Often the best ways to find out how to be successful in business, is to discover from other peoples mistakes and learn how NOT to do it!

We wanted to link to a great rundown of no-no’s in social media etiquette you want to avoid on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites. From the Interactive Insight group

If you or your client want to learn from a series of case studies. Head on over to the article here.

Open platforms have many benefits to small and large businesses alike, but many decision makers fear the concept of open source.

In this interesting article on Six Revisions, they discuss ways in which current open platforms can meet the business objectives of your clients and allow their project to stand on the shoulders of these giants.

We use open source for our rich media like video and photos. Also Wordpress and Magento ecommerce which are both widely adopted open source platforms. Read more about our web development services.

We are finding that a wide range of clients are asking for Wordpress as they have heard about the flexibility and scalability of the platform. Something which has never happened with any other web software or products we use for our client projects.

It is certainly easier to support the quality of a product with the vast number of online tutorials and showcases for an open source product.

The main reason why we use open source applications are that they are generally more robust and scalable, than licenced ‘closed’ source software. Open source allows an active community of web designers, developers, thinkers, etc to contribute their own code for others to use for their own projects. Take a look at the library of extensions at Wordpress.

Recent examples of the pro-active open source communities include suggesting features for future updates to Magento’s roadmap, beta testing for new features to Wordpress 3.0, and pin-pointing security holes in desktop application that an in-house team may have missed.

A Short Recommended List of Open Platforms

Video

• Youtube
• Vimeo

Pictures

• Flickr
• Picasa

Audio

• Houndbite

Open Website platforms

• Drupal
• Wordpress.com, and Wordpress.org
• Django – a web framework in Python
• Ruby on Rails – a web framework in Ruby
• CakePHP – PHP framework

The government now have passed a law that could cut you off the Internet

The Digital Economy Bill has been drafted largely by corporate content providers attempting to protect their industrial business models and includes measures to disconnect alleged copyright infringers without any judicial oversight.

Other impacts include forcing open wifi providers, such as cafes, bars, libraries, etc, to close their networks or face crippling penalties if someone downloads copyrighted material.

The Bill also gives unprecedented powers to the Government and State to block and censor websites it (or big business) doesn’t like and take over domain names where it sees fit.

In short, the Bill will make the UK’s Internet less free than China’s and stifle innovation, creativity and economic growth.

Unfortunately, this bill was passed last week as the government scrambled to get a number of bills passed before the general election this May.

The effects of the Digital Economy Bill as it stands will have serious implications for everyone. Us digital media types won’t be able to stop off at a café for a coffee and check our emails because free, open wifi will be shut off. Our children won’t be able to do their homework or learn about the wonders of the wider world because the household has been disconnected without evidence after someone has been suspected of ‘illegally’ sharing a large file.

So now we face a bleak future where creativity and self expression are under we are all now being shown the Orwell 1984 treatment.

People who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to buy the brand’s product or recommend it to a friend, according to a new study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies.

The study of 1,500 consumers found that 60 percent of Facebook fans and 79 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower.

The most popular reason people follow brands in social media is to receive discounts, but there were also many people who responded that they follow as a customer of the brand and to show their support of it.

Read the posts at WebProNews and Econsultancy.

Following on from our recent post about cloud computing, we want to explain how as an every day user of the internet based services, ‘the cloud’ can improve your productivity when working away from the traditional fixed office, which is increasing due to the current offerings of flexible web applications

If you can access the same files remotely (when away from your permanent office) no matter where you are is a relief. Even more so: access to those files and docs regardless of the device you’re using is possible too.

If you get a new computer, and already use cloud services for storing your image, documents, music files, or email, you will be surprised to find out that there are barely any files you’ll have to transfer.

Heres our selection of the best cloud based services:

• Online storage – Dropbox
• Email and documents – Google Apps
• Project Management – Basecamp
• Sharing photos online – Flickr
• Sharing thoughts online - Twitter
• Sharing bookmarks online – Delicious

What we used 6 months ago, are different to what I have recommended here. I’m looking forward to seeing what services we’re going to be using in the next few months!

This post will answer your questions whether you want to start using ‘the cloud’ service as a developer, or you are intrigued as how it can save you costs as a project manager or director.

Put simply, cloud computing means that your computing resources live outside of your computer or computer room.

The Cloud is being touted as the key driver behind a new emerging economy based on lower costs and higher productivity than before: an economy holding great potential for smaller, agile businesses

Cloud Architectures address key difficulties surrounding large-scale data processing:

• In traditional data processing it is difficult to get as many machines as an application needs.
• It is difficult to get the machines when one needs them.
• It is difficult to distribute and co-ordinate a large-scale job on different machines, run processes on them, and provision another machine to recover if one machine fails.
• It is difficult to auto- scale up and down based on dynamic workloads.
• It is difficult to get rid of all those machines when the job is done

Cloud Architectures solve such difficulties

• Applications built on Cloud Architectures run in-the-cloud where the physical location of the infrastructure is determined by the provider.
• They take advantage of simple APIs of Internet-accessible services that scale on-demand, that are industrial-strength, where the complex reliability and scalability logic of the underlying services remains implemented and hidden inside-the-cloud.

Business Benefits of Cloud Architectures

There are some clear business benefits to building applications using Cloud Architectures:

• Almost zero upfront infrastructure investment: If you have to build a large-scale system it may cost a fortune to invest in real estate, hardware (racks, machines, routers, backup power supplies), hardware management (power management, cooling), and operations personnel. Because of the upfront costs, it would typically need several rounds of management approvals before the project could even get started. Now, with utility-style computing, there is no fixed cost or startup cost.
• Just-in-time Infrastructure: In the past, if you got famous and your systems or your infrastructure did not scale you became a victim of your own success. Conversely, if you invested heavily and did not get famous, you became a victim of your failure. By deploying applications in-the-cloud with dynamic capacity management software architects do not have to worry about pre-procuring capacity for large- scale systems. Thesolutions are low risk because you scale only as you grow. Cloud Architectures can relinquish infrastructure as quickly as you got them in the first place (in minutes).
• More efficient resource utilization: System administrators usually worry about hardware procuring (when they run out of capacity) and better infrastructure utilization (when they have excess and idle capacity). With Cloud Architectures they can manage resources more effectively and efficiently by having the applications request and relinquish resources only what they need (on-demand).
• Usage-based costing: Utility-style pricing allows billing the customer only for the infrastructure that has been used. The customer is not liable for the entire infrastructure that may be in place. This is a subtle difference between desktop applications and web applications. A desktop application or a traditional client-server application runs on customer’s own infrastructure (PC or server), whereas in a Cloud Architectures application, the customer uses a third party infrastructure and gets billed only for the fraction of it that was used.
• Potential for shrinking the processing time: Parallelization is the one of the great ways to speed up processing. If one compute-intensive or data- intensive job that can be run in parallel takes 500 hours to process on one machine, with Cloud Architectures, it would be possible to spawn and launch 500 instances and process the same job in 1 hour. Having available an elastic infrastructure provides the application with the ability to exploit parallelization in a cost-effective manner reducing the total processing time.

Examples of Cloud Architectures

There are plenty of examples of applications that could utilize the power of Cloud Architectures. These range from back-office bulk processing systems to web applications. Some are listed below:

• Document processing – Convert hundreds of thousands of documents from Microsoft Word to PDF, OCR millions of pages/images into raw searchable text
• Image processing – Create thumbnails or low resolution variants of an image, resize millions of images
• Video encoding
• Create an index of web crawl data
• Data mining – Perform search over millions of records
• Back-office applications (in financial, insurance or retail sectors)
• Log analysis -Analyze and generate daily/weekly reports
• Perform nightly automated builds of source code repository every night in parallel
• Automated Unit Testing and Deployment Testing
• Testing (functional, load, quality) on different deployment configurations every night
• Websites for conferences or events (Super Bowl, sports tournaments)
• Promotion, Viral or Seasonal Websites – websites that only run at a certain time of year

Services offering cloud hosting and storage:

• Windows Azure
• Rackspace cloud
• Amazon Web Services

After attending a recent business event in Brighton, I was encouraged to hear that there is an active channel for securing new work and contracts for the 2012 olympics relating to digital media and marketing. And I thought it would be worth sharing.

Below are a selection of free services that enable businesses to compete for contract opportunities linked to the London 2012 Games and other major public and private sector buying organisations.

With a particular focus on supply chain opportunities, many of them act as a brokerage service, matching buyers with potential suppliers.

Where to find out about contracts:
Office of Government Commerce www.ogc.gov.uk
Purchase and Supply Agency – www.pasa.nhs.uk
Government Opportunities – www.supply2.gov.uk
Tenders Electronic Daily – www.ted.europa.eu
Partnerships UK – www.partnershipsuk.org.uk
Business Link – www.businesslink.gov.uk
2012 Olympic Games – www.competefor.com
Buying Solutions (Supplier Zone) – www.buyingsolutions.gov.uk

Business Link will be giving access to focused business support through their network, the aim of this will help to boost the long–term competitiveness of your business. This support is free and will help focus and strengthen your business for the long-term.