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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.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 14 October 2011 – Apple introduces personalised snail mail and friend stalking

Apple has introduced a free ‘Cards’ app this week. It allows you to get creative, and design and send personalised, physical greeting cards to all your friends and family, choosing from over 20 template designs.

Buying and sending your postcard or greeting card is similar to buying a song on iTunes. You just enter your Apple ID password and then simply place your order. Apple will then print the card, put it in an envelope and mail it to your loved one on your behalf. Brilliant.

Cards is not an original idea. There are many other websites and apps out there doing the same thing, however this is an Apple app, and with its style and simple design, looks set to refresh and revitalise the crowded greeting card industry.

This is a fun, creative app and we predict it could really take off.

Cards is a TIN IT.

Cards wasn’t the only Apple app launched this week. ‘Find my Friends’ is a location app which allows you to keep tabs on your friend’s location.

We don’t know about you, but if we want to get hold of our friends to find out where they are, we usually just give them a call or drop them a text. This app seems a bit creepy in comparison.

Find my Friends shares your location with your accepted friends, all of the time, which is different to one of the top location apps FourSquare, and not something that is very appealing.

Before you even begin you have to wait about for your friend to accept your request and then, you have to accept there’s back.

Once you are both finally connected, you can click on your friend to see their current location completely in real time. Yet again, this is different to FourSquare, as with the latter, you have to option to ‘check in’ to a place that you think will of interest to your friends. I’m not sure any of our friends, no matter how much they love us, would appreciate a boring update that we are going to the supermarket or just walking home!

This all feels too much like a complete invasion of privacy and a bit pointless. This is not something we will be continuing to use.

Sadly, this app is a BIN IT.

Digital design agency Heehaw has been chosen by legal, financial and property specialists Pagan Osborne to redesign the company’s website and help it retain its strong position as large new players like Tesco and the AA move into the legal market.

Heehaw won the contract based on the proven creativity and skills of its staff and its broad view of communication, which fitted with Pagan Osborne’s ‘360 lifestyle’ approach to customer care over different life stages. Both companies share a philosophy of ongoing, powerful communication with clients.

Pagan Osborne’s Marketing and Business Development Director Tania Hemming says: “The legal landscape is going to change dramatically over the next year, and we really needed someone with insight, someone who will help us up the ante when the big players come in. We have always been innovative and forward thinking, with a different angle on selling legal and financial products, and we quickly recognised that Heehaw has the right skills and attitude to help us succeed in that. We also really like the people, and that was a key point for us – they’re people we want to work with.”

Pagan Osborne was also pleased to work with a full service agency based in Edinburgh, allowing regular meetings and exchanges of ideas.
The website will be an important portal as the market changes, and Heehaw will ensure Pagan Osborne stays ahead of the competition with a site that works as a ‘conversion tool’ in itself – getting users to complete a Lifestyle Survey, educating them on what services are available to them, and showing that Pagan Osborne is the right organisation to provide them.

Mark Strickland, Managing Director of Heehaw says: “We are very excited to be working with Pagan Osborne and feel we have the skills and expertise to really help to position the company well, and to contribute ideas to their ongoing digital development.”
Future work will include a redesign of the company’s intranet, and several other projects that promise to be very exciting for the future of both Heehaw and Pagan Osborne.

For more information contact: Sarah Lee.

Leading cloud software services provider, Flexiant, has today released a downloadable edition of its Extility cloud services management software.

The new Extility Foundation Edition will give smaller service providers the opportunity to compete in the provision of agile cloud services and will enable corporate users to build, manage and deploy private, public or hybrid clouds effortlessly – without high upfront costs. The Foundation Edition can be up and running within an hour.

Flexiant’s innovative cloud software, Extility, incorporates all the key components of cloud infrastructure into a simple virtual platform solution. Highly automated, Extility enables service providers to offer cost effective, on demand and flexible cloud services to their customers.

For enterprises looking to build their own cloud, Extility can be easily integrated into existing IT management systems, capitalising on existing investment and providing extensive flexibility to meet the challenges of today and the demands of the future.

A three-month Free Trial of this exciting product is available for download from the Flexiant web site – www.flexiant.com.
Flexiant pioneered the development of cloud computing in 2007, when it launched Europe’s first public cloud, FlexiScale. Flexiant’s flagship product, Extility Service Provider Edition, launched in 2010, already offers a proven, reliable and secure ‘orchestration and automation’ solution to managed service providers and data centre operators.

Extility Service Provider Edition continues to be available to service providers who require greater customisation and tailoring. In addition to having greater flexibility, the Service Provider Edition offers a full multi-currency billing system, white labelling facilities to support multiple resellers, greater scalability and multi-hypervisor capability supporting KVM, Xen and VMware.

Foundation Edition customers will be able to upgrade to the Service Provider Edition at any time.

Robert Karssiens, Flexiant’s Director of Sales and Marketing says: “We’re passionate about making quality, reliable cloud services available to every business. Our Foundation Edition lets anyone try Extility – they can download and use it, free, for three months – and then just get on with selling cloud services.”

For more information contact: Sarah Lee.