About trends within the digital industry:

Has there been any radical change in the past few years regarding trends within the digital media industry?

Content in the web became a king thanks to Google. Web 2.0 legend felt upon our internet users as well. It doesn’t matter if the company is big or small, if it needs it or not - demand for content management grew up to 95%. The news web portals were more of general kind and we see that the lack of more specialised news portals is vanishing and the existing ones are becoming more professional. Thumbs up. Small businesses were provided with cheaper internet solutions as “do it yourself”.

Which trends do you see right now in the industry of digital media?

There is a great demand of internet advertising right now as TV loses a bit its advertising positions and which are getting stronger in internet. Blogging mania is a bit calming down and now bloggers are writing for a profit more than just blogging. Internet community portals are offering more and more services than just their primary mission like online dating.
                                    
Which tendencies can you see in the future?

Information sharing should become even more flexible and intelligent. User oriented search engine solutions altogether demolishing a linguistic barrier. Web developers will have an opportunity to enrich the web hugely as internet is becoming faster. Internet users will gain more control on the digital media they are using and sharing. Audience filtering should get even more precise for online advertising purposes. Internet will go more (if not absolute) mobile as more mobile devices are used. Range and application of such devices should increase as well. Local market oriented net and intranet solutions will become more relevant for small business just like internet ones.

How do you keep yourselves up-to-date with industry trends?

We read a lot. There are some permanent web resources which helps us stay up to date. We are keeping an eye on the new announcements from the software industries as well as senior designers; also we are tracking the awarded world sites’ techniques. We pay a lot of attention on the behaviour of nowadays internet user, segmenting them to age groups.

Information regarding skills and profile of future employees:

Which different techniques are you specialized in?

Mostly we specialize in web page design and banner ad design which are commonly constructed using Adobe software. Web and press graphics is aided by Corel products and Erain’s Swift 3D. For simple video production we use Adobe Premiere and After Effects, Sorenson Squeeze sometimes, for sound treatment – simple wave editors such as Sony Sound Forge. Search engine optimisation is achieved with quite different software. SEO is not the last thing we’ve been interested in since launching our own freelance biz and we think that overall results are really great. Some computer-local programming software is used as well.

Are you specialized within any particular part of the industry (music, games, media etc)?

We suppose that would be animation. We construct flash sites and animated components for websites such as intros, menus, headers, various media applications, banner ads. We just love it animated.

What clients & customers do you have?

We have quite a wide range of customers. The most we do is associated with companies that are into various sorts of media production, such as movie films, TV advertisements, music clips. Of course there are customers of various other spheres of activity including marketing agencies, distributing companies, travel and logistics service providers, lottery organizers, casinos and building construction corporations.

What does your view on roles and responsibility at the company look like?

The term “client is always right” cannot be applied 100% at our freelance company (good for them though :). We do only the things we are capable of, without the uncertain third parties’ help; as such a guarantee helps us and our clients sleep well at night. We take responsibility not only for our existing solution but also for the possible future threats to it. Roles between us are shared according to our current brain brightness level.