The app is dead, long live the cloud

Since the release of the I-Phone in 2007 mobile computing has been all about the app. In the 7 years that followed, we have grown used to customising our phones to a staggering effect. According to Staista there are now more than a million individual apps available for the I-phone alone. We spend approximately 2hrs and 19 mins on Apps each and every day(Flurry). Yet we only spend 23 mins a day through our mobile browser. This has led many to label the browser as just another app and certainly right now any org NFP or otherwise is not reaching its market effectively if it doesn't have an app. I can't help thinking that the age of apps is going to be a short lived blip in the history of computing, given that were only 7 years in to this mobile revolution we have a long way to go before we reach a new world order.

Apps are marketed to us as a way of personalising our content getting what we want on our devices, yet what is more personalised than a google search i simply type in what I want and the google fairies supply. No the real reason for the current app revolution is partly to allow companies to stake a permanent presence in your pocket but mainly its to account for the still pitiful download speeds and the lack of network coverage. The app essentially allows us to continue accessing services that we want even when we in a lead lined box at the top of mt Everest.

The computing industry has been through such a period before, and you only have to go back to the 90's to a period before broadband and to a time when we could all hear our data flying across our phone lines in blips and white noise. It was a time of client and servers of fat clients, and of desktop applications. It was a time when we actually installed programs on our PC's and the trick for developers was to pack as much coding into your machine as possible. Nowadays however its all about cloud computing, No longer are we constrained by network access so now companies want to hold all of our information in one place and let us access it anywhere, they want us to trust them and have us as continual presence in their pockets. Its good for us too, it removes a lot of headaches for when things go wrong and lets us get away with much lower specifications.

So now that we've looked back 10 years lets roll forward another 10, in 2024 after a decade of unprecedented investment in our mobile infrastructure we now have web 10.0 and 8G connection speeds, we have city wide Wi-Fi that even seeps into tunnels and can cope with huge concurrence. In these situations the mobile cloud becomes a far better option and the browser bounces back. No longer do we need to both with updating apps each week, no longer do we need to worry f we have space on our phones for all that data, e don't want to wait for an ap to be installed no we just want those services available when we want them. Of course our phones know who we are and can authenticate this to providers so we're guaranteed a secure and personalised service wherever we go. So it leaves nothing left for apps and smartphones themselves become nothing more than just things, and yes there will be a form factor to make some nicer than others but in the same way as we've seen with laptops there are lesss and less to differentiate the brands so we care less and less about the branding.

So may I be the first to give the app with a terminal diagnosis. Yes right now you need an app but if you don't have one already you've missed the boat and your better to let it sink and prepare to surf the next wave. The future is all about making your services accessible and personalised wherever your members or supporters want to access them. Yes if you can knock out an app quickly do it if only to grab a valuable spot on a mobile devices. Do so for the short term, and do so in such a way that it fits with a wider digital strategy
which feeds your supporters with the right information however they access your services. Use industry wide services and protocols to allow users to validate who they are then remember what and more importantly how they want to look for. Make this journey as quick and simple as possible for your users and they will come back Most importantly don't shun mobile internet, there are big clouds looming ready to provide some Epic waves and for your supporters will surf them.

Internet of Members \ Salesforce1 World tour

Earlier today, I went along to the Salesforce 1 World tour, to find out what their latest offerings have to offer for the NFP and charity sector.  Sales force as a company are unashamedly sales orientated their language and style is exuberant to say the least and the event had a personality to match. The keynote speeches include lasers, gymnastics displays and even a Salesforce controlled drone. The day saw them announce proudly that Heron Tower is set to become Salesforce tower, in typically larger than life move. 

Despite its NFP foundation, despite its 1/1/1 commitment and despite some pretty big charity’s on their books, the whole Salesforce Ecosystem just doesn't seem to gel, with the sector, at least not in the UK. You have to work hard to see beyond the showmanship and look to the functionality of the platform then you begin to see a flexible solution that does some really neat tricks. The question is can you get through all that bluster.  The exhibitors at the event where all part of the Salesforce Ecosystem, i.e those working within or on the salesforce platform. They fell largely in to 2 categories Apps or implementation partners. It’s fair to say that none of them had a specific NFP focus. There were some rather cool apps on display Riva CRM integration, Cognizant and Cipher cloud to name 3. But as with any smartphone app store there are lots of apps and finding the right one for your requirement is not a simple task for a charity to understand.

Theoretically, it’s possible to implement Salesforce without an implementation partner, and a big part of Salesforce 1 is to increase what admin users can do, and to speed up user led change. But for a NFP it remains beyond the key skill set of the organisation so better to look for an implementation partner. But here too the Salesforce Ecosystem is huge and as with anything else there are partners and there are partners. Some understand the sector, but from the conversations I had at Salesforce 1 it’s clear that most don’t.  Most focus is on delivering Salesforce and making the platform do whatever it is that you want it to do, irrespective of who you are, talk to them about specific functionally such as an organisational renewal process, or member events, and they approach it as just another sales process, which to an extent is true but rather misses the point. 

It would be very easy to rule out Salesforce, and look to a more sector specific CRM, but the fact remains, it has some good functionality and can deliver just what some charities or associations need. If you've decided you need a CRM, it would be folly not to at least look at Salesforce, just as it would be not to look at dynamics, but you also include more sector friendly solutions.

The big tag line of the moment is “Internet of Customers” which is an evolution of the “Internet of things” concept where an internet world connects everything, from your smartphone to you clothing, from your fridge to the light switch. The concept is a good one that points out that behind every THING is a customer, and I’d like to move on the debate one step further by starting to talk about an “Internet of members”, or even an “internet of supporters”. If you remove the sales speak the principal is the same, and that hasn't changed for years. The people you want to engage are out there and they will do what they do in any number of ways our job is to create interactions that work for them so that we can progress organisational goals, and this is just what CRM’s should enable.  So think about what your members\supporters are doing day to day, then what they want from your NFP. The last question is what you can do to make those interactions as simple as intuitive as possible.

Pictures – an apology

In my last post I explored the subject of image rights and realised that I was using images that I probably didn’t have permission to use. I made a commitment to go back and rectify that error as soon as possible. This post is my way to hopefully make amends. I’m going to look for the owner of each image and credit them with the ownership. If that is at all possible.  

Now I obviously cant show you the images anymore so if you want to see them you’ll have to follow one of the links. (Though most of those sites probably also don’t have permission)

Publish

So let’s start with the picture of a publish button.  It was a picture of a green button with the word “publish” on it. I used it on a post about the risks of publishing. I tried to track down the owner by doing a simple google search and found no information about a likely owner, but I did find 4 pages of google search results of blogs, news articles commercial advertising all using the same image. The including the site that I took it from.

The image was taken from

http://howtoprogramwithjava.com/publish-java-web-application-via-vps/

but look its here too

http://www.reliablesoft.net/how-often-should-you-publish-new-content/

http://teachamazing.com/9-web-2-0-sites-to-publish-student-work/

http://www.zoho.com/sites/free-website-builder.html

http://www.dlsbusinesssolutions.co.uk/publish/

Tube Train

I used a digitally created image of a met line train to illustrate my first post, and link to the train line that my blog is named after. This image appears to be quite a specialist image so I would expect the owner to be easily traceable.

I got the image from this site

http://www.globalgranary.org/2013/01/10/the-london-tube-undergound-150th-anniversary-on-9th-jan-2013/#.UxTo3fl_v6c

but it here too

http://www.emta.com/spip.php?article661

http://www.skibbereeneagle.ie/?p=292

http://www.nhmethc.plus.com/newsite/FindUs.html

But again no trace of owner, I suspect it is a TFL.gov.uk picture but there is no trace on their site any more.

Evolution

This is a classical picture of evolution showing how we evolved from the apes. This image I used to try and show that my blog an writing style will evolve. But yet only 2 weeks later I find it difficult to eve find the same image again. It’s a fairly common image of ape slowly transforming into man. But this one the man at the end has his hands together in prayer. There are lots of twists on the concept but my image just isn’t there anymore so I cant even give credit to the place that I took the image from.

I hope this post has gone a little way to serve as an apology, but also as an exercise it shows how common breach of copyright could be.

Photos Images and the Law

Voightander Camera

For my next blog paranoia post I'm looking at the issue of images, photos and pictures. Everyone has surely heard the phrase pictures speak a thousand words, and that to make a article interesting you need an image or two just to distract the eyes for a little. But I'm not an artist, and whilst I do take photos I don't have a whole stock of them ready to use. So like most lazy writers I tend to rely on the internet to find relevant pictures. But I'm vaguely aware that this may not be the right thing to do and whats more I do feel for the original artist. They have gone out of there way to create the work and it is clearly of high quality as I am prepared to use it for my own purposes, yet I have no idea what the etiquette is for taking someones work and reusing it. So in this post I intend to explore those in a little more detail. Also to note my sincere apologies to the artists responsible for the 3 pictures
I have already used. Once this post has been published I will go back and amend appropriately.

Law

Unknown students in jail

Copyright is the most obvious legal issue with photos since the Berne convention all images are copyright protected which prevents an image being used without permission or adapting the image without permission, even re-creation of an image is prohibited. There is no mistake that even small independent personal blogs are covered by copyright laws, so any image I use must be published with permission, otherwise the law may be on my back.

Its not a case of whether the image is free or if its been paid for, the issue is ensuring that you have permission to use the image, you can find a free image that you are aloud to publish or you can pay for an image and then use it for a non-agreed purpose.

Then there are laws relating to image rights of an individual, where even if you have a copyright agreement, you don't necessarily have permission from the person in the image. But that is the best left for a future post and in the meantime i won't publish pictures of people (ignoring the 2 students above). Likewise companies have laws protecting their images too so anything covering trademarks also off limits for the time being. I've also just read that certain buildings are covered by trademark too, so no pictures of buildings either. There doesn't seem to be much left for the poor well intentioned blogger.

There is however a term that keeps cropping up and that is :-

"In the public Domain"

The concept of a public domain is that if something is available to everyone then it is owned by everyone and controlled by no one. So doesn't this imply that if an image is on a free search engine then it is a free image and in the public domain. Well actually no it doesn't, images on the internet are widely available but still retain ownership.

Dollars

Free images

Yet despite all of this there are free images allover the internet, and some artists declare that the image is free to use, either by everyone in all circumstances or by providing some conditions. Whilst i can see there is some benefit of this in the case of an aspiring artist or a company wanting to draw attention to itself, i'm not certain how you can be sure that the image you have is truly a legal image.

Creative commons images

I have discovered one source of free image, Creative commons Images. Creative commons is a not for profit foundation who have created copyright licences which allow artists to licence their work for use by others at no charge. Some of the licences still contain restrictions and if you breach them your still liable under copyright laws, but essentially these creative commons licences give you the opportunity to gain permission from the artist to use an artwork.

But even these images are not without issue, the Creative commons organisation it not party to the agreement and there is no way to be sure that just because a website says the image has a license there is no way to ensure the original artist has authorized it. Creative commons also doesn't get you around image rights and trademark issues. But short of taking lots of poor quality camera phone pictures this seems like my best option. All of the images for this post have been taken from wikimedia.org which hosts both creative commons and public domain images.

Orphaned images

One last thing to note is this rather controversial term, Orphaned Image. Its controversial because its a relatively new concept that is seen by some to completely undermine the copyright laws described above, from my limited understanding the concept essentially implies that it is ok to use images that have been orphaned, in so much as that the original owner is no longer traceable, and in this sense the image is now commonly owned. Whats more it provides a level of defense for individuals and organisations as it appears that all you have to do to declare an imaged orphaned is to make an effort, to identify the owner. If you can't then go ahead and publish. Whats more it seems that you can then assume ownership of that image and re-sell it. It all seems somewhat underhand to me for the moment so I intend to steer clear until I have some time for more research.

5 Key accessibility questions to ask your supplier

Everyone wants a website to be accessible to everyone, and certainly no one wants to exclude people from getting key information about their organisation. Yet so many websites don’t cater for those with disabilities/ of particular concern is the partially sighted community but also a well-developed should also be fully usable for those with cognitive disorders, the deaf community those with conditions such as Dyslexia. In fact there is no reason why your website shouldn't be accessible to all your potential user base.

So often accessibility requirements get missed out or forgotten in the excitement of a new project, but just by asking your current or potential suppliers some simple questions as early as possible you can get a long way to a fully accessible website.

1. 1.       Is your system compliant with the 2010 Equality Act?
2. 2.       Does it work with Screen readers?  (And speech to text)
3. 3.       Can you change the Colours?
4. 4.       Are the security procedures accessible?
5. 5.       Can they help you write accessible content?

Of course this is just the start and to truly have an assessable system you need to embed a culture of understanding between your organisation and your suppliers. But these questions are as good a start as any.

Blog 101

With a bit of luck and a trailing wind I'm hoping to write a regular blog. Not sure how it will develop but the aim is  to use my time on the Much Maligned Metropolitan line to put my wandering thoughts to paper. Its a tricky thing to start, and I make no pretence of being a writer or any sort of publisher. So why am I writing one, the simplest t answer is that I often have thoughts that are too detailed for twitter and require some exploration to understand why I have reached that conclusion. I find that in implicit in the act of writing is a discipline which forces the mind to formulate ones thoughts a little better and then to commit them to public scrutiny not only allows thoughts to be tested, but ensures ones own view is resilient and at least a little thought through.

So I am writing this as a voyage of self discovery and mostly for my self. If you like what I write or have a view which can add to the conversation id love for you to join me. I appreciate this makes me sound like some sort of naval gazing self aggrandising hippy, and maybe there is some truth to that, but i guess we'll wait and see.

I guess the next question is what to write about? Quite often the best blogs with the highest readership have a narrative and a rich set of core principals, which hold the work together. Unfortunately for me I don't have those for these posts, maybe Ill find one as I write but barring in mind I'm not on a mission to gain huge readership, my goals for the blog will be slightly different. It would be easy for me to describe the blog in a whatever comes to mind sort of a way. But that also wouldn't be true, there are lots of things that go through my mind that would not make interesting reading and I do want to grip your attention and the plan is to formulate well put together blogs. The honest answer is that I don't know what to expect from this blog and that's part of the reason for doing it.Who knows in a years time I may have an idea that drives it forward, but maybe not.

What I can tell you is what i'm interested in and where my thoughts are likely to go in the early days. I'll explore all of these topics more broadly in my next few posts.

• Atheism - I am one, and there are many implications to being an atheist in today's society 
• Religion - I'm fascinated by the stuff, I don't understand it, but i'm fascinated by its history. All religions are stunning in there very existence and there are lots we can learn from how they have evolved.
• History - this mostly comes from a love of historical fiction novels, and I know little about genuine historical fact.
• Maths - the things people can do with 10 different figures is stunning. I'm not some sort of mathematical boffin but I'm particularly interested in natural sequences and the economics of reality. Think Fibonacci meets John Stewart Mill. meets
• Technology - I work in the technology industry, and there is so much to it that its inevitable that the occasional tech blog will be forthcoming especially accessibility and CRM technology
• Sport - Im not fanatical about any particular sport or team but I do enjoy the thrill of it. Essentially if I can find a knowledgeable source to get me started I can be equally enthralled by curling as I can a American football. But with a particular following for Leyton Orient
• Society - In its widest sense society and how we move forward is important, So politics, Charities, Equality, Poverty that sort of thing

Well that's about it to start with, the plan is to quietly write a blog about each of the above subject areas to get me started then I'll start looking for feedback. 

*I should say here that I'm dyslexic and my spelling is atrocious. I will attempt to fix as many mistakes as possible, but the mos important thing is that the blogs are interesting and readable, the odd mistake does not distract from that experience for too many a people, So if terrible spelling offends I can only apologise, but i'm not going to lose much sleep over it.