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Our May Interactive Mixer was a great time — amazing weather and another fantastic crowd. Nashville interactive events have been heating up as the weather gets warmer, so kudos to those faces who keep popping up at all these events. We love to see Nashville building such a strong, committed community of interactive experts; our mixers are designed to play a small part of that. And in the 5 months since we’ve started, we’ve met so many amazing people and learned so much from our beer and cupcake fueled conversations.

This week we launched the new www.fridrichandclark.com. For those of you not familiar with F&C (affectionately called by our team)…shame on you! For over 40 years they have been front runners in the Nashville real estate market.

For the past several years they have struggled to find an online identity. The site had become stale and hard to use. With this new site, it was our goal to place F&C back on the mantle where they belonged. It was clear that a traditional realty site would not suffice. For those of you familiar with real estate you might know of a tool called the “MLS.” This tool allows users to search for houses in middle Tennessee. It would have been easy enough to simply display the results that were associated with F&C through an API…but why do something simple?!!!

This week we launched a brand new site for another great cause. AuTube.tv — a project of the Dan Marino Foundation — focuses on building connectivity and community anyone either on the autism spectrum or in the autism community.  They call it an “issues-based social network” — it’s a unique concept in which each month a single topic is presented to the community, who then discusses the topic along with a panel of experts.

In preparation for my presentation (Try some Open Source…. Everybody’s doing it), I’ve compiled some of the best offerings in the land of OSS.

Utilities
Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com) – Browser
Azureus (http://azureus.sourceforge.net) – BitTorrent
FileZilla (http://www.FileZilla.com) – FTP Client
CLAMWIN (http://www.clamwin.com) – Open Source Anti-Virus
TightVNC (http://www.tightvnc.com) – Remote computer control

As the founder of centresource, I’ve always been tasked with choosing solutions that yield the best ROI – period. To that point, Open Source technologies have become an integral part of our business and as a result, also our personal lives. We don’t choose/use them simply because they’re free (in fact, some cost money) – we use them because they represent an excellent solution to an existing need.

Digital Nashville asked me to speak on the subject at their next Education Series. You can see the invite on Facebook (here) or on the actual Digital Nashville site (here). I’ll go through a variety of scenarios where Open Source technologies provide a wonderful solution – ranging from work-related to fun!

Google, why hast thou forsaken us? A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, GMail had this great feature that was a defining reason in my switch from my previous mail provider (me). That was that if you ever got a message that had any sort of “event” — various combinations of a date, time and place — gmail would detect it and automatically create a link on the right sidebar to “Add to calendar”.

Before you begin to picture a door-to-door, truth-twisting, pushy and annoying sales guy, think again. Last week, I was honored to be named the top sales person in the Media and Advertising space. I have to admit that being called a sales person still irks me a bit.

When I first began at CentreSource, I demanded that the title on my business card be changed to “Solutions Consultant.” To this day, I have no clue what that actually means, but I would think it means I help people find opportunities and solve problems. In my effort to say something profound during the City Paper interview, I said, “We want to make sure we’re delivering the outcome the client wants, not just a list of deliverables.”

On Friday, we found out that our team won NINE Horizon Interactive Awards!  The Horizon Awards aim to recognize and commend the best work being done in the interactive community.  They receive entries from all over the world, so to win even one of their awards is a huge honor.  We entered some of our recent interactive work in to several of their categories, and came away with awards in online advertising, self-promotion, and entertainment among others!  A big thanks has to go out to our awesome clients whose openness and collaboration really made these projects award-winning.   Here’s a list of our clients and projects that received awards:

All Hail the Golden Kraut

Motivation can take many forms. At CentreSource, it takes the form of spray-painted canned food.

But first, a bit of backstory…

In 2008, we were the leading sponsor of Nashville’s Barcamp. We created a program for the day, acted as MCs, and designed some interactive games for what was a great day of speaking, learning, and networking. We forgot one thing, though, until the last minute: prizes for said games. So in desperation at the 11th hour, Nick grabbed the only free things in the house: two cans of spraypaint and two cans of canned food. And this begat the dumbest prizes ever — Golden Kraut and Silvery Beans.

This week, we’re happy for a few things: spring weather, some great new projects tearing through the dev department, and new team members. That’s right, this week we welcome Shaun Jackson to our team.

Shaun is a long-time friend of the firm — several of us have known Shaun for a while and respected his leadership skills and passion for interactive. Shaun actually comes to us from the other side: he’s been a client of CentreSource many times over as the Director of Online Marketing for Word Entertainment. He has the unique perspective of knowing our processes from the other side.