Facebook at internet world

Interesting to see Facebook exhibiting at Internet World, I've not seen them at these events before. Minimal paperwork on the desks but they are pushing advertising with ad words and also marketing via Facebook pages. Interesting to see them as we've had great success with Facebook ads, cheap and well targeted with a good CTR.

Internet World 2011

It's that time again, Internet World is hitting London at Olympia and i'll be attending today. I'll be looking to update the blog during the proceedings with anything that looks of interest! So a short posting to start with saying that i'm not my way... the wonders of blogging via a netbook connected to my mobile which is acting as my wifi hotspot. I love technology sometimes! More later...

Google Talk on Android...

Google has just announced that support for video chat and voice chat using Google Talk is coming to Android handsets!

As an owner of an Android handset (Desire HD) this sounds like the first steps to the hallowed release of Google Voice in the UK... maybe. The issue with this exciting news is that it's only going to be rolled out in the 2.3.4 update for the Nexus S in the next few weeks, then for other 2.3 Android devices in the near future. No mention of Android 2.2 users... which includes me and around 75% of other users!

At the moment i'm still waiting for the 2.3 upgrade to be run through HTC for them to add in their own tweaks before they release the upgrade to the world. This has no timeframe on it and with the speed of releases from Google it could be that 2.4 or 2.5 will be ot before we have the chance to upgrade to 2.3!

I love the idea of open source and Android is a great mobile operating system but having it run through a third party leads to delays in roll out, bloated applications and potential conflicts of interest.

The big question mark at the moment is if open source solutions survive the transition to paid for & support devices?

To root or not to root, that is the question!

You can read more about the developments on the Google Blog.

V&A Website launch

Last week I managed to find enough time to head down to London for a sneak peak at the new Victoria & Albert Museum's website. Not only has it had a fantastic new front end design but it also has a rather impressive (and very technical) back end set up!

Running a combination of Drupal, Matrix, an open source search engine, Funnelback and a whole host of very clever, custom written scripts and databases the site runs really very well. It has a host of related content pulled in, clever cloud tags and a very visual design. Admittedly I did sit there a little zoned out as they started to show the lines of code they had written to do all of this but then my ISD colleague appeared to take all that part in!

What I found really interesting was that the catalogue of items held within the V&A had been crawled and compiled with and Open Source enterprise search engine. This doesn't sound that interesting until they mentioned that the catalogue is open to the public and that someone had written an Android application for them! The wonders of opening data up to the world means that people can really chip in and collaborate with you on your work.

Something to bear in mind when we're all sat at our desks working in our silos, a little collaboration goes a long way!

Design concepts... done!

After a furiously busy week last week we finally have an agreed design concept and functional specification.

The original design concept that came across was really good but as you can probably guess, everyone has an opinion on what the website should look like and so we needed to make some tweaks! In order to take the designs forward Squiz passed us the PSD files (try that with another agency!) and I sent them out to our internal designers for tweaking.

The only real area that needed looking at was the banner slot and how the banners will be displayed.The following day I had 5 alternative designs sent back to me and using a combination of two (thanks Mick & David) I presented the final design concept to our Steering Group members and it was happily signed off.

A great example of some flexible working and collaboration!

The functional specification document was a different beast as that one was down to me and a lot of reading time! Luckily the workshops we held at the beginning of the project helped to focus on what we wanted delivered and apart from having to read and re-read a 110 page document it required little changing. The advantages to doing some planning in the early stages certainly paid off and the final functional specification was signed off on Friday as well.

Tweaked, signed and done... phew! Now it's time to move on to the additional designs, project plan, build... migration.... testing.....

Bring on the trike!

We had a special visitor on the campus today, a very friendly Google trike was here to start street mapping our campus locations. It turned up in a classic white van and when it was rolled out into the car park it really turned some heads!

So, what did we have done? Well, Luton campus was covered across the front of the new campus centre and all three access routes. We then packed up and moved on to Putteridge Bury canpus where the extensive driveway was shot, a full circle of the building itself and also the landscaped grounds which was a bonus. Lucky the trike could go off road! Finally we headed over Bedford campus and did a full run through of the whole campus layout from the Library round to the accommodation block.

It will take a little while for the images to appear on Google but once in place it does mean that we can embed the street view images into our website, a brilliant addition to our marketing materials!

Many thanks Google!

The design concept is here...

So, wireframes are done and we've moved onto the far more controversial design concepts! I picked them up on Friday from Squiz and overall we're really pleased, we made a couple of initial tweaks here and there to pull some 'real world' content onto the page to make the presentations to the working and steering groups a little easier.

The tricky part now is going to be giving everyone the opportunity to feedback on the look and feel, collate those responses into something usable and then refine the designs! We're looking at holding focus groups with our current students and also to open up an online feedback session for all staff to contribute. I'm expecting a lot of replies to be based around content rather than design but that's only normal!

I would obviously love to put a copy of the designs up on the blog but then that would ruin the surprise!