Inside Digital Mission NYC: BrightLemon

Digital Mission went to New York from 1st - 5th November, along with 19 fantastic, UK-based digital companies.

As part of the 'Inside Digital Mission NYC' series, each company was asked if they would like to go into a bit more detail and share their individual stories

This mini-interview is with Leon Tong from BrightLemon, based in London.

What's your role within BrightLemon?

Strategy, presenting/speaking at events, sales and also a whole lot of mundane day-to-day stuff... basically all the things that nobody else does (or wants to do!)

What led to setting up/being involved with BrightLemon? 

After university I worked on a two year Department for Education project and then for a fairly well known financial web site in the City. However, I always thought "I could get this done better" and so set out on my own to do just that. 

BrightLemon work almost exclusively with educational and charity based clients and if you look at our client list you will see that we try to choose projects that use the web to do something good for society...

Tell us a story about the mission...

Apart from the one about waking up in the hotel on the first night to find three men breaking into the room next door...? Well after the HMS Daring reception I ended up at a far less formal drinks event chatting to someone from the online division of a TV station.... for about five hours... we had both reached the same idea on the strategy for a large scale concept - one of us from TV moving towards online... and the other from online moving towards TV.... would love to say more but you would have to sign an NDA....

What is the best thing to come out of the Digital Mission for you?

Besides those in New York, I made contact with some very inspiring people based in the UK.   

Who was your Digital Mission superstar and why?

Rod Hyde from Amaze* - because he has an astounding level of knowledge and expertise - and yet he is the most humble, soft spoken and polite person you could ever meet! We had some amazing (excuse the pun) conversations about his story and numerous aspects of business during taxi journeys around New York. I only wish we had filmed those chats and put them online....

(*also Farnaz Khan (eResponse Media) of course but I think practically everyone else will nominate her!)

What's in the future for BrightLemon?

We have been very fortunate this year to have worked on communities with the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Modern and United Nations and so will be doing more of that! We are recruiting and want to grow our online community offering steadily but also ensure our current staff are rewarded duly for the great work they have done this year. Next year we'll be looking to expand into a couple of other markets - either with product offerings or a wider range of services.... watch this space....

Longer term we would like to look at high growth markets like China (where we already have a 120,000+ user network) and from a technical viewpoint we would like to get more involved with Drupal, the Semantic Web/RDF and data visualisation.

Leon's LinkedIn

BrightLemon's website // Twitter // LinkedIn

Photo (cc) Sam Michel