It's the Third Thursday of the month... what's that? Oh, so you noticed it is in fact Friday. Soz, we had a big go live yesterday.

Our live Social Media event at Square Mile Relay

Other links referenced...

• Sarah Beeny's Rise Hall
• Our Learn Apps
• ABC Alphabet Puzzles for Kids
• Spooky Halloween Cards & Stickers
• Schedule App
• Mark runs the New York Marathon - Sponsor him!

PS We also won a W3 Silver Award in the Entertainment category for 4Music :)

A couple of weeks ago Steve Jobs died. When he stepped down as CEO of Apple over the Summer it was clear that he was losing his fight with cancer although I don't think anyone expected it to be so quick.

There have been some excellent pieces posted by more eloquent writers than I so I will leave it to them to celebrate his life and achievements. Personally I have enjoyed re-watching some of his speeches (notably Stanford Commencement in 2005 and his 1997 keynote where he effectively illustrated the technical landscape of 2011) and if you have a moment I would suggest you do as well.

So I did want to write something on this and was chatting to Luke about what was at the heart of Apple's renaissance in the late 90s, domination of the last decade and how I could look at applying those principles to the projects we work on for ourselves and for our clients.

I bounced around some themes on single mindedness, design as first principle, sweating the small stuff, but as usual, Luke nailed it.

He reminded me that the first release of a new Apple product line rejects the status quo and solves a single problem, in a simple way.

The design may often be revolutionary but when you look at it, the feature set is usually pretty limited. But we don't mind, because the concept is so getable and enlightening that we are happy to be taken on the journey as the product evolves. We get on board through glorious simplicity and the liberating notion that we don't have to accept the way things are.

Let's take a closer look at some examples.

The iMac

The iMac was the first all-in-one computer on the market. It challenged the principle that a computer was a sum of various parts, peripherals and accessories. The visual screen, the ability to hear sound and the computer processor are themselves symbiotically linked so why not unify them into a single machine? The internet was clearly the future so a modem was included, it was not considered an optional extra.

Recognising the need for industry standards and compatibility the iMac was the first computer to solely adopt USB ports for connectivity. Controversially they removed the floppy disk favouring the CD Rom (built-in, of course). They correctly argued that recordable CDs, the internet, and office networks were making them obsolete.

Finally the iMac looked completely different. It was beautiful, with it's translucent plastics and Bondi Blue trim. It was time for computers to take their place at the heart of the home, not to be hidden away on retractable desks in the box room. It changed the way we felt about them.

The iPod

The iPod was certainly another iconic design but it was definitely limited. Effectively the iPod was a hard drive with an action wheel, 5 buttons and a single tone screen. But it was the quickest and easiest way to browse your library of music on a handheld device.

They got the interface and hierarchy absolutely right from the beginning and have hardly changed it since. Other mp3 players of the time had inherited the buttons and small displays of the portable CD player and were taking users on a familiar journey without challenging it.

The iPhone

Look at the home screen of the first iPhone. No App Store. So you couldn't add any apps beyond the native ones such as web, email, camera, notes, maps, calendar etc. But looking at the interface doesn't it seem bare? There was obviously room for more but at the time they said that the web gateway was the platform for any additional stuff.

It meant they didn't have to worry about the complex eco system for the app store and could focus on disrupting the mobile phone market and changing our perceptions of what a mobile phone was actually for.

The interesting side product was that developers reverse engineered the iPhone to personalise it and add their own work. They built a way of working around it because they liked the product and saw it had a massive future. I'm absolutely convinced that those early jail breakers helped Apple to roadmap the marketplace when they were ready to open it up.

Was it just Apple?

I think it would be wrong to suggest that Apple are the only company to have got this concept of first version simplicity right. The Amazon Kindle obtusely focussed on the reading experience and then iterated to perfect that before adding anything more.

I would argue that early days Nokia were the same. They reduced physical phone size and increased battery life. My Mum still loves her old Nokia because it does exactly what she wants it to.

Google's home page is just a search field.

Conclusion

By not doing the expected you can ultimately end up with a greater solution. By stripping back the acceptable functions of today you leave room for innovation in the future and greatly increase the chances of solving your focal problem better than anyone else.

I would like to invite every client we work with (and my own team) to embrace this concept together and be brave and bold enough to try and do this on our own work. I'm pleased to say this principle is deep rooted in our latest product - Schedule.

Apple saw where they wanted us to be back in the 1970s and have been slowly dragging us there ever since. Thank you, Steve, I will leave the last words with you.

"When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there."

Steve Jobs in an MSNBC and Newsweek interview, 14 October 2006.

On the 22nd of September Facebook held its annual conference in San Francisco. Hundreds of developers on tenterhooks attended and Facebook fanatics around the world tuned in to hear Mark Zuckerberg’s big plans.

So was the event as much of an anti-climax as the launch of the non-existent iPhone5? What exactly was announced? And most importantly what does this mean for us as users and marketeers?

In summary there are four significant changes on Facebook:

Timelines
By now you’ve probably seen an example of the lovely new timeline. Big images and top stories from over the years brought to the surface for all to see. Great for those with a pretty history…not so great for those who thought their skeletons were firmly in the closet!

Smart Lists
Hot on the heels of Google+, Facebook will allow you to create lists of your friends….colleagues, family, close friends, enemies etc. This means you can share posts with specific lists only rather than sharing every status update with all 500 of your friends. It also means you can easily opt out of getting news updates from certain people.

Ticker
Like Smart Lists, the Ticker has already been launched and you will now see The Ticker in the right corner of your screen continuously feeding you real time updates of what your friends are up to –what they are liking, comments they are making etc. The main real estate of the page is now reserved for the big stuff - your friends’ posts, status updates, pictures etc.

Open Graph
Previously Facebook was about ‘Social Graph’ connecting people. Now it’s become ‘Open Graph’ connecting everything else. Rather than simply being able to ‘Like’ something, you can now share exactly what you are doing online - what you are ‘Reading’, ‘Listening to’, ‘Watching’ etc. And this is where it gets really interesting…

While Timelines are a significant change for users, nobody is really sure how, or indeed if, they are going to affect brands Pages. Facebook didn’t make any specific announcements around Pages but a spokesperson has said “we hope to make Pages more consistent with the new Timeline in the future.” This could suggest that brands need to start building up the history of their business on Facebook, giving them a richer timeline with information on heritage, growth and testimonials, supported by photos and videos. But although this will change how brands are presented on Facebook and hopefully mean more emotional connection and loyalty, it isn’t really going to affect how brands use Facebook or how users interact with them.

Smart lists and the Ticker are of more concern to brands. They allow users to filter what they see in both their main news feed and in the Ticker, which is great if you make the cut, but not so great if you don’t. No longer can a brand think “I’ve got 50,000 likes so I know my posts are appearing in 50,000 news feeds”. People are effectively filtering out brands and business from their Facebook experience. As quickly as Facebook gave us the ability to connect with 800,000,000 people, it’s making it just as easy for them to disconnect from us.

So what does that mean for marketeers? Well essentially this means that it’s more crucial than ever to stimulate and engage your Facebook fans - 1) to keep yourself interesting enough to make the shortlist and 2) to keep yourself visible in the both the Ticker and, more importantly, the news feed. Facebook describes the content for the Ticker as lightweight so you need to ensure that you are a heavyweight with valuable content, photos and videos for example. Since users now have more control over their news feeds, brands with boring or irrelevant updates will have lower visibility and the aim of the game is no longer to simply get your ‘Likes’ up.

Then this brings us on to the beast that is Open Graph or ‘frictionless sharing’ as MZ pitched it. Once you have ‘accepted’ a website it can now post details of your visit or consumption of its content onto Facebook automatically, without any prompt or acceptance. App developers can also define exactly how this interaction is reported – their users don’t have to just ‘Like’ their content they can now ‘Eat’, ‘Sleep’ and ‘Breathe’ it…..or whatever you want them to.

So, for example, you may have noticed in your new Ticker some handy updates like “John is listening to S Club 7 on Spotify”. So my questions are 1) does John want me to know he’s listening to S Club7 and 2) what are the implications of this next level of Big Brother surveillance?

There is some debate about how much Facebook is actually tracking you online. Some believe that every time you visit a webpage that displays the ‘Like’ button Facebook tracks that visit, whether or not you actually ‘Like’ the page. And now if you accept an App it will post this information to your wall, sharing the details about your visit. So for example, if I accepted the Guardian Facebook App (which got 198,000 users in 3 days after the Open Graph announcement!) because I was reading an interesting article I thought my friends might like and then the next week I went on and read an article about how to get rid of smelly feet, before I knew it all my Facebook friends would know I have smelly feet (totally hypothetical of course…)!

From a marketing perspective this opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Facebook is allowing your customers to publicise their interactions with your brand. It means deep personalisation with immense customer intelligence and the opportunity to amplify brand engagement. But it also means another ‘currency’ in which consumers are paying for content and services online. Rather than asking us to pay to watch videos, read articles etc., companies are going to start asking us to accept open graph. We allow them to find out everything about us, and promote their brand and in return they will grant us access to more content.

This is fine for companies whose products are consumed online, but isn’t it harder for everyone else? At the moment restaurants, bars etc. rely on check-ins for Facebook users to help spread the word, but check-ins are prompted not automatic based on online consumption. One would presume that this is the next step; soon we will automatically be checked-in to places without confirming that we want to. Therefore my main concern with this whole ‘frictionless sharing’ thing is… how am I supposed to pull a sickie when I’ve automatically been checked in at a bar at 3am...?!

It seems the phrase "in the cloud" is used with great enthusiasm nowadays by just about every technology company around. Obviously the thinking is that people will respond with as much excitement at the idea. However, working in the tech industry it's become clear to me that only others in my line of work fully understand "the cloud" what working in the cloud means and what it can do for you.

So I'm going to take it upon myself this month to give a brief overview of cloud services, what they are, what they can do and what ones might be useful to you at home or work for everyday purposes.

So what is the cloud?

Honestly, it's tough to say exactly what the cloud is as the term is bandied around so much now and with various meanings. Boiling it down to the basic idea, "working in the cloud" is the facility to work online, with the item you're working on never really existing on the local machine but instead safely stored elsewhere. This gives you the useful ability to access your files from any computer as the machine you're working on is irrelevant as long as you're connected to the web.

As a quick aside I just want to point out that true "cloud computing" rather than "working in the cloud" means that a computer elsewhere does the brunt of the work for you, releiving the load on your machine. On an ongoing basis cloud computing like this is continuing to grow and will mean even low-end machines can run CPU and GPU intensive applications because all that power is coming from another machine, somewhere else in the world. Perhaps you'll even be able to get simple and cheap set-top boxes for your HDTV to allow tasks like this, much like the new service onlive does for gaming.

What services are out there and how can they help me? Overall there are loads, so I'm just going to cover a few of the big ones which are hugely popular and have practical everyday uses.

General Office Work

We all know what this means, documents, spreadsheets, the daily neccesities. There are two major cloud services that allow you to do all of this and luckily they're both free!

First off let's start with the market standard for editing your office documents, Microsoft Office, which has a really fantastic cloud based version called Office Live. Now Microsoft weren't the first to offer a cloud based Office alternative, they somehow let Google beat them to it but I'll get to that later. What they do have now though is a truly viable alternative to the full Microsoft Office Suite for desktop systems, which runs right in your browser. How do you get it? Go to www.live.com and sign in, it's likely you already have an account anyway as they have so many other online services. If you've been tolive.com before you may not have even noticed Office Live but hold your mouse over Skydrive and you'll get the option to start a new word, excel or powerpoint document. You can also click on your documents folder and view any documents you already have. I wont go into the specifics of what you can do with Word, Excel and Powerpoint as you probably already know, what you get here is a basic level of functionality which is instantly recognisable and usable.

So how does Office Live work seamlessly in the cloud? Well if you're on any computer at all you can browse to the site and use it. Your document is saved to the skydrive so you can log in somewhere else and carry on later. If you've got office 2010 then you can hook it up to your windows live account and work directly on documents stored on the skydrive too but with full desktop fuctionality. Lastly, if you have a Windows Phone then Office mobile on that also syncs to the skydrive and lets you work on those documents in the cloud too, so however you work and from whatever machine you can use Office Live.

Now onto the biggest competitor and the guys who very much got a head start in this arena, Google, with their offering of Google Docs. Google docs is over 5 years old now and like almost every other Google service is wildly popular. It offers much the same suite of services as Office Live, with a couple of differences.

How do you get it? Simple, go to www.google.com and sign in with your Google account. Then click Documents in the Google menu bar at the top of your browsing area. From here you're taken to a view which allows you to see all the documents you already have and arrange them by last viewed, date, etc. There's a handily big create button which allows you to select a kind of document to create and start from scratch, similar to Office Live you've got Document, Spreadsheet and Presentation types, which have nice basic functionalities much like Microsoft's offering. With Google docs you can also create forms and drawings too, which is a nice addition, they're pretty basic too but very useful, the drawing tool for example allows you to create basic sketches in 2D or 3D environments.

So how does Google Docs work seamlessly in the cloud? Just like Office live you can browse to the site and use it from any computer at all. You're document is saved with basically every edit you make, almost per letter in fact. So you can just close your browser and carry on when logging in elsewhere later. There's not a downloadable app for Google Docs, Google don't try to compete with Microsoft on the desktop Office software front. Google docs is entirely cloud based for home computers, so it's browser only. On your mobile handset it's also easy to access through the browser and works great on Android mobiles and tablets or iOS phones and pads. If you're on and Android device there is of course a docs app, making it even easier.

One final difference between Office Live and Google Docs is Office Live's inclusion of OneNote, Microsoft's handy alternative to opening a full office doc when all you want are a few notes. In the browser you can click to create a new notebook. You can then do this every time or open an existing notebook and just add new pages of notes, Windows Phone syncs this too, in fact it is the note taking app for that smartphone platform, so any notes you take on your phone always exist in the cloud. Finally Office 2010's desktop version sits OneNote in your system tray so you can call it up, jot a note and then hide it again quickly, syncing to the skydrive the whole time of course.

So why did I leave OneNote's cloud feature's last to mention? Because I'm about to talk about another great note taking app which is a good alternative if you don't need full office functionality but rather just cloud based brain dumps. It's simpler than Office Live or Google Docs but that's the point, some people will prefer simplicity, so here it is... Evernote!

Evernote has been around a few years now and there's a version of the app for all the major smart phone platforms as well as Mac and Windows. There's also a browser based "web clipper" as they call it. Evernote isn't comprehensive like the other two offerings, it aims to be a cloud based memory for you basically and it does it very well.

So how do you get it? Go to www.evernote.com and sign up for an account basically. From there you can start using the web clipper straigh away to jot notes that are saved in your account or add a whole webpage you want to read later to a note. Then, when you're out and about download the version for your smart phone too and you can do a lot more stuff like snap a photo which will sync to your Evernote account or add a document like a travel itinerary or map as a note. Best of all, the basic functions of evernote are free, you can get a premium version with more online space, note revision histories and a few more extras but the basic functionality will be enough for most private or business users.

So, onto another type of cloud service...

Basic, (no nonsense) Cloud Storage

The premise of this category is online storage for all your files, of any kind, so not just documents but whatever you want really. Ideally this should happen seamlessly and without your knowledge so you can just rely on it and get your files from anywhere, whenever you like. There are loads of these kind of services out there really but I'm just going to cover two which are widely considered the best.

Firstly Dropbox is probably the best known of the bunch and is just really smooth and simple, even for the novice user. So where do you get it?www.dropbox.com of course. Once you've created your dropbox account then download the client. You can get it for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and Blackberry OS and the install process is simple all round. After install sign in using the client and it will ask you to choose a folder on the local machine to be your dropbox folder, from this point on anything you add to this folder will be synced online.

What this fundamentally means is that if you install the client on each computer you use there will be a folder on all your computers which is always the same, all your documents on all your computers, handy right? So what if you're on a computer you shouldn't really be installing things on? Don't worry, you can log into your account on the website too and download any of your synced files and folders directly onto that computer, then when you're done with them upload via the website to update the files again. It's not as seamless but really does give you everywhere access to your stuff. Dropbox gives you 2Gb of online space for files but you can get an extra 250Mb by referring someone, up to a total of 8Gb for free. There's also premium options so you can pay for more space in staggered amounts or a get a huge, business size Dropbox.

Okay, so what's the alternative I mentioned earlier? Well it's another Microsoft product called Windows Live Mesh. Noticing the Windows Live theme among their products? Microsoft have been terrible at unifying their products in the past but in the last few years the Windows Live brand has been pretty well integrated if not marketed. As such this service ties in with the Office Live service I mentioned earlier, using the same account.

So how do you get it? Well there are versions available for Windows and Mac which you can download by logging into your account on www.live.comholding your cursor over the windows live logo and selecting the downloads option. Like hiding stuff don't they! Set up is easy, it's the standard Microsoft Live installer and will appear in your start menu or applications folder after that. The first time you run it you select a folder to sync and after that it does exactly that, syncs whatever you put in that folder to your skydrive and to whatever other computers have Live Mesh installed, Live Mesh can actually sync multiple folders which gives you pretty good felxibility. It's completely seamless like Dropbox, occuring in the background so all your files are always there, whatever computer you're on. If you're on a computer that doesn't have Live Mesh installed then you can also access your files through the www.live.com site in your browser by looking through your Skydrive page and downloading them and uploading files there. This merges well with Office Live as I mentioned before as if any of the files are spreadsheets, documents or presentations you can start editing them right there in the browser.

So there you have it, a few options to get you into the world of working in the cloud. As cloud computing is a huge growth market at the moment there are plenty more options out there but hopefully these productivity options ideal for personal and business use will get you started.

Another month and another light-hearted rant in a series that we have called “Grind my gears” after the popular US cartoon, Family Guy.

This month up 2012.

Not the Olympics and what life might be like in living and working in London, or the outlook for our economy and the way it seems to be sluggishly making its way to another year or underwhelming growth.

No, the thing that really grinds my gears is the fact that right now we appear to be living in the year 2011 (pronounced two thousand and eleven), whereas on the strike of midnight on 31st December, we’ll be in 2012 (pronounced twenty twelve). So why the change in the structure of how we pronounce the year?

"Is that it? Is that your gripe for the month"? I can almost hear you saying. OK it’s not a massive issue, but doesn’t that kind of thing bug you? It’s the sort of thing that I lie awake thinking about and I’ve got a 10 month old baby at home, so lying awake really does grind my gears.

I can kind of understand why we had two thousand and six because pronouncing 2006 as twenty six would just make it sound like 26. But, in theory, we could have just switched to twenty ten once that confusion could be avoided. But we didn’t. We stuck to the two thousand and ten pronunciation, maybe out of a sense of continuity or a feeling that twenty ten sounded a bit too zingy. As in, “Hey catch ya on the flip-side in twenty ten, dude”.

I think, however, that when we won the Olympics back in 2006, we all somehow assumed that 2012 would be pronounced in the same way as 2020 or 1980 and so it became part of our collective consciousness. But once we get to 2012, will we carry on the tradition in 2013 and beyond, or will we revert back to two thousand and thirteen? I just don't know.

All this led me to wonder what they did at the beginning of the last century. Did they ever say nineteen hundred and eleven or was it always nineteen eleven? We all know how we pronounce the 1914-18 war, but are we only seeing that through the benefit of history? We refer to 1908 as nineteen o eight but did they say it like that? I think that once we have got used to the pronunciation of 2012, we’ll refer backwards to the years 2011 and 2010 in the same way and so the notion that it was ever two thousand and eleven will be lost to history.

And while we’re on the subject, when we were in the 1980s and the 1990s it was easy to refer to them as the eighties and nineties. We occasionally hear reference to the years 2000-09 being the naughties but it somehow feels cumbersome and trying to be a bit funny so most people don’t bother. But if naughties is the correct term, what are the hinter years before we reach the twenties supposed to be called? The teens? Surely not – it’s not even accurate: you wouldn’t call an eleven-year old a teenager. Maybe the tens?

Anyway, these things shouldn’t occupy my mind. They don’t matter, people don’t get sick, nobody cares and the world doesn’t fall over because of it and I have more important things to be contemplating. But, folks it’s the very fact that I can’t help myself and now I’ve wasted another 20 minutes of my time writing about it (and if you've got this far, a couple of minutes of yours too), that really grinds my gears.