Alan Sillitoe’s negative perception of the Olympic Games seem strangely at odds with the egalitarian spectacle and self-depreciating humour that characterised the opening ceremony of London 2012.

However, given that previous Games have been steeped in nationalism and were distorted by media and newsreel interpretation, perhaps Sillitoe’s stance is unsurprising?

The most striking example of the games being used for political purposes must be the Berlin Olympics of 1939. Captured by film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, the footage of the Games is reminiscent of her 1936 work ‘Triumph of the will’ which deified Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and perpetuated the myth of Aryan superiority.

Ironically, Hitlers ambition to use the Games as a propaganda tool were undermined by the success of African-American athlete Jessie Owens who won four gold medals. Whilst Owen’s success might appear to be a great example of an individual athlete triumphing over political dogma, his appalling treatment by the American establishment on his return the United States highlights the fact that he was a political pawn in somebody else’s game.

Throughout the cold war, the former Soviet Union groomed it’s athletes and stage managed sporting events for political gain, including the 1980 Olympics that were boycotted by the US and others in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles were subsequently boycotted by the Eastern Bloc countries.

With so much flag waving and global attention, political posturing seems hard to resist, so perhaps Sillitoe is right to suggest we should run for the hills at the sight of the Olympic flame?

The Olympic Games held in Munich in 1972 were intended to be a showcase for West German post-war renaissance, aesthetics and democracy but turned ugly when Israeli Athletes were massacred by the Palestinian terrorist group, Black September.

Yorkshireman and former-Raleigh Cycles Marketing Manager Michael Breckon was there, working as the Canadian Olympic Cycle Team Coach, a role he had sunk his heart and soul into over many years. When he paraded the Canadian flag around the stadium he had no idea that he was about to get caught up in such a tragic political standoff.

Sillitoe Trail editor James Walker and myself interviewed Michael about his experience at the Munich Games. It was the first time he had ever spoken publicly about the ordeal and was very moving. James and I had hoped to incorporate the Munich interview with the third theme of the Sillitoe Trail which focusses on Raleigh.

Michael Breckon is a big fan of Alan’s work and took the author on a tour of the Raleigh cycle factory in the 1980s – Sillitoe was disappointed that so many components were manufactured overseas.

Michael also introduced us to a lesser-known Sillitoe novel entitled ‘Down from the Hill’ in which the lead character embarks upon a remarkable cycle route extending across Staffordshire, the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Rutland, Leicestershire and his beloved Nottingham. Such jaunts were common among cycling veterans like Michael and my own Grandfather Tommy Wass who thought nothing of riding from Mansfield to Skegness and Scarborough.

Our Munich interview for the Sillitoe Trail did not meet with the editorial constraints of the BBC’s digital arts platform The Space but Michael’s story was published in LeftLion magazine and I am working with him on a digital version of his autobiography 60 Cycles to be released in 2013.

I’m unsure what Alan would have made of Olympic Games London 2012 with it’s conscientious opening ceremony directed by Danny Boyle, where British cyclists delivered victory after victory and where ubiquitous mobile technology provided unparalleled access to the event.

Perhaps our modern Olympic flame seems a little less intimidating? Though perhaps that’s all the more reason to be on our guard and be ready to take to the hills the next time we see that flame?

Explore the Sillitoe Trail www.sillitoetrail.com

Read about 60 Cycles www.60CYCLES-thebook.co.uk

Today we mourn the passing of former astronaut Neil Armstrong who was of course the first man to walk on the moon.

The space race provided a backdrop to my childhood. JKF’s dream made real – putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.

The brave endeavour was made for a cool test pilot like Armstrong and the whole fantastic exercise did at least save the world from nuclear annihilation as US and Soviet missile technology were skewed towards the race to the moon.

The Apollo programme galvanised America’s engineering industry but also gave the world a kind of collective pride that was very much in line with the youth counter-culture that ran through the period.

It is hard to convey the sense of wonderment and excitement that fuelled our imagination at that time, when as an eight-year-old boy I watched the blurry images of man’s first moonwalk unfolding on my grandparents TV set.

Astronomical TV anchormen James Burke, Patrick Moore and Peter Fairley had primed us for this moment through previous televised missions with oversized Airfix models as the Apollo missions inched ever closer to the first moon landing.

There with my sketchbook full of plans for rockets and imagined landscapes of our neighbouring planets I wondered where space exploration was taking us?

I bought a little flag from Morecambe bay to commemorate the moon landing. It’s time to wave it now.

Goodbye Neil Armstrong and thank you for your nerve, bravery and inspiration.

Over the next couple of weeks, local students in Nottinghamshire are going to be receiving the results of their mock examinations.

Some will receive lower grades than expected in their GCSE’s A-Levels.

In today’s economic climate, the competition for University places is tougher than ever and candidates are urged to take exam preparation seriously in order to attain the best grades they possibly can.

Teacher Richard Batchelor has worked with digital expert Paul Fillingham at thinkamigo to develop and brand  a maths website and mobile app which promote a series of intensive A-level maths revision courses to be held at Nottingham Trent University.

The Engaging Maths website offers online course bookings and a handy Calculator Booklet has been designed to help students make more efficient use of digital calculators in exam situations.

Engaging Maths Revision Courses take place at NTU during the Easter holidays. Courses help identify areas that students are weakest in and target these topics appropriately. Exams are not simply about knowing the facts, exam-technique is also incredibly important in achieving top marks.

Engaging Maths courses combine comprehensive exam practice with effective revision tips to help students achieve their full potential.

For many students, this time of year can be particularly stressful but the thing to remembers is that even if you didn’t quite get the results you expected it’s not the end of the world: Take stock of your situation. There is still plenty of time left to develop an effective revision plan and plenty of help available to tackle those more elusive questions.

Visit www.engagingmaths.co.uk

Thinkamigo smart marketing is the new name for dreamtargets.

Focussing on Web, Mobile and Social Media, Thinkamigo is envisaged as a fresh kind of marketing company that works with startups, entrepreneurs, business and social enterprises. It operates in a creative and marketing capacity but also provides digital training and mentoring.

The company is the result of several months working with businesses and giving back to charities and the local community in North Nottinghamshire. Thinkamigo has now opened up a studio at the Centre for Business Excellence in Edwinstowe House, in Sherwood Forest.

“Thinkamigo is a natural progression and combines years of digital marketing experience with the business engagement skills of my wife Clare. We’re amazed and extremely appreciative of the amount of encouragement and support we are receiving from businesses and networking colleagues. It’s also a great honour to be back in the former Nottinghamshire coalfield and Robin Hood’s legendary domain.”

Digital Producer and Art Director – Paul Fillingham.

Over the next few months Thinkamigo smart marketing aims to bolster it’s digital academy with other innovative outlaws. We hope to deliver disruptive technology and great ideas to the East Midlands, South Yorkshire and beyond.

The old Dreamtargets site will be relegated to a personal blog and portfolio as more commercial projects move over to Thinkamigo

All-in-all, 2012 looks set to be a busy and exciting year.

I recently worked with communications agency PR Principles to deliver the first stage of a digital relaunch for the company as they refocus on the challenges facing energy providers in the 21st century. EnviroEnergy have a range of billing and support products that will be introduced across various digital channels throughout 2011-2012.

The new website introduces EnviroEnergy’s new eemonitor product which is aimed at local authorities, businesses and private landlords who need to monitor energy usage in their properties. The site has links to Twitter for building the company’s social media presence and uses the Mailchimp service for data capture and email broadcasts.

The microsite was designed and prototyped using Axure RP Professional and Adobe Photoshop and the whole project was executed from initial brief, visuals and web launch in less than two weeks. It was built using the Umbraco .net CMS by technical partner; Headland Multimedia.

Website Link: eemonitor microsite

Production Partners:

We are so used to free web services that it seems surprising to learn that someone has to pay for all that cool Google Map platform development. I guess the same can be said of our GMail accounts that are filling up with messages by the hour. Maybe one day, Google will call time on that free ride too and turn it into a global gravy train?

Google Map APIs will be offered in a tiered pricing structure. There will still be a free option but credit card payments kick in when usage exceeds a certain threshold. Google claim the shift will be incremental so that developers have an opportunity to weigh up the options available.

As a developer who has worked with museums and artists to create map-based trails, the question remains over who foots the bill for Google Map subscriptions if a particular trail gains in popularity to the extent that it trips you over the payment threashold?

Of course, if such an application really takes off, then the trick is to monetise it. In which case, paying your subscription to Google shouldn’t be an issue!

Need help with location based web and mobile app design and development?

OK I’ve updated iTunes ready for my iPhone’s iOS5 upgrade and all the tasty new features and iCloud goodness that comes with it.

iCloud is Apple’s way of syncronising all of our devices, it’s a kind of grown-up iTunes hub for all our music, movies, pictures and other stuff besides. It’s another step along the path to truly pervasive media that is accessible 24/7 by whatever device is nearest or appropriate to our location.

iCloud sounds good and I’ve already used it to keep devices in sync when travelling. Well actually synchronising my Son’s devices since most of his digital stuff comes from my Apple Account. Anyway, it does make the whole process much easier.

However, not all clouds come with a silver lining. Earlier this week a cloud service that I use decided to pull the plug on some of its services, leaving a dirty, big, cloud-sized hole in my website.

Delicious.com has been around for many years. It began as a free service that allowed users to share browser bookmarks. This had several advantages; it allowed you to access your bookmarks from any machine or browser, you could share web links with others and it had a great method for tagging content with keywords.

Tagging allows users to create their own method of categorising content. This is different to the fixed category/sub-category taxonomy that might exist in say an eCommerce site.

Tagging is sometimes referred to as a ‘folksonomy’. It’s a structure created by ordinary folk, highly individual and sometimes quite unusual. Which was another appeal of the Delicious cloud: You could browse other people’s ‘folksonomy’ or tags for interesting links. Delicious allowed users to display the tags relating to their bookmarks in a graphic tag cloud. This offered a great way of seeing someone’s interests at a glance. Delicious also provided embedding code, so that users could add tag-clouds to their own websites.

I keep using the past tense here, because many Delicious users are very upset about the fact that the tag-cloud feature was withdrawn after Delicious was sold off by Yahoo to a new company.

Like many people who had invested time and effort into building up a resource of bookmarks, I had a Delicious cloud embedded in my website. It wasn’t on the home page or anything, but did provide content for a links page that was more interesting than a plain old list.

Delicious was a free service, so you could argue that it cost users nothing to build up their bookmarks, but when you think about it, those users made a huge investment in time and effort that ascribed value to the company – a company that was subsequently sold off. Delicious was a neat idea that became a commodity.

The new owners have aspirations for the brand. They are keen to develop a social space, following the user-interface conventions of image-rich web portals. The new Delicious feels like a destination website rather than a distribution platform. Feeding tag clouds on other people’s websites is no longer in their game-plan, or at least that is what their online forums suggest. Old-time users are abandoning Delicious in droves.

I’ve managed to migrate several years of Delicious bookmarks into Google Bookmarks – another cloud service. Google even provide a convenient ‘Import Delicious Bookmarks – New!’ link on their site to encourage people to make the switch.

Great, I’ve got my bookmarks out of Delicious and I thought it would be easy to get some Google plug-in to restore my tag cloud. Wrong!  I follow links to Google Labs where I would expect to find a plug-in… and guess what! That service has been suspended too, leaving a trail of broken widgets and plug-ins in its wake.

Here lies the problem with investing time and entrusting our assets to cloud based services: Those services are proprietary and subject to change. Cloud services are good -  don’t get me wrong!  Google’s enterprise services are genuinely useful, and in the design community, so too are services like DropBox and iDisk which allow sharing of large media files.

There have been lots of changes on Facebook recently. When their ‘Timeline’ feature kicks in, people are going to pour even more photos and personal memories into the Facebook cloud. But what if that cloud service was to disappear like GeoCities did a few years back sending millions of user profiles into oblivion?

Over the coming months, much of our digital media will be absorbed into the new Apple iCloud ecosystem. Steve Job’s legacy is a Billion Dollar server farm in North Carolina that has been built to facilitate this. It’s going to be a big paradigm shift, it’s going to be exciting and extremely useful. So should we submit to the cloud? My instinct says ‘yes’ submit to the cloud (resistance is futile) but it might be wise to think about an exit strategy or backup plan, just in case.

Postscript: 16th Oct 2011 – Delicious user Michael Massing found a hack that has got my cloud back (for now).

It’s been a long time coming but the new Facebook for iPad App is finally here!

Facebook App for iPad has a slick user-interface that feels very image intense (in a good way) that wll be familiar to users of the device. In useablity terms, the new app stacks up nicely against the efforts of it’s social media ‘rival’ Twitter and social aggregators like Hootsuite .

There are a few noteable features;

You can send a message or see notifications at any time without losing your place in the newsfeed.

Games, apps, groups and lists are available via the ‘list icon’ in the top left-hand corner. The items used the most appear at the top of the list automatically.

The handy Search function allows you to search anything on Facebook without having to click around or switch views.

The large profile picture view is very impressive and the ‘Nearby’ feature scatters images of friends who have used Facebook’s geo-tagging feature across a full-screen map that can be zoomed and panned.

For iPhone and iPad App developers maximising exposure on Facebook is going to be more important than ever as Facebook ‘Like’ recommendations could influence the number of downloads. I also believe that tighter links between Facebook and the Apple App Store will see a major increase in the number of dedicated iPad Apps.

Facebook App for iPad has been long overdue and the Beta release launched a few months back was not really ready. I’m sure the new release will be widely adopted and prove to be something of a game-changer in the social media landscape.

Facebook App for iPad:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/facebook/id284882215?mt=8

Need App Development?

As mobile internet usage increases, the importance of desktop browsers needs to be challenged. This has huge implications for the design of effective internet-based communications and for website analytics that no longer offer an accurate picture of digital engagement.

Mobile usage patterns are different from those of laptops and desktop PCs. The user experience is influenced by a whole new set of variables such as time-of-day, location and the activity the user is engaged in. Ubiquitous internet access can exist within an infinite number of situations. For example; the user may require immediate factual information concerning the location they are in, be gathering facts for an upcoming task or appointment, casually browsing en-route to their destination or sharing information on social networks.

This is a far cry from the days when we were tethered to wired modems and desktop machines in offices and home study spaces.

Internet conversation has changed too. Today online social interactions are often linked to personal recommendations which in turn are linked to commercial products and services.

Whilst social links of this type have resulted in an explosion of website traffic, users are more likely to compare several websites using browser tabs and back links before committing to one particular site.

The whole process has become accelerated and more intuitive. Yet there are still many destination websites that fail due to poor interface design.

Competition is fierce and getting fiercer by the day. It is a situation that can seriously undermine the efforts of companies and organisations, large or small.

Customer expectations are high. The fact is that users are less likely to waste time grappling with difficult menus and completing convoluted submission forms. Many of the  barriers associated with old-style ecommerce are simply unacceptable to today’s discerning and web-savvy customers.

When price differentials are minimal and time constraints are at a premium, users will simply follow the path of least resistance, opting for sites that offer clarity, confidence and the convenience of auto-complete and sign-in functions. The digital spaces that offer simple and effective user journeys will be the ones that are ‘favourited’ and convert the most interactions to transactions.

Reviews gleaned from influencers on social networks serve to expose sites that deliver a poor user experience. Twitter and Facebook can therefore seriously affect website traffic and do so very rapidly!

In the past, abandoned baskets and deferred purchases were commonplace, even in instances where the user journey was properly optimised. However, the presence of trusted brands and the clear cost advantages offered by online air travel bookings has weakened resistance to change and boosted consumer confidence. Emerging online public services and eGovernment have also contributed to the process of public acceptance.

Secure payments used to be a real issue for individuals and companies.  Today, familiarity with online banking with it’s multiple passwords and verification checks (like 3D Secure) mean that users worry less about the security of their transactions and are more likely to make ‘snap’ purchasing decisions.

Point-of-sale is therefore more important than ever before.  The potential for increased sales through linked and multiple purchases, cross-selling and up-selling can make all the difference to the bottom line. In this respect, the basket process cannot be an off-the-peg bolt-on but must continue the brand values established in the landing, browsing and selection stages.

Online engagement has become faster and more impulsive. Users want rapid fulfillment with minimum fuss. Site ‘stickiness’ therefore is more about the frequency of visits than duration of visits. Successful online retailers will aim to create a virtuous circle where good customer experiences result in loyalty, social testimonials and subsequent increase in visits and basket values.

Brands must learn to develop an holistic approach to digital engagement which takes into account the different delivery platforms and the way users are increasingly moving between one platform and another to engage with products and services.

Platform independence is beginning to feel natural. Apple’s new cloud-based iTunes service and Amazon’s Kindle book service which shares purchases across your various devices are mainstream instances of platform independence. They are also prime examples of what is known as a digital ecosystem.

From a brand perspective, the user experience within the digital ecosystem needs to be consistent and appropriate for the point of delivery. Shifting from mobile to desktop, TV to tablet also needs to be transparent and intuitive.

Effective eCommerce in the new digital landscape is all about winning hearts and minds through delivery of the three ‘C’s – Clarity, Confidence and Convenience. Behind the scenes, Marketers need to adopt more effective metrics with which to gauge the effectiveness of their communications within a platform independent ecosystem. Interpretation of multiple data streams, appreciation of customer relationships and continual design improvements are all essential elements of a successful digital marketing strategy.

Usually, interactive projects begin as a traditional sketch using a marker and layout-pad. However, initial wireframes for this particular project were sketched on an Apple iPad using an application called iMockups.

This helped map-out all the main functions of the app and provided a basic storyboard for the client.

The user interface was then refined using Axure Pro software on a Mac. I use this software package for designing websites and mobile applications.

Axure allows pages to be uploaded to a webserver as hyperlinked HTML pages. This is extremely useful, providing a non-linear walk-through that can be used to explore various user-scenarios.

Graphic primitives created in Axure were then replaced with more stylised graphics created in Adobe Photoshop and the HTML pages on the web-server were subsequently updated.

You can access the Axure prototype I designed for the Photolibrary here; http://www.dreamtargets.com/Axure_prototype/

Prototyping helps communicate the customer-journey to the client and can be used to sign-off basic design elements. Axure also generates a site-plan of all of the pages in the design which is useful when discussing the project with the client and briefing the programming team.

As positioning of Axure graphics is ‘pixel perfect’ there is less room for error when translating the design for the web or mobile device. Most of the creative assets are web-ready too which speeds up the production process and allows the programming team to concentrate on writing code.

In this case, one programmer concentrated on the web content using the Cuttlefish cPortal Content Management System whilst another wrote the iPhone iOS code using Appcelerator; a software editing tool designed to simplify iPhone and Android development.

Download the John Birdsall Social Issues Photo Library App from the iPhone App Store.

An Android version is planned for 2012.