Last week was WorldView Impact’s 2 year anniversary and to celebrate we had a presentation and some drinks at the space. As part of this event, toggle bought some rubber trees in Sri Lanka. Each tree cost £15 – which is enough to cover the cost of planting and maintaining the tree for 35 years!

And why did we buy rubber trees you might be asking?

Worldview are working towards creating sustainable livelihoods for the poor with green business and at the same time, mitigating climate change.

One of their projects is a non-emission rubber tree plantation (powered by renewable energy) in Sri Lanka, which is where the trees we purchased will be planted.

Aims of the project:

• Provide good working conditions
• Give ownership shares to workers
• To provide communities with basic health and housing standards
• Create knowledge that can be shared with local communities
• Ease pressure on remaining rainforests
• Reduce carbon

To learn more about the project or buy some rubber trees, visit Worldview Impact »

Due to our office move and new site launch we didn’t get around to making any Open Source recommendations last month. To make up for it we will squeeze in two this month.

So far our recommendations have been desktop focused and primarily for the Mac (we are all Mac users at toggle). The Open Source movement extends way beyond desktop software and the Open Source business model is being adopted in some very unexpected places. Open Source cola, Open Source hardware and more recently an Open Source car.

A shift is occurring in the way we use technology and store our data, the shift is driven by the web and is moving the software we use online. The huge advantage to this is that our data follows us to any device we happen to be using. With this in mind we felt it was time to start looking at some of the best Open Source web applications.

OpenGoo

The sales pitch:

OpenGoo is an Open Source Web Office. It is a complete solution for every organisation to create, collaborate, share and publish all its internal and external documents.

In short, OpenGoo is a strong alternative to Google Docs, Zoho and Microsoft Office on the desktop. What really impresses us with OpenGoo is the amount of features available in the application. OpenGoo allows you to manage:

• Text documents
• Presentations
• Task Lists
• E-mails
• Calendars
• Web Links
• Contacts

From the looks of it they have more features on the way too. The application is the long lost cousin of ActiveCollab (a now commercial project) that we used to make use of in the early days of toggle. Essentially it is a mashup of many different Open Source projects rolled into one neat package.

We don’t make use of OpenGoo at toggle (yet) – we would need to have mobile access before jumping on board. OpenGoo could also be improved with cleaner interface, especially if our clients are going to be collaborating on documents with us. Playing with the demo we were really impressed and we will certainly be keeping a close eye on the projects future developments.

Pope Street, SE1

Pope Street is five minutes walk from Tower Bridge on the south side of the River Thames. Its a quiet street (except for the recent road works) and within a short walk we have some great places to grab lunch. We are still discovering new luncheonettes each day, if you know the area we would love to hear your food suggestions.

Worldview Space

The office is situated in an old London brick warehouse. Worldview Space is on the third floor and is a collaborative space inhabited by a whole range of businesses. One end of the space dedicated to team toggle. The blue paint used across the building pretty much matches the toggle deep blue which is a nice coincidence.

We also have access to a tiny roof terrace, unfortunately the buildings around are a little higher than ours which restricts the view. With a step ladder you might just be able to get a glimpse of Tower Bridge and the Thames.

toggle

Last Friday we took delivery of a laser cut perspex toggle logo to hang on the back wall. This is the largest our logo has ever been and its great to see the intricacies of the typeface when it is blown up this big. The logo sits proudly above our desks.

We have four (and a half) desks to fill and a wall of storage cubes that are currently filled with lots of design inspiration and books.

If you would like to see more pictures we have uploaded a whole bunch to Flickr.

After weeks of quietly beavering away behind the scenes, we have a new website, a new office and are pleased to announce a new way of working – the toggle Design Laundry Service™

Office

Weve moved the toggle-plex down-river from its original site near Staines to just south of Tower Bridge. Its a lovely old London brick warehouse, tucked away down a side lane. It even has a tiny roof terrace for the one or two days of summer we may have!

This is a quick peek of our new office – well give you the full Cooks tour later in the week.

Website

The biggest change for our new website is that we have moved to WordPress. This doesn’t mean we are abandoning Pixie, we just wanted to try something new. As soon as we have a couple of minutes, well write a separate post all about the intricacies of the new site. For now, here are some top-lines on our favorite new features…

Shop

By popular demand weve finally integrated our handmade craft skills into the business and launched a shop. Were currently selling iphone cases and gorgeous postcard packs – but keep checking back because we are planning to add lots of other toggle branded goodies in the near future.

Going mobile

We also felt it was time to build a proper mobile friendly version of our site – and so we did! Visiting from a mobile device will automatically serve you a simplified (but still beautiful) version of our website. We’ve tried and tested it and were happy, but would be very interested to hear any feedback you may have – good or bad…

toggle design laundry service ™

When we launched toggle we wanted to set up a different sort of operation. For a while now we’ve all felt quite deeply that to keep our standards high (and our clients happy) our business practise needs be sustainable – in the way we run it as well as environmentally. So after many late nights thinking and talking it through, we’ve changed the way we work – and this new way of working is called the toggle design laundry service™.