Alberta Design Blog

Everyone loves the cloud. We love the cloud. The cloud is that imaginary place where all our business problems disappear, our IT costs vapourize and everything and everyone has the a rosy red glow of ecstasy on their faces. But have you ever actually thought about what the cloud is?

The cloud is really a series of high tech data centres all over the world. People own them. Shareholders, actually, own them. Shareholders don’t generally like free services. Your company financials are sitting in a data centre in Virginia, or Mumbai. Your proprietary technology is in Africa or China. Those cloud servers physically reside somewhere.

Now, Google is the king of everything free services. Almost all of our clients use Google services. Recently, Google delisted their free apps for business. Now, new users must pay $5/month per user. Let me put this into perspective: My email has 10,000 or 11,000 messages in it. Those messages reside in Google’s data centres. Should they decide my “free” cloud-based email is no longer free… what could I do? What I can do is pay to access “my” email.

Now in an attempt to not sound cynical, so many cloud/open source products are so cool: Drupal, CiviCrm, Salesforce (NOT free!). These products power so many things, and cost so much less compared to building from the ground up. Heck. They are so free and easy, we’ve kind of forgotten people build this stuff, and eventually need to get paid to do it.

Apple is rapidly expanding iCloud, and happily offering paid upgrades, dropbox => paid upgrades, Google => paid upgrades.

I suppose the morale of the Google Apps tale is two-fold:

1. Get while the gettin’s good; and
2. Strongly consider what is safe up there, in the cloud.

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We’ve talked about a theme party for a long time, mostly since Kayla started digging on the TV program MadMen. This month marks the sad departure of Kayla to the West Coast to pursue other things – like a new rain coat, and perhaps a cruiser bike basket. So we decided to finally do it! Turns out the Centennial Theatre in Red Deer is totally cool with retro brick and a kitchen. It was a great time, small venue, food and lots of time to reminisce. read more

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This past weekend I heard about a book – Start with why by Simon Sinek. The summary of the book rocked my concept of business. Rocked. My concept. The book (which I have not read yet) assumes that we are in business not to make stuff (how & what) but for something (why). I’ve been looking for something to polarize Redpoint’s vision, as well as articulate what we really do here. Truthfully, we design stuff, just like the other shops in town (what). But why we do it is far more nebulous. read more

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Well, here we are starting off 2012. Hopefully with a bang.  I’ve read a few reviews of 2011, and it was a good year for a lot of businesses. But what is coming up now? This article pretty well sums up the tech side, but what about us mere mortals in central Alberta?

2012 will clearly be the year of the mobile device, that much is clear. read more

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It’s pretty amazing. We’ve had a tremendous run of creative marketing pieces this past 6 months. Redpointers have created some stuff that is pretty darn impressive. We’ve written copy, printed brochures, made maps, murals, and continue to crank out websites. The problem is, most of it hasn’t been published, released or otherwise produced. read more

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In this age of social media, apps, click ads and online networks, a once immovable bulwark of business is slowly disappearing–the business card. In the “olden days” the mighty rolodex would sit on the office manager or salesperson’s desk–the all-powerful gatekeeper to leads, key contacts and everything to keep the greasy read more

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Its not often a potential landmark business opens in any community. Red Deer has been graced with something very unique – our very own coffee bus – the Traptow’s Cool Beans Bus, straight from the Oxford Circle in London!

Kevin and Becky Traptow have gone to great lengths to open a coffee shop that is unique, enjoyable and has great food. Based on the sun exposure alone, the balcony is the clear read more

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Yes. Mistakes happen. Yes. We make them. Mistakes teach designers what they’ve missed, and what they don’t know. Mistakes also give us the opportunity to show integrity, and to make things right. I think mistakes are the single greatest opportunity to show you care about clients. Will you abandon them or make it right? Will you take your lumps or be indignant? Heroes don’t often rise when nothing is wrong. read more

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Well, it’s election time again in Canada and Canadians are busy listening to the parties and their platforms. Now, it may be more efficient if the parties would wait a bit longer before calling an election, we seem to get elections more often than we get spring, but we all have to play the hand that’s dealt to us, and get out there and vote.

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