You may be aware that the FlyingBinary team are involved in a number of communities in London and around the globe. We want to tell you about an exciting event we, and a number of London based entrepreneurs are running. As we have said before we don’t blog often, just when we have something important we want to say. This event is likely to be very important to the growth of your business in this connected world.

13th February 2012 sees the start of Social Media Week and we wanted to share a keynote event "Making Social Part of your DNA" which is being hosted in London on Thursday 16th. We are part of a crowd sourced team who have arranged for some amazing speakers, companies and brands to share their success and failure with social media.

Even if you think you have got it all down on this one, we will have tips and tricks to maximise the impact of social media that you won't hear anywhere else. The wonderful JP Rangaswarmi, Chief Scientist at Salesforce will also share his vision on the exciting part social media will play in our future. Check out the video from JP introducing his keynote presentation.

So who should attend, well everyone who is using social media for business. However it is particularly important that the thought leaders are there so that what you learn on the day can be socialised with your communities.

We recommend that you get your ticket asap, they are selling out fast.

We don’t blog very often at FlyingBinary, however today’s news of the death of Steve Jobs prompted us to make an exception. Our company is a fledgling one compared to the success Steve Jobs created at Apple (twice), however we share his vision for the impact technology can have when it is built to solve a real world problem.

On our home page we have added one of our favourite videos from the wonderful people at TED, who share ideas which are changing the world. If you didn’t see it on the way into our site here is Steve Job’s take on life "How to live before you die" a message which is particularly poignant today when he is not able to share any more of his ideas and vision for our world.

If you know our company and our people, we could be described as Apple fanboys, yes we run all our software platforms via Macbooks, mobile via the iPad and if you phone us yes we will be using an iPhone. One of our favourite software choices is Tableau which is Windows native, however thanks to the great team at Parallels we run that on our Macbooks too. For us the choice of Apple hardware and software is related to the user experience, technology that disappears to let you get on with creating whatever you need to do, say or share.

One of the most admirable traits he had was the ability to keeping looking for improvement ,and always moving the company to the next horizon. A dot joiner who trusted his instincts, even when most of the technology industry didn’t understand. From that viewpoint we, and I’m sure many of you reading this have already picked up the baton to carry on and develop this vision, we look forward to sharing the journey with you.

In the video the message he left the students at Stamford with was “stay hungry and stay foolish” essentially to find and follow your dream. This to us is a call to arms for those of us who develop technology to make sure we solve real world problems with hardware and software which delights our users. For all the amazing speeches and quotes we have from him, this is the one we at FlyingBinary regard as his legacy, so for us is the best of all.

Our thoughts are with the Apple employees who have lost a leader whose shoes will never be filled, but most of all our thoughts are with his family who bear the biggest loss. 

Take the Red Pill... 

"... and I'll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." So says Morpheus to Neo in the original Matrix film, where we find out that our view of our world is just that - a view - and there is a whole other reality waiting to be discovered. 

It's very like like that using Parallels to run Windows on a Mac: you have your standard Mac OS desktop and everything that you expect as a Mac user, but then -click- you open up the world of Windows right there on the same machine.

Now I know that Virtual Machine (VM) technology is not new, and in one sense is not very exciting, but I find the thrill of having access to native Mac and Windows software in a single sleek 15" silver box irresistible. I guess it comes from starting out when 80 columns of green text was all you got, so today's machines perpetually appear as endless playtime. 

Of course, there is another key benefit of running virtual machines: you get to load any version you want - just like Neo loads up another program and is suddenly a martial arts expert.  From here I can start a Win XP machine with Office 2003, or a Win 7 machine with Office 2007. Now that Office 2010 is released, I'm going to clone the Win 7 VM and load Office 2010 in the clone. Then I'll get Ubuntu, and then ... and then I suppose sleep somewhere in the middle! I can also configure the machines to have pretty much any hardware configuration I like, including the memory size. 

For light duty tasks such as opening an Excel or Word document, then a 1Gb VM works just fine on my 4Gb MacBook Pro, but when I'm throwing serious data volumes around in Tableau, then I shut down most of my other Mac software and give 2Gb to the VM. I use iStat Menus, from Bjango to keep track of how much memory I'm using, amongst other things. I like the flexibility of Parallels to work the way that I want, rather than insisting on a particular way of doing things. Or (even worse imho) rebooting to switch between operating systems.

Once you boot the VM, it all looks and works just like it does in Windows itself. My particular killer app is Tableau, from Tableau Software, the rapid-fire business intelligence and data visualisation tool. As a Tableau partner we are building BI dashboards and visualisations (vizes) every day, so it's really important that the environment we use is stable and runs efficiently. Tableau is Windows software but we prefer to run Macs, so Parallels is the obvious choice.

Tableau itself is designed to allow an immersive experience when working with data: the program fades to transparency, allowing you to reach through the software and engage with datasets directly to build vizes. This can only be achieved through truly excellent user interface design, and is a credit to the engineering team at Tableau. At the same time, Tableau works under-the-hood to render vizes that are ideally suited to the particular strengths of the human vision system. This means that even an average user can build stunning dashboards that convey rich information easily. For example, the dashboard below is quite simple, yet conveys a wealth of meaning.

With all this in mind, it is equally important that Parallels stays in background, to allow me to focus on my work. It does this by giving me not one, but four ways to play. First, it allows a full-screen option. In this mode, I can use every pixel for Tableau (and believe me - I do!) and even hides the Mac menu bar and dock (if visible). Second, I can have a straight windowed mode if I want, treating the Windows desktop itself as another Mac program.

But I can also use Crystal and Coherence modes which 'blend' the Mac and Windows desktops to create a seamless experience. It feels just like Neo 'jacking in' to the Matrix and makes it easy for me to move data in and out of Tableau and a host of other programs. I can even use the "MacLook" option which changes Windows windows to look like Mac windows. 

I've heard a few people say that they don't want to buy and install a VM just to run one Windows program (eg Tableau). Well in my case, I'm running Tableau Professional, and Parallels represents just 3% of the total cost of the two. Even for Tableau Personal it accounts for just 8% of the cost. If you love Macs, and you want Tableau, then I think the cost, stability and ease of use make it a no-brainer.

There's obviously limited space in a single post to cover all the aspects of Parallels configuration and how they help my work with Tableau, but I hope I have conveyed some of the sense I have of "just how deep the rabbit hole goes!" If you too are a Matrix trilogy fan, you'll have noticed that the second film multiplies the scale of the vision of the first film. Well, in a future post I hope to cover the new versions of Parallels and Tableau, and I think you'll find that the new versions do very much the same thing!!

We have a free pdf which covers this in more detail and has example pictures. If you would like a copy just leave us your email and we will forward you a copy.

Today I reflected on a new Skype contact we received from across the pond, from someone we had never met. We have no hesitation in accepting such a contact, in the past it has led to anything from interesting conversations to new business.

The reason for the contact with us was to ask a single question “Why does my IT department insist in getting in my way?” Not the first time we have been asked that question in the last couple of years, not a simple answer without first understanding the problem.

It was a common situation, this user had a good idea for changing the way the business interacted with customers. However the idea needed to be managed using operational data in various business systems. In order to gain some competitive advantage the data needed to be sourced and analysed quickly, however the IT department estimated that it would take a month to deliver.

Whilst I can completely understand this was a true reflection of the time it would take to make this change, it simply is not an acceptable answer from a business viewpoint. Increasingly our business users can reach across the world to obtain what they need.

Yet another user has joined the tunnel team determined to achieve self sufficiency. Like every tunnel, the activity won’t be visible until the team breaks through to the other side.

It is our belief that it is time to change the way we deliver IT solutions to business. The way we are making that work in an agile, flexible responsive way for our customers is by utilising the power of the cloud as a delivery mechanism for IT change. 

Oh, and the new Skype contact? A new customer for FlyingBinary!