Today I will like to approach a different subject. Colors.  When you design a site,  create an ad or a presentation you have to take a look at the tone in which your message will be understand by the people.

The colors you use on your website can elicit different emotional reactions from people. Years of research has proven that each color has associations with certain feelings and can create a mood. Understanding color choices and implied perceptions can help you create a more effective design without unintended color miscues.

Warm and cold colors

Warm and cool colors may point to the feeling a color scheme can imply. Warm colors include red, yellow and orange(of course with all the variations) and are used to cover the walls of living spaces in homes and used as accents to pop out neutral shades. Cool colors, such as blue, green and purple, are popular choices for bedrooms and more relaxed home spaces because of their versatility. In the same way these colors are used to create certain feelings in a room, they can be used to elicit emotion for your website.

Warm colors are inviting, happy and cozy. These colors can make spaces appear smaller because warm tones seem to advance, creating a cozy feel. Warm colors can create an active response in the brain and bring feelings of excitement, passion and sometimes aggression. In extremely large spaces, an abundance of warm color can get overwhelming and is best matched with neutral tones.

Cool color choices, considered calming and soothing, are somewhat recessive and can make spaces feel a little more open than they are. Some argue that a cool color scheme can make a physical space actually feel cooler than it is and should be matched with open spaces (such as white space or neutrals on your website). Cool hues bring about a more passive reaction in the brain and can make a person feel pleased, relaxed or even subdued.

How to start blogging, the easy way:

• First step in installing the worpress cms is to buy a domain. A domain name can be obtained even for free if u are using a hosting. My personal advice is to use name.com(only domains) because you have more control and are not under stress from a hosting company.
• Buy some hosting. Depending on your location you can have different types of hosting. If you are at the first blog(and you are because you are reading this article:P). For US users I do recommend iPage or 1&1.
• Visit wordpress.org and download the latest version.
• Copy the content in the ftp account. You can access the ftp account by some ftp client. my recommendation is Filezilla.
• Create a database in your hosting account.
• Configure wordpress. This can be done automatically by following the wizard.
• Voila. You are done. With the easy but scary part.

Now that you have your blog up, you can access it an enjoy it. No you can`t enjoy it because you don`t have your content, your design, in one word your personality.  For the blog personalization just ask us or you can try the themes available for wordpress.

For installing a theme you have to go to the admin area of your blog. Usually it can be found typing ‘wp-admin‘ at the end of your url(Ex. www.example.com/wp-admin). After you log in go to the  “Appearance” tab in the left menu, there you will find the themes button. Now you will see two tabs(Manage Themes and Install Themes), click on “Install Themes” and search for a theme. If you don`t know what to search for, simply click the “Newest button”.  You will now see a list of wordpress themes ready for your site. You just need to decide on witch one to use.

After the decision you just click install and follow the instructions. Your theme will be available in the “Manage Themes” tab in the ‘Available Themes’ section. Click activate for the theme to change. Now if you will visit your site you will notice the changes.

Now that you have your theme installed, it`s time to write your first post. For best practices in post writing i will create a post next week.

We are different in so many ways! Some of us are more creative and like to play with ideas, and colors, and shapes, while others are exact and love numbers and concrete information; some work in big companies, while others might be doing all their work in their own room at home; some have had big struggles this year while some have had big breakthroughs; some have seen their work take off while others have only kept afloat; some have enjoyed the work while others the rewards. Still, for all of us another year has passed and another one stands in front of us.
We wish you all, who are reading these lines, to look back at this year and see the full half of the glass and take courage and hope for the one to come!
Remember that work is a means to an end and not the end itself!

Daily 5 wants to be one of those little idiosyncrasies of many people, one that is meant to relax you, loosen up the wrinkles on your forehead, and maybe, who knows, inspire you. The 5 videos are selected in such a way that almost anyone could find something to enjoy. Some of them aim at informing you, some at teaching you something, some want to give a warning, some just to make you laugh. Daily 5 can become a reference moment in your day, one of the things you know is always there, like the morning coffee or the music you listen to every day. What’s more, its creator is planning on giving access to viewers so that they too could upload the clips they like or recommend which ever ones they mostly enjoyed. Don’t worry, Daily 5 is not going to lose its accessibility to all ages because of free access. They are still going through the filter of he who created it in the first place. So Daily 5 stays the same clean cheerful relaxing place for you to enjoy a few minutes of break, be it at work by yourself, or at home with your family, or perhaps with your friends.

Daily 5 is built on the VP Factory platform, which, in its turn, was created by 648 Group. Because of this, Daily 5 was able to be given a cool outfit, for it to run smoothly and be so enjoyable.

If you want or need your fix of every day dose of cool videos Daily 5 will do that for you!

Our first project together was George Ogararu’s personal website. Catching his personality, openness and friendliness towards his fans, or whoever might be interested in any way in him, his website contains information on his life, both personal and professional. You can see lots of pictures of him at different ages and in different aspects of his life, and you get insight into his vision about life and life values, what drives and motivates him. There is also a section where you can read about what it is to play as a defender, its challenges and benefits.
In yet another section you can read about his career divided into four sections, one for each of the teams that he has played for. It is really impressive to be able to go through someone’s professional life like that, to have such access to his successes and failures, the lessons that he has learned and how he became who he is today as a professional soccer player.
Along with pictures you can also find a video base filled with clips from games that he’s played.
What else can you find there? Well, there’s a little calendar of activities and a section in which he publishes press releases.

Then we created together his blog. Here he keeps a diary of different thoughts that ruminate in his mind, thoughts about his family and family in general, about soccer, about his social campaign Soccer for Life (we’ll tell you about this a little later), about his travels. One of the things that George Ogararu uses his weblog for is to answer to different press stories in which his name is included, either to clarify, to belie, or to confirm. That way he wants to make sure that the image he has in the public eye is not created by the press. But what struck us most was his willingness to communicate on a personal level with his fans, with those who care to any extent about him or his career. On the blog he asks for their opinion on different professional decisions that he has to make. Other times he simply wants to greet them for the holidays.

A project that George Ogararu holds dear is called Soccer for Life. The campaign is meant to raise awareness and to increase involvement among soccer players in supporting humanitarian and social causes. There have already been two editions in which players like Edgar Davids, Klaas Jan Huntelaar, and other soccer players from Romanian clubs have gotten involved and contributed. The beneficiary of this campaign is Pro Vita an association for born and unborn children in Valea Plopului. The money is used to build and furnish houses, for food and medication.

Like we said in the beginning, our collaboration does not extend only to George Ogararu’s projects but to his spouse’s as well.

Andreea Ogararu has worked with 648 Group on three different projects: her personal blog, ManLifestyle, and Football Fabulous.
WagDiary (the definition of a wag, as created by tabloid news journalists, is any woman who has free access to men in sports) is the place where she asks different kind of questions than maybe one expects from a soccer player’s wife. Directly addressing those with little involvement or care in and for the world, she challenges them to real soul searching. By creating parallels between what is very familiar to them, like shoes and clothes and perfume, and real needs of people who have practically nothing, she manages to become relevant to those who have in the benefit of those who don’t. A quick example of posts are the metaphors (more or less) that she uses when she talks about “the shoes of poverty” or “fashion of the soul”.

ManLifestyle is an online magazine that once in a while comes out on paper too. Andreea Ogararu is a partner in this project and brought 648 Group in it by soliciting that we create the online platform of the magazine. It covers subjects like lifestyle, of course, sport, auto, fashion, health, technology, finance, tourism, even what women think about men. The idea behind it is to respond to questions that men have in many of the categories that interest them, but also, to some extent, to educate men.

A third project that we worked on together is the magazine Football Fabulous, which is a high quality concept, dedicated to sports, soccer in particular. What is most particular to this magazine is the fact that it wants to convey information from the horse’s mouth. There is a continual battle between the media and the people being mediated. Many times public figures accuse the media for sending false messages about them to the public. That is something that this magazine wants to avoid, not only the scandal but also the slander or confusion among readers. It aims at changing people’s perception about the world of soccer, to present the more personal, positive and unknown side of this world. Being created and led by Ogararu family, they have immediate reliable sources of information from all over Europe. They want to publish whatever the athlete wants to communicate to the public, be it professional or personal. What drives this project is the desire that the Ogararu family has to counterbalance and fight against what the media promotes, which is poor quality material, motivated only by rating.

All in all, we wanted to share with you a project… no, more than that, a relationship that we have with one of our clients. We are very proud and happy to have been working for a some time now with the Ogararu family. It’s been a trustful, professional, pleasant ride so far, and we hope to keep going.

If you don’t know what VP Factory is, we’ll give you a brief introduction and encourage you to number yourself among those who have enjoyed the pleasure of seeing how it works.

VP Factory is the pioneer of Video Players as a Service (VpaaS), the concept of a complete video platform that combines the flexibility in accepting multiple hosting sources for a video collection and the advantages of a hosted video player. You can create a classical video player or one in modern variations. You choose! You can adjust all the minutest elements. You can upload your video on your website or social networks by simply pasting in the code. You can even upload clips showing on Youtube. Video collection management is centralized. You can save and organize your video collection online, edit all video information, rapidly create playlists on different topics, share with other players. Changing the look of your player doesn’t affect your already published players nor does it mean that you have to write any line of code. You can host your videos on Youtube , your own server, or VP Factory servers supported by Amazon Cloud Front.

VP Factory was later introduced HTML5 so that your videos could be automatically converted so as to run on iPhone/iPad.

There are also functionalities that help you keep track of what happens with your videos. You can see the number of views and time spent on your video, you can place an ad on the video you choose and customize it any way you want, you can find out statistics on the activity on your videos such as the country and city of the user but also the interest areas from which your player is mostly accessed. You can find out at what length of your video the viewer stopped watching, the website on which your video was watched. You can see a top ranking of your videos sorted by number of views, visitors, average time spent, location, and traffic source.

Should you want more detailed information or to try it out, please visit the website.

A pioneer would not go unnoticed, would it?

The “press” on the internet, websites and blogs, have posted articles reviewing VP Factory. Some of them ranked it among top 10 best sites, others top 10 apps. Some like it best because it’s fancy and has a beautiful design, some because it’s very fast, some because it is useful to a wide variety of businesses, while others like it because it’s easy to use.

Speaking about VP Factory in a review, web.appstorm.net says: “Wouldn’t it be nice to easily be able to collect and manage your videos and video playlists in a central location? Or easily customize video player skins with a few clicks? Embedding video players and playlists can be a little tricky, especially for those who aren’t familiar with it. VP Factory is making it drop-dead simple though, even for people who want to host videos themselves.”

Appvita.com says “it offers all the customization and branding features a large company could need.” as it was made for the use of companies, as well.

Vidcompare.com had a talk a while back with the creator of VP Factory, Vali Balanescu, and this is how they described it: “a solution with a ridiculously easy to use back-end that allows creative minds the freedom to fine tune every detail of the video player with unique WYSIWYG and drag-drop editors that even a technophobe can use”.

In more technical terms crunchbase.com says that “one of VP Factory’s strong points is the ability to manage and stream video stored in any locations: own servers, a Content Delivery Network (CDN), the Amazon CloudFornt( VP Factory hosting service) and even Youtube . The platform can be integrated with major CMS solutions (Drupal, Joomla), popular blogging platforms( WordPress, TypePad, Blogger) and social network websites (Facebook, MySpace), allowing videos to be published on these services.” ; while appvita.com likes it because “analytics tools help companies determine which spots in their videos are least interesting to viewer, watermarking feature ensures that company-branded videos won’t be stolen and users can change the look of any videos that have already been published on outside blogs from within the content management system.”

In the end of the review web.appstorm.net says: “VP Factory was among our 10 favorite HTML5 video players as well, so if you’re looking for HTML5 embedding capabilities, VP Factory is an app you should definitely be checking out.”

No doubt this pioneer is a competitive one and is here to stay.

Try it out yourself! We would love to hear what you think about it.

So far our team has worked with ING Bank and Raiffeisen Bank.

For ING we have designed a web application called Credit Advisor, which tests your credit online and gives you the possibility to calculate all that it implies getting a new one or asking for refinancing on an already existing credit. Try it out! Who knows, you might like it!

In the case of Raiffeisen we have designed their website RaiffeisenOnline.roas well as an application called VreauSaEconomisesc.ro (“I want to save” would be the English translation for the application). What this application does is to help you figure out the best and most efficient way to save money. It covers categories like clothes, phone bills, utilities, transportation and by typing in the amount of money that you think you could save in each category, the calculator will show you in the end how much money you could actually save in a year. You would be surprised!

For them it was a practical goal oriented challenge, for us it was another opportunity to test our abilities and imagination. And here’s what the final product is.

In brief, Credit Advisor is a web application that helps you calculate the amount of money that you can save if you refinance your credit. We are proud of it for what is behind it making it work this way, but also for what’s in front making it an enjoyable resource for it’s users.

Though challenging, we managed to find a way to make it work at a high standard in Java Script. The rate calculation scripts work in most browsers. The calculator connects to ING’s CMS for the currency rate and all the conditions for calculus exist in configuration folders. That is why, whenever the ING product policy undergoes changes, it is only those configurations that need to be changed and the calculator is up and running again under new conditions in no time. What’s more, the code adapts itself when the change in configuration is made, thus making the change an easy task that can be performed from inside, not necessitating the intervention of the creator of the application. We are also proud of it because it is very accessible and user friendly, it has a creative artistic layout, and it is practical.

As so many services are beginning to expand into the world of the web, our company enjoys collaborating with firms that can assign to us challenging projects. Banks are definitely among them as they are such a great part of people’s everyday life and always look to be more and more competitive.

One of our latest projects, one that was delightful to work on due to the jovial character of its content, was creating the website for Happenstance Corporation Inc. We are talking about a multimedia entertainment company, based in Orange County California, who has strong affiliations in the film and television industry with Fremantle Corporation, Sony, Paramount, Dreamworks.

They have sales distribution throughout the world marketing their products through the largest points of distribution such as iTunes, AOL, Amazon, Target online.
Though a challenge to build a creative and entertaining website and satisfy a company that thrives on creativity and entertainment, the results stand evidence for anyone to see who might be curios to evaluate our capabilities and competency.

For all of you out there cyber “athletes” who love to “surf” and “navigate”, who are creative and ingenuous, who dream of leaving their mark in the virtual world with an impact in the real, 648 wants to support you in starting to make your dream come true.

If you have some formal training in programming and web design and want to apply your knowledge in real challenging and competitive projects, if you want to learn more hands-on, if you want to prove yourself and others that you’re good in the profession that you have chosen for yourself, working with us might be the best opportunity for you.

We believe that fresh minds deserve a chance to better themselves and to prove themselves. Unlike in politics, the web world thrives on creative new unbound minds.

The 648 team is young and professional and ready to pick your brain and teach you how to put your ideas into practice. At the same time, we work on interesting and challenging projects and that will give you an opportunity not only to show your abilities in the field but also get a feel for what kind of projects a company like this works on and what it takes to be good in this domain.

So, if you are interested and the portrait above is you then you can apply and we’ll talk.