Andre’s Blog » Business

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

What’s going on with OpenAjax?

September 27th, 2006

So first off we launched our site (www.openajax.org) last week! Which we’re all very excited about:) Right now we have over 50 member companies, and this is growing substantially. Jon Ferraiolo told us today that he’s received more than 50 emails in the last business days since the new site went live. A good sign. With the new site we also received a donation, the domain OpenAjax.org which is much cleaner and easier to remember than www.openajaxalliance.org, yah! It was pretty loose to joing at first, all you had to do was email and Jon, have a chat and he’d determine if it made sense. Now you have sign an agreement that mostly has to do with IPR issues and the steeting committee has to approve you, so we’re getting serious.

Microsoft still hasn’t joined, maybe they never will:( One can imagine they have some reservations abuut jumping with IBM and a bunch of open source projects with out considering it carefully. Mind you Atlas has a kind of interesting license, from an MS perspective anyway. Still I think it’s important for them and the rest of the group that they get on board, come we’re all grown ups!

We’ve also published an Ajax white paper which is a great semi technical resource to get up to speed on what Ajax is, what it can do for you and how to go about doing it. Check it out here or download the PDF here.

The white paper is nice but it’s mostly a marketing piece and something for the media and analysts to grab onto. The actual work product is the OpenAjax Hub which is an open source project, that will facilitate different Ajax frameworks, JavaScript libraries and components to work together in the same app or on the same page. Of the 50 some companies involved in the effort there’s only a handful of people writing code, but I’m sure this will change with the first check-ins to SourceForge. The goal is to have something usable by early 2007!

So what is Nitobi’s involvement? Well, I’m on the marketing committee with Alexei, Dave’s working with Declarative Markup and James is working on interoperability stuff. Unfortunately none of us have all the time we’d like to have to devote to this valuable industry effort…but that’s what the way things roll sometimes. So what do we do? Well for staters we have conference calls every 2 weeks, where we discuss what we do and what we have to. They’re pretty typical committee conference calls, you never get as much done as you want to or think you could but things are moving along. The tech committees actually write code and discuss interop and architecture issues, the maketing folks have come up with website, white paper and press releases. So not bad. But we are not a standards body so don’t expect any;-)

We’re having our second face-to-face meeting next week at the Sun offices in Santa Clara, right after AjaxWorld. This will be my first and I’m looking forward to meeting everyone in person.

Just wanted to give a special mention to Jon from IBM, as I think he’s done a tremendous job getting things done and managing the whole committee process. Neither of which are small feats!

technorati tags:openajax, openajaxalliance, ajax, nitobi

Blogged with Flock

Posted in Technology, Software Development, AJAX, Web 2.0, Business | 3 Comments »

Grid 3.2 Weekend Party!

September 16th, 2006

I gave Dave and Alexei a ride home shortly before midnight. We’ve been working very hard to get Grid 3.2 out this week. We’re looking promising for Thursday, but after a few late nights even an all nighter by Whitehawk himself we’re getting very close. In fact it’s just couple tweaks, some docs and website updates tomorrow and the launch email will be off. Seems no matter what you do launches are always a heroic effort in the end, but we’re getting better that’s for sure! Stay tuned…

And to the Nitobi crew, keep up the good work!

technorati tags:nitobi, ajaxgrid, nitobigrid, launch, version, pointrelease

Blogged with Flock

Posted in Software Development, AJAX, Business | 1 Comment »

We’ve launched the new Nitobi.com

September 2nd, 2006

After several months of hard work we’re almost done our rebranding process. This week we officially launched the new www.nitobi.com website! Keep in mind a website is never finished, and this is just the first iteration. We’ve update the design to be cleaner and simpler. One of our design goals was to to maintain a healthy amount of whitespace. We also wanted to make it easier for visitors to easily learn about our products and the functionality that they’re looking for. That’s we have big links to the feature highlights, demos and video tours front and center. After demos and product info, downloads and pricing were the next most visited sections of our old website so we brought those up to be in the main bar separating the header (and logo) from the rest of the content. We’ve ported over our old knowledge base to the new template as well. The forums are currently still at http://forums.ebusiness-apps.com running on PHPBB but we’re porting those over to Drupal, which we’re excited about because we want move over more of the dynamic functionality of our site into Drupal as it makes sense and as time permits. But we’re treading carefully into this new web framework, so we’re just going to do the forums and feed aggregation to start with. Our site content doesn’t change that rapidly so we don’t ‘need’ a full blown CMS for the content pages. You can access any of the dynamic content via RSS feeds as well (news, blogs, knowledge base and forums) which is handy for our customers so they don’t have to come back to the site or wait for email to keep up to date on what’s going on with the components they’re using. We’ve been working hard on putting together more rich media such as video tours and feature highlights in the form of small Flash movies that we put together using Camtasia, we’re going to be expanding and creating more and more of this content through the fall. Likely the new videos will be more technical and implementation specific, more like “how to” videos for developers.
That’s it for my website update. Please send me any feedback or ideas you may have! Thanks:)

technorati tags:website, nitobi, design, redesign, launch, www.nitobi.com, marketing, drupal, rss

Blogged with Flock

Posted in AJAX, Business, Usability – HCI | No Comments »

BarCampVancouver Wrap Up

August 29th, 2006

I thinkby most accounts BarCamp Vancouver was great success! About 120 attendees, dozens of great sessions, a pre-bbq, great location, great coffee, decent wifi, a photo walk, dj and turn tables, break-even, great organizers and 2 kegs of free beer.

Big thanks to all the organizers, Bill and WorkSpace!

I managed to catch a bunch of different sessions, Jason Billingsley of ElasticPath had an interesting talk on SEO and the longtail. I took some kind of random notes here:

Many want to be number for one”digital camera”
but there’s a lot of money to be made for “sony 5mp digital slr”
it’s very hard to become number for digital camera
if you put together a 4 keyphrase you’re further along the buying process
dig throough your logs to come up with the long tail list
keyword generation tool Jason will post this on his blog
they compete against IBM, MS, Oracle, but they are very slow to move on keywords so they got lucky
EP has baked alot of this baked into their platform
CSS vs Tables…CSS is better because:

spiders get to content quicker
your keywords are higher in the page
this creates better content to code ratio

30 keywords is the max (they use 15)

title is the most important

urls / mod rewrite to ensure clean URLS with real words, stay away from parameters

for title keep you company name at the back, put your products

marketing sherpa – landing page guidelines,

organic results get 2.5 times the clicks, organic llinks get 30% more conversions

linking is very important, links are like votes

title tags inside the href

create good content that people want to know about and will link to

google only indexes the first 100k of code – look at sitepoint.com article

BarCamp Vancouver This Friday

August 22nd, 2006

[Update] Please add/suggestion sessison here http://barcamp.org/BarcampTopics so people can start to collaborate.

Just a quick note from the BarCamp organizers to pass on some plans and news about the upcoming event. We’re all very psyched to be part of the first BarCamp Vancouver, and hope you are too.

*** If You Can’t Come, Please Remove Your Name From the List ***

There are currently about 12 people on the waitlist. If you can’t make it:

1. Visit http://barcamp.org/BarCampVancouverRegistry and take yourself off
the list.
2. Move the next person from the waitlist on to the list.
3. If they left an email address, send them a quick email letting them know
that they’re in.

A waitlisted person will be very appreciative.

*** BarCamp Costs and T-Shirts ***

Technically speaking, BarCamp Vancouver is free. However, we’ve got plenty of costs to cover (see our budget: http://barcamp.org/BarCampVancouverPlanning), so we’re requesting a donation of $20. Everybody who makes such a donation gets a groovy BarCamp Vancouver t-shirt (you can view a PDF of the design here: http://tinyurl.com/osh68).

We’ve only got 120 t-shirts, so if you’re picky about size, register promptly on Friday night.

*** Schedule ***

The schedule, such as it is, looks like this:

Friday Night, 6:00pm – Registration and Rooftop Barbeque at the Bryght
offices
Friday Night, Later – Camping out at WorkSpace
Saturday, 8:30am – Breakfast
Saturday, 9:00am – Scheduling the day’s sessions
Saturday, 10:00am – Sessions begin
Saturday, 6:00pm – Sessions end

A note on scheduling: We’ve done the math, and we’re pretty sure that all 120 of us won’t be able to present in 8 hours. So, if you’re not so keen on presenting, don’t feel obligated to do so. Try to pitch in in other ways: contribute to discussions, help clean up, ask an organizer if there’s an errand that needs running, and so forth. If you’re sort of keen on presenting, check the list to see if there’s somebody you can co-present with.
There may be some preliminary scheduling on Friday night, but if you’re keen to present, show up at 9:00am on Saturday morning and participate in the scheduling round-up.

*** Locations ***

The main venue for BarCamp has been generously donated by WorkSpace (http://www.abetterplacetowork.com/). That’s suite 400 – 21 Water Street in the heart of Vancouver’s Gastown. Here’s a map: http://tinyurl.com/qoha6.
The Friday night BBQ will be at Bryght’s offices, which are literally a half-block away at suite 400 – 1 Alexander St. You actually enter around the side of the building off Carall St. Here’s a map: http://tinyurl.com/mwsbm.

The Bryght offices are not wheelchair accessible (there’s a flight of stairs between the 3rd floor elevator and the 4th floor office). If you require special access, please contact us via the BarCamp Google Group and we’ll see about arranging access.

*** Food ***

Friday Night BBQ – We’ll be providing some weiners and such to roast, plus veggie options for the non-meat eaters. If you’re not keen on those options, you’re welcome to bring real or faux beast flesh of your choosing. Beer will be provided courtesy of AdHack.

Saturday breakfast – There will be a ‘continental breakfast’ starting at 8:30am

Saturday lunch – We’re ordering pizza
Other snacks include cookies from Midnight Kitchen, iced tea and sodas from Jones Sodas, bottled water and whatever else we can scare up.

*** Sponsors ***

This event is so cheap because of our fantastic sponsors. They are:

Uniserve
Business Objects
Belkin
Nitobi
ElasticPath Software
Bryght
Raincity Studios
EQO Communications
WorkSpace
Capulet Communications
Midnight Kitchen
AdHack
Sxip
Jones Sodas
T-shirt.ca

That’s it. Any questions, hit up the Google group at http://groups.google.com/group/barcampvancouver. Otherwise, we’ll see you on Friday!

Technorati Tags: barcampvancouver,barcamp, barcampearth

Posted in Technology, Software Development, Web 2.0, Business | No Comments »

Blogging for Business at Massive

August 11th, 2006

I’m going be giving a talk about blogging as a marketing tool at next year’s Massive Technology Show.

While “blogs” (short for “web logs”) are often associated with personal commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news, many businesses are learning how blogging can improve their bottom line.

Explore a new ways for your business to use blogging to improve marketing efforts and create better customer relationships.

Where do you work?

August 9th, 2006

My old buddy Bill is getting ready to launch Workspace, and is running a pretty cool contest for a free membership, all you have to is submit photos of the crazy places you work from.

Here’s my entry;-)

Nitobi

July 28th, 2006

After 6 years of enduring a less than marketable name which I shall not mention, we’re now the Nitobi. I’m extremely excited and passionate about the name, the logo but most of all the slogan “built for people”. We’re truly making progress in creating a more usable web.

Dave and Alexei have comments about where the name from.

The response for the community has been great, everyone likes it. Thanks for the public compliments Boris and Dave.

Technorati Tags: nitobi, eba, branding, communication, marketing, ajax

Posted in Business | 2 Comments »

BarCamp Vancouver looks like it’s going to be fun

July 28th, 2006

Megan Cole – my blog / Raincity Studios – [email protected] – How To Be A Sponge… or… How to embrace this new, very public life… Considering my fellow comrades, I am but a wee rookie. I’ll be the one soaking up all I can and blogging and vlogging it all. Oo – I’ll show y’all how to put back 12 Guinness in a single sitting.

Just one of the many wonderful Vancouver techies attending BarCamp vancouver. In other news we need sponsors. So step up to the plate;-) And let me know how we can work something out. There’s going to be one hundred of Vancouver’s best, brightest and most influential technologists and vocal bloggers there being exposed to your brand!

UPDATE: BarCamp Vancouver is Full! The 90th registrant was:

Kate Trgovac – Uniserve Communications Corp – Sr. Product Manager

Looks like Uniserve and ElasticPath are going to be sponsoring along side Nitobi, Bryght and Capulet. and WorkSpace .Woot!

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcampvancouver, vancouver, sponsor

Posted in Technology, Software Development, Web 2.0, Business | 1 Comment »

Steve Rubel – Micro Persuasions

June 30th, 2006

Steve Rubel lead a very interesting discussion about blogging, PR, marketing and advertising.

What should fortune 500 marketers do? How can marketers and PR people best interact with bloggers. Answers and input from the audience:

Listen to customers and community
Darren Barefoot : demonstrate that you’ve read their blog
As a blogger don’t be an ass everytime you get a pitch

These aren’t blogging specifc but common sense and good points

try to be helpful and build relationships

put up a wiki or a platform where real people can talk about your company, product or service. open honest communication, don’t put marketing hacks in.

Southwest Airlines is the example of a company getting right, Chlorox is getting wrong.

Less than 5% of the audience reads corporate blogs (outside of google, yahoo or msft)

Boris mann: product images, permalinks and personality are important for bloggers to link to.

Make it easy don’t send a word doc with 18 questions, send a survey where results can then be incoroporated into blogs

Have passionate users of your product is better than passionate marketers, it’s risky though

People have built BS detectors and know when they’re being marketed too, remember people have these detectors and stay in tune with your own

Give up control it’s the only way to do it these days

Improve the product not the pitch

People are passionate about everyting, or for every product there’s a passionate user group

Think about hacking marketing, don’t just use adwords. Be creative. Simplyfired.com was a neat marketing campaigng to promote simplyhired.com.

Character blogs don’t work so well because you can’t have a relationship with Mickey Mouse, but you could with Steve Jobs for example.

Technorati Tags: gnomedex, micropersuasion, steverubel, marketing, blog, blogging, pr

Posted in Technology, Web 2.0, Business | 3 Comments »