Here’s my first weekly review of “what’s new in digital”. This week, I have been using the Guardian iPhone application, hence the many references to that most excellent newspaper.

Twitter Location Finder

After a week of Twitter downtime and various malfunctions a neat new feature has emerged. Twitter places is a location finding service that allows you to include a nifty map link to where and when you are in your Tweet. I believe this will also make it’s way into the Twitter API, delivering some pretty interesting options for geotweeting in the coming months.

iPhone 4

And what better platform to Tweet your movement from that the very cute new iPhone. It has an amazing new display, and is being touted as a viable ebook reader among many other things. What really interests me was the huge interest in the launch. Demand for the new iPhone has seen ordering websites crash in the US and UK with demand running 10 times ahead of last year’s 3GS.

To me this is particularly interesting from a platform development perspective, and gives me some comfort in my decision to focus my initial mobile development efforts here.

New Apps

There are Apps and there are novelties, the later, whilst potentially lucrative for their developers are just generally annoying in my book, and what could be more annoying than a Vuvuzela. Love them or loath them, these bloody annoying droning horns have become the backing track to the world cup. Sleep soundly tonight or wake screaming in terror as your friends and neighbours download and show off the Vuvuzela app.

Windows on the web

Finally for this week’s update,  news of Microsoft stepping up to launch a web version of Office. It’s a freebee in the Google docs style (you just need a hotmail / live.com ID to log in) and offers versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. It all seems to work, but is basic in some of its functionality. Still, good to see an alternative emerge to Google docs. What will be interesting to see is where Microsoft go with this.

In this case the “niggle” is about Keynote and Pages, and their seeming inability to interact with the outside world. It reminds me of being back in the day of the Blueberry iMac, my first true love. The problem with the Blueberry was trying to share anything with anyone who didn’t also have Mac love . It felt like going out with a fat girl (I love fat girls by the way), your mates thought it was so wrong, but deep down it felt so right.

Anyway, I digress.  Pages and Keynote are actually great to use, better than I imagined. My problems started when I tried to upload my own PowerPoint template to Keynote. Firstly, and amazingly, there is no integration with Me.Com, Apples cloud based storage and mail solution. To me, this makes no sense whatsoever. The Good Reader  (Nice app) will happily connect to Me.Com so why not Keynote?

The solution. It would seem, is to sign up to iWork.Com, the caring sharing place provided by Apple for the purpose of exchanging documents with the world at large. Happily my Apple ID got me in with no trouble, but in to what? Basic is great, we love clean design and no clutter, but iwork.Com is devoid of anything resembling functionality. Sadly it really does feel like they knocked it up on Friday afternoon when they realised the obvious flaw in an otherwise good product.

I decided to accept the fact that I couldn’t use Me.Com, and to live with the minimalist functionality of iWork.Com. I proceeded to upload a .pptx presentation. Compatibility with MS Office is thankfully no longer an issue in iWork applications, but clearly in iPad land something is amiss.  Following a fair amount of faffing I concluded that my MS documents were not destined to hit my iPad, which I have to say is a great shame.

There have been no other revelations to sully our new love, and I feel sure I will learn to work around this one. All in all, one week in I am still delighted, and still happy to recommend an iPad to anyone and everyone prepared to listen or read my words. Further updates to follow.

The keyboard

First and foremost I can’t tell you quite how impressed i am with the keyboard. It is accurate, fast and not at all difficult to use. I doubt I would tackle a large complex document, buy also doubt I would get my laptop out on a flight again. This blog entry was typed up using Notes, although I will probably download Pages later today.

ToDo

Very early days. I have been using the Toodledoo app for some time and found it’s functionality (especially the sync with outlook using chromatic dragon) spot on. On the iPad the app could clearly do with some work to make more use of the available real estate, however it is still good.

Appigo’s ToDo looks good and has some well integrated GTD functionality. It is synced with my Toodledoo account, and therefore outlook in my office. I am still struggling with some of the navigation, but judging by the reviews the product has had, and the fact that i can’t be arsed to look for instructions, feel it will turn out to be a keeper.

Twitterific

Just as I abandoned twitterific on the iPhone in favour of the Twitter app ( which i love) along came the iPad and all that extra space. It has to be said that iPhone apps just do not scale in any kind of satisfying way and will always be a poor relation to the iPad designs. Twitter on the iPad just wasn’t working for me, and as twitterific comes as a free download i thought it was worth a shot (i tried a tweet deck install but just couldn’t get it to run). So far, so good. It does what it says on the tin, and i couldn’t ask for more than that.

Eyewitness

This is an amazing free offering from the Guardian newspaper. An awesome picture each day together with some tips to improve your photography. The image viewing experience on the iPad is just fantastic, and this is the perfect showcase. Recommended – go and download it now.

Wired

I subscribe to the UK edition of this magazine and was excited about reviewing the digital edition. It is brilliantly put together and is an absolute pleasure to use but is it more fun than the print edition landing on my doormat . . . . . . .

Marvel

It’s been sometime since I have looked at a Marvel comic, but what a way to reconnect with them. The colours just suck you into the screen and the frame by frame scroll functionality really focuses your attention on the story.

I downloaded the free comics to review and will almost certainly add to my library over the coming weeks.

iBooks

My first foray into e-readers – (the kindle just didn’t do it for me). Lovely display and page turning experience. My children enjoyed having winnie-the-pooh read to them, especially the illustrations. In our tiny home I rarely have the pleasure of keeping books for any length of time, so this could well be a winner for me. The initial offering of books in the store was disappointing, but from memory iTunes started small. And just look at it now.

The buying experience in the store is excellent, with a really decent sample available.

Calendar, Mail, Contacts, Safari

All fantastic developments on a tried and tested theme. Brilliantly reworked for the iPad. Only one complaint – Apple, when are you going to provide a decent integrated task manager? Surely I can’t be the first to ask?

WordPress

So far, so thwarted. I thought it would be perfect if I was able to do this entire post from my iPad. I downloaded the Wordpress app, ready to go, but had a heap of problems. Firstly it only seemed to want to work if I was an admin (out came the MacBook, logged into wordpress as admin, gave myself admin privileges), then it wouldnt let me paste the text I had written in notes (ending any hope of prepairing an article on a plane for example, and posting on reaching wifi land) and finally it wouldn’t let me edit the image I was posting (I was hoping I would be able to hook into the great image editing enhancements in 2.9.2, but now way jose.

Still, pretty happy with everything else. I will work on the WP app to ensure it is not just user error, and to be fair, I could easily have logged in – I just wanted to app it!

Note: I have since tried creating posts by opening wp admin on my iPad. No luck as yet as the keyboard does not get activated (obvious i guess). Drop me a note if you have an solution.

Im not ready to write a book on the subject, but it seems that the complexities are often driven by a desire for information – both on the web page itself and in the choices so often presented in search. Where large, international corporates simply translate western sites into Japanese they fail every-time. My own business runs two versions of our site, the corporate .com and a pure Japanese design – it’s no surprise that the Japanese design site has a much, much higher hit rate.

I love Tokyo, it’s a great city and my colleagues here never fail to impress me. The picture was 10 minutes of fun with and iPhone and Powerpoint. It is the view from the 30th floor of the Cerulean Tower Hotel. Who knows where Tokyo stops – if indeed it ever does.

Online and e-marketing professionals are in demand and in the money

The Robert Walters Q1 Sales & Marketing Update is full of good news for the Digital Marketer. My only hope is that the economic recovery is long and prosperous.

“The outlook is positive in both the temporary and permanent market. We are experiencing an increased appetite from clients which in turn is going to create more competition for the best candidates. As a result clients have increased salaries for business critical employees to ensure maximum retention. From a hiring perspective we recommend clients sell the benefits of an opportunity and ensure they are getting their best interviewers to meet potential candidates.”

“The demand for professionals with digital and e-commerce skill sets put increased pressure on an already limited candidate pool.”

The big problem I found was getting it to work with my current GTD implementation. The blackberry synchronised nicely with my Outlook Tasks, albeit in an uninspiring application. The native Mail and calendar apps are great on the iPhone, but there is nothing to manage tasks (surely this is a huge oversight on the part of Apple?).

Never being one to give up easily I crowd-sourced some suggestions from the Twitter GTD community and now have a nice workaround in place using Toodledoo to span devices. The following presentation explains how I did this. Drop me a line and let me know how you get on.

A very quick search of the app store, and some great reviews led me to Omni Focus, the GTD tool for both iPad and Mac. According to it’s makers the Omni Group “The iPhone OS version of OmniFocus (winner of Best iPhone Productivity Application at the WWDC 2008 Apple Design Awards) brings powerful task management functionality to users’ fingertips. With live, automatic syncing, location-aware custom actions lists, and on-the-fly task entry with voice notes and image capture, OmniFocus for iPhone is built to enhance your busy life. Access shopping lists, agenda items for work, tasks for home, or any other lists you need, wherever you are.”

And it is indeed a great tool, and perfect for GTD. It was simple to set up my projects, brain dump into my inbox and ensure I had my contexts set and an d working well. It kept me busy on a long flight, tweaking until everything seemed just so. And then I realised why it would never work for me.

Whilst my computing preferences are very much Apple, the organisation I work for is PC through and through. My entire GTD process in the office revolves around Outlook, and specifically the Task functionality. Tasks used to sync well with My Blackberry, and although the usability of the device wasn’t the best, they were at least ubiquitous. Alas, now I have a great device, awesome usability but no synchronisation of my tasks.

I am sure this is not insurmountable, and I would be grateful if anyone could share their solutions with me. In the mean time it’s back to the hipster PDA, reliable and always available, if not a little boring.

]]> http://www.phillipjenkins.co.uk/2010/04/omni-focus-gtd-on-the-iphone/feed/ 1 http://www.phillipjenkins.co.uk/2010/04/ted-talks-on-the-iphone/ http://www.phillipjenkins.co.uk/2010/04/ted-talks-on-the-iphone/#comments Sat, 10 Apr 2010 09:03:58 +0000 Phil Jenkins http://www.phillipjenkins.co.uk/?p=425

Neither TED or the iPhone are breaking news, but as a new devotee, I cant help blabbing about them.

First, and very briefly the iPhone.  Steve Jobs and Jonathon Ive are way up there on my heroes list, but thanks to the Blackberry’s dominance as a business phone, and my unwillingness to spring for an iPhone when my Blackberry was free, I am a latecomer to this particular ray of sunshine.

I recently started a new job as Head of Digital Marketing, and on my long hit list is the development of mobile apps across all platforms. So where I once had one device I now have four on my desk, and no prizes for guessing which one has become my special friend.

I have been aware of TED for some time, and have been seriously amazed, motivated and generally awestruck my many of the talks.

New iPhone in hand, crusing through the App store I found my new favorite app – TED. Anything that can take you from Tim Berners-Less to Jamie Oliver by way of David Blane and Jane McGonigal can only be a good thing in my book.

So do yourself a favour, get an iphone, get online and get TED in your life. It’s like a daily dose of mind Yoga on the commute into the office, leaving you energised and focused and ready for the first meeting of the day.

I was recently interviewd on the rise of digital marketing – it’s short and sweet!

How has digital marketing changed over the last three years?

Digital Marketing is now a proven medium. We are seeing exciting new ways to connect with the consumer, be it social media, video, podcast, mobile application or more likely, a combination of all these and more. As these evolve and provide richer and more meaningful experiences for the consumer they become more powerful as marketing tools.

How does this affect professional marketers today?

Just looking at some basic statistics is enough to get a feeling for the direction digital is going. Over 60% of UK homes have Broadband, with a government push to hit 100% by 2012. There have been around a billion apps (globally) downloaded for the iPhone with other mobile platforms gathering speed.

There are clear signals that social media is here to stay, LinkedIn has more than 50 million registered users, Facebook has over 300 million. Providers of Sales Automation tools like Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics are now building tools to track social media chatter. Dell is even using it to answer customer queries.

Josh Bernhoff (Advertising Age) predicted that digital was about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, and likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Professional marketers need to be fully aware of these channels and to be prepared to advise clients of the most effective solutions, be it traditional, digital or hybrid.

How important are digital marketing skills in today’s business environment?

If you believe the evidence, and there is no reason to doubt it, digital marketing skills have already become essential in today’s environment.

What advice would you give to marketers looking to improve their digital marketing skills and get ahead in 2010?

Do your homework. Most of the principles of traditional marketing hold good in the digital space. Do as much research as you can, look at the campaigns that inspire you and win awards and consider why they work. Consider new ways of using existing collateral, for example, embedded video and presentations in mobile platforms or geolocations to target content delivery. The possibilities are endless and we are just at the beginning of a long journey.