Year: 2008

Notes for 9/7/2008

Here are my weekly notes:

Not looking forward to a five day work week!

Edmonton's New Downtown Plan

edmonton's new downtown plan The City of Edmonton unveiled a draft of its New Downtown Plan this week, an overhaul of the Downtown Redevelopment Plan that was first created back in 1997. There were information displays setup in various places downtown, including at the City Centre Farmer’s Market today.

I quite like the marketing for the plan. Dark, bold colors, and a clear message: “My Downtown Is…Sustainable. Dynamic. Well-designed. Liveable. Accessible. Moving Forward.”

The plan outlines seven strategic priorities:

  1. Spaces for People. More open spaces, including parks and plazas.
  2. Expand the Knowledge Base. Support the continued expansion of education institutions.
  3. Increase Cultural and Entertainment Options. New facilities and expansion of existing opportunities.
  4. Enrich Jasper Avenue. Restore the prominence of this street as Edmonton’s main street.
  5. Connect to the River Valley and Adjacent Neighbourhoods. Build walkable links and improve access to the Legislature and North Saskatchewan River.
  6. Pedestrians First. Connect downtown with richly landscaped, sustainable streets.
  7. More Amenities. Build a downtown that is rich in things for people to do and places to go.

According to the Edmonton Journal, 600 people have participated in the creation of the plan by filling out surveys, questionnaires, and attending public meetings over the last few years.

“Edmontonians have told us they envision a dynamic neighbourhood, with more amenities and cultural activities to attract, residents, businesses and students,” said Shafee Mohamed, senior planner for the Downtown Plan.

“We have tried to capture that vision in this plan.”

I live fairly close to downtown, on 122nd street and 104th avenue. For many years I had an office right in the core at 101st street and Jasper Avenue, and I continue to spend a lot of time downtown. Even though I think it has come a long way since 1998 when I moved back to Edmonton, I’m happy to see renewed interest in improving the downtown area. We still have a long way to go before we’re on par with cities elsewhere in Canada.

The city is collecting feedback on the plan now, and will make revisions before presenting it to council in November. You can help by filling out the survey, or by calling 780.496.6064 to leave your comments.

If you’d like more information, check out the Downtown Plan website, call 780.496.6225, or write to shafee.mohamed@edmonton.ca. You can also check out a public Open House on Tuesday, September 9th at the Winspear Centre. There will be brief presentations at 5, 6, and 7pm in addition to information displays.

I took a few photos of the information that was on display at the Farmer’s Market today, which you can see here.

Microsoft's new ad campaign: off to a bad start?

The first ad in Microsoft’s new $300 million campaign was launched yesterday during the NFL season opener. My first impression? What a horribly bizarre ad. Featuring the legendary Jerry Seinfeld, the commercial appears to be an ad about nothing. The Seinfeld fan in me loves that, but the Microsoft fan-boy in me was expecting so much more. I wasn’t the only one apparently – Twitter, FriendFeed, and other sites were abuzz with disappointment and confusion.

The ad campaign is being created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, a well-known firm responsible for some very successful campaigns, such as Burger King’s Subservient Chicken. I’m not sure they are off to a very good start though if Microsoft felt the need to explain things:

In an email we’ve obtained from Microsoft SVP Bill Veghte to all employees, he talks about the goals of the campaign. The overall goal is to inspire consumers and “tell the story of how Windows enables a billion people around the globe to do more with their lives today.” This first phase, he says, “is designed to engage consumers and spark a new conversation about Windows – a conversation that will evolve as the campaign progresses, but will always be marked by humor and humanity.”

If you say so Bill! I was expecting something more along the lines of the “Flat World” ads we saw back in July.

Chris Baskind is among the few willing to say the new ad works:

The campaign debut isn’t about selling Windows, trying to out-irony Apple, or reversing the fact that Microsoft’s strongest current marketing image is the strangely lovable PC Guy in those Mac spots. It has one purpose: to brand Jerry Seinfeld as the new face of Microsoft.

I’m not so sure I buy that argument. I am willing to give the campaign time to unfold, however.

Edmonton could use a place like WorkSpace

A few years ago I started reading about shared workspaces. In particular, I was interested in what Boris Mann started calling The Innovation Commons – a place for “creatives” to gather and feed off one another. These are physical places, with tables and chairs and Internet connections. They are perfect for programmers, designers, mobile workers, and others who don’t necessarily need office space of their own. I love the concept, and I am happy to see it catching on in a number of places. In Toronto, there’s the Centre for Social Innovation and in Vancouver, there’s WorkSpace. I took some time to visit WorkSpace when I was there a couple weeks ago.

WorkSpaceWorkSpace

Located at 21 Water Street in Gastown, WorkSpace is in a historic and unique area of Vancouver. It’s fourth floor view of the harbour is quite impressive. Sharon and I met Dane Brown, who gave us a quick tour and let us explore the place for a bit. There are small offices that can be used for breakout rooms, a larger meeting room, and lots of open space with tables and chairs. There are also private offices available, and a small cafe at the front. WorkSpace is even equipped with a shower!

Instead of renting space as you would in a traditional office building environment, WorkSpace is membership-based. For $95 per month, you can use the space after 4:30pm on weekdays and all day Saturday and Sunday. The rates go up from there. Full-time access costs $495 per month, and the private desks cost $595 per month. There are also drop-in prices available, starting at $25 for half a day. WorkSpace currently has about 70 members.

I think Edmonton could definitely use something like WorkSpace. Dickson and I originally got an office for Paramagnus because we knew that being in the same room together often has a really positive effect. We ended up getting rid of the office because we didn’t need it all the time, and it got to be too expensive. WorkSpace would have given us the best of both worlds.

There are lots of interesting, creative people in Edmonton working from their bedrooms and basements. Opportunities to connect are somewhat rare though, limited to events like BarCamp. I can’t even begin to imagine how positive something like WorkSpace would be!

I know I’d be a paying member if we had something like WorkSpace in Edmonton. What do you think? Would you find such a facility useful?

Facebook's virtual gifts – money well spent?

In a post at VentureBeat yesterday, Eric Eldon shared some estimates that suggest Facebook’s revenue from virtual gifts this year will be in the range of $28 million to $43 million. That’s a serious amount of coin for nothing more than an image on a web page.

Gifts are priced at $1 each, and the study found that an average of 470,000 are sold each week.

Facebook introduced the gifts feature in February of 2007. A gift is simply an image of something, like a heart, a flower, or hundreds of other options, that when given, shows up on a “gift box” in a user’s profile. If the gift is public, then the recipients’ friends can see it, too. If it’s private, only the recipient and the giver can see it.

I think the key there is “simply an image”. This is definitely one of those things where you can’t help but think “why didn’t I come up with that!”

Clearly, gifts are a good source of income for Facebook. I wonder who buys them though. Why are people so happy to pay $1 for a bunch of pixels on a web page?

Surely that $40 million could have been spent on something better?

Thoughts on Google Chrome

As you probably read or heard today, Google has released a beta version of their very own browser, named Chrome. You can download it today for Windows XP or Windows Vista, and Google promises that Mac and Linux versions are coming soon. I downloaded it as soon as it was available, and have been playing with it all day. Here are some of my impressions and thoughts so far:

  • The interface is surprisingly simple. I like it.
  • Chrome is fast. The two sites I’ve noticed the greatest speed difference with so far are Google Reader and Buxfer.
  • I love the “Create application shortcuts” feature. The first thing I did after testing that out was uninstall Mozilla Prism. This feature is what will keep me running Chrome.
  • I like having the status bar at the bottom of the window, so the fact that it is missing in Chrome will take some getting used to. Fortunately a box still appears when you hover over a link.
  • Firefox made an effort to look more “native” to the operating system with version 3, and I wish Google had done the same with Chrome.
  • A couple of my favorite Opera features are built into Chrome: paste and go, search shortcuts (such as “g” for Google”), and the “Speed Dial” page, though it is automatically created in Chrome vs manually created in Opera.
  • As a web developer, I’m incredibly grateful that Google built Chrome atop the WebKit rendering engine, rather than creating yet another one for us to test against.
  • I find it amusing that the Google Chrome logo has the same color scheme as the Windows logo.

Google very creatively launched Chrome with a web cartoon written by Scott McCloud. It’s quite long, but worth a look.

If you’d like to read more about Google Chrome, I suggest the following:

And for my own reference, here is the NYTimes launch article.

I’ll be sticking with Opera for now, but I’ll definitely keep my eye on Google Chrome.

Notes for 9/1/2008

Here are my weekly notes:

Ummmm yesMack & Sharon CanoeingSharon & MackMack & SharonEveryone!

I love Facebook Mobile via text messages

facebookBuilding a mobile application that works really well is hard. In general, I think we put up with sub-standard mobile applications simply because they offer convenience, not because they blow us away. The iPhone is definitely changing things but for the most part, I still cringe when I need to use most mobile apps. Especially ones that claim to work over text messaging. There’s only one SMS app that I really like – Facebook.

I think Facebook has absolutely nailed the text messaging experience.

Use it for a while, and you’ll realize that the SMS functionality of Facebook is so much better than everything else. Take Twitter, for instance. One of its original claims to fame was that it worked well over SMS. Except that compared with Facebook, it absolutely sucks.

Here are a few of the reasons why Facebook over text messaging rocks:

  • You can do many different things. You can update your status by prefixing your message with the @ symbol, or write on someone’s wall by prefixing the message with “wall Name”. Similarly, you can send messages by prefixing with “msg Name”.
  • Facebook will ask for clarification. If I send a message prefixed with “wall Kim” it will ask me which Kim I mean if it can’t figure it out automatically.
  • Context! Let’s say someone sends me a Facebook message, which I have set to come to my phone. All I need to do is reply, and it will send a Facebook message back. Same goes for wall notifications. I don’t need to specify the “msg” or “wall” because Facebook understands the context.
  • Taking that to the next level, Facebook over text messaging is “multithreaded”. By that I mean, there is more than one number. If I get two messages, they’ll come from different shortcodes, so that when I reply Facebook knows which one I am replying to.

The key difference between Facebook SMS and other applications, is that idea of a session. The way that my reply to a notification is not isolated – Facebook understands some of the context around it. It makes the whole experience so much better.

Another major plus with Facebook over text messaging is that it’s both fast and reliable…unlike Twitter. I’ve never had any problems with it – it just works.

If you don’t already make use of Facebook Mobile, I encourage you to give it a shot. You can learn more about the SMS features here.

Carsharing with Zipcar

zipcar I first learned about Zipcar at the ALT.NET conference a couple weeks ago. I was talking with a developer from Toronto who told me a little about the company. I meant to look it up when I got back to Edmonton but of course, I forgot. Then when I was in Vancouver this past weekend, I noticed a bunch of advertisements for the service. I made a note in my Moleskine to look it up.

I think the concept of carsharing is fantastic:

Carsharing is a model of car rental where people rent cars for short periods of time, often by the hour. The organization renting the cars may be a commercial business or the users may be organized as a democratically-controlled company, public agency, cooperative, ad hoc grouping. Today there are more than six hundred cities in the world where people can carshare.

Zipcar, founded in 1999, operates in nearly two dozen cities. Currently they are available in just two Canadian cities – Toronto and Vancouver. They claim to be the world’s largest carsharing operation.

In Vancouver, there are two plans. The “pay as you zip” plan costs $55 per year, and you can then rent from $9.75 per hour, gas and insurance included. The other plan is a monthly fee for people who use the service more frequently. The way it works is you become a member, then you can reserve a car online or on the phone.

I am not sure how well Zipcar would work in a city like Edmonton, but it makes total sense in a place like Vancouver. Sharon and I took public transit everywhere we went over the weekend, and it was always really efficient. Sometimes a car is quite handy though, such as when transporting something large or awkward. In those instances, Zipcar could be really useful.

Here’s a comparison with rental cars, and here’s a comparison with owning a car. You can definitely save a lot of money with Zipcar, but I think it would work best in cities with really well-developed public transit systems. That certainly seems to have been their strategy given the cities in which they currently operate.

ETS is constantly improving, so maybe we’ll have Zipcar or something like it here in Edmonton one day.

Please don't send me large files via email

email If you’ve ever sent me a large file through email, you probably know how much I hate it. No one escapes a lecture! Just because GMail and other services give you gigabytes of storage, doesn’t mean that it’s okay to send really large attachments. I was happy to read that one my favorite blogs posted about the subject today. From the Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog:

Putting any issues with your e-mail service provider’s limits on large messages aside, sending large attachments through e-mail is still a bad idea for a number of reasons.

In the post, Outlook Program Manager Ryan Gregg outlines a few of the reasons why you shouldn’t send large files via email – mail servers may reject large files, mailboxes may go over their quota, attachment bloat, attachments may be out of date, etc. He also outlines a number of alternatives, including SharePoint or a Shared File Server, Office Live, photo sharing sites like Flickr, and video sharing sites like YouTube.

When you use one of these alternative ways to share files with your friends, family, or colleagues you help them keep your mailbox and theirs clean, and you can be sure that your file will be available no matter what service or program your e-mail recipients are using.

I would add a couple more reasons to avoid sending large files: slow Internet connections and small devices. If I’m checking email on an unreliable connection, the last thing I want to do is wait for your images to download. If I’m checking email on my iPod touch or a cell phone, I might not be able to read the files anyway.

If you’re sending photos, why not stick them on Flickr and email a link? Same goes for video – use a site like YouTube. Some other alternatives include Box.net, Amazon S3, and SlideShare.

It doesn’t take a lot of extra effort to stick your file online somewhere first, so why not just do it? Send links to large files via email, not the files themselves!