An astonishing story from the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones – The £105m web site
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Is it corruption though, or incompetence, and which is worse when you are in control of these sorts of projects?
Let me know what you think…
In the UK we have a couple of periods each year when young people, mainly school and college leavers, try and get some experience of real life work – and it’s a painful process.
When we start to get those calls and emails at HMX asking for work experience, I often find myself surprised, and somewhat frustrated, that the young people involved do not seem to be given the simplest and most basic instruction in how to present their case.
I believe it is part of an employer’s role, if that doesn’t sound pompous, to give young people a taste of the work environment and perhaps give them an idea of what they might like to do with their lives, so we are receptive to these requests, but over the years have developed strong filtering antenna.
Of course, being a video production company, we are quite high up on the ‘want’ lists, which makes us very picky, so here are some thoughts to put in front of your (or your friends) son or daughter to help them make the most of an opportunity…
Remember, the key thing is to make yourself stand out – by being more pleasant on the phone, more determined to get through to them, by doing what you say, by turning up, by being friendly and being interested in the business.
Hope it helps…and good luck!
…even if very few people this side of the pond have actually seen one yet, with the possible exception of Stephen Fry!
Me, I couldn’t possibly comment, but I did like this…
For those of you who haven’t got a clue what I’m on about, Apple have launched a new device which they believe will be a game changer in the space between laptops and smartphones which, I know, you hadn’t realised was there. It does seem to be attracting more than it’s fair share of flak and praise. It promises to ‘make the technology’ disappear, which is a bold claim indeed. They should be in the UK at the end of May, and I for one can’t wait!
I’ve had some great feedback to my post about putting video into PowerPoint, but I did have one comment the other day which was very useful – the phrase my friend used was that her ‘eyes glazed over’ – so I thought, well I can do something about that!
So here’s a version for Kim;
1. Make sure your video files are in the same folder as the PPT, on your hard drive.
2. Go to the slide where you would like the video to appear and from the menu select Insert; Movie.
3. Choose ‘Wait for a keypress’.
4. Don’t resize the video box
….and if you need any more, carry on reading!
…anything at all, you should find the answer here;
And this is a link to a short video which will make you laugh out loud, it is so mind boggling!
www80.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html
I’m a positive kind of a guy and always optimistic in my outlook, my wife might say a bit too optimistic, but hey, what does she know?
I don’t know about you, but it seems to me there’s been a groundswell of optimism already this year and it’s a great feeling. After last year, when everyone seemed a bit down most of the time, it’s a refreshing change.
At HMX we’ve certainly been very busy since the year began and with some great wins just before Christmas, I feel we are in a good place to hit the New Year running.
But then I saw this phrase in the papers last week – a ‘breakout of feelgood’ and thought, actually, it is a bit like that – and maybe we should be a little cautious in assuming that the whole boring recession thing is behind us…
So for an optimistic chap, I might just temper those inflated sales forecasts and not put too much store by the positive noises from the media.
After all, we’ve an election to get through yet…
Although this sounds like it should be the easiest thing in the world to achieve, the reality is often the exact opposite, and so I felt it was worth writing a simple explanation of the process.
Before you start there are a number of things to bear in mind;
Video files are not actually ‘embedded’, into your PPT presentation, they are simply linked, which means the video files need to be placed in the same folder as the PPT presentation, and remain there, if the link is not to be broken. This folder should always be on the hard drive. Never try to play videos from a CD, always copy them over for best results.
So how do we go about getting the videos ready for Powerpoint?
Firstly, the video files must be in a compatible format, such as AVI, MPG or WMV, and which formats work best varies depending on the laptop and the version of PPT you are using.
If we know you will need to use the files in PPT, we will prepare the correct versions for you, bearing in mind a number of things which are outside our control, such as speed and power of the delivery laptop and the resolution of your presentation.
If we make files too tiny they will display too small, and will then appear fuzzy if they get resized. (NB: Never do this! More later) If we make them too large the laptop can sometimes stutter or even crash. As a result, we tend to go with a standard size of 640 x 480 pixels, or if we are confident of your delivery laptop, maybe 800 x 600 pixels.
The presentation resolution will depend on the screen resolution of the host laptop, or will have been set in the master template, but is likely to be either 800 x 600 pixels, in which case the video would show up in a box slightly smaller than full size; or it may be 1024 x 768, so the files at 640 x 480 would occupy about two thirds screen size. If we can find out what resolution you are using for projection, we can make files which fill the frame, assuming the laptop will be able to cope.
The process of linking the files is quite straightforward;
1 – Go to the slide where you would like the video to appear
2 – Go to Insert;Movie on the menu
3 – A dialogue box will display asking if you wish the movie to play as the slide displays, or wait for a keypress. If your video is playing from it’s own slide then the former would apply, but if you have a title or some other information displaying before the video, we recommend choosing the latter, so when you hit the space bar, the movie will run.
4 – A video box will appear on the slide for you to position it as you wish. For all sorts of complicated reasons, the one thing you must not do at this stage is resize the video box. Videos must stay at the size they are when they are imported, if the quality is to be maintained. Resizing the video box will almost guarantee that the video displays at a lower quality.
To determine the optimum size for your final videos, we can provide sample videos at different sizes and in different formats. You should soon be able to work out which version works best.
To summarise then;
1 – Make sure the video files are in the right format and are the right size for your computer and software.
2 – Make sure you have copied the video files to the same folder as your presentation.
3 – Menu – Insert; Movie
4 – Don’t resize the movie!
Good luck – and you know where we are, if you have any further questions!
For more information, here are the official Microsoft sites which have a lot more information on the whole topic.
For POWERPOINT 2003: click here
For POWERPOINT 2007: click here.
And finally, thanks to Charles and Paola of Viva, our favourite provider of Powerpoint whizziness, for proofing these thoughts.
One of the advantages of this blog is that I can share some of the stuff that intrigues me, makes me laugh and is perhaps a little (or a lot) irreverent.
Here’s something to kick off with, which made me fall over laughing…
http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html
…and it’s an object lesson in great ‘blogging’.
I was extolling the virtues, and otherwise, of Twitter the other day to a contact who runs an online business. He was aware of it but couldn’t quite see the point, which is I think a familiar reaction for most of us. I offered to set up an account for him and articulated in some detail how it might be used in his business and so thought it might be useful to encapsulate my thinking here too.
Twitter is above all a ‘permission’ based messaging system, by which I mean that only those people who choose to see your messages, or Tweets, will actually see them. If you have ever spent a few moments on the live public feed, where every tweet from around the world shows up for all to see, you will know that it would be impossible to use unless users were able to limit what they see to the messages that are likely to appeal to them.
Thus we have the concept of ‘following’, whereby you choose the messages you’d like to see, and ‘followers’, those users who have opted to see your messages.
Twitter is a micro-blogging tool, that is the messages are limited to 140 characters, about 15 – 20 words, so brevity is of the essence.
So Tweets are short and to the point, but why would you bother? The reason, to an extent, is precisely because they are so short. A tweet, seen on a mobile device, or a PC, will take seconds to read – in effect every tweet is simply a headline – so there’s no decision to be made about opening it or not. Once you’ve seen it, you’ve read it and it’s gone. Hopefully, it was useful, and if it linked to an article you would like to read later, or to a web site which intrigues, then you know how to find it when you’re ready to go back and read it in full.
People are using Twitter in many different ways;
For celebrities, it provides a direct channel of communication to and from fans, uncluttered by media spin and often refreshingly honest because of it. Clearly, for some, having a direct feed from their favourite TV face can be compelling, particularly if they reply to you. Stephen Fry now has over 1m followers who get not only an insight into his daily grind, but links to anything he finds interesting or outrageous. For building a personal brand the system delivers enormous benefits.
If you love to chat and enjoy telling people what you’re doing at every moment of the day, then Tweet away, but I can’t guarantee you’ll get many followers beyond your immediate circle. Then again, keep it witty, charming or useful and you might be surprised!
My area of interest though, and I guess yours, is in using Twitter in a business context and here it has a number of distinct advantages over other media. To be able to deliver short brand building messages, service announcements, information on updated or new products, or special offers, to a receptive and willing audience makes your brand stand out.
We’re all in the reputation business and clearly anything we can do to enhance our reputation with our key audiences is a good thing, particularly if we can achieve that without becoming annoying or repetitive.
The trick then, is relevancy…if you can provide timely and relevant information to your customers, then they are likely to be interested enough to follow you. When they do that, you then start the process of turning them into fans…
In the case of my friend with the online business, he can now provide a regular stream of product information, he can set up special offers more frequently and for a shorter period of time, because he knows the response is going to be immediate, and overall he can build his brand in customers minds.
And as we all know, being front of mind is all…
Clients often come to us with a specific requirement in mind, but when we drill down to objectives, delivery mechanism, budget and timescale we often find that an issue or communication need can be resolved more successfully in a different, and often less expensive, way.
This blog post then is a plea to ask us for our thoughts earlier in the process, and preferably before you have decided exactly what you need – there are likely to be other, better ways of killing your particular cat.
I always try to uncover what is behind what is being asked for, but when, as happened this week, I’m confronted with an apparently clear requirement, it doesn’t seem appropriate. The frustration in those circumstances is that what could have been a conversation leading to the development of a bunch of workable ideas, becomes a simple costing exercise.
So my learning point for myself this week is to remember to delve a little deeper every time, to try and get to the heart of the issue.
And it’s so much more fun when clients are open to a discussion much earlier in the process. I love to chat through different approaches, often bringing something out of left field and sometimes even finding that the right solution means we have no further involvement.
In an age when everyone seems to be desperately clinging on to every piece of business no matter how small, this might seem strange, but we need to enjoy our work too. And a client who goes away happy with a free solution is a client who’ll come back one day.
So if I ask an irritating number of questions next time we speak, I’m just delving. Remember…it’s more fun if you ask us ‘How?’ rather than ‘How much?’.