Mad about .NET

Why is everybody talking about apps?

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 15:46:09 -0300

The last few years everyone seems to be talking about “apps”, if you are a runner there is an app to provide all kind of info for your running workouts, if you need to go anywhere there is an app with maps that will guide you via GPS, if you want to video conference there is an app to do it, if you want to do karaoke with your own music, manipulate a photo, read your favorite news, interact in social networks, check your credit card reconciliations, play a game…there are apps for all that…even if you want to simulate farting, unfortunately there are many apps to do it too.

There are several reasons that have contributed to the apps explosion, explosion that hasn’t reached yet its maximum level.

The main reason has been the popularity of Smartphones, mobile phones that offer many more features than simply a phone call or texting. These phones are more and more powerful and they are already similar to PCs and Laptops. Smartphone sales are not yet comparable to the sales of traditional mobile phones, they are only about 40% of total sales, but it is clear we are in the middle of a new trending. While the total mobile sales have declined -1.5% during Q1 2012, smartphone sales have grown +42.5% YoY compared to the same quarter in 2011. The forecasts indicate 686 million smartphones will be shipped during 2012 (source: IDC).

The next reason is that all smartphones come with a marketplace, which facilitates sell and distribute apps. Let’s think for a second how hard was before the distribution of your own software, you had to deal with local distributors in order to sale your product in local retails, another option was to sell via Internet, but then it was harder for users to trust the download as there weren’t easy mechanisms for them to identify a safe software free of malware and spyware.

Nowadays any company or single developer can create their own apps and access to a global market in a short time, on the other side the users can trust better the software they install as they access it via a trustable marketplace as the ones from Microsoft or Apple, which both check every single app uploaded before it is published.

Finally, it is hard to find any other device you own that is always as near to us as a mobile phone, otherwise just try to think how many times you leave your phone more than 2 meters away from you.

Checking the smartphone sales figures, how easy is for the users and developers and how companies can be more close than ever to us, it isn’t surprising that many companies and single developers having started to create their own apps and games to be the next Angry Birds.

As you can imagine having success with your app is not that easy, a recent study conducted by Adeven indicated that about 400.000 apps in the Apple Appstore are zombies, which means 60% of the apps in the AppStore have never been downloaded.

So it seems obvious that just creating an app is the key for success, developers will find fierce competitors and the difficulties to obtain the necessary ROI for their work, since it is very common to find free apps or apps priced under $5. Therefore, it is necessary that as a developer you plan your marketing app appropriately or that you count with partner who can do it. It is also important to select the right business model for your app, the commons are:

Single payment. The user pays just when he downloads the app. The main risk in this model is to do not have downloads enough to obtain a ROI. In addition, once you have sold to all your potential market and there aren’t more downloads you will not be able to generate more revenue from your current users.
Ads supported. In this case, you still need to have a big amount of downloads and make sure users spent long enough time to display your ads.
In-app purchase. This is will probably be one of the biggest revenue streams in the near future as it allows to create revenue on existing users. It consists of invoicing users for new content or features, i.e. in a game you might want to offer new weapons or maps after an additional payment, or just think in how Kindle works, the app is free but you pay for each book you download.
Subscription. Following a similar model to the cloud computing, you can invoice your users just for the use of the app, if you stop using the app you don’t have to pay. Think for instance in NetFlix you pay a monthly or yearly fee that gives you access to their content.
Combination of the previous ones. For instance, you can create a free version of your app that is supported by ads and paid app without advertising.

As I was saying at the beginning the apps business hasn’t reached yet the saturation point and it is still growing very fast. This is because in addition to rapid growing smartphone sales, we need to include now the tablets and also Desktop PCs + Laptops. The arrival of Windows 8 will potentially convert the Windows Store in the biggest marketplace considering the installed base of Windows PCs

Because all this, the forecast for 2014 shows the app business will reach $35 billion and the app downloads will grow from 10,7 billion in 2010 to 76,9 billion, reaching up to 182,7 billion in 2015 (source: IDC).

It is reasonable to say that the next years will be more than ever the developer years, which reminds me the Steve Ballmer’s quote:

“Developers! Developers! Developers!”

Common Reasons Managers Fail

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 08:01:00 -0300

I’ve been working 14 years in the IT industry, before that I’ve worked in all kind of temporary jobs while I was studying, summing up a total of 19 years working with and for managers from diverse industries and countries. The last 7 years of my career I’ve been a people manager myself.

I’ve had horrible, bad, good and excellent managers, but all of them, including myself, had something in common: managers fail and do mistakes.

In this post I want to describe some of the common reasons managers fail. To do it I’ve created a list based on the sources “Why Managers Fail” by Will Phillips and “Becoming a manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership” by Linda A. Hill.

The common reasons managers fail are:

Unable to make the transformation which involves a profound psychological adjustment.
Independent. Likes to accomplish things on their own.
Poor interpersonal skills.
Failure to adapt.
The “Me Only” syndrome.
Fear of action.
Inability to rebound.

There is an additional point, which is not included in their lists but I think it’s crucial and makes lot of bad managers fail.

Fear of building a great team.

Let’s analyze these points more in detail.

Unable to make the transformation which involves a profound psychological adjustment.

When people becomes manager they suffer a a transformation of identity, most of the skills for which they were bright and lead them to become manager are actually useless to be a manager.

This is very common in sales and technical positions, someone who is great selling doesn’t mean that can organize a full sales department. If we take the example of my industry, I have seen lot of times how the best developer became manager, the one who had the best coding skills, the one who finished his tasks always on time and with less bugs, the one who always solved the most complex tasks … just that one became manager. The problem is that those technical skills are not related to manage people, to deal with providers and vendors, to manage a budget, to be a good communicator and listener…

In addition to losing the sense of mastery and having to begin working on a new set of skills, you involuntarily move to what I call the “dark side”.

The dark side is that zone where you are not anymore part of the employees, you become “one of them”. How many times have you been in the coffee machine having fun, laughing … suddenly the manager enters … silence …. manager: “hi guys” … crowd: “hi” …. silence … everyone comes back to their desks…

You might be thinking: I’m a cool guy that will not happen to me. Assume it, you might be the coolest guy of the world, but there are always conversations where you don’t want your manager in. Therefore as a manager you are not part of the party anymore, you are the one who creates uncomfortable silence, you are on the “dark side”.

You have to be prepared for that change, because you are not an employee anymore. As a manager you are now an ambassador of the company.

Independent. Likes to accomplish things on their own.

This one is the classical “delegate” talk. New managers think it is easy to delegate, I mean you just have the delegate the duties and that’s all, isn’t it?

Delegate is probably one of the hardest things to master, you have to know what to delegate, because you can’t delegate all the duties. You will need to keep doing yourself many things and it isn’t easy to identify where is the barrier on what to do and don’t do.

You have to choose the right person to accomplish the work being fair with all the members of your team, you can’t give always the complex tasks to the one who solves them faster or the easy ones to the newbies. If you do it you will have one member of your team always stressed and the rest of the team will not develop their abilities appropriately.

When you delegate a task be clear on what to do and don’t expect the people will accomplish their duties in the same way you will do it, especially when you work with senior teams.

In my opinion one of the keys to know how to delegate and be satisfied with the results obtained is to define properly the “what”, the “why” and “when” needs to be finished, but just let the people decide “how” are they going to accomplish the task and follow up with them on the progress.

You won’t know if you are delegating properly in your daily work, you will know it when you are under high pressure. It is under pressure when we want to resolve the things ourselves.

Inability to get along. Poor interpersonal skills prevent the manager from effectively leading people or teams.

Another common reason of failure is the lack of poor interpersonal skills, soft skills or people skills. These are the ability we have to communicate with people.

I don’t want to make it too long, we could talk during hours about inspiring teams, win their loyalty, non-verbal communication, active/passive listening and more…there is lot of literature about this.

In this point, I just want to stand up that it is extremely important to be a great listener, but also to be self-conscious of what you communicate and the words you select to communicate. Let me explain you one of my biggest mistakes around that. Once I read (sorry I don’t remember where) that the higher you are in the hierarchy the more your suggestions become commands. I was having a conversation with one of my project managers about the issues we were having with a vendor, we talked long and deep about how to face and solve the issues. After three hours meeting when the project manager was leaving my office I said something like “these guys are driving us crazy, if they annoy you we should just cancel the contract”. I swear I was joking, I was smiling when I said that … and do you know what? My project manager cancelled the contract, one week later I had on top of my desk an attorney letter requesting to pay the reparations fee for cancelling the contract without respecting the terms. I won’t explain how much money that stupid joke did cost us.

Key learning: Be very cautious on what and how you say things.

I have also good examples of really nasty results because of not listening properly, by listening I don’t mean hear words and understand them. I mean also receive and process all the messages people transmits with their behavior.

Failure to adapt. Flexibility is crucial.

Lot of managers have success at the beginning of their careers, in a specific company or using a concrete method and they insist ad nauseam applying the same formula over and over again, when what you have to do is adapt to the environment, to the team, to the market conditions…inability to adapt and lack of flexibility are great ingredients in the recipe for failure.

The entire world has been based on natural selection, discarding those members of a population who where not able to adapt on time. I link you here an article related to the failure to adapt quickly and effectively to a changing business environment. “Three change management lessons from the dodo bird!”

The “Me Only” syndrome.

This point makes reference to the people who just considers a management career for their own recognition, something that will have obvious negative consequences.

These kind of managers are more worried about the kind of recognition or visibility they will get, how many money they will earn or how fast they will climb the hierarchy…they are damned to death from a career point of view.

A manager position is not all about yourself, you must be a team player and work towards the recognition of the team, not only your own recognition.

If you take all the credit for what you achieve together with your team, your team will leave you alone.

I honestly haven’t seen this behavior too often in the companies I’ve worked, the only time I had to work with a ladder climber he was catch pretty soon and his career was interrupt quite fast.

Fear of action.

Managers can fall into the “analysis paralysis” and want to examine all the details before taking any decision.

I have seen this problem and variants of it quite often, they are normally motivated by different things:

Many people has so much fear to fail that they invest excessive time analyzing every single point of failure, studying the possibilities from every angle…
Forget perfection. I had a manager who always said “perfection is the enemy of good”. We all want to be great, to be perfect, but unfortunately it is just not possible to have all we want at the first shoot. At a certain point you need to set a limit you should not overpass.
Not having a deadline. Deadlines are not defined to stress us, but to achieve something at the right time. If you don’t have a deadline, you will not feel the pressure to finish anything.
Not taking hard decisions. This is something I really dislike about certain managers, there are situations were hard decisions need to be taken. Remember that, whether you like or not the manager position doesn’t come only with higher salary, it comes also with higher responsibility.

Fear of action and any of their variants have always the same consequence, not being able to accomplish your goals and tasks at the right time.

Inability to rebound.

As a manager you have to take decisions, taking decisions means take certain risks and with any risks you have an amount of success and failure.

As I said at the beginning of the post, all managers have something in common: We all fail or do mistakes.

Now you are lucky because you already know you will do mistakes, so be prepared to rebound appropriately. Managers who don’t rebound tend to blame everything and everyone before trying to understand what they did wrong.

On each mistake or failure, don’t think the entire universe is against you. Reflect on what steps drove you to failure, be self-critic, do retrospectives with your team, accept criticism and feedback.

Good managers take ownership of their mistakes and learn from them, big part of your experience and seniority will depend on what you learn from failure.

Fear of Building a great Team.

The last point I wanted to talk about is the fear of building a great team.

I have seen a couple managers during my career that were not hiring the best talent for their teams, this insane behavior is normally given in managers with low self-esteem and highly insecure.

This kind of manager thinks he has to know everything and better than their direct reports to be always over them.

It’s obvious that you can’t know everything, so try to find the most talented people you can, don’t be afraid of hiring people who is better than you and work always to have someone in your succession plan to facilitate your own development and progression.

I want to finish this point with a great quote of one the best managers I’ve ever had. “You are as good or bad as it is your team”. Therefore, get the best people you can to work with you.

There are much more reasons to fail, so at least do your best to avoid the common ones.

Innovation is all around Microsoft

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 16:21:25 -0300

Microsoft is an innovative company, that’s something we all know.

It invests+$9 billion yearly on research and development and it would be impossible to list all the products, projects and activities related to it. Probably some of the most well known are:

But there is much more than this, in fact I don’t joke when I say innovation is all around Microsoft. Being an innovative company starts from the mindset of its employees and we have multitude of activities in Microsoft that motivate employees and fosters innovation like the famous Bill Gates Thinkweek or other activities that might not be that famous, but are extremely inspiring.

One example of it is the Science Fair, an internal event done at the Microsoft Campus where microsofties can show off their latest science projects every six months…more or less. Most of the projects demoed will never become public, some of them will be a new product or a new feature of current products, but nobody cares where it ends up because the real goal is just coding for the sake of having lot of fun. An example of a project presented in a Science Fair is the .NET Gadgeteer, a prototyping platform for small electronic gadgets and embedded hardware devices built on .NET Micro Framework.

Similar to the Microsoft Science Fair, the guys at Microsoft Research have their own annual party: TechFest. The TechFest showcases some of the coolest projects from any of the Microsoft Research’s locations around the world. Researchers have the opportunity to share the technologies and projects emerging from their work. TechFest is open also to guests, so you can take a look at some of the Microsoft Research projects presented during 2011.

We have also an internal portal called ToolBox where all employees can build and submit the tools they develop, there are so many of them of all kind and flavors'. One you might know that made his first appearance in ToolBox is Mouse without Borders, a cool tool that allows you to handle up to four computers with a single mouse and keyboard.

Some of these things are done thanks to THE GARAGE, a community of employees who like building things in their free time and have a clear mantra: “Do-ers. Not Talkers”. They are the group who organize the Ads Science Fair, the Office Science Fair, the Hyderabad Science Fair, the Enginering Science Fair, the Hardware Science Fair, the Everything Science Fair...

Again, this is not all. I wrote this post because now we are in the period of the Microsoft Next a year video contest, open to all the Microsoft employees, which pursues to identify the most innovative talents around the world with a very prestigious panel of judges. If you want to have an idea on what kind of videos are submitted, just take a look to some of videos that were submitted during the Microsoft Next 2011.

As you can see, innovation is not just funding research and development projects, innovation is a mindset that you have or not have. In Microsoft, innovation is all around.

How to use the Geolocation API

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:21:26 -0300

Geolocation is a new standard that allow us to identify where a user is located by the use of scripts within the browser.

This is particularly useful when we want to offer in our web app local information to the users. Some examples of it could be a web app that tells you where is the nearest bus station, a restaurant or just to know where you are when you get lost in the city. Something that by the way, happens to me a lot.

The first thing you need to know is that the Geolocation API just defines a high-level interface to access the geolocation information, but it is completely agnostic on the system used to obtain that geolocation information.

There are several ways to get the information like:

GPS
GSM/CDMA cell IDs
IP address

As you can already imagine the accuracy of the results will depend a lot on how the geolocation information is retrieved.

Now that we have a little bit of background, let’s see more in detail what the Geolocation API offer us. The API defines a new interface that is called, not surprisingly, Geolocation. This interface defines three methods:

//Used to retrieve the current geolocation, just one time.
void getCurrentPosition(
     //Callback to receive geolocation info
     in PositionCallback successCallback,
     //Callback to receive errors produced during the call
     in optional PositionErrorCallback errorCallback,
     //Options about the geolocation information to retrieve
     in optional PositionOptions options);

//Used to track the geolocation of the user.
long watchPosition(
     //Callback to receive geolocation info
     in PositionCallback successCallback,
     //Callback to receive errors produced during the call
     in optional PositionErrorCallback errorCallback,
     //Options about the geolocation information to retrieve
     in optional PositionOptions options);

//Used to stop tracking the geolocation of the user.
void clearWatch(
     //id of the watch retrieved with watchPosition
     in long watchId);

At this point you will have already noticed that the method getCurrentPosition does not return any value, this is because the API is asynchronous, so in order to obtain the results we need to implement a callback function (PositionCallback) that will be called once the method has the results.

The other two parameters are optional, they let us to define another callback function to receive any error produced while calling the method and the different options to configure the geolocation information that will be retrieved.

Before we proceed to implement a real example let’s examine the rest of classes used in the API:

// used to receive successful notifications about position requests
interface PositionCallback {
    void handleEvent(in Position position);
}

// used to receive error notifications about position requests
interface PositionErrorCallback {
    void handleEvent(in PositionError error);
} 

// used to specify the options about the geolocation information to retrieve
interface PositionOptions {
    // by default false. Indicates you want to obtain the information with
    // the best accuracy available, even if that consumes more battery or
    // means slower response time.
    attribute boolean enableHighAccuracy;
    
    // expressed in milliseconds
    long timeout;

    // expressed in milliseconds. Indicates you accept a cached value
    // no greater than the specified time. If 0, acquires a new position
    long maximumAge
} 

// used to obtain geolocation position information
interface Position {
    readonly Coordinates coords;
    readonly DOMTimeStamp timestamp;
} 

// used to obtain errors while requesting geolocation information
interface PositionError {
    const unsigned short PERMISSION_DENIED = 1;
    const unsigned short POSITION_UNAVAILABLE = 2;
    const unsigned short TIMEOUT = 3;
    readonly attribute unsigned short code;
    readonly attribute DOMString message;
}

// used to obtain the geolocation position details
interface Coordinates {
    //specified in decimal degrees
    readonly attribute double latitude;
    //specified in decimal degrees
    readonly attribute double longitude;
    // specified in meters
    readonly attribute double? altitude;
    // specified in meters and corresponding to 95% confidence level
    readonly attribute double accuracy;
    // specified in meters and corresponding to 95% confidence level
    readonly attribute double? altitudeAccuracy;
    // specified in degrees, denotes the direction of travel counting
    // clockwise relative to the true north (0º to 360º)
    readonly attribute double? heading;
    // specified in meters per second
    readonly attribute double? speed;
}

Now that we have all info we can start creating a real example, to test them you will need any of the modern browsers that supports this feature like Internet Explorer 9.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Geolocation example</title>
        <script 
            type="text/javascript" 
            src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=7.0">
        </script>
        <script type="text/javascript">
            var map = null;

            function successCallback(position) {
                // we create the location for the Bing Map
                var userLocation = new Microsoft.Maps.Location(
                    position.coords.latitude,
                    position.coords.longitude);

                // we add the pushpin to the map
                var pin = new Microsoft.Maps.Pushpin(userLocation);
                map.entities.push(pin);

                // refresh the map centering the view on current location
                map.setView({ center: userLocation });

                showMessage("Your location is: " + userLocation.toString());
            }

            function errorCallback(error) {
                var code = error.code;
                var message = "unknown error";
                switch (code) {
                    case 1:
                        message = "permission to geolocate you has been denied";
                        break;
                    case 2:
                        message = "position is not available";
                        break;
                    case 3:
                        message = "geolocation request timed out";
                        break;
                }
                showMessage(message);
            }

            function showMessage(message) {
                var div = document.getElementById("message");
                div.innerHTML = message;
            }

            function getMap() {
                // replace with your own Bing credentials
                var mapOptions = {
                    credentials: "YOUR BING CREDENTIALS",
                    center: new Microsoft.Maps.Location(40.42, -3.8),
                    mapTypeId: Microsoft.Maps.MapTypeId.road,
                    zoom: 16
                }

                // we create the Bing map with a default position
                map = new Microsoft.Maps.Map(document.getElementById("map"), mapOptions);

                // if the browser supports Geolocation we do the request
                if (navigator.geolocation) {
                    var options = {
                        enableHighAccuracy: true,
                        timeout: 2000,
                        maximumAge: 0
                    };

                    navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(
                        successCallback,
                        errorCallback,
                        options);
                }
                else {
                    showError("Your browser does not support geolocation");
                }
            }
        </script>
    </head>
    <body onload="getMap();">
        <div id="map" style="position:relative; width:400px; height:400px;">
        </div>
        <div id="message"></div>
    </body>
</html>

In the above example we have seen:

how to request the position of the visitor who is accessing our web page
how to load a Bing map using the Bing Maps API and set a pushpin in the map indicating our current location
how to handle the errors in the case the geolocation information could not be retrieved.

Nokia Lumia 800

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 07:48:00 -0300

A week ago I bought the new Nokia Lumia 800 and I can already say I love this device.

Once you open the box you will see the phone comes with a soft cover in the same color of the device, people who knows me know I hate covers but this one fits perfectly and I’ve decided to use it myself. You can see the phone with and without the cover in the figures below.

Nokia Lumia 800 with soft cover.

Nokia Lumia 800 without soft cover

Another nice surprise is the fast USB charger, instead of having the traditional AC/DC adapter you will find as a charger a small circular piece with a diameter just a little bit bigger than a coin. You can compare it below against 2€, a quarter of dollar and fifty pence.

The design of the phone is simply gorgeous and solid, the case is built in a single piece of polycarbonate that gets emptied and filled with all the electronic in a later phase. The screen, a very stylish Gorilla glass, is a curved 3.7” capacitive AMOLED with ClearBlack that redefines the concept of the black color.

The Nokia Lumia 800 comes equipped with a 8 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics that provides you with a resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels, a 2x LED flash, F aperture of 2.2, minimum focus range of 10 cm and focal length of 28.0 mm. The camera also allows you to record 720 HD video.

The phone has other goodness like:

GPS
WIFI
Bluetooth
2 microphones
3D accelerometer
Magnetometer Sensor (compass)
Proximity sensor
Ambient light sensor

You will see some haters say the phone doesn’t come with a dual core and they use it as their argument to dismiss the phone, a dual core is completely useless today in Windows Phone 7.5 devices as the OS is extremely fast and fluid. The single core Qualcomm MSM8255 with a clock rate of 1400 MHz makes the phone and apps perform much better than several dual core devices.

As I said above, the Nokia Lumia 800 comes with the Microsoft OS Windows Phone 7.5 aka “Mango” installed. The OS offers you out of the box among many other things:

Microsoft Office Mobile: It allows you to work with your Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote files. Thanks to SharePoint Workspace you can also access to your corporate SharePoint repository.
Xbox Live: You can play games with the advantages of the Xbox Live network like achievements, manage your friends and messages, etc.
SkyDrive: To have your files synched/backed up in the cloud (25 GB of free space)
Zune: To have your music and videos downloaded, streamed or simply synched on the phone
Social Networks: Have your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Live contacts as any regular contact, see their updates, etc..

In addition to this, Nokia has included some exclusive apps like Nokia Music, Nokia Maps and the impressing Nokia Drive that allows you to reach your destinations by car using cartography that can be downloaded, free of charge, for virtually the entire world.

Just to finish you will like to hear that the battery lasts for:

9.5 hours for 3G talk time
335 hours for 3G standby time
55 hours for music playback time
6.5 hours for video playback time

Did I say I love the phone?

Why has my Klout score dropped

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 03:58:24 -0300

This seems to be the question that many Klout users asks themselves since yesterday. The reason is simple: Klout has released a new version of the algorithm to measure the influence to improve their accuracy and transparency.

The algorithm will now track better the quality of your interactions instead of the quantity. According to their official work there are three principles that form the basis of the algorithm to determine your score:

How many people you influence
How much you influence them and
How influential they are.

So, something as having a more accurate system has been transformed in a very negative change because lot of users have seen how their score has dropped.

In my opinion the main error Klout has done is not the change itself as many users suggest, but how to reflect it in the score. They should have played more with the psychology of the people and increase the base of the score like for instance adding 100 points to everybody before apply the change, in that way people would have not seen a drop in their score and their egos would have been safe. I’m being a bit ironic but you get the point.

It is really worrying to see how many people trusts the score reputation indexes as the most important thing in Social Media, which in my opinion it’s plain stupid. Don’t get me wrong, I think any score system that allows you track your progress is good, because it will allow you to measure how you are evolving online. But it can’t become your only point of interest or action plan.

Some of the comments you can see in the Klout blog show the madness that is around the online influence and reputation Look this example

many organizations have coupled economic functions and job-related selection to your scoring system. By making this change, you have negatively impacted the job market

Really? Are there companies hiring based on your Klout score? If that’s the case I truly think it is very worrying where we are heading up.

As I said before in all our tasks it is important to have a way to measure success. So Klout, PeerIndex, TwitterGrader, TunkRank … and all the similar systems that give you an artificial and automatic way to measure influence can be a hint for how you are doing your activities online, but none of them can -neither should- replace how we evaluate the influence of a person. It is just common sense to see how any of these score systems attribute you online influence on subject but make you completely irrelevant on a secondary subject.

Don’t be fooled, B2B decisions are not being significantly influenced by conversations on Facebook or Twitter.

Widget Twitter not found. Root element is missing

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 05:18:27 -0300

I don’t know when the issue started, but today I noticed the Widget Twitter in BlogEngine 2.0 has stopped working.

Instead of displaying the latest tweets, it shows the error “Widget Twitter not found. Root element is missing” as you can see in the image below.

The error looks a bit weird because I haven’t done any modification lately in my blog that could crash it, in addition if you do a quick research online you will see I’m not the only one suffering the issue. It is like all twitter widgets going mad at the same time.

Fortunately it has a very easy solution, the problem is related to the data feed used to display the latest tweets. So to fix it you only need to go to your folder App_Data, delete the file “twitter_feeds.xml” and force the refresh of your site. Once it loads again it will work as normally.

I hope it helps.

Internet Explorer and Web Standards

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 08:43:15 -0300

Many times I see people complaining about Internet Explorer 9 not rendering properly a “standard” web page, after digging into what the problem can be it normally resumes into two options:

The web page is not using the document mode “IE9 standards”.
The web page is using conditional comments making use of browser detection instead of feature detection and treats IE9 as IE7 or IE6, very old versions of IE that do not support today standards.

Let’s start with what the IE9 standards mode is.

Internet Explorer is the only browser that offers backward compatibility with older versions of the browser. This is done incorporating the new, plus the older versions of the rendering engine with each release of Internet Explorer.

As a user of IE you only need to press F12 to open the Developer Tools and select what document mode use.

This is very powerful because as developers we can decide what version of the IE rendering engine will be used to render the markup of our pages. In the case of Internet Explorer 9, as you have seen in the figure above, we can chose between the next document modes:

IE 9 standards: This is the default and latest standards-compliant behavior used to render webs that have a strict or unknown document type.
IE 8 standards: This behavior acts as it does IE8.
IE 7 standards: This behavior acts as it does IE7.
Quirks: This is the oldest behavior that can be used with IE, and applies when rendering a document with no doctype or a quirks doctype. It is similar to the behavior of IE5.

Selecting a different mode will reload the page to render it in the document mode selected, but will not change the user-agent string sent to the website. To do that you can also change the Browser Mode using the developer tools.

Regardless the best practice and my suggestion is to target always the standards and keep our sites upgraded to support them, in the case you have an old site you can’t migrate yet, you don’t need to continue using old versions of IE. You can upgrade to IE9 and use as quick fix the X-UA-Compatible meta tag to set what render engine IE has to use to display properly the page.

It is obvious but worthy to mention that if you use an older document mode as “Quirks mode”, you will use it with its full consequences. This means means that your modern IE9 browser will behave as the old IE5 browser and will not be able to use all the new standards and performance improvements that IE9 includes. You can easily see this by running this code and visualizing it in “Internet Explorer 9 standards” and any other document mode:

   1: <html>

   2:   <head>

   3:     <title>HTML5 Canvas example</title>

   4:     <script>

   5:       function drawCanvas(){

6:

   7:         var canvas = document.getElementById('myCanvas');

8:

   9:         var context = canvas.getContext('2d');

10:

  11:         context.fillRect (128, 25, 100, 100);

  12:       }

  13:     </script>

  14:     <style type="text/css">

  15:       canvas { border: 2px solid black; }

  16:     </style>

  17:   </head>

  18:   <body onload="drawCanvas();">

19:

  20:     <canvas id="myCanvas" width="260" height="200">

  21:     The document mode does not support canvas

  22:     </canvas>

23:

  24:   </body>

  25: </html>

So, if you find your website not rendering properly in IE9, first of all check that the site is being rendered in IE9 standards mode and secondly that you are not using any conditional comments that serve custom code for older versions of IE.

In this article we will not cover best practices on how to use feature detection instead of browser detection bad practices to avoid conditional comments, but I recommend reading the article Same Markup: Writing Cross-Browser Code.

You can read additional information on how internet explorer determines the document mode.

What is a MACH?

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 09:30:00 -0300

People who follows me on twitter have probably seen this week that we are hiring a MACH Developer Evangelist for my team, which basically is a truly passionate about software development.

But being honest, anyone knows what a MACH is? Yes, I really mean MACH this is not a Mac with a typo. If I have to evaluate it based on the amounts of questions you have sent me, the answer is no. So, I realize I made the mistake of thinking everybody know what it is.

The MACH acronym stands for Microsoft Academy for College Hires and it is an accelerated career development program, designed to recruit and hire people who have between 18 and 24 months of experience from around the world that stand up because of their potential and top performance. They are intended to be the new leaders and key people inside Microsoft.

The main goals of the program are:

Hire among the top universities of the world in each country the students with the higher potential and talent.
Provide them with a top-class on boarding program to accelerate the ramp-up time in Microsoft.
Retain talented students and enable leadership-potential employees to excel in their careers at Microsoft.
Provide them community-building and networking opportunities.

After reading this you might erroneously think this is just an internship, but a MACH is a full time employee and has all the standard Microsoft employee benefits.

From the very beginning, if you are hired as a MACH you will work in a challenging real role, what it makes it different from a standard hiring is that:

The MACH position combines top-class training with the standard job tasks you were hired for.
During the first year you will have a structured training program.
During the second year you will continue with your accelerated career development.
You will have a mentor selected among experienced Microsoft managers.
You will participate in international trainings with other graduates in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
You will have global networking opportunities with other MACH hires outside EMEA

I guess you are already asking how you can become a MACH, the good news is that Microsoft continues betting on talented young people and we have several open positions around the World, as an example I show you the ones open in Spain:

MACH Developer Evangelist. The graduated selected for this position will be part of my team.
MACH Consultant Core IO
MACH TSP
MACH PAM

Reached this point I can only say I wish you very good luck during the selection process. If you have any question don’t hesitate to ask.

Microsoft welcomes Skype

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:20:38 -0300

Microsoft officially welcomes Skype after we announced the acquisition in May 10, 2011. During this timeframe the US Department of Justice, European Commission and Australian ACCC have reviewed and cleared the purchase of Skype.

Beginning on 13th October Skype will operate as an independent business unit at Microsoft, this will allow to preserve the creativity that has been critical to Skype’s success since 2003 when it was founded, and places Tony Bates reporting directly to Steve Ballmer as the president of the Skype division at Microsoft.

It’s still soon for Microsoft to make any announcement on how Skype will be used to improve and extend current products, but we can imagine many ways on how Skype will support Microsoft devices like the Xbox, Kinect, Windows Phone, etc. and how it will enhance services like Microsoft Lync, Outlook, Windows Live, Hotmail and so on.

Skype it’s a leader and synonym of video and audio chat in many countries, indeed it has 170 million connected users and over 207 billion minutes of voice and video conversations in 2010. Which is the equivalent of a single conversation lasting approximately for 393835 years or what is more important lot of time enjoying a conversation with your friends and family.

The acquisition includes also Qik, a platform to capture and share video shots using your mobile phone and GroupMe, the app that was described by Gizmodo as “Lifechanger…utterly indispensable…Whether or not you think you need group texting in your life, you won’t know how you lived without it once you give it a shot.”

Last, but not least important. It’s worthy to note that the Skype advertising inventory will be sold by Microsoft Advertising sales force –with exclusive rights- in the US starting 24th October, and will have the rights to do it in other markets once existing Skype relationships expire in other markets.

So, Welcome Skype! I hope to see our new colleagues in the corporate network soon.

How to measure twitter reach

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 10:40:00 -0300

Today we are going to talk about how to measure twitter reach from one of my most used applications: Microsoft Excel.

The tool you have to download to do it is Analytics for Twitter and allows to query Twitter directly from Excel thanks to the free PowerPivot Add-in that needs to be installed too in order it works.

The installation of Analytics for twitter will place an Excel file in your desktop, once you open you will see that the usage is very simple, we only need to introduce our search queries separated by commas in the Excel sheet called “Topics”. The queries can be free text, hashtags or twitter alias, once we press the search button it will contact with the twitter api to extract all the info and present it to us properly formatted.

Once the search is completed we need to do two extra steps to see the information retrieved. First one is go to the PowerPivot menu and click “Update All”, when it finishes go to the menu “Data” and click “Refresh All”.

After this we can start analyzing the results of our search, which is divided in three Excel sheets:

Topics: Contains the main dashboard where we can see stats related to the amount of tweets, how they are published by hours, overview of the tweets’ tone.
People: Provides information about the users that have been tweeting about the topic we have searched and who are the most positive/negative twitters.
Tone: Displays detailed information about the tone of the tweets based on a dictionary we can configure to adjust it to our language or preferences.

The best of all is that you will be able to apply several filters to the information extracted, which will allow you to fine investigate the reach of the topic you have introduced.

Below you have the resulting reports based on a query where I looked for the hashtag #IE9. As you can see the reports are very attractive visually.

Topics

People

Tone

As you can see create reports to measure the twitter reach is very simple with Analytics for Twitter, so just download and play with it.The file contains also all the information of the features and limitations the tool has today.

How to increase returning visitors traffic and measure it

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 14:51:00 -0300

Increase returning visitors traffic is one of the metrics any web analyst has in mind, this is because it means you are obviously increasing the loyalty of your audience and helps to guarantee the continuity of your site. There are many more metrics of course like conversion, page views, bounce rates … but in this article we will focus in how to increase returning visitors.

It is not new that lot of companies try to increase its returning visitors traffic, there are many techniques to do it like subscribing by email, forums, chats … all of them, of course, useless without good content in the site.

Probably the “easiest” way to achieve it, it is becoming the homepage of your browser, unfortunately this is a battle that is lasting from the very beginning of Internet, you saw Yahoo, NetVibes, MSN trying to become your homepage and now you can see it also with Facebook or even Google constantly telling you to do it.

The problem is that it is very hard to compete with the big Internet players to become the browser’s homepage, but today we are going to show an easy alternative that Internet Explorer 9 and above offers us: the pinned sites.

The pinned sites allow you to pin any site to the Windows Taskbar like if the site was a Windows application. Below you can see my taskbar with my pinned sites Hotmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and SkyDrive sharing the space with traditional Windows Applications like Outlook or the Notepad.

Why this is better than the browser favorites?

In the first place, because according to the statistics retrieved with the improve user experience programs we know that 87% of users launch pinned apps from the taskbar (vs 18% opening sites from the favorites bar) and 33% of users have pinned at least one non-default app to the taskbar (vs 4.4% who have added a site on the favorites bar).

In the second place, because the pinned sites allow you to have a higher level of personalization and some advanced features that help to improve the user experience and easing how the user access our site.

In my site http://www.josebonnin.com I have implemented the pinned mode adding: personalized tasks that display the latest posts published, the main categories of my blog, access to the archive and how to contact with me.

There are many sites that implement the pinned mode today and some of them have shared some of their figures, the most well known case is the Huffington Post that thanks to implementing the pinned mode in their site they were able to increase among IE9 users 14% their returning visitors and 11% the number of pages visited.

There are many features of the pinned sites that you can deeply explore in the Pinned sites developer documentation. But the easiest and simplest way is to implement them is to include the next metatags in your site:

   1: <meta name="application-name"    2:   content="Jose Bonnin" />   3: <meta name="msapplication-starturl"    4:   content="http://www.josebonnin.com" />   5:     6: <meta name="msapplication-task"    7:   content="name=Contact;   8:   action-uri=http://www.josebonnin.com/contact.aspx;   9:   icon-uri=http://www.josebonnin.com/mail.ico"/>

The first metatag defines the name that will have the site once it is pinned in the taskbar, the second defines the url that will be opened.

The third will add a custom task called “Contact” that opens the URL http://www.josebonnin.com/contact.aspx

You can add as many custom tasks as you want by adding more metatags that follows the pattern of the “msapplication-task”. As I said before, there are many more options you can apply like: notifications, thumbnail buttons, custom tasks based on the context of the page, etc. just check the URL above to find all the documentation.

So, now that we know that we can increase the returning visitors by implementing pinned site features. Let’s see how we can measure it.

How to measure the increase of returning users thanks to the pinned mode?

To do it we have to tag all the links we define in the pinned mode options using the parameters of our Analytics provider. Google Analytics for instance forces you to use at least the parameters utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign. You can find more info on what each parameter means and in the URL Builder.

Therefore, following the example above I would need to tag the start URL and the Contact URL, using for instance the next values: utm_source=IE9, utm_medium=web, utm_campaign=pinnedmode.

Doing this the start URL would become http://www.josebonnin.com/?utm_source=IE9&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=pinnedmode

and the contact URL http://www.josebonnin.com/contact.aspx?utm_source=IE9&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=pinnedmode

After you do this you will be able to measure as with any other campaign all the traffic coming to your site through the pinned sites.

This is all, feel free to share how much have you increased your returning visitors thanks to the pinned sites.

Consumerization of IT

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 07:07:00 -0300

Consumerization of IT means that enterprises are seeing how their businesses are being affected by consumer devices and services, which normally include new devices like smartphones or tablets and services like cloud-based applications or social networks. Or as we can read in the Wikipedia “consumerization is a stable neologism that describes the trend for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market and then spread into business organizations, resulting in the convergence of the IT and consumer electronics industries, and a shift in IT innovation from large businesses to the home.”

Enterprises see how these new technologies are changing the way people communicate and work. Today nobody is surprised to see how employees have contact with customers or partners using consumer services like Messenger, Skype; social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn or even Facebook, or that employees share documents internally using consumer SaaS services like Skydrive or DropBox

Another perfect example are the smartphones, a device that was designed for the enterprise, but that is having now its apogee in the consumer space thanks in big part to the disruption that the iPhone created in the market. Any smartphone today allow us carrying the work home, this was the initial idea, but this has also the reverse consequences that means we can also take our personal life to the office.

Whether we like or not we have crossed the line that divides our personal and business life too many time ago, lot of times fostered by the companies themselves in an effort to involve more and more the employees into their work.

The problem is that CIOs and IT Professionals need to face this situation, which is growing very fast especially now that the Internet Generation has fully joined the job market, and will be multiplied by several orders of magnitude when the generation that born fully connected and holding a device in their hands hits the workforce. This tech-savvy generation is not demanding the change, instead it is brutally driving the change.

The main challenges CIOs and IT Pros will need to resolve to avoid frustrating and to fulfill the expectations of these new workers are among other things:

how to certify soon new devices for their enterprises
how to provide a common experience across disparate devices
how to secure the communications
how to protect personal information
how to increase the capacity of their systems to support the new demand

The good news is that all these challenges don’t come alone, they come also with lot of opportunities, because the Consumerization of IT can boost productivity with new ways of communicate and being connected, we have seen also how the use of Social Networks for instance drives higher levels of NSAT among customers and increased loyalty. Embracing public cloud services can also help to improve cost and efficiency by reducing IT costs and provide better application performance...

The consumerization of IT needs to be addressed today, not tomorrow. Like it happens with the cloud movement resistance to the consumerization of IT is futile.

If you have two extra minutes you can check also this funny video.

Use Skydrive from Windows Explorer

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:22:00 -0300

For those who do not know SkyDrive yet, it is a free online storage that offers 25 GB and has been around since beginning of 2008, it's interface has been completely rebuilt this week to make use of HTML5.

SkyDrive provides other additional features like:

- The possibility to create, view and edit Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files without having Microsoft Office installed on your computer.

- A versioning management system that allows you to rollback to earlier versions of your documents.

- Create photo slide shows, so you can view your photos online without having to download to another PC.

- Share documents online with different levels of permissions.

In addition, if you have a Windows Phone 7 you might benefit also of SkyDrive. Since you can upload automatically from your Windows Phone 7 the pictures taken and access/upload your Office documents.

After the brief introduction to SkyDrive, I would like to explain how to use SkyDrive from Windows Explorer instead of having to use the web interface. To do it we will map a network folder in Windows Explorer to SkyDrive.

- First of all you need to create or access your SkyDrive account on http://www.skydrive.com

- Click on any of the folders available under the section Documents. This will allow you to see your unique id in the URL, which now should have the format of https://cid-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.office.live.com or https://cid-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.photos.live.com

- The xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx above contains your unique id, let’s say that is, just copy the id and open Windows Explorer.

- Select the option “Map network drive” and in the textbox belonging to “Folder” type \\docs.live.net@SSL\xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx\^2Documents replacing the fake id by your unique id and “Documents” by the name of the SkyDrive folder you want to map.

Yu will be prompted to introduce your Live Id credentials and after this you will have access to SkyDrive from Windows Explorer as with any other folder.

Samsung 9 Series

Wed, 25 May 2011 03:12:05 -0300

Yesterday we received at the office the new Samsung 9 Series notebook that was first introduced at CES. I should confess that the first time I saw this notebook I immediately fell in love.

Samsung has done a great design exercise with this device. The external case is very slick with almost no sharp angles, instead the lines follow a nice subtle curve. All the connectors, which include Micro HDMI, headphone, mic-in, RJ45, 2 USBs and even a MicroSD slot, are hidden in small slots that you can open only when needed.

The weight, 1.3 Kg and the size 32.7 cm x 22.6 cm with a thickness of only 1.7 cm are just amazing and places this computer in the same range of the MacBook Air or the Lenovo ThinkPad X1.

The display follows the same high quality pattern with a 400 nits, HD Led Backlit anti-glare display with an Intel HD Graphics 3000.

This is not just a small computer, it’s a serious and powerful device with 3 year warranty and great specifications:

Intel Core i5 Processor 2537M
4GB DD3 (8GB Max.)
128 GB Solid State Drive

All this and more for approx. $1600 and a battery life that gives you up to 7 hours to go.