User Vision, one of Europe’s leading independent user experience consultancies, has completed a long-term contract worth over £100,000 to develop online accessibility guidelines and assess the accessibility of Abu Dhabi government websites.

Part of the Abu Dhabi Government Modernisation Initiative, this innovative project is the first of its kind in the region and underlines the government’s active interest in web accessibility and improving the accessibility of e-government services to people with special needs.

Managing Director and founder of User Vision Chris Rourke says: “We are delighted to have this opportunity to work with the Abu Dhabi Government on such a prestigious and innovative project. The Abu Dhabi government is committed to improving accessibility for all its citizens, including those with disabilities throughout the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and it is a privilege to be part of such an important initiative.”

User Vision delivered the project over six phases including researching best practice international guidelines, reviewing local guidelines and the current landscape of accessibility provision online in the UAE. They then developed the accessibility guidelines and supporting materials in order to evaluate and audit a representative set of Abu Dhabi government sites. To help ensure accessible future e-government website development, User Vision will also qualify potential digital suppliers to the Abu Dhabi government.

User Vision will work with local partners Flip Media in Dubai to assess websites in both the English and Arabic versions. The project will raise awareness of best practice for web accessibility within the Abu Dhabi Government departments and within the community so that the widest possible audience has access to e-government services and information.

User Vision has been active in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region for five years, working with leaders in the travel, tourism and e-commerce sectors, including Emirates Airline and the Jumeirah Group. They have also performed regional projects for financial services firms and government entities in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Over the years the agency has accumulated extensive experience providing usability and accessibility services within the Middle East and has a deep understanding of the cultural complexities and nuances needed to deliver user-centred design research and analysis.

User Vision recently opened a satellite office in Dubai following a period of sustained growth and strong demand from the local market for the usability and accessibility of websites, software, advertising and digital channels.

For more information contact: Sarah Lee.

Cloud software and services company Flexiant is continuing its push into the US market with a partnership announced today of full-service reseller, DSA Technologies.

Founded in 1991, DSA Technologies provides a complete range of IT services and solutions to clients across the United States. It will introduce Flexiant’s Extility cloud platform these clients, helping them to develop their own private and public clouds.

Robert Karssiens, Flexiant’s Director of Sales & Marketing says: “Resellers like DSA Technologies are essential to our international growth plans. This agreement will help introduce our Extility platform, already used extensively in Europe, to a new and demanding market.”

Flexiant, headquartered in Scotland, developed Europe’s first cloud platform in 2007 and is one of only a handful of independent cloud platform providers world wide.

DSA Technologies’ CEO, Michael Pearson says: “We pride ourselves on finding the right technologies for our clients, to help them in their own businesses. Flexiant’s Extility cloud computing platform will let our clients create exactly the clouds they need.”

The two partners were introduced through Phoenix Fire, a business development agency specialising in partner channel development for the US technology sector. Flexiant entered a partnership agreement with Phoenix Fire at the end of 2010, to help find quality resellers for its products.

Flexiant’s Extility software is a licensed cloud computing platform delivering all the benefits of real-time server estate management to end-users through its unique user interface and API. Central to these end-user benefits is the ability to shape server requirements to meet and exceed the demands of a perpetually shifting market landscape, allowing provisioning and reconfiguration of servers in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days.

Licensees of Extility not only enjoy the competitive edge of providing world class scalable services to existing or new business; the savings springing from Extility’s unified platform mean that they are able to do so at realistic prices in a market projected to comprise of over 20% of corporate IT infrastructure within five years.

Flexiant also offers a public cloud service, FlexiScale, which enables start-ups and SMEs to grow from one server to one thousand servers in seconds – critical for organisations offering streaming video, social networking or SaaS, and ideal for a wealth of other applications.

FlexiScale’s pay-as-you-go virtual dedicated servers can be up and running, or taken down in less than 60 seconds, ensuring businesses can rapidly shape their IT resources in response to dynamic market conditions. With no long-term commitment or capital expenditure required from customers, FlexiScale facilitates clear focus on core business activities by reducing time, energy and effort spent on IT provisioning and investment.

In addition to a range of other deployments, Extility is currently being used as a test bed by the European Commission on three multi-million pound FP7 research and development projects aimed at driving forward the adoption of cloud computing across Europe.

For more information contact: Lauren Cormack.

About DSA Technologies

Founded in 1991, DSA Technologies provides a complete range of IT services and solutions to clients US-wide. DSA has grown from a professional services only firm into a full-service solution provider offering complete technology solutions for: strategic planning, cloud-readiness assessment, project design, product sales, professional services implementation, managed services monitoring, post-implementation support and on-going staff services.

Look no further!

TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

———————————————————————————————————————–———–

Tin It Or Bin It – 26 August 2011 – Maximising your impact on Twitter

Twitter is great and we sure love to tweet, but lets be honest, it’s sometimes pretty difficult to be consistent with your tweets. It seems to be that you either post lots at once or don’t tweet enough. This is where Buffer comes in.

The app, co-founded by Leonhard Widrich and Joel Gascoigne, builds a ‘tweet queue’ and spreads your updates out over time, meaning that you never have to flood your followers again with tweets. You simply add your tweets to your ‘Buffer’ and they spread them out over the course of the day. Simple.

Now, when you’re browsing the net and you come across lots of great content, you don’t have to post it all at once – this handy little tool will spread it out so you don’t tweet eight things in a row and annoy your followers.

Conveniently Buffer also has an analytics feature for every tweet you send so you can see exactly how many people your tweet has reached and how many followers have re-tweeted.

Another advantage is that Buffer has extensions for every major browser so you don’t even have to visit the website.

We think scheduling tweets is definitely the way forward, however we would not recommend scheduling all of them. Finding the right balance between ‘Buffering’ and live tweeting seems to be the best and most efficient way to use Twitter.

Buffer is a TIN IT.

Flexiant, a UK-based cloud infrastructure software and services provider – and Europe’s original public cloud provider – and Standing Cloud, Inc. a leader in the emerging platform as a service (PaaS) marketplace, have gone live with their “Standing Cloud powered by Flexiant” integration, bringing a vastly simplified method of deploying and managing cloud-hosted applications to European cloud users.

“Standing Cloud powered by Flexiant” marries an application layer from Standing Cloud with Flexiant’s Extility cloud product. Extility customers will be able to find and immediately use around 100 popular web applications—WordPress, SugarCRM, DotProject and OpenBravo, to name a few—complete with built-in monitoring and management tools that ease system administration headaches. Developers can use PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails, and Python to support rapid testing and live deployment. Pricing starts at $38.95 per month.

Together, Standing Cloud and Flexiant aim to remove the mystery of the cloud for “informal buyers” who have struggled with accessing cloud technology. Forrester Research defines this group as including application developers, innovative business users and service providers.

The ““Standing Cloud powered by Flexiant” integration includes a separate Flexiant-branded area of the Standing Cloud web site, and offers the ability to register and run a free trial of the various applications, before opting for full hosting. This allows users to see how flexible and immediate cloud application provisioning really can be.

“Standing Cloud powered by Flexiant is an exciting new way to bring the promise of cloud computing to business users and developers. By connecting Standing Cloud’s point and click interface to their infrastructure, Flexiant’s customers no longer need to have system administration skills to use it productively,” said David J. Jilk, CEO of Standing Cloud.

As well, earlier this year, Standing Cloud began expanding its support for data centers in the UK and Europe so that users could take advantage of the company’s ability to restore their application in minutes to another cloud in case of downtime on their primary cloud provider. For more info, read “Standing Cloud Facilitates Privacy Law Compliance in the EuroCloud.”

“We found we had a lot in common with Standing Cloud, in our determination to look at things from the users’ point of view. We’ve created a service that ‘just works’, that doesn’t need a lot of knowledge or skills. You shouldn’t have to hire someone to manage your cloud computing, you should be able to do it yourself. And with Standing Cloud’s innovative application layer, you can,” said Alex Bligh, Flexiant CEO.

Flexiant’s flagship software product, Extility, allows licensees to build their own cloud and sell cloud services under their own brand. The cloud computing platform delivers all the benefits of real-time server estate management to end-users through its unique user interface and API. Central to these end-user benefits is the ability to provision and reconfigure servers in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days.

Ends

For more information contact: Sarah Lee.

About Standing Cloud

Standing Cloud is the only platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that enables cloud users to deploy, manage, customise and/or develop applications on a variety of cloud services and with several programming languages. The service supports PHP, Java, Ruby, and Python, as well as 80+ complete open source applications that can be deployed by end users with a few clicks. Target customers include business users who want an easy way to automatically deploy and manage SaaS; developers who customise existing open source applications or develop their own from scratch; and IT professionals in search of a time-saving way to deploy applications and development environments for teams within their organisation.

Flexiant, an independent cloud platform provider and software and services company, has been listed as a Champion Innovator in Info-Tech Research Group’s recent “Cloud Infrastructure as a Service” Vendor Landscape report.

Flexiant was one of only four Champion vendors out of 13 Innovators. The Innovator category exists “to identify vendors that have demonstrated innovative product strengths which act as their competitive advantage in appealing to niche segments of the market. These vendors are poised to emerge as leaders,” the research group says.

Flexiant is in good company, with the list of Innovators including such big names as Amazon, Rackspace and IBM.

The four Innovators identified as Champions “receive high scores for most evaluation criteria and offer excellent value. They have a strong market presence and are usually the trend setters for the industry”, Info-Tech says.

Flexiant developed Europe’s first cloud platform over four years ago and remains one of only a handful of independent cloud platform providers worldwide. The company’s pioneering cloud platform is now being used by the EU across a range of multi-million Euro FP7 projects as a testbed to speed up cloud computing’s adoption rate by enterprise-level companies across Europe.
Info-Tech listed Flexiant’s strengths as its usability, the ability to perform live recoveries and fast reboots, its high flexibility in choice of CPU and storage, and the use of persistent storage as a default selection.

Info-Tech also praised Flexiant’s highly granular control, allowing easy account management, the controls for firewalls and disk encryption which are easy to use and modify, and Flexiant’s control panel, designed on a “virtual data centre approach”.

“Most functions normally requiring a command line of configuration utility within the operating system can be done in the control panel instead, such as adding IP addresses to an interface,” Info-Tech says.

Info-Tech Research Group Vendor Landscape reports recognise outstanding vendors in the technology marketplace. Assessing vendors by the strength of their offering and their strategy for the enterprise, Info-Tech Research Group Vendor Landscapes pay tribute to the contribution of exceptional vendors in a particular category.

Ends

For more information contact: Lauren Cormack

About Flexiant

Flexiant is a software and services company, one of only three independent public cloud providers in Europe and five worldwide. Its public cloud, FlexiScale, was Europe’s first cloud platform and was launched in 2007. In March 2010 the company launched its flagship product, Extility, a software product that allows licensees to build their own cloud and sell cloud services under their own brand.

About Info-Tech Research Group

With a paid membership of over 8,000 organisations worldwide, Info-Tech Research Group (www.infotech.com) is the global leader in providing tactical, practical Information Technology research and analysis. Info-Tech Research Group has a thirteen-year history of delivering quality research and is one of North America’s fastest growing full-service IT analyst firms.

Look no further!

TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

———————————————————————————————————————–———–

Tin It Or Bin It – 12 August 2011 – Question Time

Today we have been looking into a new startup called Knod.es, which is a useful app to help you find the most suitable people in your network to answer a specific question.

It beats going on Twitter or Facebook with an open ended question, which doesn’t usually generate a good response (they are best for broadcasting and sharing). Instead, Knod.es narrows the search down and looks at the public activity of your social media contacts on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

When you search for a select word or phrase, the web app looks for people who have mentioned that exact term. It also allows you to search for people who have talked about that term or even worked at a particular business. To make things easy for you so you’re not faffing about, once you’ve located the appropriate contacts you can message them all in one go, and even better…they don’t have to be on Knod.es.

This app, which went live in private-beta a month and a half ago, is not a unique concept. There are a few similar applications out there like this, but Knod.es takes a different approach – it gives you a list of potential contacts for a specific topic rather than just solely helping to answer your question.

It went live in private-beta a month and a half ago, so only time will tell if this takes off. It does look very promising though.

TIN IT.

Look no further!

TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

———————————————————————————————————————–———–

Tin It Or Bin It – 4 August 2011- Internet Addict?

Have you ever stopped to wonder how long you actually spend on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube? Or is it simply too scary to think about?

Well for those who are curious (like us), there is now a new browser plug-in called Voyurl that will tell you how many hours you actually spend browsing online.

Users who install it get a detailed description of how they use the web, which is updated in real time. This includes how much time you spend browsing, the sites you spend the most time on and your browsing patterns. Additionally you can compare your behavior to the average user to see where you fit in.

Voyurl also produces a complete list of what sites you visit and how you behave on them. Detailed factors like scrolling and mouse hovering are taken into account.

Voyurl is currently in private beta but there is a section on the site that allows you to click to ‘get a beta invite’.

So TIN IT or or BIN IT?

This is a TIN IT for those who are brave enough to confront their browsing habits. However for those who are freaked out by the concept, this would most likely be a BIN IT.