HyveUp

DocVerse Vs Google Docs: Microsoft Office Strikes Back

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 08:00:04 PST

Two weeks ago, I wrote about Google Docs' new zip upload feature. I was interested in the way Google was slowly eating up on Microsoft Office's grounds by adopting the position of the collaboration platform for documents. Yesterday, Techcrunch wrote about DocVerse, a plug-in to Microsoft Office that les you collaborate on your Word, Powerpoint of Excel files direcly with coworkers.

To work, DocVerse must be installed by all parties involved in the collaboration, but once that is set, any member of a doc can edit the doc offline, or directly on Docverse's online document editing and sharing platform. Everything is automatically synced, kind of like the way DropBox works. There is even an IM integration to enhance collaboration and feedbacks. The plug-in lets you simply add comments on the documents you collaborate on, and is a great time-saver for those who do not use Google Docs in the first place. Will it save Microsoft Office from being slurped by Google Docs?

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The Map Provider Does Matter

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:00:07 PST

The Map Provider Does Matter: "

Does it matter if some data is presented to you on a Google Maps or a Bing Maps? All Points Blog had an interesting post on that question yesterday:

[...]Regular folks don't really care about the source background or API used, just that there's interesting data and the app 'works'[...] API providers and data providers are 'back' to selling to developpers.

It's true that from a developer's point of view, it is hard to judge if the consumer really cares about who provides the map. Personally, I like to find the Google logo on the maps I browse, but technically any map provider is ok. However, I have a hard time believing that consumers do no care who the map provider is. Maybe the difference between map providers is not so obvious today, but this could change in the very near future...

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Geocaching Gets Hot Creds With Rachael Taylor

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:00:01 PDT

Geocaching is coming to a theater near you! On November 6th, the movie SplinterHeads will be out. SplinterHeads is a simple love story:

Galaxy (the girl, Rachael Taylor) takes Justin (the guy) on a geocaching adventure, a GPS activity that is a part hike and part treasure hunt, and he quickly falls in love with her.

The movie was written and directed by Brant Sersen, an indie film director who used to do skateboard and punk films.

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Google Docs Enable Zip Uploads, Slurps Your Desktop In

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:00:08 PDT

Google Docs is on a roll! Two weeks ago, the announced a great feature for Docs users: Sharable folders. With this addition to Google Docs, users don't have to share a doc again and again with their coworkers, they can just assign it to the shared folder. Today, Google brings more to its online office platform: Liberate your Google Docs with Convert, Zip and Download:

The feature lets you bundle your Google Docs in a format of your choice (MS Office, Open Office, PDF, etc.) and download them as a zip file. No longer do you have to download each document individually, which can take a lot of time if you have hundreds of documents like I do!

That is... Pretty awesome! Keep in mind though: while you can download zip files, you cannot upload zip files.

Google Docs is starting to break the barriers down between online and desktop files. It is almost entering in a collateral race with DropBox, the service that automatically syncs folders across computers, and keeps a record of everything online for backup. Google Docs and DropBox are two very different products right now, but if you consider Google's browser approach to an operating system, then those two products might be heading in the same direction!

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Google Map Icons Collection: Could It Be Huge?

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:06:41 PDT

Interesting find through The Map Room: Some developers created a database of map icons, and anyone's welcome to use them.

Nico Mollet writes to tell us about his project: hundreds of free icons, colour-coded by category, to be used as placemarkers in Google Maps (API or My Maps).

For two years now, Google has allowed users to import their own markers on the maps they create. However, creating a good icon requires the hand of a graphic designer (32x32s are tough), and I assume most maps creators (professional or not) are not graphic designers. Thus Google's marker import tool had shortcomings, which is why the Map Icons Collection is an interesting project.

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Make Your Blog Mobile: MoFuse Is No Use!

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:15:09 PDT

A few months ago, I read a very interesting post about the misconceptions around mobile Website optimization. This article (I didn't bookmark it, unfortunately) made me realize I was probably losing traffic in the growing mobile search arena. The article was mentioning the fact that search engines will not automatically favor a site because it has a mobile version, but having a mobile Website certainly gives you more brownie points.

Since I don't like to miss out on an opportunity to optimize my content, I went online and looked for services that could make my site mobile. The most popular service seems to be MoFuse, so I tried it out. MoFuse does one thing great: It is easy to create a mobile version of your site. MoFuse fails something else: Nobody finds your mobile Website.

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The Blogger-Powered Altglobe Widget

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:07:57 PDT

Two months ago, Altglobe was a community of green and spiritual-minded individuals, with a publishing tool to share thoughts within the Website. Today, it is a community of eco-human friendly bloggers who connect to Altglobe with their blog's RSS feed. An house-made algorithm crawls all those feeds and posts engaging articles on the homepage of Altglobe at a pre-defined pace. Altglobe promotes content and acquires shares of attention. Bloggers get traffic.

I am the one who suggested this change, and who leads the front-end development of it. Today, I am glad to present to you this little guy: A widget that displays all the latest headlines on Altglbe.

I know, it's just a RSS feed embedded in an iframe built with a drupal module, and the design has not yet been 'optimized' (in other words something super easy to do). What's more challenging is to make the creators of the RSS feeds, the bloggers, spend a few minutes to submit the RSS feed themselves. Why bother bothering bloggers instead of grabbing the RSS feeds directly on their blog (a process that could easily be automated)?

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Can Google Maps Revive The Dead With Augmented Reality?

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:01:53 PDT

Our friend over at Google Maps Mania reports on a pretty spooky service: In Krakow, Poland, a Website offers to find the cemetery plot number of dead people on Google Maps. The 'Lokalizator' lets you search graves by 'resident' name, and offers to narrow the search down by date ranges.

The map also includes bus-stops for each of the cemeteries, with bus times, and shows the locations of all cemetery entrances.

Obviously, since this map is in Krakow, it's not really interesting to search through it (I have no clue what a typical Polish name is, and I have been to Poland before). However, if there were a similar service in my area, I can easily imagine myself playing with it the night of Halloween to see who's dead where, and maybe pay them a visit! And then it stroke me:

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Better Twitter Bot? Twitterfeed Says Yes You Can

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:21:11 PDT

If you don't read ReadWriteWeb, you might have not heard about Twitterfeed's shiny new features: Faster engines, Pusubhubbub for real-time goodness, Facebook integration, and Google Analytics tracking enabled. This is the best list of feature additions I have seen in a while!

I have been using Twitterfeed for a year and a half now: It has allowed me to post updates from anything that has a RSS feed to my Twitter profile. When Friendfeed came around the corner with its syndicate'n tweet model, I stopped using Twitterfeed and it slowly reached the bottom of my toys' box. After a site re-design, Twitterfeed is now announcing a technology revamping. Will it change anything?

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UK Crime Maps Down, Stress Goes Up?

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 06:46:19 PDT

The Government of England is keeping pace with new technologies by publishing a crime Maps of England's neighborhoods [Map]:

The Home Office hopes it will boost public confidence in the police service by giving people more information about crime. The map gives the public immediate access to figures on all crimes and specifically burglary, robbery, violence, vehicle crime and anti social behaviour.

The question raised here is: Is it appeasing or stressful to be aware of your neighborhood's crime rate? I want to say 'depends where you live', and if you live in a high-rated crime area, you certainly don't need a map to know it. However, there are some interesting facts that come with this seemingly useless technology.

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Google Customer Service

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:15:35 PDT

I use several Google accounts to gather and share specific chunks of info with the people I work with. I understand that in the war against spam, Google must not like those who create hundreds of accounts, and start blasting emails through some clever duct-taped smtp engineering. I operate several Google Accounts simply for the sake of leveraging Google's awesome set of products and sharing it with specific entities.

Last week, I tried to log into one of those account and found out it had been deactivated. I followed links around explaining Google had reasons to believe my account was not in good standing. I was not happy about this so I left a note in a box that says 'We read your emails but we never respond'. Since Google has the best customer relationship reputation in the West, I thought this account and all the products/content attached to it were gone forever.

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How-To Add A Twitter Feedflare That Says 'Follow Us On Twitter'

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:40:13 PDT

As you can see above, some feeds have some really cool flares (links) showing in the footer: Link to a Facebook Page, Website, Twitter profile... In the Feedburner's feedflare library, you have a wide choice of flares for your feed, but not a single one helps you promote your social profiles.

To compensate this shortcoming, Feedburner lets you create and submit your own duct-taped feedflare. So how can you create a feedflare that promotes your Twitter profile?

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Mobile Maps: BodyRunner, Best Android Jogging App

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:43:08 PDT

Last week, I wrote about JogTracker, an Android app that tracks your jog routes and performance. I was a little disappointed by the lack of features the application offers. This week end, I tried another jog-tracking app: BuddyRunner.

First off, you can sign up to BuddyRunner from your phone. No more signing up through the browser's tiny interface or waiting to have a laptop nearby to get started. Nice productive start! Once you've set up your account, you're ready to jog. BuddyRunner will send you an email minutes after you signed up with the link to your profile page to check out once you're done.

BuddyRunner offers an awesome set of features that turn the app into a real activity enhancer. Here is the list of features for what is undeniably the best jogging app on Android:

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EchoTweets: Build A Retweeting Army!

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:27:12 PDT

With the rise of asynchronous social networks, it has become vital for marketers to develop a network of agents that relay messages to their own mini-sphere of influence. On Twitter, we call that retweeting (you know that). This new deal makes broadcasting trickier, because the marketer doesn't control the communications channels anymore.

Just as Twitter definitely changed the rules of online marketing, it might also bring them back the way they were. Enters EchoTweets. EchoTweets offers a way for marketers to build a network of fellow agents that will automatically repeat your tweet. How does it work?

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Stweet: Streetview + Twitter = Augmented Reality?

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:03:25 PDT

There is a crap-load of location-centric Twitter apps! All that they do usually is open a window withholding a tweet above the location on a map where the tweet was sent. The experience is fun 5 seconds, and then you yawn. A few minutes ago, I discovered the most beautiful way Twitter has ever been integrated to a map: Stweet.

What Stweet does is take a tweet, spot where it was tweeted from, captures a Streetview image of that location, and integrates the tweet and the image in a simple interface that I find extremely poetic:

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Flickr Slowly Drops Yahoo Maps, Integrates OpenStreetMap

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:43:42 PDT

Earlier this week, the Flickr team announced their effort to integrate OpenStreetMap into Yahoo's photo-sharing service:

The complete list of map features in OSM (OpenStreetMap) is a bit daunting in scope and constantly changing. It would be nice to imagine that we could keep pace with the discussions and the churn but that’s just not going to happen. If nothing else, the translations alone would become unmanageable.

Instead we’re going to start small and see where it takes us. (from Flickr Code blog)

Today, Flickr uses Yahoo! Maps to display geolocated pictures. However, back in March, Yahoo new CEO Carol Bartz publicly stated that she wasn't a fan of Yahoo Maps. With the Yahoo-Microsoft deal inked this summer, everybody thought that Yahoo would also hand its mapping chores to Microsoft, a rumor that Director of Yahoo! Geo Technologies Gary Gale had to disprove. So why is Flickr going OpenStreetMap?

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Demandbase: Get An Alert For B2B Qualifed Leads On Your Site

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:39:35 PDT

Demandbase, the rising demand generation company, has just announced a new key feature to one of its products that I find pretty revolutionizing for the online marketing space:

Available today, the latest version of Demandbase Stream will now automatically send you a Web Alert when a company visits your web site and views a minimum number of web pages. You can then click on View Alerts to see details about the company, what pages they viewed to understand their interests, select and email the appropriate business contacts right from Stream. (via email)

Demandbase is a Web-based Software that provides extremely rich data about professionals visiting your Website. By tapping into a wide variety of trusted sources, Demandbase will give you the name of your visitor (not always that sharp), company name, traffic analytics, and all the contact info you need to follow up with that visitor. Demandbase Stream, the product mentioned in the announcement above, is Demandbase's desktop component (an adobe Air app), that displays visitors' data tinker-style.

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Wibya: Excellent Blog Social Bar, Maybe An Ad Revenue Channel

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:36:21 PDT

About a month ago, I remember Techcrunch tested a bottom bar that brings a lot of value for blog design: It displays an RSS subscribe button, a link to your Facebook Fan page, your Twitter account, notifications, IM integration, and much more. The comments following the Techcrunch article were not very positive regarding the bar. Techcrunch readers tend to bitch all the time about everything, so I went ahead and tried the social bar anyway.

The bar is brought to you by Wibya, an Israeli startup. Wibya is still in private Beta, but I got my invite pretty fast, so I am sure you will too if you haven't signed up yet. Once you have access to your account, you can go straight to your dashboard and customize your bottom bar with the following features:

First you can chose the color design of your bar, making sure it fits your blog right (can't control the shape though). Then you choose which apps you want to integrate to your bar:

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The Evil Plot of Google Places

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 06:49:42 PDT

Sometimes, a small new feature can make such a big splash. Last week, Google announced the launch of Place Pages for Google Maps. Place Pages are Google's profile pages for local businesses. The page gathers a whole bunch of useful info fetched from Google's data centers, and from other sources like Judy's Book or Zagat.com: Description, price, reviews, Website, map... Pretty useful stuff.

Unfortunately, things are not all groovy with Place Pages. Techcrunch provides a simple explanation of the underlying problem of Place Pages: Basically, Google's Places are so SEO-friendly that they appear on top of Google's Search (Ooops).

If you do a search for the Burdick Chocolate Cafe in Boston, for instance, the Google Places page is the sixth result, above results from Yelp, Yahoo Travel, and New York Times Travel.

Google Maps Is Not For Kidz

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 06:50:32 PDT

As I was watching this video, I started wondering how much of Google Maps resources were dedicated to kids. We always say that even my grandma can figure out Google Maps, but what if a kid wants to use Google Maps for his own entertainment? Would he find something he could play with?

Straight answer: No.

For some reasons, it seems like the Google Maps advocacy team and its devoted army of independent developers ignore children at large. 'Step aside kids, building maps is a grown-up thing!'

The dominant result for the search query google maps kids is the Missing Kids Map. Yea, what a fun a way to spend the afternoon!

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Help Me Please A Lady

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:42:43 PDT

Would you have 2 minutes to spare on this short survey? It's a set of 10 questions about travelling and travel guides. I'm doing this as a favor for the wife of a good friend of mine. Thank you for helping this lady!

Survey here: http://koo.li/1T

Google Reader: Send Your Blog Back To Your Blog

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 06:51:15 PDT

In case anyone else missed the news like I did last month, Google Reader added a pretty cool feature to its RSS subscription services: A 'Sendto' button has appeared to share RSS items everywhere you wish on the Web. I remember no later than a year ago, we had to dig into the Greasemonkey directory of scripts to add those features to our RSS experience. No more, Google Reader has evolved from a messy RSS depository to a content-sharing powerhouse. Still messy, but sharable!

Of course, Social Web hackers are the most enthusiast about this little addition: Google Operating System suggests tweaking the sendto feature with AddToAny. Kevin Purdy from LifeHacker recommends adding Instapaper to the list of sharing destinations. Evernote released a post on how the Sendto button can work with their virtual binder.

I like this button, but since it's not featured on mobile applications, as a reader, I don't really care about it. I need to experience my RSS on the go! However, as a publisher of content (and not as a reader), there is a sharing feature that I really like: the sendto Blogger.

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How-to Update Your Facebook Page with Your Blog's RSS Feed Automatically

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:15:03 PDT

I recently started to re-focus my attention on the marketing potential of Facebook, and created a Fan Page for my blog to experiment with the features of a Page. What stroke me right away is that using your RSS feed to update your Facebook Page is not that easy to do.

There are probably a dozen ways to do this, but here is the one way I adopted, and I can't complain about it:

First you will need to create a profile for your blog on NetworkedBlogs. NetworkedBlogs is THE application to hook your blog to Facebook and have access to cool features. I actually created the HyveUp's profile on NetworkedBlogs quite a while ago when the application was still called Blog Networks.

One of the new nifty features of NetworkedBlogs is the automatic blog-to-Page functionality:

Once you click on the 'Pages' link on the top right, it will take you to a page where, out of the list of the blogs you follow on NetworkedBlogs, you will check your blog in the column 'Publish to wall and show on tab'.

Once you did that, make sure to scroll down the page (if you have a long list of blogs you are following), grant permission to the NetworkedBlogs application to access your page, and save.

You are now good to go. A first update on your page will appear saying something like 'Importing blog feed using NetworkedBlogs'. Give it an hour or two, and next time you publish a blog post, it will automatically update your Facebook page! Pure... Dope!

I have one issue with that system, but I am not sure if the problem comes from the NetworkedBlogs application, or from Facebook: Facebook offers an automatic post-to-twitter feature for Pages. Unfortunately, if the Page updates come from NetworkedBlogs, it seems like Facebook doesn't pick those up to post them on Twitter. If someone knows a tweak around that, I am all hears.

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Blog Euthanasia: Should Your Company Kill The Gimp?

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:22:30 PDT

For the past few months, I have been hired by a company to update their blog. Because of budget restriction, my contract is limited to one update a week. Whenever I have extra time, I write two posts instead of one. Why? Because with one post a week (and even two), the blog barely survives. The updates/week ratio of a blog is extremely important for search engines, and a blog loses a lot of authority/attention if it's not often updated. A few weeks ago, I talked with Louis Gray at the Future of Influence Summit, who told me that his blog grew because he kept his daily habit of posting, and that was it. Regular updates are the number one requirement to keep your blog healthy.

During the hype of blogs, businesses were told to blog, even though it wasn't clear what blogging really meant. And a lot of company started to blog. Web strategists were venturing in trying to rationalize business blogging, and trying to determine unheard-of-before factors of success.

Here is the naked truth about the factors of success for a company blog:

1. Impact: Share your company's knowledge of an industry, and people looking for it on the Web will find your article and your company.

2. Personality: When visitors read your content, if they like your humor, tone, ideas, what have you, they will keep you/your company under their radar. Your blog community starts there.

3. Pace: A new post is yet another opportunity to interact with your readership. It is also yet another bottle thrown in the ocean of the Web to be found.

Here is what happens when you don't update your blog regularly: You are less likely to be found; you are creating an opportunity for your competition; you are losing the attention of your community; you are neglecting an organ of your company; your blog updates will not generate an interesting return on the time invested to create them.

How do you know if your company still needs a blog?

Today, the Web strategists I mentioned earlier are all focused on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Some of them have declared traditional blogs dead, but really it is just a shift in attention. There is a reason for this change: Social networks have sufficiently evolved to enable businesses to settle their presence directly there. In other words, if your company has a Facebook page and a Twitter account, you are good to go. No need for a blog that requires time to host, design, organize, update... From that standpoint, blogs are old.

Also, in any business, actions are measured and efficiency is expected. Above is the traffic of a blog that is updated once a week (and went through numerous hiatuses). As the owner of a business, if I see such a low activity, I would ask: "How much does that cost to the company again?" And sure enough, if that same budget was invested directly in a simple Adwords campaign, it would probably generate more leads than the old blog you got there.

So if you don't have the time and the money to make your blog survive and thrive in the blogosphere, shouldn't you just kill the gimp?

It is a very well-known fact that people going through a long coma are very expensive to maintain alive, and there is no guarantee they will ever wake up. Euthanasia is a huge issue in the medical field because it involves dealing with primary human values (like the right to live). Blogs are not Humans, so we don't have this ethical problematic to deal with here. But just like Humans, blogs have a cost that shouldn't be neglected, mostly for smaller businesses.

Can you tell your blog goodbye?

My opinion is yes. Here is why:

- Impact: Twitter has a 140 characters limit, and Facebook is social-graph-constrained. A blog can be extensive and open to the World-Wide-Web, but it won't be if it is not active.

- Personality: You can write whatever you want on Twitter and Facebook, but that is about it. However, a blog is fully customizable, and can be tweaked in many different ways. You can share links all over the place, embed Youtube videos, chose your banner and background color, embed all sorts of crazy widgets, and even explore the muddy waters of hacking the Web. But no one will see it if the blog is not active.

- Pace: Publishing on Twitter and Facebook can be done in less than 12 seconds. But you only get a fraction of your audience's attention span. A blogs' update usually gets a few hours of attention before losing steam (yes, there are exceptions). However, if a blog is not active, there won't be much of that either.

So yea, if your company doesn't have the money to invest more seriously in a blog, I think you can just kill the gimp. I never tried it, but I picture it as a moment of sadness and relief: Sadness because you spent a lot of time on your baby, but relief because you don't have to watch it while it painfully takes its one breathe of air every week.

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Buy The Geek Body Shirt!

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:34:20 PDT

When I wear this shirt, I am popular. Seriously! Those who don't know HTML just like the very simplicity of the shirt, and of course coders appreciate the clever pun.

Let me tell you: If you wear this shirt, people will come to you and ask you questions about it. It' a great way to look good and spark discussions with strangers (and strangerettes, indeed).

So get your geek on, buy one today!

Geek Body T shirt - $29.90!

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