Parking Not Fine

Warning! The following post isn't constructive or creative or related to work or anything artistic, it's just a rant!

I got a parking fine the other day, or a bus lane fine, or a Penalty Charge Notice. I thought it was a mistake. I don't drive in bus lanes, I hadn't parked anywhere I shouldn't have and I didn't think I'd gone down a one way street backwards.

Here's the letter:

and here's the photo from the back of the letter showing my car 'in' the bus lane:

I'd been driving to work on a clear road, following a white van which braked suddenly to turn right. I swerved to the left, moving into the bus lane for a fraction of a second in order to avoid the van. I'd got a £120 fine for doing this.

I've been driving for 20 years and through a mixture of good luck and common sense I've never been given a speeding ticket or had an accident. But living in the Borough of Newham, it's almost impossible to avoid getting tickets from cameras located at the top of masts and being monitored from afar. This is my third ticket.

The first ticket I received was for waiting outside Canning Town Tube station, in a lay by regularly used to pick people up and drop people off. It's regularly used because it's the only lay by there. I couldn't understand why I received a parking ticket for parking there. I stayed in my car for the duration I was waiting, which was no more than five minutes. After conversations with the council it transpired that whilst I'd been waiting in my car all along, I'd been waiting for more than four minutes, after which, by using a remote camera, the council are within their rights to fine people £120. There are no signs I am aware of informing people of this fact. I have no idea how many people have been fined this way.

The second ticket I received was when I took a wrong turn down a back road and accidentally drove over a raised part of the road which does have signs saying that cars are not allowed, but which although obvious, I managed to miss. It's a regular residential road which used to allow cars to pass but which for whatever reason no longer allows anything but emergency vehicles to pass. Again I was fined £120. You can see what I'm refering to here.

Here is a Google map showing the places I've been issued fines.

So with the arrival of this third ticket and what seems like a gross misuse of the power to issue tickets I decided to challenge the PCN. Here's what I wrote on 8th September 2010:

... and here's the response I got 3 months later ...

.... and here, presented in a top ten list, is why the response, and the whole situation has frustrated me enough to spend an hour of my time writing about it when I could be doing something much less boring instead....

1. I accept that fines can be an effective way to enforce good road use and hence make the roads safer. Nonetheless, any objective analysis of the circumstances, and the photograph of the transgression would surely conclude that it is incorrect to fine someone for avoiding an accident or at the very least, driving safely.
2. In my challenge to the parking fine I set out the point that I was challenging the parking fine on the basis that it had been issued with no consideration to road safety and this point, whilst being valid -  it's why they issue the fines in the first place, right? - was not addressed in any way.
3. Despite not addressing my legitimate challenge to the PCN, the last line of the latest correspondence from Newham Council states 'Please note that Newham Council will not consider any further correspondence regarding this penalty charge until the enforcement notice is issued.' This means that I'm not allowed to address the fact that the council have completely ignored my challenge until the fine has changed from the reduced rate of £60 to £120. Furthermore we are talking about a lot of money here. For many people £60, or the full rate of £120 is a days wages and yet the council will not even enter into correspondence relating to genuine grievances and challenges.
4. The first paragraph of the latest correspondence states 'I apologise for the delay in response which is due to a correspondence scanning backlog'. It took them 3 months to get this letter to me, but I only have 14 days to respond and pay the fine.
5. If they have a 3 month backlog of correspondence, how many fines are they issuing?
6. The whole second page of the councils correspondence is dedicated all the different ways to pay the fine, despite this being correspondence relating to a challenge of it. It's amazing, it's almost as if this system is designed to make money for the council rather than for the safety of the residence of the borough who the council are answerable to.
7. It's a small one this, but why is the London Borough of Newham Parking and Traffic Enforcement section located at 218 miles away at PO Box 1125, Warrington? Why is it not located in the borough that it 'serves'?
8. 1/4 mile up the same road on which I was issued a ticket it becomes impossible not to drive with two wheels in the bus lane. This is due to parked traffic and oncoming buses on the opposite lane. Everyone has to drive with two wheels in the bus lane. The council doesn't appear to issue tickets for these transgressions, so there seems to be little consistency to the way in which the fines are issued.
9. I genuinely believe that I drive less safely now than before being issued with this fine. I avoid putting two wheels into the bus lane at all costs, even when it is the safe and sensible thing to do because of close oncoming traffic. It cannot be right that the council's policy relating to the issuing of PCN's causes people to drive less safely.
10. Councils behaving in this way lead people to have no respect for, or trust in them. As a society we criticise people in our neighbourhoods for dropping litter or painting graffiti through to people not contributing to 'big society' or not paying their taxes and yet I honestly believe that Newham Council and others like them are leading the way in demonstrating how not to be a good and honest neighbour.

So, I don't think I need to say this, but I won't be paying the £60 reduced rate fine. According to their letter, I'm not able to correspond further with the council until my fine has gone up to the full £120. I'll  post here when I hear back from them. Has anyone else had an experience like this? ... something tells me I'm probably not the only one.

Arrival at Pripyat

After alot of driving and numerous checkpoints, we arrived in Chernobyl where we received a quick briefing and were given forms to sign which said we accepted that we would receive internal and external radiation and that we waived any right to claim if our photography equipment was damaged. We were also told to touch nothing and place nothing on the ground. Zak and I had rented Geiger counters for the day as had one other person on the tour. The driver and our guide also had them.

We got back on our minibus and headed to the Chernobyl power plant. Its was stange to see reactor number four in its concrete and lead sarcophagus. I'd seen a number of photos of it, but nonetheless to be there was weird. There was a guard behind us as we stopped to view it and whilst we could photograph the destroyed reactor, we were absolutely forbidden from photographing anything else on the site, which seemed slightly strange.

Pretty soon we were back on the bus and heading around the north side of the reactor towards Pripyat. All of a sudden loads of alarms went off. It was all The Geiger counters on the bus signalling a quick rise in radiation. We were passing through a hotspot which was reading around 6 micro rongens. After a couple of minutes of bleeping, the dosimeters showed the radiation falling quickly back down to around 0.23 micro rongens which was background radiation.

We continuted driving for around 10 minutes before being informed we were now on the main boulevard for Pripyat.  This wasn't obvious as trees had grown high on the central reservation as well as to the side of the road, obscuring the view. I had thought we were travelling down a road through a forest, which of course we were.

Journey to Pripyat and Chernobyl

We got up early and headed to a hotel to meet a group of fellow explorers keen to visit Pripyat. After struggling to find money and then struggling to find breakfast, it was good to get on a minibus and relax into the journey north to the Alienation Zone, otherwise known as the Area of Mandatory Relocation. Our guide was a student from the UK who was doing a PHD looking into tourism around Chernobyl. This was his 23rd visit to the location and he was heading back to the UK the next day. We were really lucky to have him on our tour as he knew loads about the disaster, and was able to answer loads of questions relating to it and provide lots of insight.

A three hour journey north saw us arrive at the first of three checkpoints that would be required to get to Pripyat. The checkpoints were not a cursory or superficial thing. The guards checked the passports of every visitor against the names that had been sent ahead. At each checkpoint our papers had to be in order to proceed further. This highlighted an interesting contradiction in the number of urbex explorers who appear to have visited Pripyat under their own steam as it were, vs the feasibility of actually doing this. The alienation zone is around 200,000 square kilometres, and after the first checkpoint, there is a 10km journey to the second, followed by an 18km journey to the third, so this really isn't a journey you can do on foot, and you really can't get a car in without going through a checkpoint, and you really can't go through a checkpoint without being on an official tour. If you see what I mean..... well actually you can, as we discovered.... but that's another story...

 I forgot to mention that during our journey to the alienation zone, we had been shown a documentary on a TV in the minibus which was made about the Chernobyl disaster. It was a well made film and was absolutely fascinating .... and very sobering. Heres some potted facts and info - when the accident happened, the first people to arrive on the scene were fire fighters who thought it was just a regular fire and were wearing no protection. Two died that night from radiation. 24 died over the next couple of weeks. After 2 days of trying to decide what to do about the burning reactor, the Russian military called their best helicopter pilots back from the Afghan front and they flew sorties over the reactor with soldiers dropping sand bags one by one onto the fire. This was the extent of their plan to deal with the disaster - drop sand bags onto it. Needless to say countless numbers of soldiers who were flying over the fire and dropping sand bags died. 1/4 of all the pilots died within months.

190 tons of nuclear fuel was in reactor 4 when it exploded and the uranium fire it caused was so hot that it melted the sandbags ontop of it and then started to melt the concrete floor underneath it. Below the concrete that it was burning through was all the water that had collected from the initial attempts to put the fire out. Along with many other things that were hushed up at the time, was the fact that there was nearly a second and much more serious nuclear explosion which would have occurred had the nuclear fuel melted through the concrete and come into contact with the water. Calculations have shown that should this have happened the explosion would have been hundreds of thousands of times more radioactive than Hiroshima and Nagasaki and would have likely rendered most of Europe uninhabitable.

All of the Russian focus on containing the disaster centred on ensuring that the melted nuclear material didn't come into contact with the water below it. New sorties were flown over the reactor, this time dropping lead bars and lead shot. These quickly brought the temperature down but also resulted in vaporized and highly radioactive lead. At the same time, miners from all around Russia were drafted in to dig an underground tunnel to below the reactor where they would create a room which would be filled with a cooling system designed to stop the melted core from sinking further into the ground and coming into contact with water. This was achieved with the help of thousands of minors, many of whom died.

As well as containing the melted core, they needed to clean up the massive amounts of radioactive material that had fallen all around the reactor. Initially the military used remote control vehicles, but the radiation was so severe that it destroyed their electronics and control systems. Instead, biorobots were called in .... in other words humans. For many of the areas they were cleaning up, such as the roof of the reactor, 15-45 seconds of radiation was terminal. As such they were told to run and pick up two spadefulls of rubbish from the roof, throw it over the edge and then get out of there. These people would subsequently suffer a life of illness for about a minutes work. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were involved in this operation and in this way, two spadefulls at a time, they cleared up the disaster.

I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but all this information was really insightful when we came to actually visit the reactor and the town of Pripyat.

Night Time Exploration

As well as exploring Chernobyl and Pripyat, I was keen to meet up with some fellow urban explorers in Kiev and see some local sights through their eyes. To this end Zak and I headed out with Sasha and Nastya to get an alternative view of Kiev. After buying 8 bottles of local beer we headed off to explore the town. We'd had a number of discussions about places to visit in Kiev and Sasha's area of expertise is underground tunnels and rivers. Neither Zak and I were equipped for this or to be honest inclined to head below the streets, so instead we headed for an abandoned bridge. The bridge we visited crossed, or half crossed the main river that runs through Kiev, who's name I can't remember. As we walked over the bridge, Sasha revealed that it was the oldest suspension bridge in the Russian region... or at least, what remained of it was. Nearing the first of two towers, Sasha veered towards the 30 metre column on the left and I can remember distinctly thinking that this boded badly ..... drinking Ukrainian beer, at night on the remains of the oldest suspension bridge in Russia and heading towards a potentially scary climb. Sure enough, Sasha's plan was to jump the hand rail, head down a short ladder, onto an improvised wooden ladder which lead to a platform which ran around the stantion and lead to a caged ladder running up 30 metres to the top of the bridge.

Zak declined, I declined. We sat on the bridge deck drinking beer instead. Yes I wimped out, yes, I'm glad I did.

Kiev - Day 1

Today is about getting our bearings in Kiev and doing a bit of planning of urbex exploration for Saturday. Zak and I headed out early to discover a beautiful city bathed in sunlight, full of well dressed people striding around town with a particular sense of purpose. I was acutely aware that I didn't have ANY Russian or Ukrainian language skills, such that I wasn't even able to say thanks or goodbye, but thanks to a slow speaking taxi driver, I now believe 'spas-ibo' is thankyou and 'dos-du-vanya' is goodbye. I could be totally wrong, so I'm going to confirm this after writing this blog. Tea - are you reading this? Am I right? What other phrases should I have under my belt? 'Two beers please' always seems to come in pretty handy as well.

In lieu of any urbex, Zak and pretty quickly found ourselves up a 86 metre bell tower in the City's cathedral. I'm not brilliant with heights and the precipitous climb around the inside of the giant tower had me hanging on to the hand rail far tighter than I like to admit. The view at the top however was amazing and Kiev revealed itself as an ancient walled city with golden church domes and a winding river cutting through lush green forest.

After the cathedral we explored the war museum / memorial. An inordinate number of tanks and tracked vehicles lined wide boulevard style walkways where ubiquitous loudspeakers played somber and moving traditional Ukrainian / Russian music of the kind you get in Soviet war movies.  The place was amazing and there were some truly spectacular statues on a colossal scale commemorating struggles and victories passed. The entire park was overlooked by a defiant robed female holding a sword and a shield emblazoned with a hammer and sickle which made the statue of liberty seem somewhat of a dwarf. Whilst I've taken photos of these things, unfortunately it appears that my 7D will not communicate with my net book, or more specifically, the software that I brought along to install requires a higher resolution machine than I have. Without a card reader, this may mean that photos taken on the 7D have to wait until my return to the UK before I can post them. Bummer. I'll break the IXUS and camera phone out tomorrow to so that at least I can put a tester on this blog.

We're going out for a beer shortly to meet a contact over here to discuss other explorations and put a plan together for Saturday...... time to go drink some Tuborg ..... still haven't found a single Chicken Kiev......

Arrival in Kiev

The trip into Kiev was largely uneventful. I sat next to a fellow brit on the flight - a banker who was headed over to Ukraine for business. He made conversation and when it was apparent that he'd been here a number of times, I started asking him if he had any do's and don'ts. Any advice for us. He told us that no-one would be able to understand us, that there was nothing much to do in Kiev, that there were no bank machines and no internet. He said that there wasn't much by way of places to go out either and that when we said to the customs guy that we were here on holiday, he'd think we were from MI5. He didn't sell it very well.

We were met from the airport and got a taxi to our apartment in the centre of town. I was a bit concerned as to what our apartment might be like. We went past rows of Soviet era tower blocks on the way from the airport and although I've seen, and visited places like this in Latvia, and found them to be great, I was still a bit reticent as to what our place might be like.

The taxi dropped us off near the centre of town, next to a somewhat decrepit looking building and another chap who'd been waiting for us showed us in, up to the second floor and into our apartment. I need not have worried - the place is like a presidential suite. Huge rooms, high ceilings, polished parquet floors and white walls. Plasma TV and internet access. Zak has done us proud in finding this place. We were both pretty impressed. After dropping our stuff off we headed out into town to find beer and food in that order. Something that we'd both been after for the last four hours at least.

Kiev is pretty much the opposite of everything the guy on the plane had told me. Good beer, good food, friendly people who speak English, bank machines. First impressions, albeit ones at night and through a bit of a beer haze are of a really interesting city. The architecture is amazing and I'm looking forward to exploring it further tomorrow.

Oh yeah, and if they don't have the right change when you buy something, they pay you in Chupa Chups.

Pripyat Trip

Its a while since I've written on this blog - work has been busy with a number of really interesting jobs for our clients, but also ones which are demanding of time, squeezing out time for other things such as blogging. I've now got some time off and figured where better place to head to for a relaxing break than the nuclear hot spot that is the abandoned area of land surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The land around the town of pripyat is otherwise known as the alienation zone.

As far as urban exploration is concerned, this is a fascinating location to visit. Were not talking about an abandoned house, street or village, but instead an abandoned city that was once home to 48,000 people.

Whilst I'm not adverse to 'going it alone ' when it comes to urbex, the research we've done into visiting Pripyat has thrown up a number of reasons to take an officially sanctioned tour and so that is what Zak and I are doing this time. More specifically, whilst the radiation levels around Chernobyl are now considered safe, there are still hotspots, and these are something the guides with their Geiger counters  are hopefully aware of. Other reasons include wild bears, bandits, and the dim view that officials apparently take of unofficial foreign visitors to the zone.

So this is how I find myself sitting on a Ukrainian airways flight into Kiev. Its the first flight I've ever been on not to have air vents above the seats, which was something I missed whilst waiting for our delayed aircraft to get airbourne. The aircraft is a Boeing 737. I'm somewhat sad that its not a Tupolev. The Russians have a long history of impressive air and space craft design. I suppose it maybe wiser to experience a Tupolev through a lens these days, rather than by flying in it, but its sad that that should be the case.

As well as visiting the alienation zone, I have a contact in Kiev who were hoping to meet up with and who has said they'll show us around some unofficial urbex locations. Were here for four days so we have a good opportunity to visit a number of locations. The last time I was in an ex-soviet state - Latvia - the place was littered with strange and abandoned Russian military vehicles and devices and hopefully well see some of that, although the Latvia trip was 15 years ago.

As well as visiting some amazing places, this is also an opportunity to experiment with the Canon 7D which is what ill be shooting with. I've been keen to start working with a camera that will shoot video as well as stills and so the move from a 40D to 7D allows this - expect to see video as well as stills come out of our trip.

The only other thing I need to do whilst I'm away is try a Chicken Kiev. George asked me if I though chicken kievs came from Kiev, I said I don't know. Today, Zak has assured me that they do. Quite why I find this fact pleasing and mildly amusing, I don't know.

Branding: What Does iPad Mean to You?

Recently Apple launched the iPad. Before the launch there was huge speculation as to what the product would be called. Names suggested included 'iSlate' and 'iNote', but the actual name of their new device, we now know to be an iPad.

As soon as the name was revealed, bloggers, press and the general public went into overdrive making jokes about the name Apple had chosen for the device. It was generally percieved that 'iPad' conjoured up images of - amongst other things - sanitary towels and was a bad choice of name.

Four months down the line, everyone's perception has changed, and people such as Blackberry are releasing products such as the BlackPad.

What changed?

I often get asked about brands and what makes a good visual brand identity, and I think what happened with the iPad launch illustrates an important point, if not the most important point when talking about brands.

That is to say that no matter how good .... or how bad your brand's visual identity is, if your product is good, you'll imbue your brand with value DESPITE your brands visual identity.

Before we go any further, here's a little branding 101:

Brand: The personality that identifies a product or company.
Brand image: The values and qualities a customer perceives a brand to have.
Visual brand identity: The logo, the images associated with a brand, the fonts and colours used, etc.
Brand experience: The sum of all the experiential contacts a customer has with a bran. If the brand was a shampoo, this would be what the advertising looks like, how the bottle is manufactured and how it feels in the hands, what the product feels like in the hair, what it smells like, and how good it is.

To elaborate on the iPad scenario, because Apple have such a strong brand, brand image and brand experience, they changed our perception of the qualities we associate with the name 'iPad' from 'sounds like a sanitary towel' to 'I really really REALLY want one of those'.

The proof of the value Apple have imbued 'Pad' with is that Blackberry appear to be choosing to name their product a BlackPad.

There are other examples of companies changing our perceptions of the values associated with brand names and visual brand identities - Smeg is a brand associated with expensive and high quality kitchen appliances and that's what I think of when I hear the word 'Smeg', but when I first heard of this brand I laughed, because until then, 'smeg' meant something entirely different to me.

Volkswagen bought Skoda and changed the brand image from that of cheap, unreliable car to be joked about to that of good quality, reliable, value for money car... and they did this with very little changes to the visual brand identity. You might ask why Volkswagen didn't change the visual brand identity of Skoda in order to help change the brand image. The idea of Skodas being awful cars was pretty engrained, so much so that it could be argued that VW should have dropped the name Skoda altogether.

What VW did was clever though. They kept the name Skoda to allow them to manufacture cheaper, mass market cars without negatively affecting the brand image of Volkswagen. In other words, by selling their cheapest cars under the name 'Skoda' they allow the brand image of VW to be one that remains associated with premium cars.

My advise then is that your visual brand identity needs to follow a range of objective and technical requirements, such as being easy to see and identify, working well on screen and in print, but beyond that your visual brand identity is what you make it by doing what you do as best as you can, a point demonstrated by amongst others, NO-AD and Muji who go out of their way to avoid having a visual brand identity altogether.

Rosie Blush Shoot

Last summer I did a shoot for Adele Rosie of Rosie Blush. Adele is a make-up artist and the shoot was to promote her amazing work. We shot in the FW studios one supremely hot summers day. There was no air conditioning, we'd blacked out the windows and we were using constant lights as well as strobes, so were generating a lot of heat also.

Despite all this, the team pulled together really well and we got some amazing shots.

A selection of the pictures from the day are here.




Below is a short film that Ed Rosie put together after the shoot.


Rosie Blush - Simply Gorgeous Make-Up from Ed Rosie on Vimeo.

Top Films With Rock Bottom Budgets

I saw the film 'Primer' a couple of days ago. It was released in 2004 but I only heard of it recently. It's a movie about a group of scientist entrepreneurs looking to make their fortunes who come up with a mind blowing invention. I don't want to spoil the plot so can't go into too much detail (in fact, frustratingly, the nature of the film means that I can't really go into ANY detail), but suffice to say, it's the best film I've seen this year. For me, I know I've seen a good film when I keep thinking back to it beyond the day on which I watched it, and this is definitely one of those films.

For me, the brilliance of the film is all the more sweet because the writer / director / producer / actor Shane Carruth made the entire film on a budget of $7,000. For anyone who ever wanted to make a film, this is inspirational. Of course this isn't the only film made on a shoestring budget, far from it, there are countless films that have been made for, we are told, virtually nothing. But when one sees one of these films, if it stands up in it's own right - not just as a novelty because it's been made for such an amazingly small amount of money - it stands testimony to the fact that ultimately, it's the story that makes a good film. If you have a good story and you have the talent, passion and conviction, you can make a good film, money or not. This is more true now than it ever was - we live in an age where if you choose to, you can film and cut a feature on your mobile phone and broadcast it to the World using YouTube.

Here are some other films made on a shoestring (budget listed after the name) that are well worth checking out:

• Clerks - $27,000 (grossed over $3,000,000)
• The Blair Witch Project - $22,000 (grossed over $248,000,000)
• Paranormal Activity - $15,000
• Eraser Head - $10,000

Also check out Driven - (budget £32,000 and counting) - this film is still in production, but it's shaping up to be awesome. It's being produced by my business partner Rob Fletcher, you can see a trailer here.

Shrek 4 - The Unsung (Anti) Hero

I saw Shrek 4 this weekend. The film we'd planned to see was fully booked so we ended up donning 3D glasses and watching the green ogre and his donkey sidekick running around - and out - of the screen for a couple of hours. Whilst the movie relies on familiar concepts (both within the series and in storytelling in general) - 'loves true kiss' and parallel universes for example, it's fun, and laugh out loud funny.

The animation is amazing. Despite working in the field of animation and doing character animation from time to time, it completely amazes me to see what can be produced these days if you have the budget for hundreds of talented artists, and tens of thousands of computers.

The thing that amazed me most however was the character of Rumplestiltskin. The sneaky little baddy that he is completely stole the show. He was the perfect bad guy - genuinely scary, but also a bit cheeky, flawed and insecure. The character comes across as incredibly cohesive - you really believe that the voice you hear comes from the animated character that you see, which isn't always the case in animated features.

I was so taken with the character that I stayed through the credits to see who played him. I was certain I would recognise the actor - I had no problem placing his A-List cohorts - and was sure that I'd seen a movie with him in before, I just couldn't place the voice.

It turns out that Rumplestiltskin is played by Walt Dohrn. I'd never heard of him.

The reason I'd never heard of him is that Walt Dohrn is actually 'Head of Story' on the Shrek 4 production at DreamWorks and isn't technically an 'actor' at all.

A nice featurette on YouTube explains all and shows a bit of what goes on behind the scenes....



Now as Head of Story you would expect Walt to have a comprehensive insight into how the characters of the movie should play and hence be in a good position to develop a voice that integrates so believably into their visual manifestation. Or maybe Walt had more time available to him than the others appearing in the film, or just more inclination to practice and develop the voice of the little rogue that is Rumplestiltskin.

Whatever the reason for his stellar performance, Walt and his character Rumpelstiltskin completely stole the show and alone make the movie worth viewing. Not bad for a behind the camera guy, for whom this appears to be his first acting role.

New York from my car window

New York from my car window, originally uploaded by alaskajoey.

My friend Kate takes photos like this by accident. I love this shot. I love the texture in the clouds that looks like they're daubed with oils, I love the pale buildings on the horizon and the photographs monotone nature. I love the fact that the top 9/10th might have been painted by Rothko and the fact that despite it's impression of calm, it actually represents thousand of people at work and play in chaotic NY.

I lament the fact that many of the photographs I take that I like the best are not considered.

Kate says 'most of mine are accidents it's MY THING'

Maybe I should work harder to make it my thing, but it's a bit like asking someone not to think about an elephant.

On the other hand, I once heard a successful golfer say 'the more I practice, the luckier I get'........

Working In The Cloud - Part 1

- Services for running Office, Admin and Business Operations

Introduction

I want to write about something that a lot of us are spending increasing amounts of time doing, and that's 'working in the cloud'.

As a partner in a small business, I want to make our business cost effective, easier to run and more flexible, in many ways Cloud based applications offer us ease, cost savings, and flexibility of working that is unrivaled by existing PC based apps.

For us, the most fundamental thing that Cloud apps offer is the ability to work anywhere - from the office, at home, from a client location, from a shoot. This has introduced a freedom that we've not seen before and that can enhance or ruin your quality of life depending upon the way you approach it!

I've broken the tools that we use into two categories - office style tools that help us with day to day running of the business, and Sales and Marketing. Here's what we use:

Office, Admin and Business Operations

• Google Apps - mail / docs / video / sites / calendar / contacts / chat
• Snaptic
• Google Maps
• Remember The Milk
• DropSend
• Delicious

Sales and Marketing

• Salesforce
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Facebook
• Blogger
• Flickr
• Google Analytics
• Mail Chimp

I'm going to cover off this article in three posts, one focusing on each of the two groups above, and one about what we plan to manage using Cloud based apps in the future.

So to start, here's a look at our Office Admin and Business Operations in more detail:

Google Apps (replaced Outlook, Word, Excel, Windows Server)
Google Apps is the biggest piece of the jigsaw. We store the bulk of the documents used to run our company using this technology which of course means we can access them from anywhere. We used to do this using remote access to our server, but that wasn't nearly as reliable or fast. The partners in the company keep in touch with Google Mail, Contacts, Calendar and Chat.

I used to be the biggest fan of Microsoft Outlook and used it for around 10 years, but I also used to regularly copy my outlook data which was stored locally onto a memory stick and bring it home with me so I could use Outlook from home, which was a complete pain. Forgetting it would necessitate a journey into the office. I also couldn't access the data on my phone or on other computers such as my Mac. We looked at running Exchange Server, both hosting it ourselves, and also as a managed service which we would pay monthly for. Hosting it ourselves necessitated buying a server, the software and maintaining it which had an initial outlay of thousands, followed by time and money spent on maintenance. As a managed service, Exchange server costs around £30 / month / user. Google Apps is £30 / year / user, so the decision to go with Google was pretty easy.

There are a couple of things that Google Apps doesn't replace Outlook for and these are To Do Lists and Notes. Actually, Apps does have To Do Lists, but it doesn't offer the flexibility that we'd like, this is where Remember The Milk and Snaptic come in.

Remember The Milk (replaced To Do Lists in Outlook)

RTM is a brilliant app that allows you to keep multiple To Do Lists. It also allows you to associate notes with a to do list item and to send tasks to other people. I keep lists on a project by project basis as well as lists with the following titles 'work', 'personal', 'household' and 'sales and marketing'.

RTM appear to have spent a lot of time looking at ways to make their app as efficient as possible for the user, so for example, by prefixing a task with 'tom' it will automatically be given a due date of whatever day tomorrow is, 'mon' would schedule the task to be due on Monday, etc.

Notes can be assigned a priority by using one of three colours and the system is flexible enough to allow a variety of different views on tasks, for example being able to view all tasks that are due today across multiple task lists or just tasks due in a single list.

This is one of five tabs that is always open on my browser when I'm working (the others being Google Mail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts and Snaptic).

Snaptic (replaced notes in Outlook)
I've only recently started using Snaptic, possibly because they haven't been around for so long. They appear to be one of the new kids on the block when it comes to note taking apps, and for my requirements, they're the best.

I tested Snaptic up against Evernote (I'd also experimented with Zoho office). I know alot of people swear by Evernote, but for my purposes - specifically to make notes which are primarily text based ideas and record them quickly, Snaptic is a winner. It appears to be much faster than Evernote (admittedly, it has less functionality, like scanning graphics for text, but I don't need this anyway).

Snaptic allows you to easily and quickly add tags to notes and it is with tags that you organise your notes. The client for Snaptic on Android, which is my phone platform is called 3banana. Like the web based part of the system, it's super fast. Unlike Evernote on Android, it stores your notes locally and syncs with the web, rather than always accessing your notes directly from the web. This means it's faster and also still works when you don't have phone reception - on the tube for example.

DropSend (replaced FTP server)
We use DropSend to send large files to clients. We have an Pro account which costs $19 per month and allows us to send unlimited files. If you work in media and need to send large files to clients, you're definitely going to want this app or something similar. There are loads of other apps out there that do what DropSend does, YouSendIt being one of it's main competitors.

We used to use an FTP server installed on our office server, but we were forever having problems with clients not being able to connect, or not knowing how to connect and needing their hands holding through the process. I don't think it was a problem with our implementation, just a problem with FTP in general. I'm really glad to see FTP server replaced by web based systems!

DropSend is good, but it also has a few issues. I like the fact that for the price you get loads of Cloud based storage - 25GB. This is fantastically useful as both backup for projects and a handy archive of assets that can be quickly re-sent to a client.

Here's what I don't like:

There is a maximum default duration of links being active set to 14 days. If you want the link to be active for longer, and we invariably do, you need to set it manually for every file that you send. When you set it manually, you can set it up to 365 days.

For as long as I've been using the Adobe Air based app, there has been an issue whereby occasionally, upon completion of upload of a file, the app reports back a 'send error'. Whilst the app is supposed to have 'send resume', the only way to get around this error is to re-upload the entire file. I use two windows based PCs and I've had this problem on both machines, so it doesn't seem to be installation specific.

When you minimise the PC based app to the task bar (Windows 7), you cannot expand the app again by clicking on the task bar, as you should be able to. Instead, the only way to get the app back is to click on it in the system tray. I keep expecting them to fix this problem with every software update, but it's still there.

Despite all this, we're still using DropSend and it works very well most of the time.

Here is a tip if you use DropSend in a company environment, with Google Mail: set your DropSend e-mail address to a distribution list that will reach everyone within the company and then set up a rule within Google Mail that will remove messages from DropSend from the inbox and place them in their own folder. This way, everyone can use the same DropSend account and everyone will receive notification that a file has been picked up, without the notifications clogging up your in-box.

Google Maps (replaced Microsoft Autoroute)
Invaluable tool for planning how to get somewhere, researching locations, parking, etc. It syncs very well with most phones and particularly well with Android phones.

Delicious (replaced bookmarks in various browsers)
I got so bored of trying to manage multiple bookmarks in multiple browsers on multiple computers, that I installed Delicious, and never looked back. These days there are a number of different tools available for synchronising links, including through tools specific to Explorer, Chrome and Firefox, but Delicious is OS and broswer agnostic and does exactly what I need it to do. I highly recommend it.

Summary
Whilst this isn't an in depth review of the services I've listed here, or a recommendation of the best apps and services for all circumstances, it is a description of what we're successfully using within our company to operate our business in the Cloud.

In part 2 I'll explain how we used cloud based tools to win promote our company and win business.

I'm fascinated to know what tools other people are using - let me know how you do it.