Umbraco 5 Release

In a nutshell, Umbraco v5 is a ground-up rebuild of your favorite CMS and is built on top of ASP.Net MVC 3. It looks the same and has all of the same great Umbraco ideas powering the new CMS but the underlying architecture has been completely upgraded. See http://umbraco.com/umbraco-5-status/what-is-v5.aspx for details.

Dakar Rally In Chile

Dakar Rally In Chile

Powerhouse Launches Online Store Package For High-End Fashionistas

Some of our best clients are fashionistas in the true sense of the word.  They want to spend their time designing, evaluating, and promoting their creations.  They explicitly do not wish to waste time on ancillary marketing efforts, online commerce details, and anything that detracts from their focus on the international show circuits.

That's where Powerhouse comes in.  Drawing on our experience with e-commerce, the retail and custom fashion industries, and a certain savoir faire with all things marketing, we've built an off-the-shelf package that can be dropped in to any textile, garment, tailoring, or retail fashion enterprise to automatically connect the supply chain with the brilliance of the designers.  

It truly just works.  One of our clients bumped sales 500% in the first month, with one phone call to us.  Some of our clients in the custom tailoring sector have achieved the holy grail of textile commercialization -- independence from fabric suppliers and offshore tailoring shops -- and now have a lineup at their door consisting of both clients AND suppliers.  

Thar's gold in them thar hills

Well ok.  Maybe not gold in the literal sense.  But we've recently landed a very cool commission to create a web presence (and brand, and traffic funnel, and reservations portal, and multilingual SEO strategy) for a new ecotourism venture in South America.

We really need to brush up on our Spanish, and also to figure out how to tap into the $1.5 billion in revenue from foreign tourism into Chile each year.  More than 30% of that revenue is attributed to accomodation expenses, and our client offers, in addition to luxury lodgings, a complete immersive experience into the Maule and Biobío regions; a transcendent set of cultural legacy expeditions (including the legendary but diametrically opposed Tierra del Fuego and Atacama) and of course any conceivable form of adventure travel in between. 

Not a small project, but a big endeavour. We intend to drive our client's occupancy to over 80% (high season).  We intend to provide such a marketing assault that it breaches the awareness of every single adventure traveller (25-34) in Europe, Canada, and the UK.  We intend to vault this resort into the top 25 in the continent, competing with adventure-travel resort destinations in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru.  We intend to pin this resort to the "must experience" list of any reasonably intelligent, wayward, thrill-seeking, and even vicarious traveller of the 21st century.

Powerhouse rocks.  Watch this space.

Umbraco 5 Beta 1

Umbraco version 5 beta release 1 is out as of Friday November 11 2011!  We are eagerly awaiting our chance to download and test it out.  We have one big e-commerce project in the works where we *know* the v5 feature set would be a big help.  Stay tuned for more updates on Umbraco 5 as they happen, or check out  the official word here.

The Ooomera Project - Social Connectivity With A Twist

Powerhouse is pleased to announce the imminent arrival of a new and game-changing social media platform called Ooomera.  

Along with vencap partners in Alberta and California, Powerhouse is the visionary sponsor of this astounding new addition to the landscape of social connectivity.  Ooomera will enable meaningful interaction at the grassroots level among friends, families, communities, and collectives.  And here's a teaser: you can collaborate with people you've never even heard of.

We can't elaborate too much on Ooomera right now, other than to say the name comes from the middle letters in "boomerang".

Stay tuned!