We have a news that deserve a blog post! But it's a sad and happy post at the same time...

Sad because one member of the team is leaving us, one of the four partner at 1MD.

The good thing he is leaving for a really super challenge and we all support him. So, yes, Vincent Battaglia, our beloved developer, is leaving for San Francisco. The place to be as a developer. He's going to work for Storify as a front-end developer with Xavier Damman, another famous belgian developer. The company already raised 2 million dollars. It's definitely a good move! We all know he is going to be very happy there, and he will do strong job as he used to.

Is 1MD dying of sadness then? Not really, we have to admit we have been in the middle of busy months. There are very exciting projects on the go, and we can't wait to show you more! So stay tuned!

Obviously the team is evolving, we have hired 2 more people recently. So please a warm welcome to Guillaume Janne (Graphic designer) & Anas Alaoui (developer).

Need a new wallpaper for your iPad? Finally, here is the 1MD official iPad wallpaper, adopted by every 1MD team member.

• Download 1MD lock screen wallpaper
• Download 1MD home screen wallpaper

More will certainly come soon!

We are back from our trip in San Francisco since one week now. I think it's time for some conclusions.

As already said earlier, we were there for the Webmission, a delegation of Belgian Web entrepreneurs that travel abroad to promote their companies and to network.

What have we done there?

Of course we were not in San Francisco only for business. We really love the Golden Gate Bridge, incredible Lombard Street, victorian houses, cable cars, etc.

Besides that, our trip was really a geeky trip. For some of our people, the main event of the Webmission was the Google I/O (not for 1MD because the event was already sold out when we decided to go to San Francisco). Anyway, we had the chance to showcase WooRank at SF New Tech, the local BetaGroup. We think that it was well perceived by the Californian audience and that's great because it was our main purpose. Moreover, it was nice to meet and to benefit the support of Rudy Demotte, Chief Minister of Wallonia (the french-speaking part of Belgium).

Except from Google I/O and SF New Tech, we made a lot of startups' visits, including Kyte, Google, Seesmic, Twitter and CBS Interactive. Definitely, our favourite visits were Facebook and Adobe.

At Facebook, we had the possibility to talk with Danny Conway (Partner Manager), Guy Cross (Partner Manager) and Pete Bratach (Tech Writer managing the developers wiki). We even met Mark Zuckerberg in the office and took a picture with him!

At Adobe, we had the chance to be accommodated by the « chiefs » of Flash: Thibault Imbert (Flash Player Product Manager) and Richard Galvan (Flash Professional Product Manager). It was great to talk and complain (in a constructive way) about Flash with them during more than two hours. And as we are part of the Adobe Agency Program and consequently, under NDA, we had the chance to be informed about future versions of Flash (10.2 and 11). Unfortunately (for you), we cannot talk about it!

What have we learned there?

A lot but if three things should be retained:

• They are very open! It was very easy to get meetings with those people and to talk with them about very specific things. We even went to the restaurant with Happy Cog President from San Francisco (not Jeffrey Zeldman but Greg Storey)! Unthinkable in Belgium!
• Your first idea is not necessarily the good one. Try in one way, in another, refine and you'll finally find your business. Especially, don't be afraid to make mistakes!
• You cannot mislead people there. They want quality! Here in Belgium, some people benefit from the customer ignorance to sell them wobbly things. You cannot do that in San Francisco...

Definitely, we must say: Webmission accomplished!

(photo by yplouf)

We launched WooRank three months ago now but I just realized we never talked about it on this website.

WooRank is an online marketing tool created by 1MD (in collaboration with our friends Jean & Boris) that helps you to improve the way search engines (especially Google) see your website. It's free and fully automatic! All you have to do is insert your URL and 30 seconds later, you'll get a full report of what is good and what lacks on your website, from a SEO point of view.

Here is for example the report generated for 1md.be.

Last week, we won the « most promising startup of the year » award here in Belgium thanks to WooRank! Next week, we'll fly to San Francisco for the Webmission and we'll present the project at SF New Tech. They created a special event for us: « The Belgians Are Back ». We are very excited about it!

During SF New Tech, we'll showcase for the first time some screens of our Premium application that is currently under intense development. If everything goes well, it would be released somewhere in the middle of June. We think people will love it!

On this blog, we'll let you know what happened in San Francisco and we'll inform you of the release date of WooRank Premium.

Stay tuned!

We definitely wanted it harder, better, faster and stronger than the old one but also much more expensive!

Browse through our latest jobs and stay tuned on our new blog where you'll be able to follow our daily inspirations, our day-to-day progresses on some projects and our favorite websites and videos.

Don't hesitate to watch our new showreel in HD format.

Enjoy.

The Many Faces Of... Alan Rickman or A Lesson on How to be a Villain. Quite funny!

You heard a lot about HTML5 but you don't know exactly what it is and what's new in it? Check that great presentation.

Nivo Slider is probably the Most Awesome jQuery Image Slider! We use it on this website!

Thanks to flashBannerPrince, bannering won't be a nightmare anymore.

You already know My Major Company but do you know MYDORCEL.COM? Same concept but applied to the porn industry!

The most terrific showreel we've seen recently: Nokta .

We really love the navigation and scrollbars of that website!

WTF game of the week: Sydney Shark :-D

Block based destruction effect on video in full HTML5!

1MD is very excited to announce that we are now part of the Adobe Agency Partner program! The Agency Partner Program connects the world's leading creative teams with special access to Adobe news, software releases and briefings unavailable to the general public. To learn more about becoming a partner, contact agencies@adobe.com.