I had looked at these around Christmas time, and couldn’t remember the name of them when I was trying to show Dave yesterday. I couldn’t find the site no matter what I searched for in Google. With a title tag of “Innovative Solutions” and no home page content even mentioning the words “multiple device charger” or “desktop charger” there isn’t much hope for them at the moment ranking for anything other than their brand name. After about half an hour searching I finally remembered their name… lucky for them.

Recently we have had to replace a few chargers including my Blackberry charger, Miles’ old mobile phone charger as well as one of kid’s laptop chargers. This is not due to losing them but due to them being chewed through by one of the cats. Yes strange but true, but all we can imagine happened is that during the night the cat has found a good game of playing with the dangling wires and chewed through them. Fortunately for the cat we always switch off the charger at the socket if they are not being used.

So having the Idapt we plan to station the multi charger where the mains wire can be tucked behind one of the units in the sitting room so there are no wires on show at all. The beauty of the Idapt is that you get 3 charging stations which you can mix and match the connectors that you want… so charging my Blackberry, Dave’s HTC and say one of the kids PSP’s all at the same time won’t be a problem. The kids now have my “hand-me-down” phones of a HTC Diamond and the SPV E650 which both use the same charger as Dave’s HTC so that’s perfect. It also comes with an iPod charger but I tend to keep the iPod docked in the Bose speaker system which keeps it nicely charged.

You can order direct from the Idapt site for European use, but the best place for the UK would be HMV and at £24.99 with free delivery it seems quite a good deal. The other UK site that the Idapt site recommends is Littlewoods but at £39 for the same product I don’t know how they expect to sell many. So hopefully when it turns up next week it will be as good as it looks and sounds.

Overall for January my blog received 4080 visits, with 2626 coming from Google Organic, so its heading in the right direction. As I blog about some pretty random things, as well as doing topical post my site seems to rank for many things.

The top traffic in January was for:

UK Vat Increase with 397 visits
The Harcombe Diet with 361 visits
How to Make Yorkshire Puddings with 332 visits
How to Make Sausage Casserole with 324 visits
When do the Clocks go back with 232 visits (overall received 4322 visits)
Ripon Rugby with 149 visits

Some of the other search terms that I have attracted visits from include:

Do I boil carrots before adding to the casserole
Local council sperm logo
What does the orange shag band mean
Droopy eye after botox
What little things can we do to make the staff happy
What does Tesco do

I’d love to know if there is a post that anyone would like me to do, so let me know. I can do recipes (lol), latest news, stories of my life or the secrets of running a company.

But if you find yourself one day bored at work, here is an easy way to pass the time that you also might find that you have a talent for.

Step 1 – kill a few flies (yep slightly cruel, but you may be able to find ones already dead)

Step 2 – put them in the sun for a hour to dry

Step 3 – get a piece of paper and a pencil and see what you can create.

Here are a few suggestions…

Cheers to Claire at Review Ripon for sending me the pics

What I love about iGaming conferences is the “glitz and glam” that the merchants, operators, players and super affiliates bring with them. The affiliate conferences is something that we started going to when A4U and the Casino Affiliate Conference first asked Dave to speak back in 2008. Last year we went to AAC in Amsterdam and BAC in Budapest which were great events.

The venue hotel for the London Affiliate Conference was the Grange St Pauls Hotel which is a new and stunning building. The standard of the hotel was very high, but I think they struggled with the volume of people heading to breakfast and needing serving at the bar on the evening. Here’s a picture of the view from the 3rd floor of the dining area and lounge below, as well as the Lamborghini that was parked in the lobby.

The Old Billingsgate Market is a great venue but it got a bit cramped as the huge amount of attendees started to turn up. Fortunately as we had heard that LAC had signed up 2400 registrants we knew it would be busy and registered the day before the conference at the hotel so we could just go straight in. As we walked in we were greeted by a huge 888.com sign and lots of stands with lots of buzz and noise.

Dave was on the Demon SEO Panel with Bob Rains, Ziv Dascalu and Frank Watson, talking about all the bad stuff that is out there like injections, hacking, Xss, click botting, messing with inhouse SEO teams and messing up web logs. The conference room was packed out and 2 or 3 deep standing at the back and sides of the room. It was quite a technical session and I think a lot of people in the room didn’t even think that some of it existed, so hopefully they may start trying to protect themselves better in the future.

Friday night started with a gorgeous dinner at Gaucho’s, which is an award winning Argentinean restaurant near Tower Bridge where we enjoyed fabulous steaks and conversation.

There was a big 888 party on the Friday night but we opted out as the venue would only hold 500 people and by the time we would have got there it was no doubt at capacity already. We spent a good deal of time in the hotel bar chatting to lots of very cool and interesting people. I’m certainly looking forward to the next iGaming event, but the next conference for me will be SES New York in March which I’m really looking forward to.

Yesterday it was announced that the UK economy had grown by 0.1% during the last 3 months of 2009. This is a worryingly low increase though, and especially when the 3 months in question include the all important Christmas sales period. With the total recovery only being 0.1% I feel that we are very likely to see a downturn when the figures come out in April. January will have seen a natural downturn due to the 2 weeks of really bad weather that must have harmed the economy with people unable to get to work, school or the shops, but time will tell.

We are the last country to come out of the recession which just shows how weak we are as a nation in supporting ourselves. Gone are the days when we led the world in the times of the Industrial Revolution, when we were the leaders in manufacturing. Now we seem to be a nation of service industries and rely heavily on imports for good and products. The worst decline in the economy was in the first quarter of 2009 when the economy slumped by -2.5% and it has taken all this time to make a comeback.

We are very fortunate that the Internet industry that we have our business in hasn’t been hit badly by the recession. Our core business is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and Web Development where the demand has been stronger than ever for our services. We do run PPC campaigns for some clients but not on the scale where any tightening of their budgets affects us. We have also prospered during this time as corporate companies are having to look at their marketing spend and make sure that they are getting good value for money. Gone are the days of just paying a large SEO company, who are great at the “pitch”, large sums of money for a long winded report at the end of the month, as large corporations rethink their online marketing needs.

The last 18 months have been nothing like an easy ride for Dave and I as we have doubled our efforts to remain strong and growing during the recession, making sure we are providing everything and more that the clients require. That has meant bringing in more of the right people to join the Bronco team and streamlining everything that we do in-house to make sure that we remain efficient as well as profitable.