The Mesh 2007 Conference kicked off today with a great line up of speakers and panelists. One of the great aspects of the Mesh Conference is the social interaction between speakers. Its a great environment to interact with speakers and other members of the industry. One of the dominate themes I’m seeing at this years […]
The Facebook Opportunity
The popularity of Facebook has taken off in Toronto. The population of the “Toronto Network” on Facebook is close to 10% of the city’s registered population. This is amazing market penetration and its creating some interesting situations within the online community. For example, typically students and teachers maintain a certain professional distance. Facebook’s original strategy […]
IAB Canada drinking their own Kool-Aid?
Online advertising growth in Canada is taking off. IAB Canada just released their report on 2006 growth and it was 80% over the 2005. While I have great respect for the IAB I thought their summary of reasons for the growth were extremely weak. One of the biggest trends in advertising is the consumer shift […]
Geosign in the spotlight
Geosign announced this week that they got $160M in funding. Geosign has been operating in a fairly low-profile for the last few years and I was only aware of them through discussions with some of the Tucows crowd. I’ve also seen Product Managers postings for some of their online properties like Hockey.com. Still it was […]
Canadian SEM finally warming up
For the past few years Google Adwords has been the dominate SEM marketing tool in Canada. Yahoo had a ridiculus process to advertise to Canada through its American site, and different process for Quebec. MSN had no really clue what they were doing and it was difficult as a small business to engage them. All […]
TTC Pricing Breakdown
Over the past week I’ve been taking the TTC ( Toronto Transit Commission ), mainly because my car has some electrical problems. I like the down time after work to just relax so I thought I’d investigate options to use the TTC more often. The TTC pricing is very complicated but an excellent example of […]
Don’t ignore the Echo
I was reading an article in The Toronto Star yesterday about the number of university applicants, and how Canadian universities can’t handle the load. You can read the full article here: Universities Face Baby Bust I thought David Foot’s response was very disappointing and the tone of the article was basically that we could just […]
Pragmatic Roadmapping
Pragmatic Marketing has launched a new coursed focused on Roadmapping for Product Managers. I’ve been a big fan of the Pragmatic Marketing courses since I took their Practical Product Manager course a few years ago. One of the hardest areas of being a Product Manager is determining when to schedule features you’re customers need. Its […]
Handling High Demand Launches
Recently the Sony Playstation and Nintendo Wii have hit the streets with a small number of units and insane customer demand. The interesting part around this how Sony and its retail partners handled the demand. In Canada, Toy-r-us and Sears Canada seemed to take the fairly normal route of accepting pre-orders on a first-come/first-serve approach. […]
Big Problems with Third-Party Measurement
There have been several articles around getting your site ranked in search engines and a whole economy has developed around SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ). While this is critical in getting users to your site, the advertising value of your site is also tied to its relative position with competitors. Calculating your competitive positions […]
Is Aeroplan insane?
Aeroplan has just introduced a couple of rather dramatic changes to their program. For those you not familiar with Aeroplan its Air Canada’s frequent flyer program and designed to be a tool to keep people flying Air Canada. Today they introduce 2 changes: 1/ Expiry on Aeroplan Miles Points now expire after 7 years and […]
CaseCamp Toronto 3
For those of you familiar with DemoCamp, CaseCamp may be the polar position with its flashy power point presentations and marketing case studies. For anyone interest in online or interactive campaigns its a great event to see what works and what doesn’t. CaseCamp Toronto at The Fifth Club Wednesday nigth after a summer break and […]
LiveSearch
Unspace has a great article on what they’re calling LiveSearch. There are few great examples of this display, then filter approach at work. One of my favorites sites is the Trulia.com site in the US that provides a Real Estate search. They’re continually improving the interface but the basis premise is get the user listings […]
Lack of Focus
Over the weekend I was in Montreal and staying downtown at the W Hotel. If you’re familar with the W Montreal you know its very well positioned for walking around the city. Its also right around the corner from Royal Bank’s form there head office during the 1920s. I’ve been using Royal Bank for about […]
Hard or Soft, how do you like to launch?
There’s seems to be a new approach to launching a website redesign. If you’ve been following the Yahoo home page design since February you’ve probably seen their new site and had the option to swap between the new and old designs for several weeks. Yahoo has only recently started forcing moving users to use the […]
