Tuesday – “New Year – New You”

On Tuesday, we gave away two tickets at one of Scotland’s top personal development coaches – Jack Black. The 2 tickets were for his upcoming “The Best of MindStore” in Glasgow on 3rd March. It will no doubt be a life-changing experience to all who attend.

Then Garrett Ramsay (@garramsay) offered up a three-hour, business coaching session focusing on sales. No matter what business we’re in, we can all improve our ability in sales, no doubt…

At the end of the day @HarperMacleod, took away the MindStore prize and @LomondBeauty gets the three hours with sales genius Garrett.

We would like thank Garrett and Jack for the Twitmas giveaways and congratulate the winners. Let us know how it goes you two!

Wednesday – Was all about the body

Body Butter that is, courtesy of the lovely Miss Polly. I had been admiring her work at a recent craft fair, and so when we were arranging Twitmas prizes, I immediately thought of these darling tins of Body Butter.

Given the sore feet I’ve been having lately – I’d been wishing I could win the Peppermint Tootsie Treatment. Sadly I couldn’t win but the people who do win these little pamper pots were – @anniegburns, @flofoxes and @BruceDevlin. Congrats to all three of you. I sure hope that you or your special someone enjoy these silky-smooth body butter treatments.

Thursday – Our penultimate prize

For this year’s penultimate Twitmas giveaway there was not just one but two bottles of wine – red and white courtesy of wine guru @pieterrosenthal from  corkandbottle.co.uk and www.lovethatwine.co.uk. Pieter was kind enough to hand pick a bottle of Lomond Sauvignon Blanc and a red Gran Sasso, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo too.

Congrats go to the winner of the Gran Sasso @Thomassimpkins and @Mickles20. Please check out his new video How to Decant Your Christmas Port.

Two-Day Finale

So here we are on the final days of Twitmas and to give more of you an opportunity to win, we have several fabulous prizes to give away. We are just so excited about it as Gary explained in his last blog and so grateful, and I’d like to reiterate the special thanks to Alan Tennant – Regional Director of Hotels.TV Glasgow.

Good luck today to all who follow @nsdesign – and thank for your participation!

Happy Twitmas one and all!

Last year, our Twitmas Grand Prize was a break at a beautiful cottage in France. Hard to beat, but this year, we think we just have.

Our 2011 Twitmas grand prize – isn’t just 1 prize.. but THREE. Giving more people a chance to win, and experience a real taste of luxury!

Starting on Friday (23rd December), we’ll be promoting prizes from without doubt, 2 of Glasgow’s best hotels – The Grand Central Hotel, and the ABode Hotel on Bath Street.

Both are offering one lucky Twitmas winner the chance of a free double or twin room on a “Bed and Breakfast” basis for an agreed date in 2012. If ever you needed a city break, now’s the time!

Then we move to Saturday – Christmas eve… and an exclusive offer from The Douglas Hotel on the fantastic Island of Arran! One final Twitmas winner will receive a TWO night stay, complete with breakfast, and a bottle of bubbly on arrival thrown in too! A perfect romantic getaway perhaps, allowing you to start 2012 in true style!

We’d like to thank all three of the hotels for agreeing to take part in this year’s Twitmas fun, but a very special thank you also to Alan Tennant – Regional Director of Hotels.TV Glasgow. Alan has been critical in securing these prizes, and so a massive thanks for helping us better our grand finale prizes!!

Follow @NSDesign on Twitter to ensure you don’t miss a thing..!

Best of Luck, and Merry Twitmas when it comes!

It was a very busy week for us NS Social Media types – what with us, like most people, having full time jobs and yet still trying to get out there to participate as much as we could.

Like any festival, conference or the like – there is a danger of being “too much” on. In my opinion, life is better with quality not quantity, but that’s just me. In many cases, there were things happening concurrently, and I’d want to be at both – which is, of course, impossible.

As luck would have it though – the vast majority of the sessions were recorded and streamed, so it was possible to watch LIVE while at work, or later at a more convenient time.

Wednesday night Gary took part in an event at Glasgow’s Film City called Socially adept or socially inept? How to do, learn and use social media for business. It was, as ever, an engaging and informative talk from him – this time recounting some of the stats from our recent Social Media ROI survey. There are a few of my snaps on our NSDesign flickr page – if you’re interested.

SM STATS

There were some surprising results in the survey like: Nearly 40% of the Scottish businesses doing Facebook don’t think it’s useful. Ironically, the winner was Twitter – which most people don’t initially “get” – but was found to be the most used and useful.

Another key social media tool was blogging which 64% of our respondents found useful (that’s quite a bit more than the aforementioned Facebook stat).

Also on the bill were: our cultural client, Clare McLeod @IntermezzoArts, who uses social media to promote the arts, Inner Ear’s @dougalperman discussed having a plan, then doing the campaign, and most essentially recommended using tools for measurement (an interesting example of SM tool CO TWEET was given), and finally the ever-controversial social knowledge authority @MurrayBuchanan recounted the tale of how he grew his Facebook followers to the thousands only to dump them down to just his nearest and dearest. (Frankly, after years of doing social media daily, I can’t really blame him,…)

Thursday morning I gave my own social media bite-sized talk for The Business Banter crowd. I was speaking on my 10 Quick Tips for LinkedIn Success – which I’ll no doubt post as a blog later this week. It was a nerve-racking experience but overall pretty fun. I might just do it again. My fellow presenters all did a fantastic job to amuse and enlighten us.

With each talk I attend I usually walk away from it with some tip, suggestion, nugget or thought. It’s often something as simple as checking out a website, or a suggestion on how to do social media more effectively.

Friday I was in work all day but rushed to Skypark to hear the closing keynote of Social Media Week, delivered over Skype, from Don Tapscott. Don is the author or Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006) and a new book Macrowikinomics – Rebooting Business and the World. While it was interesting, I have to admit it was all a bit over my head. I ended up leaving Skypark feeling that it was all a bit anti-climactic. Of course the excitement raged on, in town, but after a long week of work and Social Media all I really wanted was some food and to put my feet up.

It was a good experience over all. I got to catch up with many of my peers from across the Central Belt. I heard some of them talk and share their stories. Like most people I didn’t get to half of the talks I wanted to see but thankfully, as I said, there’s always the LiveStream. Speaking of which, off to finish watching the talk on Responsive Design.

Let us know if you attended any talks. Which were your favorites? What was the best bit of advice you walked away with?

Much of the work we were involved in was focussed around the use of IT (and later the web) to Architecture and the Built Environment, and Abacus developed what was at the time one of the biggest 3D city models – 25 square kilometres of Glasgow City Centre.

In 1998, I was challenged with the task of making the model available online, and using new and exciting visualisation technologies such as VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) and QTVR (Quick Time Virtual Reality) – carried out a prolonged R+D period which resulted in a system we called “The Glasgow Directory”.

In short – An interactive Map/3D Model which accurately gave a true reflection of the real city with layers of data accessed on request. Our urban information system allowed web-based users to explore and “walk around” the virtual Glasgow model, highlighting areas of interest such as key city landmarks, tourist resources and more, with fancy 360 degree panoramic views of selected street-scapes… this sounding at all familiar yet?

When the Glasgow Directory was launched, it was very well received within the web research world, particularly those working in the field of VRML and city visualisation. As a result, I was fortunate enough to present a number of academic papers at various locations across Europe, highlighting our innovative system, and explaining our ideas to take it further in the future. Anyone know if Larry Page or Sergey Brin visited around that time?..

Ok – being serious – I don’t actually think that Google based their Google Maps (and more recently – Google Street View) on the VRML Glasgow Directory, but in retrospect, some of the similarities are astounding….

Above… George Square and the City Chambers… both systems have the ability to explore the “virtual space”, identify the street names, buildings of interest etc…

 Glasgow Catherdral from the roadside….  left is the VRML Glasgow Directory, right is Google StreetView

  Using the Map as an information system, searching for a good Bar in the Merchant City – in this case Bar 91

Unfortunately, much of the original source for the Glasgow Directory is now lost. Regrettably this includes a lot of the later research and development including embedding realtime audio, location specific navigation feedback (VERY similar in nature to Google Maps on the iPhone with GPS) and multi-user “avatar” based interactions.

Some links to material and examples that I did manage to dig up:

Working Glasgow Directory (kind of) – requires a VRML client such as the Cortona Plugin

Research Stuff:
Inside The Map – Academic Paper written by myself for a Cartography Conference
Visit VR Glasgow  – Academic Paper written by Myself and Prof. Tom Maver

So Google.. if you’re reading this… own up – was it me that invented Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Street View? I’ll assume that I did until I hear back from you. In the meantime, I’m off to dig out that primitive working example of an online video sharing site that I remember showing to some Paypal employees back in 2001…