skignz: 2014 - What a year!

2014 has been a pretty interesting year for skignz so we thought we would like to have a little look back over our time to remember some of the great moments we had!

January

January saw skignz providing seminars to Teesside University students about the technology available to them personally and on campus. This was a great opportunity for skignz as we got to inform our target audience just how great the technology is that is available to them. This for skignz went great and we saw our user database rise within a matter of weeks.

February

In February we started our next stage of development with Teesside University, which was really good for us as we had a lot of great plans that we had discussed to implement!

With starting our next stage of development with Teesside University, we also started to shoot promotion videos for other Universities! We wanted to make the skignz technology available to all universities possible which is still undergoing as we speak!

As skignz had an aim to make the technology available to all universities possible, we though where better to start than China! One of the world’s largest countries for population and universities! So we decided to hire a new Intern Katherine Kui, who was from China originally herself so that she could work on the social media channels for China and to start generating interest over there!

skignz can also proudly say that we got nominated this month for the environmental category at the Best New Business Awards! We came runner up in this however we hope to be the WINNER of the next awards so keep an eye out and wish us luck!

We also this month started to do preparation for the Motor Expo event which we enjoyed creating some great footage and images.

March

This month skignz got shortlisted for another great awards at the North East Business Awards. We got shortlisted for the innovation category and came runner up again also! This was still great for us but we are still hoping to make it winner again in these awards next year!

skignz also this month had our first meeting of many with Facebook!

March also saw skignz engage with a great online marketing company Get Me Media! Which allowed skignz to be noticed by many others and widen our recognition.  We got invited to exhibition events and hopefully more future opportunities to allow skignz to meet more of the best companies around!

April

At the beginning of April, we launched our April fools to all of our followers. This got a great response for skignz as it fooled a lot of people! We told them that we had secured a contract with Nasa to which people were phoning us up and contacting us to congratulate us on the best news they heard! What a great April fools!

In April skignz also attended the Silicon Valley Banking networking event down in London. This allowed us to meet some of the best people and liaise with some great companies that we wish to plan future work with!

skignz also spent some time down in London this month again as our CMO was down filming some production shots for the company at some of the great views around!

May

May was a great but sad time for skignz as it saw our Film and Media Producer Glen College be offered the chance to go and work in the Falklands for a year for FITV! Now we of course ensured him that it was a great opportunity and that he had to go for it and could not turn it down! However we did assure him that he would always have a place at skignz!

During May, we also began to do work with the great Silicon Valley Banking account corporate team! We agreed a partnership deal with them which meant for skignz it was a big push in the right direction!

skignz also this month needed a new Film and Media producer to replace Glen who was off on his new journeys to the great Falkland Islands!

June

After interviewing a lot of people in May to join skignz, we decided on our finalist for the position! Sarah Spowart was the new member to the skignz team! She was very happy to become the new Film and Media producer and to help skignz along with the future success.  

During June skignz also delivered the first of many pilots to Motor Expo in Canary Warf. We hoped this was the start of something good for us … keep watching this space.

The CMO also attended the Good wood Festival of Speed this month.

Finally a big thing to happen during June was skignz launched ‘make your own image of skignz’. This was very fun and interesting and opened up a lot of future possibilities for skignz as it could now be more personal to anyone working with skignz. The team also had a lot of fun playing about with creating their own skignz as you can see from the images.

July

The beginning of July allowed skignz to provide a great opportunity for students! skignz got asked to deliver a tutorial of skignz to a group of African students who were visiting for a couple of weeks at Teesside University. Members of the team got to work with the students, provide presentations to them and help guide them around Teesside University and Middlesbrough through using skignz on a small orientation activity. The experience was a great time and the feedback received from the students was the best we heard. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing and had been introduced too!

July also allowed skignz to create new engagements with different school within Teesside University!

During July, skignz also got tested abroad through one of our team members going away to Spain, she used it to help her find where she needed to be and find her friends. 



This was a huge success and shows skignz can be used in any location and just how useful it is!

Towards the end of July skignz got the chance to go and be tested at the Common Wealth Games in Glasgow! This was a great opportunity for skignz as it allowed others to see that it can be used for great causes and events and that the opportunities it can provide at each event is spectacular.

August

During August, skignz got the chance to have an initial meeting with a Global Bank about race days, sponsorships, appointments and marketing to see how skignz can help assist with any of these. skignz wants to further the business and make it very global and we hope this is just the beginning!

As you noticed earlier in the year we started to work with an on-line marketing/advertising company Get Me Media. Well this month skignz got the chance to go with Get Me Media to the races. Now as fun as this day was out, it meant that skignz got to showcase the technology to some new businesses and also show people just how good it is and impress them just a little…!

August was also a great month for skignz as it allowed us to give our live demo of skignz to the Jockey Club. One of skignz big ambition as you know is to work with all live events around the world, and what better way to do this than to work on all race days around the world. New technology is advancing all the time, so skignz believes it would be a huge benefit to every race day.

September

September saw a really busy month for skignz. It started off with the launch of our Kickstarter campaign which was a massive important task to skignz this month. We had launched Kickstarter to help raise funds towards the business so that we could further what we do and improve it for all our users. 

However this didn't go as well as we thought so we decided to cancel the campaign and re think it to make it much better with a re-launch next year. We were entirely grateful for all those who had already supported us!

skignz also this month we have written eight different patents for skignz technology ready to go to the next stage of making sure the IP behind skignz remains ours.

skignz was also down London again this month as we have been looking into working with some leading global brands. We have provided Diageo with demonstration through a Pilot Project where branded skignz are placed above over 100 London pubs this month to allow the Diageo team and its partners to understand more about skignz, how it works and how its relevant to them, their particular Diageo brand and the possibilities it creates for engaging customers and providing a unique brand experience.

Also during September, BETA had carried out testing on skignz new 3D models. Yes that’s right, we are in the current process of launching 3D models to which users will be able to interact with if they choose. From launching out 3D models we are now looking at doing some great work with something very interesting …

skignz also got to deliver in the ASI conference in America this year which was really great for us. We got to inform a whole lot of people and businesses about skignz and what it does and how we can help them and their businesses.

As part of skignz mission to work with big brands, this month we went live on Apple, Facebook and Google headquarters campuses! If you would like to see these then you can still, plus you can also read about it here …

If you are an employee of Apple, Google or Facebook then do check your headquarters campus now!

October

October was very exciting for skignz as we managed to agree a deal with CHIME PLC. This means a strategic partnership over the 5 years to deliver the skignz technology in to pretty much every major global sporting event. skignz is very excited to get going and we hope it brings a range of new opportunities for both CHIME and skignz!

skignz also this month had a lot of interest with Scotland, Ireland and a  group of Serbian Universities. This work is still in the early stages so hopefully when we find out more we will be sure to let you know through our social media how everything goes.

November

During November skignz found out that we had been short-listed for the Best New Business Awards for the Marketing Category. We are very pleased to have been nominated again and hope this time that we managed to win! Cross your fingers for us and wish us luck!

Also this month skignz were confirmed as part of the NE England delegation that is visiting Boston, MA, in the US to meet with a range of tech companies, agencies, VC's and potential tech partners including Microsoft who are hosting part of the event alongside UKTi (UK Trade & Investment), NECC  (North East Chamber of Commerce) and BABCNE (British American Business Council New England.

December

The 1st week of December will be all about establishing relationships in Boston MA, between skignz and a select number of companies and organisations. The visit will also include meetings with VC's, British Consulate and attending the BABCNE Annual Christmas Luncheon at The Harvard Club

Following immediately after the Boston trip skignz are very privileged to not only attend Most Contagious this year in London but also exhibit and demonstrate the skignz technology to everyone there. 

This quite clearly is still to happen, so when it does we will update you all straight away on how the event goes and hopefully what the great outcomes of it will be through our usual social media channels.

If you enjoyed reading what a great year skignz had then wait till you see what next year brings. 

If you would like to know more about skignz then please visit our website at http://www.skignz.com and don't forget to check us out on any or all of our Social Media Channels.

skignz: Increased Functionality for Users...

skignz has been actively functioning now for over a year so we thought that we would give you a small insight as to how the functionality of the business has increased and how we are working now compared to how we were when we first developed skignz.

skignz has achieved a lot in the previous year and has got many more exciting opportunities to look forward to, so we thought we would share with you just how much we have progressed.

When skignz was first developed we were a start-up company, so everything was basic including the interface and technology behind skignz. A skign that you see now was just very plain, had no design, style or even much added to it. 

                       

The skignz came in a variety of colours, with just a simple box style and two spaces to insert your heading and write a small amount of text. There was not much to a skignz when we first began, so we saw an opportunity for progression to the next stage.
The next part we wanted to focus on was making more room for users to be able to insert more text into their skign. We also were working with Teesside University and other possible brands and needed to create a skignz design for all students on University campuses to use.

                                                                                                       


Since creating and developing the team skignz managed to come up with a wide variety of ideas and ways in which we could change the way that skignz appeared to all users. We wanted to create a simple and fun theme that we could demonstrate to users as ‘your signs in the sky’ – skignz.

Improving the interface of skignz and the way that it looked was a vast step for us, now we could appeal to more, increasing our user and businesses data. We then saw an opportunity to focus on ways to try and reach a wider audience as we wanted skignz to be globally; not just locally.   

Working on our social media to the highest extent we could, we decided to create a video blog post that we could upload to all our social media sites and see how much of a wider audience this would reach. Luckily for us this managed to go very globally reaching people in Las Vegas which lead us to doing business arrangements and now having the success of opening our very own office in Las Vegas and having Nick Vilardell run it from the US. That was one of skignz first MASSIVE step which were a great time for us.

We then gathered that we needed to add more to our skignz platform and create ways in which it would attract more business interest and users. For that we directed ourselves to the brainchild behind the technology of skignz - Gary Baker.

We first considered creating different accounts so that if anyone managed to become a premium user of skignz they could have unlimited amount of skignz to place around wherever they wished to. From this we thought that with having a premium account where any user can place as many skignz as they wished, they would then like the opportunity to be able to create their own skignz, so they wouldn’t just have to use the already pre placed ones and be able to personally design them however they wish, and that is exactly what we did.

Now any user can manage their own skignz on their account and upload whatever one they would like, whether that was to be an original design taken from the internet or creating and design their own. 

The team at skignz have had a lot of fun with creating their own skignz, from placing doughnuts above houses, roasted chickens in cars to even creating themselves as a skignz and casually chilling outside their own home. 

There is a lot of fun to be had with skignz which is what we are all about; we would like users to have a lot of fun whilst finding it practical and useful at the same time, skignz is not just for one practical use, it is practical for anything. Users can even also use skignz to leave greeting messages for someone if it was the birthday or a special occasion was upon arrival, - if two people are newlyweds then someone could leave a great big congratulations skign right outside their house or their wedding venue at the time; what a groovy wedding gift that would be!

skignz has increased its functionality a lot over the past year, from changing the way that skignz works and appears to future deals we have made and companies we have been in discussion with all ready for some great work in the future.

There is a lot more going on which currently is not available, however soon we do wish to be looking at being able to pull in your Facebook profile to your skignz and being able to run your social media that way whilst discovering new people. 

Also how great would it be to be able to have your 'dating profiles' above your head in a skign, so that you could see who is the perfect match for you and just whereabouts your lucky other half is located.

We are looking to take the initial development we have currently done to the next level, through launching a Kick-starter campaign later this September which you can read about here. http://skignzblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/kickstarter-pre-launch-campaign.html

Please keep in touch with skignz and have a read of our current blogs. If you would like to know more then please contact us through our website or through social media using the links below.

www.skignz.com

www.facebook.com/discoverskignz

www.twitter.com/discoverskignz

www.youtube.com/skignz