Facebook Garage Montreal – Oct 26, 2009
The agenda for Facebook Garage Montreal has been posted and I’ve been accepted present on ‘Public Involve with Social Media’. I will be great to talk about my work with Ascentum over the last few months. The preliminary agenda is: 5pm to 6:30pm: buffet, socializing 6:30pm to 6:45pm: opening remarks – Louise Clements, Head of […]
Top CNN Technology usage for Obama coverage
CNN really surprised me today with its use of technology around the Obama inauguration. There’s 3 main components that I think stand out: Facebook Connect integration, it was awesome watching the video online and getting comments/status updates from your friends or the general public in real-time. This absolutely made the experience for me and I […]
Confused users? Just add stickies…
Facebook is trying hard to get users to user and like its new profile re-design. I think one of the funniest new additions are little yellow stickies on all the new and non-obvious additions. Kinda of a “we know you’ll miss this if we don’t tell you” approach to interface design. I’m not sure how […]
More Visa Frustrations
A few weeks ago I wrote about my frustrations with the CIBC visa opt-out upgrade program. Since then CIBC and I have parted ways, my Aeroplan Visa card was the last CIBC service I retained from them since openning a bank account with them as a child. A few years ago I switched to Royal […]
Facebook breaks Application list, again…
It looks like Facebook is reacting to user feedback about how hard it is to find and navigate applications in the new profile design. In response last week they changed the application list so that the “browse all applications” actually connected you to all your applications. This week they’ve changed the application drop-down so that […]
More brand Assassination, from CIBC this time
Leigh Himel has a good post about how the opt-out campaign approach should never be used. We’ve both been the victims of CIBC’s wonderful new Infinite Visa upgrade program. Without talking to me CIBC has decided to upgrade me to this new VISA program while I was in Portugal at Alex & Iuliana’s wedding. This […]
Simple solutions to complex problems
I recently had to send a letter, for the first time in a long. When I was at the Post Office ( I don’t know where else to buy stamps ). I noticed that all Canada post stamps a valid regardless of their value. Instead of having to buy $0.01 stamps when the price goes […]
CBC Hockey Night in Canada, the biggest branding mistake ever?
CBC, or Canadian Broasting Corp, has just made what I think can only be called the worst branding mistake ever with regards to the Hockey Song. For 40 years the CBC hockey broadcasts have used the Hockey Song and this week they let it slip away to their competition. I can’t think of a bigger […]
Distance costs.
Sebastian, over at Praized, has a great post about the “New Inflation “ report by CIBC world markets. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you check it out. I’ll wait… ( besure to check out the “Will Soaring Transport Costs Reverse Globalization?” section ) Over the last few years there’s been alot […]
User Generated Recommendations, hard to get right…
Joey deVilla has a great post about his experience trying to get a recommendation for a moving company. It sounds simple enough, ask you’re blog readers to respond with recommendations for local services. In reality its hard to get reliable information, in Joey’s case the recommendations were tainted by an apparent fake recommendation and legal/intimidation […]
Early funding, for early exits?
I attended Rick Segal’s VC round table last week, which was also attended by Susan Dingwall Williams and Scott Pelton. It was a good forum to discuss the VC community and the funding process for startups. One area I was surprised with was the agreement from both Rick and Scott that they wanted to involved […]
Can Social Network Monetize?
I’ve been reading alot about Social Networks and concerns over their ability to monetize. I’m not really too sure why there is a belief that social networks can’t be monetized. Myspace the guerillia in the space, and arguably still the leading Social Network in the US, has been monetizing just fine. Fox Interactive is reporting […]
No Refresh for Yellowpages.ca
For disclosure I think its important to get out that I use to work for the Yellowpages Group when they purchased Autotrader.ca. It was with some humour today that I got a call from the local Yellowpages rep about a free business listing for Refresh Partners. YPG ( Yellowpages Group ) sells advertising as a […]
Lots of attention on Canadian Startups
There has been a lot of attention lately on the technology startups in Canada. We’ve had very successful StartupCamps in Waterloo, Montreal and Toronto and even mainstream media is starting to notice. There are also a number of events focusing on helping startups: Canadian Innovation Exchange This is probably one of the bigger events and […]
Facebook working the Media
Facebook seems to be changing their approach to communicating new features/functionality. In the past Facebook would just use their blog or the developer blog to communicate new functionality. Media sites and other blogs would then pick the new features and write about them. The approach worked reasonably well but wasn’t really inline with traditional PR […]