I’ve been to a few conferency things over the past couple of years and more often than not they’ve been a let down, not in terms of presentations, but atmosphere.

Speak the Web nailed it.
A bar.
At night.
No pads and paper in sight.
Just a group of people getting together and listening to some good speakers talk shop.

They got the price right too. More often than not you pay over the odds for these things, but at £20, with a free pint (and an iPhone development book in the raffle) you simply can’t complain! Bargain…especially when work pay for it

First up was Stuart Smith, who talked mobile, and brushed over the current mobile landscape. I did find it odd that the likes of the Nokia Ovi store and the Android platform were completely missed from his talk, but Stu said he simply didn’t have time…fair do’s! All in all a decent enough talk, but didn’t really encourage any debate or conversation.

Next was Chris Mills from Opera, sporting some fetching MC Hammer pants and a corker of a beard. HTML5 was the order of the day, lots of examples of what possibilities lie ahead when browsers catch up. Decent enough fare.

Last up was Andy Clarke, talking about what he coins ‘hardboiled web design’. I’ve seen Andy a fair few times now and was lucky enough to attend one of his workshops in London last year, so I knew to expect. He didn’t disappoint. Again, it was a glimpse into the possibilities of a HTML5/CSS3 future with a few eye opening examples.

Andy also pushed his message of using progressive enhancement. Designing for the more competent browsers first then degrading for older browsers (who cares if they don’t get rounded corners…yeah?). Some of the guys in the audience were understandably a bit cynical about it, after all, IE6 still needs to be considered for most clients. It’s a a familiar frustration but I strongly agree with Andy that if anything is going to change, we as web designers need to push the boundaries and make the change happen! Little by little.

Now, I design websites, and also have a background in coding, so for people like me it’s perhaps easier to see the possibilities, and understand the pitfalls in designing for technologies such as HTML5. What became clear however, after talking to a few people present, was how some developers struggle with designers who have little knowledge of technical developments in HTML, and therefore can’t take advantage of it in their designs. It’s certainly difficult finding a decent designer who understands code, and vice versa.

That’s where the likes of Andy come in. They, with their gypsy-like life of the conference speaker, and apparent lack of corporate clients insistent on testing in every single browser until they look the same, can continue to experiment, to push, and try and change people’s attitudes.

I’ll be the one stood at the back nodding in agreement, and patiently awaiting the day when HTML5 and CSS3 are the norm.

It was to be expected. It’s a bold strategic move to compete directly with newly designed Facebook, who have reworked their user interface to look and act much more like an email inbox. But who is Buzz targeted at?

Obviously, gmail users will be quick to adopt as it will be added automatically to their account. But the masses are much less likely to change their webmail provider than they are to adopt a new independent social network, so is it ever going to achieve widespread usage?

I’ve watched the above video from Google, and to be honest my instant reaction was…well…meh. It simply looks a lot like Friendfeed/Facebook, so how is it going to differentiate itself? what’s the big deal?

Well, to state the obvious, Google’s strength is in search. It’s search results pages are also going social, we know that for sure (enter link). So this raises some interesting questions. Will content aggregated by Buzz be given any form of priority? Will users profiles be highlighted in any way?

I can personally foresee a future where when searching a topic on Google it will return not only site listings, but a list of the key influencers around your search term.

For that reason, I’m going to dip my toes in and keep on top of any future developments.

I’d never be stupid enough to underestimate the power of search.

Being able to communicate directly with people all over the world helps me share my thoughts and opinions, but I was dubious whether there was an app out there that could positively affect my health and well-being. I’ve done my research on this and there are plenty that assist in helping achieve a balanced and healthy lifestyle, but last week I came across one, costing 99p, that has since made me re-evaluate the true power of the iPhone.

It’s called Sleep Cycle.

Sleep Cycle uses the sensitive accelerometer in your iPhone to monitor your movement in bed. It then determines the best time to wake you up by measuring your sleep phases, and rousing you when you are in the lightest sleep phase. You can of course set a half hour period in which it does this.

A natural way to wake up where you feel rested and relaxed.

I was dubious at first but was swayed by the positive reviews on the app store. But it works! I’ve been using it for a few days and have instantly noticed a difference. Even the alarm sounds are a massive improvement on the standard alarm, and the fact you can review and save a chart of your sleep phases night after night is a huge plus.

Now you may not be aware of the fact I’ve just become a dad again for the third time recently, and am loving it! But, believe me, I have years of experience in dealing with sleep deprivation and understand how it can really affect your day.

Sleep Cycle doesn’t shut my kids up or tuck them back into bed (how I wish there was an app for that!) but anything that eases the affect of interrupted sleep and helps me come to my senses in these dark, miserable mornings is a winner in my opinion.

It may also have woken me up to the true potential of iPhone apps.

This book came to my attention via a colleague of mine (@mspownall) who sent a link to a competition on the e-consultancy website. I’d never heard of the book, or the author, but e-consultancy is a trusted resource of mine so I entered it. All I had to do was explain what my passion was.

I sent an email:

My passion is…divided. Work/life balance is very important to me, so family always comes first. Parenting is a hugely rewarding challenge, especially when you have 3 children at the age of 28! Professionally I thrive collaborating on exciting, innovative products and campaigns for a variety of clients.

Anyway, a few days later I received an email with the subject line WINNER. Bonus! Another few days went by and the book landed on my desk. A signed version no less. Queue the questions from everyone in the office asking who the hell Gary Vaynerchuk was.

“No idea” was my reply.

But hey, what better way to find out than stick my nose in on my daily travels to and from work!

It turns out Gary is a the epitome of the American dream. And was recently listed in the top 10 internet entrepreneurs of the moment.

Born in Bosnia (or Serbia, I can’t remember) he moved over to America when he was a young lad, and eventually ended up working at his fathers liquor store. He’d always had an entrepreneurial instinct but working day in day out in a liquor store has it’s limits.

Then the spark happened.

Gary discovered the Internet.

There are lots of similar stories out there, granted, but Gary’s sheer enthusiasm for the power of the Internet, and belief in following and promoting the one thing you are truly passionate about really struck a chord with me. He also stresses the importance of personal branding, and delivers some great insight into how to promote yourself whilst remaining true to your personality. He is a family man, like myself, and it is refreshing to hear that you can put family first, but still ‘crush it’.

Anyway, this lad Gary really knew his stuff when it came to wine, so he set up a video blog, pimped himself all over forums and the social web, and Winelibrary.tv was born.

The hard work didn’t stop there though. His straight forward language and abrasive style really caught on, and his sheer determination and effort to engage fully with customers and prospective viewers/ customers very quickly made him his fortune.

He now runs a consultancy firm that guides businesses on how to reap rewards from the Internet.

It’s a really easy to read book. Gary’s personality really comes across and his advice is spot on.

Passion + hard work + good use of online tools = success

Simple as.

You can buy the book from Amazon or if you want further views email me at mail@kevcharlton.com – (tip from Gary, include your email address as often as you can )

Mid February seems me heading over to Amsterdam again, this time for 4 days to the Flash in the can conference. Visit the conference site at www.fitc.ca.

I’m heading over there with Andy and Nigel from fuse8 as well as our new Concept Director Grzegorz Kozakiewicz, who will be doing a talk entitled ‘Behind the Scenes: Pencil Rebel’. A fuse8 invasion! I’ll be tweeting and blogging as much as I can whilst I’m there, so any shenanigans will be made public. Ha.

Whilst we are over there I’ll also be doing some interviews with some of the speakers, as well as an article and accompanying photography for www.designtaxi.com, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

Gonna be an interesting one for me. Never really been heavily into full on flash websites, but you don’t have to be an expert to know that’s how most of the truly creative work is being done online. At fuse8 we have an excellent record in producing nicely designed CMS driven websites, but Gregorz’s appointment should see us stepping more into the interactive flash arena…which in turn enables me to go on jaunts to Amsterdam! Exciting times!

Since being given the responsibility of managing a team in my current role at fuse8 I’ve been thinking of ways we can interact, share ideas, and generally keep each other updated about what we’re working on, other than face to face meetings (you can’t beat those! – although they’re not always practical). As a test I decided to start using what has been labelled ‘Twitter for Business’, Yammer.

At work we’ve always relied on email and MSN, so basically you get a lot of emails containing links, location updates, invitations to nights out etc etc, all amongst the stuff that matters….work. MSN just adds to the interruption with people expecting instant responses, meaning concentration can soon become a pretty much impossible task. So I was worried that Yammer would just add to the noise, and end up distracting people and harming these concentration levels.

The initial testing group consists of me and 5 of my team. These include an Information Architect, Concept Director, User interface developer, HTML coder and an SEO consultant. Some were avid Twitter users, a couple of them don’t use it at all. So…a mixed bag. It’ll give me an idea whether using Yammer would work across the whole company…the suits, the hardcore developers and even the creatives. I started by introducing it to the team as an experiment in the hope that the actual usage of the tool would give us a good insight into how it could work. The results so far have been very positive.

It’s proved a good way of team members updating other’s what we’re working on. We all work in for a digital full service agency, so everything is relevant to everyone, meaning everyone can have input. There have been several occasions so far where we’ve collaborated on a project which we wouldn’t have done in the past, and ended up improving the output. It’s also helped keep track of where people are. In the past I might have popped into a meeting, and if someone was away making a cuppa they wouldn’t know where I was. Now they do.

To share articles, inspirational websites, and videos we all use Delicious, but people still send links around via group email. It’s just a quicker way to get everyone looking at something you think is interesting. On Yammer I can share links with an individual (via private messages), group, or all of the team. You can also integrate it with Google Reader. Also, just like Twitter, Yammer has it’s own iphone app, and also works via SMS. So if someone’s gonna be late in, they just Yammer it. Easy as.

All in all, it’s still early days. It’s a test to see if it really could change the way the whole company communicates. I’m fairly optimistic that it will.

Ed – Since writing this I’ve found this great article on The Economist – worth a read.

I love David Shrigley’s work, so this is one of my fave finds of late. It basically acts as a promo vid for Pringle, but it’s done in such a quirky way that it doesn’t feel like it’s pushing the product. The script and voiceover compliment the animation brilliantly, there just seems to be something about the Scottish accent that makes things sound better…wish I still had mine….tha nos.

Genius, just genius. A must see!

2010/01 Michael Bierut from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

This is a great talk from Michael Bierut from Pentagram. Interesting for anyone that works with clients. He is right about so many things…but especially like the section where he discusses never talking about educating the client. It’s a sbject that doesn’t get talked about much, so it’s definately worth taking time out to watch.