Barclaycard PayTag is coming...

Always fancied the idea of using your mobile phone as a way to pay for your morning coffee? Well Barclays have announced that the PayTag is on it's way... not got an NFC enabled mobile? Not a problem, as they say on the site:

"PayTag can turn any mobile into a contactless way to pay, in seconds."

At the moment they are looking for people to register interest in using it and once you sign up to the interest form it's 6-8 weeks before you'd receive your tag. A really interesting move by Barclays and this could tie in very well with the Visa Olympic sponsorship deal.

The only issue would be that moment when you hold your phone over the contactless payment point and the cashier stares at you like you're mad... it's bad enough when you use a normal credit card!

If you fancy leading the pack in contactless then follow the link below to sign up:

• Barclaycard PayTag

Embed Spotify in your blog!

A new feature from Spotify, embeddable music! Obviously will appeal to a huge number of music fans and what a nice piece of functionality for Spotify to offer for free... Surely the fact that it links back to Spotify has nothing to do with it!

...and just to prove it works:

Instagram + Facebook = Facegram?

So Facebook has just picked up Instagram for $1billion... pretty high pricing for a product that doesn't appear to have any real revenue stream at the moment and was initially only valued at $500m.

So the question is, why have they done it and why did they pay so much?

Well, Facebook are looking to secure their position as the place to go for photo sharing. Although it may not be initially obvious Facebook contains a huge archive of peoples images, a big driver in staying engaged with the social network. If Facebook hadn't purchased Instagram it would be highly likely that Google (Picasa, Panoramio, Google+) or Yahoo! (Flickr) would have picked it up, putting them in a much stronger position to move forward. As Facebook continues to face competition from other social networking sites it will be keen to ensure that the competition can't simply purchase a superior product with a wide user base. The premium price paid by Facebook would have been to ensure that the deal was locked down early on.

A lot of people have expressed concern about the acquisition by Facebook and what the future plans of the app will now entail. Facebook has a reputation for swallowing start-ups whole and not necessarily keeping the functionality running. To try and help calm the storm Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom was keen to point out on the Instragram blog:

"It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away. We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network. We’ll continue to add new features to the product and find new ways to create a better mobile photos experience."

Moving forward though, will it prove to be money well spent by Facebook and will Instgram really survive intact!

Life as a newbie...

So, week two at the University of Hertfordshire and i'm already starting to see some very similar patterns that must run through all Universities. Similar issues around content maintenance, faculty demands and the oncoming deluge of paperwork! One huge plus point though is that fact that this project looks like it's going to be brilliant, lots of things I can bring to it from my previous role, a huge number of quick wins and some stability that I can put in place that should last us for a number of years.

Thankfully my new team appear to be exceptional and I have a great mix of technical support to throw into the mix as well. Interesting times ahead but for now it's down to shaking hands and putting my face about as much as possible! Luckily life as a newbie involves a lot of coffee...

Want to search next years courses? We can do that!

One of the advantages of pulling content from a central source is that you can quite easily pull additional versions of the data and it will be in the same format, nice and easy to work with!

So, as of yesterday we are now offering prospective students the ability to search 2 years worth of course data on the website. Entry for courses starting in 2012 and courses starting in 2013.

The reason for this is that when the normal recruitment cycle closes post-clearing for 2011 intake (September) and the new cycle opens for 2012 start we sometimes still have places to offer that start in Feb 2012 but are included in our 2011 intake numbers. A tad confusing but means that there is a need to advertise 2 overlapping years of course content...

The only real change that can be seen is the inclusion of a new button on our course finder:

http://www.beds.ac.uk/search/course-finder

that says 'Switch to 2012' to the right of the search field. This will switch any search made from courses starting in 2011 to courses starting in 2012 and a marker on each course to show which intake it is for.

As the Meerkat annoyingly says "Simples".

Update: Quick shout out to @danielinniss for the hard work on the above... shout out not prompted for at all of course!

Change is as good as a holiday!

You may have noticed that the blog has a new design applied to it... well, I am moving on from the University of Bedfordshire in a couple of weeks time and heading over to a Web Project Management role at the University of Hertfordshire!

I'm taking the blog with me of course and it will still be based around all things digital, i'll just be posting from a different office. Exciting times ahead!

PS Totally random image of an ashtray at Reading Uni I took during IWMW 2011... very cybermanish!

JISC XCRI-CAP Project

Before Christmas we put together a bid for JISC funding around the implementation of XCRI-CAP formatted course data. Many, many intensive submission writing sessions later and we're pleased to say that we have been awarded the funding! This is a brilliant project with some very interesting potential outcomes. The first being the automated process of passing well formatted course data to our website in a feed format shared by multiple univerisites.

The idea behind this is ultimately to create the possibility of a 'compare the uni' type website that will allow students to directly compare the same course across multiple institutions. This has huge advantages for potential applicants and could mean a more engaged and informed application.

So, all we need to do now is start mapping out how we're going to get to that point. A fair proportion of the work will be focusing on internal processes that will need to be in place in order for the system to work. so, whilst the display of courses on the website may not immediately change we're be busily building in the admin side!

Watch this space, there's going to be some rather interesting outcomes over the next 12 months!