In August I flew north to Chiang Mai to attend Barcamp, a geeky gathering held once or twice per year. Looking out of the window of the plane shortly after takeoff I was shocked to see an inland sea. As far as the eye could see, sunlight reflected back off the surface of the water, roads were submerged, small villages and temples had become islands.

Prior to this flight I had seen news reports on TV, but only when witnessed from the air did the extent and magnitude of the flooding hit home. On the flight back I kept a close eye on the water and followed it right up to the northern edge of Bangkok. Over the following weeks slowly but surely the water progressed south, swallowing industrial estates, university campuses, and whole neighbourhoods in it's wake.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/thailands-disastrous-slow-moving-flood/100188/

By late October it became clear that those in power had little or no clue what they were doing. In scenes reminiscent of Monty Python, hundreds of boats were strung together and used to push the water down the river and out to sea. Daily there were assertions of "confidence" and reassurances inner Bangkok would be "100% safe". Once you have been in Thailand a while you learn that an assertion of confidence by someone in power means exactly the opposite. It was time to prepare for the inevitable. Bangkok was going to flood, and it wasn't going to be over in a few days.

We made a list.. sand bags, plastic sheeting, duct tape, boards, silicone sealant. I had nightmares about power cuts, or worse, losing internet connectivity! We sourced a generator, stored up water, and mentally prepared for the worst.

By now some of our team members homes were flooded or at grave risk of flooding. The water was putrid and they were forced to leave and stay with relatives. Our work continued without too much interruption thanks to distributed source control and a wide choice of communication options ranging from Skype chat rooms to Google hangouts.

Then one night it hit me. We didn't have to stay, we could do our best to protect the house then move our office. Once the decision was made we just had to work out on when to leave. I looked at satellite images of the flooding overlaid with elevation data and expert predictions. Based on my unscientific estimates it looked like we had about a week.

We booked flights and I found a few large houses in Chiang Mai and a reserve in the mountains. If you have to evacuate you might as well do it in style. Luckily I think we booked a few days before the main exodus started. As people left, Bangkok was transformed, the traffic jams evaporated and highways were lined for miles with parked cars seeking higher ground.

Moving our office isn't that hard. Everyone on the team has a Macbook and can live without hefty desktop computers. We packed a box with our office essentials:

• Mac Mini - This acts as our dropbox server for file sync with London
• Diskstation - Used for internal file share and backups
• Apple Airport - So we don't have to deal with unreliable or unencrypted wifi
• Android Phone - In case ADSL connection is unavailable we can fall back to 3G or EDGE
• Power strips with surge protection - You never know how many sockets will be available
• WDTVLive - Allows us to connect any old TV to our network
• Spare Macbook power adapters - More the better
• Network cables - A few short ones and a long one

Before leaving I setup some webcams and installed tracking software on the computers left in the office. If someone was to break in and make off with them we might as well have some fun tracking them.

The day the evacuation came was not without minor drama. Over night water had overflowed the canal and was within 500 metres of our house. In times of flooding a friend with a pickup truck is a friend indeed. Luckily our designer Nor had such a vehicle and that day was a saint coming through the floods to transport our family, luggage, and french bulldog to the airport.

Upon arrival I discovered my beloved laptop had been left outside the house! If you are a geek you will understand the terror this caused. Nor rushed back and thanks to the lack of traffic on the roads was able to return to the airport before our flight left. Phew!

Later that day she made yet more trips to the airport, collecting Jirasak from his flooded neighbourhood with his two cats and getting them out safely. We are all grateful for her help.

Once we arrived at the rented house in Chiang Mai we plugged in our network and settled right back into work. We spent a week working out of a house in the suburbs then moved to an amazing reserve in the mountains where we were reunited with the rest of the team.

We have been here for a week so far and its the best office I've ever had. The internet connection is a bit lacking but the view more than makes up for it. I grew up in Snowdonia,North Wales and so feel a certain connection to mountains. Waking up in the morning and watching mist roll over mountains while drinking your coffee beats commuting through busy city traffic any day.

I feel this break from our routine has been productive. We mix activities with long quiet periods of sustained focus. Fresh air, walks down country lanes, and wood fire under stars provides the perfect setting to discuss what really matters to us and has helped us define our strategy for the year ahead.

Next year be there floods or not I think we will return here. Arthur C Clark described a future in which knowledge workers have the privilege of working from anywhere. We are lucky to live in the future and yet we seldom get up from behind our screens to make the most of it. Just because we work as a team doesn't mean we have to be stuck in an office. If your team is small and your systems are lean you can work different.

We have one more week in Chiang Mai before we are scheduled to fly back to Bangkok. When we left I felt a little guilty leaving friends to face the floods but in retrospect escaping the mental stress and relocating the team was the right thing to do. The flood waters will recede and Thailand will rebound as it has done many times in the past. No amount of water can wash away the character, resilience, and pure ingenuity of the Thai people.

A couple of weeks ago Steve Jobs died. When he stepped down as CEO of Apple over the Summer it was clear that he was losing his fight with cancer although I don't think anyone expected it to be so quick.

There have been some excellent pieces posted by more eloquent writers than I so I will leave it to them to celebrate his life and achievements. Personally I have enjoyed re-watching some of his speeches (notably Stanford Commencement in 2005 and his 1997 keynote where he effectively illustrated the technical landscape of 2011) and if you have a moment I would suggest you do as well.

So I did want to write something on this and was chatting to Luke about what was at the heart of Apple's renaissance in the late 90s, domination of the last decade and how I could look at applying those principles to the projects we work on for ourselves and for our clients.

I bounced around some themes on single mindedness, design as first principle, sweating the small stuff, but as usual, Luke nailed it.

He reminded me that the first release of a new Apple product line rejects the status quo and solves a single problem, in a simple way.

The design may often be revolutionary but when you look at it, the feature set is usually pretty limited. But we don't mind, because the concept is so getable and enlightening that we are happy to be taken on the journey as the product evolves. We get on board through glorious simplicity and the liberating notion that we don't have to accept the way things are.

Let's take a closer look at some examples.

The iMac

The iMac was the first all-in-one computer on the market. It challenged the principle that a computer was a sum of various parts, peripherals and accessories. The visual screen, the ability to hear sound and the computer processor are themselves symbiotically linked so why not unify them into a single machine? The internet was clearly the future so a modem was included, it was not considered an optional extra.

Recognising the need for industry standards and compatibility the iMac was the first computer to solely adopt USB ports for connectivity. Controversially they removed the floppy disk favouring the CD Rom (built-in, of course). They correctly argued that recordable CDs, the internet, and office networks were making them obsolete.

Finally the iMac looked completely different. It was beautiful, with it's translucent plastics and Bondi Blue trim. It was time for computers to take their place at the heart of the home, not to be hidden away on retractable desks in the box room. It changed the way we felt about them.

The iPod

The iPod was certainly another iconic design but it was definitely limited. Effectively the iPod was a hard drive with an action wheel, 5 buttons and a single tone screen. But it was the quickest and easiest way to browse your library of music on a handheld device.

They got the interface and hierarchy absolutely right from the beginning and have hardly changed it since. Other mp3 players of the time had inherited the buttons and small displays of the portable CD player and were taking users on a familiar journey without challenging it.

The iPhone

Look at the home screen of the first iPhone. No App Store. So you couldn't add any apps beyond the native ones such as web, email, camera, notes, maps, calendar etc. But looking at the interface doesn't it seem bare? There was obviously room for more but at the time they said that the web gateway was the platform for any additional stuff.

It meant they didn't have to worry about the complex eco system for the app store and could focus on disrupting the mobile phone market and changing our perceptions of what a mobile phone was actually for.

The interesting side product was that developers reverse engineered the iPhone to personalise it and add their own work. They built a way of working around it because they liked the product and saw it had a massive future. I'm absolutely convinced that those early jail breakers helped Apple to roadmap the marketplace when they were ready to open it up.

Was it just Apple?

I think it would be wrong to suggest that Apple are the only company to have got this concept of first version simplicity right. The Amazon Kindle obtusely focussed on the reading experience and then iterated to perfect that before adding anything more.

I would argue that early days Nokia were the same. They reduced physical phone size and increased battery life. My Mum still loves her old Nokia because it does exactly what she wants it to.

Google's home page is just a search field.

Conclusion

By not doing the expected you can ultimately end up with a greater solution. By stripping back the acceptable functions of today you leave room for innovation in the future and greatly increase the chances of solving your focal problem better than anyone else.

I would like to invite every client we work with (and my own team) to embrace this concept together and be brave and bold enough to try and do this on our own work. I'm pleased to say this principle is deep rooted in our latest product - Schedule.

Apple saw where they wanted us to be back in the 1970s and have been slowly dragging us there ever since. Thank you, Steve, I will leave the last words with you.

"When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there."

Steve Jobs in an MSNBC and Newsweek interview, 14 October 2006.

You have probably heard about the recent social media explosion surrounding Quora. There have been some pretty grandiose claims about how it could be "bigger than Twitter" and "the future of blogging" so I thought I would give you a closer look to see what all the fuss was about.

What is Quora?

"Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organised by everyone who uses it." - their definition

• You ask a question and the community answers it. You can also subscribe to topics, answers or people that interest you.
• It utilises your existing connections via close ties with Twitter and facebook so you are more likely to start getting answers from people you're already engaged with.
• The best answers get voted up Digg style, the dross is pushed down so you iterate towards quality.
• Relevant content is collated into a facebook-like feed enabling new content to be brought to your attention (via notifications).
• It has a strong, intelligent search engine for easily finding topics and answers surrounding the question you might have.

So it's like a discussion forum then... wow!

Indeed! Plus Q&A sites are not exactly unique either so why has it carved out its space on the web and been so highly praised by the big players of Silicon Valley? The answer lies in building personal reputation. Aside from the pleasure of writing, bloggers generally publish in order to share their opinions, experiences and expertise so they can build an audience and ultimately become influential. However this can be at quite a considerable cost in terms of their time creating and marketing that content (ask me how I know!) and is rarely successful.

By engaging with Quora on topics that you have sound knowledge and opinion on you can build audience and influence much faster than before. A well constructed and timely answer will get voted up towards the top and therefore will be read (alongside links to your profile) by everyone following the topic. Invariably, you will pick up more followers and be inclined to write better quality answers to help increase your votes. It's this game mechanic that has really set Quora apart.

Ok, I'm liking this anything else cool?

Funny you should ask. The SEO benefits are actually astounding. Q&A sites are doing particularly well in natural search at the moment (as are video and real time social media content) as the space race for relevancy and fresh content continues between the major search engines. It is completely feasible that your post on Quora could top the search term for the topic whereas your own blog post would normally nestle somewhere on page 5. Now that is powerful, and it's already started happening.

The quality of the current conversations is really high, primarily because of the extremely engaged early adopter community who buys into the concept and is committed to producing good content. Additionally there is the chance of commencing discussions with the top people in each topic field. Thought leaders and CEOs such as AOL's former chairman Steve Case are talking openly with regular users on a level playing field (not from a lofty conference stage). This is your time to be seen and heard by the right people.

It is not to everyone's taste though!

It wouldn't be right if I didn't list a few faults would it?

• The site does spew out a lot of notification emails which can be a little annoying, especially during this massive growth period. Although do you remember how many invites you got to join facebook initially? However, it was enough to prompt one developer to create this spoof site.
• You are building your reputation on someone else's platform. No different to doing the same on Twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace etc. but Quora is still in its infancy and anything could happen. Maybe best not to shut down that blog just yet and possibly repost what you write on Quora there as well?
• As the platform expands into the mainstream there is a danger that it will dilute and get spammed causing the big guns that are currently engaged to get bored by mediocrity from the wider community of fools. Some people feel Twitter is moving this way and it certainly is the reason Yahoo! Answers is widely derided. In this case we could see questions outstripping answers. The community must continue to police Quora for quality but will they stay engaged?
• You can edit another person's question. This is a marmite feature and does feel reminiscent of the warring editors of Wikipedia battling for supremacy. Where reputation matters, big ego also lurks.

Do you use it Mark?

I must admit I did sign up pretty early (last summer) and just clicked about, followed a few of the geek guys I take note of on Twitter and pretty much left it there until the explosion around Christmas. I am following a few topics like "Getting your startup featured on TechCrunch" and "What's the best CMS to build a corporate website?" and the quality of answers are really high! It's undoubtedly a useful resource.

However I'm not addicted to riding on the sweet high of Quora as yet. That may be because I am not really trying to build my personal brand as much as I am for our agency. Quora is currently positioned around the individual although inevitably in the future it will open up for companies in much the same way facebook did. Brands are being mentioned right now so if you represent one I would start searching straight away and getting in on the conversations early.

You can follow me here if you like and please do tell me what you think of Quora in the comments below.

It's the Third Thursday of the month. I think the word you are striving for is... budget. This month we have been challenged by both space and time but thanks to the power of (limited) video tech we stick together. Nonetheless plenty is going on in the past, present & future. Enjoy!

PS We are actually quite gifted at film making. Seriously, check this out :)

Python Developer Neng from BKK makes the most of his time in the UK

Other links referenced...

• Winston Churchill iPhone App
• Sing Up Awards
• Hoxton Hotel £1 Sale
• Exchange Away - (current site trading as Home Xchange Vacation)
• Searcys - (current site)
• Skechers - (current site)
• Nokia Coast to Coast Challenge - Scotland
• Arsenal 6 - Braga 0

There are 2 things that you want to avoid when a user lands on your site; firstly scaring them off with too much copy, secondly not giving them enough information to enable them to use your website or even understand what you do. 

A video is a great compromise; it can explain your proposition in seconds whilst simultaneously increasing accessibility and engagement. Creating, producing and editing a professional quality video seems like a daunting task but in reality, with the right tools, it isn’t as hard as you might think.

We’re going to give you an overview of why video is a valuable asset for any site, and why we believe After Effects is the best product for the job.

The Importance of Video

Why a video? From information-lead films to arty stop motions, video allows direct, fluent and human communication. It could be shown on the landing page of your website and allow you to present your business in an instant. It can also be used to reach out from your site to create buzz around your marketing campaigns. 

Why After Effects?

Improving your video 
There are a myriad of tools that After Effects gives us. It allows us to remove all evidence of camera shakes, increase contrast, modify luminosity to bring out gorgeous colours and so much more. Visual and matting effects can also be applied to improve the look and feel you want to give to the video. Alternative video editing programmes, Premiere or Final Cut can handle most of these improvements just as well but what makes After Effects better is that it doesn’t stop there...

Tracking function, total symbiosis
We can create a multi-layer composition by integrating other videos, photos, texts or vector graphics into your video. Notice I said "integrating", beware, adding is one thing, integrating is another. Thanks to the tracking function, we can follow a point moving on the 'master' video and apply this movement to the new item we have layed on top. From this comes the impression of symbiosis, graphics follow the movement of the camera perfectly, they really feel part of the video.

The Third Dimension
After Effects now takes your video production to the third dimension. The 3D mode allow you to create a virtual camera over your composition, to allow you to change your point of view. You have complete control over this virtual camera, being able to configure the lens length, image area size, and aperture. This powerful tool makes it quick and easy to incorporate several lights with shadows and define their intensity, all of which will take your video new level of dynamism.

High Quality Manipulation 
With After Effects, time can be stretched and/or reversed. But crucially it will also smooth out the jerkiness usually associated with this sort of effect when it is applied with Final Cut or Premier. 

After Effects is integrated
After Effects works seamlessly with other Creative Suite software such as Illustrator, Photoshop (including it’s 3D layers), Flash, Premiere Pro and other QuickTime-based software. You can even import and manipulate audio files and render them in high quality in real time. It is even possible to export the composition from After Effects to Flash, to then make it interactive. Whatever the project needs, this level of integration gives you the flexibility to port your content across different software.

Fit the Web

Be versatile & be connected
After Effects contains an export module which will optimise your video for the web. With a couple of clicks you can export your film to web-friendly formats like QuickTime, AVI or MPEG-4, making it easy to put your video onto your website, blog, Youtube, Vimeo etc.

Mobile accessibility 
The latest version of After Effects integrates mobile-device authoring into its workflow and multi-device previews for most phones and PDAs. With the ever-increasing popularity of smart phones, thinking about how to reach people on their mobiles is becoming a close second to reaching people on their PC's.

Video is a fantastic and popular way to reach and engage with people and any tools that help us do that better get the Codegent seal of approval!

Exciting times here at Codegent, we've just completed and launched a new website for Nickelodeon.

Nickelodeon presented us with an interesting challenge, they needed a website that could showcase their on-air summer content. This content consisted of (amongst other things) a competition to find SpongeBob Square Pants' biggest fan. Here's an example of one of our favourite entries so far. The other main part of the site was TEENick, a magazine style show aimed at teenage girls.

The challenge came in finding a way to create a cohesive site that would encourage the 2 different audiences to engage and interact with these seemingly disparate elements.

We wanted to incentivise people to travel through to the different parts of the site so we designed 5 SpongeBob cards that we 'hid' on various pages. When a user found a card they could click on it and were then given the option to download and print the card. 4 of the 5 cards incorporated a marker which, when printed and held up to a webcam, would display a 2D message from a character from SpongeBob. Finding the fifth card unlocked an augmented reality, 3D SpongeBob which the user could interact with by pressing their space bar. You can view a demo of the SpongeBob AR here:

These cards helped us to tie the site together and to generate page impressions, however we didn't want to incentivise people to travel through the site if we couldn't be sure that they were engaging with the content, so we constructed a points system that rewarded good behaviour, such as commenting, rating entries, entering the competition etc. Points are accumulated during the visit and when you reach certain milestones you unlock Nickelodeon 'goodies'.

We also wanted the user to feel a bond with the site which is why we added a badge creator. This allows users to create a badge with their unique username and design, this badge is displayed whenever they leave comment on an article. Here's an example of the badges in action.

The competition has had hundreds of entries and from the stats we've got so far, page impressions and time spent on site is looking good. The augmented reality aspect has had great feedback in terms of how it looks but also how it gives the user something new, exciting and valuable in exchange for their time and attention.

Definitely something we want to do again soon!

This week we have launched the first phase of our new property website Tepilo, a joint venture with Sarah Beeny.

In the gloomy economic climate, the property market is suffering badly. People want to not only save as much money as possible, but also be in control of the way their property is marketed. Tepilo (an imaginary castle that Sarah's father used to describe to her when she was a child) was set up to give people a new way of buying and selling their property.

This is the first time we have joint ventured with a client for equity in the business rather than agency fees. We have been offered equity deals numerous times before but had always turned them down until now.

Sarah was an existing client who we had worked well with previously and arguably was in a prime position to start an online property business as host of Channel 4's Property Ladder and as one of the most trusted authorities on the UK property market. The brand building exposure she can produce is something that most start-ups lack or cannot afford to generate. The buzz has started already...

• Tepilo on Brand Republic
• Tepilo launch Webcast on Money Supermarket
• Hype on Property Portal Watch
• Tepilo noise on Twitter

As a result some really large brands have already approached us tabling potential partnership deals and mass exposure for the new site. Brand Beeny is certainly opening a lot of doors!

The full site launches in July and we will be hitting the mainstream press at that point as well. Watch this space for more info over the summer. In the meantime I would love to hear your thoughts on our decision to JV on this project - good or bad :)

www.tepilo.com or follow @tepilo on twitter.

Is that a Jeroboam of champagne in your pocket or are you just pleased to see us?!!

Last night codegent scooped the FITC Award for Motion Graphics for our work with 40|30 at The Gherkin.

We beat off some really strong competition to win this award as we were short-listed with Coca-Cola and Warner Brothers so a huge congratulations to the codegent team for an amazing job – it makes me really proud!

Next up: the Webbys! You can help us put our trophy cabinet under further strain as there is also People’s Choice Award - you can cast your vote at http://pv.webbyawards.com. Our nomination section is Website » Ballot » Marketplace » Restaurant or click this link to go direct (you have to login first).

I'm off to iron my tux...

Wow! We are one of only a few UK based agencies to be included in this year's prestigious Webby Awards for our work on 40|30 at The Gherkin.

Hailed as the "Internet's highest honor" by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honouring excellence on the Internet.

"Nominees like Codegent are setting the standard for innovation and creativity on the Internet," said David-Michel Davies, executive director of the Webby Awards. "It is an incredible achievement to be selected among the best from the nearly 10,000 entries we received this year."

In a similar vein to our FITC Award nomination, we also eligible to win a Webby People's Voice Award, which is voted online by the global community. From now until 30 April, you can cast your vote at http://pv.webbyawards.com.

Our nomination section is Website » Ballot » Marketplace » Restaurant or click this link to go direct (you have to login first)

I can't believe it's the second time I am asking this in a month but if you could take a few minutes out to vote for us then I think you improve your chances of a place in Heaven ever so slightly :)

It's an amazing time for us right now and I cannot think of a better way to celebrate our 5th birthday on 1 May! We are so proud of the team that worked on this project.

We fly out to Toronto on Monday for the FITC awards...

Have you ever seen an ad on the tube and continued to think about it once you've got out of the station? What is it that is likely to make you carry on thinking about an advert? And are we more likely to retain the message if we've been exposed to it longer?

We've just created a small site with our client, CBS Outdoor to demonstrate the concept of "dwell time +" in advertising on London Underground.

The concept is that for the large 48 sheets on the Underground, the "dwell time", ie the time that spend looking at the ads whilst waiting for their train is such that people are able to get more engagement with the ad itself. This is an experiment to see if dwell time can be enhanced by giving people a thought-provoking question to consider.

The posters are around for 4 weeks, with an online response mechanism for people to react to what they have seen on the Underground.

www.timetoconsider.co.uk