A panel of executives at top phone manufacturers came to agreement on this forecast at the CTIA Wireless 2011 conference in Orlando, Fla.

It’s a logical transition for a lot of companies. Most major enterprise companies like Salesforce offer a tablet-friendly mobile-app version of their desktop software. Many companies have already begun their transition to tablets for field work and other corporate necessities. About 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 100 list have already begun testing or deploying applications for Apple’s iPad tablet.

“Android is becoming more enterprise-ready every day, we’re all working on hardening android to make sure the security is there,” said Omar Khan, chief strategy officer of Samsung Mobile. “We want to make sure So we can address the enterprise so it can become a true laptop replacement.”

Android devices only account for around 30 percent of enterprise activations, while Apple’s devices account for 65 percent, and growing faster than Android.

Read the full article here

We’ll be there for one-to-one advice at the Portfolio Clinic from 5 to 7pm. It’s a great opportunity for those looking to carve a career in digital design to get expert advice and feedback on their portfolio. presentations. Along with some of Brightons other leading creative agencies.

If you are coming we look forward to seeing you there, there maybe some freebies too, shh!

UPDATE:
Here’s Wired Sussex’s review of the event on their blog.

Here are some notes on how to manage your cashflow, and to decrease your spending on excessive expenses, at the same time building up your assets.

Remember, by bringing down your regular outgoings you can save more, and have more financial freedom. Regard your spending as an investment and you should be able to recession-proof yourself with these handy tips:

Make sales your priority

• Increase your marketing – by generating leads and sales
• Get your costs and prices right
  • Compare yourself to what clients want to pay
  • What your competitors are charging

Get Paid

• Train customers to learn your terms, ie: 14 or 28 days payment
• Take deposits
• Interim/milestone payments
• There is an online filing for claims which costs £80, only use for clients you don’t want to keep!
• Train your customers to pay promptly, by chasing promptly

Value your suppliers

• Reserve money to pay for suppliers promptly
• When times are tough, communicate
• Spread your money around if paying more than one

Get rid of costs you don’t need

• An obvious one, but reduce the tariff of your mobile phone, changing contract tariffs and plans can save a great deal of your monthly outgoings.
• Only think about keeping something on if your are getting a return on investment back on it, like regular web hosting.
• Check your direct debits, and cancel the ones you don’t need.

Personal Finance and Spending

There are three types of personal spending:

• Fixed – Mortgage, rent, phone bill
• Variable – Food, clothes, going out
• Occasional – Christmas, dentist, holidays

Why not try moving the fixed spending into a new current account? Then you will have better control of the other two spending types.

And finally plan and review your cashflow constantly.

Where did the idea for this site come from?

With an idea and a sketch by Founder and Chairman of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. He explains:

One night in July of that year I had an idea to make a more “live” LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it. For the next 5 years, I thought about this concept and tried to silently introduce it into my various projects.

Photo of wireframe that was to become the basis for the design of Twitter

In 2006 Twitter launched, and immediately the service rapidly gained popularity: In March 2007, it won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category. Dorsey gave the following playful acceptance speech at SXSW: “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”.

Early adopters we mainly web type people and various geek collectives sending their thoughts to other connected friends.

For us, it has been excellent for gaining instant insight into new products, people views on various web services and keeping in touch with colleagues, friends and peers without having to email or call them!

Brand and reputation management

However, it didn’t take long for forward thinking companies to identify that they could directly converse with their customers on this rapidly growing social media platform.

Never before has one been able to track and measure what is being said about your brand and product online. View the results for the keyword ‘cornflakes‘ using Twitter Search. This surely has to be the quickest and most cost effective way to communicate with your customers, increase coverage of your brand, and increase the strength of your company reputation, online.

Today, Twitter is one of the most visited websites in the UK

UK Internet traffic to the site has increased 10-fold over past last 12 months. For the week ending 17/01/09 Twitter ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, up from a ranking of 2,953 for the week ending 19/01/08. UK Internet traffic to the website has increased by 974% over this period.

Source: Hitwise

The most popular website visited after Twitter is Facebook. Britain’s most popular social network continues to pick up users and is now the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK. As we reported a few weeks ago, on Christmas Day Facebook received 1 in every 22 UK Internet visits.

Prominent Users on Twitter

A number of politicians, celebrities use twitter to communicate with their followers/fans.

• Barack Obama with over 144,000 followers
• Jonathan Ross
• Alan Carr
• Stephen Fry
• Richard Branson
• 10 Downing Street

Twitter first for breaking news

Using Twitter search to monitor the ‘buzz’ over last years US elections was a fantastic way to get into the voters minds, as well as getting their opinions, gut reactions and feelings on what was happening at a very detailed street level with all the events and coverage.

Earlier this month, US Airways Flight 1549 experienced multiple bird strikes and had to be ditched in the Hudson River after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in New York City. Janis Krum, a passenger on one of the ferries that rushed to help, took a picture of the downed plane as passengers were still evacuating and tweeted it via TwitPic before traditional media arrived at the scene.

Twitter featured on BBC homepage

Perhaps the strongest sign that Twitter has reached the mainstream is being featured on the homepage of one of the worlds busiest websites.

Questions on the future of Twitter

There is no doubt Twitter is here to stay.

The question I have is the problem of friends on other social networks. How soon will they realise they have to start a new friends list on this site as well? Something we have been aware of for all too long, effectively a ‘Walled Gardens for each social network’. Perhaps mass demand will increase the adoption of OpenID. Although, single source sign-on was dropped from Twitters features during a company restructure in 2008 so is not currently supported.

Also with our current friends on Twitter are a bit more low-fi than some of the techy conversations we may have currently with colleagues on Twitter, this is leading to multiple profiles for the same person. For example, a business and personal (private) profile.

Another problem is that all the Facebook friends you’re currently avoiding will track you down on Twitter – so what then?

You can follow me on Twitter @JimCallender, where I continue to enjoy the service and would gladly pay for some additional features. I find the short method of communicating in 140 characters or less and ‘from one-to-many’ to fit my style and enjoy ‘following’ and updating my friends.

Further Reading

• Look out Twitter, the masses are coming!
• How Twitter was born

Firstly, it seems as if the coming year will be a challenging time for most of us. But running a small business is all about tackling and overcoming challenges, so in many respects, it’s business as usual. It’s just that the difficulties we now face are different to those we’ve battled in the past.

Wise words from a recent article by Jeffrey Zeldman in the .net magazine:

‘While it’s difficult to tell what will happen in the wider economy, web design has remained robust through numerous economic ups and downs”

He reasons for the increase on our reliance with online services – even if shops close down and staff laid off, products need selling and websites need creating and maintaining. This means freelancers, in-house staff and agencies should be busy, even when others are losing their jobs’

What should you be doing as a design company?

• Our main aim for this current economic climate is to continue to have empathy for users, base our work on a strong design process based on site users and client business goals.
• Continue to look ahead, embrace and adopt new technologies and assess their usefulness for your clients work.
• Diversify your capabilities and services/products you offer to appeal to a wider client base.
• Get organised, form teams of compatible skills through your networks to increase your chances of being able to respond to a wider set of briefs
• Think beyond the desktop browser – get a head start and learn about the web on a smaller screen
• If you have a quiet time you can still be proactive – here’s some ideas:
  • Teach yourself new skills
  • Get out meet new contacts for coffee
  • Get off-line and you may find it easier to focus on what is important for your business

What we have planned for 2009:

• Client guides – In a series of free ebooks we will explain to our new and existing clients about current web services, trends and technologies in easy to follow guide
• Training freelancers and mentoring local colleagues
• Work with our peers
• Develop International business opportunities
• Attending conferences, meetups and networking events, and also attend more non-technical events (no not knitting classes)

How you are going to stay confident, fresh and stay relevant in this industry? We’d love to know, comments are on..

A QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.

QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that users might need information about. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL.

You can use your phone to read QR codes by installing Kaywa Reader.

And make your own QR code like we have below on the same kaywa site.

QR code containing website link for callendercreates.com

An introduction to barcode scanning on youtube

OK, so we cannot ignore statistics like that, and it just takes a visit to the City in London to find out something is wrong with the economy in this country.

Spending on Public Relations (PR), and advertising is the first to go from a companies budget before staff cuts, wage reductions – Are you noticing this yet if you are a digital company? Let’s look towards filling this gap by being creative and innovate:

Some of the best innovations are done during times of economic downturn

Innovation can be done cheaply, picture this – two geeks in a garage, wearing sweaters, trying to get an online experiment to work on an old macbook.

Innovation inspires, educates and entertains societies

That’s the amazing thing about being based in Brighton. It’s all about small groups of people working collaboratively at coworking locations across the city or at events like barcamp Brighton.

However, I want to think in terms of a revolution, rather than a downturn.

Revolutions are seen as ‘fundamental shifts’ in our lifestyle, and social interactions. They only happen usually once within our lifetime. Which lead to redefining what it needs to get the job done, and how people use these methods from a revolution.

As good things usually come out the end of revolutions like this, the Industrial revolution, the Internet revolution, now this financial revolution - we don’t actually know what will come out of this – I feel this is why a lot of people are worried.

I hope the ‘big R’ doesn’t mean that peoples creative taps are turned off. We are currently in a time of radical change, now is a chance to connect with people who you may not have done with before.

Stand out, put a sweater on and get down to a geek event near you!

There were lots of seminars on search to content management, from hosting to email, some terrible powerpoint slides.

One particular highlight was Andy Hobsbawm’s (Agency.com) Keynote on “How people value brands and brands value people in an interactive world”.

Below are some quote and points from his Keynote:

• Be a verb not a noun
• Go with the flow
• Be a guide not a gateekeeper

“Today ‘the virtualisation of everything’ is possible”

“A brand is not what you say it is, it’s what Google says it is”

“No place for brands to hide, as information flow to the consumer is so great on the internet”

“The internet is one big social network, email being the biggest tool for networking”

“Don’t assume customers don’t know anything nowadays, they now have the information by searching for the answer = information driven”

“Exploding connections on the web means that brands can’t be linear anymore”

I think he is genuinely quite excited about the new functions and user applications on the web.

However, he describes web 2.0 as what ever you want it to be. Another nice web 2.0 definition then.

LANINGHAM (interviewer): Do you get excited at all about emerging Internet technologies as described, you know, Ajax and things like that? Or are you thinking most of the time at such a conceptual level and a solution level that you don’t really feel like you have time to get too worked up over those things?

BERNERS-LEE: Oh, this tabulator project, the RDF tabulator, I coded it up in Ajax. So yes, I’m very…I find that Ajax is the…. It’s the one computing platform where everybody who has a Web browser has got that platform. So the nice thing about it is when you do code up an Ajax implementation then other people can take it and play with it. And I think that’s one of the things that’s so exciting.

Also it’s actually got a really powerful, you’ve got a really powerful user interface toolkit with the HTML DOM and also with the SCG DOM, so I think scalable back to graphics, Ajax applications are going to be really fun in the future.

And then when you’ve got an RDF and SPARQL library which gives you access to the Web of data, then that gives you extremely deep programmatic access both to the user and to the data underneath so that application becomes something relevant. So yes, I get excited about things which allow people to have fun and make progress and prototype new ideas.

LANINGHAM: You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Is that how you see Web 2.0?

BERNERS-LEE: Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

And in fact, you know, this Web 2.0, quote, it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0. It means using the document object model, it means for HTML and SCG and so on, it’s using HTTP, so it’s building stuff using the Web standards, plus Java script of course.

So Web 2.0 for some people it means moving some of the thinking client side so making it more immediate, but the idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact.

Now, I really like the idea of people building things in hypertext, the sort of a common hypertext space to explain what the common understanding is and thus capturing all the ideas which led to a given position. I think that’s really important. And I think that blogs and wikis are two things which are fun, I think they’ve taken off partly because they do a lot of the management of the navigation for you and allow you to add content yourself.

But I think there will be a whole lot more things like that to come, different sorts of ways in which people will be
able to work together.

The semantic wikis are very interesting. These are wikis in which people can add data and then that data can then besurfaced and sliced and diced using all kinds of different semantic Web tools, so that’s why it’s exciting the way people, things are going, but I think there are lots of new things in that vein that we have yet to invent.