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Stop the presses and sound the alarm!! We found out yesterday that our entry into the Interactive Media Awards competition has won the IMA Best in Class Award in the Advocacy category. This is our second best in class distinction this year! The first for the W3 awards and now this!!!

The IMA judges scored our entry in the high nineties in all five of the core criteria: Design, Content, Feature Functionality, Usability and Standards Compliance / Cross-Browser Compatibility. As if the award wasn’t enough, our fellow winners for other categories included: Coca Cola, Bacardi, Red Bull, Sony and Cisco to name a few.

The weather may be quite a bit cooler than it was a month or so ago, but it is warm in our North Fourth office. Why? Because CentreSource was named as one of the “Hot 100″ by BusinessTN magazine. You can check out the story in the November/December issue  (pg 24 to be exact) — which happens to be the very center of the magazine. Coincidence? I think not! Get it…centresource – centerfold. (hehe)

Our Director of Technology Chip Hayner was named the Software Programmer of the Year by the Nashville Technology Council at an award reception this past Tuesday. The picture is of perhaps one of the coolest trophies we have ever seen: a custom designed Gibson/Epiphone electric guitar!

CentreSource Interactive Agency was honored with four total nominations, including Technology Organization of the Year, Innovator of the Year for our Founder/CEO Nicholas Holland, who also earned a nomination for the Lifetime Achievement Award. Our hats are off to all of the nominees and winners for the work they do to make this an incredible city with a thriving technology community.

I live in the wonderful town of Pleasant View, Tennessee. It’s located about a 30 minute drive northwest of Nashville. Yesterday, as I passed exit 31 on I-24, I saw a sign in bold red letters proclaiming… “FIREWORKS Sold Here!” Nothing too fancy or flashy, just red paint on a white sign.

I began to recall fond memories from my childhood… memories of the all-too-seldom family vacation fireworks stop. At every exit with fireworks I would beg my parents to pull over and let me partake of explosive goodness. I’m not sure if it was the idea of blowing something up, or the large red arrow that caught my attention, but regardless…I wanted them…NOW.

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?!!!

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.”