We spend so much time working on our client’s websites to make sure they look great, work effectively and keep your users engaged. But no matter how good your site looks, if your web hosting is not up to scratch, the user experience will be diminished. When you’re thinking about hosting, spending a little more can be the difference between a fluid user experience and a user leaving your site while waiting for it to load!

The Google Webmaster Blog have this to say about the need for speed in your hosting and page performance:

“Speeding up websites is important – not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users, and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But, faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs”

Here at Liquid, we’re big into games. Casual games, hardcore games, mind games – the lot.

Liquid Interactive is proud to announce we’ve joined as a sponsor for the Play Well Cup  – an Australian Starcraft 2 league where companies around Australia battle it out. All for a good cause, donations go to Child’s Play – a charity dedicated to raising money to help kids in hospitals including Mater Children’s Hospital in Brisbane & the Sydney Children’s Hospital.

Running in September & October, Play Well is a 6-week tournament.

Now, I’m not into playing Starcraft competitively but when James (@jamescroft) approached me to join, I leapt at the opportunity to mix with like-minded players… after all  it’s for charity!

For those not in the know, Starcraft 2 is a ‘real time strategy’ video game (or a RTS). Players lead their army to victory… or not. Games in can be highly unpredictable and very exciting. It’s so huge, it’s practically a Korean national sport, broadcast all around the world.

Last week, Liquid took on Firemint (the now legendary Australian developers behind Flight Control, Real Racing and now Spy Mouse) and won by the skin of our noses. At the time of writing, our team is currently placed third.

Every game is lovingly and expertly cast by James and Jason giving a blow by blow account.

Dispatch yourself to http://playwellcup.com.au/ to watch the latest casts and donate for a great cause!

For the most part of last week, Amy and I spent our time in Cairns at the VII World Avocado Congress 2011. We were invited to give a couple of presentations about our work in digital for Australian Avocados. What we perhaps didn’t realise, however, was how much we could learn by comparing the marketing activity of different countries all for the same product.

Australia was hosting this congress which is held every 4 years. There were delegates attending from 24 countries from all parts of the supply chain; including scientists, growers, people from the pack-houses, as well as the marketers. Amy and I were fortunate enough to see presentations and have conversations with marketers from Mexico, Chile, South Africa, Columbia and New Zealand. Each with their varied challenges and approaches to promoting Avocados.

We were also able to participate in a field trip to Mareeba and surrounds (up in the Atherton Tablelands), where we visited a variety of Avocado Farms to learn about their innovation in quality control and production processes.

Of course a conference wouldn’t be a great conference without some excellent social events, where you can enjoy the company of the people you’ve met over a salsa dance and a vino or two… These were some of the best times, as we made friends which we can stay in contact with and continue to follow their progress, as well as gain insight from their activity.

From the outset we were delighted to have been given the opportunity to attend this congress to meet with our collegues from other countries. We found the unique concept of such large scale and open knowledge sharing very refreshing. All countries may well be competitors, but two minds are better than one. Understanding what’s going on and collaborating with your competitors can actually grow your business; which as we learnt, is the proven case for avocados.

From a marketing perspective, the closer you can get to your product and the people who produce it, the better your work can get. I’d definitely encourage more ‘out-of office’ engagements, where we can really get to know the purpose of our campaigns and the real people who involved throughout it’s production.

If you’re interested to see the congress action, see our gallery on Facebook!

Grammar Rules! Interactive Games (Macmillan Education Australia) is, as the name suggests, an e-Learning multimedia CD ROM providing grammar games for lower, middle and upper primary students.

Eight games were designed and developed by Liquid Interactive for the project, with six levels of difficulty for each game. The games have been designed to be deployed on interactive whiteboards in the classroom, either facilitated by the teacher or undertaken by individual students.

The games focus on such skills as:

• sentence structure
• vocabulary enrichment
• figurative and expressive language
• nouns, verbs and adjectives
• parts of speech
• punctuation

Full of colour, sound and cool animated characters, students get to dunk aliens, make robots dance, open treasure chests and feed monkeys, all in the name of language development.

It recently won the Literacy category for ‘Best Student Learning Digital Resource’ in the Australian Educational Publishing Awards, 2011!

Congratulations to everyone who has worked on it!

Last year the Liquid Team collaborated with Brisbane Festival to create an awesome artistic display on the exterior wall of the Brisbane Powerhouse – if you haven’t seen it, check this out. This year we are again collaborating with the Festival team to produce a digital art installation that will be available for the public to visit, this has been called The Liquid Interactive Light Scope.

Over the last few months the creative and technical teams have been hard at work experimenting in C and C++ programming languages to see if it’s possible to synchronise 8 Xbox Kinects, with 500 LED Screens and an original soundtrack, with crowd based human interaction, all in a large scale environment – a 30metre tunnel.

For Seqwater, Liquid are creating virtual tours of Wivenhoe Dam, Wivenhoe Catchment and the Mt Crosby Water Treatment Plant, using high definition cameras to film locations and create 360 degree hubs that people can explore and get information. To get the best possible shots, we’ve climbed cranes, abseiled dam walls, waded through creeks, delved 40 metres below water level and (unintentionally) spooked cattle. It made a great change from sitting behind a computer all day!

A special thanks goes to Isuzu Ute, who provided us with transportation. We couldn’t have got to the places we went without it!