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Blimey, it's the last Third Thursday of the year!
David with the actors(!) from Skins in our 4Music Christmas Promotion
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It's the Third Thursday of the month... and the nights are drawing in.
Mark completes the New York Marathon!
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In August I flew north to Chiang Mai to attend Barcamp, a geeky gathering held once or twice per year. Looking out of the window of the plane shortly after takeoff I was shocked to see an inland sea. As far as the eye could see, sunlight reflected back off the surface of the water, roads were submerged, small villages and temples had become islands.
Prior to this flight I had seen news reports on TV, but only when witnessed from the air did the extent and magnitude of the flooding hit home. On the flight back I kept a close eye on the water and followed it right up to the northern edge of Bangkok. Over the following weeks slowly but surely the water progressed south, swallowing industrial estates, university campuses, and whole neighbourhoods in it's wake.
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/thailands-disastrous-slow-moving-flood/100188/
By late October it became clear that those in power had little or no clue what they were doing. In scenes reminiscent of Monty Python, hundreds of boats were strung together and used to push the water down the river and out to sea. Daily there were assertions of "confidence" and reassurances inner Bangkok would be "100% safe". Once you have been in Thailand a while you learn that an assertion of confidence by someone in power means exactly the opposite. It was time to prepare for the inevitable. Bangkok was going to flood, and it wasn't going to be over in a few days.
We made a list.. sand bags, plastic sheeting, duct tape, boards, silicone sealant. I had nightmares about power cuts, or worse, losing internet connectivity! We sourced a generator, stored up water, and mentally prepared for the worst.
By now some of our team members homes were flooded or at grave risk of flooding. The water was putrid and they were forced to leave and stay with relatives. Our work continued without too much interruption thanks to distributed source control and a wide choice of communication options ranging from Skype chat rooms to Google hangouts.
Then one night it hit me. We didn't have to stay, we could do our best to protect the house then move our office. Once the decision was made we just had to work out on when to leave. I looked at satellite images of the flooding overlaid with elevation data and expert predictions. Based on my unscientific estimates it looked like we had about a week.
We booked flights and I found a few large houses in Chiang Mai and a reserve in the mountains. If you have to evacuate you might as well do it in style. Luckily I think we booked a few days before the main exodus started. As people left, Bangkok was transformed, the traffic jams evaporated and highways were lined for miles with parked cars seeking higher ground.
Moving our office isn't that hard. Everyone on the team has a Macbook and can live without hefty desktop computers. We packed a box with our office essentials:
Before leaving I setup some webcams and installed tracking software on the computers left in the office. If someone was to break in and make off with them we might as well have some fun tracking them.
The day the evacuation came was not without minor drama. Over night water had overflowed the canal and was within 500 metres of our house. In times of flooding a friend with a pickup truck is a friend indeed. Luckily our designer Nor had such a vehicle and that day was a saint coming through the floods to transport our family, luggage, and french bulldog to the airport.
Upon arrival I discovered my beloved laptop had been left outside the house! If you are a geek you will understand the terror this caused. Nor rushed back and thanks to the lack of traffic on the roads was able to return to the airport before our flight left. Phew!
Later that day she made yet more trips to the airport, collecting Jirasak from his flooded neighbourhood with his two cats and getting them out safely. We are all grateful for her help.
Once we arrived at the rented house in Chiang Mai we plugged in our network and settled right back into work. We spent a week working out of a house in the suburbs then moved to an amazing reserve in the mountains where we were reunited with the rest of the team.
We have been here for a week so far and its the best office I've ever had. The internet connection is a bit lacking but the view more than makes up for it. I grew up in Snowdonia,North Wales and so feel a certain connection to mountains. Waking up in the morning and watching mist roll over mountains while drinking your coffee beats commuting through busy city traffic any day.
I feel this break from our routine has been productive. We mix activities with long quiet periods of sustained focus. Fresh air, walks down country lanes, and wood fire under stars provides the perfect setting to discuss what really matters to us and has helped us define our strategy for the year ahead.
Next year be there floods or not I think we will return here. Arthur C Clark described a future in which knowledge workers have the privilege of working from anywhere. We are lucky to live in the future and yet we seldom get up from behind our screens to make the most of it. Just because we work as a team doesn't mean we have to be stuck in an office. If your team is small and your systems are lean you can work different.
We have one more week in Chiang Mai before we are scheduled to fly back to Bangkok. When we left I felt a little guilty leaving friends to face the floods but in retrospect escaping the mental stress and relocating the team was the right thing to do. The flood waters will recede and Thailand will rebound as it has done many times in the past. No amount of water can wash away the character, resilience, and pure ingenuity of the Thai people.
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
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PS We also won a W3 Silver Award in the Entertainment category for 4Music :)
It's the Third Thursday of the month and we are both in the office!
A focus group for our Clever Kids iPad Puzzle Game
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Is user verification an essential part of your business?
Many websites rely on their users' identity to be verified in order to create trust, especially when it comes to the exchange of money or even to ensure physical safety.
If you follow any of the major tech blogs you will have heard about the nightmares that Airbnb, the highly valued online marketplace for peer-to-peer travelling, have had recently. Airbnb enables people to earn money by renting out extra space, and offers travellers a viable alternative to hotels and hostels. However, after one blogger’s flat in San Francisco was ransacked by a “guest” concerns over safety and security were raised by the community.
Airbnb have rapidly added a load of new security features to their platform, including our very own Webcam Snapper app to help validate user identity.
Snapper is just one ingredient though so I thought it would be interesting to list the forms of verification they are using to build up a comprehensive user trust profile.
Taken one by one none of the above (sadly even Snapper) can realistically say they crack the issue of online trust. However as a collective they build a compelling picture of a person that would be very hard to fake. Dodgy users are clearly not going to try and follow these steps which will weed them out as potential people to avoid.
In that regard Airbnb can say with some conviction that home owners enter into deals at their own risk. The vast majority of good apples won’t have any issues with that.
It's the Third Thursday of the month and continuing the theme of exotic locations I am in Italy.
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| THAI | CHINESE | KOREAN | JAPANESE |
| iPhone Lite | iPhone Lite | iPhone Lite | iPhone |
| iPhone Pro | iPhone Pro | iPhone Pro | |
| iPad | iPad | iPad | iPad |
| Android Lite | Android Lite | Android Lite | Android Lite |
| Android Pro | Android Pro | Android Pro | Android Pro |
Since Google+ was unveiled on June 28th 2011, its propagation has known no boundaries. It’s everywhere - on the internet, on mobile, on tablets - has attracted 18 million users in less than a month and a billion shares per day. People are begging for invitations, a tactic that increased interest dramatically, just as it worked for Facebook’s launch.
With "+1" popping up everywhere, it looks like it soon will be naturally integrated into the landscape. We’re discovering exactly what it offers and are clicking everywhere like thrilled kids in front of a smart new toy, ready to compare and dissect. But we must face it…
It’s the same, but slightly different
Google + is the social networking side of Google and has many traits that we are familiar with from other social networks.
First, it allows you to rate webpages and share them with your contacts like Stumble Upon. Sites recommended by your friends will have a lot more value and will make your browsing easier and safer.
Second, you can chat on Google+ and have video conferences like on Skype. You can also leave messages, share pictures, albums, videos and links like on Facebook and Twitter.
If you are on the go, you can check-in and be joined by your friends as per Foursquare. You could even turn your Google+ feed into a blog, not far from what Tumblr offers.
You start to notice that Google+ has borrowed pieces of everything and mixed them together. This is networking made easy because it’s all on the same platform and this is how it's different.
A friend of mine used to complain about how much work she had to put into her social networking life. Updating her news on Twitter and Facebook, writing articles for her blog, adding pictures on Instagram, it’s a real workout considering she is also a busy young mother.
Google+ gives you an easier life. The all-in-one package rather than needing to download applications, register, familiarise yourself and post across multiple networks, wasting time that could be spent at a good gig enjoying life.
The plus of Google+
Not only is Google+ combining many networks, it also brings all your contacts together. AH! At last. Drag and drop your contacts into organised ‘circles’ to avoid an embarrassing post meant for your friends being read by your boss, and instead of running between Facebook (friendship orientated) to Twitter (work and acquaintance related) all you have to do is select a circle before posting. You have your family circle, your work circle and any more you want in order to be extra accurate when posting: "Geeks", "BFF", "Band of ducks"… be creative!
More seriously, this circle concept is particularly interesting when working on team projects. Imagine being able to create a Project Team circle that everybody can join without having to download anything. Members can share ideas, pictures, videos and comments on this platform and make your project progress faster. Easy.
In the past, we’ve had clients thrilled by the idea of putting social media icons all over the place. Well now, one will be enough: Google +. However it does raise the question will the two main social networks, Twitter and Facebook, survive?
The interface of Google+ looks like an improved version of Facebook with even more features. I believe people will choose simplicity and shift to Google+ unless Facebook comes up with a brilliant idea. It would be time for them indeed: studies have revealed that people are closing their Facebook accounts, tired of it and its privacy issues.
On the Twitter side, the concept of tweeting small and quick notes is not clearly present on Google+, but it does give you the ability to follow someone who is not following you and allows you to express yourself without the 140 characters restriction.
Google+ has taken the best of both Facebook and Twitter, improved them and left the inconveniences on the side. The Huddle to chat with everyone and receive push notifications to keep the conversion alive is brilliant, the multi-face video chat gives everybody a presence and invites people to talk and exchange, the capacity of Google+ to provide analytics of your profile page is more than interesting from a business perspective, the smartphone app is clear, smart and ergonomic and eventually, you'll click on "sparks" to check the latest news organised by theme.
Trends show that the use of Google Mail is falling as everybody uses the Facebook message tool instead. Well, we can safely say that Google is making an attempt to inverse the trend with Google+. A massive attempt.
There is no + without -
Google+ brings together all we ever wanted, plus what we didn't know we wanted. It’s exceeded expectations and is a huge step forward for Google. Soon enough it will be one of the most used social networks as it's based on the empire of Google and these sorts of things help.
The dark side of having an all-in-one platform launched from the top of Google is that it will increase the supremacy of Google massively. Why is that so wrong? Well, history has proven that when there is one person leading without equal competitors their attitude changes from helping to using. See Facebook and their privacy deficiency as an example.
The fact that the success of Google+ is massively due to its parent Google doesn't seem to be fair for all the other social networks which have built themselves with blood, sweat and tears. They will be overtaken by somebody using their ideas. Yes, Google+ took other social networks' ideas and brought them together and this is called plagiarism. Google+ plagiarises Facebook, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Skype and Foursquare.
Supremacy and plagiarism are not the only minuses. My life is on my mobile and since I bought my iPhone I rarely open my laptop in my free time and do everything on the go while travelling. Excited by the Google+ site, I couldn't wait to try the app. But there was no Google+ iPhone app or this is what I thought. The app for iPhone was actually only available on the Apple website, not on iPhones app store, confusing 28% of smartphone users. This is what I call a minus.
To sum up, Google+ is a sexy project on a simple and smart interface providing an intuitive experience in a clean and ergonomic environment. It is pushing social networking forward with a more human and logic profile. However, Google+ might weaken some other social networks and use its supremacy for its own sake like eBay in the e-commerce field with its always higher fees. We also have to consider that people might get bored by the monotony of using only one social network. It’s just a supposition and only the future will tell us, but for now, give it a go: https://plus.google.com/up/start/.
