Official Google Blog: SearchWiki: make search your own

this looks interesting, soon to be released I guess, bout time we had some more control on searches.

Branding & Marketing: SEO... going WAY beyond Google

I'm just having a little fun on with your SEO work.

We're trying to place well for best web developers now that we've conquered google for Best web developers in the world.

Ahhh... if only we really were :)

From the Vancouver Sun:
A Microsoft first
The company announces plans to open a software development centre in Vancouver Vancouver Sun
Published: Thursday, July 05, 2007
Gillian Shaw
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I'll let you read up on the whole thing yourself, but in essence the city, politicians and the local business community is all excited about this as it will ... and I quote.

The Microsoft expansion here is seen not only as a coup for the province but as good news for a country that is struggling to see its technology sector compete on the world stage.

I couldn't disagree more.

First of all, we are not "struggling on the world stage". Companies like RIM, Rogers, Flikr... The list goes on.. are all Canadian success stories operating on a global level. We have no shortage of talent, which is why Microsoft wants to come here in the first place.

It's why the movies come here, it's why EA came and set up here, Satelite companies, production houses, animation studio's... ALL come to Vancouver for the great quality of life and the deep creative and technical talent pool that abounds here.

What this article does not discuss is that the only thing that is flagging is Canada's ability to support the growth of global companies with the proper funding and capital markets to enable Canadians to RETAIN their intellectual property rights.

The real issue is that like with the film production community, and as EA has successfully done, Microsoft will be able to attract the best and brightest, buy the promising technologies it wants or squash it's competitors with it's giant marketing muscle and deep reserves and generally acquire the real gold that is IP.

We will once again build a top notch service economy that has no longevity and is at the mercy of larger American corporations, instead of growing and retaining our own IP.

I don't see this as a good thing for the local software economy, I think it will drain talent, create artificial inflation amongst the local players and generally undermine any sort of local efforts to grow software associations and business building.

I've been doing a lot of research about branding and marketing

We're having to really examine our choices around XLsuite and the way that we want to position ourselves in the market place.

What is our brands message, our position in the market place, what does the name say to people, how are the graphics going to affect the overall impression that people have of our soon to be product.

Of course my friend for these things whenever I'm stuck is to turn to google for answers.

In my search I've found this site http://brandandmarket.blogspot.com/ which has all sorts of good tips and resources on branding and marketing issues.

Since My struggles are rarely unique to me, I thought that I would share this with you, since many of our clients turn to us for branding and naming support. While we're pretty good at it, I never try to tell people that I know everything. This is a good place to learn more about this field of interest if you're starting your search for information on branding and marketing.

Hello Interested Party.

Although you may thing that we've fallen asleep at the wheel and driven our little smrty truck off the cliff... it is not so.

In fact, we've been so busy working on another project that we didn't notice there were problems with the signup as we were merrily using smrty for our own billing as were the several other friends and associates that were already set up in the system prior to the signup going sideways.

Since we were unaffected, we really didn't notice that it wasn't working for quite some time.

Sorry :)

Of course the instant question is... When will you fix it?

Ummm, Soon?

To tell you the truth, we're working on embedding all of the functionality of smrty along with some upgrades that we've decided are needed, into our larger content and contact management system XLsuite.

You can visit our ruby on rails open source CRM, XLsuite, as we've made the bulk of the code opensource (sorry but some parts of smrty will be staying proprietary).

Or, if you're not the "get into the code type" or you can visit ANYSUBDOMAIN.xlsuite.com if you'd like to grab it as your own and try out the system.