Among some of the most popular of these are those suited to a variety of businesses that typically enable increased efficiency within a particular business area.

Basecamp from 37Signals is a prime example of this type of “web” software. It is an online project collaboration tool that allows businesses of any size to easily manage their projects and communicate effectively with their clients and partners.

Another great example is Google Apps – which provides web-based office tools like Google Mail, Google Documents and Google Calendar. These free apps allow a business to get started quickly and work collaboratively.

In these times of economic uncertainty, businesses are increasingly looking at ways to make themselves more productive, lean and efficient. Instead of getting bogged down with admin tasks, staff need to be on the ground, working and communicating with clients, old and new, to bring more work in. Even firms who would traditionally shy away from web-based software solutions are becoming increasingly switched on to “web apps”, as a way of avoiding costly up-front fees, licensing costs and long maintenance contracts.

Web applications can come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from generic solutions to a specific problem (eg. project management) to something more bespoke.

For example, we recently worked with a large offshore postal carrier to build them an e-billing platform for their bulk-mail clients. This enabled them to move to an entirely digital system from the pre-existing paper-based system, allowing for much more control and monitoring over all the inputs by these clients. Consequently, it ensured that the pricing and billing was carried out correctly.

The system now handles over £20m per year in transactions and is estimated to have saved over £1m a year from miscalculated postage since its implementation.

As technology continues to grow, more and more opportunities are becoming available to create web applications that are easy to use and extremely powerful.

Applications that were previously extremely difficult to implement, such as web-based word processing, are now good enough for anyone to use. The increasing trend is a push towards web-based software which is cross-platform (can be used on PC’s, Mac’s etc), rather than desktop applications that can be limited to a particular platform.

Ultimately, this all leads to a whole range of benefits to the end business consumers. It allows staff to work remotely, documents are automatically backed up in the cloud and allows for true real-time collaboration between employees.

In our opinion, the most beneficial aspect to web-based software is platform independence, meaning that a company’s existing IT infrastructure does not have to be modified to switch to using web-based applications.

Written by Chris Barber and published in NE Buisness on December 15th 2011

I’ve recently been working on a simple game of Top Trumps with supercars, which I’ve made using jQuery.

I’ve made the code freely available on github for anyone to view / adapt / use / play with.

A working copy can be found here: blog.chris-barber.co.uk/supercar/

The gibhub repo can be found here: github.com/chrisbarber86/…

It’s a fairly simple design and the game allows either 1 player to play against the computer, or 2 plays to play against each other. Ideally I’d like to be able to improve on this by adding animations, better image preloading and make the whole thing on one page.

Would love to hear what people think

Simple. You refuse his resignation and open up a new office north of the border just for him.

The daring move by Newcastle digital media agency boss Justin Turner is already paying off. Carrot Media Ltd has won several new clients in the Scottish capital, including a leading jewellery designer on the Royal Mile.

Carrot Media Ltd, based on Newcastle Business Park, is a digital media agency specialising in web design, development, ecommerce and marketing training.

Originally set up as a Young Enterprise company in 2003 while studying at Newcastle University, Justin’s business now has clients ranging from sole traders to large multi-national companies.

“Carrot Media has been in business more than seven years and in that time we have learned what businesses need. We’re not just another company turning out the same solution to every client. We tailor our work to give clients exactly what they need and they love our friendly, no-nonsense approach.

“One of our secrets is recruiting the best young graduates. A lot of our staff comes from Newcastle University; Tom Harnasz was one of these. He joined us after finishing his degree in Information Systems last year and has quickly become a key part of our team, one of our experts on ecommerce systems. I was gutted when he handed in his resignation to move to Edinburgh with his girlfriend.

“Setting up a new office in Edinburgh was the obvious solution. I didn’t want to lose Tom and I’d been thinking of expanding the business. It’s working like a dream and now I’m considering opening another office in London as well.”

New client Gordon Young, whose jewellery firm Hamilton & Young commissioned Carrot to create a website allowing online sales to both trade and public using different pricing structures, likes the company’s consultative approach.

“These days it’s not enough for businesses to trade only on the high street. Ecommerce was a whole new confusing area for me but Tom and Justin helped steer me through it and designed a website that suits our business perfectly,” he said. “It’s been great working locally with Tom and he’s settled in well in the city.”

Tom has moved into an apartment in the West End Village and is enjoying living in Scotland’s capital city.

“This is a fantastic opportunity for me to establish Carrot Media in Edinburgh, it’s a privilege to live and work in such a thriving and prestigious city.”

Other current Carrot projects include work for Northern Rock Foundation, award winning beauty salon City Retreat, Wallsend People’s Centre and bestselling business author & top motivational speaker Michael Heppell.

Justin, from Gosforth, has entrepreneurship in the blood with a string of successful businesses under his belt including buy-to-let properties, fashion accessories and printing. He is committed to helping start-up businesses and offers training sessions in his specially-designed suite at Carrot’s HQ.

I would walk 500 miles: Digital media boss Justin Turner (centre) opened a new office in Edinburgh just to hang on to employee Tom Harnasz (left) and has already attracted new clients like Gordon Young, of Royal Mile jewellery firm Hamilton and Young.

Facebook revealed it would be expanding the sharing option so that users can restrict people from seeing particular posts. This feature is done extremely well in Google+ with the Circles feature.

Chris Cox from Facebook said, “Your profile should feel like your home on the web – you should never feel like stuff appears there that you don’t want, and you should never wonder who sees what’s there. The profile is getting some new tools that give you clearer, more consistent controls over how photos and posts get added to it, and who can see everything that lives there.”

Further changes will bring user controls from the settings page closer to the posts, photos and tags functionality. Facebook has been in trouble several times over the last few months with privacy campaigners around the highly controversial facial recognition feature. In particular, the German government has asked for this feature to be disabled and requested further data to be removed on the grounds of breaching protection laws.

Facebook seems confident these new changes will keep the sceptics happy as well as ensuring they hold back the advances of Google+ on their market share.

Will Facebook be able to reduce the rate at which Google+ is growing? Two months after launching, they’d already reached up to 25 million users!

Thanks to Esselar for the video I used during my seminar to help explain cloud computing.

I started to think about this statistic while using the Carrot Media iPad. I visited a website and I got the dreaded message, please download Flash in order to use this website.

I recall saying to myself, “Don’t they know I’m using an iPad, have they not considered other technologies?”

Lets consider this 1% iPad statistic further, and build in other Apple devices such as the iPhone or the iPod Touch. All of a sudden websites using Flash are loosing huge amounts of web traffic because Apple have no plans to support Flash on their mobile browsing devices.

At Carrot Media we have never been a huge fan of Flash and stopped using it about 4 years ago. Without getting too technical, we now have access to something called jQuery which in most cases is cheaper, faster and better than Flash.

I would encourage any website owner to check if the Flash on their website can be replaced or at least simplified.  Finally, don’t forget to check whether your website actually works across all mobile devices.

It’s around this figure – 2,095,006,005

I have to say I was rather shocked when I saw that number as it’s hard to comprehend just how large it is.

Just over 12 months ago Apple launched a product called the iPad. You may have heard of it? The success of this product has been staggering and the latest statistics about Global Internet usage revealed that 1% of Internet browsing is done on the iPad.

In fact to take this even further, in developed countries such as the US it represents over 2% and in the UK over 1%.

Just using the 1% figure, this represents over 20million people so maybe it’s time to make sure your website works on your iPad.

I have two brilliant examples of how video content can be used to promote a business. If you have 2 minutes spare and need a good giggle I suggest you have a watch. The First Video, “Cat’s with Thumbs” has had close to 4 million views and the second video “Will it Blend?’ has had close to 14 million views! Wow! These figure were correct at the time of publishing so it will be interesting to see how they have changed.

Cats with Thumbs

[youtube]h6CcxJQq1x8[/youtube]

Will it Blend?

[youtube]lAl28d6tbko[/youtube]

My point for website owners is two fold:

1. You can create your own video content and it doesn’t have to be high budget like the Cravendale advert. With some correct advice about technology, you can easily get going producing video content. I had my first go at a video blog post and you can see it here explaining about DropBox. It’s not great but we realise we have room for improvement and we’ve done something proactive to tap into this massive marketing opportunity.

1. Secondly, you don’t have to use your own video content. In this blog post I’ve used someone elses video content and in fact it is being hosted by YouTube. We use a technology called WordPress which makes it very easy for me to drop in video content.

If you’ve been saying to yourself, “this sounds complicated and expensive” then I suggest you need better advice around what technology your using in your website.

If you are business or website owner and don’t think this is important news, I suggest you read on. A freedom of information request put into the ISO revealed they saw recorded traffic to their website drop by 90%.

If you run a website, how would you feel if web traffic dropped by 90%? Would this maybe cause a dramatic loss in sales?

I know most people reading this will have heard of a ‘cookie’ but won’t know what one is. Cookies are small files that are essential for the vast majority of websites. If you ever revisit a website it might automatically know who you are, or remember certain details before you’ve even logged in. This is the basic definition of a cookie.  They can be used for a variety of purposes to improve a users experience and record essential information.

One big implication for advertisers, is whether you love them or hate them, they are the people who will drive customers to your website.  They use cookies to record information on who has visited a website and from which source. This information can then be used to pay commissions to the correct party.

This is all great ammunition for arguing against this new directive, as it could be fatal to the European web market. Finally, it puts the EU at a distinct disadvantage compared to the US market that will not be following any directives regarding cookies.

I’d be interested in hearing from business or website owners what they think of this issue.