CREOFF

2012: from digital TV to digital newspapers

2012-12-30T17:11:22Z

2012 has been a very exciting year for CREOFF, having had the pleasure of helping on some cutting edge projects including a next generation digital tv experience, a next-gen digital newspaper platform and Belgium's official local election site.

Bahlu digital TV experience

Right Brain Interface is developing the next generation of Digital TV watching. Currently the service is in private beta so I can not disclose too much info at this time. Suffice to say that several features are being built in to make the tv experience even greater.

CREOFF assisted with the onscreen user interface coding and integration.

Watch a presentation video on YouTube

Interested? Leave your name and e-mail at bahlu.com and they'll get back to you if the service becomes available in your country.

Belgium Local Elections

Belgium held local elections this year. CREOFF had the honour of helping with the front-end development of the flemish government's official result website. The site needed to work with mobile devices like tablets and there was a special version for smartphones with no graphs but even faster access to results.

Visit the election site online

Digital Newspaper

Twipe has been developing a next generation HTML5 cross-platform publishing platform. Their platform allows newspapers to publish to a range of media and apps for different mobile platforms including iOS, Android and Windows 8.

CREOFF assisted in tweaking and optimizing the existing HTML5 code base and delivering a Windows 8 version just in time for Microsoft's worldwide Windows 8 introduction in October 2012.

Find out more at the Twipe site

Belgian Local Elections 2012

2012-05-15T20:59:03Z

CreOFF was chosen to help with the front-end development of the Official Local Elections Result site.

As with most election sites the goal will be to provide election results in a clear and accessible way on your pc or mobile device.

CreOFF is fortunate to be able to participate in this project as it will present interesting design and performance challenges: on election day the site will see a huge peak in visitors trying to get the latest election results.

More info will follow later.

CreOFF can put your idea in the cloud

2011-05-03T20:06:46Z

There are several cloud hosting solutions out there, but Google's App Engine is currently CreOFF's favourite by far.

Because it has such great potential for hosting scalable apps and services CreOFF is promoting Google App Engine usage by offering 25% off normal development rates for App Engine projects for a limited time only. (1)

App Engine is a good choice for:

Backends for Flash/Flex/Facebook/mobile games or apps
Brand activation campaigns and minisites
Web services or online software (Software As A service)
Sites for big events like rock concerts, international seminars, Royal Weddings...

In fact, any project where traditional servers would have a hard time keeping up with the sudden peaks in traffic will benefit from running on Google's cloud.

Benefits and limitations of Google App Engine

Google App Engine is a good choice, but not suitable for every project. It's important to know when to use App Engine and when to use a different solution.

BENEFITS

Pricing: pay what you use, below quota the hosting is COMPLETELY FREE
Automatic scaling: can handle sudden peaks in traffic automatically
Decentralized: your app can automatically run on different servers around the world depending on location of users
Platform As A Service (PaaS), allows easier deployment and versioning
New features and bugfixes being added by Google on a regular basis

LIMITATIONS

Several technical constraints to ensure scalability
Less suited for very complex database queries and transactions
Still very much do-it-yourself, no ready-made open source solutions like WordPress or Drupal available
Python based development (although some consider this a benefit)

Get started

Contact CreOFF to see if your idea would benefit from running on Google App Engine. I will gladly discuss the possibilities with you.

And even if your project would be better off running on a traditional server environment I can be of assistance too: CreOFF has been developing PHP based solutions for the past several years, with CodeIgniter and recently Zend Framework as the frameworks of choice.

More info:

App Engine Free quotas
App Engine billing rates (above free quota)
UPDATE May 2011: Google's new pricing structure (starting 2011)

(1) offer valid until August 2011, pending project approval by CreOFF and if planning permits. Lower rates apply to development costs not hosting

Easy payments with your NFC enabled phone

2011-04-18T10:45:06Z

If you thought QR codes were pretty amazing you might be interested in NFC too. With a NFC capable mobile phone you’ll be able to use your phone to pay for parking, bus ticket, drinks, etc just by holding your phone over a compatible device...

What is NFC?

NFC, or Near Field Communication, is a new communication technology that allows devices to talk to each other (like Bluetooth for instance), but NFC is optimized for easy communication over an extremely short distance, just a few centimeters. Essentially, it allows you to read information while holding your phone over a NFC chip or tag that can even be embedded in “smart” posters.

So how could this be useful?

Not only would this allow your phone to easily pay for small expenses like bus tickets and drinks but it goes beyond payments. Just by holding your phone over a tag you can read info, without having to take a picture of a QR barcode first.

Google is experimenting with stickers that business owners can display in their windows and allow customers to access info about the business, including opening hours etc...

A swedish company is testing the use of NFC-enabled phones as hotel keys. The technology can literally open a lot of doors.

These are just a few examples of possible uses and I'm pretty sure you can come up with some good uses for this technology as well.

When will it be available?

In my country, Belgium, some banks and mobile operators have announced plans to offer NFC payments by the end of 2011. Orange already announced it would be rolling out NFC across most of it’s European network.

Which phones have NFC?

At the time of writing this post only a few phones have NFC chips built-in. My latest phone, the Google Nexus S, is one of the first to support this feature but other phones are following. There are rumours that iPhone 5 will have a NFC chip built-in as well.

More info:

Privacy in the cloud

2011-03-22T13:07:56Z

At a FeWeb+ seminar about legal and privacy issues my cloud related questions didn't get a clear answer, so I decided to do some research on the latest developments in this area. It seems the cloud environment is still something of a “gray zone” and it’s often unclear which laws apply.

The situation now

Being an EU citizen myself I already knew that the privacy laws are far more strict here than they are in different parts of the world, including the US.

If a EU visitor submits his personal data to a US server and his data is stored there we have a conflict between the stricter EU and the US privacy rules. To overcome this problem a directive has been created, called the International Safe Harbor Principles (1).

In short, these principles force the US or other non-EU companies to comply with a minimal set of privacy requirements. Google, for one, is following these Safe Harbor principles. (2)

In fact European companies are not allowed to send personal data to non-EU companies that don’t comply with these rules. Although I’m pretty sure lots of smaller websites online today are just ignoring this either because they really don’t know (or maybe don’t care) about them. You don’t happen to have a US based host, do you?

The role of the US Patriot Act is less clear to me. This could potentially give the US government access to data.

The situation tomorrow

Cloud computing has only been around for a few years and laws are trying to catch up with this growing phenomenon. As I’m writing this article the EU commission is in the progress of updating it’s privacy rules (i.e. making them stricter?).

In May 2011 they will consult stakeholders on regulation for cloud computing, and in 2012 the commission will probably propose it’s EU strategy for cloud computing. (3)

Final thoughts

Since the internet is a global network maybe it would be wiser to find a solution on a global scale, e.g. under the World Trade Organisation (WTO)

Too many EU restrictions would definitely hurt the growth of cloud services in Europe, and right now the legal “gray zone” is keeping a lot of companies from jumping onto the cloud.

Having a (small) EU business that’s investing heavily in cloud services myself I would not like to see the EU take measures that force us to host on EU servers only. I consider the fact that the cloud servers are spread all over the world to be an advantage.

Related links:

Preview mobile sites on your pc

2011-03-11T13:08:21Z

If you visit the CreOFF site with a recent mobile phone you'll notice the layout looks simpler and lighter. Making it look nice on a mobile phone requires tweaking of the layout and changing the stylesheets.

The Opera Mobile Emulator turns out to be a big help with this. It's a desktop version of the Opera Mobile browser which allows you to preview the site as it would be rendered on a real mobile phone.

Several profiles

The emulator has several mobile phone profiles which let you mimic the viewport size and pixel density of that particular phone. The profiles also behave like the phone would behave, including menus, swiping etc...

Unfortunately, right now the list of profiles seems to be limited to HTC phones only. Would be nice to see Opera add other phone types as well (iPhone for one) But there's a "custom" profile that lets you customize all the settings so you can mimic other phones as well.

Works with Dragonfly

Dragonfly is Opera's DOM inspector tool that helps developers inspect and interact with the page's internals, similar to Firebug on Firefox.

The Emulator allows you to establish a connection with Opera Dragonfly so you can see in real-time what's happening your page as if you were looking at it via a normal browser, making this tool even more useful.

More info

The emulator is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

Visit the Opera's Mobile Emulator page for more detailed info

The Royal Wedding on Google App Engine

2011-03-04T18:23:23Z

Accenture and Reading Room, creators of the Official Royal Wedding site for Prince William and Catherine Middleton, were faced with the challenge to create a website for an event that will draw worldwide attention and have the site scale and handle the huge peak in visitors before, during and after the event.

They chose to build the site on top of Google's cloud infrastructure.

Visit: The Official Royal Wedding website

New CreOFF site is online

2011-03-04T15:06:54Z

The new CreOFF site is online. Or maybe not.
And I have no idea on which server it's running right now.

Sounds confusing?
It's because the site is now running on Google's own cloud infrastructure, which means it should be highly available and scalable, and a copy of the site will be started on a server located relatively close to anyone visiting it.

Actually, for now the new site is not even "always on" which means the site only runs when someone actually visits it.

The site is a work in progress, so you might still notice changes along the way. Count on me to keep you updated. Via the new site of course.

Google I/O tickets sell out in 59 minutes

2011-02-08T12:03:55Z

The 2011 Google I/O edition in San Francisco looks interesting, but apparently you had to register VERY quickly: Google I/O tickets sell out in 59 minutes...

Apparently the registration site had huge problems keeping up with the sudden burst of visits: what happened? Did the registration site run on an IIS with ColdFusion instead of running on Google's own cloud infrastructure?

Running on Google Apps for Business

2011-02-07T12:33:43Z

Most of CreOFF's administration (e-mail, calendar,...) has been migrated to Google Apps for Business, running on Google's cloud infrastructure.

What are the benefits for CreOFF?

It takes an effort (and some risk) to move all your sensitive data and e-mails to a different infrastructure. Still, these features persuaded me:

Team collaboration

Not just an e-mail service, but also texts, presentations, spreadsheets, private wiki/sites can be shared and worked on simultaneously by several people (worldwide if necessary). Some of the Google Wave technology was implemented into Google docs nicely.

Cloud infrastructure

Data is moved into the cloud instead of one single pc: access your data from any pc or mobile device, worldwide. Google offers reliable and redundant data centers, faster worldwide access.

Lots of storage space

Every mailbox gets 25 Gb of storage space. Hmm... that will keep me happy for a few years.

Easy migration

The migration of all CreOFF's mail accounts to Google seemed like the biggest challenge, but luckily Google provides several migration tools which make the job simpler. The move from IMAP server to Google Mail was done in one afternoon, and even an unforeseen problem with our creoff.net domain was handled promptly by the Google Apps support team.

Less worries

...one less (mail)server to maintain and troubleshoot.

Cost?

There's a FREE version available, business edition costs 50$/user. Read more at the Google Apps site.