A term you may have heard being thrown around is cloud computing. It is used to describe something fundamental that happens to all high tech. The best definition I could find to describe this phenomenon was:

Cloud computing is a paradigm shift - a disruptive change in I.T. towards online services.

What does this mean exactly? It means the computer is undergoing commodification; it is in transition from being a product to a service. It is moving towards becoming a utility - much like electricity! Businesses will no longer sit down and talk about using IT; they’ll just be using it. In other words, IT will simply be a cost of doing business rather than being of strategic value.

The word cloud is appropriate as it is hard to pin point what stage we’re at. Clearly, if you ignore commodification, your business would be at a competitive disadvantage - you won’t have any of the gains, such as lower costs and maintenance that keep the cloud computing buzz going. For example, using Google Apps could remove the need for a start up to install and maintain Microsoft Office.

On the flip side, the risks of bringing innovative services to market are barriers to adoption. There are certainly concerns about being dependent on third parties for IT services. Recently, T-Mobile stopped production of the Sidekick mobile phone as a technical glitch in software designed by Microsoft caused around one million customers to lose their personal data. Risk management is therefore essential when using web based services, as with adopting any new technology.

Periscope, our online studio management system, is an example of a service using cloud computing. It offers a core service with no limits and no installation; it allows businesses to concentrate on creating value rather than maintaining and scaling a system. Give Periscope a whirl and benefits will soon become clear!

It was announced recently that Microsoft will continue to support Internet Explorer 6 until 2014. With an increasing demand for better looking websites, higher performance web applications and increased security, it was a major blow to web developers globally campaigning for support to be dropped. Currently, 25% of users browse the web using IE6. Whilst it’s important to know that upgrading to the latest version of Internet Explorer is free and recommended, there are still legacy systems designed specifically for this browser, which stops people from upgrading.

Legally, web applications need to be accessible by anyone using any supported agent. The continued support means that web developers will have to continue to work with IE6 whilst that meeting the high expectations that newer browsers perform with ease. No need to panic though, as our development team has been taming  the ‘IE6 beast’ for years.

Accessibility is an important thing at IE, and we maintain to make sure everyone is included.

The biggest buzz word amongst developers and users at the moment has to be location based services.  Location based services, such as the GPS in your car, are certainly nothing new. They are,  however, becoming both more popular and more useful as devices embrace the technology and users become more location aware.

Mobile phones, such as the G1 and iPhone, have recently helped to boost the production of applications and web services solely build to deliver location dependant information.  Users have also become a lot more comfortable with sharing their location using services like Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and BrightKite.

So what is the benefit for developers in knowing a user’s location? First and foremost it enriches both your application/website and the user’s experience.  Because you are using multiple parameters (i.e. geolocation, time, search query) it helps you to quickly deliver the right results, without having to inconvenience the user with unnecessary form filling.  Secondly, it helps you to run a more efficient service as only relevant data is delivered to the user.

A good example of an application that would benefit from location aware services, would be something like the yellow pages.  A user would simply be asked which service they require, and upon entering a keyword (e.g. “plumber”) they would be shown a list of nearby plumbers.

LBS (location based services) are not just restricted to the iPhone and satnav, as browsers are starting to get in on the game.  Mozilla has played with the idea in previous beta builds of their browser, Firefox, and is set to roll it out in the next version.

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!