It has been possible for some time now (since the release of Flash Player 9.0.115 in December ‘07) to play High Definition (HD) video using Flash. This is due to it’s support of the H.264 video codec (a standard for encoding videos).

However, few mainstream video websites have taken advantage of this - probably due to the larger video files that are needed and the average speed of a users broadband connection making them slow to download. That is, until recently. Back in December, YouTube announced full support for HD on their site, allowing users to upload HD videos. Then, just this week, both BBC iPlayer and the Amazon Video on Demand service announced that they are also offering an HD option.

This is great news, as web video has been tradionally dismissed due to it’s poor quality. Now with these big players adopting HD format, we can start using it for our own projects. Users will become increasingly familiar with great quality video on the web, shifting the opinion towards it.

This is also good news for the education sector, meaning they can start to put more and more video online, instead of sending out DVDs. This will make it easier (and cheaper) to deliver content to even more people.

For a while now, Becta have been trying to establish a common file format for Interactive Whiteboard content. Having spoken to both Promethean and Smart at the BETT show however, they didn’t seem to think it was a brilliant idea given that a common file format will always be the lowest common denominator across all platforms, and hence the functionality offered would be greatly reduced.

That said, Becta have now managed to sign up all of the major whiteboard manufacturers, and even have European support for the standard. Having looked through the technical specification, it does look rather limited. What it should be useful for though is making it easier to create downloadable versions of our flash content, as this is able to be embedded as a media object using the new standard, so allowing users of all IWB’s to access our activities.

All we need to do now is wait for the manufacturers to start supporting the standard, and away we go!

00:00 on Saturday 10^th January 2009 was meant to be the launch of the new site for Monster, the UKs largest jobs board. I was talking to a friend of mine online last night and they pointed me to the site where there was a countdown to the big launch. I watched the seconds tick down to midnight eagerly awaiting a great new site. Midnight came and went and the countdown was at 0 days 0 hours 0 minutes and 0 seconds and I waited, and waited and waited. No new site just a timer. I finally went to bed confused as to why the new site hadn’t launched on time. Continue reading

It’s that time of year when people reflect and project. Rather than review what has happened in 2008 I am more interested in what is going to happen next year. What will be the ‘next big thing’ and who we should be watching.

After much reading over the last couple of months I have noticed an increase in chatter about Location Based Services (LBS). This is all about providing and aggregating content that is relevant to your location. For instance you may wish to find out where the nearest cash machine is to your current location or to track friends, colleagues and even children! It can also be used by businesses to provide location-based mobile advertising (something which has been done previously with varying success with Bluecasting).

A key enabler of these new services is GPS. Previously the size and cost of GPS receivers had ruled out their use in mobile devices (a rough location could be estimated by the cell site it was connected to) but now that are almost ubiquitous in new devices on the market. And with the explosion of the GPS enabled iPhone 3G and the Apple Apps store have exposed a huge number of people to LBS and created a real buzz. T-mobile’s G1, Blackberry and touch screen Android (Google’s phone operating system) based phones are following closely behind.

Who should we be watching? There are numerous LBS’ out there with huge variations in their usefulness but the following is a pick of what I will be watching: Continue reading

During a recent marketing training day delivered by IE to attendees from not-for-profit organisations, MD Ollie Leggett made a couple of seemingly commonsensical points about the need for brands to behave with integrity. You probably don’t even need to be involved in the marketing/communications-related industries to understand that the ‘Three Cs’ – or credibility, clarity and consistency – are the life blood of the healthy brand. However it seems that sometimes even the pros let one of marketing’s golden rules slip by.

In a news item appearing in Marketing, CEO of The Partners Jim Prior provides an excellent and highly topical case study of the consequences of disjointed branding by analysing the decline of one of the long familiar faces on the high street, Woolworths. The article is worthy reading material on several levels. Even if all it does for the reader is reaffirm the need for brands to behave in a ‘joined up’ fashion, then it does this in a succinct and persuasive manner. Prior writes: ‘[Woolworths] is a proposition of authenticity, of democracy, of variety, of carefree, guilt-free indulgence… a proposition that everybody wanted but that just never got delivered against. It went unnoticed by the management of the company who, instead, pointlessly fragmented the brand into the Big W warehouse stores and a wholesale distribution business. Did anyone there have any idea what Woolworths really was?’

Prior doesn’t allow Woolworths the luxury of economic downturn as an excuse for the decline which does, granted, seem ruthless, but again he has a point. The weak spot much of the UK had for Woolies just wasn’t enough to compensate for the meagre experience of visiting a store. Do many of us actually know anyone who shops there regularly? Probably not, and there’s a reason for that. To what extent can a couple of generations’ nostalgia for pick n mix sustain a business that actually has little to offer to most shoppers?

I wouldn’t like to claim that IE’s branding experts could have saved the long-ailing Woolworths had they been brought in to do so. However I do think that in the current climate, where already-stretched businesses are competing for the few pennies their customers can afford to part with, an identity crisis – where tone of voice, visual signature and customer experience simply don’t correspond – represents a lot more than just a hindrance on the path to marketing bliss.