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 February 19th, 2008
Web agencies like topLingo – working five, ten, twenty projects at a time – need a cheap, easy, secure and online way to manage tasks and milestones. They also need a way to collaborate with internal and external team members (including clients), set varying authorization levels, and provide an accessible repository for project related files.
Basecamp from 37signals does all that.
What’s the buzz about Basecamp? It’s intuitive, affordable, highly functional, secure, web hosted and accessible. It comes with impossible to miss tutorials on screens that the user hasn’t yet added content to, putting help resources where and when they’re needed most.
Basecamp is priced on a monthly subscription basis. It’s worth checking out. Learn more.
 December 13th, 2007
With great fanfare, Steve Jobs told the world the one of the biggest innovations of the iphone was bringing the “real” internet to a mobile device for the first time. No more junior, stripped down websites, with the iPhone you can view entire original websites as they were intended to be viewed.
Because the iPhone did not ship with the ability to run third party native applications, Jobs boldly told the development community they should build web 2.0 applications that would be just as good as native applications. Than Apple release development guidelines detailing how developers could build custom web applications formatted perfectly for the iPhone.
Thousands of web applications have sprung up for the iPhone, many of them very useful and well done. But these are custom applications that only run on the iPhone. What about the rest of the mobile market? What ever happened to the “real” internet? The point that you didn’t need to develop any kind of special or stripped down version of a site just to view it on a mobile phone? Apple has fallen into its own bear trap. I’m not complaining too much, being an iPhone user myself, but the rest of the mobile world is getting a little bit of a rip off with more development time being put into iphone specific web applications.
If you’re a business and you are looking to make some noise in the mobile market, should you create an iPhone custom web app? Probably, especially if you believe your target customer is likely to own an iPhone, but don’t forget about the rest of the mobile universe. It’s still a great deal bigger than the iPhone market, at least for now.
December 12th, 2007
The hot buzzword in 2008 will be social platform. Rising social network star Facebook got the ball rolling this year when they announced their open development platform which allowed software developers to create custom applications to run inside Facebook. This has turned out to be wildly popular and other social network sites are following the leader. Myspace has been working on a platform and more recently, news that LinkedIn, the popular social network for business professionals is also creating an application platform.
Social networks will become much more than networks in 2008 as more social platforms arrive, allowing users access to more features and marketers access to more of the so-called “social graph“.
October 2nd, 2007
San Jose based Adobe Systems is a legend in Silicon Valley, most famous for their dominant Photoshop application. Adobe is also a leader in desktop publishing and has a strong competitor in online video editing as well. Now Adobe is stepping into a whole new world, the world of online Web 2.0 applications. Adobe has purchased Virtual Ubiquity and their online word processor Buzzword. This puts Adobe in direct competition with Google and Zoho for the online office productivity market.
Traditionally a master of the desktop, it shows a great deal of savvy and guts for Adobe to move into the online market. What makes this even more interesting in the Buzzword word processor is based on Adobe’s Flash technology. Adobe is playing up the benefits of Flash, saying it is more flexible and powerful than Ajax, which is the current favorite web 2.0 technology. Adobe’s AIR allows Flash applications to run offline or online, which will prove to be a critical factor as most web 2.0 apps do not work offline yet. The Zoho word processor does work offline but Google Docs does not.
A question everyone should be asking is, where is Microsoft in all this? As of yet, nowhere to be found. Microsoft clings to their venerable Office suite, continuing to bet on the desktop. It may be a long time before web 2.0 supplants the desktop application, but I am surprised to not see Microsoft at least put a toe into this water.
 March 7th, 2007
Recent security holes with PHP will be undoubtedly under-reported. Why? Because it’s no fun to pick on Open Source code … there’s no Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Open Source has no figurehead that the contrarians can throw rotten tomatoes at. Weak.
Funny how MS Office can have some obscure issue with email attachments and the ill-informed press (both tech & mainstream) loudly compose the epitaph for MS’s corporate tombstone. Less often, Jobs announces the latest iGadget and those same reporters predict with unflinching certainty that Apple is overextending and won’t be around in 2 quarters. But PHP has several major security holes that affect half the world’s servers and I’ve seen one tech notice in a small (but reliable) security newsletter. Guess what? I tested out the holes, since they are so easy to replicate, and they do exist.
So what gives? I think it boils down to the simple concept that it’s not cool to talk smack about Open Source. Along the same lines you’ll probably never hear anybody say anything negative about hybrids, or Volkswagen bugs, or Tom Brokaw, or PBS. There are some things in our society that somehow get a natural coating of critic-resistant teflon and that doesn’t seem fair.
I wonder what the criteria is for receiving that coating. The only reason I’m asking, of course, is because I’m jealous and I want it.
March 6th, 2007
 A fast way to create your family tree online and stay in touch this web applicaiton is so web 2.0.
www.geni.com/tree/start
March 5th, 2007
| Title: |
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Pay Per Click E-Marketing:
Why It’s OK to Buy Your Way to the Top! |
| Summary: |
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topLingo showcased everything you need to know about Search Engine Pay Per Click Advertising. The players, the costs, the strategies and the do’s and don’ts. |
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Wednesday Feb 21, 2007 |
| Presenters: |
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Mike Glezos – Principal
Mari Catala – E-Marketing Manager |
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14 Min. |
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CLICK HERE TO VIEW ONLINE
(12.7MB Flash)
Or for your iPod:
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD
(22MB M4V)
March 2nd, 2007
A few days after I posted a blog about Google’s online apps waging war on Microsoft more big news comes from a major player in our field. Adobe is taking it’s flagship product Photoshop online.
Adobe recognizes that the future of software is to be a hybrid offering both online and installed versions. They’re also following the lead of companies like Google who benefit from ad supported online services and subsequently are bringing both Photoshop and the new Adobe Remix (a web based video editing tool) to the internet. Released dates are scheduled within next 6 months.
To quote Borat “NIIIIIIIICCCCCCEEE!”
Full story from CNN
February 14th, 2007
To quote Jerry Maguire’s mentor Dicky Fox “If you don’t love everybody, you can’t sell anybody” and if you love sales … you can’t live without SalesForce.com.
The price tag can be a bit steep depending on the features needed but entry starts around $700 for 5 users per year with the next level at $600 per user per year. But forget about the price.
The real value of this online sales and marketing automation solution is what it accomplishes. It’s 100% configurable to your business logic, integrates with almost any technology out there, includes comprehensive analytics and within one day you can up and running without any software to install.
I love it, and use it daily.
www.SalesForce.com
February 13th, 2007
These online video editing websites seem to be springing up right & left. One of the coolest ones I’ve run into is Veoh . You can submit your videos and Veoh auto-converts them to various online-appropriate formats, including iPod size & resolution. Then their site syndicates your video out to MySpace, YouTube, and Google Video for you, saving you several steps in the process of posting embarrassing phone-captured vids of your drunken roommates. Hypothetically.
February 8th, 2007
As rapid application development like Ruby On Rails increases in popularity clients with strict deadlines will be requesting more and more of this type of development. The obvious upside is meeting shorter deadlines and deliverables but don’t forget to weigh the cost of doing things quick. Applications developed rapidly in Rails face possible expansion issues, feature limitations and because the technology is so new website owners may experience application bugs and hard to find quality developers. Know thy risks.
January 31st, 2007
The best way to explain the benefit of AJAX on a website for an end user is to see it in action. Check out this Microsoft site with some perfect examples of AJAX in action. Click the samples on the left.
http://ajax.asp.net/ajaxtoolkit
January 22nd, 2007
A top 10 contender for any web developers blog list, TechCrunch is a great resource for keeping in touch with the new and the now of internet products and companies. Subscribe to their RSS feed and pay attention it if you have any interest at all in Web 2.0 or web apps that are new and cool.
www.TechCrunch
January 3rd, 2007
 Maybe it’s because I’m bad at math and saved by using spreadsheet formula functions or maybe it’s because I’m just an “attention to detail dude” and the thought of throwing important data into a word or plain text document scares me. Either way I’ve always been a spreadsheet fan.
Now enter Google Docs & Spreadsheets, an online spreadsheet application that has most of the functionality of Excel, sharing and editing with others in real time, editing from anywhere in the world and massive import and export features all of which elevated me into a much bigger spreadsheet supporter. Go Team! In fact, I find myself using the Google system on a weekly basis for both clients during correspondence and internally with the gang for collaboration. Word up to the online spreadsheet!
http://spreadsheets.google.com
January 2nd, 2007
Welcome to 2007 and Happy New Year! Lots of great opportunities in the web development world this year and just like each year before it some cool technologies and ideas will emerge and some will fade away. And although personally I prefer to stay on the cutting edge of technology, the reality is that my business and my business clientele is about one or two steps behind. Not a bad thing of course, in fact staying a step behind helps reduce the risk of investing into any unproven technology or concept thus wasting time and money. So, with that in mind here are some things that we predict will be a hot topic for both our fortune 500 and small entrepreneurial clients in 2007:
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2 Venture