The Staufenberger Repository

Who is John Staufenberger?

We're called Staufenberger, Smith & Butte. But as none of us are called Staufenberger, Smith or Butte people are naturally curious about why we would give our outfit such a name. Here's why.

When you decide to set up a business, the most pressing issue is not the important stuff like backing, premises or clients. It's the name, isn't it? Well, we didn't want to do the groovy, one-word thing. It's already been done really well by loads of other people. We could've put our names over the door, but neither of us are famous enough to get any benefit from naming it after ourselves. So we made up three fictitious partners. Simple.

To help us in our search for the perfect three names we turned to the Kleimo Random Name Generator. It takes names from the US census and spits out names based on the relative obscurity - or otherwise - of every name in America.

At an obscurity rating of about 75, Staufenberger came out as our favourite. We liked Butte because, well, you know, it makes us laugh. And Smith made sense as a foil for the other two.

So there you have it: Staufenberger, Smith & Butte.

We like it because it sounds as if we've been going for decades, like an established New York legal practice. And it probably won't scare any procurement people.

And without realising it, we gave ourselves a name that makes us easy to find on google. Not so easy if you call yourself bingo. Or Amp, say.

And last week a client of ours told us he gave us his business on the strength of that story. Not bad for a bunch of gonzo planners, eh?

Idle hands

It's another skateboard post but I'm not going to apologise for that. This time it's of the finger variety.

A few years ago I wasted hours of work time attempting to ollie pencils with my fingerboard. After 3 months and not much learnt I gave up and my fingerboard was stuffed in the bottom drawer of my desk at work. I never took it with me when I left that job but having seen this I kind of wish I still had it.

Ollie and Janson spend a day with...

Ollie and Janson, creatives who blog (a subject recently covered by Simon, Dan and beeker), have finally got a long anticipated side project off the ground. It's a lovely, simple idea: interview someone they wouldn't normally meet and get that person to document what they do of a day with a disposable comera.

First up is John, a crane operator from St. John's Wood. Last summer, John was working on a site in Shoreditch and he took some great shots from atop his rig.

What I like about it is that they haven't made it easy for themselves. What ends up looking really focussed and simple, takes a lot of persuading, organising and marshalling.

Nice work, chaps. It was worth the wait.

New year, new office

After a long search, late last year we found a new home. It's near Smithfield Market.

To mark our arrival, we've renamed the area the meatpacking district. What? New York's got one, why can't we? They trade and pack meat here, it's a recognised district...you know, it makes sense. If West End estate agents can rename Fitzrovia as North Soho (or worse, Noho), it's fair game as far as we're concerned.

We moved in over the last week, a process that was elongated by a frustrating series of delays to our broadband installation.

But we're in now and rearranging furniture and the obligatory Playlounge product on a daily basis. When we're happy with the arrangements, we'll post some photos.

Staufenberger drinks promotion

Now we've a nice new off...er, studio, we don't want to leave. We're a bit sad like that. So if you're in or near the meatpacking district, pop by for a cuppa.

Interactive directions on Zooomr and Flickr

Back last summer we posted a photo tour of a trip across London. It used Zooomr's portal function that enables you to embed one photo in another. 

As suggested at the time, it was interesting but, you know, a bit pointless. And it was not immediately obvious what the portals themselves would be good for. Well, we've just stumbled upon a use for them: interactive directions to our new office.

Tucked away in the backstreets of an old part of London, the all new Studio Staufenberger can be a little hard to locate. Solution? A visual guide.

Most of us find our way better if we can picture where we are and use landmarks, however mundane, to place ourselves on our route. So we've snapped a few shots that guide you from the tube - via the traffic lights, the pub, the alley - to the office and stitched them together using Zooomr's portals.

If you saw the previous portal post, you might remember that the functionality wasn't working in Internet Explorer. You would have thought they'd fixed it by now, wouldn't you? A new service with a wizzy new gizmo, it would make sense if it worked in the most popular browser, right? Wrong. I might be doing them a huge disservice, but it isn't working on Yusuf's Dell/IE7 set up.

So in the interest of opening our drinks promotion to as many as possible, we've done one in Flickr too.

Barbican Tube to Studio Staufenberger (Zooomr/Firefox etc)
Barbican Tube to Studio Staufenberger (Flickr/IE)

See you soon, perhaps.

Five things you might not know about our TV careers

We've been tagged by Faris and Lazbash in the five-things-thing that's been going round. So here are five things you won't know about us, all with a tenuous link to the glamourous world of TV.

Yusuf:

1. My first and only appearance on national TV was when I competed in the 110m hurdles final of the National Schools Athletics Championships. Channel 4 broadcast highlights of the championships and featured a nice close up me at the blocks. But I finished so far off the pace that they didn't have time to show me finishing. However, I was part of the team that won the 4x100m relay. Unfortunately, C4 didn't broadcast that event.

2. Actually, that's not true. I also appeared in the video for Fallacy & Fusion's The Groundbreaker, as gangster number 3, which received heavy(ish) airplay on MTV.

3. I once lived next door to Alexei Sayle. We used to park in his underground parking space. He didn't appreciate it and never asked me to join him on the telly.

Patrick

4. Before setting up Staufenberger I spent some time trying to be a scriptwriter. In 2004 I got down to the final two for a place on the writing team for Sky's football soap, Dream Team. I know nothing about football. And I didn't get the gig. The two facts may be connected.

5. I was once on The South Bank Show. It was all about me. Me, me, me. Actually, it was the Albert Finney interview (sometime in the mid 90s). Melvin Bragg chatted with Finney over lunch at L'Escargot. The wife and I were given the arduous task of being fake diners in the background. Still, we got a free lunch out of it. The tarte tatin was pretty good.

As all the world and Margate appear to have been tagged by now, we'll refrain from passing it on.