Archive for October 2009

Augmented Reality

Thursday, October 8th, 2009
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ar-baseball

You’ve maybe not yet heard of Augmented Reality, AR, but a simple YouTube search indicates an amazing new frontier everyone can appreciate. AR is best described as the layering of digital elements on to views of the real world, in real time. Honestly, this is not just nerd stuff.

Imagine standing on a street corner, panning the neighbourhood in front of you with your cell phone camera. At once you see your surroundings on the phone screen as usual, and additional information layered on top the live scene showing you real estate opportunities of the very building(s) you are pointing at. How? The software application on the phone uses the physical characteristics of the buildings observed as keys to fetch respective data on the units inside.

Poor Online Reputation Management

Thursday, October 8th, 2009
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If you read my earlier post about the implications of not having done search engine optimization, you’re familiar with my anecdote about looking for an auto body shop to fix my car.

I did want to look into the franchise shop I mentioned, Boyd Autobody. So, I did a search in Google and here’s what came up.

Body Autobody Search Results

Wait, what?

Boyd AutobodyYikes!!

Dear Canadians, smile! You are on Google Street View

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
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Google Street View, a feature of Google Maps that shows high-resolution street-level images on the internet, has gone live in several Canadian cities.
The service is now available in Toronto, Calgary, Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax, Vancouver, Squamish, B.C., Whistler, B.C., Ottawa, Kitchener, Ont., and Waterloo, Ont.
The service, which is already available in cities in the U.S., the U.K., Spain, Australia, Japan and several other countries, provides close-up, 360-degree views of city streets as they would be seen by someone driving along them. The images are linked to the company’s Google Maps and Google Earth applications.

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Top 10 lessons learned in our 10 years of being in business

Monday, October 5th, 2009
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October 5th will be a date that sticks out in my mind for a long time.  Ten years ago in 1999 we formed Canada’s Web Shop.  In looking back it has been a long road to build this business and there have been many lessons learned along the way.  One thing for sure is the only people that think running a business is easy are the people who have never done it before.  Its tough but rewarding at the same time.  Here is a list of the top 10 lessons learned on our 10 year business journey:

Google Wave: What is it, its potential uses, how to get it and a screenshot

Friday, October 2nd, 2009
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What is Google Wave?

Keeping it simple, Google Wave is a tool for real-time communication and collaboration.

How does it look like?

Here is a screenshot of my account at Google Wave. Click on the image to preview it in full size.

GoogleWaveSmall

List of potential uses for Google Wave

(Note that all of these are done in real-time. When I say real-time, I mean “real-time”.  You will be able to see people type, delete characters, insert videos, games, plugins, photos and more right before your eyes on your browser without reloading.)

Implications of No Search Engine Optimization

Friday, October 2nd, 2009
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Warning: I’m about to ramble which means this could turn into a rant.

Sometimes I think that being a search engine optimization specialist works against me. Sometimes I wish I was ignorant about how indexing and ranking happens.

Let’s take an example.

IMG_0891I hurt my car (pause for tears – anyone who knows me knows how much I love my car). It’s going to require some body work.  Now, I know a few places in the city from driving around and seeing them. Especially the franchise shops like Boyd Autobody (who, by the way, could stand a new web site and some marketing and online reputation management help – but I’ll save that for another post).

Form Serialization with YUI

Thursday, October 1st, 2009
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I’ve been a big fan of the YAHOO! User Interface Javascript library for some time now. It provides so many richly featured widgets and it has really forced me to learn how to write better Javascript code. That’s why I was excited by the latest release of the version 2 branch of YUI : 2.8. One new feature in YUI 2.8 that I nearly missed is form serialization. It’s a feature that I’ve been wanting for a long time and it’s a reason I’ll turn to  jQuery for its serialize function.