Solid State Group Blog

Browser Stats for this site

Ben Rometsch — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:36:26 +0000

I thought it would be interesting to post the browser stats for our site. Goes to show how much a specific market segment can affect your browser statistics from the norn...

Solid State Group Develops a Visual Effects Procurement Application

Matthew Evans — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:04:18 +0000

Introduction

VFXmarketplace.com brings together the buyers and suppliers of visual effects. Set up by Emmy award winning VFX supervisor Tim Webber and Peter Horne, it offers a radical new approach to providing basic visual effects.

Visual Effects (VFX) has become an increasing element of production in the film industry. VFXMarketplace aims to enable increased specialisation within the industry, allowing buyers to focus on more complex VFX, knowing that they can call on responsive capacity when they need it.

Website

www.vfxmarketplace.com

Problem

Visual effects (VFX) has become an increasing element of production in the film industry. Each new film requires more complex VFX techniques more often which loads more work onto the already busy VFX companies. Outsourcing the less complex VFX work such as wire removal, paint and roto is commonplace in large VFX companies but this can sometimes be expensive, cumbersome and lead to poor quality or even worse, delays on client deadlines.

Peter and Tim realised that a Visual Effects procurement application could solve this problem and enable production companies to reliably outsource VFX work on a global scale.

There are many skilled individuals across the globe that can't get into the VFX market because they aren’t well known, or don't live in the right location. There are many Buyers who wish to outsource some of their basic Visual Effects work for a competitive price to reliable and accredited suppliers in return for work of excellent quality.

The aim of VFXmarketplace.com is to cater for these individuals and buyers, providing the most skilled and reliable artists with work at the best price, and a database of suppliers who meet the Buyers requirements.

Solution

Peter and Tim came to Solid State Group with the concept and after carefully analysing the requirements; Solid State Group proposed a Sugar Cube powered solution with bespoke Dutch auction and profile functionality.

The solution used Sugar Cubes Media Management capabilities to allow the buyer to upload VFX work in lots, with each lot having requirements, instructions and most importantly the digital assets in varying formats. For a supplier to bid on a piece of work, it was important that they could view a sample of the work required (on video) with more information (in the form of text and/or images) associated with the video, to give them a clear idea of what they were bidding on.

A Dutch type auction engine was required to allow the supplier to competitively bid on work they are interested in with the buyer having the final say on which supplier to select based on final price and supplier rating.

The system also allows the Buyers to manage their users and projects, to give them full control over the work they’re outsourcing and the workflow once they accept a bid. The flexibility of the Sugar Cube platform allowed Solid State Group to easily integrate these bespoke requirements into the application.

The application has two core areas; management of digital assets (mainly video) and an auction engine. Leveraging the Sugar Cube Digital Asset Management system, a large proportion of the asset management requirements were solved without an additional line of code being written. Aspects such as user management, fine-grained security, content ingestion and the serving of large video files were provided out of the box.

The auction engine was then written as a bespoke component to complement the Sugar Cube platform.

There are 4 areas of the site: Public, Admin, Buyer and Supplier

Public

The public area of the site is accessible to all users informing them of how the site works and allowing them to register as a Buyer or Supplier.

Admin

The Admin area is only accessible to the VFXmarketplace administrators, where they are able to content manage parts of the site, administer Buyers and Suppliers, and export data.

Supplier

Once registered and accredited, the supplier can find Visual Effects work they are accredited for and bid on these. The site allows them to keep track of their bids and notifies them when they have been outbid by another Supplier, allowing them to change their bid. They can also watch items and track items they have worked on.

Buyer

The Buyer can add projects, upload their requirements and set parameters for the supplier’s bids to be restricted to. They can then manage their items that are in the bidding stage, work in progress stage and completed stage.

Projects and Users can be created and managed in the respective areas. Allowing buyers to tag and assign users of different levels of access to the projects. Users can also be removed from projects and set different roles.

Results

VFXmarketplace.com has been able to introduce Visual Effects artists from around the globe to the market through its unique auction functionality. Suppliers now have their own quality ratings from multiple Buyers based on the quality of the work for all the completed jobs.

Suppliers and freelance artists love the site – as they can access work on a flexible basis. Buyers enjoy great quality work at low prices – with tailored security.

The Sugar Cube powered solution has enabled VFX Marketplace to launch quickly and on a low budget which is crucial for any start-up company looking to capture market share.

Solid State group worked with the VFXmarketplace team, to ensure that the working site was up and running within 3 months of it being commissioned.

As VFXmarketplace has grown, Solid State group have supported the business through strategy, consultancy, design and development of additional functionality.

“I enjoy working with the team at Solid Stage Group - they are not only great at delivering on time to budget, but bring a creative approach to making it happen. They take the time to understand the business goals, and build the technology solution to match those needs.”

Peter Horne, Managing Director VFXMarketplace.com

About Solid State Group

Solid State Group is a web platform software vendor and technical agency. The company specialises in solutions for managing web content and digital assets as well as social networking. Our products enable the rapid development of web sites and applications on proven and stable architecture. We also develop bespoke web applications from scratch and offer a full service solution including strategy, design, usability, SEO, and integration into third party systems.

The company has developed over 100 web projects since 2002 and complexity ranges from simple brochure websites to complex social networks, intranets, payment processing portals and eBay style ecommerce sites.

Our client list consists of blue-chip, public sector, SME and not for profit organisations. Blue chip clients include Shell, Disney, 20th Century Fox, Sony, Yahoo! and Ericsson. Other clients include NHS, Amnesty International, Brit Awards, Odeon and i-level. For more information please visit www.solidstategroup.com or call +44 (0) 207 613 7220.

Shell

Dilara Begum — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:27:40 +0000

Introduction

Solution Partner, Digitas, introduced Solid State Group to the Shell Group as a technology partner on the microsite, ‘Shell Dialogues’. The site was created to provide an on-line presence for Shell to enter into a dialogue with the public on a number of important subjects.

Shell Dialogues Website

Website

http://www.shelldialogues.com

Background

With the launch of Tell Shell back in 1998, Shell was one of the first large, global corporations to actively invite people to post questions about their industry.

Shell wanted an upgrade to the dialogues site where members of the public could ask questions, download reports and engage with an active community on the shell site. This centered around the annual release of the Shell environmental and sustainability report.

Objectives

Promote accessible and interactive debate
Enable user generation and ranking of dialogue to draw public in
Allow members of the public to ask questions and leave feedback about the report.
Enable the report to reach more people through more channels.

Solution

Solid State Group built a custom interface to Cookie Jar CMS that was tailored to Shell’s workflow process. The system allowed users to ask questions about the report and general policy on the environment and sustainability.

Shell could choose and then publish the 10 most relevant questions to topics that were being raised. These questions and answers were then rated by public users on a scale of 1 to 10. Content tags, tag clouds and RSS provided alternative methods of accessing the dialogues.

Fig 2 – Shell Dialogues tag cloud

Cookie Jar then processed those questions into a carefully thought out moderation workflow. Some questions were answered in an online debate streamed live from the website, some questions were answered in text on the website, others were answered direct in email and others were unsuitable for answering.

Cookie Jar CMS was integrated with data from shell.com to pull in content already in use on their main website. The shell.com site, built on Interwoven’s TeamSite CMS, shared videos and documents that were all tagged in Cookie Jar and displayed alongside relevant content.

Results

The dialogues website was well utilized by the public and the system processed hundreds of questions which were moderated and answered online. Shell were able to display a willingness to discuss matters of the environment, something oil companies have traditionally had problems with. They were also able to moderate and control the discussion so activists couldn’t use it as a tool for anti PR.

Shell were extremely pleased with the outcome.

About Solid State Group

Our client list consists of blue-chip, public sector, SME and not for profit organisations. Blue chip clients include Shell, Disney, 20th Century Fox, Sony, Yahoo! and Ericsson. Other clients include NHS, Amnesty International, Brit Awards, Odeon and i-level. For more information please visit www.solidstategroup.com or call 0845 838 2163.

Cookie Jar 7 launches

Matthew Evans — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:49:50 +0000

We're finally releasing Cookie Jar 7, the latest version of our content management system, and to celebrate we are giving away 5 of our precious Google Wave invites.

It's been a long time coming, but we are now releasing version 7 of Cookie Jar which has a number of upgrades including:

Redesigned, intuitive user interface with many UI issues addressed
Universal content search
In context editing
Content from email
Email distribution lists
Performance increases

We are already using Cookie Jar 7 to implement a number of projects including a cutting edge intranet and knowledge management system which integrates completely with Google Apps.

We've spent a lot of time playing with Google products and this will be the first time we have integrated Cookie Jar so completely with the Google platform. We have designed the new intranet to pull tagged information from Google mail, Google calendar, Google documents, Google chat and shared Google contact list. The intranet will have a universal search that will pull back all content from the entire system through a federated search and present the results on the Cookie Jar powered website.

We've also been playing with Google Wave to make sure that when they are ready, they can move the entire system over to Google Wave quickly and easily.

If you do have a wave account, check out our Nathan Barley tea bot. Just add nathanbarleyteabot@appspot.com to your wave and he will periodically pick out people in the wave to make tea, in his unique colourful language.

It's a one of a kind cutting edge project, and we can't say who the client is just yet, but we can give out 5 of our Google Wave invites over 5 days to celebrate the launch of Cookie Jar 7 and this new intranet project.

If you want to grab one, simply tweet “@solidstategroup launches Cookie Jar 7 and is giving away 5 Google wave invites. ReTweet and follow for a chance to win http://bit.ly/IUkbl” and follow us on Twitter.

We will be handing out one invite on each day from the 26th to the 30th of October, and will notify lucky recipients by twitter at the end of each day.

Google Wave - Hit or Miss?

Ben Rometsch — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:15:13 +0100

I actually feel that there is going to be a collective feeling of anti-climax within the community when people start using the application in earnest. Over the last few months of working with it, I really do feel that it is a solution looking for a problem.

Who's better?
It can't decide which paradigm is right - Email or Instant Message, and as a result it does neither well. Some people will consider it in the same bracket as IM, leaving the window open and using it to chat, whereas others will manage it like email, opening it periodically.

There's nothing worse than trying to chat to someone over IM and having to wait ages and ages for their reply. Conversely, If you try and use Wave as a replacement to email, it becomes a constant source of interruption. If you try and use it to replace IM, you might get frustrated that the people using it more like email don't reply in a timely manner.

If I send someone an IM or SMS, the social protocol for this sort of communication is that I want a short reply, quickly. If I email someone, they are right to infer that I don't need a reply right away, but when I get one I expect it to be well thought through. These are silent, unspecified codes of conduct that have been built around their respective methods of communication, and they work.

The problem with Wave is that there is no way of implicitly communicating this in a wave. As a result you get the worst of both worlds, since there's no appropriate code of conduct that everyone understands.

The 'feature' of seeing people type, letter by letter, is also a completely new concept, and one that I really don't think people will like. How many times have you typed something rash in an IM window, only to reconsider, delete and retype the message? Well, you won't be doing that any more.

Heavy Client
The front end to wave is very, very heavy. It demands a browser with an advanced javascript interpreter. It also needs a lot of screen real estate. You want to use it on your mobile, or on a 7" netbook screen? Good luck with that. No chance of anything approaching a reasonable user experience. The rich nature of the wave's themselves will translate poorly onto a mobile device. No doubt all the extensions will break on an iPhone.

Then there are all the non-standard user interface widgets and paradigms. The scroll bars that don't work like regular scroll bars; you can't infer the size of the list by the size of the scroll bar, and it scrolls in message chunks as opposed to using a standard linear method that every other application on my Mac uses. The scroll bars don't take up the entire right hand column of the window they are bound to, do you have to click and drag them. I have no idea why they made this design decision.

Right click doesn't do anything contextual, yet the interface is crying out for contextual right click functionality.

The interface does not maintain state between sessions, so if you minimise a message and then log out, it's not there as a minimised message when you log back in.

Being a web application, there isn't any deep desktop integration. There's no "number of unread messages" in your tray/dock. No growl/bubble/audio alerts when someone types something but the window is minimised. No doubt someone will hack some sort of site specific browser together for this, but for now, we're stuck with this.

As I said before, ironically I feel that Wave would really benefit from a proper desktop client. A lot of these problems would go away with a proper desktop client.

Performance
The server aspects of wave are really slow. I searched with:public in Wave (to find public waves. Obvious? of course not...) about 5 minutes ago, and it is still searching for the messages. At the moment it's trying to retrieve 39 messages, but it's 5 minutes later and I'm still waiting.

We wrote a robot for the developer preview. At the moment robots have to be hosted on Google AppEngine. Within the developer preview of wave things were nice and speedy, but now I'm waiting minutes for my robot to respond to a message that I send.

All very un-Googley.

Where's the SMTP?
It doesn't yet have an SMTP/IMAP bridge. That means that I can't use it as my email client. I think this is going to be crucial, otherwise it's just going to be another thing that I have to worry about keeping on top of. I am already tracking email, SMS, Twitter, RSS, IM and IRC traffic at work. Do I really need another thing to worry about?

In conclusion
Well, here's hoping I don't read this post in 3 years time, cringing as I fire up Wave before I read my email, RSS feeds etc. etc! Predicting whether this sort of thing is going to take off is extremely difficult, but my gut feel is that it will, at best, become a niche forgotten about Google product. Google Base...Google Video...Google Wave?

Blog by email

Matthew Evans — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:16:49 +0100

Over the coming months I plan to blog about various upgrades we are doing to our products. In this post I'm going to explain a little about the incoming email functionality we have added to the latest version of Cookie Jar.

Cookie Jar 7 now has the ability to accept incoming email, check it's mailboxes for various patterns and process the email content based on preset configuration in the CMS.
Let's say for example that you want to be able to blog to your site from your email. First you setup the connection details to the email server you want to check.

Then you setup the mailbox you want to accept incoming mail and point it to a content folder that you want to accept the content from the email.

Then you simply send an email to blog@solidstategroup.com with the content you want to appear on the blog and Cookie Jar will check the email inbox and read the content in the email and save it as a new blog article. Easy as pie.

There are also options to redistribute the email to members of one of the user groups in Cookie Jar which is pretty handy if you want to setup an email list for your clients and have all the conversations automatically tracked and made available on a secure area of the website.

I'll be blogging about some of the cool ways we are using this feature in the future, so stay tuned.

The problems with @font-face

Ben Rometsch — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:32:48 +0100

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about a comparison between sIFR, Cufon and @font-face, and yesterday, amongst the current on-line chatter about @font-face, we came across an excellent post by Steve Souders about the performance of @font-face.

According to Sounders, if the font takes a while to download from the host server then, in some way or another, none of the browsers will handle this elegantly:

Firefox intelligently renders the text in the default font first, and then re-renders once it's loaded. Clever it may be, but annoying as the text will change half way through reading it. If the font is a different size then other elements in the page might jump down too.
Alarmingly, on the other end of the spectrum, Internet Explorer won't render any of the page at all until the font is downloaded - and who waits around for a blank page?

To me, this supports the conclusion that we came to in our comparison; whilst @font-face is an excellent idea, and will be commonly used one day, it's just too much of a hassle to implement at the moment. Cufon is still getting our thumbs up using the canvas element (and VML in IE).

In fact, of all the 'new' elements in HTML5, it's the canvas element that I find the most exciting. Take a look this blog post by AjaxIan. Someone made a comment on the post and said this was a 'ridiculous notion' - personally I think it's going to open up a new world of UI opportunities. Watch this space!

India gets online

Dilara Begum — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:43:59 +0000

Yahoo! have just taken out an expensive press ad in India that made headlines in its own right. In a field where I have an uneducated stereotyped view and consider Indian web maturity to be low and penetration to be tiny. This made me think and do some Monday-web-surfing-in-the-name-of-research. And I am glad I did.

As of the end of August ’09, broadband penetration rates were roughly 0.46% - not a lot. In numbers, that’s about 6.98million people – source TRAI.com. Not that exciting. Oh, and that’s an increase of 2.7% of from June – a steady growth rate. That’s quite a bit for a month.

That’s broadband.

Looking at overall web penetration, the ITU reckons that in 2008 only 7% of the population were connected…that’s an incredible 81million users. Er, wow.

The numbers themselves are staggering, but it’s the growth rates that are the real treasure here. In a previous life at Hutchison Telecom in the guise of Head of Online, I remember talking to the Marketing Director at Hutch India and the problems he had. Number 1 was scale; they were acquiring 750,000 new customers a month! Their infrastructure couldn’t cope – every part had to be upgraded on a monthly basis. Number 2 was that only 2% of the population has a bank account.

…3 years later and the total figure for phones is still rising dramatically:

Telephone subscribers August ’09 494.07million

Growth rate from July ’09 3.13%

= 15 million new customers in one month!

Source TRAI.com

If you want to go and compare this to our puny attempts either I the UK or in Europe, go here and prepare to be underwhelmed.

In terms of the conclusion to this article, there are too many to digital ones to draw so I will leave it up to you. The one thing I would advise is to keep an eye on the emerging digital markets, where there is an explosive market, there will be exciting things happening.

Real Time Content

Matthew Evans — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:32:39 +0100

It’s not just about Twitter, although it has had a large part to play in all of this. People simply won’t adopt a technology until a society is ready for it (think scale, emotion and price availability), and one piece of software isn’t enough. This is a fundamental issue, just ask anyone building a new market. In terms of real-time content, it seems we are absolutely ready.

What does this really mean though? Looking at it bluntly, there aren’t many services that work reciprocally in real-time. It’s not as if we are all plugged into trading systems to make a living. We don’t need to be absolutely informed at all times.

The best way to look at this is by translating ‘real time content’ into ‘up-to-date content’ and in a bigger and better world, ‘latest’ is a hot commodity. Breaking news stories, knowing more than your competitor sooner makes you better. Translate this to real people and their almost limitless ability to communicate – even on the go – and you have the same thing; a desire to be noticed, to be better and not to be left behind.

Does it serve any real purpose though? Well, in parts yes. The difference really comes in the type of information, or service, you are peddling. If you take real-time train and bus information (a service) as an example, you have your answer. Additionally, customers expect to be able to make a decision about the best restaurant/play/movie/game instantly. Everything is now available at all times.

Real-time content is here to stay and it will soon become the standard and not always because it is relevant, but simply because it is a societal function. This is the key for all website owners; accept this as a basic requirement and you will be fine. The sooner you do this, the better…

The power of content

Phil Mudd — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:03:42 +0100

I thought our Feedburner graph was worth sharing. What with all the 'old school' content providers fumbling with the idea of charging for content, it's hard for us to quantify the value of this blog. Do we win extra business from it? Hard to say. Do we get any ROI from the time we spend writing it? Again, I'd be surprised if we do, but I can't be sure.

That being said, based on the graph it's clear that some people find the content interesting enough to subscribe to the RSS feed. You can't put a price on a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Turning an ATL campaign digital

Matthew Evans — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:31:36 +0100

At least once a year for the last 12 years I have worked on squeezing some kind of TV ad online. From basic ‘micro-sites’ with a few screen savers and other downloads to a fully managed, pan-European digital campaign. At every stage it has been difficult simply because the two environments are so different in terms of audience participation, internal attention, budgets and production to name the big ones. I am leaving the whole rights issue out of this debate for sanity reasons.

A new campaign usually starts with the Communications teams, who brief the lead agency and ask for a response. TV advertising is the norm for the big boys and so a TV focused idea is born and carried. The rest of the campaign is then usually built from this point onwards (ad sign off) by individuals. In order of priority, this is what you should be doing when things start to happen. The first rule is the most important.

Get involved as early as possible

The sooner you get involved, the easier it will be in the long run. Hear something is happening, go find out and start contributing. This gives you more time to act

View the TV ad as a snapshot of a story and find the key idea

Look at the characters, the story and move around it to find a suitable hook if there isn’t one already. I always look at the TV ad as the trailer with every avenue and option open to use around the key idea or theme. Always remember to keep any spin-off relevant to the key idea

Does the ad make a point or have an opinion

This is relevant, because it will define and drive any community based discussion. Without it, you don’t have a ‘real’ conversation, at least not one people are interested in. TV ads by their virtue tend to lean towards the aesthetic so don’t always rely on them for the opinion

Then find your voice

It’s not always the case, but you might want to take a side and defend it. Some people will be on your side, others won’t…this is good for conversation and you should facilitate the debate. Sometimes you can get away with being the mediator. In either case, you have to create the stimulus for both sides

Is there a creative element involved

Galleries and uploads are common responses to any digital marketing brief, but they are dangerous. Don’t expect people to love your idea and make sure that as a minimum you match the complexity of the ‘ask’ to the quality of the reward. Additionally, uploads will be slow so be prepared to make gallery assets yourself right from the start – include a mix of ‘good’ and ‘filler’ content

Assets

How many markets are you covering? Do you need to be at the shoot (additional film/camera teams)? What are you building online and are these requirements briefed into the schedule? What are your detailed specific requirements? Detail, detail, detail – you often won’t get a second chance

Take a risk

Overall you will have two jobs; first to get bums on seats and meet your objectives – aka nice CTR’s/Coversion/Sakes and other internally viable numbers. The second is about execution and I would recommend you allocate a small percentage of your budget for a risk or two. Do something off the wall, give your agencies a long leash, but lead any development. If it works you win big and you will get extra budget. If it doesn’t your main budget sorts out your objectives and you are seen as a ‘creative do’er’

There is a lot of ‘you’ in the above and I really can’t stress this enough; bring something of yourself to every project and do it. In traditional media environments, ATL is still king and that’s something you will have to work with. The digital side will be yours to own and all the great young talent sits in digital and most of these will love anything risky. Use this energy, as a minimum this will flow over into the main project work.

How to choose a digital agency

Matthew Evans — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:37:44 +0100

The NMA have just sent me an £110 ‘invite’ to a half day conference to help me learn how to choose a digital agency. ‘The traditional divides…are coming down’ I am told, and the agencies themselves agree as they have received an increase ‘in strategic briefs’. All in all it seems, the client is getting less able and agencies are very clever.

As a life-long client – up until this year – I find this a bit patronising. Rather than rant I am going to give you tips, from a client rather than a media owner in partnership with an agency (yep, they are sponsored by a digital agency).

1. Get your internal selection team together

A mixed bag is needed here, it lends perspective and depth, look at no more than 3 core people with one ‘sponsor’ who will add weight to the process and – once appointed – the agency itself. Be mixed and varied in your selection, focus on opinion and projects delivered, and most of all don’t be afraid to choose someone random; someone very junior, someone from finance, a creative…you are after breadth

2. Choose and agency who has an opinion

Whether it’s right or wrong, at least you have a discussion. Discussions mean you have to focus and think more. In a time poor client space, this is the most valuable thing you can accrue. It keeps you on your toes, teaches you to listen and above all it means you learn

3. Choose someone you get on with

If you don’t like them, any discussion will be hampered by Ego and Self. This is important to remember post-pitch too; don’t be afraid to ask for people to be changed. The old relationship rule, beauty is only skin deep

4. Choose someone who compliments your drive

If you want to allocate budget and talk nothing but CTR’s and ROI then go for a big player. They will get you column inches and results as well as fine dining and good parties. If you want personal investment and service without boundaries, choose a smaller, hungry agency – maybe even a start up. Breadth is not an issue as this kind of agency will go from learn to expert in a matter of days

5. Add a structure

The above 4 points are where you should start, they are the things that make it happen and work. To bring them together – and to tick some formal / legal boxes – you need a structure. Have a calendar or events, book meeting rooms, create a selection criteria sheet for your selection team and schedule review meetings

6. Be in charge

It’s about you, your daily work and your reputation. You hold the casting vote, use it and be clear that you are in charge

There, I’ve just saved you £110 and the embarrassment of having to go an agency sponsored event about choosing an agency. All delivered without an annoyingly cheap goodie bag…

TV ads are still on the list

Paul Masek — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:55:09 +0000

TV advertising has always been there in my career, with me the digital guy there to make the internet version. Outside of this, I generally like TV ads too and have witnessed their effectiveness first hand on many occasions. Just look at the online noise that ads create, the worst ones fair better it seems.

This list though has nothing to do with ad effectiveness, rather more ad appeal. That’s ‘ad’ as an individual thing and not a campaign. I have tried to keep these current, nothing more than a year or so old. They are in no order, some I love, others I hate, but all have a marketing reason for being on the list.

Tesco ‘Unlimited’ – really, really highlights the way things are sold to us. The real irony is that Tesco are trying to sell us something, but you forgive them because you like their message. A sale is a sale is a sale…

Cash My Gold – A parody of rich people excitedly running around their mansion looking for gold to sell to a random stranger at a below market price. Compare this to a profile of their real customer and you can’t help be annoyed. Probably works though

Alpen ‘We know you know’ – attractive women in 80’s cut bathing costumes limbering up in suggestive posses. Narrated by a husky voiced puma who tells us this is sexist and shows a nano-second of hunky men. I like the ad for all the wrong reasons, but know I shouldn’t

Autoglass ‘Speed Bump’ – this is probably the most honest ad on the TV at the moment, it is selling something but can afford to be really honest as it’s selling a mostly ‘free’ product

D&G Anthology – can’t even be bothered to go into this one and how much it offends me. It’s like all the others…in fact, just watch this parody and laugh. Oh, it probably cost a fortune with a capital $$$$$$

That is the end of my self indulgent run through of TV ads.

P.S. If you want to see the Mel Sykes Boddingtons ad just click

A comparison between sIFR, Cufon and @font-face

Giles Cambray — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:51:59 +0100

Every now and again we at Solid State like to review the current trends in dynamic text replacement techniques; getting text on a web-page in a non 'web safe' font.

Traditionally, 4 years ago, if you really, really needed to use a particular non web-safe font, you would have had to use an image instead, alongside a CSS technique like one of these. This is an approach that is still widely used due to the fact that it's easy, SEO friendly and relatively fast to render, providing you use CSS sprites.

For static web sites this worked well, up until the text needed changing, creating the tiresome process of starting Photoshop whenever a website required an edit, creating the new heading, uploading it and proofing it. A content management system vendor, such as ourselves, is always on the lookout for a better solution.

The three options below represent the current state of the art. Unfortunately none of them are clear winners in terms of overall functionality. Like most things in web development, it's a compromise; chose the right tool for the task in hand.

sIFR

Back in around 2005, sIFR appeared, and everybody thought it was going to change everything. It did, sort of. Beautiful, SEO friendly, dynamic text was now possible, but it was slow to render on the page, created complications using AJAX, and despite what the documentation suggested, was a nightmare to implement with links and navigational elements. Oh - and Flash was required too. And so it is for these reasons why most web-developers wince slightly whenever the technique is mentioned. In fact, even though the 3rd version of SIFR is a little better than its original incarnation, I'm grimacing a little as I write this...

Cufon

In an attempt to tackle sIFR's shortcomings, a clever guy called Simo Kinnunen came up with Cufon - a JavaScript rendering engine that made use of VML in Internet Explorer, and the HTML5 <canvas> element in other browsers, to render custom fonts. It doesn't need Flash, it's faster to render than sIFR and from what I can see from it's demos page, it's suitable for navigation too. My colleague Paul (@paulmasek), has just started a project using it, so I'm sure we'll be talking about it soon. Watch this space.

The main drawback with Cufon is that you can't select the rendered text as you can in sIFR. If the user wants to select it in order to copy it somewhere else, they are going to end up confused. Interestingly, it is worth mentioning Typeface.js, which works in a similar manner to Cufon. If you are happy to sacrifice a little rendering performance, it is possible to select the text rendered with Typeface, though it has to be said it did work quite slowly when we tested it.

@font-face

Whilst these techniques are great in providing credible solutions to the lack of available fonts to web designers, it does suggest that there should be a better solution; one that wouldn't require messing around with JavaScript and Flash. After all, other fonts can be specified in the regular CSS 'font-family' property, but there is no guarantee of their installation on users' computers.

@font-face is a css technique that has actually been around for a while; it was first defined in the CSS 2.1 specification. It allows a font to be hosted on a web server and referenced within a web page, creating the 'perfect' solution to this issue.

Well, almost! Apart from the thorny issue of font copyright that needs to be dealt with, together with increased page loading times due to the download of the font file itself, there is something of a show stopper to this technique.

Unsurprising, it's Internet Explorer that causes us the grief. Not that IE doesn't support this CSS property - in fact IE4 was the first browser to do so back in the dark ages. But to this day it only supports @font-face using an Embedded Open Type (.eot) font, which would be fine, but for the fact that creating one of these involves the most unnecessary and laborious process using Microsoft's WEFT tool, which is where most people give up. And to be honest, so did we.

And the winner is...

So, to summarize:

	Images with text replacement	sIFR	Cufon	@font-face
Dynamic Text	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Browser compatibility	All modern browsers, inc IE6	All modern browsers, inc IE6	All modern browsers, inc IE6	Limited support in IE
Needs plugin	No	Yes (Flash)	No	No
Rendering speed	Fast	Slow	Fast	Fast
Selectable text	No	Yes	No	Yes
Relative ease of implementation	Easy	Difficult	So-so	Easy
Suitable for hyperlinks	Yes	Eventually	Yes	Yes

My opinion remains that we should still try and use web safe fonts, certainly for main text blocks. For static headings (for example sidebars and panels) I still think CSS image text replacement, cunningly crafted with CSS sprites, is still the optimum technique, especially in a world where JavaScript heavy sites are becoming more common. In instances where we do need dynamic text, providing it's using sparingly I'm tempted to go with Cufon; it is relatively easy to implement and has provided us with some good results so far.

I would love to say otherwise, but regardless of the hype that @font-face seems to be generating at the moment, I can't see it's widespread adoption happening any time soon. Microsoft still needs to resolve the font DRM issue, so it can allow more common font types. It might seem a while off, but together with every other web developer out there, I can't wait for that day to arrive!

Run to the beat

Matthew Evans — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:18:08 +0100

This Sunday Mike Wilcox, David Hemmings and Paul Chenery all ran in the Sony Ericsson run to the beat half marathon in Greenwich.

Hemmings was the fastest with a scorching time of 1 hour, 40 minutes, 7 seconds, Chenery, the dark horse, put in an extremely decent 1 hour, 44 minutes, 11 seconds, and Mike came in with a most triumphant 1 hour 52 minutes dead.

Of course we had to offset the healthy activities with all day support drinking, just to maintain the chi of the universe. Well done guys, some good effort and a lot of good money donated to charity.

TFTP, CTCP and Big Panet

Matthew Evans — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:18:16 +0100

After arriving home on Friday night Luca sprints round the corner of the corridor, sees me and shouts "Big Panet!" He's 2 years old and is apparently already addicted to my PS3 and the game "Little Big Planet". I don't blame him, it is a lot of fun, even if he can't actually control the characters yet.

So I boot up the PS3 and start the game, however on this occassion it required a game update to be downloaded from the PS3 network. So I reluctantly start the download to update the game, knowing there is a good chance it will fail, which it does, and takes down my router and therefore Internet access to the other devices using it (much to Amelia’s annoyance).

After a bit of research it seems that downloading game updates from the Playstation Network uses some ports that cause my router to think it’s being attacked with a Denial of Service (DOS) attack and therefore blocks access and also crashes the router. It’s a Linksys WRT54G router and is a pretty popular device. So popular in fact that there are open source projects which replace the default firmware with Linux based upgraded firmware which unlocks new features and most importantly is more stable. Details of the open source project are available on the DD-WRT website. My router is a WRT54G v5 which is apparently one of the worst to upgrade but there is a handy guide on the WRTrouters site for upgrading it.

Edit: Ben recommends this firmware from polarcloud as he has been running it for some time.

I quickly scan the guide and it seems simple enough, it basically has the following steps:

1. Use the router web interface to upload a file that scrubs the current firmware from the router. Once you do this, it’s gone for good so you need to make SURE you can upgrade or restore from here on in. It also loads in a program with a web interface for uploading new firmware. Powercycle the router.

2. Use the new interface to load in some basic Linux firware which will allow access via TFTP. Powercycle the router.

3. Use a TFTP client to FTP the new firmware up into the new Linux based router. Powercycle the router.

4. Enjoy a cold beverage and a new router web interface with more stability and features.

It looks simple enough, I’m fairly used to upgrading firmware and I’ve searched the forums and most people says this tutorial works for them, so I feel confident that it will all be ok.

So with Luca running round my ankles still chanting the mantra “Big Panet, Big Panet”, I do the first step and blow my current router settings into space. I then do the second step through the new web interface, so far so good. Then I use a TFTP gui program to upload the linux firmware in the third step but as sods law dictates, it doesn’t work. The upload times out as if the router hasn’t got a TFTP server running. I try this about 10 times but it’s not working, and now I can’t get on the net to do any research. I’m getting a ping from 192.168.1.1 so I know the router is at least alive and the network settings are ok.

After about 30 mins of searching on my Android phone, I find a post that says the TFTP client won't work with Vista or windows 7! Bah!!! I’ve got 3 machines in the flat and they all run Vista. Apparently Windows Vista and Window 7 use CTCP (Compound TCP) which speeds up standard TCP communication but won’t catch the small window that the TFTP client needs to connect. It’s too fast and needs delaying. I spent a few hours trying to manufacture interrupts, but in the end I decided to nip round to Hans’ house and use his little netbook which runs Windows XP to copy over the Linux firmware and finish the upgrade.

So if any of you out there are considering upgrading firmware to a Linksys WRT54G, or any other router, or indeed any device that requires an update via TFTP, think twice before starting the procedure because Vista and Windows 7 don’t play well with TFTP.

I now have a much more reliable router, my PS3 connects faultlessly and download games updates and I’ve got new features to enable more wireless options like signal boosting and chaining and I have a 2 year old who is content for about another 5 mins.

ICMM

Dilara Begum — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:31:50 +0100

Introduction

The International Council of Mining and Metals (ICMM) is a CEO-led organization representing many of the world's leading mining and metals companies as well as regional, national and commodity associations.

ICMM Website Homepage

Website

www.icmm.com

Background

During 2007 Solid State Group, alongside partner agency Bostock and Pollitt were commissioned to produce the new website for ICMM. As part of this project the website was built on the Cookie Jar content management system. Solid State Group handled the technical aspects of the project, whilst Bostock and Pollitt delivered the branding and design.

Objectives

Develop a website with cutting edge design, reflecting the new ICMM branding.
Build a modular, scalable set of page elements that can be organized by the content managers.
Provide the platform to deliver Intranet, Extranet and CRM solutions in further phases of work.
Include multi-lingual aspects including UTF-8 character sett.
Incorporate an existing document library consisting of a large number of electronic documents including meta data and related content.

Solution

Working in partnership with Bostock and Pollitt, the solution provided best-of-breed content management with a modern design. Bostock and Pollitt provided all the creative expertise, handing over the technical build of the project to Solid State Group.

The site makes use of a set of modular of page components that can be included and managed on a per-page basis. Page modules are intelligent and context based, and includes content relevant to the page that they appear within.

ICMM are also using the Cookie Jar platform to manage their email database and send out regular newsletters to members.

The ICMM website is produced to the highest web standards validating to XHTML 1.1 and is optimised for excellent search engine rankings.

Fig 2 – ICMM Website – Our Work

Results

The ICMM website was very well received at launch, and has continued to be popular with members of the organisation as well as with employees. The solution has enabled the communications team within ICMM to manage the content on the site without any additional assistance.

The site launch was phase 1 of a multi-phase project. An Extranet and Intranet have already been implemented, and a Knowledge Management System with deep integration into Google Apps is currently in development.

ICMM have also benefited from product updates with the CMS platform, and have driven the development of product features with their requirements.

About Solid State Group

The Cloud

Dilara Begum — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:23:28 +0100

Introduction

Founded in 2003, The Cloud has evolved from an indoor hotspot provider into the number one wireless broadband network in Europe.

In addition to thousands of indoor locations, they also provide extensive outdoor coverage in cities like Amsterdam, Stuttgart and The City of London. The Cloud has already expanded to Germany, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway.

The Cloud Website Homepage

Website

http://www.thecloud.net

Background

During 2007 Solid State Group, alongside partner agency Bostock and Pollitt were commissioned to produce the new, multi-lingual website for The Cloud. As part of this project the website was built on the Cookie Jar content management system. Solid State Group handled the technical aspects of the project, whilst Bostock and Pollitt delivered the branding and design.

Objectives

Develop a website with cutting edge design, reflecting the new branding for The Cloud.
Provide a multi-lingual site that is translated from English to both German and Swedish.
Build a modular, scalable set of page elements that can be organized by the content managers.
Integrate with third party data providers for hotspot location services.

Solution

Fig 2 – The Cloud Website – Subscriptions

Results

The solution enables the Cloud to manage the content on their site, be it English, German or Swedish, without the involvement of a third party. They can also ensure that their marketing messages are up to date; an important aspect given the first-moving nature of the market that the company operates in.

The Cloud have recently made some big press announcements, including tie-ins with the Apple iPhone and McDonalds Wifi. Such announcements ensure a flood of traffic to their website. The CMS solution has been built with performance and scalability in mind, allowing the site to deal with this traffic without interruption.

About Solid State Group

Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios

Dilara Begum — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:53:45 +0000

Background

SCE (Sony Computer Entertainment) which owns 14 software development studios spread out over Europe, Asia and North America, has grown organically and by acquisition since SCE’s inception in 1993. On September 14^th 2005 SCE WWS (Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios) was formed as a single entity overseeing all wholly owned development studios within SCE.

While a lot of the individual studios have their own websites, others do not. Without an SCE WWS umbrella site there was a potential for missing countless opportunities, especially when recruiting talent and identifying business partners.

The SCE WWS site concept was put forward to address these issues, providing a channel that will engage potential talent and partners, providing information and contacts for the SCE WWS team and their locations. The site would also serve as a brochure site to let consumers know a little bit more about the teams that create the games they love.

Website

http://www.worldwidestudios.co.uk

Solution

Sony began discussions with Tonic and Solid State Group with the requirements to design and build their new multilingual site that would be able to withstand extreme volumes of traffic and handle custom security requirements.

Leveraging the Cookie Jar content management system Solid State Group built the site with English and Japanese languages spread over clustered load balanced servers for high performance and redundancy.

Sony Computer Entertainment had stringent security requirements. Cookie Jar set up master and slave servers that only allow content editing to be done through the master server, which is then later uploaded to the slave server. This provided a secure editing platform that minimises the risk of hacking.

Since this website was primarily to promote the Sony’s game development studios it was a requirement for the site to be compatible with the PS3 browser. This browser has some limitations when handling JavaScript, which affected the light box gallery design. Solid State Group configured Cookie Jar to identify the viewing browser and when the PS3 browser is identified Cookie Jar responds with alternative JavaScript and CSS to render the gallery correctly.

Using Cookie Jar’s new add new locale function, all of the English articles and sections were used to replicate the site in Japanese, removing the need for content editors to spend a lot of time reformatting the site for the new language.

Tonic’s designers were free to be as creative as they liked as Cookie Jar has no design restrictions. The finished site contains a number of high resolution images of various games that rotate in a Flash environment, all of which are content managed. An interactive map allows you to easily see locations of all the Studios worldwide, providing relevant links and contact details.

Results

The solution enables teams of business users at SCE WWS to edit the content on the new site in real time, while minimising the involvement of IT. Full workflow control including content approval ensures that live content is error free and reduces manual approval processes. Content versioning at both the site and article level allows authorised users to rollback changes ensuring mistakes do not prove costly.

The SCE WWS site is now attracting potential employees and business partners globally, while providing gamers background information on each of the development studios responsible for the production of some of the most popular games on the PlayStation platform.

"Thanks again for your help and to David and the rest of the team in the final weeks before it launched. We were really pleased by the way that SSG addressed everything that was thrown at you and also how you dealt with problems at short notice, you all worked hard and didn’t let us down, so thanks again!"

Oliver Wright, Sony Computer Entertainment

About Solid State Group

Logical Convergence

Matthew Evans — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:21:02 +0100

Mobile phone operators have now agreed to a unified charger – from 2010 onwards. At last. Why did it take so long? Should we be happy with praise for this brilliant idea, or is it more a feeling of relief that they have finally done it? Let’s face it, this isn’t rocket science and people have been moaning about this issue for years, so why did this convergence take so long?

‘Convergence’ used to be the digital marketing term to be seen with, it was the ‘Web 2.0’ of its time. It kind of died a quiet death, no bang and no proclamations of success. The realisation was that by virtue of market forces things should converge; it is an expected right. The second reason is that once converged, there is parity and its market status shrinks (value shrinkage). The final and most telling reason is that it is very, very difficult to achieve any kind of parity before a market and product have reached a certain level of maturity, and that before this stage there are simply too many variables to generate a solid result. Any concept of convergence needs to be right and proven and that takes time at hands of the user.

Even in a mature market, the consumer encounters a lot of cases where things don’t work well together. Given the speed at which the web changes, it is no wonder that online is a constantly changing space of diverging and converging issues. Take something as simple as web browsing and you will still find websites that don’t play well across all three major browsers simply because the browsers work differently. The price of the solution is that each and every website has to carry the cost of being compatible with all browsers. This is an expensive, fluctuating and recurring solution that needs to be managed and paid for by all individual site owners. It is now an accepted and relatively small issue, but a good point in case. The problem is much less compounded than it used to be, as it also starts to demonstrate the solution; time and market forces have reduced the size of the differences.

The consumer still wants a simple plug-and-play lifestyle and we have to provide that taking all obstacles into account. Suddenly their role as the most driving market force becomes clear; how you converge isn’t important; just create an illusion of convergence. The more accepted a protocol then becomes, the more it is adopted as a standard reducing your cost of convergence. Users multiply over time, habitual behaviour becomes ingrained and functionality gets standardised.

As an online service provider though there is only one important thing to remember; if the button says ‘upload’, it had better work first time around. Anything else has to be accepted as a cost of doing business.

“Convergence denotes the approach toward a definite value...a common view or opinion,…or equilibrium point.” (Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia)