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All posts tagged iphone

07
Jan

VNX Framework 4.0 released

Categories: Approach, CMS, Conversion, Mobile/Responsive, News, Social, Strategy, Thinking, UX
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VNX4

Connected are proud to announce the launch of VNX 4.0

Designed as a world-leading digital framework and based on 10 years of platform development, VNX provides an ideal, fully curated digital platform on which to build world-class strategies, easily and quickly. The key features are:

  • Cloud-based, scaleable architecture to handle up to 5m visitors per month with 99.999% uptime, disaster recovery and business continuity,
  • 100% responsive build – delivering stunning websites on all platforms includes IOS (iPhone & iPad), Android, Windows Surface & 8, PCs and Macs,
  • NoCode philosophy, dispensing the need for expensive programmer resources, dramatically cutting the cost of deployment, evolvement and support
  • Best practice dynamic landing pages for high-return, direct response digital campaigns
  • EU privacy compliance and cookie management (EU-only)
  • Site visitor management and routing based on site activity and behavioural targeting
  • Semantic markup, optimised for natural listings
  • A/B and multivariate testing
  • Uses the Industry standard WordPress CMS for ease of management and changes

Originally conceived in 2004 as VITES, has powered many industry firsts and with the release of VNX 4.0 brings the platform up-to-date adding mobile, touch, cloud-hosting and CMS support. Already deployed on a number of web-sites, the full release simplifies the production, delivery and support of almost any web property.

Architecture Notes

  • Most clients license VNX 4.0 under a turnkey deployment agreement that includes build, configuration, layout and support.
  • Core VNX 4.0 is optionally available as an Amazon AWS AMI under a developers license.
  • VNX 4.0 is a complete re-write of the preceding platform, VITES 3.x. Despite all the core functionality from VITES 2/3 being available in VNX 4.0 there is no shared codebase whatsoever.
  • There is a migration service available to move VITES 2.4 and 3.x to VNX. Migration from earlier versions of VITES is available on request to support.

VNX Plugin Support

Core VNX 4.0 support a range of standard and bespoke plugins. The list of plugins for VNX is growing all the time, be aware some plugins will become obsolete or deprecated from a support and therefore SLA support needs to be up to date to ensure full support. The list of curated plugins supported in Q1 2013 covers:

  • Social integration for login, data acquisition, interaction, sharing, posting and following/liking
  • Data capture, processing and routing
  • mySQL data storage
  • Dynamic landing pages
  • Automated registration and subscription
  • Reporting, monitoring and tracking
  • Anti-spam, whitelists & blacklists
  • Video, image and third-party format media embedding (not including Flash)
  • Semantic tagging and markup
  • A/B testing and reporting
  • Online booking
  • Click-to-call services
  • Live chat
  • Specific mobile version, as well as full responsive layout
  • Third-party fonts including Google
  • Portfolios, sliders and image-based galleries
  • e-commerce kart and checkout (updated: due Q2 2013)

Custom plugins may be created or purchased and modified for use on VNX 4.0 unsupported. There is a validation service available if support is required.

Support Notes

Customers using the previous versions of VITES (2.1, 2.4 and 3.x) are supported via existing agreements.

Pricing & Licensing

Turnkey deployment starts from £5k for a complete web-site built to exacting standards and assured to give organisations the highest return on investment. Typical capital cost is around £20k.

Platform licensing starts from £100 pcm for core VNX 4.0. Plugin licensing from £10 pcm. Developer SDK & licensing from £750 pcm. Standard support contracts charged on 21% of capital value. Development charges from £168 ph with agile project management provided.

Talk to us about your digital challenges and we’ll provide a no-obligation run-through of how VNX 4.0 will surpass your needs. Comfortably.

by Martin Dower
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01
Feb

Giving back to writers on the web

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For some time there has been a little browser bookmarklet which goes by the name of Readability, a simple tool which de-clutters web pages by stripping them down to display just the content of the page allowing for distraction-free reading.

Early today (UK time) the team at Readability launched the new service which offers a reading experience users of Instapaper will be familiar with but on a subscription based service. The idea is to pass 70% of the subscriber money directly to the writers and site owners who’s content passes through the service. As a registered user you can see how much of your subscription fee is spread across all the sites you have saved for reading.

As the service builds up a user base, it could help site owners earn a snippet of money for their trouble and willingness to post great content on the web. As a registered publisher, you are also be privvy to information about the articles which are being saved most allowing you to better understand which posts and topics are more popular.

It’s early days yet and they’re yet to announce more info on their partnership with Instapaper but if it builds up some steam, it could be interesting to see how people utilise the service to earn a few dollars from their articles.

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23
Sep

It’s all coming together… on Twitter

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For years, Twitter users have been split between those who predominantly tweet directly through the website and those who choose to use third party applications. As I currently sit amongst the latter group opting to use Tweetie on Mac and Twitter (formally part of the Tweetie app family) on the iPhone, I can only give my opinion on why people choose to do shy away from the web interface. Read more
13
Sep

Privacy arms race is hotting up

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You cannot help to notice that privacy is fast becoming one of the hottest subjects in town. Driven, in part, by the social networking revolution every Tom, Dick and Harry are throwing great new applications at us such as Facebook, Gowalla, Google Me (?) with the aim of capturing a large slice of our social activity. All of these are freebies with no easy “pay” model and after Friends Reunited pissed away market leadership in the UK by charging a fiver a year no-one is keen to go straight to a charging model. The investors in these new applications will want to turn them into cash hoovers at some point so are trying all sorts of mechanisms and ideas out, mostly revolving around behavioural advertising.

The backlash has started, Mark Zuckerberg took a real kicking over changes to Facebook’s privacy policy and Google is making some major changes to it’s policy on October 3rd. We are also seeing an explosion in geo-location based applications (Gowalla, Foursquare, Facebook Place, Around me and Google Instant) so privacy concerns are now no longer just about personal data these guys hold about us – it’s now about these guys knowing where we are, who we are with and what we are doing. All this extra data greatly improves the quality of information held on regular people and, critically, adds the time/date dimension to the data held. In many ways, it’s a marketer’s dream and is propelling behavioural targeting and personalistion to the top of many company’s agendas’.

So where does that leave us? We can commit Facebook suicide and we can switch off GPS on our iPhones but surely that just leaves us out in the cold. We will need these tools and applications to be able to communicate with our friends and family in the near future. Some argue that this is a generational thing and will require the next generation to grow up into consumers before it really makes itself felt but that is plain bollocks. Many of the ideas may gain early adoption by the younger people but they soon teach their parents, mentors and anyone else who has a need to connect with the youth and once middle-aged groups of women are “checking in” at the WI using Gowalla then the game is well and truly up. As an aside did you know that 28% of Facebook’s users are older than 34, their fastest-growing demographic.

What about paying for privacy? How much would you pay to manage your privacy? I don’t mind seeing personalised adverts about, say, motorcycling or AC/DC or Apple products but I would love to have a central place to go that holds all this information so I can correct the errors and remove the rubbish I don’t want to see. And I would pay for it; digital identity management on a personal level.
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04
Aug

Tactile web?

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The absence of many of the senses (touch, smell, taste and largely, hear) when interacting with t’interweb is a challenge that at some point needs addressing if we are to replicate the real world into the virtual world.

Lots of studies have shown that these senses greatly influence our decisions and if virtual environments seek to achieve comparable success to the real world it won’t be overlooked for long.

Sound

On the face of it, sounds easy to deal with – simply play a backing track on a page and you have sound except that’s not the whole story. We use sound in a far more complicated manner and how we perceive or react to sound also varies depending on what we are doing.

We’re going to start testing using sound as an aid to navigation, initially it will be as simple as small “click and ding” cues to assure site visitors that actions they are trying to do, have, in fact been achieved. Sound is, potentially, the easiest sense to deal with as most browsing devices have a speaker, very few have “smell-o-vision” and I’m not aware of any device that produces taste (urgh!).

Touch

Is an interesting one. The growth of touch-enabled devices such as the iPad and other touch screen tablets shows some promise. Joshua Ackerman of MIT suggests that our use of tactile concepts in metaphors that relate to behaviour might influence our judgement which provides an interesting basis to start thinking about how we might use tactile feedback to “convince” a web site visitor. There is not yet a way for a site to directly feedback touch but there most certainly is a way to read touch via devices that have accelerometers installed. In fact simple examples of this exist already on, for example, the iPhone that can carry out actions when shaken, turned or moved.

Early work has started on meta-materials that can impart different touch sensations such as rough, smooth, rippled and whilst this work has an early home working with vision-impaired people the simple idea that a site can “talk” to you through the feeling of the site as your finger or palm wanders over the page is appealing, if not a little ‘Star Trek’.

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22
Jun

iPhone iOS4 update

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Yesterday Apple released their latest iPhone software update. I wasn’t as quick off the mark as some of my friends so this morning I deliberately ignored Twitter and other social media so I could make my own mind up without being influenced.

I don’t like doing major iPhone updates as there hasn’t been an update yet where I’ve not heard stories of iPhones crashing and generally being worse than before. Fortunately, I’ve managed to avoid any problems and get to experience the new features as though I’d opened a brand new iPhone!

I’ll be honest, the update last year wasn’t all that great in my opinion, the features I found useful day-to-day could have probably been counted on one hand. Since hearing about the new features of iOS4 I’ve been waiting in anticipation to play with the new features and already putting together a small list of things I love about it…

Folders

Folders is an easy one to start with as they’re pretty self explanatory. Basically, iOS4 allows you to group your apps together making your home screen less cluttered and more organised. The automatic naming of folders (using the apps you’re grouping to find their common category eg. Games, Social etc) makes the process quick and easy to do.

5x Optical Zoom

My experience in the past with Digital Zoom on any kind of camera has been less than fun. The results were often poor and pixelated making it about as useful at capturing an image as a Rhino with a paintbrush.

With it’s reputation already tarnished, I wasn’t expecting much when I took a few test shots and for a moment I was again left disappointed. I opened the camera app and pointed it to a random subject and zoomed in. The onscreen representation was pixelated and poor quality at which I huffed with disgust, then I went into my photo album to check the end result. The image was good quality and relatively sharp for a digitally zoomed image. My opinion of digital zoom was swiftly changed, it can be done!

Photos and Places

The photo album on iPhone has gone pretty much untouched (as far as I can tell) for the last few years so I was pleasantly surprised to see that Apple started to use geo-tagging in a way that’s useful to iPhone users. When browsing your photo album there is a new icon named “Places”, touching this brings to you a map view. Geo-tagged data is retrieved from the photos stored on the iPhone and applied to map based on where they were taken. I think it’s a different but useful way to view photos. With this feature I can quickly find photos I took at my wedding venue,  a friend’s wedding or on a recent trip to London.

Personally, I think Places is the best improvement I’ve discovered so far. It gives additional functionality and an alternative way view photos while encouraging iPhone users (whether they know directly or not) to apply more useful data into their photos, which in the fast world of the Web could lead to new and interesting applications for viewing photos.

06
May

Moving with the times

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The Connected site shown in Mobile SafariOur way of working is far from conventional and with the arrival of the new iPad, our thoughts on how we work are beginning to change further and these thoughts extend out to how we use the web.

Mobile browsing has grown fast over the last few years thanks to the wide availability of smartphones and despite most sites work great in mobile browsers, they can still be a usability nightmare. Other options have been made available in the form of CMS plugins allowing you to apply a more app like experience to your site.

Not ones to ignore conventions (where they make sense), we’ve applied our own iPhone friendly skin to our site allowing you to get straight to our content wherever you are.

Let us know what you think!

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