Gareth Shapiro | London Based Freelance Web & Mobile Consultant, Developer & Trainer

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, one of the world's most popular Linux distributions, has teamed up with Dell to make roads in to the Chinese personal computer market, which has recently become the largest market in this sector in the world.

Ubuntu's latest version 11.10 will be available pre installed on a range of Dell machines and Canonical has planned a number of strategies to convince consumers that Ubuntu is as good as any operating system they can choose from.

In addition to the operating system a number of applications are preinstalled on the machines to immediately meet the needs of people taking them home. Two of these applications I am proud to say were developed by myself using Adobe Air.

Nokia is the worlds largest manufacturer of mobile phones, selling about a third of the world's handsets in 2010.

Like other mobile phone companies they appreciate the benefit of a store for customers to visit and this is especially true of the markets in Russia and Asia. Upon arriving at a Nokia store customers experience funky and cool interior design and of course access to all of the latest Nokia devices. To help enhance the experience through digital technology Nokia turned to the London branch of R/GA, Digital Agency of the Decade.

The new Renault Wind is a snazzy looking coupé-roadster. When you feel like letting the sunshine in the top comes down, folds away and the whole trick is completed in 12 seconds.

To promote the new car Renault held a competition to win one based around this theme and the 12 Second Strip was born.

A recent trend within the UK government is one of providing access to the data sets they hold to the public. It appears to me at least that the thinking behind this is that transparency is promoted, the public may well come up with ways of using the data that are useful to everyone, and after all the public has paid for the creation of these data sets and so it seems correct that they should have access to it.

Not too long ago I attended a meeting at London's amazing city hall which focused on the Greater London Authority's contribution to this movement, The London Datastore. For someone like myself who develops compelling rich interactive digital media for a living it was obvious that here is a rich source of potential to tell a story using this data and Flash / Flex.

Booz and Company are an international business management firm with clients and consultants stationed around the globe. A large part of what they do is develop, collate and distribute business expertise. Digital media has obvious benefits over traditional distribution models for content such as this and the rich interactive experience made possible using Flash enhances the impact and enjoyment of the ideas and messages for everyone who experience them.

You did read correctly. That does say "Hack" and "The Government" in one sentence.

People often misuse the word hack. It originally meant "to solve a problem" and a group of developers, designers and statisticians got together in London over the weekend to solve the "What cool things can you build with publicly accessible government data?" question.

Being a Flash and Flex programmer naturally I thought it might be good idea to do an interactive data visualisation of some sort.

If you live in the UK and you buy a new or used Nissan you get access to the Nissan After Sales website. This site allows Nissan car owners to register their vehicles with their local dealer, book a service and stay in touch with Nissan after purchase. The bulk of the functionality is delivered via a Flex Application which is powered by a Sales Force back end.

Like many companies BlackBerry have undertaken sophisticated analysis of the types of people that buy their products and also identified some that don't yet but are likely candidates for the future. This is of course invaluable information to those responsible for developing marketing campaigns and strategies. It is the way that BlackBerry has gone about distributing the information internally that is different.

Isn't it great when digital work lasts longer than 5 min? I recently updated a piece I did exactly a year ago for The Economist's annual World In project.

Underwired are a London based ECRM strategy and execution agency.

Recently they produced their first Flash site but being specialists in digital relationship marketing, retention and email marketing and not Actionscript, it was not running as well as it should. I restructured their site so that it would load quickly while maintaining the clever HTML/Javascript/PHP code they had written to maintain some search engine readable HTML on each page.