I had planned to write this addition to the Dream-Racer blog yesterday, in daylight, but that was before the power went off because of the storms. Luckily, we have a few candles around the house and the darkness was an opportunity to light up.

Regular followers of this blog will know that we are developing radio controlled toys for disabled children and young adults. For the benefit of new readers this blog is about Dream-Racer a "black box" we have developed that enables children with physical disabilities to drive radio controlled scale model cars produced by Nikko Toys.

Last week I finished the Dream-Racer web site.  You can find it at www.dream-racer.com.

The site uses Actinic Catalog as the e-commerce engine. At the moment we only have two Dream-Racer rigs on the site but that will change as we move ahead. The next thing we are planning is a series of ads to promote broader awareness of Dream-Racer and its potential for disabled children and young adults.

Have you ever looked at the sponsored ads on the right hand side of a Google search and wondered about them? Well, their structure is very strict. The title has a maximum of 25 characters and both lines one and two only allow 35 characters each including spaces. Sit back and think about this; with so few characters it's actually quite tough to get your message across.

This is my first attempt:

Title: Toys from Dream-Racer

Line 1: Radio controlled model cars for

Line 2: children with physical disabilities

If you do see our ads when surfing please don't click on them because it will cost us at least 10p or so. Instead go direct to the Dream-Racer web site by typing www.dream-racer.com into your browser.

When you visit the site you may spot a new product announcement we call Dream-Gamer. It's a new idea we have that will enable disabled children and young adults to play games on the Sony PlayStation. I'll be writing more about this next week.

All comments welcome.

Mike

Earlier this week Mark and I went to the BETT exhibition at London Olympia. BETT is all about the use of technology in education and how information and computing technology can help children learn.

It was an early start on Wednesday morning. I left the house at 5:20, met up with Mark at 6:00 and by 10:30 we walked into Olympia. Wednesday was the first day and I had expected it to be fairly quiet. The reality was a little different - it was already heaving. Our main interest was in visiting the special needs section to take a look at the range of products on offer and to check if there we could see anything similar to Dream-Racer on the market.

To help explain our ideas behind Dream-Racer I had made up a simple slide in Powerpoint - this one here.

We had some good discussions, met a number of people and companies that we will be contacting shortly.

A few hours later it was time to leave. Only to find the service on the District Line was suspended, so we set off walking back to Earls Court for the Piccadilly Line.

As we walked over the bridge we noticed a sign announcing "The Special Needs Fringe" was open. As neither of us knew anything about it we decided a short detour was in order. Our first thought was that it was an overflow from the BETT exhibition just across the road. Actually it's not: it's an entirely separate organisation that has been running for I think ten years.  To cut a long story short we spend more time with people in the Fringe than we did at BETT.

We had some excellent discussions and the opportunity to talk to some very knowledgeable people about our ideas for Dream-Racer. Overall, a worthwhile visit and especially after we found toured the Fringe.

I'll be writing next week about our web site: it's just gone live at www.dream-racer.com

Mike