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Vol 1, #3, March 31, 2009 |
Clements has ten years of experience in advertising and digital marketing. Prior to Facebook, Louise was the vice president of digital properties at Rogers Media where she lead strategic development, revenue, and audience growth for all Roger Media’s consumer brands. Before Rogers Media, Louise worked at several other leading companies such as AOL, Sympatico, and Bell Globemedia. Top of Page Google making website design easier JavaRebel 2.0 expected to pay for itself According to ZeroTurnaround, the company looks to build upon the success of the first version with JavaRebel 2.0’s expanded feature set, easy installation, and dramatically improved performance. While the cost savings are beneficial in any economic climate, developers report results of another nature. “We’re hearing that the folks who used to look with envy at this feature in dynamic languages like Ruby and Python, are feeling much more comfortable with their Java applications now,” says ZeroTurnaround founder Jevgeni Kabanov. “They’re enjoying the quick feedback and the incremental development techniques that flow naturally from a lightweight coding style like this.”
The new product is priced for the cost-conscious and according to customer feedback, they expect most firms to see the tool pay for itself within the first month of use, and offer a 30-day no-questions-asked money-back policy. Top of Page Mosaic launches interactive services team "This is a natural evolution of our service offering," says Aidan Tracey, President, Mosaic XM. "For the past five years, Mosaic has been actively engaged in building online extensions of offline brand campaigns for some of the largest brand companies in the world, such as P&G, Coca-Cola, Mattel and General Mills." Mosaic Interactive has been formed by merging Mosaic's existing in-house digital hardware services team with leading independent web design agency, "We've worked seamlessly with Mosaic on a great deal of business over the past five years," says Sean Patrick, president, Patrick Paradisi Inc. "Considering the amount of work we regularly share as well as Mosaic's continued growth, it's a very exciting time to be joining the Mosaic team." The new Mosaic Interactive services group combines their strategic and creative design proficiency with Mosaic's extensive offline field hardware technology experience at retail locations, events, bars and community locations across North America. In addition to the creation of Mosaic Interactive, Mosaic XM also announced the launch of the Mosaic Brand Management System™ (BMS™), a proprietary social media management platform designed to streamline the integration of offline and online efforts. This unique platform makes social media marketing campaigns significantly easier for marketers and their agency partners to manage. "As we all know, technology has changed the marketing landscape and forever altered the way brands interact with consumers," says Tracey. "The opportunity for brands to use technology to amplify their efforts in an extremely cost-effective fashion will only grow, as offline and online continue to become more seamlessly integrated." Top of Page Yahoo! widgets bring the internet to TV screensIn an attempt to bridge the web/television divide, Yahoo and Intel have introduced “TV Widgets”. Based on simple screen icons, it will be showing up in a range of products this year from flat-panel TVs to DVD players. The first product to hit stores is the Samsung LED 7100 Series which is available at Best Buy. This TV is equipped with Yahoo widgets, mini-applications that connect directly to the web using Intel’s Media Processor CE 3100. Other companies, including Sony, are expected to follow suit and offer their own flat-panel HDTVs, set top boxes or DVD players based on the Yahoo-Intel widget platform. So far only four widgets, all Yahoo branded, are available: Yahoo News, Yahoo Weather, yahoo Finance and Yahoo Flickr. By pressing one button on the TV remote, users can load the widgets toolbar – a customizable, scrollable horizontal set of icons located at the bottom of the screen. Widgets can be undocked to see more detail without interrupting ongoing TV viewing. Most widgets will be free but some providers such as Comcast will charge for additional services through widgets. Top of Page Maple Leaf adds blogging to ongoing PR strategy Maple Leaf Foods has had significant dialogue with Canadians since the recall and listeriosis outbreak of August 2008 and this blog will allow them to maintain a direct and candid conversation with interested Canadians. Food safety will be increasingly in the news and is a matter of high interest and importance to everyone. On the blog, Maple Leaf will provide updates on the company's progress towards food safety leadership, address questions and topics related to Listeria management and other food safety concerns and respond to events as they happen. Top of Page Google ups the search ante with updated features The first allows a refining of search to better understand associations and related concepts related to your search. “If you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need,” Google explains on their blog. The second feature allows for longer snippets (text extracts containing the keywords) when users input queries of three words or more. The objective is to provide more context to help the user determine if the site is worth visiting. “When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page.” It also has new features into Insights for Search, which allows users find out how often keyword combinations are searched, where they are most often searched, and whether their popularity is seasonal. These include new data sources, category suggestions and specific geographic regions. Top of Page Skype leads the way in international call traffic "Only five years after its launch, Skype has emerged as the largest provider of cross-border voice communications in the world," TeleGeography analyst Stephan Beckert said. TeleGeography estimates that 384 billion minutes' worth of international calls were made in 2008, up 12 percent on the year before, but revenues were flat due to falling call prices. Skype, owned by eBay, has traditionally been seen as an enemy by telecoms carriers who fear further revenue losses through calls made via the Internet. But recently the company has begun forging partnerships with the likes of Hutchison Whampoa's 3 in Britain. Mobile carriers in particular have little to lose through consumers using Skype for international calls, as few non-business cross-border calls are made from mobiles. 3 says it has seen an increase in traffic since launching a Skype phone. 200 sales and marketing positions cut at Google For companies in hyper-growth such as Google has experienced, "it's almost impossible to get everything right," Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Business Development Omid Kordestani wrote in a blog post. "In some areas we've created overlapping organizations which not only duplicate effort but also complicate the decision-making process," Kordestani said. "That makes our teams less effective and efficient than they should be. In addition, we over-invested in some areas in preparation for the growth trends we were experiencing at the time." This marks only the second significant headcount reduction in Google's history. The first came in January, when the company let go approximately 100 recruiters. Top of Page Webhost pioneer Netfirms expands data centre, officeLeading web host, domain name and cloud host provider Netfirms, Inc. of Markham, ON has completed its office space expansion and move into their new data center and headquarters allowing for continued expansion in staffing and hosting solutions to meet the opportunities found in this market. The new office provides over 200 per cent more space to handle Netfirms' growing team. This expansion, the fifth since 1998, includes a hiring campaign to attract a range of new positions in customer care, marketing, software innovation and senior management. In addition to the new office space, and hiring campaign, Netfirms will also be launching a 40,000 server capacity Tier 1 Datacenter in June. The current operational mission critical datacenter serves the banking industry and will be upgraded to provide further features for Netfirms customers. "We are in a challenging time, when trust, security and peace of mind is increasingly important to our clients,” says Thomas Savundra, Netfirms' CEO and founder. “Our reputation for a solid service offering coupled with our strong incentives we have seen a tremendous growth in all of our services and look to support more small and medium businesses in the coming year." Netfirms offers domain registrations, site building tools, grid web hosting, e-commerce and mission critical business email solutions. Top of Page |
 Upcoming Events 
"Who's Zooming Who?April 1, 2009 Toronto, Ontario
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