I visited Internet World at Earls Court yesterday. I'm not madly keen on exhibitions, but I am keen to keep current and understand what's important to people. The things that I noticed were...

1) Everyone is peddalling the same stuff. The show is split up into areas, which means that as you move from stand to stand you get the same message repeated until you leave that area.

2) No-one has really worked out their unique selling point (USP). These are the people that have massive marketing budgets, but they are saying the same things that I believe about my company.

3) I learnt more about what's important to people by chatting to the person behind me in the queues that I did from most of the speakers. I got honest opinions and great feedback which is really valuable to me.

I was left with two thoughts:

 - there's people put there selling websites that start from £45k which have less functionality, are less useable and have less compelling design than the websites that I produce for £10k. Their overheads add no value to the website.

 - it took till about 9:00 in the evening to have the irony pointed out to me that I'd travelled up on the train to see the interent...

I've bought a couple of IP cameras over the past could of years.  Not for any real purpose, more to experiment with what's possible. They all seem to come with web interfaces that are a bit ugly and unwieldly. One of them uses an active-x control that knocks my desktop back to Windows basic.

What I want from my camera is a really easy interface that starts when my PC starts and gives me a gadget sized app that doesn't get in the way. My office is in the  back of the house, and I want to easily be able to see who it is coming to the front door.

Searching around, I found some code that enables me to do just this - I've now created a VB.net app that shows me small images from all my cameras, doesn't use too much CPU and doesn't get in the way. Just got to connect the audio now, and I can work in the office and still be "child minding" to a sufficient level!

QGate, whom I work with on CRM Migrate, have been working towards getting the application Certified for Microsoft Dynamics. We've just got the app through the technical testing. There was a couple of things that we needed to check before testing however it passed the test first time. We've just got some references and paperwork to sort out and we'll be able to use the logo!

-- EDIT --

QGate have now done all the paperwork, so it's official - we can use the CfMD logo.