Dell B2B kicked off with Lee Bryant from Headshift talking about Social business.
As we begin our digital and social shift, we, as businesses are expected to have an open and accessible network externally but what about internally. With cost pressures and increased competition, though our organisations can seem advanced, they are often too expensive internally in how they function so they can’t be global. Corporate IT is ripe for re-invention & humanisation but we need to make a deep structural change to a network centric world. Then we can have the speed and agility that are needed to have continued success. Read more…
Yesterday talk of another new Twitter feature came out. Nothing to do with an inbox flooded with emails but all to do with a nifty new follow button you can add to your website.
Currently, if you have a follow button, anyone on your site who wants to follow you gets taken to another browser. The nifty new follow button will bring up a pop up and if you’re already signed in, you’re now following that Twitter account without having to really leave the website you are browsing. Nice.
Though I’ve been editing film on Premiere Pro for the past 2 years, I’ve never used After effects before. So when I saw an After Effects for beginners session on at Barcamp London 8, I jumped at the chance to find out more.
Emma ran the session. She explained that animation, graphics, and rich media is handled better in after effects. Excitedly, you can bring in video to colour correct. I wish I looked into this earlier.
It is great if you are using other adobe software as it’s compatable. You can bring in drawings from illustrator, and cut video from premier. When you look at the set up of After effects, it’s also similar visually. To me this would make it even easy to use.
Here are a few tips/ functionalities that Emma went through:
When importing, footage flattens whole document, composition brings in layers.
Placed higher up in the order, the file becomes the top layer
Every layer has a transform layer underneath: anchor point, positions, scale, rotation and opacity.
Pan behind tool allows you to move anchor point.
All compostitions can have different settings within the project.
Effects panel: Alot of effects are generative and you will lose what you had on that layer if you add it directly to the layer. You need to create a new blank layer as a place holder. – effects control panel opens
When in the effects panel, the conductivity state moves the animation using keyframes.
You can also use Moca to select an area and it will tell how selection is moving throughout the clip.
I’m definitely going to try to use this for my next project. Thanks Emma for getting me thinking about this and thanks Barcamp London 8!
One of the things I’ve noticed is that it can be hard to keep track of all the social media, tech and communication meetups in the UK with the initial focus on London events. I know I often miss some good ones as do a lot of people I know. So I’ve set up a calendar until www.plancast.com adds a feature that does the same. If you have an event please let me know and I’ll add it or if you know/ run lots of events, I’m more than happy to add you to the calendar so you can add your events! Fast and easy.
Over the weekend of the 19th and 20th of September 2009, over 100 developers gathered at the PayPal offices in Richmond to take part in the first ever PayPal charity hack. Within 24 hours they had to use PayPal’s new adaptive payment APIs with brand new ones from MissionFish and JustGiving to create new ways for charities to promote their causes. On offer: a grand prize trip to Innovate 09 but what really motivated this group to give up their sleep and their time to hack for charity?
At the end of the 24 hours, the applications varied from mobile uses to online games. It was a glimpse into how these new applications could be used by developers to make payment and donation giving even easier for the consumer. The big winners were:
Silliest hack – comparetheduck.com, by Alistair MacDonald and Michael Heap allowed you to compare rubber ducks and build your own top trumps cards. It was suggested that a charity could use the system with a more appropriate theme.
Breast Cancer Campaign challenge – Pinkify. This facebook application allows you to select a friends photo and make them “wear it pink”. This ap has a huge potential to go viral as well getting the “wear it pink” message over to the facebook generation. The winners included Cristiano Betta and Melinda Seckington.
Best Mobile hack – GetGiving was based on allowing you to make a spontaneous donation to charity on seeing a poster or paper/tube advert. This allowed you to either use an iphone ap/ text message or a mobile website.
Best Social Media based hack- Sponsor Me. This facebook application allows you to set up a cause and donate the proceeds directly to a charity via Missionfish and PayPal. This app allows you to pick a charity and therefore has great potential on the world biggest social network. The winning team included Wakari founder, Mat Clayton.
The winning hack was CharityFrag by a team of 5 including Tim Nash , Dom Hodgson , Kevin Prince , Leeky and Tom Morris. This amazing application connected an opensource first person shooter game up with PayPal’s adaptive payments. Judges picked this one not only as it used very innovative technologies, but it addressed the issue of engaging a younger generation in the donation process.
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