A former Sharp Electronics distribution centre in East Manchester, UK, The Sharp Project is designed to be an incubator for growing businesses and aims to create a collaborative community amongst like-minded companies.

Speaking of the move, Managing Director Mark Newby said “We spent around 6 weeks spread either side of the Christmas break carefully planning our space. We were moving from a tiny box office in a Regus business centre and wanted an office which represented us like nothing we had before. We wanted the new office to be like a home for our staff – somewhere it feels comfortable and peaceful to work from. Happy staff are productive staff, after all.”

“We bought 90% of the furniture second-hand for the new office from retailers and traders on eBay and Amazon. Everything has a backstory; our office chairs were previously used by Yahoo! in their (now closed) London office.”

“At the heart of our new office is ‘The Bar’. We built this ourselves with items from IKEA and it works really well; our team can choose to stand, or sit and it creates a lively meeting space. We feel it encourages thought & action rather than encouraging becoming too comfortable and switching off a little which I think is a problem with some meeting spaces. We also designed the layout to be as symmetrical as possible – positioning things in line with features of the space to tie the furniture to the room.”

“Our staff can take their laptops to a comfier seat if they wish, or they can grab a drink from our kitchenette and take a break here.”

“One of our key considerations in moving office was expansion space. The photo above shows where our customer support and sales teams will sit – a total of 8 desks for them to expand onto as we grow throughout the coming year”

“We have staff working for us in Germany and Canada as well as other parts of the UK, and previously keeping in touch with remote staff was confined to 1-on-1 webcam sessions or skype chats. With our new web-conferencing screen, we’re able to bring the remote workers into team meetings. We also have a PS3 for staff to use when they need a break.”

“At the back end of our office are two corners – Developer Corner and Management Corner. There is a sightline between the which makes it less lonely than working in a cubicle, but still gives that ‘personal space’ benefit a cubicle does.”

“The colour scheme of the office is the colour scheme of ChannelUnity which helps us to remember what we’re here to do – drive ChannelUnity to a successful launch and grow it into a global solution for multi-channel retail.”

“The past 12 months have been challenging for us – we’ve morphed from a digital and creative agency into a fully focussed software development business which was a harder process than initially thought, but we are now in an excellent location to launch and develop our product.”

ChannelUnity will be launching in Spring 2012 – to find out more or to sign up to the newsletter, please visit ChannelUnity.com

Beta One will be our initial ‘platform level’ testing phase. We’ve worked hard over the past 8 months to develop a secure and stable management area and API which you can use to control how and where you sell. A lot of time has been spent optimising our private cloud for speed and load, and we feel that our user-interface design is desktop-class in usability; Everything loads almost instantly.

Beta One will allow you to do the following:
– Be amongst the first to create your ChannelUnity account.
– Download the first beta version of our Magento Connector Kit (free)
– Link your Magento installation(s) to our cloud system
– Have your product data and categories imported into our cloud system
– Setup your account ready for when we launch our first Channel connections
– Request features and report any issue you have in getting started.
– Join our community forum and talk to other retailers from around the world.

As we prepare to launch into beta, we have decided to increase our focus on ChannelUnity. We will no longer be taking on bespoke client projects, and have discontinued sales of our plugin modules for Magento with the exception of our Amazon marketplaces integration. These changes to what we do will enable us to ensure that ChannelUnity is the success we feel it will be.

We very much look forward to seeing as many of you as possible on ChannelUnity.com from Monday.

Visit the ChannelUnity.com holding page

Camiloo can today reveal that it has received investment from the European Regional Development Fund backed ‘North West Fund 4 Digital & Creative’.

Camiloo, which began trading in 2009, provides services to online retailers worldwide and also develops mobile and desktop applications for third parties, from its base in Salford Quays, UK.

Starting with a single client retainer, the company has grown to more than 320 clients worldwide despite having only spent £400 on marketing and until recently employing only its two directors. Its growth can be attributed to the success of its Amazon integration plugin for popular eCommerce software Magento, which it has developed and supported in-house from launch. An exciting evolution of this integration lies ahead as the company prepares to launch a revolutionary tool connecting retailers to over 120 marketplace websites such as eBay, Aukro and Allegro Poland – channelunity.com.

Managing Director at Camiloo, Mark Newby (24) said “We have worked hard to make our Company an investible proposition. We began trading just over two years ago from a spare room in an apartment, a story I think will sound familiar to many startups around the world. In the past two years we have worked numerous weekends and 30+ hour shifts to meet phenomenal demand for our services.”

Mark added “We see ourselves as almost a fusion of two companies. Part of what we do is traditional agency work; developing iPhone applications for clients, and then we invest our spare energy in creating exciting products and platforms. This has been our vision from day one, and we feel that todays news enables this to become more truthful than ever.”.

Camiloo are currently accepting CVs for Mobile developer (iPhone, Android) and PHP developer roles, as well as Sales staff with a view to recruitment in Autumn. Interested parties should email hello@camiloo.co.uk with their CV & Cover Letter.

More details on the North West Fund can be found at www.thenorthwestfund.co.uk

A major step along the road to launch for ChannelUnity has been reached today, as two nodes on its international private cloud have been successfully installed into two of the UKs leading datacentres. Providing capacity for 600 UK customers, the nodes will form part of an international grid of servers working as a distributed system to process marketplace actions such as synchronising stock levels or importing orders from a marketplace back to a retailers web store.

The news forms part of not only the road to launch of ChannelUnity later in summer but also the build up to some major news which will be revealed by Camiloo at midday (12pm GMT+1) tomorrow.

The framework is built on the AFL / OSL codebase of Magento eCommerce. We have applied a new visual styling to the Magento frontend and admin area, and have carefully removed all elements of eCommerce, removed some of the built in functionality such as ‘Admin Notifications’ and renamed ‘Customers’ to ‘Users’ on a global basis.

This enables rapid development of web applications such as content management systems, customer relationship managers, intranet portals, appointment managers and more. However, the exciting application (we feel) is in the develop of cloud hosted Software As A Service applications. We will be releasing code onto GitHub over time which will allow users to sign up on the front end, head through payment methods and be granted access to the ‘admin’ area with a special role. There will even be the ability to assign each user a database built from a template foundation, from which all of their data can be securely read.

In Q3 2011, we will be opening an ‘Extension Store’ for the platform. This will allow developers to earn money by publishing their solutions for the Camiloo Framework onto a store. Much like the popular ‘App Store’ on iOS and Android Marketplace is integrated into mobile devices, this store will be baked into the administration area on every installation of the Camiloo Framework. We will handle hosting, bandwidth and payment for developers, and will pay commission on all sales on a monthly basis. The ‘Extension Store’ will also provide update tracking, issue reporting and one-click installation.

Imagine a platform which you could install and turn into a CMS in an instant.
Or instantly create your own hosted ‘Basecamp’ style project management system.
A transformable, extendible platform for web 2.0 application development based on a proven and tested platform developed by Magento Inc.

We are in the process of developing ChannelUnity within the CamilooFramework. It is going to be at the core of everything that we do in the next 12 months. Our website will be re-developed as a testament to the flexibility the platform provides, and we will be holding developer days later in the year to excite and interest the developer community.

The alpha version of CamilooFramework can be downloaded from GitHub here:
https://github.com/Camiloo/CamilooFramework

You can access a demo installation of the framework here:
http://framework.camiloo.co.uk/
Everything you see on here is the standard installation with the exception of the test admin account and the note about it on the homepage. CamilooFramework gives you a full user area and admin area out of the box!

To download the latest tarball and install this on your server via SSH, simply follow the instructions below:
wget https://github.com/Camiloo/CamilooFramework/tarball/master –no-check-certificate
tar -zxvf Camiloo-CamilooFramework-55f25a4.tar.gz (your filename may differ)
mv Camiloo-CamilooFramework-55f25a4/* Camiloo-CamilooFramework-55f25a4/.htaccess .
chmod -R o+w media

That’s it – then just visit your URL to complete installation.

Working in 3-4 hours on a shift basis based on your availability, you will be responsible for answering incoming telephone calls, responding to support emails and taking questions from prospective customers via MSN Messenger style live chat. This role is designed for students of IT based courses, but those looking for employment with flexible opening hours may also apply.

Full training will be given, and successful applicants will always have the ability to search a concise knowledgebase or escalate a ticket to their managers should they feel they cannot answer a question by applying their training.

We are very interested in speaking to students fluent in European languages such as French and German as this may enable us to provide some degree of foreign language support to our customers.

As we are software developers, applicants should have experience using a computer, with development experience preferable but not essential. Experience using web based software such as WordPress and Magento are also desirable.

Pay: £6.90 / hour
Average Hours per Week: 8 to 12 depending on availability.
Closing date for applications 13th May 2011

To apply for this position, please email an up-to-date CV along with a cover letter highlighting any relevant work experience to hello@camiloo.co.uk. Applicants will be considered after the closing date.

NO AGENCIES PLEASE

It seems like only yesterday that we opened up Camiloo, but this week marked the end of the second year we’ve been in business. Starting in 2009 with a 4 day per week retainer contract for one client and one day spare for other work, we’ve steadily grown Camiloo into a globally facing small business with 323 customers worldwide.

The past year has been far bigger than we could have imagined, and our accounts show a 120% increase in revenue year on year.

We are continually improving everything that we do. From releasing updates to our software, to purchasing or evaluating better support and helpdesk suites. Support is something we take very strongly.

Recently, we ran a week long test into being open USA friendly opening hours, with our office opening at 1pm and closing at 10pm.
We learnt valuable lessons from this trial, as our US customers preferred to contact us via email or twitter rather than directly calling, therefore negating the benefit of time shifting our hours.

Therefore we invested in moving our support area onto a new enterprise-grade system. We’ll be expanding our usage of this system in the coming months with live chat facilities to better improve our responsiveness to you. We’re also in the process of setting up freephone numbers in France, Germany and the UK. Additionally, we plan to recruit at least 6 dedicated support agents as ChannelUnity establishes itself as the go-to solution for Channel Integrations into Magento and the wider eCommerce software arena. Its our goal to have a least 2 dedicated support staff on-site between 9am and 9pm UK time Monday to Friday by September 2011, contactable via support ticket, phone call or live chat.

One thing we hope to achieve over the next 12 months is a greater level of business focus. As ChannelUnity begins to open up onto the marketplaces served by our current premium modules for Magento, we will remove these premium modules from sale, continuing support for 6 months and providing upgrade incentives to our existing customers. Our lower cost Magento modules – Easy Stock Uploader and The Kit Creator will be released as open source free modules with no support guarantee made.

We’ll then be re-positioning Camiloo itself (as in camiloo.co.uk) as a SaaS, Mobile and Desktop Application Development company. Behind the scenes over the last 12 months we’ve produced 5 mobile applications for clients, and we have spent more than 8 months working on one top-secret mobile application for a client.

Core to these applications has been our fledgling ‘Project Steeple’ framework, which is designed to allow very easy and intuitive iPhone app development with a web based, cached content management system as its backend. Its our goal to open Project Steeple up to other agencies and developers.

So we will then have ChannelUnity – a SaaS application for Merchant integrations, and Camiloo – an application development business. Applications need reliable hosting, and this is where CamilooHost, our dedicated hosting brand will be targeted. Whether you’re launching an eCommerce store or launching a SaaS application of your own, CamilooHost can provide for this. We’ll be detailing our offering later this year as it launches, but we have 5 clients happily up and running on our servers without issue and are confident of their power.

We’ll be relaunching CamilooTalk as a developer API for telephone communication later in the year – this is very secretive at the moment but could prove revolutionary.

And finally, we have our SMS messaging service textCommerce. This recently sent its 1000th message, and we’re seeing new customers download the free Magento module every week. But we know there is potential for much more with this service, and to this end we’ll be launching applications for mobile and desktop which will use the service in new and exciting ways. We’re hoping to reach 10,000 messages sent by September 2011.

With that, its time for us to climb back into our development tools and get coding once more.
Here’s to another successful year.

Mark Newby
Managing Director
Camiloo Limited

From Monday to Friday this week, our offices will open at 1pm BST and close at 10pm BST. This means if you’re in New York, we’ll be open from 8am – 5pm. And to make things easier, you can reach us by telephone for free from the USA on:

We hope this makes contacting us easier for our USA customers. We’re working on launching toll free numbers in other countries ahead of the launch of our ChannelUnity platform and should have lines open in Germany and France before the end of April.

Today, we’ve taken a further step on the road to the launch of ChannelUnity – our holding page ‘microsite’ has opened its doors at:

http://www.channelunity.com/
http://www.channelunity.de/
http://www.channelunity.fr/
http://www.channelunity.co.uk/
http://www.channelunity.eu/

We want to involve you, the online retail community in the development and specification of this platform as much as possible. Because of this, we’ve set up a development blog and twitter stream along with a ‘marketplace suggestions forum’ where you can suggest marketplaces you’d like ChannelUnity to support. You can find links to these features on the websites above, and do sign up to the newsletter using the form on the website too – we may reveal some details early to newsletter subscribers as launch date approaches.

Launch date has been confirmed as 23rd May, and we should have a beta test open in late April for those not afraid of a small bug or two.

About ChannelUnity

ChannelUnity will be a cloud-based web service capable of scaling with demand, and paid for on a monthly subscription per marketplace you wish to use the service for. The service will take a single feed of data – our own Cxml data schema – and will translate your product information, stock, price, image and variation data with ease into the required XML formats which Amazon and eBay (initially) each require. The beauty of the system lies in its simplicity – you will simply need to instruct the connector module to add your products to your marketplace account, and it will do the legwork for you. And as more marketplaces are enabled you will be able to easily and quickly add them to your account.

Logo / Branding revealed

First, we are delighted to reveal the branding for the platform, which has been developed by LogoQuality and expanded upon in-house. We hope to have holding pages up on our global set of ChannelUnity domains shortly which will allow retailers to register interest.

How will it work with Magento?

As many reading this will know, we have specialised for more than 3 years in creating complex modules for Magento which allow full management of your Amazon listings. ChannelUnity changes everything. Rather than having a complex module built within the confines of a redistributable Magento module, our Magento module will be built using an open, simple architecture which will take secure commands from our cloud network and create orders, update stock levels, create products and more. We then hope to open up an integration API at ChannelUnity allowing developers familiar with other e-commerce apps such as VirtueMart, Shopify and PrestaShop to develop integrations, adding significant value to their shopping cart platforms of choice.

Having a simpler Magento extension with the ‘brain’ of the system being within the cloud has significant advantages in terms of updates. We anticipate only needing to release one update per Magento version upgrade once our module is stable, and as the module itself will be completely free and unencrypted, developers are free to tailor the module to their clients needs.

How stable and scalable will it be?

Very. We have chosen to host the platform within the Amazon EC2 Cloud. This has major advantages, as we are able to globally load-balance demand for our platform. For example, if you are in the Europe, your requests will be handled by a server within the Amazon EC2 Ireland data centre, while those in Asia will be served by Singapore EC2. And we will then be load balancing further, to the point that a load balancer and two cloud nodes will initially run each task – for example submission of product feeds to one marketplace.

This system architecture will provide enterprise level scalability, and we will utilise the Amazon EC2 ‘Auto Scaling’ facility to ensure that servers scale horizontally and vertically with demand.

What about data security / PCI Compliance?

We will ensure that our system is fully PCI Compliant from launch, including handling of customer address and contact details. Our staff will not have access to your customer details, instead should you need assistance they will see anonymised data with no personally identifiable details visible. You will also be able to opt to have the cloud ‘flush’ your order data once it has been sent through to your Magento installation, meaning data will only be held while needed.

What will ChannelUnity do differently from Mercent and Channel Advisor?

We see these competitors as Web 1.5 services. While they appear to do everything you need, you will struggle to find a way to download the data from them into your web shop back office such as Magento. This means the point of data centralisation is often offset in their own back office administration area.

Additionally, try to find pricing information or a sign up form on services such as this. Our pricing is transparent and not based on your size or product count, our solution will be scalable, and our sign up form will be at the foreground of our website, not buried behind a forced contact from a sales department. We have also heard unconfirmed rumours that some competitors to ChannelUnity charge a percentage based on revenue generated on a channel, something which we disagree with as we understand scaling operating costs sometimes make business unsustainable.

Pricing

We’ve set prices per currency to make it easier to manage your growth across channels. Data centre costs vary between the USA, Ireland and Singapore, meaning that there is a slight variance in this pricing (less than equivalent of £2-£3 per month), but this variance allows us to cater for currency value changes moving forward. Below are just a subset of these currency specific prices.

Monthly Subscription Pricing per Marketplace:
USA: $79
Canada: $79
UK: £49
Euro-zone: €59

Our pricing is simple. Monthly subscriptions per marketplace you connect to via ChannelUnity. For example if you sell on eBay Germany and Amazon UK, you would need 2 subscriptions. We feel this pricing is fair – if you disagree please tell us what you think via the contact us form: http://www.camiloo.co.uk/about/contact-us/. Remember that included within the subscription will be telephone support, continuous refinements and updates to the cloud based platform and more.

Supported Marketplaces

This will follow nearer launch date, but in advance of this announcement we can reveal that our exclusive field mapping technology will allow us to integrate into 50 marketplaces and counting. But that’s not all. Nearer to launch date, we will reveal how ChannelUnity will also help other areas of your e-commerce business.

Do you have a feature suggestion for ChannelUnity, or want to suggest a marketplace we should integrate into? Catch us on twitter: @camiloohq or email hello@camiloo.co.uk. Or if you prefer, reach us via our contact form: http://www.camiloo.co.uk/about/contact-us/. We look forward to hearing from you.