Hello readers,

First up, my apologies that there wasn’t a blog post last week, but I and my colleagues were extremely busy for reasons I’ll explain further down.

It’s been an interesting two weeks for us here at Wishtrac.  We’ve had a glimpse of summer with some sunny weather, which was a welcome change from the gloomy weather we normally get.  We’ve also been looking ahead to the biggest sporting event of the year – the football World Cup in South Africa.

To mark the occasion, we’ve created two brand new products – one of which is completely free.  The first product, the 2010 International Football Activity Pack, retails on disk at £4.95 and contains over 100 pages of printable resources, including a number of fun football-themed activities.  These activities include simple puzzles such as Dot to Dot, Spot the Difference, and Navigate the Maze as well more complex puzzles such as Number Puzzles, Anagrams, Word Searches, and Quizzes.  There are up to three difficulty levels for each activity, so even the football-mad ones will find a challenge!

The second product is the Interactive Whiteboard World Cup Wallchart, which is available as a free download right now on our website.  The software is designed to be used on an interactive whiteboard, and allows scores and match results to be tracked each day.  Match reports can also be written and saved; pupils who don’t normally feel motivated to write might suddenly want to when Rooney scores a hat-trick!  As mentioned before, this product is completely free – all you need to do is fill in the details on this page and then click on the ‘Submit’ button to start the download.  We’ve had a few people clicking on the ‘Buy Now’ button, which won’t work as the product is only available as a free download.

Well, I hope you and your pupils enjoy our new products and are looking forward to the World Cup as much as we are.  I won’t be posting next week because of half-term, but check back in two weeks on the 10th of June for more news and updates.

Last week I talked about one of our colleagues who’s out in China sourcing some new products for us.  Well, he’s managed to make an improvement to one of our existing products, the ever-popular Large Lower Case Keyboard.  A few of our customers who have a visual impairment told us that the white symbols on yellow keys were sometimes hard to make out, so we’re now stocking a version with orange keys instead.  Take a look at the difference:

Old

New

I think even our fully-sighted readers will agree there is quite a significant difference.  The Royal Society for the Blind and Partially Sighted (RNIB) agree, and have officially approved keyboards which use orange keys rather than yellow.

The first shipment is currently on its way over to us, and we’ll update the product images on the website as soon as it’s arrived.

Next week, we’ll be looking at another keyboard, but this one is of the virtual variety.  Until then, thanks for reading, have a good weekend and I’ll be back same time next week.

Hello readers,

In last week’s blog, I spoke about our Facebook and Twitter accounts, and the week before that I mentioned that we might be rewarding people who visit them with some discount codes.  Can you guess what I’m going to write next?  That’s right, we’ve got a discount code up – but I’m not telling you anything more about it here.  You’ll have to visit our Facebook page and click on the ‘Like’ button to get the goodies.  This offer will expire by the end of Monday the 10^th, so get clicking if you want to save some money (and who doesn’t)?

In the office, things are pretty quiet on the development front, but we have lots of ideas and concepts for our next projects flying around.  One of these projects is Ben & Lexi’s Early Keyboard and Mouse Skills, which I’ve already mentioned previously, but our other projects include some free resources, which we’ll be working on soon.  I can’t say too much about it now, but they may be related to a minor sporting event which is happening in South Africa this summer…

Meanwhile, outside the office (a long way outside it in fact) we have a colleague in China who’s looking at sourcing some new products for our hardware range.  At least, we hope he still is… we suspect that we might’ve annoyed him recently when we phoned him for a progress update at 8pm our time, thinking the time difference was minus 7 hours, only to find that it was actually plus 7 hours.  Consequently, the progress update we received was neither intelligible nor very friendly.  We’re sure he’ll forgive us soon.

That’s all from us for now, but be sure to check back next Thursday for another blogtastic entry from Wishtrac.