The world in which we operate, the ever-connected world of the web, never stops moving. Products appear, hit critical mass, and they die. People become celebrities over night, and then disappear without a trace. Companies and sites change hand, again and again. It’s a world constantly in flux, made even more evident when you take a break from it.

I’ve recently returned from business, having been away from this blog for two weeks. Whilst that’s never long enough a break for the real world, it’s an eternity for the web. Just think of all that’s happened.

”Yahoo! acquires Tumblr for $1.1billion”; valuing it at one and one-tenth of an Instagram. The blogging service that has helped thousands of people share their creativity, personality, and a whole lot more (some of it quite NSFW – not safe for work) has been acquired by one of the behemoths in the digital world. A company that up until recently was known for acquiring and dismantling teams, but which seems to have taken a change under the leadership or Miss Meyer.

”Flickr gets a redesign, and 1TB of free storage for all” may be another move from Yahoo!, but a big one nonetheless. Giving every single user of the service 1TB of storage, for free, is just mental. You can pay a fee of $50 a year to get rid of the adverts, or $500 a year if you really need to double that storage to 2TB.

”Minbox launches, and doesn’t pull punches”. It’s a competitor to Dropbox, in that you can quickly and easily share files with your friends. The speeds are ridiculous, and the marketing video is definitely not holding back. Take a look for yourself here.

”Google wants to Hangout after I/O”, as is consolidates all of its communication services under one roof. Google Talk, Voice, and Hangouts will come together under the Hangout brand. They will be closing down access to the Google Talk service through other clients, and creating their own Hangout client.

It’s difficult to not be amazed by the fluid and temporary nature of everything on the web. We’re constantly having to adapt, change, and look for the next big things. We can never stay still, we can never dawdle. We must be forever running, or we’re left behind.

Adapting to change is how we survive. Constantly on the look out for changes in how users view your service, changes in the technologies you depend on, trends in the connected world, opportunities for expansion and disruption. It’s a hectic world.

Does your web strategy consider this? Are you walking into mobile, when you should be sprinting? What will your app be in 2 weeks, let along 2 years? These are the questions that need to be answered. The questions that should mould how you approach the digital space. If you’re having problems answering them, then we’re here to help.

xDesign365 are experienced in the design, development, deployment, and iteration of digital services. We work with people like you to make sure they are constantly at the cutting edge. Get in contact with us, and see how we can help.

As Apple countdowns to their 50 Billionth App download, let’s take a look at this week’s App headlines. There’s a lot of sharing going on, that’s for sure.

Instagram (www.instagram.com) decided to steal the headlines this week. Not only did they update their logo, they decided it was time you could tag yourself and your friends in your photos. Out with your friends? Applying filters to events from the past? Want to show your dinner to even more people, even more quickly? Just tag them in your photos, and they’ll know straight away. You can also tag brands, and it will be interesting to see how that pans out.

Rovio are at it again, finding another way to be in your pocket. This week the Canadian game company released Angry Birds Friends (http://rov.io/13P162a). Now you can pit your bird flinging skills against your Facebook friends. You also get weekly challenges, daily rewards, and the ability to sync your progress to your Facebook account.

Jawbone (https://jawbone.com/up), the audio and fitness accessory company, have opened up their ‘UP’ platform to other apps. This means fitness apps can contribute their data to the information Jawbone stores from their ‘UP’ band. Apps can also retrieve data from the platform, adding to their own analytics potential. All the information about your fitness and wellness can be easily shared across all the apps you use.

Nike weren’t to be left behind, letting their Nike+ FuelBand (www.nike.com/Fuelband

) users easily share their workouts with their Facebook friends, along with photos of their workout activities.

Sometimes you want to share things with only one person, or a small group. That’s where Couple (http://couple.me) comes in. Easily share calendars, voice notes, and messages with those closest to you, on your own private network. This week they’ve updated their app to allow a feature very similar to competitor Snapchat: self destructing photos. Send whatever photo you want to your nearest and dearest, set how long it can last, and it will only show when they tap on it. I’ll let you decide what you send.

App piracy is a real danger to small companies. It can drive startups out of business before they’ve even got going. Greenheart Games have taken this to heart in their game Game Dev Tycoon (http://www.greenheartgames.com/app/game-dev-tycoon/), available for Mac, PC, and Linux. They released the game for £5.69, as well as leaking cracked versions of the game to random Torrent sites. These leaked versions contain slightly altered code, that means that player’s games are pirated after a period of time, causing their company to go bankrupt. Sometimes, sharing isn’t what you’re hoping for.

It’s amazing what you can do when data is shared. We recently worked with the awesome guys at Swarmly (http://www.swarmly.co) to create their iPhone and Android app. An app designed to answer the question “Where should we go?”. By sharing data on venues, and people’s opinions on them, we’re able to answer that question.

What do you want to share? Is community at the centre of what you’re doing? We’ve been there, done that, and rated the T-Shirt. Pop us an e-mail if you’re interested in working with us.

The industry in which we work is a young one. Apps have come into the common consciousness over the last 5 years. Smartphones only struck a chord with people with the launch of the iPhone in 2007. They’ve only become affordable with the recent generations of Android devices. The web itself is celebrating its 20th birthday this year, making it younger than most of the people who use it.

A quick history lesson for you.

In the May 1970 issue of Popular Science magazine Arthur C. Clarke predicted that satellites, like those used for TV and GPS, would bring “the accumulated knowledge of the world yo your fingertips”. He imagined a device that combined the functions of a photocopier, telephone, television, and a small computer. This device would allow you to transfer data, and create video conferences across the world.

About 20 years later, Tim Berners-Lee and  Robert Cailliau published a formal proposal for the WorldWideWeb. A connected network (web) of connected documents (created using HTML) using a system of clients and servers. Servers would hold the hypertext documents, and would know how they connect together. Clients would use a web browser to connect to these documents, view their contents, and use hyperlinks to travel between them.

In 1993, CERN released the project to the world. It became known as WorldWideWeb 1.0, and was accessed by the world’s first web browser, also called WorldWideWeb (later renamed to Nexus).

In the last 20 years a lot has changed. From simple websites containing mainly text and a few images, we have evolved. Wikis were the first websites allowing their users to easily edit the content, and Wikipedia is a great example of this. RSS allowed users to keep up to date with their favourite sites, getting updates straight to their computer.

Around 10 years ago, the world embraced the .COM bubble, with millions of dollars thrown around looking for the next big thing. We moved into the territory of Web 2.0, websites that were more about interaction and media than about plain text.

In recent years we’ve taken our love of apps to the web, and they’re more popular than ever. You can do everything you need inside of a browser, and some computer systems even rely on that (Google’s Chrome OS for example). Want to write a letter? Google Docs. Want to know where to go? Bing Maps. Hungry? Sainsbury’s or Just Eat have got your back.

You can even get incredibly meta, and create a website on a website.

Back to the modern day, and you can see just how far we’ve come. But have we lost some of what got us here? CERN have recently announced that they’re working to restore the first website, http://info.cern.ch, to its former glory. Remind us all where we’ve come from. Want to know more? You can get all the info at http://first-website.web.cern.ch.

Why have I brought this up? Sometimes it’s nice to look back at where we’ve come from, before we plan where we’re headed. Discussion is abound about how the future of the web looks. Are we looking towards a world of web based applications, or will we go native? Designing on and for the devices people use. Will design for the web continue its current trend towards ‘flat design’, or will we always hold on to the last scrap of skeuomorphism. Will computers be forever something we hold, or something we wear?

Looking at how far we’ve come since 1993, what will the next 20 years bring?

xDesign365 work to make the web wonderful. We take your ideas from just a spark, through to deployment and beyond. We design and develop for the web, computers, and mobile devices. We’re part of the social web, and can help you get the most out of your online presence. We’re natives of the web, and bring our knowledge to bear on everything we do.

Instapaper, the online ‘read it later’ service, surprised everyone this week. Just yesterday (Thursday) the service was acquired by Betaworks, adding Instapaper to a portfolio that already includes the news aggregation site Digg.com.

Marco Arment, who developed Instapaper after leaving Tumblr, announced the acquisition yesterday, stating that it was the best move for the service. Instapaper will now have a full time team to work on the project, instead of being a freetime project for Arment himself. Arment will continue to work on his other projects, including the iOS publication ‘The Magazine’, as well as advise on the future of Instapaper.

To add to Thursday’s Instapaper news, Parse – the company that provides tools to developers building mobile apps – was acquired by Facebook. The company is a Y Combinator alumni, and recently raised $5.5 million funding. The acquisition deal is said to have been worth about $85 million. The announcement encourages its customers that Parse will not be going away, but will be getting better.

Updates

Earlier this week Yahoo! released an update to their iOS app, which now includes the summarisation technology they recently acquired from Summly. Is it worth the $30 million they paid for it? Now’s your chance to find out.

For those of us who have to be social all the time, Tumblr updated their iOS app with ability to share posts in more ways. You can now send your favourite posts to Facebook, Twitter, App.net, through email and more.

Facebook gave it’s Android users some more love this week, soon after the launch of Facebook Home. The Facebook Messenger App for Android now allows users to send Stickers. Think of them as super sized emoticons, perfect for annoying your friends with.

Releases

You’ve probably played Simon, the colour matching memory game, or a version of it. Released this week is Circles [Circles for iPhone] a weaponised version of the popular game. Tap the colours in the pattern they appear, and play versus your friends with multiplayer modes. Best of all, every purchase of the app helps support Alzheimer research.

The BBC finally ported it’s BBC iPlayer Radio app to Android this week. The app lets android users listen to live radio streams, as well as access on demand shows and podcasts from the last 7 days.

Have you got an app idea? Keeping the next killer web idea close to your chest? We’ve got the experience, the knowledge, and the connections to help you happen. We’ve worked with people like Swarmly, National Galleries Scotland, and National Museum of Scotland to help them achieve their vision. Could you be next? Drop us an email.

It’s August 1998, and the dot-com bubble is in full swing. The internet is the future, and investors are willing to throw money at companies they would normally ignore. Pets.com has setup as a way for retail consumers to buy pet supplies. With an easy to remember domain, and a sock puppet mascot, they’ve their eyes on world domination. By October 2000 they’ve managed an Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the Stock Market, have raised over $300 million in investments, have 320 employees, acquired a competitor, and advertised during the Super Bowl.

Despite this early success, Pets.com didn’t make enough money from it’s day to day operations. They self liquidated in November of that year, and sold all their assets to PetSmart.

The App Bubble is here

Fast forward 15 years, and money is definitely flowing around the tech industry. Seed rounds and acquisitions are abundant. Kickstarter and Seedrs are opening up the doors to crowdfunding. Anyone can be an investor, and they’re all looking to back the next big thing.

Summarisation startup Summly was founded by 17 year old Nick D’Aloisio, using summarisation technology developed in tandem with SRI International (the guys behind Siri). In March 2013, just 6 months after launching the app, and with 1 million users, Summly was acquired by Yahoo!, in a deal estimated to be worth $18 million. Summly has now been integrated into Yahoo!’s iOS app, and Nick works for Yahoo!. The app had quite a small number of users (comparitively), and no way of making money. The acquisition has been scrutinised by many, far and wide.

Treehouse is a for-profit online learning company. Their product, teamtreehouse.com, teaches how to write HTML, code apps, and run your business. They’ve raised over $12 million of funding. They have over 25,000 active and paying Treehouse Students. They have grown to yearly revenues of $5m, and have over 55 employees. They aren’t looking for an acquisition, they’re looking to change the world.

I use these two companies for a specific reason. Summly was acquired very early on in its life, at a time when it was making very little (if any) money. People are at a loss about how the valuation came about, some are wondering how they can do the same.

Treehouse has grown from a small team, through hard work and perservence, to a business that’s making a nice sum of money. People find it easier to validate the investments going into it, and their customers love what they can do on Treehouse.

One of these ways is sustainable. The other, not so much. Can you guess which one?

Is the bubble going to burst?

If we continue to invest money into businesses that have no way of making money, then we’re going to have a bad time. More money will go in then comes out, and the bubble will burst.

If we continue, as in the case of Treehouse, to support and grow businesses who have a way of making money, then the bubble can hold for quite a long time. Investment is used to support growth, rather than artificially force it.

At xDesign365, we believe that good ideas are sustainable ones. The quicker you can get to your first paying customer, the better. We’re here to guide you from idea to finsihed product, and get you in front of your customers as quickly as possible.

The headline this week has to be Google Glass, the API for which was released this week. Developers can now develop applications for the wearable tech, in the form of web based services that can send their output to the device’s display.

We also know a bit more about the specifications of the device. The camera for which Glass can become infamous is able to take 5MP stills, or record 720p video, and store them onto 16GB of internal memory. A controversial feature, that has led to some public places banning the device already.

Glass connects to your smartphone, through Bluetooth, to share a data connection and uses bone conduction technology to let you hear what’s happening  A built in battery powers everything for a day.

With this hardware, and a whole new way of interfacing with technology to work with, it will be interesting to see what applications people will create for Glass. Imagine being able to price check a product just by looking at it. Add an event to your calendar by looking at the poster. Or get a movie review from watching the trailer.

Google has raised eyebrows with developers though, by not allowing them to charge for applications or to include advertisements. It is uncertain whether this is purely for during the beta period, which Google is calling the Explorer Program, or is a sign of things to come.

In other news:

Yahoo! have been busy this week. Not only did they bring their Mail application to the iPad and Android tablets, they also released what has to be their best designed application to date – Yahoo! Weather. An elegant design, matched with gorgeous photography make this app a truly pleasant experience. (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/yahoo!-weather/id628677149?mt=8)

Facebook have updated their iOS app this week as well. A slight UI refresh on the iPhone, and a complete overhaul on the iPad, is matched with their new Chat Heads feature, letting you see who’s chatting with you.

Twitter launched their new #music service yesterday on iOS and the web. Discover new music you and your friends like, and find out which of your friends is a Belieber. Find it online at music.twitter.com.

Pocket, the read it later service, has made it easier than ever to share articles you find. It’s new ‘Send to Friend’ feature lets you email saved pages to your friends, and they can add it to their own Pocket.

Mailbox the email app that not so long ago everyone has talking about, has finally removed its entry waiting list. Now anyone can sign up to easily archive their email, or save it for later.

Those of you who can’t wait for Microsoft to offer Office for iOS may have to wait a bit longer. The product has been rumoured to be pushed back into 2014. Until then, it’s just a white shiny horse with a horn.

The Wearable Tech Revolution

With Google Glass out in the wild, and every tech company and their grans working on wearable technology, the opportunities for new and unique applications is limitless. But with great power, comes great responsibility, as people worry about their privacy in a world of always connected, always looking devices.

Do you have an app idea that’s going to take the world by storm? Have you been inspired by Google Glass, and the possibilities it brings? We’re bringing our experience to wearable tech, starting with Google Glass. If you want to work with us – just get in touch.

Ribbon.co aims to make it easy to sell across multiple platforms. For a small fee (2.9% of transaction, plus 30¢) you can sell using Facebook, or your own website. Last Tuesday (April 10th, 2013), Ribbon launched Twitter integration. The launch was well publicised, with many blogs and media outlets shouting about the new product.

Less than 90 minutes into the launch, Twitter pulled the rug out from under Ribbon’s feet, removing their access to Twitter Cards.

AppGratis makes discovering new apps incredibly simple, and let’s you get them for free for a limited time. The company closed a $13.5 million funding round earlier this year, just over a dollar for each of it’s 12,000,000 users.

This all changed on Friday 5th April, when Apple decided to pull the application from the App Store.

Adblock Plus has been used by people for years to get rid of the adverts that plague all internet users. Available as an extension for web browsers such as Firefox, they decided to release a version for the Android operating system. Google did not take fondly to this launch, and have now decided to remove Adblock Plus from the Play Store.

All of these Apps decided to use and, in their eyes, enhance existing platforms. They brought new features to end users, which were not implemented by the platforms’ owners. They were innovating. But they were ripped down in their prime. Why did the guardians of these platforms take these steps?

The answer is simple: They all broke the rules. Ribbon.co used their Twitter Cards, but not for the purpose they were first granted. They were allowed access for showing video, but they added their payment technology into the card. Twitter are now reinstating their Card access, and Ribbon.co are able to work on improving their product.

AppGratis didn’t change their model when the rules changed. Apple constantly evolve the rules for their App Store, to protect their customers. AppGratis was found to infringe two rules: promoting other apps for purchase, and using push notifications for advertising or direct marketing.

Adblock Plus? A similar story, no less. Google states that the app was removed due to “interference with another service or product in an unauthorized manner.” No doubt relating to Google’s delivery of advertising and other services through the Android platform (Google Now, for example).

These are big name examples, but small endeavours are rendered useless each and every day by changes to the rules, technology, and politics of the platforms they are building for. Working with people who understand these changes, and can help you work around them, can be the difference between make and break. A decision not to take lightly.

xDesign365 is Scotland’s premiere web & app design and development company. Our developers are well versed in Objective-C and Java, the languages used for creating iOS and Android apps. They have experience navigating the ebb and flow of the App world, and bring their experience to bear on every project we do.

In our effort to continue the development of students across the UK and especially Scotland we have also launched two internship positions for both development and design.

We look forward to adding to our ever growing passionate team how ever ensuring that our standards and quality are retained throughout the process.

This year has been a real test for us, we have continued to grow at a steady and cautious pace whilst many have had to scale back their operations. We have had the pleasure of working with over 40 new clients throughout the year as well as being involved in many start-ups and exciting projects. We have continued to position ourselves as leaders in the mobile app development market in Edinburgh having delivered over 13 applications for our clients throughout 2012 on various platforms; as well as continuing our success as a web design and development company. All of this could not be achieved without you – our customers.

2013 is already shaping up to be a huge year for us and we’re still 10 days away from it! We have already been preparing for it by fine tuning our processes and readying ourselves for another period of growth.

We look forward to continuing our great work with clients old and new and wish you all the success that we have had in 2012 for 2013.

Thanks,

Euan and all the team at xDesign365

Ps. This blog has been neglected and will be seeing much more attention in 2013!

Holiday opening times:

We close on Friday the 21st of December until the 7th of January 2012, during this period we will have emergency support available.

Management staff will be on hand throughout the holiday period responding to emails and voicemails.

Development team will be on standby only for emergency support should it be required.

Customers with maintenance contracts in place, these will continue as normal with the support SLA outlined in your contracts.

Please use your usual contact methods to get in touch with useither directly to Euan info@xdesign365.com voicemails will be picked up daily on 0131 339 3838.

Martin was with us for over two years and in that period he was instrumental in raising the profile of the company and helping us rapidly grow to our current size.

Martin made a great contribution to the company. On behalf of myself and everyone at the xDesign365 I wish him all the very best for the future.

Martin is keen to express that he enjoyed his time at the company and he wishes his former colleagues and the company itself continued success in the future.

As a team, myself, Nick, Ross, Jean-Baptiste and Rory now look forward to continuing the good work we have done for our clients over the last few years.

In the coming weeks we will be announcing a number of exciting new contracts.with some of our new customers.

Euan Andrews

Director