Nigel Nicholson is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the LBS. This video is part of a collaboration between the London Business School, the Daily Telegraph and Google entitled the Survival of the Fastest.

…linking to reporting or sources on the web to enhance, complement, or add more context to original reporting. Link journalism can also be a topical news aggregation, with links to interesting and important stories from any source on the web.

Publish2 plugs-in to existing sites using widgets and feeds allowing individuals to aggregate, mash-up, and publish content easily from one place.

“With AWS you can requisition compute power, storage, database functionality, content delivery, and other services — gaining access to a suite of elastic IT infrastructure services as you demand them. AWS enables the academic community to inexpensively and rapidly build on global computing infrastructure to pursue course projects and accelerate their productivity and research results, while enjoying the same benefits of reliability, elasticity, and cost-effectiveness used by industry.”

See: http://aws.amazon.com/education/

Leaders in Ruby on Rails

Simple and elegant, Ruby on Rails is the framework of choice for many greenfield projects. Programmers love the uncluttered, minimalist approach. Users enjoy the clean, intuitive interfaces that can result. And clients are delighted by the speed to market and cost-savings that Rails can bring.

We’ve worked on numerous projects in Rails. These include social networks, ecommerce booking systems and logistics tracking tools.

Experts with PHP

Well established and robust, PHP already powers many leading web applications. We can help build new apps or develop existing systems. Our PHP team has years of experience working with a variety of extensible frameworks including CakePHP.

Our PHP work includes e-learning applications, custom content systems and recruitment portals.

Extended toolkit

We have a growing range of skills in areas that compliment our core technologies, these include: Adobe Flash, RESTful API creation, Deployment troubleshooting, Amazon Web Services, Internationalisation, MySQL optimisation, JavaScript/AJAX, Opensocial/Facebook API.

Agile methodology

We use a custom agile process for all our projects. This gives clients a greater ownership over the development life cycle and results in highly user-centred products.

Support & hosting

Successful web applications require constant innovation. We pride ourselves in superb on-going client support, maintenance and hosting. This ensures products are both reliable and current, whilst our research and strategy tools innovate services on the fly.

These consulting tools allow our clients to gain a competitive advantage by delivering products that are useful, delightful and easy to use.

Social media planning

Social media represents a paradigm shift in communications. Today’s audience is writing, taking pictures, shooting video and recording audio. They’re talking to each other. They’re sharing opinion and content. And they’re doing it online. We can help you understand the strategic and practical implications of this for your organisation.

Our services include but are not limited to:

Needs analysis and writing a social media strategy.
Blogging policy development.
Community building
Mentoring, training and adoption.
Monitoring and maintenance
On-going support.

User experience design

User experience design incorporates organisational goals whilst catering directly to the needs of the user.

…an approach to the design of products, services and environments based on a holistic consideration of the users’ experience. Experience design is therefore driven by consideration of the ‘moments’ of engagement between people and brands, and the memories these moments create. Wikipedia definition

Inception Consulting’s refined UCD process incorporates 5 steps:

1. Research: Organisational needs and business objectives.
2. Requirements: Functional specifications and outcomes.
3. Design: Information architecture, wire-frame interaction and visuals.
4. Build: Interface, navigation and information.
5. Launch and measure: Managed roll-out with feedback and on-going analytics.

This UCD process is central to our agile software development practise.

Audience auditing

Understanding exactly what users are doing is crucial to delivering successful interactive products. We use a combination of ethnographic tools and online usability testing to profile key target groups. This research can quantitatively demonstrate ways to improve user-experience, helping to innovate and iterative new products or services.

Future market modeling

Show up with a product or just bring along an idea. We can help conceptualise, design and develop it. We understand how real-world strategy, implementation and maintenance works. By engaging more directly with the needs and aspirations of your users we can help imagine future directions for your brand experience.

Dutch design firm Experimental Jetset created an identity and custom typeface based on a geometic interpretation of an architectural space in Arnham. They’ve posted an interesting article about the process of translating it across different media.

It will be interesting to see how Google’s Android compares in popularity to the iPhone with developers over the next 18 months.

Photosynth is based on Seadragon technology; it creates multidimensional spaces by effectively ‘synthing’ together digital photos. Combined with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth it shows how social media can be used in a really exciting way.