It goes without saying that our PMs, coders and designers are world-class website-making geniuses but without their tools they are useless. Like Zeus without his lightning bolt or Wonder Woman without her lasso of truth. So which tools are used by these apocalyptic menaces to create such wonderfully functional pieces of digital perfection?

Here are the top 5 free or cost-effective web-apps used by Codegent on a daily basis to keep this engine running.

#5 Tickspot

Tickspot is a great tool for everybody here to log how much time they’ve spent on projects and to compare the total time with the target. It’s really simple to use and at $39 a month, pretty good value.

We could have also mentioned Yutiti. Like a pre-project tickspot. A time managing application for our project managers. Yutiti allows the user to manage the use of resources and projects, so everybody knows what to do and when. With its simple graphics and Gantt chart, it’s very easy to use. Other features include a drag & drop system and world-wide access.

#4 Twilert

We feel that it’s of great importance to see who’s saying what about us and our clients. That’s why we invented this handy little gismo. Twilert is a free service which lets you know when you, your company or... well anyone really is being tweeted about. It sends you email notification in certain time intervals that you choose which means you’re not bombarded with emails about how your Aunty Sheila likes your dog or how your best friend when you were six has just bought a mars bar.

We could have also mentioned Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck lets us browse all of our social networking sites in one place. Available for computers, iPhones and iPads; a great way to keep on top of everything at once.

#3 Codebase

This tool is quite new to us but getting popular fast. It has a few features including tickets & milestones for each step of building a website. Codebase basically helps us to see what’s been done so far and what’s left to do – like an interactive checklist. It also acts as a database for our progress. The developers will upload their work to the project so it can be seen by everybody else involved.

We could have also mentioned Google Docs. Google docs is an incredibly useful web app for sharing documents in real time. A really simple and effective way of updating and sharing documents between computers and countries.

#2 Skype

Where would we be without Skype? Like a massive string and cup system between London and Bangkok. We create rooms for projects so everybody involved can discuss progress as they work on it. We also have room for project managers, designers etc so they can talk between themselves. It means that there is a paper trail for everything that’s been said if you join the conversation late and the team in Thailand are just as accessible as the people in the next room.

We could have also mentioned Campfire. Campfire is like instant messaging but designed exclusively for groups”. With this in mind, it’s designed to deal well with group conversations and conferences.

#1 Dropbox

Dropbox is a brilliantly simple and invaluably useful tool for us here at Codegent. We are often faced with large amounts of videos, photos and other large files which need to be shared between people here in London and in Bangkok. Dropbox is the perfect tool for this. The files are as accessible as if they are on your local network and they are also available from the Dropbox website, so you’re never left without them. Plus there is an iPhone app that lets you manage files on the move.

We could have also mentioned Backblaze. Backblaze is a back-up system which is constantly adapting to keep your work safe. Every file on your computer is constantly being backed-up without you even having to lift a finger. A small icon on your taskbar allows you to check the progress and your items are instantaneously saved. It’s never funny to lose your work. This makes sure that never happens.

It was only a couple of years ago, when we would get a brief a week to design & build a flash game. These simple games were designed to appeal to the casual gamer, a simple game the can dip into and out of, and share with their friends. Over the past year the market has changed, the “viral game” has remained the territory of the tech savvy, leaving the mainstream to be catered for in a whole new wave of viral social games.  What I am talking about here is the rise & rise of Farmville and how it fits into the life the consumer.

When I told my friends I was writing an article about Farmville, I was met with 2 responses. The first “If you take your iPhone out to water your crops, while we are in the pub, Consider yourself no longer my friend” and the second “Have you got the limited edition silver rainbow baby sheep, which gets your double XP points?... I can send one to you”.  This ‘Marmite’ reaction to Social Gaming is brought on by what is at its core; playing a game, and getting your friends involved. This is seen as negative by the social media “creators” as it’s easy to have your Facebook news feed polluted by the constant “calls to action”  to receive gifts from your friends playing a game that you aren’t.  But it is this emphasis on getting your friends involved has lead to Farmville makers Zynga notching up 235 million users of their games per month, with 65 million coming back every day.

For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past couple of years and aren’t part of that 235 million.  Farmville is a game which is built on the Facebook platform, which has become a social network unto itself.  In this game you can build & tend a virtual farm, doing everything from sowing virtual crops, to rearing virtual animals, to building virtual barns. Users spend their Farmville coins on crops which they can sow,  wait a couple of hours then come back to harvest & sell the crop for which you are paid in Farmville Cash, to repeat the process all over again

But what happens if you want to buy something you don’t have enough Farmville coins for?” I hear you ask... Well this is where Farmville will convert your hard earned and very real Great British Pounds into virtual Farmville coins.  This transaction is currently earning Zynga $1million a day.  Zynga is forecasting to turn over $450m in 2010, this puts Zynga in second position of PayPal’s largest merchant list only behind eBay. The Farmville economy has grown so much that now, more virtual tractors are bought every day than there are real tractors in the U.S.

Facebook are making sure they get their share of the pie, not just by scraping 30% of the top of transactions for these virtual goods, but by accepting almost $100m in facebook ads from Zynga to Advertise its game.

But who are the people spending so much time and money playing these virtual games? The demographic from the game developers shows an even spread of ages, with a slight skew towards female. It is these figures that game developers would like us to believe as they suggest that social games are played by everyone. The anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that this audience’s can be grouped together as passive users of social networks. To these users, social networks aren’t about the usual sharing content with their friends. They aren’t updating their status or engaging conversations. To this audience, Farmville IS social networking. They only really communicate their friends via the game, to send them free gifts… and get their friends to help them to the next level. Farmville has saved this audience for Facebook. Now that their initial interesting in snooping what their friends from high school are doing now has worn off Facebook offers them nothing without social games like Farmville

With so many Farmville users, brands are chopping at the bit (all puns intended) to get involved. The most interesting has come in the shape of Organic food maker “Cascadian Farm” who sell fresh blueberries throughout Canada. They have placed branded blueberry seeds into the Farmville Market so users to buy & grow their own “Cascadian Farm” Blueberries. I haven’t been able to find any stats to prove that these in game sales have effected real sales of blueberries, and I would be keen to know how effective this brand communication is (If anyone has any more information on this campaign please drop us a line in the comments below.)( http://mashable.com/2010/07/22/farmville-organic-blueberries/

A whole host of other brands from Lovefilm to O2, who want to target this market but don’t have products which can be placed into a virtual farm, are now offering Farmville money as a bolt on for the services they are selling. For example when you buy a monthly Lovefilm subscription you can receive 89 Farmville Coins.  Will this style of Bolt on get me to change my mind and switch my mobile contract from T-mobile to O2, or is this just a nice little extra to sweeten the deal? Once again I would like to see the stats and figures on the effectiveness of this style of promotion.

One thing is for sure; with $1.6 billion estimated to be spent on virtual goods this year, the Virtual Economy is expanding at a radical rate. The answers to these questions are going to become more important to both brands and government...can you tax virtual goods?

Some of you may have read about the row in the US about XY.com, a gay teenagers magazine’s website that has filed for bankruptcy. Other than a couple of dollars in the bank, the only asset of note belonging to the failed company is a database of tens of thousands of young men. The argument is from one side: that the personal details were given with the assumption of privacy and should not be transferred to anyone else. And from the other side: "Any property listed... is property of the bankruptcy estate and (we) intend to administer those assets for the benefit of creditors."

Codegent creates sites that hold private data every day. And because we have a specialism in working with children and young people, much of that data includes children’s information, which brings with it many additional responsibilities. We often have the discussion with clients about the best way to protect children’s data, as well as protecting them online. The concerns from clients are generally around security of our systems and the best way to prevent children from being exposed to inappropriate content or malicious users. It’s something we take very seriously and something we’ve spent a lot of time on. It is beholden on us to ensure that we collect as little data as possible and we look to get parental approval for any user-generated content that we publish.

But never have any of our clients asked what would happen to the data if they went bust. Maybe because most of us don’t start a business thinking about what happens if that business goes down the plug-hole. But it’s something we should be worried about. 

Privacy law is very clear in the UK and people have a variety of rights under the Data Protection Act, from accessing information that others hold about them, to preventing unsolicited marketing, even through to claiming compensation for distress caused by breaching the act. But according to Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, talking to the BBC, in the event of bankruptcy or winding-up, “all bets are off”.

But if I give my details to a website (or worse, agree to the details of my children being stored by that website), I don’t then expect those details to end up being used for something else by the website’s creditors about whom I know nothing. 

Ordinarily, a business can’t just pass on your details to another company for a different purpose without your permission. But if ownership changes, for example if someone bought Facebook, all my details would become the new owner’s property, but so long as the details were only used for the purposes of me continuing to use Facebook. We recently took over Twilert  from a former client, and although the service was broadly the same, we took the decision to contact everyone on that database and invite them to sign-up again. We did this because we wanted to be 100% transparent to our users, but given that we were going to use their data in the same way, we didn’t actually need to do this. (And in fact some people actually moaned that we didn’t just port all their data over to the new system).

But despite this, and although I’m no lawyer, to me the key question to ask is around the reason the data has been collected in the first place. Yes, there is value in that data that should be “administered for the benefit of creditors”, but so long as that data is only used for any future incarnation of XY.com. There should only be any value if the data is used for the same purpose that it was given. If they want to use the data beyond that they should get the permission of everyone on that list to do so. In other words, people should be able to opt-in, but there should be no automatic assumption that data is data regardless of where it sits. 

My sporting year looks like the profile of the 20th stage of last year's Tour de France. Flat for the main part with a single majestic peak rising out of the relative flatness.

The Tour itself is the Mont Ventoux of my annual sporting calendar, a monolith event of such epic proportions that its shadow looms large over everything that precedes it.

Like most cyclists I am a details freak. I revel in cadence rates, riders' gear ratios and other banalities that would be bed-wettingly dull to most of you reading this. 15 years ago I would clear my daily calendar between 6pm and 7pm and drink up every scrap of information that the Channel 4 daily Tour highlights could give me but it was never enough to sate my thirst for these details from the Peloton.

Similarly, it would never convey the rider dynamics, the feuds and alliances, the sheer and brutal pain that each rider would endure as the Tour wound its inexorable way towards Paris.

Then came the Social Web.

What social media gives cycling is the means of giving detail-obsessed fans like me an instant hit of the tedious, granular information that I crave. It lets me see Cav's cadence as he rips up the Champs Elysees or Brad Wiggins' heart rate as he goes backwards down the Col de Madeleine.

I can go to my 'Pro Cycling' group on Tweetdeck and see petty squabbles between riders unable to resist the lure of Twitter whilst holed up in a Novotel with nothing but a sponsor's smartphone and a travel kettle for company. Or the Peloton's praise for someone's superhuman feats, such as riding 200km with a broken arm. I can go to Flickr for Hi Resolution images of the day's suffering or stream the race live on my iPhone through the ITV Tour App. In short, there is so much for me to see and do that I am almost certain to do no work for most of July.

A few Tour-based treats for the other bike geeks out there;

1. Keen to show off its capabilities, Microsoft have built an App for Bing Maps that visualises each stage of the tour and provides stage results and weather information. http://mashable.com/2010/07/03/2010-tour-de-france/
   
   
2. Mapmyride have created an App that allows you to 'virtually race' the Tour by uploading data about your own day's ride. The app uses your stats to create a virtual time that you would have achieved if you had actually ridden that day's stage. I havent used it but i imagine it might be quite depressing. http://beta.mapmyride.com/tdf/
   
   
3. This is one for real data lovers. HTC (the smartphone guys) and Team Columbia have joined forces to bring the ultimate cycling Google maps mashup. The App gives realtime information on the Team's riders including speed, power, cadence and heart rate, as well as their real time position on the road. http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/mytrackstour/
    
4. The ITV iPhone App lets you watch live streams of the Tour on the go as well as providing news and stats around each stage, team and rider. http://www.itv.com/sport/tourdefrance/iphoneapp/
    
5. Stalk your favourite riders on Twitter. http://twittercycling.tumblr.com/

Whilst completing my masters in IT and Marketing in Paris two years ago I wrote a dissertation on mobile social networks and their marketing opportunities (you can read it here although it is in French...). I was convinced that the meeting of mobile and location based social networks would become THE next big thing and help businesses to deeply connect with consumers. Today, I am glad and not so surprised to see location-based services going mainstream!

Location-based services are defined as applications delivering relevant information to users on their mobile depending on where they are based. The LBS market is burgeoning with two types of players:

1. The check-in based companies like Foursquare, Where.com, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, Rummble or Yelp... These are the ones currently leading the way. Just to give you an idea, Foursquare reached the 1 million members in April and it appears they have just crossed the 2 million users mark yesterday!
2. The more established players like Twitter, Facebook and Google have recently entered the market as they see location-based services as a massive revenue generator in the future. GigaOm estimates the potential value of the location-based services market could be worth up to $20 billion (see infographics here) and according to Juniper Research, revenues from mobile location-based services market are expected to exceed $12 billion by 2014! These revenues will mainly come from advertising, retail coupons, business sponsorships and local search marketing which will be exciting news for brands.

Whilst mobile marketing has been around for a while with SMS, MMS, banner ads etc. it has never really taken off before because it was targeted for users and lacked that special social element. However, the improvement of the wireless carriers' network infrastructure (3G), as well as the increasing proliferation of internet and GPS-enabled smartphones combined with the need for consumers to always be hyper-connected has led to a promising future for mobile advertisers. Location-based services use specific location information for delivering the right message to the right person at the right place AND time. The consumer only receives information relevant to him which should engage and encourage interaction with advertisers. Location-based services are opening up a range of new marketing possibilities improving experiences and relationships between people and businesses.

An example of location-based service: Foursquare

Foursquare is a free game available on a variety of mobile platforms. Once you start using the service on the go, you are presented with a list of locations around you and the whole point of the “game” is to check-in to broadcast your location in real-time at the various public venues you visit each day to your inner circle of friends, family and colleagues. The location can be anything from bars, train station, restaurants or work. If you can’t find a venue, you are invited to add it and you are rewarded for your crowdsourcing effort. You can also create notes/reviews for others about the venues like promotions, recommendations or tips. Every time you check-in to a venue, you are awarded a number of points based on how many times you have come there. The more often you do that in the same location the higher you are ranked in the leader board. You can also unlock badges such as newbie, adventurer, explorer, local, or superstar. The user who checks-in more than anyone else becomes “mayor” of that location. Mayorship encourages real competition between users and is very addictive. You can check Louis Gray’s article to see if you are on your way of being a Foursquare addict :)

So how can you tap the power of the “check-in” for your business?

Specials Offers

Last year some venues started rewarding their Foursquare mayors with special deals like free cocktails instant discounts. Foursquare loved the idea and realised that the check-ins were not only benefitting users in their quest for badges and mayorship but also businesses by giving them a chance to engage better with their loyal customers! They therefore built support for this type of deal and started offering Foursquare Specials for business. This is where Foursquare gets interesting as a marketing platform, especially for retailers selling physical merchandise. You can claim your venue from a foursquare venue page and once your business is verified you can start offering specials to your customers. There are 4 types of Specials:

• Mayor Specials: unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days). Example: "Foursquare has deemed you the Mayor? Enjoy a free order of French fries!"
• Check-in Specials: unlocked when a user checks in to your venue a certain number of times. "Foursquare says you've been here 10 times? That's a free drink for you!"
• Frequency-based Specials: are unlocked every X check-ins. "Foursquare users get 20% off any entree every 5th check-in!"
• Wildcard Specials: always unlocked, but your staff has to verify some extra conditions before awarding the Special. "Show us your Foursquare Swarm badge and get a free drink!"

You can also get Foursquare to provide you with some window clings so you can market your Specials to customers in your venue. Foursquare also provides you with free real-time stats about your venue: most recent visitors, most frequent visitors, time of the day people check in, total number of unique visitors etc. Valuable information for every business trying to learn more about their customers and track their behaviour patterns and habits.

This is a real win/win situation, on one hand users get engaged into a free and friendly competition over the mayorship of your venue and potentially get the chance to win freebies and discounts. On the other hand, as a business you get the chance to monitor and identify your customers, give them special treatment and encourage frequent visits and loyalty!

Some other thoughts on how to leverage Foursquare

1. Give tips to your customers – it is a good idea to leave advice in the tips section. This could be some info on a new menu item, an upcoming event or tip on how to avoid busy times. For example the History Channel has started using Foursquare to give its users tips at various venues around the United States to coincide with its show, America The Story Of Us.
   
   
   
   
   In the same way, Louis Vuitton is partnering with Foursquare to offer users tips on their favourite locations around London. Check some of their tips on the Louis Vuitton account
2. Create your very own official badge for your business - Starbucks created a Barista badge for caffeine addicts which you can get if you check in at 5 different Starbucks.
   
   
   
   
   Bravo, Fashion Victim badge by Marc Jacobs for the Fashion Week 2010, Time Out - Happy Hour (New York) Badge, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) and some cities like Chicago are also good examples. But don’t be intimidated by the big names cited above, it doesn’t matter what size your business is; you could do the same thing to promote your product or service and engage with your customers.
3. Listen and learn from people’s comments – remember the user now has the power to talk and say what he thinks. Don’t ignore this and leverage Foursquare to gather users' feedback and show you are listening and improving. You could even use the ‘to do’ list facility to show your customers what you are going to improve.
4. Hold an event or a party for customers to earn the Swarm Badge – 50+ people are also checked-in here - it's a foursquare flash mob! The best example is probably AJ Bombers restaurant which hosted an event for customers to help them earn Swarm and I’m on a Boat badges (difficult badges to obtain). They managed to attract 161 foursquare users at the same time and their typical Sunday sales more than doubled, with an increase of 110% that day! You can’t do much better in terms of harnessing the power of location-based services. By using Foursquare, this restaurant owner not only achieved record sales but also managed to build a sustainable and real-time word-of-mouth which will probably have an impact on long-term sales as well.
   
   
   
   
   Read the full story on Hubspot blog
5. Think outside the box... The only limitation is your imagination! – Early this year Jimmy Choo, the fashion shoe retailer used Foursquare in a very interesting way organising a real-time treasure hunt around London via the location-based service for the launch of it's new trainer range. The idea was simple and fun, the audience was hugely engaged and a lot of PR was generated.

Whatever your current digital marketing plan is, don’t underestimate the power of location-based services. Unlike the current social media marketing activities, services like Foursquare and Gowalla are able to bring to life online and offline relationships and experiences to unlock a city’s true treasures. So, are you now ready to check-in?

Further reading:

• Nice Slideshare presentation - How Foursquare Helps Consumers and Business Owners
• Check out some more examples - Ten Foursquare marketing campaigns and 21 Unique Location Examples from Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, and MyTown
• If you still don’t understand why people are checking-in, this article could help you out - Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location-Based Social Networks
• Some more exciting news coming from Foursquare HQ last week - Foursquare Launches Location Layers - This is Big and Foursquare Unlocks ‘$20 Million in Funding’ Badge

Shock horror Flash doesn't work on the iPhone or the "magical" iPad. Steve Jobs has declared its death, and decreed that it's not worthy of inclusion in Apple's market leading mobile platform. Dropping Flash in favour of HTML5 is akin to replacing floppy drives with CD-ROMS we are told. You don't need it, you will be better off without it, it's time to stop living in the past and embrace the future. Naturally Adobe (the makers of Flash) aren't too happy about having the door slammed in their face. Adobe tried launching a campaign online but were forced to accept they have lost the battle. However the war is only just heating up; Google's latest phones support both HTML5 & Flash.

The controversy has been fodder for bloggers, sparked flame wars between fans, and led to an awful lot of FUD (fear uncertainly and doubt) being spread online. This puts many of us in the industry in an odd position. For years Apple and Adobe have been the pillars of the creative industries. As developers and designers we have a love hate relationship with both companies. Designers need photoshop to get their work done, yet vent about it online. Developers love apple hardware, but have a hard time accepting the App Store's restrictions on how they can write their apps.

Which side are you on?
Despite what you read online I don't see a major split in the web community between HTML5 and Flash or between iPhone and Android for that matter. On the contrary, I see lots of overlap. In our industry it pays to have multiple disciplines. Lots of the popular games for the iPhone are written by people who are also Flash game developers. The people doing the cool 3D demos in HTML5 are often the same people who pioneered 3D in Flash. Those of us working on the cutting edge do not erect walls between technologies, we tear them down.

Flash has a long history of bringing innovations to the browser: animation, fonts, audio, video, 3D, and networking to name just a few. Recently we have noted interest and momentum building behind HTML5. It's about time browsers had native support for many of the things Flash has supported for years. The 4 "modern" browsers (Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox) are competing against each almost daily to take the crown as being the fastest, and most feature complete implementation. Competition is a good thing, after years of stagnation it's an exciting time to be working in the web. If you are stuck using a "legacy" browser (hint: the one with a blue e) do us all a favour and upgrade today, I promise you won't regret it.

Unfortunately outside of cutting edge Mobile web it's hard to fully utilise all the advances offered by these "modern" browsers. The elephant in the room remains every web developers pet hate; Internet Explorer with it's stubborn 50% market share. Even if Microsoft were to support full HTML5 and CSS3 in IE9 (unlikely), we won't see IE7 and IE8 disappear for years to come. Many sites are only just getting around to phasing out IE6. The key strength of Flash has always been that it's cross browser; unencumbered by the incompatibles and quirks that have plagued browsers. With penetration rates hovering close to 100% and a fast upgrade cycle driven by automatic updates it's no wonder Flash has become the de-facto standard for delivering video and rich experiences online.

So where does this leave HTML5 and CSS3?
Some features lend themselves to progressive enhancement, enabling HTML5 drag and drop file uploads or offline storage for those with capable browsers is an easy win. Using the latest CSS3 properties to render nice UIs while still degrading gracefully to support IE can be tricky, but is doable. It doesn't have to be pixel perfect, it just needs to work in older browsers. This leaves those features that you can't degrade gracefully without falling back to an alternative such as Flash. This category includes the much hyped video tag and canvas element.

Video support in HTML5 is still a bit of a minefield, there are 3 different codecs (H264, WebM, and Vorbis) that may or may not work in your browser, some with critical hardware acceleration, others lacking. In order to provide the best experience on the web and mobile you need to encode and deliver the video in multiple formats as well as providing a Flash version for those without HTML5. There are other rough edges too, such as fullscreen support; which depending your browser works differently or may not be supported at all. My advice to clients is to do what YouTube is doing and give users the choice to pick what works best for them.

This brings me to canvas element, a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly. Many of the demos show it being used for amazing Flash like experiences. Unfortunately there are problems here too. when you do a lot of animation and graphics processing you are going to burn CPU. Lots of it. Technology can always be abused at the expense of your CPU, those annoying battery draining banner ads can be rendered using canvas on the iPhone too. Recently Flash player added code to throttle down processing on browser tabs that are not active. I expect a similar feature will have to be added to browsers to control canvas abuse. Then there is the legitimate concern of accessibility, while it can be a challenge to create truly accessible Flash, it is at least possible.

In conclusion
Despite all the challenges I think it's our duty to push for the adoption of the latest web standards. While I may not agree with Steve Jobs reasons for banning Flash from iOS, I'm grateful that the controversy has put the spotlight on HTML5. I take issue with the assertion that Flash is a dead technology, on the contrary I see Adobe continuing to innovate and evolve Flash for many years to come. When noise generated by all the bloggers and fanboys has died down, it will be left to us humble web designers and developers to make all these technologies work for users.

When I was a kid, growing up in the 70s, I had a comic book and in one of the stories the main character had traveled to the distant future (1999) where everyone flew around using jet-packs. All his meals were delivered in pill form, but tasted of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and the menial chores were performed by different shaped robots. The comic writers were right, in that technology has had a fantastic impact on our lives, but these clichéd predictions were sadly not to emerge.

In the 80s, at school we were introduced to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. In particular, Orwell’s 1984 painted a shocking picture where the state was able to eavesdrop on your every move. The government lied about the country’s economic output to keep morale high and censorship was a recurring theme. I remember reading the book around the actual year 1984 and thinking ‘thank God none of this happened’.

And although today, we have one of the highest CCTV cameras per capita in the world (in West Sussex there is 1 camera for every 2,000 people) and the government can intercept and record every one of our digital communications, I think something else is more interesting...  maybe it’s because it’s that time of year again where Big Brother comes on our screens for the summer that I'm thinking about this, but I reckon one thing that George Orwell and his contemporaries didn’t predict was the degree to which technology has allowed everyone to spy on everyone else. And there are a few developments and very small leaps of faith that make it easy to imagine a whole Brave New World of our own, where we semi-willingly enter into a state of “Total Transparency”.

OK, let’s consider a few tools out there:

• Twitter – let’s you tell people what you are doing/thinking
• Twitpic – let’s you take a photo and share that with the world via Twitter
• Twitpic face-tagging – let’s you take a photo, say who’s on that photo and share it with the world
• Foursquare – let’s you tell people where you are
• Whoshouldifollow – tells you what sorts of people share the same interests as you based on your Tweets
• Facebook – let’s you connect with Friends and also is a place where you can share your Tweets and Four-square updates. Also you can tag photos and videos.
• LinkedIn – let’s you connect with business contacts and get introduced to contacts of your contacts
• Twilert – allows you to set alerts to monitor people’s tweets and can be based on subject, person, location etc
• Google Goggles – an Android-only application that allows you to identify items in a photo (such as a painting or a book). It has the potential to recognise faces but this functionality has been withheld over privacy concerns.

Working together these various tools could tell you a lot about a person.

Here is a positive application:

You are a printer who is going to a marketing conference. You set up a Twilert to find people who say they are going to the conference and either supply the printing trade or buy printing services. You also run a whoshouldifollow search to see if anyone else is thrown up with a similar interest. You follow them on Twitter. When you get there you check Foursquare to see which of the people you follow is at the conference. There are one or two that you really want to meet. You send them a DM via Twitter to ask if they want to meet up. But there are a lot of people at the conference and it may be that people don’t check their DMs, so you lookto see if they have been tagged on Twitpic so you can recognise them as they are wandering around and can introduce yourself. It would be unlikely that you would realise your shared interests or simply bump into each other at a conference, so these tools could connect people in a very useful way.

But here’s a more sinister application:

You’re in a bar, you see a few people that you want to meet. You do a quick scout of Foursquare and see that there are a few people there. None of the avatars are actually of their face so you have a quick look on Twitter to see if any of the people on Foursquare have Twitter accounts. Of course they do, and you check out the Twitpics that they have been tagged on. You can recognise one of the people in the bar. You run a Twilert on their name and scan through the last 100 bits of activity around their Twitter name. You deduce that they hate football but love Thai food. You go to their Facebook page and realise that you used to work with one of their friends. You see pictures of them with their family and see that they recently went on holiday to Egypt. You notice that they are single. You see what age they are and where they went to college.

I’m not sure there is a single application out there that would do all this for you yet, but I’m sure we could build one if we thought it was worth it. Depending on how we marketed it, we could either bill it as a tool for networkers or a tool for stalkers.

So in some ways this Total Transparency is great: it’s like a multi-layered, interactive dynamic business card. It can connect you in ways we could never have imagined and, to an extent, it can be controlled by the user. But on the other hand, if you want to participate in this super-connected world you have to accept that much of your life will necessarily be on display to everyone and this information could be used by less scrupulous people.

Just a final thought. Face-recognition is a technology that exists. Google Goggles is still in its infancy and the face recognition element of it hasn’t been rolled out yet, but like all technologies it’s going to get better and cheaper, and even if Google doesn’t do it someone else will. Surely it must only be a matter of time before someone can walk into a club, point their phone towards the face of someone they like the look of and every Tweet, Twitpic, Facebook photo and Foursquare location relating to that person is instantly downloaded for their viewing pleasure.

We’re all Big Brothers now.

There are 2 things that you want to avoid when a user lands on your site; firstly scaring them off with too much copy, secondly not giving them enough information to enable them to use your website or even understand what you do. 

A video is a great compromise; it can explain your proposition in seconds whilst simultaneously increasing accessibility and engagement. Creating, producing and editing a professional quality video seems like a daunting task but in reality, with the right tools, it isn’t as hard as you might think.

We’re going to give you an overview of why video is a valuable asset for any site, and why we believe After Effects is the best product for the job.

The Importance of Video

Why a video? From information-lead films to arty stop motions, video allows direct, fluent and human communication. It could be shown on the landing page of your website and allow you to present your business in an instant. It can also be used to reach out from your site to create buzz around your marketing campaigns. 

Why After Effects?

Improving your video 
There are a myriad of tools that After Effects gives us. It allows us to remove all evidence of camera shakes, increase contrast, modify luminosity to bring out gorgeous colours and so much more. Visual and matting effects can also be applied to improve the look and feel you want to give to the video. Alternative video editing programmes, Premiere or Final Cut can handle most of these improvements just as well but what makes After Effects better is that it doesn’t stop there...

Tracking function, total symbiosis
We can create a multi-layer composition by integrating other videos, photos, texts or vector graphics into your video. Notice I said "integrating", beware, adding is one thing, integrating is another. Thanks to the tracking function, we can follow a point moving on the 'master' video and apply this movement to the new item we have layed on top. From this comes the impression of symbiosis, graphics follow the movement of the camera perfectly, they really feel part of the video.

The Third Dimension
After Effects now takes your video production to the third dimension. The 3D mode allow you to create a virtual camera over your composition, to allow you to change your point of view. You have complete control over this virtual camera, being able to configure the lens length, image area size, and aperture. This powerful tool makes it quick and easy to incorporate several lights with shadows and define their intensity, all of which will take your video new level of dynamism.

High Quality Manipulation 
With After Effects, time can be stretched and/or reversed. But crucially it will also smooth out the jerkiness usually associated with this sort of effect when it is applied with Final Cut or Premier. 

After Effects is integrated
After Effects works seamlessly with other Creative Suite software such as Illustrator, Photoshop (including it’s 3D layers), Flash, Premiere Pro and other QuickTime-based software. You can even import and manipulate audio files and render them in high quality in real time. It is even possible to export the composition from After Effects to Flash, to then make it interactive. Whatever the project needs, this level of integration gives you the flexibility to port your content across different software.

Fit the Web

Be versatile & be connected
After Effects contains an export module which will optimise your video for the web. With a couple of clicks you can export your film to web-friendly formats like QuickTime, AVI or MPEG-4, making it easy to put your video onto your website, blog, Youtube, Vimeo etc.

Mobile accessibility 
The latest version of After Effects integrates mobile-device authoring into its workflow and multi-device previews for most phones and PDAs. With the ever-increasing popularity of smart phones, thinking about how to reach people on their mobiles is becoming a close second to reaching people on their PC's.

Video is a fantastic and popular way to reach and engage with people and any tools that help us do that better get the Codegent seal of approval!

The most exciting election in years finally came to an end this month. I didn't hear about our new Prime Minister on the radio, TV or the morning papers, I first heard the news, via a tweet. This seemed to be a fitting way to find out about the outcome of Britian's first Social Media Election. In this post I am going to talk about the various digital initiatives the 3 major parties put into place throughout this election but also, more crucially, the various digital initiatives which everyday people put in place.

The Tory's Cash Gordon website is an example of how dirty politics can go so wrong in this world of social media. The site was planned to be a social media game where Tories were given points for performing tasks such as recruiting friends and reading news articles. If the idea seems a little strange to your marketing ears, that is because this site was shoehorned into a site originally built by the Republican strategists David All Group. It was actually developed to galvanise opposition to Barack Obama's healthcare reforms. Several campaigns have been built into this template without really making any changes. Have a look at no energy tax to see how much customisation a $15,000 pricetag, gets you.

Blatant copying isn't even the biggest oversight of this campaign. As you will notice, it automatically pulls in any tweets with the Hashtag #cashgordon. This is all well and good if people agree with you, but it was only a matter of time before people were tweeting things like "Tories taste like cocks #cashgordon". They really didn't think that through.

So far the Tories aren't scoring high in the 'understanding social media' stakes, but wait, it gets worse. Moments later it was worked out (by people arguably more technologically savvy than the Tories) that html code could be sent via tweets, which would then run on the site. The first piece of code through the system declared in Large Red Type "David Cameron is a Cunt"... the next redirected the site to Rick Ashley's video "never gonna give you up" at this point the Tories were definitely rick rolled.

It was only a matter of time before someone tweeted some code to redirect the Cash Gordon site to a pornographic image of overweight gay OAPs. It was at this point the site was pulled off-line as the Tories went into 'damage limitation' mode. But the story doesn't end there, as far as social media is concerned, this was a triumph for the people who had sabotaged the site. And as often happens in cases like this, at this point the people of the social web move to the next stage, and start to create content. Within hours of this event there were hundreds of tweets / blog posts and satirical info graphics. Thus ensuring that this whole mess was spread even further around the web. One massive own-goal to the Tories.

Record numbers turned out for this election, I think this is down to the electorate being more informed about the candidates that they are voting for. The websites They Work For You and the Guardian's election 2010 site were able to strip away the legal language of the Parliamentary record, and tell you the voting record of any MP in simple terms For example, are they for or against the war on Iraq, are they for or against equal gay rights, and a dozen other key issues of the past 5 years. This meant for the first time "the man on the street" was informed enough to be able make their local member accountable for how they have voted on key issues important to them.

Voter Power finally put an end to the pub conversations which start with "it doesn't matter who I vote for". This site lays out in simple graphs how safe your local seat is, constituency size and percentage of discarded votes. I do wonder if this site was enough information for people from "Sheffield Brightside & Hillsborough", (where they have the voting power of 0.253 of the Average UK resident) to "Afron" (where they have the voting power of 1.308 of the Average UK resident)

The site My Gay Vote was one of many niche sites which popped up informing voters on individual issues. All this information was delivered in bite sized chunks, designed to fit into 140 characters. As all campaigners tried to encourage the masses to share their message they became painfully aware that a tweet can move faster and is less accountable than a newspaper article. Negatively, depth of analysis is lost in a tweet culture where everything is reduced to black or white. Most of these sites don't show the source of their data and aren't "authorised" by a political party, which means that someone with a little Search Engine Optimisation experience can have an equal footing online.

Britain loves the underdog, and came out in force to defend Nick Clegg when he was attacked at the beginning of the campaign by the right wing tabloids. All over Twitter the ironic #nickcleggsfault Hashtag was attached to everything from "I have lost one of my socks #nickcleggsfault" to "Ash cloud is covering England again #nickcleggsfault". The irony of this is that when the parliament was hung and Nick Clegg assumed the role of King-maker, the #nickcleggsfault Hashtag made a resurgence, this time without the irony.

In a digital landscape where MP's records are easily digestible and where constituents are vocal in announcing their views and influencing their followers, does this mean people are going to stop voting along party lines and continue the march away from the two party system?

Guerilla Marketing campaign

In a world where people have become almost completely de-sensitised to advertising in any traditional sense of the word, trying to infiltrate people's consciousness is an increasingly impossible task. Smart advertisers recognised that the way to combat this apathy was to get their message into places where people wouldn't expect to find them, making them impossible to ignore. This practice has become known as 'Guerilla' Marketing.

Guerilla Marketing is all about surprising people, breaking their concentration and making them have an unexpected and emotional reaction.

Pioneered in 1984 by Jay Conrad Levinson, Guerilla Marketing was originally intended to establish a new tactic for small companies to keep up with the big players. Since then even organisations like Nestle, BMW and Unilever have learned to appreciate the advantages of a well developed Guerilla Marketing campaign.

Enough of the theory; here are some of our favourite examples of Guerilla Marketing campaigns:

If you think the first image simply shows a woman carrying a crate of beer, you have been taken in by a successful Guerilla campaign! This crate, looking like it only weighs half a pound, is a shopping bag in disguise.

This should make you smile. Hundreds of people appear to be coming out of a Mini Cooper, when in reality it is a subway exit. Well done, BMW!

Vacuum cleaner producer Miele is proud that their products suck :-)

Mr Clean puts other zebra crossings to shame...

As you can see, Guerilla Marketing campaigns include giveaways so that on closer inspection people realise that they are being advertised to, but hopefully the pay-off in terms of entertainment means they don't mind. The key is to add something unexpected and exciting to a space, not consume it with a corporate and boring advertising message.
Now let's get down to the nitty-gritty. Here are 5 golden rules, which you should keep in mind when creating your own Guerrilla Marketing campaign:

1. Don't forget to define your goals
Although Guerilla Marketing is all about creativity and the element of surprise, it still needs to be planed thoroughly. You still need to know what to do, where to do it and what you want from it.

2. Know your audience
Guerilla Marketing is effective because it is provocative. This is why it can bypass the 'corporate' constraints of traditional advertising. However, you also have to carefully consider your audience's sense of humour, you want to be memorable but not offensive.

3. Provocative or offensive?

This carries on from the above point. Prompting a positive emotion is what any advertiser wants, but in the case of guerrilla marketing you don't have to focus on humour. Appealing to people's sympathetic emotions can be just as effective.

However, you do have to bear in mind that there is a very fine line between being emotive and being crude. This is a good example of a campaign that manages to straddle the line well:

4. Be brief
A Guerilla campaign should appear out of nowhere and then disappear just as quickly. The mysterious and temporary nature adds to the effectiveness. In a nutshell, don't let the joke get old.

5. Do your research
Don't be caught out by any unforeseen issues:

• Permissions: You're not Banksy. Contact the responsible authorities and make sure you have got all permissions you need.
• Law: Know and obey the law. There are some crazy rules out there which you need to be aware of. For example, in Switzerland you are not allowed to dance on bank holidays. In Maine, USA it is forbidden to display Christmas decorations after 14th of January. And in Illinois, USA it is illegal to whistle in public on Sundays. Those are just some of millions of unbelievable laws that might constrain you and your work.
• Protests: Check the animal and eco friendliness of your campaign.

All in all, everybody enjoys a little surprise, a thought-provoking impulse or a reason to smile in his/her everyday life. Guerilla Marketing can turn ordinary and mundane activities, like watching people leaving a subway station, into entertaining events. Advertising can be fun for everybody, who'd have thunk?