So, I was browsing the web this morning and found this cool little video over at Digital Buzz
What do you think?
"Deck The Screens" (@DeckTheScreens) is a fun little holiday app from the folks at Deeplocal. It lets you string holiday lights between all of your screens. Just create a new set of lights, share your code with some friends or co-workers (it works best if everyone is in the same physical location), and watch the lights go. We put this together in a hurry as a fun excuse to play with some new technologies so if you run into any trouble, bear with us. You know how these lights are, one light can mess up the whole thing. Or, if you like what you see and want to know more about us, definitely let us know.”
Big email providers like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo may have been a little threatened after Mark Zuckerberg recently claimed that email is would soon fall behind social messaging.
Now they have even more reason to take the statement seriously, as the huge information technology company Atos bans internal email. Atos CEO, Thierry Breton, said that just 10% of the approximated 200 emails received by employees each day were actually useful. And as much as 18% of those emails are spam. According to Breton, emails are “just time-wasting noise.”
The idea is that by communicating via instant messenger and a Facebook-like interface, a huge amount of time will be saved. With a company as big as Atos, who have over 74,000 employees, even if each employee could save 5 minutes each day by not needing to trawl through there inbox to find the important emails, that would be a combined saving of more than 6000 hours every day! Based on those figures, there is definitely something to be said about the logic behind this plan.
The strategy has, so far, been in place for 6 months, and internal emails have since been reduced by 20%. Caroline Crouch, a spokeswoman for the company, said that the change in communication had been taken positively with a “strong take up of alternative tools” by the employees. Breton says that he hasn’t sent an email in 3 years, suggesting that he feels very strongly about the strategy.
Opinion about email is definitely changing, and much more significantly in the younger generation. This is important to a lot of companies, as if email is not popular among their next generation of employees, there could be some serious issues, which would mean that it would be better to change with the times rather than remain tied down to the one method of communication. The chart below shows a year on year comparison (2011 vs. 2010) on email usage, split into age groups.
Despite the possibility that cutting internal emails, and putting other forms of internal communication in place may work great. It does not offer a solution for external emails as of yet. And I can’t imagine people wanting to have all of their professional associates as friends on their Facebook!
Either way, the big drops in usage for 12-24 year olds are definitely something for the big email providers to take note of. And it offers up some interesting possibilities for where digital communication could end up in the future.
We at Silverchip have moved office, to our brand new home in Salford Quays, just a quick update to advise that all our phone numbers are the same and we are still providing great Web Design and SEO. We promise we will follow up shortly with some photos, but here is a brochure shot (This is pretty much the view from the office!)
Search engine optimisation has definitely seen a change throughout 2011, becoming less about trying to deceive Google into thinking that a website is great and more about creating engaging content and increasing an audience. SEO is now, more than ever, about focusing on making a website experience that is good for the user.
In the past it has been possible to use technical tricks like using CSS image replacement to inject keyword text or by controlling the flow of PageRank by hiding links from search engines. However, techniques like these are becoming less effective and are thankfully being left behind.
It was also industry standard to keep updating websites with poorly written articles, just so that they could optimise their keywords in the easiest way possible. However, now that the Panda updates are live, websites are being punished for having too much poor quality content. This means that the only effective way to optimise keywords is by having content on a website that people actually want to read, share and link other people to.
Web Design
One of the best ways to optimise a website so that it creates a better overall user experience is to keep it simple. The longer it takes to navigate a website, the harder it is for people to get to what they want.
By using web analytics, the pages and areas of a website that are being visited the least, or have the least amount of time spent on them, should be moved to a better location or if needs be, completely removed from the website. There is no point in keeping a page on your website, just for the sake of keeping it there. The likelihood is that it will get in the way of clean website navigation.
In most cases, the highest visited pages on a website are the ones that are closest to the home page. The levels of your website must be reviewed, and if necessary should be removed, so that the pages where you want visitors to be going are easier to get to. This is hugely important for e-commerce website, where the user shouldn’t have to click more than 3 times to get what they want. Any more than this and the risk of the user leaving before making the conversion will significantly increase.
SEO is now becoming more and more about streamlining websites. Using web design to create a clean, easy to navigate website will improve user experience. It will also make it easier for search engine crawlers to get around the website and index everything on there.
If done properly, using web design to streamline your website will increase the internal flow of authority (PageRank, link juice, etc.) to SEO hub pages. SEO hub pages are pages on your website that you want search engines to easily find, because they may have a lot of quality, keyword relevant content. If it’s easier for search engines and links to get to these pages, then it will improve rank for the keywords.
According to a survey of 2,500 small to medium size companies, SEO was found to be the best marketing channel. The question that each company was asked was:
“If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?”
They were given the choices SEO, paid search (cost per click), mobile marketing, social media marketing and traditional media marketing. SEO came out on top by some distance, with 32.9% of the 2,500 small to medium size businesses saying they would choose it. Traditional media was anything but a close second, with 19.7% saying that they would choose that. The table below shows the full results from the survery.
It’s interesting to see that traditional media is the second most favoured marketing channel. This would include advertising in the yellow pages and newspapers, direct mail marketing, radio advertising, etc. Advertising in newspapers and direct mail marketing came out on top of the traditional marketing channels.
I think that in the future, we will see a drop in traditional media marketing, as SEO, social media marketing and cost per click advertising become more widely used. For a lot of companies who haven’t used SEO before, it takes some time to be persuaded of its efficacy. However, once SEO has been given a chance, and when it is done properly by the right company, the benefits of it really start to show. As small to medium size companies become more familiar with digital marketing channels, they will most likely increase in popularity.
The question, “Are you promoting your business with the following website/services?” was aksi asked in the survey. Despite only 16% of companies questioned in the survey saying that they would choose social media marketing as their sole marketing channel, this question found that 70% of the companies use Facebook (not Facebook paid ads) to market their business. This would suggest that social media is still very important to a lot of these companies. The table below shows how many of the 2,500 businesses surveyed use each website/service to market their business.
This online survey was conducted in November 2011 and the sample came from MerchantCircle’s 1.6 million small to medium size companies member database.
Silverchip are pleased to announce our latest contract win with Crown Paints (www.crownpaint.co.uk) after getting the go ahead to carry out the development work on their new web project.
As much as we’d love to, we can’t go into much detail about the project as Crown hasn’t yet taken it to market. However, we can say that it is a hugely innovative system that will improve the interface between the company and its customers within the professional market.
Workhouse
The opportunity came about as a result of working closely with creative marketing agency Workhouse (www.workhousemarketing.com). The partnership that we have with Workhouse has enabled us to complete a number of successful projects, as we handle the development and functionality of web systems, whilst Workhouse offer expertise in the creative and design aspects.
Looking forward, we will be keeping a strong focus on our partnership with Workhouse, maintaining our effective approach to web design and development.
Lasting Business Relationship
Everybody at Silverchip is excited to be working on the new project. And by delivering an excellent product, we hope to open up the possibility of a long lasting business relationship with Crown Paint.
Crown Paints’ Senior Brand Manager commented, “This is a key project for Crown Paints and I am looking forward to working with Silverchip.”
Bright Future
Winning a contract with such an established company is a true credit to how far Silverchip has come in the past year. Our innovative, custom build approach to web development is clearly getting us noticed. And if we can continue in a similar momentum and continue to exploit opportunities by working with big industry players, just like Crown, the future is looking bright.
The challenge was simple. Eat three packets of caramel chocolate digestive biscuits in 30 minutes.
The reward was questionable. Three free chicken kebabs the following week (One for each packet of biscuits)
The challenger was ignorant. Arron Parkinson claimed that he could easily finish the biscuits in the allotted time.
The reason was… I don’t know what the reason was. It just happened.
The stage was set. For the biggest biscuit eating challenge that Silverchip had ever seen!
It all came about while the Silverchip team were working away earlier in the week, enjoying some lovely caramel chocolate digestives. As usual, the question arose,
“How many of these do you think you could eat in one go?”
The question that seems to come up every time a nice food is being eaten in the office.
“How many chicken nuggets do you think you could eat in one go?”
“I’d do 100”
“How many mini chocolate muffins could you eat in one go?”
“Easily 50”
“How many caramel chocolate digestives could you eat in one go?”
“I think I could eat 3 packs”
Who’d have thought it would be 3 packs of biscuits that broke the camel’s back! Everybody had had enough of the wild claims of how much of what food could be consumed in a given time. It was time to set the challenge.
And so it was arranged. Arron would be given the chance to eat 3 packs (53 biscuits) in 30 minutes. There would be no cash prize, but a prize of more food. Arron is partial to having a chicken kebab for his lunch, and so was offered 3 free ones (paid for by the rest of the team) for the following week. Although he said he would have preferred 5 (one for each day), he was happy enough with the prize.
Shortly before the challenge Arron was quoted as saying…
“America sent man to the moon. I’m going to eat 3 packs of biscuits”
Showing how highly he regarded this challenge. He was clearly serious about completing it.
Unfortunately, Arron didn’t manage to finish all 53 biscuits. Although he did put away an impressive 38, totalling 3,040 Kcal.
When asked about what the future held for Arron, he just said:
We’re feeling very generous at the moment and have decided to give our loyal fans the chance to win a brand new iPad 2.
To gain access to the competition, you will need to ‘like’ the Silverchip Systems business page on Facebook (www.facebook.com/SilverChip). Then click on the ‘iPad2 Competition’ tab and enter your details.
Once the competition has 1,000 entrants, we will use our random number generating technology to select a completely random winner.
So make sure that you share the competition with your friends so that we get to 1,000 entrants as soon as possible!
The latest Google search update will affect up to 35% of Google searches a Google engineer says, and to put that into perspective the highly publicised Panda update earlier this year which caused somewhat of an outcry from some SEO ‘experts’ affected only 12% of searches!
The latest release, which is a build on last years ‘caffeine’ update focuses around real-time and historical search and differentiating between the two; the widely used (and topical example) is that of the occupy protests vs. recipe searches. A user searching for ‘occupy Manchester protest’ or ‘occupy London protest’ would be hoping to see up to date news stories on what’s happening, anything from a few months or years back would not be relevant and 99% of the time provide to be an unrelated search. Equally, if you are searching for a homemade recipe for bread, you may not receive the highest relevance from the latest news stories or pages and would be more than happy with pages from a few month’s or even years back!
Now, what does this mean for search? Are our ranks all about to dramatically change?! The answer coming from our search analysts is, not as much as you may think. The key thing to note is this update will affect any search terms deemed to be real time searches, users looking for news or information on current events, which typically most SEO campaigns will not share key phrases with. One of the larger worries is that this does open up an avenue for web spammers to release and submit content more often in order to attempt to capitalise on the advantage given to fresh content (although I do feel Matt Cutt’s, head of Google web spam will have given this point much thought). One of the benefits of this update is that it with the advantage given (and web spammers aside) it does attach a value to actually creating and circulating current news for companies and websites alike which no doubt will mean we will see a larger number of sites jumping on the ‘blogging’ bandwagon.
No doubt we have some work to do to see what advantages we can take from the update for our search engine optimisation customers, but unlike the suggestion in the title, our conclusion is that this will not affect current SEO activities as much as is widely believed, it only opens up a potential new avenue for more value for SEO companies.
Microsoft’s new research project, Holodesk, lets users mess around with virtual objects using other virtual objects and even allows users to interact with the virtual objects with their own hands. In its current form, user can only see the virtual, 3D objects through a plastic screen that is attached to the machine. I’m sure that a resolution for this minor limitation will be found in not too long a time.
It looks like a pretty amazing technology, and reminds me of the film Minority Report. It might be quite a while off the advanced (fictional) technology that is used on the movie, but it’s definitely a start!
Plus, it opens up a world of opportunities for gaming. I can just imagine a game where you walk around and kill virtual zombies with your own bare hands. As long as the graphics and gameplay were up to scratch it would be a very impressive and realistic game.
Whatever the technology is going to be used for, it seems that Microsoft is preparing for a future which is thriving with advanced touch interfaces and virtual interaction systems. This technology development is an accomplishment of the Sensors and Devices group, part of Microsoft Research Cambridge.
