Mando Group Ltd - technology

Wall Street Journal Features googleDrive

A little project a couple of us have been working on. googleDrive allows you drive a car around on google maps, anywhere you want! It's our first google maps mashup, and was done as a bit of fun and to see if we could do it.

We have plans for future versions that will allow you to race against the clock on pre-defined circuits round London, Paris, New York, etc. We would like to do a multiuser version so you can see others driving around too, we just have to find some time!

It's even managed to find its way across the pond, and has a little article in the Wall Street Journal. Read Here.

go ahead have a drive! - googleDrive

JavaScript Frameworks

Last year saw the increase in popularity of javascript frameworks such as prototype, jQuery, Dojo, YUI, GWT, and others. These frameworks make life a lot easier for the developer, allowing for easy cross-browser scripting, extending native objects and in most cases the opportunity do to some cool effects.

Mando's framework of choice is MooTools. It's small, lightweight, compact, modular and has a healthy following. It's allowed us to develop our own library of effects and functions, some of which can be seen on one of our developer's sites: phatfusion.net.

All the interest in javascript and front-side scripting that these frameworks has raised over of the past year or so, has made the browser vendors sit up and take notice. Javascript itself it starting to get development momentum and the posibilties are starting to open up.

Let's see what 2008 has to offer!

Sometimes you're just so happy with your work...

....you simply have to show off about it - check out the case study for our award winning efforts with Mercia Partnership on Mercia World :-)

18 months, 1000's of man hours, a ground breaking concept and a truly exceptional end result...

My mother is on broadband at last!

This really is the end of an era. Last weekend I installed my mum's new broadband router and hey presto; her dial up days are over.

Over the last 3 years nearly all of us have gone from dial up to broadband and there is significant evidence that now we have broadband, we are not getting bored with the internet, but instead our usage of the internet is growing beyond most predictions. So here are just a few facts that I hope you find interesting.

1 - It took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million users, 13 years for TV, 5 years for the Internet

2 - Facebook now has over 50 million users and is growing on average at 3% per week

3 - Facebook's user base is very loyal, approximately 50% login daily

4 - Over 88% of internet connections in the UK are now broadband

5 - In 2005 in the UK, online advertising spend exceeded radio advertising spend

6 - In Q3 of 2007 Google’s advertising revenue overtook those for ITV1

7 - In May 2007, Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the Internet Advertising Bureau said "I believe online [advertising] spend could overtake TV within the next three to four years"

8 - In March 2007 in the UK there were over 38 million internet users

9 - In January 2007 5.7 million people in the UK accessed the internet from a mobile device

10 - Google is by far the fastest growing brand name in the world top 100 brands. Its recent inclusion as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary confirms what Google's competitors feared: to web users, Google means search.

More about the rise of broadband usage.

Pandora's Music Box

No, this is not a box to contain all the musical evils of the world; Daniel O'Donnell and the like. Pandora is actually a personalised internet radio service that helps you find new music based on your favourites. It is based on the research from the Music Genome Project, where musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever. They produced hundreds of musical attributes that they call 'genes' into a very large Music Genome which helps to categorise preferences in music and therefore from understanding your preferences Pandora aims to predict what you would like to listen to.

With Pandora you start your new personalised radio station by defining an artist or song. From that first choice, when the track has ended Pandora provides the next track which it provides based on similar characteristics to the first track that you chose. If you really like a track or really dislike a track you can indicate the fact to help Pandora understand your preferences and become more accurate at predicting what you would like to hear. As its bank of music is much larger than any collection that you or I could have access to, it is a fantastic way of being opened up to new music similar to music that you already like.

For legal reasons Pandora does say it is currently for US listening only; and they ask for a US ZIP code on registration, but this is still an excellent idea and one that I hope will be able to be used legally for the rest of the world soon.

Also see Video killed the radio star.

This is a call

This morning, some colleagues and I (plus another 1000 or so delegates at the Business North West Conference) listened to Dan Germain, Head Creative and co-founder of Innocent Drinks talk on the mind-blowing success of his company. They have seen a meteoric rise in sales to now well over £80m in the 8 years since they started out selling crushed fruit drinks to passers by in the park.

Dan talked in a very engaging manner about quirky PR, brand development and so on but, as with most speeches, it’s sometimes the almost throw-away comments that get you thinking further. One that stood out for me today is this: - he stated quite simply, that however good his marketing and comms are, however engaging the packaging of the product is and whatever nice things they’re doing for their staff or the world they have to keep making the best, tastiest and healthiest smoothies on the market, otherwise it doesn’t mean anything. You could tell he meant it too; he wants to make great, healthy beverages that continually delight his customers.

It made me think about Mando Group. Our ‘product’ is our people, experience, ideas, talent, creativity, technology, process and so on, but we never make the same thing twice. Every time we do a piece of work it’s different to the last. Yes, we have an ever-improving, refined approach to our work but our output and our relationships are forever changing.

And we like it like that, doing diverse work keeps you fresh. But that said; how do you then subsequently get to the point where you can confidentially say you are the best when what you do is so diverse?

So I make this call! – you! the people, readers of our web site, prospective customers, existing friends, partners and potential employees, tell me what it is, in your view, however small an idea or big a niggle, that we can do to be the best provider of web design, application and brand development services we can possibly be. Tell me how we can serve you better, how we can delight you and become your trusted partner. There may be some things we can do straight away and others we can’t or won’t for various reasons but please know that we will read and respond to everything. We are committed to continuous improvement and being less than the best is not in our plan.

You can either comment on this blog (which would be great as it might inspire other people!) or email us at open@mandogroup.com

Wireless Liverpool?

We are all about to benefit from becoming one of six BT Wireless Cities, with access to BT Openzone across Liverpool city centre. But what does this actually mean?

From what I understand*, it means, I will be able to connect my laptop or PDA to a high speed wireless BT connection in Liverpool city centre...if I am happy to pay BT for it.

So, who will this benefit? I’m finding it very difficult to work that out – the mobile worker with no office base perhaps?

A launch event is being held over the next few days at Williamson Square, maybe some of my sceptical questions will be answered and I will be made aware of the merits of this initiative.

However, with a one hour BT Openzone voucher costing £6.00, I would rather pay for a great cup of tea at my favourite city centre café which provides free Wi-fi access.

*with very limited techy knowledge and the little information I could find about wireless cities.

Online applications

A few years ago most common software applications such as word processing or preparing presentations would be installed on local machines, and most of us paid Microsoft for this privilage. However due to increasing bandwidth for the average home internet connection, there is a growing trend for applications to be provided via the web. Here are a few applications I've become aware of, some of which are available for free:

SlideRocket is a web application that provides everything you need to design professional quality presentations, manage and share libraries of slides and assets, and to deliver presentations in person or remotely over the web. Very handy!

Buzzword is an online word processing tool. It is still early days for this application but it looks good so far.

Picnik claim that 'it's the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos' - simply it is a good online image editting tool.

Check out our videos

We thought it was about time we had some fun creating video's for our own website (not just for our clients). The availability and prevalence of video on the internet has been fuelled by the popularity of community sites such as YouTube. Video clips have proved an effective internet tool for making content quickly and creatively available to your audience.

The first three videos that we have created for our website give you an insight into our trip to Barcelona, our dreams for the next 10 years and our employee of year the awards.

Enjoy!

The hand drying revolution

Whilst at the FOWA (Future of Web Apps) conference I have made an unexpected discovery; the Dyson Airblade hand drier.

At conferences hundreds of people leave a session at the break and many head for the toilets. Nobody likes queuing in toilets so here at the ExCel centre they have installed Dyson's revolutionary new design of hand drier to get people through quicker and obviously prevent queuing.

It is amazing!! It will do for hand drying what the original Dyson did for vaccum cleaning. Once you've tried it, you get frustrated with every other conventional hand drier.

All conventional driers are just like a wall mounted hairdrier, blowing hot air down on to your hands. I've generally found these fairly ineffective, and the only ones that seem to work are the ones that have a powerful motor and really blast your hands, taking about 30 seconds. Surely this is very inefficient. Dyson's approach is completely different but very obvious once you see it. Simply his system provides an open plastic box which you lower you hands into, which then blows hot air onto your hands from all directions, so that after less than 10 seconds your hands feel really dry. As well as the obvious consumer benefit, the premisis that installed the device will benefit from reduced enegy costs (Dyson say 83% less), and finally the environment benefits!

I expect that within 5 years nearly every new venue will have airblades or a similar copy installed in the toilets.

I love innovation, and I think this may be my favourite of the year so far. Dyson really understands that "Value innovation is about making the competition irrelevant by creating uncontested market space." -- W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy

So we'll be an application development company then...

..and one with a great product too!

The title of this blog might well be obvious to some of our clients who see us like this already but I guess culturally we sometimes just see ourselves as designers who happen to do web.

This, in reality, woefully undersells our corporate experience. Despite investing thousands and thousands of pounds into our technology, we just kind of treat it as a given because we're all about the design and the usability of the Interface....And rightly so as the majority of our customers are primarily interested in how their audience is going to interact with them, but, WE DO REALLY COOL TECHNOLOGY that enables this to happen!

Being at this conference has helped me realise how far ahead of the game we actually are. The Mando Group .Net platform is one of the only pieces of technology aimed at the wider market that can be used for all of the major requirements of commercial web development - publishing, e-commerce, community and integration with other systems. Time and time again, I've heard at this conference the problems start-up companies and developers have had with scaling up their products for mass use and how they needed a platform and yet here are we taking for granted that our platform can serve all these different purposes. Having built it up over time and the course of over 500 projects, what we have is actually quite awesome and a true platform in every sense of the word.

And one that all our clients benefit from as we continually try and improve it. I've also been mulling on the fact that in the last year over 50% of our work has actually been on web applications - not just our ubiquitous content management of web sites, but also applications such as financial extranets, social networking tools, online project management, e-learning, market comparison tools, e-commerce and e-procurement.

We're making cool stuff happen all the time so if you're a client or partner reading this and need a online application developing give us a call! We have the experience and technology to help! :-)

The Future of Web Apps

Five of us from Mando Group are currently delegates at a conference in London, named the 'Future of Web Apps'. We have a good cross section of the company; the MD, Head of Operations, a designer, a programmer, and a flash developer. So we are hoping that we will get some really good insights into what leading thinkers in the industry are expecting to be happening over the next couple of years. We also hope to pick up some inspiring stories of new business ideas or new technology that have made a difference in the last few months.

Firstly, I must say I feel completely nerdy as I sit in a seminar whilst writing this blog entry on a Mac Book; but I fit in, because most people are doing it. People in this industry really love Apple. Most people here have laptops and Mac Books outnumber PC laptops by a ratio of 4:1. People here also love iPods and iPhones; no surprise there.

My hightlight of today so far has been hearing Robert Kalin talk about his successful website www.etsy.com He looks 25 but talks with the maturity and clarity of someone who is 45. Throughout his 40 minute presentation he peppered his talk with points about how important it is to have values behind what you are creating; and I thought 25 year old entrepeneurs were just interested in making money?

Etsy.com is an on-line marketplace thats slogan is 'your place to buy and sell all things handmade'. I really didn't understand why people would use etsy rather than ebay until I understood the community. People who make things by hand take care in and value what they do. Therefore they also value others who do the same, and they would like to buy from people like them. Hence a market of people who don't want to mix on ebay with everyone else as they prefer the smaller and more niche area where they can buy and sell form people like them. Robert Kalin has done a number of things which has tapped into this need for community, and it works! Etsy has only been going just over 2 years, and had limited funding, but now employs 44 people and over 7000 items a day are sold through the website!

Well the session is drawing to a close and battery is a bit low on the Mac Book so I'd better sign off.

Microsoft Silverlight

Yesterday Microsoft announced the release of Silverlight 1.0. If you haven't heard about Silverlight before, it is Microsoft's attempt to rival Flash as a cross-browser plug-in for doing cool stuff on the web.

For years web developers have used Adobe's Flash technology to develop highly graphical, interactive elements for websites, and to view it you would need to download Flash player. However, now there is an alternative, some web developers will start to use Silverlight, and to view their creations you will need to download the Silverlight player to run in your browser.

So the battle has commenced and only time will tell which will come out on top.

Shortcuts to heaven

Have you ever been working on something with a colleague and noticed them hitting a key which does something immediately that would take you five mouse clicks and trawling through a number of menus? My usual response to this is "Wow - show me what you just pressed!", and once I am enlightened I have a secret mission to spread the word about this new short cut which will cut down on the dreaded mouse clicks and menu trawling that absorbs our working life. So here are some of my favourite short cuts.

- Windows M - hit the windows key and the 'M' key at the same time and all your windows that are open will be minimised leaving your desktop clear. This one also has the benefit of giving you the same feeling that you get when you've tidied your desk - but much quicker. If you want to undo the minimise just go for shift, windows, and M, all at the same time. This is very similar to Windows D - for more information on the difference see here.

- Windows L - hit the windows key and the 'L' key at the same time and your computer will be locked automatically until you enter your password to unlock it. Great to use when heading out to lunch.

- Windows E - hit the windows key and the 'E' key and Windows Explorer (to manage your folders and files) opens up.

- Windows F - to find files and folders.

- Word: Alt Shift U - do you use automatic table of contents in MS-Word? I do, and for large documents they are a life-saver automatically updating your table of contents without you having to work out page numbers etc... Anyway updating the table of contents normally takes 5 clicks, but once you've highlighted the table of contents a simple 'alt shift U' causes an update of the table of contents.

- Alt T S - whether you are in Word, Powerpoint, Outlook, or another Microsoft product spell checking is as easy as Alt T S.

- Control X and Control V - cut and paste. Very useful for moving text around documents.

- Control Z - undo - pure and simple. Wouldn't it be good if we could use this for things we've said.

- Powerpoint: B - you're running a presentation in an important meeting and your audience keep staring at your complex PowerPoint slides when you want to grab their attention. Simply hit the 'B' key and the screen is blanked, and they automatically (and almost subconsciously) adjust their focus on to you. At this point make sure you say an important line, and say it slowly with a good pause afterwards so that they don't miss!

- F2 - when in Windows Explorer and you want to rename a file or folder just highlight the file or folder name and hit F2.

- Windows R - finally for the aspiring-techies out there; get using Windows R to bring up the 'run' command.

Change is here to stay

A good friend of mine often says 'One thing is certain; change is here to stay'. Like it or lump it, change happens and it affects us all.

As a technology organisation we are very aware that how we manage change is key to our business. There are new exciting things happening all the time that drastically change the environment in which we operate. Who would have thought 5 years ago that my mother in law, and possibly yours too, would spend hours every night auctioning the contents of her loft through the internet?

As the internet develops there are so many new things out there promising to change your life; so which of them may actually live up to this grand billing? Here are my suggestions. This isn't trying to be an exhaustive list, just one that may make the less adventurous internet user try something new.

Photobox. In 2006 Nikon announced that it would stop making the majority of its film cameras. Digital photography will soon be the only from of photography for the vast majority of people. Therefore we will all need companies that produce decent prints of our digital snaps. Photobox is one such company. You simply upload your photos, choose which you wish to purchase as prints, select sizes, quantities and pay on-line. Before you know it, your photos are delivered. Even more useful is the ability to publish your on-line photo album to friends and they too can order prints.
Blogging. Nearly every corporate website has news, which gets old very quickly. I think people are more interested in what you are thinking than what your company did a few months ago. Since putting this blog on our company website we have had a significant increase in comments from clients. In fact we spent the first 10 minutes of one client meeting discussing the merits of the 'Interrobang' from them reading about it on our blog.
The iTunes music store. It only takes a second of reminiscing to download one of your favourite songs from the 80s and pop it on your iPod. You can send iTunes vouchers as presents. I recently received a voucher and spent a very pleasant half an hour scouring for old singles that I listened to as a kid but never owned.

Some of my other favorites include:

MySpace. Information, pictures and music tracks from un-signed bands through to U2.
YouTube. Millions of random videos posted by members and ranked by viewers.
Digg. Articles submitted by users are ranked by how many people 'digg' the article. Once logged in you can click to say which articles you 'digg', therefore you should never have to read a boring article again.
eBay. No matter how strange the contents of your loft, the miracle of eBay is that someone somewhere will probably pay something for it.
Freecycle. Ever just wanted to give your old stuff away? Try Freecycle; which now has over 3 million members. It is a nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free locally.

Of course we can't forget Google, the undisputed king of search engines. Google has changed the way we live life by making billions of pages of information readily available to billions of people on a daily basis. They are also constantly innovating; bringing new products to our attention. Have you tried Google Maps, Google Earth or Google Desktop?

Authenticity II

With regard my blogs last week on differentiation and authenticity I thought I would showcase our web hosting partner Rackspace as a great example of being true to their values. Rackspace have a mission statement / strapline / vision - call it what you will, of: "Dedication. Obsession. Commitment - Fanatical Support. At Rackspace, it's a way of life".

I can say, hand on heart, in dealing with them from their initial pitch to us in 2003 to their ongoing support for our dedicated network no one we have dealt has ever broken this commitment. Of course, they are not perfect, no company is nor are the cheapest by any means but in this area they are faultless - they do what they say they're going to and we value this greatly.

Is this whole social networking thing going just a bit mad?

Social networking sites seems to be going the way of voyeuristic reality TV and the endless celebrity game shows. I think they started out quite interesting but now some are just getting more and more desperate.

In the last few months of my web activity I have:

- 'digged' quite a few articles
- read countless blogs
- myspaced with the best of them
- shared my tunes with other like minded music fans
- linked in with my fellow business professionals

(all quite useful!)

- and found out who my celebrity look-a-likes are
(ok, maybe not so useful , but quite amusing)..

....but never have i found anything as pointless, ridiculous but as strangely fascinating as this www.clipboardsecrets.com a site which has people sharing what's in their computer's clipboard with the rest of humanity.

madness.

If anyone can find something more useless / odd than this or indeed has an opinion on this new generation of web sites then feel free to email me or comment below