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Vol 1, #16, June 30, 2009 |
CNW launches new tool for PR professionals CNW MediaRoom is a new product that gives public relations professionals the ability to update their online newsroom anytime and on their own without the need for programming skills and without impacting the rest of the corporate website. Top of Page eBRIDGE Software has unveiled a new website with more interactive features for its customers and visitors. Leveraging its 16 years of experience and knowledge in the Integration as a Service marketplace, eBRIDGE hopes its new ‘eBridge Online’ site will bring its software as a service (SaaS) offering to a wider audience. eBridge Online allows prospects to browse through the thousands of existing EDI, CRM, Webstore and Supply Chain Management (SCM) connections that the company has built over the past 16 years. Features of the new site include a ‘snapshot’ window called eBridge Statistics that shows prospects which eBRIDGE connections are being used by companies similar to theirs. In addition, the new eBridge Online website allows visitors and prospects to:
“Using various Web 2.0 tools, our new site allows us to build and support a solid community of users," said Dave Malda, eBRIDGE Marketing Coordinator. “We wanted to demonstrate our commitment to our customers, and our 16 plus years of experience to the small and medium-sized business owners who are our prospects. We invite all prospective clients to join our online community so they can freely review and explore what other customers have done. It's the best way to show them that we understand their business, and that our connections can help them to grow.” By offering visitors a ‘behind the scenes’ glimpse of the thousands of connections that eBRIDGE's ePortal handles every day, the company hopes to reassure prospective customers that they will not be the first to use a particular connection that they need to do business. The site's new level of transparency makes it easy for anyone to see the number of documents transacted by any specific connection, whether it's to Home Depot for EDI, eBay for webstore connections, or FedEx for supply chain management connections. Top of Page Quebec infrastructure project on Web 2.0 A new blog will provide everything there is to know about Quebec’s Mercier Bridge rehabilitation project. The Jacques Cartier and Champlain Bridges Incorporated (JCCBI) and the Ministère des Transports du Québec (MTQ) have launched an interactive blog featuring updates on the rehabilitation work to the Mercier Bridge (mercierbridge.ca.) The initiative represents a first for Quebec and will allow bridge users to stay informed and speak their minds on the largest bridge rehabilitation project ever undertaken in Canada. “The bridge rehabilitation is an engineering challenge we want everyone in Quebec to be able to follow,” says JCCBI General Manager Glen Carlin. “The mercierbridge.ca blog allows us to present the rehabilitation process while providing the means to remind users of the provisions that have been put in place to ease any inconvenience.” “Blogs are an effective means for creating dialogue with citizens and responding to their questions,” says André Girard, Vice President, Communications for the Federal Bridge Corporation Limited and the person responsible for making blog posts to mercierbridge.ca. “The tool will allow us to very quickly bring traffic impediments to peoples’ attention before they occur.” In addition to blog posts, internet users will find explanatory photos and videos on the rehabilitation work. A camera will allow web visitors to monitor traffic in real time in South Shore direction. In order to be among the first to get news, users can also subscribe to a newsletter, an RSS feed and to Twitter. Top of Page RIM aims to cross categories with BlackBerry Tour The new model, called the BlackBerry Tour, falls somewhere between the BlackBerry Curve, which has proved very popular with consumers, and the BlackBerry Bold, which RIM has aimed at high-end corporate users. It is what RIM calls a “world phone,” which means it can easily access voice and data services on networks outside the user's home country. This has proven popular with business users in the past. To appeal to the retail market, the Tour is loaded with multimedia features similar to those found in the BlackBerry Curve and Pearl, including a photo and video camera and media player. Unveiling products that cross customer categories is proving increasingly important to Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM and it is continuing to make deeper inroads into the broader retail market. Top of Page Open Text adds social media to ECM Suite Open Text has announced another major part of its Enterprise 2.0 strategy with a new software offering, Open Text Social Media, the latest addition to the Open Text ECM Suite. The solution offers a natural and intuitive social media application that gives people new ways of working productively together through the web and mobile devices, while also meeting security and compliance demands by being integrated with a company's wider ECM system. According to Open Text, traditional tools such as email are ill-suited for the task of connecting people in social networks, leading many employees to embrace consumer-oriented social media technologies, with or without corporate approval. While these tools can boost productivity, their use leads to concerns around security, intellectual property protection, knowledge preservation and compliance. Open Text Social Media, for the first time, gives organizations a way to address these concerns by marrying social media technology to an enterprise-ready content management infrastructure. The new solution adds to Open Text's collaboration products offered in the Open Text ECM Suite, providing a combination of document centric collaboration solutions and a new solution that connects people to people to content in social networks designed for the enterprise. Open Text Social Media also meets the demands of today's increasingly mobile knowledge workers who demand mobile solutions that enable them to access key corporate systems. For social media solutions to be truly successful they need to provide a rich mobile experience. Open Text Social Media provides this with native mobile applications for Apple iPhone and RIM BlackBerry devices initially, with additional device support planned. “A virtual and mobile workforce and the explosion of user-generated content have created a demand for a new model for enterprise collaboration. Open Text Social Media builds on social media applications to deliver a secure online environment where employees, customers, and partners can meet, share, network, and experience the power of collective knowledge,” says John Myers, General Manager, Social Media at Open Text. “This new component of the Open Text ECM Suite enables organizations to benefit from these new ways of working together within the overall context of the organization's records and content management strategy.” “Like most federal government departments, we are very email centric and keeping people up to speed involves sending project updates and supporting documents to already overloaded inboxes,” says Art Monette of Canada's Federal Judicial Affairs, one of the organizations beta testing the solution. “Open Text Social Media offers us central project sites with user profiles, discussion feeds, documents and wikis - everything in one place to keep everyone up to date. This alone is a huge timesaver. The ability to set up user profiles with photos and background information makes a big difference in helping people from cross-functional teams in different locations to work better together.” Key features of Open Text Social Media include:
Telnic Limited, the registry operator for the new communications-focused .tel top level domain has released TelStats, its free web traffic measurement service for owners of .tel domains, in beta. “As .tel domains are not traditional web pages, until now it has not been possible to measure web traffic of a .tel domain,” says Henri Asseily, CTO and Chief Strategist at Telnic. “With the release of TelStats, .tel owners can now add the understanding of who is visiting them over the web as well as how they choose to contact them through the .tel.” The new TelStats service enables .tel domain owners to access information on web visits to their .tel domains and import the data into their favourite analytics tools. .tel information has been logged since May 27 and will be stored on a daily basis moving forward. .tel owners can log in using the TelFriends associated with the relevant domain to prevent unauthorized access and then select a period of time to measure. The system will retrieve all the .tel domain names associated with the TelFriends account, providing a log for one, multiple, or all .tel domains. Analysis can be performed at specific times of days as well as over longer periods of time. The service is provided as with other Telnic offerings using open source code, enabling .tel owners to call the log script programmatically and feed it into their own front-end solutions. The current version of the service is in beta, and logs are provided in the standard Apache log format that can be parsed by any web log analyzer to display the data graphically. The list of popular web analyzer tools is on wiki page referenced from the web form. These logs do not include traffic to the domain from Telnic and third-party applications looking information directly up in the DNS. Top of Page SIRIUS invites Canadians to Face the Music SIRIUS Canada has launched its national SIRIUS Face the Music Tour, a “Name That Tune” style challenge that will test Canadians’ music trivia knowledge at kiosks and online. The winner will receive an ultimate concert experience for two in New York or Los Angeles. The tour kicked off last week with a media charity challenge today at the SIRIUS Satellite Radio Stage at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre.As well as testing Canadians’ knowledge of artists and song titles from a wide variety of music genres, from the 1960s to today, the tour will also highlight SIRIUS’ offerings including sports, news, talk, entertainment and commercial-free music content. Additionally, Canadians can play along online at home at www.facethemusictour.com. “Music lovers are often also music trivia buffs, and we love the idea of putting them to the test in this fun way,” said Janet Langille, Vice President, Marketing, SIRIUS Canada Inc. “The SIRIUS Face the Music Tour not only challenges Canadians’ musical knowledge, it also allows them to discover new artists and genres they might not be familiar with and gives them a chance to win amazing prizes. It’s also a great introduction to all the other great sports, news, talk and entertainment content available on SIRIUS.” Those competing in the SIRIUS Face the Music Challenge, whether at a kiosk or online, will be faced with music-related questions on everything from 60s Pop Hits and 80s Hair Bands to Canadian Indie and 60s and 70s Country. The SIRIUS Face the Music Tour will make stops at Ottawa’s Canada Day Celebrations, the Calgary Stampeders home opener on Canada Day, the Collingwood Elvis Festival, the Merrit Mountain Music Festival, the Edmonton Grand Prix, Whistler’s Mountain West Music Fest, and Live Nation Concerts among others. Top of Page Elatu.ca named one of world's best employment sites “We're tremendously pleased with this endorsement," says Kim Peters, President of Eluta Inc. “Especially coming from the people who know our industry best. It’s a badge of honour for Eluta.ca, which just celebrated its third anniversary.” The WEDDLE's guide has been in publication for almost 15 years and is considered the industry's gold standard. “Our Top 100 employment sites are the elite of the job board industry,” says Weddle’s Publisher Peter Weddle. “They have the strongest brands, the best services and the most distinguished track records of the sites we’ve seen on the Web. Are there other good sites out there? Of course, but the Top 100 selectees are truly in a class of their own.” Top of Page Real estate sales meets the mobile age Homes on Mobile Phones, a subsidiary of Airborne Mobile Inc., a leading full-service mobile media company, has partnered with Sutton Group Realty Services Ltd, to offer agents its innovative new mobile real estate product. The mobile functionality offered by Homes on Mobile Phones will provide more than 8,700 Sutton realtors with the competitive edge and superior service necessary for selling more properties to a new generation of tech-savvy clients in today’s real estate market. Homes on Mobile Phones offers a comprehensive mobile marketing package and selling tool to real estate professionals for their prospective buyers. Homes on Mobile Phones helps real estate agents sell properties with a number of easy-to-use mobile features, providing potential home buyers with:
All these features are available on virtually all mobile phones and provide an immediate and in-depth inside look into a home, reaching clients when they are most interested - curbside or in front of a page of listings. “We are thrilled to be working with Sutton agents in taking the real estate industry mobile,” said Andy Nulman, President and CMO of Airborne Mobile, parent company of Homes on Mobile Phones. “And we're incredibly excited to see Homes on Mobile Phones become the tool-of-the-trade for real estate professionals.” “Sutton is committed to customer-driven services and creative business initiatives, so choosing to work with Homes on Mobile Phones is both a logical and necessary step in our mobile-centric lives," said Cary Shivrattan, Head of Franchise Relations, Sutton Group Realty Services, Ltd. Top of Page CTC sends bloggers cross-country Have laptop, will travel. That's the mantra for two bloggers and their interactive pilot project with the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC), " Canada is a Big Place" blog, which launched on the summer solstice June 21. As they travel around Canada, the pair will be blogging and uploading photos and video daily to inspire fellow travellers to follow in their footsteps. All material will be available to media rights-free. Victoria Revay, a freelancer from Vancouver, BC, and Carolyne Weldon, a Montréal, QC-based Francophone freelance photographer and writer, are the lucky pair who set off from Montréal yesterday on a seven-week odyssey across Canada. This truly interactive Web 2.0 pilot project is a first for the CTC and is integrated with CTC's recent LOCALS KNOW campaign which aims to introduce new hot spots to Canadians and people visiting the country. CTC will host the bloggers' adventures on its CTC Media Centre website. (Watch Revay and Weldon tell you about it themselves.) Join the conversation at www.canadaisabigplace.ca and on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Top of Page Launch of .eco app to empower global community Empowering individuals, businesses, and organizations to make informed environmental choices is the key idea behind a globally-developed bid for the .eco (Dot Eco) Internet extension launched by Big Room Inc.. |
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