Trying to predict the future is tricky at the best of times, but I think it is perfectly possible to use current trends to illustrate future developments. Using trends like this does work. A famous example is “Moore’s Law“. In 1965, the Intel co-founder  Gordan Moore suggested that the computing capacity would double approximately every two years. Broadly speaking he’s been proved correct and the development curve has been exponential from the monstrous computers of the 1950s through to the supercomputers of today. Semiconductor companies have based billion pound budgets on Moore’s prediction.

Throughout the 20th Century there has been a trend of rapid and continuous improvement in nearly all fields of human endeavor. We have progressed from the Model-T to the Bugatti Veyron, from the Wright brothers and their rickety bi-plane to the Euro-fighter. From the 8-bit website of the 1980s to the web 2.0 website of today…

The overarching trend is of rapid and innovative technological development. So where is this development curve taking us? Is it possible to pick trends applying to the web and web devices? Yes, I think so. Read on…

A client asked me the other day to provide a cost estimate for some creative work. He wanted a concept that clearly communicates the unique benefit of his product. Something simple, powerful and persuasive. Something like the old Araldite ad with the car stuck to a billboard (ok, we might not come up with something quite as iconic as this but who knows?).

This concept would be used on the website, on newsletters and potentially offline too. Nothing strange in that… but then I realised that this request was actually quite unusual.

The product in question was a medical device to help prevent deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in hospital patients. I thought I’d try and find some other examples of medical devices that use a creative concept to get across their USP. I found very little indeed (there’s a list of the best examples below). Most medical device websites launch straight into the product features, often ignoring the benefits. If you’re lucky, you might get a big photo of the product on the homepage.

Read on…

Most intranets are largely static sites. On its own, an intranet is essentially a shared drive, serving up centrally stored documents alongside internal articles or communications. Some organisations use words such as “communication hubs” to describe them, but for the most part that communication is one-way.

These days, however, an intranet really can be a hub for your company. The intranet portal now closely mirrors employees’ expectations of world wide web functionality. Systems such as Microsoft SharePoint allow users to communicate with each other and collaborate, much as they would using social media tools such as blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

There are a number of capabilities that you can implement relatively easily, with SharePoint in particular making many of them available as standard.

Read on…

The observant consumer abroad may have noticed patterned squares on their purchases. In Japan, these shapes now take up space on the side of whole houses, and seen teenagers whipping out their mobiles to take photos.

Of course, these codes contain more than just obscure patterns. Devised in 1994 for industrial use, ‘QR codes’ were employed for tagging boxes as a more information-heavy barcode. For example, the German Post uses them to keep track of packages.

Read on…

Healthcare providers are finally opening up to social media – and it’s about time. I wrote recently about the Gardasil campaign, and now we have the UK NHS opening their own Facebook page: Say Yes To The Test.

Say Yes To The Test is a campaign to inform people about chlamydia, supported by the NHS website. At the time of writing, the Facebook page has been live for around two weeks and has over 36,000 fans. Given that the average Facebook user has 130 friends and that every new sign-up displays on all of a user’s friends’ profiles, the page has potentially reached 4.7 million users.

Read on…

We’ve already written our top 5 resolutions for 2010 for intranet owners – but what about those of you out there on the Great Wide Web? Keep reading for our top 5 New Year resolutions for website owners…

Read on…

Social media: it’s the ‘in thing’ for marketing departments around the world. But not all campaigns are created equal, and the internet is a fickle place. What works for one campaign might not for another, and ideas quickly get stale.

We’re always impressed with creative uses of social media, and this year we’ve seen some incredibly inventive ideas. Keep reading to find out about three of our favourite campaigns of 2009, and one of the worst. Don’t forget to let us know about your favourites in the comments!

Read on…

On one of our intranets, we developed custom functionality to enable employees to rate feature articles. The client stipulated that ratings should appear itemised beside the article with each employee’s name.

However, there was the possibility that this would discourage members of the organisation from providing feedback, given news of soaring unemployment all over the world due to cutbacks.

The fear that all employees’ engagement is visible across the internal network potentially leads an employee to ask themselves “will my manager scrutinise my level of participation in my next appraisal?”

Read on…

Social media. It is thought of by many companies as the domain of the clinically bored, and by many marketers as being actively dangerous towards the corporate image.

In the right or wrong hands, social media (that is, blogging and the use of social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) can be the difference between a company being accepted as cool and being a laughing stock. When marketers only use social media to throw out the company line, they quite often miss the point of the medium.

Read on…

Remember Tom Cruise using his hands to move data around in the futuristic film “Minority Report”? Well it turns out that this image is not that futuristic after all: you can more or less do it on your iPhone right now.

The key phrase you need to know is “augmented reality”, and it is becoming increasingly mainstream these days as more applications are found and the media keep jumping on the “OMG this is so cool” bandwagon. (Which it is, to be fair). But what is it and how does it work? Put simply, augmented reality (or AR) is a digital overlay on the real world. A camera takes a picture, and then the computer overlays King Kong (or whatever) onto your screen. The cool thing is that this can be done in real time while you’re walking down the street.

Read on…