demonstrated that we were able to take a real world event and elevate it into an online brand and take the client on that journey with us.

Winning the award has done two things for us really. Firstly, it has opened the door in allowing our business to mature, elevating our profile to the point that we are now establishing strong partnerships with various advertising agencies, PR agencies, marketing companies and other partners, to bring our production expertise and R&D knowledge to their clients.

Secondly, it has given us the confidence to invent more. Based on the positive affirmation that this award provided, we have created a powerful new platform that allows any brand, any business and any content owner to become a broadcaster and deliver high definition video to an online audience from their own website. We have already used the technology to power a site for one of the biggest companies in the world and this is an exciting time for us as we start the search to find partners and clients that we can roll out the service with.

If we hadn’t had the validation of this award, we would probably not be where we are today. We would not have the platform that allows us to feed into new areas of business and establish new relationships with partners and clients. Our future will be partly defined by the positive affirmation in R&D that winning the Big Chip award provided… and that future is bright.

Thank You Big Chip and Thank You Tony.”