codegent

We love music here at codegent, there is always something playing through the speakers, and usually quite a mixed bag. ( unless Mark is in charge of the tunes :) )

So when we came across the Muxtape, we were very excited. Inspired by the mixtapes of our youth this is service where you can select 12 songs, upload them, and then share your mix with your friends. Or you can flip through the mixes others have put together. It’s a great way to discover new music, in a random way.

But it is this random approach which got in the way of the service stepping out of it niche music-nazi audience. Enter the Audience.

Members of the community have developed a serices of tools to make Muxtape so much better. MuxFind and MuxSeek have are search engines that allow you to search through all of the mixtapes available. This is the community taking something which is great, and making it better. This is the community taking control of their services, and making it what they want it to be. A similar revolution has gone on around Twitter. Companies such as TweetScan and Twhirl have developed their own businesses and services around the Twitter Tool.

This is what Web 2.0 is really about. And this is why this is why we love this thing called the internet so much.

It is with interest which we have been watching Google’s Android Application competition. This is the $10m competition to develop applications for Google’s Android mobile platform. The 50 semi-finalists were announced today, and although a lot of the applications are shrouded in secrecy, a strong theme seems to be developing. The majority of applications seem to be based around Social Location tools, or Security applications.

For more about the semi finalists information have a look at this site.

We recently re-launched Meet the Author's interview site as Authors' Lounge TV.

The site had been around for about 5 months and had built up a decent following from the blogosphere. It made sense as fans are quite likely to write about exclusive video interviews of their favourite authors.

With bloggers in mind we introduced a few cool social bookmarking and embedding tools to help syndicate the content around the web, as well as overhauling the look and feel so it felt more like an Internet Television Channel.

In the two months since re-launch the traffic has tripled on average and the number one source of referrals are indeed blogs, with natural listings on Google a close second. Well you have to chuck in a bit of SEO haven't you?

Most of the industry are predicting a breakout year for the mobile web in 2008.

For a long time, the mobile web has been unpredictable, costly and low on user take-up. The majority of campaigns I have previously worked on with any serious mobile element have just scraped the surface, tapping into popular SMS and MMS services.

So what is encouraging us to use our mobiles online?

Apple's iPhone, released in late 2007, has made mobiles very sexy again.

If you haven't heard of it (welcome back to Earth, the wall is down and the cold war is over) the iPhone is a revolutionary device that unites your calls, contacts, email, music, camera, web browser etc in a dynamic, touch-screen, curvy-edged box.... and regular people are using it in droves!

For many reasons it would be wrong to confuse the iPhone with most mobile devices, especially if you are considering building a mobile site, but it has finally united the idea of phone and web working together properly.

It's not just the technology that has pushed us. Major websites, search engines and social networks such as YouTube, Flickr and Facebook have placed mobile services at their core, tempting unsuspecting users into an ever-connected virtual world.

Location Based Services

We have been using Google Maps and Sat-Navs for a while. It makes perfect sense to be applying all this thinking to your mobile. Needless to say the iPhone already does a lot but what about the rest?

In 2007 Nokia acquired a mobile advertising firm and a leading navigation system company. It isn't hard to see where they see things going. The benefit to marketers is easily delivered, relevant, geographically contextual content to end users.

Open Platforms for Applications

It's not all about browsing! 2007 really brought home the possibility of the web app, widget, mashup etc. Vista followed the Mac's lead and introduced desktop feeds for your local weather, football scores, status updates (the list goes on forever) and we all became RSS junkies. Adobe launched AIR and iGoogle followed suit so even your default homepage can tell you everything about anything you want.

But what about the mobile phone? Geeks have been hacking the operating systems on their phones for years but there have been no open standards available for developers to really use the core features of a physical handset. Until now!

The Open Handset Alliance Project launched Android, an open, free mobile platform which is being supported by some heavy companies such as Google, Motorola, LG, Samsung and T-Mobile to name a few. Expect that to be supported as standard in most future handsets.

Apple decided to open up the iPhone Developer SDK last week so we can look to develop intelligent bespoke apps that can fully interact with the handset soon!

Mobile Web Standards

There has been a degree of convergence in web standards for mobile. XHTML-MP has become the default industry-supported language for the mobile web. Page load and the multitude of various screen sizes still need to be taken into account when designing but at least the code is behaving itself!

Codegent Mobile

So we thought after all that talking we should show you something. We have built a simple version of our own site for your viewing pleasure.
www.codegent.com/mobile/

Or you can navigate to it using your mobile barcode scanner on the funky looking graphic below. You will see these dotted around everywhere soon. The Japanese have been using them on outdoor advertising, business cards, print ads etc. for years. But don't feel too left behind, they also have robotic dogs that clean their flats whilst they micro-sleep :)

Geek out.

We have recently launched The Nutrition Program, a new website to help people understand more about what they’re eating and how nutritionally balanced it is. You can create and save recipes and diets as well as generate graphs to show detailed nutritional analysis.

To build this we used an up and coming technology called Flex, which is basically Flash with a heavy data requirement. And it looks pretty as well!

Using Flex our developers can build more functional Flash applications, including lots of data and math, without excessive coding lead times. This means the app can look slick like a Flash site, be highly interactive, easy to use and can also perform complex data analysis and comparison.

As testament to this wonderful technology, and our wonderful new site ;) we have been featured on Flex.org, which showcases new and interesting Flex sites. Check us out at - http://flex.org/showcase/

Barcamp came to Thailand for the first time on Saturday. As codegent was one of the main sponsors (along with a couple of lesser knowns - Google & Microsoft) Matt and I felt it our duty to come out to Bangkok and join the fun.

Topics ranged from the seriously geeky (the virtues of streamlined ssh) to the seriously socialist (how Open Source can empower the common man) but in between we had some great discussions about RESTful web apps, PHP Frameworks and the most enthusiatic man on the planet eulogising about Twitter. There was even room to talk about online adult video.

The event was a huge success and undoubtedly Barcamp Bangkok II will follow next year. It's just cool to meet the people from around the globe who are as excited about this whole 'web thing' as we are.

AS3 for Flash Player 9 is so amazing. Everyday people around the world discover new things in it to play around with and the performance is a big bonus for developers. Today I found a site that has benchmarks on each animation tool in Flash (including AS2 too). The performance for the new tweening tool is very impressive and this site demonstrates how it works really well. Check out codegent's own performance test using Baked Beans! (Requires Flash Player 9 to be installed)

More power, more creativity.

With Wii's in lounge rooms across the world connected to the web, a whole new platform has appeared, not only are people surfing the web through their tv, but by using the Wii camera and remote, they are interacting with the content in a new way.

Cynergy Labs is working on some cool technology! This system uses the Wiimote as a camera, to interface with Flash, which uses the users fingers to determine what the user wants to do. What I love about this is that it uses Flash which and doesn't rely on you buying new equipment, like Microsoft’s "Surface"

I think it's only a matter of time before applications like this pepper the World Wide Web. I believe that before too long this technology being built into laptops and other computer system in the near future to be used at an additional input device,

This site has a whole host of wonderful code toys which just feel great

This may well be a spoof but what a great one it is. This surely sets a new benchmark for brand centered creative content. And how much must it cost to get such a beast off the ground? Who knows?!