So rather fortuitously (or not, depending on your point of view) Third Thursday this month has fallen slap bang in the middle of perhaps the biggest controversy to affect the internet since it’s commercial release (1995, for any budding geek historians out there). I think we can all agree that since then it’s done nothing but grow, the clear principle being that the more people who have access to it, the more the amount of content generated constantly rises.

And so we land in the here and now, a time at which the internet is no longer populated with reems and reems of text but also video, audio, images, satellite data, pointless conversation, pretty much anything you can imagine exists online (which is both fantastic and terrible at the same time). But hold on a second, isn’t that much the same as the real world? There’s good and bad, there’s philanthropy and there’s greed, those who give and those who take. In those terms surely it’s simple to think, we should police the internet in much the same way as we do the real world, right? Catch the criminals, and allow innocent civilians to go about their day to day business and innocent companies to carry on trading.

This is the of view I want to talk about SOPA and PIPA from, as someone who works in the tech industry I feel I have a pretty decent understanding of the internet and this is how I believe it should be viewed, as another (virtual) world in it’s own right, much like the “real” one in which we live. The opinions being bandied around by politicians and corporate execs don’t seem to recognise this fundamental fact but instead they think of the internet as a system, probably due to “technology” being involved. The internet is a living thing, a representation of billions of living beings (that’s us by the way) and therefore can’t be controlled, it will refuse to be, as we would refuse.

It’s this fundamental misunderstanding of the internet that is causing these IP owners to try and wrestle control of what we’re able to see and do online and it’s the fundamental lack of knowledge in the legal establishments that is letting them get so close to achieving it. For example, if I were to go out into the local community and look around for seedy criminal types, then go and chat to those people about their various activities (for the purposes of the metaphor I achieve this without being brutally murdered or robbed) then that would be entirely my own choice. It might not be a smart thing to do, it may even mean I have an implicit knowledge of illegal activities that makes me a person of interest, but it’s my own choice to do so.

Now imagine I do the same thing but instead what I find is the community (housing estate, street, town, etc) in which those people live, has had a 50 foot wall built around it, unfortunately cutting me off from visiting the poor innocent locals as much as their shadier neighbours. This is basically what rights owners have been arguing for with the presentation of SOPA and PIPA. Rather than targeting the criminals who steal, duplicate and distribute content, they want to take down entire sections of the web so these people can’t communicate with us regular folk and spread their ill gotten gains.

The more worrying aspect of the two bills is that don’t even operate on a “suspicion” basis rather than a “proof” basis. So if a site is reported to be under suspicion it could potentially be blocked somehow.

Up until this week the creators of SOPA and PIPA were suggesting achieving this through alteration of the DNS, or Domain Name System. A fundamental foundation of the internet that allows sites to be identified by names like www.google.com, instead of purely IP addresses, like 209.85.147.103

They wanted to be able to remove (on suspicion) a domain name from the internet registry, if that site was in any way associated with illegal sharing. This would potentially give them complete rule over the web space. So you’d either play by their regulations or have your site’s domain name removed. Fortunately, due to opposition from the Whitehouse this section of the bills has been dropped but that doesn’t mean the concept is gone. Discussions in the senate recently have been around how to block sites like this anyway, even without using the DNS.

Now as an every day internet user I have to ask some serious questions:
Firstly, what exactly is considered illegal behaviour, constituting a block on that site? They certainly haven’t gone into much detail regarding this but surely it should be incredibly well defined. I can’t be arrested in the real world without a damn good explanation so why should my online presence be impounded without a clear description of the precise charges relating directly to sections of the bills I’ve contravened?

Secondly, who’s going to police this and enforce the blocks on sites? It’s obvious that the movie and music industries want the power to do this themselves but in the real world don’t we call that vigilante justice? Surely a system based on these kind of “site blocks” needs to be run by a third, independent party, who are not on the payroll of the very companies seeking to exert more control.

Lastly, how will this affect social media? We once lived in a time when the majority of online content was created and owned by news agencies, corporations and private companies. We now live in a time where most of the content is, in fact, user generated. A lot of it may be utter rubbish but the internet is now a social space, a prime are for exchanging everything be it useful or the aforementioned utter rubbish. I’ve seen plenty of people tweeting or posting on Facebook about how to access football matches or movies online, some if it legal, some of it not so much. Would these industries seriously purport to block social media platforms because they contain normal human conversation, some of which is less than law abiding. That’s like shutting down a pub because someone once sold something shady under a table there.

And that’s what I’ve been getting at throughout this whole rambling journey. The internet is a world in and of itself, trying to control it is pointless and would cost (read: waste) billions as it will grow and adapt as it always has. Besides, (outside of James Bond movies) no one has ever tried to destroy the whole world just because it was a bit flawed. The internet is fundamentally flawed… of course it is, it’s populated by us and we’re only human. The biggest thing I’ve been able to read through all the myriad of situational analyses lately in the press though is this; the institutions pushing for these changes have a complete lack of understanding of the internet in its current form. It’s evolved to a point where it belongs to billions and declaring war on the internet just to solve a piracy problem is in fact declaring war on every consumer they have. This is hardly going to endear those consumers to them and gain their support in the war on piracy. Instead declare war on the criminals themselves in such a way that the ordinary users of internet services are not even aware there is a new system in place. It’s probably difficult to achieve but it’s the only solution that won’t cause an enormous backlash, the like of which we’ve seen in recent weeks.

Google+... that’s been around a while now hasn’t it? It’s hardly taken off as a social network but recently it seems Google have their sights set much higher than that. They know that they can’t compete with Facebook, but then they don't need to. Google are still the most used search engine in the world, they have more traffic than Facebook anyway, so why shouldn’t their social network revolve around that aspect of their platform? Well, Google have slowly been revealing that it does, and I’m here to tell you that it’s a good thing for your business. 

Combined with Google+ Business Pages, the whole Google platform can deliver more for you. It only takes 5 minutes to create a page so there’s really no reason not to. But what exactly will you get out of it?

Be Found Instantly

Not only are Google+ Business Pages another great channel to broadcast your business through, they are also an instant access point for users to reach you as a brand. For example, since the business pages went online big brands like Pepsi, McDonalds and Lexus have all signed up to the service. Users who want information or the latest news from those companies merely have to type + and the name of the company into the Google search bar.

Try it out now and you’ll see that as you type instant search literally offers you the Google+ page of that business, giving users an extremely fast way to access your social stream.

Obviously, if you’ve got a page Google will find that anyway but the Google+ integration with the search engine is just so fast and slick. It’s a service only Google can truly offer within the confines of their own platform and as users become accustomed to this unique Google offering (as we have done with so many others) it could become a winning feature.

Increased Search Ranking

Perhaps the single most relevant thing that will attract those of you who still mostly think of Google as a search provider is the ability of Google+ to improve your search rankings. There’s a new system at work to integrate with Google+ and it works like this...

Say, for example, I +1 something, a page, a product, a business (the +1 system can be integrated all over the web just like a Facebook ‘like’) and then you do a search for it. Because we’re friends (hello!), on Google+ your search results will have my relevant +1’s displayed. This means that users of Google get advice from their friends without even having to ask for it. An absolutely crucial marketing tool if you have a loyal fan base, allowing it to grow by subconscious word of mouth.

Additionally a friend of codegent who knows the guys at Google rather well recently told us that your Google+ page will be (can we say artificially?) promoted up the search algorithm for searches against your brand name. Its a very easy way to boost your search position and dominance of the first page of results.

Access to Your Customers Zero Moment of Truth

There’s been a long standing phrase in the marketing world, “moment of truth”. Traditionally this was broken down into two parts; the First Moment of Truth, when a customer sees a product they like and begins to gravitate towards it and the Second Moment of Truth, when a customer attains said product and uses it, reinforcing their belief that the product was as good as they believed it to be.

This traditional concept of these two moments is 100% accurate and has been proven over billions of sales of products worldwide since the dawn of the modern advertising agency. However, thanks to the connected world we now live in Google has assessed that there is another, more important, Moment of Truth which occurs through social media and dictates a huge proportion of peoples’ spending habits. As we now do more shopping online than anywhere else this makes perfect sense, why would we go out to do research when we have the largest compendium of human knowledge just a mouse click away? Not only that, but the benefit of the experience of millions of other customers.

This, is the Zero Moment of Truth. Gone are the days when you had to get a product home and try it out or luckily come across a good tester model of it in a shop to find out it’s real value to you. Social media doesn’t just drive peoples’ lives socially, though the name may allude to that. In reality Social media drives peoples’ opinions of everything, from football matches, to movies, to physical products. So if I were to be torn between two equally popular products, between Samsung and LG for example, not knowing what to do I might look to their social media pages. If one were to have several million more fans than the other it would certainly seem that their customers had a reason for acting in such a way and alter my perception.

That’s a high level example, but it can be equally important on a small scale, for a single product or campaign behind that product. If you publish a post (and there are over a billion a day on Google+) related to your product and it catches the right eyes it will spread. Knowledge of your product will expand and the hits on both your Google+ business page and that products own page online will increase, potentially exponentially. Many users will be experiencing a Zero Moment of Truth, proof by a large body of their peers that the product is good, appreciated, interesting.

It’s impossible to emphasise the importance of this effect to you and your business but Google are helping with that one too. They’ve introduced a feature called Ripples, which allows business people, marketers and general speculators to view the effect a post had, a sort of butterfly effect on Google+. Your post flapped it’s wings here and then what? You can see where it spread, to which users, how it spread on from them and the impact it had on your site traffic.The ramifications of this type of awareness are astonishing, allowing marketers to tailor their posts to mimic their most effective campaigns.

The simplest way I can summarise is - get your business on Google+. There’s never any telling how a new service or product will pan out but Google+ has a lot to offer you right now and you shouldn’t miss out.

If you’d like to know more about the Zero Moment of Truth and how it really drives your customers then Google literally wrote the book on it, which is a free download in all the common eBook formats and can be found at www.zeromomentoftruth.com.

What is Recurring Billing?

Recurring billing is effectively subscription modelling for businesses transacting online. You automate charging customers for a product or service at a predefined cost and schedule. There are two key factors involved in planning recurring billing.

1. The time span between charges that affects how you retain and acquire custom.
2. The access model - usually different price plans, options and possibly a freemium service, which offsets the cost of giving away a limited but free service against the profits of more likely upgrades.

Why is recurring billing good for my business?

A business relying on one-off transactions may initially bring in more revenue but will most likely struggle to retain the customer over a long period of time. Recurring billing usually results in a higher Average Customer Lifecycle Value (ACLV), a predictable income stream (Monthly Recurring Revenue - MRR) due to a combination of customer inertia and commitment as the relationship shifts from a purchase to opt-out decision and has more potential for up and cross sell as you have good reason to be in regular contact with your users.

In terms of valuing a business these patterns of predictable recurring revenue are hugely attractive to investors and purchasers as they can see genuine opportunities to scale and mitigate risk.

What the potential pitfalls?

The two major areas of difficulty revolve around the security of the sensitive information you acquire and the technical systems you need to put in place to automate these processes.

Security
Storing sensitive financial data about your customers presents you with massive security risk and plenty of legislative red tape to boot. Your servers must be PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant which is costly and complex to achieve.

In addition to that you may be more susceptible to direct fraud as criminals often use free trial offers to verify stolen credit information.

You might remember the Sony PlayStation scandal in April this year when its systems were breached and the personal data of 75 million customers including some credit information and passwords were compromised. It brought the network down for several weeks and caused a public relations furore. Their systems were not fully restored until June and the trust of their customers was severely damaged. The whole episode is believed to have cost Sony £105 million. A security breach is not something to be taken lightly.

Technology
Building a recursive billing system quickly mounts up to be a considerable technical challenge (and therefore requires time and investment). Here is a quick brain dump of functions you will need to deal with:

• Daily invoice generation and account management
• Sending emails and dealing with spam filters, bounce backs etc.
• Multiple prices plans
• Credit card fails and re-attempts to bill
• Discount coupons and free trials
• Upgrades and downgrades
• Expiring cards
• Different currencies (potentially)
• Tax implications of multiple geographic regions (potentially)

A complex system like this is inevitably going to have errors and bugs in it at launch. Every system does. Will your early adopters tolerate this whilst you fix the problems?

On top of that you will have a system running that needs to be continuously up, processing data, being maintained and scaling in order to keep the engine alive and up to date. And of course you need to make sure it is secure! For an engineer’s perspective check out this blog from Freshbooks.

What recursive business model should you adopt?

Broadly speaking the model splits into Annual or Monthly billing cycles with free trials or “freemium” no cost limited accounts as a popular extension.

Annual payments give you more cash upfront, guarantee customer retention for at least one year and reduce invoicing and collection costs. However monthly payments are less risky for the customer who may not be keen on such a long upfront commitment or high cost. Monthly therefore creates a lower barrier to entry so you could see an increase in customer acquisition. Your sales process should shorten, as the proposition is less risky and more cost effective.

I think for most online businesses the monthly billing cycle is better for the reasons outlined above but also as it provides you with an opportunity to talk more frequently with your customers, make sure they are still using your service to it’s fullest potential, up or cross selling and reminding them you are here and happy to help.

With annual payments you run the risk that your customers may have completely forgotten who you are, or moved on from their jobs or decided to seek an alternative. There is also a legal implication (in the US at least) that if you bill on anything over 60 days you must send ample warning of the renewal, at least 30 days. This gives the customer more time to consider cancelling or shopping around. On a monthly billing cycle you can bill and email them the same day but as they should be used to receiving the emails this shouldn’t be too great a shock.

You could also consider a combo deal that has a monthly plan as well as a reduced annual option for those customers that know they will stick with your service and are happy to just to pay in one go and save some money. These customers are less likely to fall into the annual payment traps above.

A few golden rules for emailing your bill:

1. Always explain the charge. Remind them of the service they are getting and that it has been previously authorised. “You have been charged $XXX” does not cut it!
2. Don’t miss the opportunity to upsell or add value with marketing copy. A slight discount on the next product tier could be all it takes to bring more revenue in. Likewise a gift or a simple thank you could seriously impact your retention and reduce “bill shock”.
3. Make it super simple for the customer to access your customer service team. Preferably by simply replying to the email or with a clear phone number. This is really the point at which you want to be talking to them and cementing/saving your relationship.

What technology is out there to help me?

Over the last few years several companies have been launched to help alleviate the issues around recurring billing. These guys sit above payment providers such as Sagepay and do all the hard work so you don’t have to.

Chargify, CheddarGetter, Recurly, Spreedly and Zuora (more of an enterprise offering) are the major players in the space. Sadly most of them have quite poor UK payment gateway support so we plumped for Recurly for our apps who have been excellent. Spreedly also have good UK support and hopefully the others will catch up soon so you get a greater degree of choice.

Paypal have a recurring billing option but I would highly advise avoiding them despite the fact that getting setup is relatively painless. My reason? Poor support, random behaviour, tricky deep integration methods with a lack of features and customisation.

What you should be looking for in your billing partners, aside from price

• PCI-DSS Level 1 Compliant service - which makes verifying your own business’ compliance easy
• Support for your favoured currency(ies) and payment gateway
• “Grandfathering” of costs - a pledge to honour the deal you sign up to if costs change in the future
• Adherence for the Data Portability Standard to ensure you own your customer credit data
• A complimentary feature set or flexibility for custom elements to fit with how you want to run the accounts of your business
• Developer friendly tools such as well documented APIs and relevant code integration examples for your tech team’s preferred language

Phew, that was a longer article than I had planned! If you have any thoughts or questions on this please leave a comment below. Happy billing!

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.

This week the world’s favourite micro-blogging site Twitter announced that it’s crossed the 100 Million users mark. Quite an achievement for any online business and let us not forget that Twitter is a business. Their most recent round of venture capital funding will leave their value at 8 Billion dollars, but where’s the money coming from to justify that value?

Well as we all know, Twitter currently makes no money, it’s free to users and is a bottomless pit for the aforementioned funding. So what are the market speculators valuing at 8 Billion dollars? The site and all its posts? The technology behind the service itself? No, of course not. That myriad of information (purely narcissistic, or otherwise) although interesting is worth nothing, even the news reported on Twitter is usually a short version of what exists elsewhere in a much more readable form. Even the infrastructure itself over the years of R&D and redesign is probably worth somewhere from a few hundred thousand to a few million at the most (although the 24/7 running costs must be remarkable).

So what’s worth 8 Billion US Dollars to the many investors who keep Twitter running? You.
Quick calculation $8,000,000,000 ÷ 100,000,000 = $80

That’s pretty reasonable! Each user being worth $80 is a great deal, for it is you that they own. Unlike Facebook, to date Twitter seems to remain relatively unscathed in this regard. Facebook has come under plenty of fire for user privacy issues in the last 12 months. Mostly this is because Facebook is very clear that the user is their particular commodity, but people don’t like being seen this way. Facebook knows all about you, what you like, where you go, who you talk to.

Twitter is no different. It knows who you follow and therefore what you like. It knows who you tweet to and even where you are when you tweet. The reason it has escaped criticism is largely because it hasn’t taken advantage of this. Yet! But at some point the investors will want their $8 Billion back. Thus the conversation has been sparked, how long will it be until Twitter introduces advertising to their service?

On a wider level this has happened on similar services and successfully too. Google for example saturate you in advertising throughout all their services. They are so good at it though, the advertising itself is so subtle and so well targeted, that users rarely find it irritating. However, they achieve this in much the same way as Facebook, that being collection of personal data. Google know all about you, it’s just not as obvious as Facebook, who are recently the whipping boy for privacy issue gripes.

In fact, when Google bought out YouTube for close to $1.7 Billion in late 2006 they began the process of heavily commercialising the site. At first this resulted in the usual condemnation of any change but has been largely embraced and accepted by the sites users. And no doubt it’s this advertising that brings in the much needed running capital to ensure a site as complex as YouTube keeps going.

The fact is social media companies treat the user as a product, that’s just an underlying principle of online business. If you (the consumer) appear to be getting something for free, then you are the product. Overall, we have to recognise that this is a trend which is prevalent online now, the long game is king.

As members of this industry the strategy of these companies should be obvious to us, find a niche and populate that niche with great content for free. This will draw thousands, millions or even hundreds of millions of users to you. Once traction is that high, sell these users (or at least access to their prefrontal cortex’s) to the highest bidders.

Sounds horrific, doesn’t it but it’s actually not always a bad thing. The reason Facebook came under such scrutiny was their willingness to share user’s details with partners by default. If user’s have the ability to control what’s shared then bad press can be easily prevented, unfortunately Facebook learned this the hard way. That said, the other usage of our information by Facebook was internal, Facebook’s servers simply determined which, of their myriad of available adverts, were relevant to us. This actually works and personally I find it’s always showing me things I’m genuinely interested in. Google’s extensive algorithms seem to do much the same, with plenty of advertising, but all of it related to the searches I’ve made and hence, things I’m interested in.

We can only hope that lessons learned by others are taken into account when Twitter inevitably begins leveraging their huge user base for something more profitable. If adverts appear in my feeds which are relevant to me I should be happy, right? It’s a balance of course; most users accept that adverts are needed to support their favourite sites and services. This is still a learning period and both sides need to forge some tolerance. Users need to understand that who they are and what they like is up for grabs and online services need to understand there’s a limit to this, users will only tolerate being owned by their favourite service if that trust isn’t abused.

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

Other links referenced...

• Our 'Responsive' Learn Apps Website
• Clever Kids First Puzzles Learning Game
• Building Trust Online - Airbnb User Safety
• Tuborg Promotion with 4Music
• We are seeking a Project Manager - know anyone good?

The way we browse the Web has changed. People no longer only use desktops or laptop computers: they consume the Web through a multitude of mobile devices, sporting all kinds of screen shapes and resolutions.

The traditional fixed-width layout doesn't really cut it anymore. People expect to be able to view sites on their phones just like they do on their desktop computer. Sites need to adapt to these different browsers and screen resolutions. But what's the right way to do it?

The common response has been for sites to provide a mobile version as a nice little "extra". That's good, but it doesn't always mean the site will display nicely on an iPad or non-iOS mobile devices. This also often means developers will have to maintain two distinct websites, with their own sets of content.

Unfortunately, this doesn't scale well, and it restricts access to the content to only a few selected devices.

The better way to do it is with what we call Responsive Web Design.

The idea behind Responsive Web Design is that the websites' layout and design should adapt to fit any device that chooses to display it.

As Ethan Marcotte explains, "Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them."

This is why last week, codegent released a revamped, responsive and mobile-friendly website for our Learn Apps. The site is still a work in progress (there's a few things that need to be ironed out), but we think it's good enough to take a little tour today!

Learn Apps homepage as seen on a desktop browser

The homepage adapting to smaller resolutions

Here's the effect in video

The Learn Thai page adapting to various resolutions

Some small details that make the difference:

• One website "code", working on a wide range of desktop as well as mobile browsers (including Safari Mobile, Firefox Mobile, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini)
• The header "Our Apps" dropdown is automatically replaced by a Select dropdown for ease of use on mobile devices (ie. works with touch screens devices as well as non-touch screens devices).
• The iPhone and iPod will see an iPhone 4 capture of the apps, while Android handsets should see captures from a Nexus S
• The Contact form uses the JavaScript library called "Chosen" to make it easier for users to find and select apps/devices, by replacing the default Select dropdown with a custom dropdown with auto-complete search (on desktop browsers)

We invite you to go through the website yourself: www.codegent.com/learnapps and have a play!

We are quite pleased with the results so far, and are thrilled to offer more "responsiveness" in future projects! Let us know what you think in the comments.

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.

1. Webcam Photos
   This is ideal for helping you build trust that your users are who they say they are. A webcam photo taken whilst the user is logged into their account is far more likely to be authentic. Photos can also be date stamped and you can also request the user holds up an ID cards, driving licenses or passport to add further proof.
    
2. Validating a Phone Number
   Entering your mobile number and being sent a code automatically via SMS to input is pretty simple but very effective. Of course not all mobile numbers lead to trackable contracted folks but having a verified contact number is helpful.
    
3. Connecting your Social Network Profiles
   Over the past couple of years we have seen the rise of social logins where users can create accounts on websites and apps by authorising facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. to act on their behalf. Originally this was designed for convenience and end user security. However this use case is all about extending the digital footprint of a person for trust verification purposes. LinkedIn is an especially interesting use case here as an account on this platform very much places the user profile in a real life context.
    
4. User on User Reviews
   The power of comments from total strangers has meant big business for the likes of Amazon, Apple, eBay and Trip Advisor and this is no different. Over time the web has built up a degree of community, camaraderie and social responsibility amongst total strangers with a unified goal. The principle being that if we collectively share our thoughts and experiences we can all benefit from better products and services, as well as avoiding disasters!
    

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.