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Vol 1, #3, March 31, 2009
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March 31, 2009




Headlines

Facebook adds new head of sales to Canadian team
Google making website design easier
JavaRebel 2.0 expected to pay for itself
Mosaic launches interactive services team
Yahoo! widgets bring the internet to TV screens
Maple Leaf adds blogging to ongoing PR strategy
Google ups the search ante with updated features
Skype leads the way in international call traffic
200 sales & marketing positions cut at Google
Webhost pioneer Netfirms expands data centre, office

Facebook adds new head of sales to Canadian team

Facebook has added Louise Clements to their team as the head of sales for Canadian. She will be responsible for setting up and managing the company’s Canadian advertising sales operations based in Toronto. Her appointment represents a key step in Facebook’s on-going commitment to Canada, and to its growing number of Canadian users and advertisers.

Clements will join Facebook on April 6 and will focus on building a team in Toronto to support the advertising agencies and marketers in Canada, who are increasingly in need of creative and relevant solutions to reach Facebook users.

“The appointment of Louise Clements as the head of sales for Canada is a reflection of our commitment to providing Canadian advertisers and marketers with the expertise and resources they need to reach millions of Facebook users in Canada, as well as our 175 million users around the world,” said Mike Murphy, vice president of sales at Facebook. “Louise Clements is a strong leader, and will combine her deep knowledge of the Canadian market with her extensive background in digital marketing to create a world-class operation in Canada.”

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
It used to be that creating a webpage was reserved for the truly tech-savvy, requiring expertise in HTML, Java, or C++ coding.

These days, it's a different story. Working with a hosting service has made things a great deal easier, as they can help you reserve a name for your site and they often provide tools to help get you set up, with minimal to zero programming experience required.

Google Services for Websites now gives you a few more tools that your hosting company can enable to help you improve your website. This expanded program includes Webmaster Tools, AdSense, Custom Search, and Site Search, making it easier to drive traffic to your site, monetize your site through the Google ad network, and add various search capabilities to help your visitors find information on your site faster
. Top of Page

JavaRebel 2.0 expected to pay for itself
With ZeroTurnaround’s release of JavaRebel 2.0 last week, Java developers will be able to see changes to their code immediately without the need for application or container restarts.

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.”

JavaRebel 2.0 supports:

  • changes to method bodies
  • changes to class structure, including adding methods, fields, constructors, changing/adding annotations and changing interfaces
  • changes to configurations in Spring, Guice, Wicket, Stripes, Tapestry 4, and Struts2, with an open API for adding further support
  • all major JVMs and containers

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
Mosaic Experiential Marketing (XM), a division of Mosaic Sales Solutions North America introduced Mosaic Interactive, a new digital extension ofMosaic XM's existing services and expertise.

"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,
Patrick Paradisi Inc.

"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 screens
In 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
In an effort to reach out to Canadian consumers, Maple Leaf Foods has launched an external company blog last week at http://blog.mapleleaf.com. The first posting, "The Journey to Food Safety Leadership", is a letter written by President and CEO, Michael McCain and the blog will also feature posts from other leaders at the Company going forward.

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
Google has rolled out two new improvements to its Google Search results pages. The first offers an expanded list of useful related searches and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions.

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
According to Reuters, eight per cent of international call traffic in 2008 used Internet calling company Skype, an increase of 41 per cent on a year earlier, according to data from communications research firm TeleGeography released on Tuesday.

"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.
Skype's paid "Skype Out" service, which lets users make calls to standard telephones, from which telecoms carriers earn money, generated 8.4 billion minutes of calls in 2008 -- about one quarter of all international Skype calls.

Skype has until now mainly targeted consumers but it announced a beta version aimed at business users on Monday.
Top of Page

200 sales and marketing positions cut at Google
Citing inefficiencies created by the company's rapid growth of the past several years, Google plans to cut approximately 200 positions globally in its sales and marketing organizations.

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, office
Leading 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



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