Around here, everybody's digging out this morning. The snow started falling at around 9 AM yesterday, and finally quit over night. Thankfully I hired a plough service this year. My driveway was cleaned up in the middle of the night by Pat, a volunteer firefighter with a tractor and the biggest snow blower you've ever seen.
According to some reports, we've just been hit with the "worst storm to hit the region in 60 years". You can see the weather map for the last 24 hours below. Smack in the middle of the purple is Ottawa, with volumes ranging from 50 cm to 75 (between 20 and 30 inches) just over the Quebec border (the Gatineau and Laurentian ski resorts!).
I guess it's all a matter of perspective. We ski and skate in our family. This is shaping up to be the best winter I can remember in years.
A lot of people where I live are thinking about Christmas right now. The weather couldn't be better for it, either. We're having an old fashioned Canadian winter, the likes of which I haven't seen since I was a child. It's cold at night (think -25C), and during the day we're getting snowfall after snowfall. Yee haa!
At iotum, we're already thinking about the New Year, or rather New Years Eve, specifically. We've been running promotions for the last month encouraging people to get in touch with family and friends throughout Thanksgiving and the rest of the holiday season — Christmas, Chanuka, Eid… they're all great excuses to get your family together, virtually, on a call with our Free Conference Call service.
New Years is the last hurrah for the holiday season. So, we've got a few special items in the works.
First, to get everyone in the spirit, we've built a little New Years Party application on Facebook. Send your friends News Years gifts, ranging from a midnight kiss (for those special friends) to a party kit, and even a hangover cure. My favorite is an ice bucket with Veuve Clicquot Champagne! And if you don't like the gifts we provide, upload one of your own!
Second, to make it super easy to call your friends — even from the party! — we've built a simple conference calling application which we've dubbed Talk-Now Conferencing. Choose ANY four digits as your access code, send them to as many of your friends as you want (a text message is an easy way to do that), and then have everyone call 218-936-6583 to be all joined together. No registrations, no applications to install, and no other extra steps. Easy easy easy!
Third, for those who like a great big countdown, and can't make it to Times Square, or wherever people gather in your part of the world, we're organizing the Great North American New Years Call. There'll be a countdown, and other fun and shenanigans like games, giveaways, and quizzes.
And lastly, to promote the event, we've had a video made (professionally even!). It's posted up on YouTube, and also on Facebook.
The story behind this video is particularly cool; a real feel-good holiday story. Longtime readers of this blog may recall that last winter I made a series of home-made promotional videos for our Talk-Now application. The first was pretty amateur, and a fellow by the name of Fred Graver in New York City mocked it. Upset, and not wanting us to be known for a bad video, but rather the quality of our software, I removed the video from YouTube and the other places it had been uploaded. I also wrote a pretty savage post about the experience.
I didn't give it another thought until September, when I got a piece of email from Fred apologizing. He had just had my posting pointed out to him by a friend. Subsequently we met in New York for a coffee, where I learned that Fred - a former VH1 producer and script writer for Letterman - was the brains behind Best Week Ever, a video review site.
Fred offered to write and produce a video for us, at his expense, to make up amends. A couple of months passed, with a few conversations about the topic for the video. Then, just before the American Thanksgiving Weekend, he called me and suggested a New Years Party, which we thought was a very cool idea.
That's the origin of the video you see in front of you — it's campy, edgy, and way better produced than anything we've done previously.
Happy New Year to you all! And thank you, especially, Fred for being such a gentleman.
A fierce duel is being fought at retail by Telus and Bell. When Bell announced unlimited data plans on HTC Touch devices for $7/month, Telus responded by dropping the price of the Touch to $0. In the last two days there have been full page advertisements offering the device (with certain conditions) from either Bell or Telus for $0, when signing on to a long term contract. At Rogers, the HTC Touch is still a whopping $199… on a three year contract. Presumably, Rogers is keeping its powder dry in anticipation of a 2008 launch of iPhone in Canada. Meanwhile, Bell and Telus are scooping up as many customers as they can with the only viable alternative to iPhone. By locking customers into contracts now, they're hoping that they can make iPhone's Canada debut into little more than a damp squib rather than the explosive market changer it's been elsewhere.
Read the fine print on that unlimited contract carefully, however. As one unlucky Bell subscriber in Alberta recently found out, after receiving an $85,000 data bill from Bell, unlimited doesn't often mean what the dictionary says after a telco lawyer has finished redefining it in the fine print on the contract. Even after Bell's agreement to adjust the price to the best possible rate, he still owes over $3,000. As the Globe pointed out, in the US a plan from Sprint would have only charged him $70 for the same service. Despite the claims to the contrary, Canadian "unlimited" data plans are anything but unlimited. The BBC noted in its coverage of the story that "Canadians complain that their mobile phone charges are much higher for comparable service in the United States."
Interested in trying the latest phones about before you buy? ZDNet's Russell Shaw has uncovered a web based simulator which not only does iPhone, it also does the LG Muziq, Samsung Juke, and Blackberry Pearl. Pretty slick, and a great way to try these devices before you head out into the pandemonium of Christmas mall traffic.
The die is cast, the gauntlet thrown… pick your melodramatic metaphor kiddies, but one thing is clear from this afternoon's announcements by Facebook and Bebo — it's war on OpenSocial. Mark Z and his team have correctly judged that OpenSocial is a threat to their burgeoning platform, and have decided that the Facebook API, architectures, tags and methods will be licenseable by any social network. Bebo immediately signed on.
Developers and users alike have embraced Facebook applications. 100,000 Facebook developers are currently building on Facebook Platform, and over 85% of Facebook users have used Facebook applications. Facebook Platform is open to all developers and companies, no matter what their size, goals or technical expertise. Our platform has been proven successful across audiences over the past 16 months, and we want to share the benefits of our work.
Opening up Facebook Platform Architecture
In the next step of opening up Facebook Platform, Facebook is now making its platform architecture available as a model for other social sites. Facebook will even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags for use by other platforms, which means that the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work.
Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve. And by enabling our industry partners to use what we’ve learned, everyone benefits — users have a better social experience no matter where they are on the web, developers can make their applications available to new audiences, and social sites can offer more applications for their platform.
To clarify how you can use Facebook Platform as a model, we’re including some example FBML tag implementations, and also offer our test consoles and full documentation. Take a look at the High Level FBML Specification.
If you’d like to license the Facebook Platform methods or tags for your social site, please contact the Facebook Platform team at platform@facebook.com.
Neat move, guys. You can just hear the conversations at all the major social networks: "Why wait for OpenSocial applications to be delivered sometime next year? Let's just use the Facebook platform and access the work of the 100,000 developers who have already delivered over 10,000 applications into the Facebook environment." And you can imagine similar conversations at application developers: "Gee, maybe targeting Facebook is all we have to do!"
Microsoft must be soiling themselves at their good fortune over having bought into Facebook and their strategy. Presumably it means that the tools that the Microsoft developer group have been developing for Facebook are now just that much more valuable.
And in MountainView one can scarce imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth over this development.
Perhaps it's time to open a Bebo account and check it out.
