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Simulmedia hosts a periodic Salon Series in which key leaders in the advertising and television industries share their thoughts on some of the key issues impacting their businesses. David Cohen, Chief Media Officer of UM, sat down with Dave Morgan, Founder and CEO of Simulmedia, to discuss issues facing leaders in today’s advertising industry.

The recent B&C On Demand Summit offered insights into what is being done well, what we can do better and what still needs to be accomplished in the On Demand arena.

Last week I did a live interview with Gert Jonkers and Jop von Bennekom, the editors of Fantastic Man, at the third What Design Can Do conference in Amsterdam. You can watch our conversation above (25mins). The conference encompassed all types of design – graphics, architecture, digital, food, technology – and was one of the best-organised events I’ve taken part in. It took place at the Stadsschouwburg, a beautiful 19th century theatre and each day opened and closed with a gospel choir singing a design statement (ie Dieter Rams’ ten principles), the perfect way to wake people up. Speakers presented in twenty minute sessions, with a series of breakout sessions straight after lunch. Highlights included London digital design duo Hellicar & Lewis, Indian architect Rahul Mehrotra and food designer Marije Vogelzang. They’re already planning WDCD 2014, well worth going if you can. Magazine-wise, as well as my Fantastic Man interview, Rene and Anneke from Amsterdam’s best magazine shop Atheneuam had a pop-up shop over the two days, and ran a breakout session about independent magazines with some astute observations about current indies. And editor of Italian Wired Carlo Antonelli gave a talk which seemed to polarise the audience – I’m looking forward to catching up with that on video.

Penguin Books India has recently launched a website targeting young adults between 13 – 21 years of age called Inked which also has an offline imprint division. The company claims to have over 20,000 registered young adults on Inked website, although we didn’t find any registration process on the site at the time of writing this article, so we are not quite sure on what company means by registered users. Just a blog targeting Young Adults? Penguin Book claims that Inked is a creative platform for young adults and focuses on books and writing for young adults as well as topics like music and art. However, at the time of writing this article, we noticed that the website is just a simple blog which features blog posts across various topics like music festivals, iPhone apps, inspirational ideas, among others. It also features works from various youngsters on the site and also allows them to submit their work for showcase on their website. What could Penguin Books do with Inked? This initiative appears to be an attempt by Penguin to tap into younger audience who are tech savvy. While their idea is worth appreciating, we believe their approach could’ve been significantly improved. Firstly, its just a simple blog which is publishing articles across various topics, rather than being a platform for creativity as they claim. While they do offer the option for youngsters to submit their work, there is currently no room for interaction which can make it a creative platform. At the least, Penguin Books could probably add a forum type of feature that enables youngsters to engage with other youngsters with similar interests. The website would also become more interesting to youngsters if they introduce collaboration features, which allows youngsters across various regions to collaborate on a work which can then be showcased on the Inked website and also can possible be published offline as a book. On the social media integration as well, there is so much more that can be done with its extensive repository of youth related books. For instance, Pottermore by J.K.Rowling & Sony is a good example of a similar kind of engagement with young readers who seem to come back to the website even after the Harry Potter series is over. Besides unpublished stories, Pottermore also offered games, tasks, and activities around the Harry Potter books. Gamification done with enough thought could be something that could keep the interest of youngsters and make them come back on a daily basis, however we don’t currently see enough incentives for them to keep coming back to the website.

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When Justin Bieber tweets, 39,361,876 people (and counting) immediately jump to attention. But when one of those nearly 40 million people tweet, does the Beebs see it? Does he react at all? Communication among terrorist cells works much in the same way as Justin Bieber's Twitter account, according to mathematicians from Ryerson University in Toronto who have built a mathematical model of the way information spreads through these hierarchical networks. Their approach may give counterterrorism agents insight into terrorism hierarchies and allow them to predict terrorist attacks and sabotage networks before the attack plans can be carried out. Read more...More about Terrorism, Big Data, Tech, Apps Software, and Dev Design

The Guardian's international editions are proliferating, but before the newspaper launches an online edition in Australia later this year, it's uniting all of its websites under a single domain, theguardian.com. Currently, The Guardian operates three websites. The primary one is guardian.co.uk. It has a second URL for its U.S. operation, guardiannews.com, which redirects to guardian.co.uk on section and article pages. It has a third subdomain for mobile, m.guardian.co.uk. The Guardian describes the move as a symbolic one. "As we set out on our mission to become a unified, global [organization], we now have one domain we can rally behind," Guardian U.S. CEO Michael Bloom said in an interview with Mashable last week. "[And] it will be much easier for users and partners," he added. Read more...More about Media, Newspapers, The Guardian, and Business

Getting started in freelance web design work can be scary, especially if you are planning to do it full time. It is important to get the right design tools for your business, but that can be costly right? Maybe so, but not for the thrifty freelancer. This first thing you will need to begin freelancing (besides a computer!) is software which will allow you to build websites. I am currently a Windows user, but much of the software and tools listed here is either Mac compatible or has decent Mac alternatives. Below are my recommendations of free and low cost software that does not compromise on quality. Text Editor: The bread and butter program for any web developer – this is no doubt where you will spend most of your time. Luckily, we are blessed with some great free text editors. My personal favourite is Komodo Edit. The latest version (8 at time of writing) has support for all of the web languages including HTML5 and the CSS pre-processors LESS and SASS. I find the syntax highlighting, HTML tag matching and autocomplete function suit my needs perfectly and there are plenty of customisation options to make the experience just as you want it. It also has a built in FTP client for live editing files, it works very well but I definitely don’t recommend live editing websites (read on for the version control section!). Alternatives: Notepad++ (FREE) and Sublime Text 2 ($70, free trial is available). CSS Pre-Processor: If you are not pre-processing your CSS, then you really should be – it can really speed up the way you write your CSS and even if you just use it in its most basic form (variables and nesting) you can still save a lot of time and effort. Being a SASS and Windows user there’s unfortunately not that many options for which application to use. I find Scout to be a nice and simple free tool and I’m yet to have any issues with it. Alternatives: CodeKit ($15, Mac), SimpLESS (Free, Windows) and Fire.app ($14). FTP Client: Every web developer needs to upload files sometime. My client of choice is the free FileZilla. There is no solid reason for using FileZilla over some of the alternatives, but it has never let me down so I’ve never found a reason to switch. It quite simply does what it says, and very well (+ the frequent updates are reassuring). Alternatives: WinSCP (Free) and CyberDuck (Free). Version Control: Many people are scared to switch to version control, but once you have you will never go back to live editing by FTP ever again. Version control is particularly useful on client sites where you simply cannot afford to make mistakes by live editing. My version control system of choice is Git, which I chose due to its popularity and support. There are two things you need for Git version control – somewhere to host your repositories and a Git client to handle the changes. Many will have heard of GitHub, which is free for open source projects but charges for private repositories. Luckily, there is an alternative – BitBucket (https://bitbucket.org/), it allows unlimited private repositories for free for up to 5 users (perfect for small freelance teams!). BitBucket however does fall down slightly on deployment, but there are scripts available which automatically deploy your commits by FTP. Version control has notoriously been not very user friendly. As Git is now being used so extensively in the web design industry, better tools are being released. My Git client of choice is GitHub for Windows (Mac client also available). It has a great interface and despite its name is also compatible with BitBucket. Alternatives: GitHub (free for open source, from $15 a month for private repos) and Beanstalk (from $15 a month but has deployment built in). Design Software: Whilst designing in the browser is becoming more popular, I still can’t step away from Photoshop/Fireworks for mock-ups. It is one of the few applications I pay for but the pricing may not be as bad as you think. Recently Adobe have moved

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