Last week I saw a Tweet on Twitter looking for both Brummies and Geordies to help with a project on lastminute.com. Hailing from ‘God’s Country’ as I do and speaking the “Queens English” (Brummagen) I thought, “that’s a project I could get involved with” and duly replied.

After a bit of email chitter chatter I was shown Pronto - a ‘nifty’ new search facility from lastminute.

Not only is this an AMAZING search facility (the technology is brilliant - you really do need to have a play with it) but as it’s a search for local hotels and restaurants the ‘lingo’ can be localised (see below). In short you can change the regional dialect in which you search - just for fun. Instead of saying “hello” you utter the immortal Brummie greeting “Alroight me babbie!”. Hence the reason why they needed the wealth of my Brummie colloquialisms.

As I say, it’s a really impressive search facility and is worth a play with. It’s very intuitive, very quick and very clever. Also - because it’s something that’s a bit different, with all of the regional twangs, I think it’s something which will afford Lastminute a lot of PR too, which is obviously a win win from their perspective!

Well done Lastminute. Very clever indeed!

Toodle pip.

Zak.