iPhone Applications hit 10k & my top5

Posted on by Samuel Lavoie
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Originally launched on July 11th, the App Store have reach the 10k applications that can be downloaded. With around 25% of them for free this is plenty of them to fill your shiny iPhone. That’s pretty amazing taking into consideration that the iPhone hardware limit you to 144 applications… which I wont rant about, its pretty decent for a 600 mhz machine (under clocked around 440mhz).

As I said in July the Application are the killer app (literally) of the iPhone and it success can’t be denied as it’s now the third most sold cellphone in the US. The future of the iPhone is exciting, not only a cellphone or even a smartphone but a new platform :)

Appstore Application Analytics for November 30th 2008

Appstore Application Analytics for November 30th 2008

Top5 iPhone 3G App

My humble top applications I’m using almost everyday: Continue reading →

iPhone 2.2 update

Posted on by Samuel Lavoie
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The yesterday rumors were right about the upcoming 2.2 firmware update for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. With the yesterday release of a small iTunes 8.0.2 update, the chance of this 2.2 release was greatly anticipated by website such as macrumors. One of the best blog covering all about mac stuff, from a very dedicated blogger. They are primarily known for their great Mac Buyer’s Guide, the guide to check every time you want to buy apple products.

Cool new features

  • enhancement to Maps application including Google Street View (not Canada)
  • improved stability for Safari
  • better html email handling
  • downloading Podcast directly from the iPhone
  • the ability to turn on/off the keyboard auto-correction
Safari on iPhone 2.2

www.samuellavoie.com on Safari iPhone 2.2

What’s missing

  • copy/paste within all the iPhone’s application

Don’t forget to check out the new Google Mobile App with Voice recognition… it’s simply amazing. Yes I’m a big fan of the iPhone (and my MacbookPro and my Cinema Display) and you should expect more blog post about my switch to the Apple side in the near future ;)

Quebec is an information-age laggard

Posted on by Samuel Lavoie
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Quebec is an information-age laggard and we need to fix this problem. As a group of business bloggers said in an open letter to the Quebec Government: Quebec need a digital plan. Business need to have the tools to sell online to the Quebec population. As a fact actually only 52% of Quebec small and medium business have their own website. This is a huge space of the economy where our companies aren’t doing any business, so international and especially US based enterprise are taking this virtual space. Statistics from Quebec stat agency SOM Recherches et Sondages, reveal that only half of the $300 million spend by Quebecers online went to non Canadian websites. Continue reading →

How to Own the SERPs

Posted on by Samuel Lavoie
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Personal Branding is something too much people, even in the Marketing space, are missing to play with. First you need to realize that people will search for you whatever you do against it. There’s no place to hide on the Internets so why not use this powerful tool to promote yourself, your passions or whatever that make sense for you.

So the goal is to have all the Google results related to you when people are searching for you. Can be done also for a company, an association, etc. So let me tell you the secret! after the break.

Personal Branding in Google

samuel lavoie query on Google.com

samuel lavoie query on Google.com

The trick to Own the SERPs

If you’re not able to take the time and only want a quick fix, there’s not, like for SEO and this site isn’t for you, really.
So be part of your community of interest, have a presence in those places and be heard. This is commonly name as Social Media, but really its just like in real life; making connections and enter conversations.

This personal blog is of course one of my ways to be heard and as you can see with this google query there’s plenty of them ;) What’s yours?

Accessibility worth it for businesses

Posted on by Samuel Lavoie
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Bruce Lawson from Opera is right, the gap between web worker working on “traditionnal” agency and on the edge consultant isn’t going to narrow anytime soon. Web workers need to really get their hand (and their directors and the upper management team) on accessibility.

Web Accessibility and Web Standards are good for SEO

You need to get those upper managment people that web standars and accessibility are good for their business. Name it whatever you want but get the CEO buy-in as he’s going to push it down afer for you. Continue reading →

Why use Microformats from a business perspective

Posted on by Samuel Lavoie
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Greg Wolejko wrote a post giving reasons why to jump in the Microformats wagon for entrepreneurs and business owner. Some really good reason and I’m more than happy to see more conversations going on about Microformats in a business way. It’s too often only geeky stuff.

Better markup – more meaningful markup allowing more semantic info to be added, enhancing quality of your site.

Saves time – Microformats are standardized ways of adding markup to a specific kinds of informations (events, contact information, blog posts) and therefore remove the need of coming up with own markup thus saving time.

Staying ahead of competition – the whole Semantic Web thing just gains momentum so using Microformats is the new cool thing to do (look at BBC or Yahoo or even last.fm).

Provide value – easy to use as changes are only done in the presentation layer (read: HTML markup) but benefits go beyond adding enhanced markup.

I will also add that Microformats and Web Semantic help you build future proof websites, which is for any company with already an aging website a concern.

Firefox world record

Posted on by Samuel Lavoie
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Firefox 3 Download day 2008 badge

A quick note about the soon to be release Firefox 3 version of the Open-source browser. I currently run the latest version of Firefox 3 and everything is smooth after a buggy last release on OSX.

Hope we can raise the bar to a 20% worldwide browser share for Firefox soon!

Silverlight, the Microsoft RIA, Keynote at the W3Québec meetup

Posted on by Samuel Lavoie
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This monday, my friend at the W3Qc association, Benoit Piette invited Laurent Duveau from the GUVSM to give a keynote about the Microsoft Rich Internet Application product; Silverlight.

Here’s my little recap of the entire keynote

Silverlight is a RIA brought by Microsoft. It’s a plugin, like Flash that users can install in their browser. However it’s still a beta, version 2 will be release in 2008 and a mobile version is under development. The current beta, version 2 beta came out in April 2008.

How Silverlight work

Silverlight use the .Net framework ACL directly inside the browser client. This way .Net programmers can use the languages they are already use to, #C, VB, Ruby, etc. The user on his side just receive Html/JavaScript the same way JSP technology works.

Silverlight use the XAML a declarative XML based language by Microsoft. Continue reading →

What to expect from Digg in the near future

Posted on by Samuel Lavoie
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A quick post about some of the new features coming out the #2 Digg Town hall and my personal thought :

  • Announcement of a more integrated Facebook feature, integrated friends.
  • They are currently working on a new comment system. What? another redesign, I found the current one really usable.
  • Digg may implement a new system to manage micro communities inside the digg website, to more reflect the digg diversity. Thats the feature I’m personally looking too, I’m eager to see any Mixx community functionality.
  • They say that they are not working on word or url specific that user may filter, but they are working on a NSFW filter.
  • The upcoming section will have major improvements to boost the usability in the next few months, right now there’s too much submissions to go through. It will display more targeted submissions based on your and your friends activity. Again this kind of feature can boost micro community.
  • They are testing a new version for the anti dupe detector. Will detect dupes before you even fill the form for the title and description. Great feature. So they will crawl your url .. can be extend to some anti spam features too maybe with DOM inspection…
  • They are working for podcast and videos sections integration. Great! podcast are just dying right now, sadly.

That’s it : )

edit : the new comment system is up since few days and its blazing fast, great improvements in speed. All the highlights on the Digg Blog.

Intracom 08, April 29th in Quebec City

Posted on by Samuel Lavoie
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This Tuesday, I went to Quebec City, for the Intracom 08 Conferences to be a part of the Tuesday 29th panel. How to improve web development with Benoit Piette, Jean-Francois Renaud, Nathalie Berger and Guillaume Séguin.

Here is a little recap of my day

First of all, I didn’t went to the Benoit Piette’s presentation, I already saw it the day before, in the bus on our way to Quebec City. You can find the slides about the Web 2.0 Browsers battle on his website. So I went to the Aaron Marcus presentation. Continue reading →