The attendees were an interesting mix of people from a variety of the MIH companies in South Africa representing industries from web and mobile development to pay television. We all got together to discuss topics that affect us all, ranging from open source technologies, architecture, scalability and best practices.

There were plenty of interesting topics being presented and having open discussion around those topics was very informative. I will touch on a couple of things that I took away which I am sure we often forget when the pressure to deliver starts building.

Open Source Licensing Models

I think that the most interesting points taken away from this workshop has to do with licensing models. Or rather the question: “Do you know what developers are putting into your product source code?”.

There are many different open source licensing models each with their own advantages and disadvantages (depending on your view); and depending on the type of business you are in it may affect you dramatically. For example if you have a commercial product that is build on open source technologies and your developers ‘copy-and-paste’ some random code from an copyright protected internet blog into your product source code you may be in breach of the licensing agreement that your software is classified under.

What I took away from this session is that if you do not fully understand open source licensing you may be in for a surprise. So do some homework around this.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN’s)

I have always had the idea that CDN’s are for caching of static content ie. images, video, scripts and stylesheets. I did not realize that your actual HTML content can also be cached. And if implemented correctly it can cache only parts of your pages.

This definitely needs some more investigation.

If you are not aware of what a CDN is or you are a little rusty have a look at this.

Cookies

We all use cookies to store session data but do you realize what it may be doing to your site performance? Remember that the bigger your cookies are the more it affects your page performance because they need to be uploaded to the server when a page is requested and then downloaded again from the server when the requested page is retrieved.

This is done for every resource on your page! This includes every image, js and css file that you use on that page.

Have a look at the following article that explains what is happening: Performance Research, Part 3: When the Cookie Crumbles

Distribute content over multiple servers

Consider that each resource (images, scripts, css files etc.) that you include on your page requires a separate request to the server to download. If you then take into consideration that your browser can only download two resources from the same hostname in parallel you can see that having resources on multiple servers could dramatically improve your page performance.

The following article explains this in more detail: Performance Research, Part 4: Maximizing Parallel Downloads in the Carpool Lane

I think that overall the workshop was a great success and I hope that there will be many more in the future. Thanks especially to the two excellent speakers Paul Scott and Diego Cassinera – they really do know what they are talking about and I think we are lucky to be working with them.

What is NFC

Near Field Communication (NFC) technology establishes mutual reciprocal wireless communication between two devices at short-range. The idea stemmed from Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology and allows users to maximise communication and applications. Applications could be file sharing, purchasing tickets, gaming and of course mobile payments.

The NFC Ecosystem

The NFC ecosystem is a complex one. And when involving mobile payments it is not only complex, but it is extremely ‘political’ (due to the economic benefits). The response to NFC at the 2011 MWC suggests that the next two years is likely to be the years for battle between operator control and the ecosystem.

In the context of payments, for NFC to really reach the consumer, support and collaboration between the issuers, carriers, processors and banks are necessary. The industry expects commitment from these stakeholders to ensure that progress will not be stalled, because if the traditional payments processes are no longer tenable, merchants and consumers will find another way to do business – PayPal has blazed the way, but there is the potential for the likes of iTunes or Facebook to emerge as the transaction processors of the future.

The vendor side: Challenges for the Mass adoption of NFC

The SIM-Card vs. External Secure Elements Debate (or Debacle)

The debate and lack of agreement on who should control the Secure Element (SE) is the top reason why NFC adoption has been slow on the uptake. SE is a secure location in the device, where things such as secure keys are stored in order not to be compromised.

Many commentators believe the SIM card, which already plays a key role in handsets by identifying the subscriber and related account, should be the SE of choice for mobile payment. At first, this makes sense as from the technical perspective, the SIM card is very secure, it has a secure channel between the SIM card and the NFC chip over Single Wire Protocol (SWP), and the Over-the-Air (OTA) management aspects are in place. But from the business perspective, there is a huge drawback — it gives way too much control to a single stakeholder, the operator.

The fact though is that SEs can be implemented in various ways:

1. The SIM card, as explained above
2. Secure internal memory
3. External SEs such as in a microSD. The latter is becoming a strong contender for NFC, as it is ensure flexibility and provides the consumer with selection possibilities.

Projections shown by analysts at Juniper Research, estimates that one in six mobile users is likely to engage in usage by 2014. However in light of promising mobile adoption rates and more ubiquitous internet penetration, these projections may be well off the mark for it was thought that NFC enabled phones would be mostly restricted to the Smart Phone segment. This has now changed, as since early 2011 a number of phone manufacturers announced they would be producing more simple NFC enabled mobiles. It is therefore only a matter of time before the industry reaches critical mass.

There is still a way to go for Near Field Communication (NFC) to accomplish a mass market rollout. There are barriers behind accomplishing this, but the mobile industry is working hard to overcome these barriers and promote a successful international rollout.

For Users

For a start, NFC-equipped mobile phones could double as electronic wallets, by taking the place of credit cards. They could also give a much needed boost to electronic cash, an idea that has struggled for years to get off the ground. A long list of other failed e-cash schemes have demonstrated, getting people to adopt high-tech alternatives to cash is extremely hard. Such schemes present a classic chicken-and-egg problem: consumers will not adopt the technology until merchants do, and vice versa.

Given its relatively slow transmission speed—a maximum of 424 kilobits per second, with early devices limited to half that data rate—NFC would not be very suitable for transferring items like music files between a mobile phone and another device. There are however solutions to such issues: having established a secure pairing with NFC, the two devices can switch to a wireless technology with higher bandwidth, such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, which will also allow the devices to stay paired once they move out of direct proximity.

The long terms plan for NFC is full integration. NFC is the element that acts as a conduit between the online (through mobile) and offline worlds. In view of the way that technology is being developed, and with the incessant focus on data points, the value extends beyond just the consumer interaction. This is especially so as the focus shifts to big data and real time interaction. Very few technologies are able to integrate a consumer conscious into data.

As the cost of NFC technology decreases, more interesting applications will become feasible, this is especially so, as the internet becomes more ubiquitous and we shift into the paradigm where all devices are connected to the internet. These include consumer devices such as computing devices, TVs, cameras, gaming units, and household appliances. NFC will become viewed as an important complimentary technology for such connected devices.

Off the cuff, future opportunities for NFC

• The technology will open doors for you…. NFC-enabled mobile device will act as the key to the locks on your car, your safe, house or work- security provided through password or facial/voice recognition.
• Health and emergency benefits- information on tap
• Social networking- tap, connect and swap.
• Pre-set your settings- Tap your device in a hired vehicle and the seat and mirrors will automatically adjust.

…the possibilities and conveniences are endless.

Very basically, PSR-0 is a recently defined standard for autoloading classes in PHP-5.3.x and above.
If you would like to have a much closer look, a copy of the final document can be found at https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards/blob/master/accepted/PSR-0.md

I am not going to spend much time on explaining the document or autoloading in general, as that is an exercise best left to the reader, but as a quick introduction to those that have never worked with this kind of thing before, I will explain the very basics and leave it at that.

Basically, in the old days, you would have a class with name, say, User.php to do something with users. Great. Now to use that code you needed to go through certain steps in order to include() it and then instantiate and use it, like so:

<?php
require "User.php";
$user = new User("Paul");


So far, so good, right? Right! OK, so skip forward a few years and suddenly we see that there is a magic function called __autoload() in PHP5. Awesome! Let’s look at how that works then:


<?php
public function __autoload($className) {
$filename = $className . ".php";
if (is_readable($filename)) {
require $filename;
}
}


OK, nice. Now we can load up files with a specific file naming structure with relative ease. One very big drawback here is that you could only ever register a single auto-loader, which, in many cases was OK, but not the best situation. Skip forward to PHP-5.1.x and we see spl_autoload() being introduced. What this allowed was multiple autoloaders with the spl_autoload_register() function. Cool, now we could have a function to autoload the different components of our frameworks (such as controllers, views and models) with slightly different autoload functions, which tends to increase the security slightly as well as making tracking down bugs a lot easier.

This was all great stuff, and made our lives as large project developers much easier, but we soon started to see some cracks in the glossy sheen of autoloading. What people started to notice very quickly is that everyone was doing it their way. Look at a few examples of class names from projects that I have worked on:

1. Chisimba – user_class_inc.php
2. PEAR – PEAR_User which translates to PEAR/User.php
3. Zend – Zend_User which translates to Zend/User.php
4. etc. (see class.name.php, class_name.php, class.name.inc.php, classname.inc.php, etc…)

This is part of the reason that PSR-0 was conceived; to try and standardise some of this mess.

What PSR-0 tries to do is to make sure that all classes and reusable objects are kept as such, reusable, across many different frameworks and codebases with minimal effort. These standards are also exploring other aspects of large project codebases such as cache interfaces as well, but those are still in active discussion.

By now, I guess you have read through the PSR-0 standard document as above. Let us take a look at it quickly.

Basically, the way that it all works is that you have to stick to a certain naming convention. That naming convention should implement a certain directory and code file layout according to a fully qualified namespace in your code. PSR-0 compliant autoloaders will then automagically be able to find the files by traversing the directory structure and include them for use in your code. Magic! An example can be found at https://gist.github.com/221634 with a SplClassLoader implementation that sticks to the standard.

In my own project(s), I have adopted the Symfony autoloader component though. You can find a bunch of information, as well as a guide and download link at http://symfony.com/doc/2.0/components/class_loader.html Please go and take a look there for additional information.

So why is this significant?

The actual subject of this post is the significance of PSR-0. Now that we have a pretty good idea of how it works, we can now start thinking of the possibilities associated with it!

Imagine starting a new project which requires a forum, a wiki and a file upload area. OK, not a huge ask, but will take time. These are also not uncommon web applications, so there will be a lot of reusable code lying around in other projects that we can use, but each class may need to be manually edited to work with the overall project, and many other finicky little subtleties may need to be addressed, which could end up taking as long as if you were to have coded everything almost from scratch. Not good.

If, however, we used a bunch of high quality components from any number of fine projects and frameworks out there already, we could simply start adding some, or all, of these components to our own project and simply writing a bit of glue code to hold them all together, which would significantly reduce the dev time on any project. Bug tracking and fixing becomes easier due to the use of namespacing and the overall velocity of the project increases. All good things.

The more projects and people that stick to these standards, (as they become available) the better. The more simple, reusable components that are created and made available via systems like packagist http://packagist.org/ the better. Many projects can now make use of these components by simply adding a line of JSON or two to a file and using a package manager like Composer (http://getcomposer.org/composer.phar) to work with them! Side note: If you do use Composer, it will automatically generate an autoload.php file for you, making this even easier!

As a final note, from a performance perspective, we all (should) know that require() and include() etc are pretty heavy operations, but by using SPL, we should even get a bit of a bonus performance boost (on top of the performance boost you get from using PHP-5.3.x and above anyway), as well as making your code more readable and maintainable. What reason could you have for not using it?

In conclusion, PSR-0 autoloading is the first of many standards. If you would like to participate in creating these standards, the working group is an open one and your feedback is welcomed.

The fact that these things are being collaboratively created makes for a very exciting time to be a PHP developer! This is one of the most significant things to happen to PHP since PHP5!

Keep an eye out and most importantly, have fun!

When it comes to the fundamentals of SEO, whenever I post something on Google+, I always think carefully about my use of keywords and phrases within my comments or posts to measure it’s impact on personalized Google results. I ran an SEO experiment over a weekend where I only changed one element of one page on a site and posted the difference it made, when comparing the same time period to 1 week before, to G+.

The Impact one change made to that one page:

• Visits from search engines increased by 118%
• Those visitors viewed 45% more pages than the previous week.
• Bounce rate decreased by 53%

So what on-site SEO change had that big impact you may be wondering? Some of the G+ comments suggested that one of the following changes had been made;

• Added fresh content
• Changing of the title tag
• The utilisation of a trending keyword
• The removal of a pop-up
• The addition of a pop-up
• Adding a clear call to action, video action or something else on the page that requires an action
• Internal linking
• Spam reported competitors
• Duncan Green even suggested that I did a bit of adobe photoshop to the dashboard page!

I’m sorry to burst your bubble but the only thing I changed on the page was the page’s <title></title> To me, this demonstrates that no matter how much Google is changing the fundamentals of SEO remain the same.

What impact will Google+ have on SEO?

With users able to switch between personalised and ‘worldly’ search, SEO efforts will have to be tailored specifically for each. The new functions being presented by ‘person’ toggle function, seemingly provide more authority to Google+ pages and social shares. As a result authoritative content will be determined with respects to “+1’s” and shares.

There may be some advantage to SEO practices in respects of the ‘world’ search function, as personalisation features are completely eliminated, allowing for more SEO tailored items to pull through.

Further items for consideration:

• Technical On-Site SEO Fundamentals and basics will remain important.
• Authors of content will have to place emphasis on their G+ profiles, in-line with the implementation of Google’s authorship mark-up. This includes UGC and content created by company employees/journalists.
• With the evolution of search and content becoming social objects, immediate implementation of Schema.org is necessary to ensure various content types are properly indexed and understood by bots. With Google being one of the founding organizations behind schema.org, it is more than likely that SERPs will see the inclusion of more rich snippets (Google+ is “social rich snippets” ).
• (not provided) keywords, the hiding of keywords for users signed into their Google accounts, launched in Q4 2011 in Google Analytics could be used as a signal to determine what percentage of users are more than likely to see SPYW results. This could be used to determine how important an G+ SEO strategy should be within your business.
• Having More Pluses Will Increase Search Rankings, thereby placing emphasis on quality of product, service and interactions, especially in the context of e-commerce. This is due to social networks being able to provide users with a general perception about a product or service, accorded by known friends and even unknown people (Bing has previously cited statistical findings that around ninety per cent of users take into consideration the feedback of family and friends when making decisions).
• Ensure that your content is well optimized for distribution on Google+
• User search patterns will start to change (as this change begins to take hold, the way people search for travel destinations and products online could change, due to users making more use of their own network’s recommendations.)

Has Google Search Plus Your World impacted your SEO strategy yet? Let me know in the comments below.

Some have applauded Google’s inclusion of personal results as the logical next step for Search in an ever increasingly social Internet. Others have been cynical, seeing it as a blatant attempt by the search giant to force their Google Plus social platform into a world dominated by Facebook and twitter by building on Google’s monopoly of the search industry.

Predictably there have also been claims that this is the “death of SEO” – the latest move by Google to force the focus of SEM away from manipulating organic results (SEO) towards their cash-cow of sponsored search (Adwords). And its hard not to see the merit in the conspiracy theorist’s argument after October’s SSL encryption of user queries which hides personalised search keywords from Google Analytics organic traffic reports, while retaining the same keywords in Adwords reports.

I dont know if Google is trying to kill SEO, but I think its obvious that there will be increased competition for real estate now that Google + Profiles are showing up at the top of the SERPs as well as on the right side where ads are traditionally displayed. In order to  guarantee a position above the fold people might have to turn to Adwords. And Adwords advertisers will have to ensure they are in the top 3 most visible ad positions, while adverts below position 3 might see a decrease in click through rate as they are pushed further down the page.

I also think its vital that advertisers enable the Social Extensions feature within Adwords in order to ensure their  adverts and landing pages share +1 votes.

I’d also recommend keeping an eye on predictions about Google Plus. Last year at SMX East I attended a session called “What Every Paid Search Marketer Needs To Know About Google+” and I was particularly interested in some of the predictions that Mathew Guiver made about the future of +1s. I wont go into detail about through all his predictions, but the one that’s of obvious interest to anyone with an Adwords account is the prediction that +1 votes will eventually have a greater impact on average advert position that quality score.

While Google currently deny that there is any impact of +1 on Quality Score or Ad rank, I think that its almost inevitable that Google will start including +1 votes as a sign of relevance, and therefore something that will affect quality score in future.

Also, whether you believe +1s will eventually have a direct effect on quality score, there is no denying that they already have an indirect effect – by making adverts more prominent, thereby increasing click through rate.

The start of 2012 has shown us that Google Plus is not just an attempt to get into social media, but also a way for Google to incorporate social media into search. I’d definitely recommend watching this space. You can start by checking out some more of Mathew Guiver’s +1 predictions available on slideshare here.

SEO for Web Developers

When it comes to achieving sustainable SEO results the work of the web developer plays a major role in a campaigns success or failure. So much so that 2 of the 3 “On Page SEO” columns in the Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors, HTML and Architecture, rely solely on the work of our web developers. Preventing violations like cloaking and hiding words by using the same or nearly the same text colour and body background could be blamed on developers and designers who do not know enough about what works or doesn’t when it comes to SEO. The following post highlights 1112 SEO guidelines every web developer should know and try to adhere to.

1. Product Owners should assign SEO stories to each sprint.

Whether you like it or not visitors referred to your web application by search engines can be anything from one third to somewhere near 80% of all your traffic. If you are building anything that will be publicly available on the web- search engines, or rather their bots, should also be considered as a user. “How will search engines react to any change we make to our site?” should be asked when planning your Agile sprints therefore adding it as a user story will be beneficial.

2. Give SEO tasks higher priority in the Product Backlog

In most cases an SEO or agency’s expertise is consulted when the powers-that-be realize they need a boost in their rankings. The great thing about search marketing is that it’s never too late to provide assistance in increasing search engine traffic. Your engagement with an SEO usually results in an audit in which many tweaks and changes are suggested. From personal experience those tasks are assigned to somewhere near the bottom of the product backlog or don’t make it to the product backlog at all.

3. Page Speed – Make Your Code Harder Better Faster

Not only does the speed of you site have a positive effect on decreasing bounce rate, improving page views, and a higher conversion rate. The speed of you page is a factor in search engine algorithms too. I’d suggest reading Google’s Distinguished Engineer, Matt Cutts’ post. If you need more convincing that site speed effects the bottom line read Alistair Croll’s detailed article. Their are various add-ons plugins available for Firefox and Chrome that can assist web developers at improving page speed. Web Developers should take Daft Punk’s lyrics to heart…

Work It Harder Make It Better
Do It Faster, Makes Us stronger
More Than Ever Hour After
Our Work Is Never Over

Google have also released a web-based page speed testing tool. The easiest way to find out how to improve you site’s speed is to enter the URL, click analyze and follow the guidelines.

4. The URL’s impact on SEO

When it comes to SEO all URLs are not created equal. URLs should be constructed for users first, search engines second. A personal rule I like using is to keep the URL as close to the root directory as possible i.e do/no/put/folders/in/the/URL/if/it/is/not/needed. Rather use hyphens (-) as separators between words or numbers. Even though the underscore performs a similar function to the dash, works as a keyword separator in a URL, it requires an additional keystroke when typing _. There are still some people who believe people use the URL structure when browsing a website but have you ever witnessed the practice of navigation by URL structure recently? If you plan to change ensure the proper redirects are in place. This brings us to the next point…

5. Getting Redirections Right for SEO

You’re about to change the URL structure of your pages and would like to retain the traffic those pages are receiving via search engines. We’ve known for over a decade that links are vital when is comes to rankings in the SERPs and those URls you are planning to change may also may have vital links pointing to them from external sites which are sometimes impossible or time consuming to request other webmasters to update. Have no fear, the 301 redirect is here. Of all the redirect codes the 301 redirect is the most important one to know. This will alert search engines to the new location of a page(s) and pass almost all it’s link juice (ranking power). SEOmoz has a detailed guide to redirection using an Apache Web Server. When redirecting pages or folders on IIS do not forget to select “A permanent redirection for this resource”. If you require a guide to 301 redirect for PHP, ASP(.net), Coldfusion, JSP/Java, Perl or Ruby-on-Rails follow these guidelines.

6. Duplicate Content Mitigation & Parameter Handling

Duplication of content occurs on the web when various pages (URLs) contains the same or very similar content. The problem with having more than one piece of identical content on the Internet is that it’s difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query. To provide the best search experience, search engines will rarely show multiple, duplicate pieces of content and thus, are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the original (or best). To assist in preventing duplicate content issues which may negatively impact your SEO efforts the rel canonical tag was introduced. The rel canonical tag is vital for ecommerce stores which allow users to toggle the order in which the products are displayed (order by price or alphabetically). In most cases the same URL with additional query parameters are created to order/sort products. The canonical tag will prevent duplicate content issues in this case. Another instance where you wouldn’t want to confuse search engines is when paginating pages with hundreds of products listed or archived content. Google advises you not to use the rel canonical tag in this case but rather another rel tag called rel prev an rel next.

7. Get to Know & Give Robots.txt a Go

The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web crawlers and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Beware of blocking pages that should be indexed when using robotx.txt there is also a robots meta tag. The robots.txt or tag can be your best friend when implemented correctly or worst enemy if not This site dedicated to the Robots Exclusion Standard is a great place to start learning all you need to know.

8. Give Images Descriptive File Names

Digital cameras and mobile phones have the naming conventions that make no sense to us or search engine spiders. Instead of uploading an image as DSC00786.jpg rename it to something descriptive that give like may-the-force-be-with-you.jpg instead, if you were displaying an image of Yoda

9. Do not hide content within Javascript or Flash

JQuery is used almost everywhere online these days which isn’t bad as it improves the user experience in most cases where content on a page can be changed on the fly. Search Engines may not see the content you wrap within Javasrcipt or Flash even though progress has been made by them to better read and understand them. This is where the <noscript> tag comes into play. When using Javascript or Flash be sure to also include the content you want indexed by search engines between <noscript> and </noscript>. A word of warning though, be sure that the content within Flash/Javascript is identical/similar. We do not want to violate their guidelines with keyword stuffing, cloaking or excessive link manipulation within the noscript tags.

10. SEO’s Future is Semantic

Seen those enhanced search results with movie ratings, personal information, product prices etc.. Google calls them rich snippets. The only way to enhance your site’s SERPs is providing semantically marked-up data. At SMX Advanced 2011 a new standard adopted by the Bing, Yahoo and Google was introduced called Schema.org. Utilizing schema.org may not be a major ranking factor right now but it certainly will be in the near future. The best advice I can give any developer who wants to build a web app that will perform well when it comes to search engines rankings and attracting traffic is that you have to learn and implement schema.org as soon as you can.

11. Social, Social, Social

Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and the thousands of other Social Media platforms your target market use helps your SEO efforts too. Don’t go out and spam the various Social Networks with messages that are not targeted/solicited. Rather provide the tools and widgets that allow users to easily share your content with their networks. Which networks you choose will depend on who your target audience is. In this article’s case of we allow you to tweet, +1 or Like on Facebook. If you’ve found any value in this article feel free to share it

12. How To Ensure New Content is Indexed by Search Engines Quickly

Google have recently updated their algorithm to ensure their results show you fresher content. The latest update impacts 35% of all search queries. What can you as a web developer do to ensure the content on your site gets indexed quickly? By utilizing XML sitemaps and alerting the major search engines to changes to your XML sitemap as soon as content at a new URL gets added, content at old URLs are updated (a comment is posted, or any editorial changes) or even when a URL is changed. What is an XML sitemap?

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Learn more about the XML Sitemap Protocol and study the XML Sitemap WordPress plugin for a better technical understanding of how to create sitemaps and alert (ping) search engines to changes to your site quickly. This should ensure your new content is indexed quickly and should ensure pages from your site is included as part of the ‘fresh’ search results (when relevant).

This article was not intended to be the complete list of SEO Guidelines for Web Developers but the intention is for it to be the starting point on your journey to make the web applications you buiild more SEO friendly now and in the future. If you think or know of anything I may have missed feel free to comment below with your SEO tip(s).

Images used within this article are CC by Kalexanderson.

As it has been heralded so many times before, we know that the internet has become the engine of change; it has been both revolutionary and disruptive. So it begs the question: is the internet (now finally) in a position where there is truly the potential for it to disrupt the TV industry?

Why the push for convergence? According to Eric Schmidt (in his recent MacTaggart presentation ), it’s because the internet can offer something TV cannot do: “It makes TV more personal, more participative (and) more pertinent”.

What is convergence?

The convergence of Internet and TV is not just about the migration of traditional TV content onto a computing device, or even for that matter allowing web pages to load onto a flat screen TV. Media convergence is more than simply a technological/hardware shift. True convergence is recognized through the ability that new media has to alter the relationship between existing technologies, audiences, genres, industries and markets. The essence of this convergence is the migration of media consumption from the computer to the living room and the living room to everywhere else.

This account gives to the realisation that technology hasn’t been the barrier to online convergence; the barrier has been the sought acclaim that comes in owning the business model, as all industry stakeholders seek to control the final entitlement: the relationship with the consumer.

Why the fight for this control

Fuelling the fight for control of the inevitable convergence has been buoyant-ed by the pattern shift in media ownership. No longer are media companies operating in silos, where traditional media is confined to a vacuum; they are now vertical, horizontal and even diagonal. The result: new media networks have shifted their controlling interests across the entire entertainment industry, from conception through to delivery.

These are evident when one looks at how the media giants are aligning themselves:

• Comcast’s acquisition of NBC Universal
• Google acquired YouTube
• Sony Entertainment acquired Grouper networks, Gracenote and Media Systems Corporation.
• Warner Bros. Acquired Social Movie Site Flixster (and Rotten Tomatoes)
• Walt Disney owns 27% of Hulu, NBC 32% and Disney 27%
• Fox has Fox on-Demand
• And in the UK, BBC has the iPlayer

And most recently: the launch of the UltraViolet System (cloud-based licensing system that allows content to be streamed or downloaded onto multiple platforms and devices: a partnership between Sony Entertainment, NBC, Fox, Paramount, Warner and Lionsgate.

He who controls content is king

For this reason, GoogleTV and AppleTV have never taken off, for this reason Netflix, Roku, Red box, etc. are troubled. Whilst they able to provide access to the viewer, they don’t carte blanche access to premium content. Hence, Netflix paying billions to secure content rights and even going to the extent of licensing scripts to produce their own content (House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey). Youtube too have gone to great lengths to secure long form content, to the extent that they are approaching Hollywood directors and actors to make exclusive content. The most recent Netflix stock plunge is a case in point (other than bad management) as to why it is important to have access to content. You can’t be the future of TV if you got nothing to show.

For the sake of mention: there is of course, Facebook, who could potentially be in the best position to deliver next level TV convergence. In many ways they have started ramping up efforts in this direction through partnerships with content producers which enables them to stream TV Shows and movies.

Why the delay in convergence?

As mentioned previously, the delay in convergence is not due to the technology not being ready; rather it is the networks fight to assert control over the business model. Convergence presents the opportunity to mess with the synchronicity and localisation of content, that networks push to control. Synchronicity, relates to: the control of the audience (creating peak viewing times, etc.), and localisation, the regulation of content through different licensing geographies.

Both these aspects allow media networks to exert a measure of control. Allowing the TV medium to migrate to the internet medium and let others control the platform, opens the networks up to vulnerabilities, meaning loss of revenues (mostly in the form of advertising dollars). Networks therefore have clammerd, they have push to force their control, until they themselves can continue their dominance in the online arena.

Furthermore, allowing the internet to become the dominant medium for viewing content, puts the networks against the risk of the mounts of democratised content (Indie and layperson releases). This potentially creates an issue, as audience now have more content to select from, potentially bypassing the professionally created content, creating an issue for the synchronicity element.

Benefits of convergence for the user?

It provides viewers with a more immersive and involving experience. The greatest advantage of convergence: is the push to pull factor. This will change the commercialisation of media forever.

The internet has been hailed by the Indie movie industry, as the barriers to distributing TV shows, news and even movies will go way down (like how the Bieber person used social media to rise to fame). Media passionista’s and entrepreneurs can now compete with traditional television channels by producing and crowdsource editing their own TV series or news and talk shows.

With too much content available, the viewer will inevitably be snowed with an overwhelming amount of content. So with, the extremely long tail of content, the natural coping mechanism will be to have recommendation engines. Content discovery engines will draw on user data and social recommendations to fuel the viewing list: the more you watch and share, the more the system learns, the better its predictions.

How will marketers leverage the change in consumption?

The result of the convergence will potentially see two platforms become one. This of course does leave to loss the most valued platform of all time; however at the same time this will give rise the genre of unified communications- highly targeted and interactive ad products on the Internet will accelerate, with advertisements being selectively integrated in or around content in real-time based upon targeting metrics (day part, behaviour, demographics or other). All video advertisements may be bought based upon who is seeing the ad rather than what show it is playing in. the potential for reach then becomes more valuable. The result is that marketers will create an ecosystem around their TV programming. No doubt, the space will become more competitive; marketers will have to go beyond just creativity and need to draw in intelligent process advertising

Advances in the internet have changed the way that individuals are able to interact with the web. Established players are noticeably shifting their business models to accommodate for new technologies, competition and the changing consumer landscape. Convergence is inevitable: Video and social media’s versatility is one of the leading causes for this change. As Eric Schmidt mentioned: “…you ignore the Internet at your peril. The Internet is fundamental to the future of Television for one simple reason: because it’s what people want.”

Zend Developer Cloud is a free, cloud based environment for developing and deploying PHP applications. It has tools to quickly set up PHP application stacks, including Zend Framework, Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. It includes a code tracing tool and debugging features. Once the application is ready, it can be deployed to any cloud provider supporting the “Zend Application Fabric”, including Amazon and Rackspace. Zend Developer Cloud also supports the ability to take snapshots of instances at any given time that can be shared with other developers. This could be useful for developer collaboration. It is currently available as a “technology preview release”, you can request an early access key here.

The keynote also featured a live demonstration and one of the tools featured during the demonstration was the new Zend Studio 9 beta. It features tight integration with the Zend Developer Cloud, allowing developers to deploy to the cloud instances from within the IDE. Other noteworthy features include Git and Github support build into the IDE which should make a lot of developers very happy. Emphasis was also placed on how the new IDE can be configured to only include modules that developers need, cutting down a lot of the bulk that is a common complaint with Eclipse IDEs.

During the week before the conference, the beta 1 release of Zend Framework was announced. ZendCon 2011 had several talks detailing the internal workings of the new framework. One of the major changes includes extensive use of dependency injection throughout to make it truly extensible. Most of the framework was rewritten to ensure consistency throughout and to harness the full capabilities of PHP 5.3. The architecture was also simplified greatly by introducing event driven programming to the framework. To find out more about ZF2, have a look at the community wiki. Take note that the API will change while still in Beta.

Day 2 (and beyond) presented itself with a Schmorgasboard of presentations, which at times appeared to be a bit pitchy. The thread that I drifted to mostly was payments. These were dominated by Visa (diamond sponsor of the conference).  It interesting to note that there was sort of an acknowledgment of the fact that payments is all still very experimental and that everyone is looking to be the most relevant.

Quite a few speakers emphasised the role of payments in the social context and how frictionless inclusions are required to promote ubiquity in a converging society. Visa is especially focussed on the shift in behaviour from the merchant to new forms of interaction. In many ways the idea is to imitate payment methods found in gaming, a frictionless experience that will not require the user to leave the context they are in.

What has been interesting from the payments discussion is the relationship/linkage between payments and the social factor that the internet relates. This is especially so as cell phone ubiquity takes payments into the era of the internet of things…where ‘payments will be processed directly from the refrigerator’.

Another theme that was highly featured was of course Social Media. There was some interesting talk on the ways that business could use Social Media to extract metrics and lessen the load on other business resources (e.g. a call center).

Two interesting facts: the IPhone 4S has outshined the IPad as the most waitlisted apple product by pre-release demand…. and proof that everyone is going social, is shown by the fact that the ‘secretive’ Freemasons have launched an official blog.

As markets collide (NB- not converging but rather competing: devices, platforms, content providers, etc.), a lot of restructuring is taking place. Google catalogue is an example of the change that could easily affect retails outlets, as manufacturers now have a conduit to the consumer directly.

New media requires a different thought on existing business models, once again drawn from gaming, businesses need to consider context and relate products and services in new forms:

• Bundling
• For free (with embedded ads)
• Subscription models
• Try before buy

Most interesting and probably the greatest take-out of the conference: there is a lot taking place right now as the industry day by day is defining and redefining itself. At the moment, much of what is happening is a result of experimentation (an important consideration for organisations). In this regard, an allowance must be made for failure, as it is through failure that innovation can be augmented.

The first round of incubatees were limited to graduates of the MIH Media Lab at Stellenbosch, where MIH has been heavily involved with pushing web technologies. Four students eagerly took the challenge and moved into a house in a quiet suburb of Stellenbosch. The four of them would work on two separate projects;

Bazooka Games
Started in 2010, BazookaGames is a mysterious trio of developers, fueled (apparently) by pizza, coffee and the love for games. Bazooka Games is currently focusing on social platforms in the mobile space, but plan on expanding to other platforms such as the local Facebook market in the near future. So far Bazooka Games have developed two and a half games. BattleTrivia was released in May 2011 and has been very successful on the MXit platform, soaring to the number one most “liked” game on the new MXit gaming API.

Coachingmill

CoachingMill is a sports coaching website. Sports coaches can view, create and rate sports coaching resources such as training drills and sessions, coaching articles and year plans. Current sports include Rugby , Soccer , Hockey and Cricket. The site is 100% free and aims to be community driven where coaches from around the world can share their knowledge and experience. Users are able to draw training drills, write articles and plan sessions using all available drills. Training resources can be made private, where only the user can view it, or public so that everyone can use the resource. Users also have private folders where they can save resources to group them for specific purposes and to quickly find them again later.

The site is growing daily and future endeavors such as team management and game analysis software is something that is still on the roster. Team management will enable coaches to manage their teams from a single website. Training sessions can be imported to use for specific practices, players can be notified and results of the games can be published online. Game analysis software entails applications for tablets that can be used to record stats during the game as well as video analysis software for post game analysis of recorded games. All the stats can be uploaded to the website to be reviewed or published. Any coach, no matter what level of experience you have or team you manage, can benefit from this all-star coaching website.