Frédéric Boulanger's Journal

Week numbers in Google Calendar

2009-05-07T15:02:00.003-04:00

One would think this is an easy peasy feature to add, in business it's useful anyway. I finally found something that seems to work reliably and display week numbers on sunday or monday depending on when you start your week. go to Google Calendar Week Numbers

our financial industry partnership

2009-04-01T10:00:00.002-04:00

I'm very excited by our new partnership in the financial indsutry go have a look at our news release.

Remember Gordon Gekko - why him now?

2009-02-11T08:13:00.000-05:00

Read the post here When Greed Is Good. I find it odd that in the times we are now, that good old Gekko would be right on something! This was a great movie needless to say. Gekko was far from being respectable and represents every thing the people in the US (main street as the in the know people say) now despise of WallStreet. Still let's face it the US is the US, where on the NewHampshire plate one can read "Live Free or Die", my point - it's the land of show me the money attitude. One where regulations are not going to do half as good as the entrepreneurs who wants to make a buck stepping up to the table and putting on some bets. Let's make sure this time that if they cook up something like the mortgage mess we're in some guidelines will be in place to catch the problem early.

I read the post and I thought he is right about banking on the private money to get this mess in ord order. When I go one step further, I know the private money will find a ways to make a lot of money out of this, and not all of the ways really good for the long term. When longterm is no longer considered, or even mid term, we're in trouble, this is where I think a little more intervention from the state is necessary, as much as I think regulations are no good they are legitimate.

from the fun to talk about department - President Elect's blackberry

2009-01-09T13:02:00.002-05:00

It's no secret that Obama thinks very highly of his blackberry. Several times we've read that he was dreading the prospects of giving it up for security reason now that he is the most powerful man in the world. The NYT has an interesting slant to the story. They are trying to put a value to such endorsment, is it 10M, or 50M that RIM would have to pay? In a way the fact that it's all genuine, no strings attached is making Obama's comments about the Blackberry even more valuable. At the end of the day kudos to RIM for creating such a great product such that someone of the stature of Obama is endorsing it publicly to the world! Congrats RIM!

Blackberry vs IPhone

2009-01-08T09:56:00.002-05:00

It's the third of fourth time I stumple on this story. Basically it speaks about the fight RIM and Apple are on for the smart phone market. The new products from RIM (Storm, Flip, Bold) have been good for RIM to get their momentum back from apple. Apple is really closing in fast on RIM though, and RIM can't sit on their laurels too long. The bit that is most interesting to me is the perception of consummers toward the storm vs the iphone. Analyst are all up in arms about the fact that iPhone has 77% of its owners 'very satisfied' about their iPhone, and RIM only has 33%. It's an important data point, still is it that important? Since when are Apple owners not hugely proud of their apple wares, and since when business users (read BB owners) are all emotional and franctic about their BB. We're speaking of two kind of people, one looking for the cool, simple and the remarkable experience - the apple brand promise. The second group looking for the device that will work, will be reliable, get the job done - Blackberry brand promise. Any thoughts?

Tasks in Gmail

2008-12-09T12:49:00.003-05:00

Well at last, tasks in Gmail. I took an initial look at the task feature in Gmail, and it's a good start. It does have categories, and it's easy to create tasks from gmail, right in the app. I will wait before I start using it, since it's still missing ability to sync with Remember The Milk or even better my BlackBerry. Kudos to the team there for adding a feature I consider key for my productivity.

So is Jobs going to go run GM and build an iCar?

2008-11-13T14:33:00.002-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Such is the question that Friedman is asking in this great piece if the us government should save detroit Op-Ed Columnist - How to Fix a Flat - NYTimes.com. The lack of money to do innovation is what is causing Detroit's demise that's what the auto industry is saying anyway. Not so Mr. Friedman says, it's just that they don't know how to innovate altogether. They should innovate less on the marketing gimmicks like 1.99$-a-gallon gasoline for a year and more on building fuel efficient cars for a start. Looking back it's not as if we haven't known about peak oil for a while, so it's inxcusable on GM and Detroit in general to not have been more serious about it. So it goes. On the other hand remembering the book Innovator's Dilemma it's logical why GM for example would not be more serious about fuel efficient cars. How so Fred? Well the theory of this book is that in most companies what drives innovation is the need of your customers, not the need to the blue ocean, the non consummers. So what - well existing customers have their own needs in mind, and GM's golden goose was SUV, and as such they innovated to sell more SUVs, because their consummers were demanding innovation in SUV. Had they stopped and looked at the non consummers of SUV, they would have found something else, potentially much bigger and better aligned with our time - but no they rode the wave as much and as long as they could. GM never made it to a radically new product because their best people were busy innovating on the product with an end in sight but making money the SUV. They never floored the pedal to the metal on the electric cars, or fuel cells because the SUV money was so good.

World Usability day - making life easy!

2008-11-02T21:32:00.003-05:00

Ladies and Gentlemen - Simplicity is the new black. Why does life have to be so complicated afterall? I ask myself this question way too often. Well here comes World Usability Day, which we proudly support, please join us at Software Usability: Listening to the voice of the user! if you're in ottawa on Nov 13th.

RSS are keeping me from reading books or magazines

2008-10-24T21:01:00.001-04:00

That's it I'm addicted to RSS. I'm a slave to Google Reader, and I'm subscribed to so many RSS feeds I can't keep up. I can't stay up to date with the news in RSS, and I don't read anything more than four lines anymore... I have this very interesting book, a thriller, I think I will have to start over since I have started too long ago, and I don't recall the names of the characters. I spend so much time reading the news, and there is so much of it that it's interferring with more serious or fullfilling reading. I almost compare this news reading addiction vs magazines and books, to junk food vs a good healthy meal. It's always more fun to go for the junk food.

3g Modem

2008-10-24T20:56:00.001-04:00

Tonight we're driving to MTL to see grandma. I got myself one of those little 3g modems. Well I was able to send emails all the way from ottawa to montreal on my laptop. I feel good about the work I got done. I was even able to go check out of big the moon is compared to earth, Ludo was wondering, pretty useful stuff I tell you! I wasn't driving is you're wondering. It just speaks to connectivity being more and more ubiquitous. I thought that was cool enough to share!

Blackberry Storm and Bell

2008-10-09T10:13:00.002-04:00

Well Bell is on the storm banwagon. I look forward trying one of those. I wonder if Rogers has been excluded from this deal because of Apple itself forbidding them to sign up a competing device to the iPhone or Rim just got more money from Telus and Bell because of iPhone envy. There is a GDM version of this phone, so I would imagine Bell and Telus have some form of exclusivity for some time?

Mobile innovation gap closing because of google and the iPhone

2008-10-08T15:30:00.000-04:00

Image via CrunchBaseFrom BusinessWeek - we have "The US closes the mobile innovation gap" and how google and apple are in large part responsible for bringing the US (that would include Canada) out of the dark age wireless wise. More over we are now sending as many SMS as our Western European counterparts, amazing if you ask me. My conclusion is they were not sending that many SMS to start with compared to asia. They continue saying that the iTunes app store as catalysed mobile development in the US. Apple oddly enough here seems, according to businessweek, changed the game from a focus on hardware to a focus on content. I find that odd, given that all people rave about first and foremost is the slick design of the iPhone. The fact the apps are there up until now I'm sure has nothing to do with the success of the iPhone. Another interesting fact out of the article, now that mobile has caught on, the trends would only seem to accelerate as the US with only four carriers will drive adoption of new technologies, delivery models, content etc, than the numerous carriers in Europe. YOu can trust the US to always find an angle to differentiate favorably, 4 carriers mean more than one, so no monopoly, and fewer than many where it makes it hard to get things adopted.

gmail labs

2008-10-07T08:14:00.000-04:00

From the useless feature department -Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Stop sending mail you later regret - google is releasing another feature in gmail that is at best eye candy nothing more. I'm sure there are other features that would be more meaningful to me joe user. I blogged this before but where is the address book synchronization functionality?

I don't understand what this feature will do for people. How in any meaningful way is it going to improve the user experience?

Karate

2008-09-30T19:25:00.000-04:00

For some parents it's hockey, others it's soccer, with for now it's karate. It's no where as demanding as hockey for the parents. That is a good thing, as martha would say.
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Ottawa high school technology program

2008-09-30T12:22:00.000-04:00

I can't tell you how happy I am this morning. It's the launch of high school technology pilot program. It's been two years now I've been collaborating with kelly daize at ocri, Roxy at oce, and then the bigs guys started noticing and next thing you know we have marcellus mindel from ibm, rob from nortel all pitching in and getting things to fall in place. I probably forget tons of people who made this possible - thank you all!

It's the start of kids getting to be hands on with technology to program and do very exciting things with hardware and software. I hope this introduction will have the same impact the first time I wrote a basic program to convert miles into km will have on them. For me a light went on, I could do things with this beige box. Now they will be developing games and putting computers together or rip apart blackberries, different thrills for different times.

All in all I hope we can get some of those kids, boys and girls to discover how great sciences and engineering can be. the most interested ones will go to university and ultimately we will all be winners, students will have discovered a career they are passionate about and ottawa/canada will have a bigger innovators talent pool.

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Using Usability and End-User research to create great software

2008-09-29T16:19:00.000-04:00

Image via WikipediaIf you have ever wondered what the role of End User Research is all about or what tools and techniques are helping figure out what a user really thinks, then this is for you! We all want to create more succesful products, and getting your users on the bus will go a long way - if you know what to look for, how to get it and how it integrates in your release cycle.

We're holding a seminar on October 1st from 1pm to 2pm eastern and it's free. Please join us to learn more about how Using End User Research can help you create great software for your company. We hope to help you Debunk common usability myths and UX common tools and techniques. Enroll here if you're interested.

i-centre

2008-09-17T13:32:00.000-04:00

Interesting fact- 1percent in conventional recovery is 22billion gain. Talk about an incentive to improve!

Goal of alberta is to Go toward zero emissions for extraction. Just like conventional oil, alaska and others. The battle is that our oil is considered as dirty oil. The main culbrit is the open mining we're doing to get to oilsands that are on the surface. The treatement of the bitumen requires lots of chemical using the open mining concept and it leaves lots of residual waters that we can't do anything with - they are called the tailing ponds. Now unfortunately it's still how the bulk of the oil is extracted, in 5yrs in won't be the same, the new processes will be taking over. New processes that are much cleaner in terms of ecological footprint.

Water consumption even with the new and much cleaner processes are making extensive use of water. It's funny that water here is gold, it's the expensive resource used in order to get the byproduct - oil. So people, researchers are working at optimizing where water is used in the process in order to increase the roi. The interesting point to make about the roi in this case is that it factors the ecological footprint of the activities as a whole, and I think this is smart.

To give the right imagery about oilsand, the extracted or to be extracted resource viscosity is just like peanut butter that you would need to push through a straw. So increasing the viscosity in the extraction process is important so that it can go straight through the pipeline.

The new processes being deployed now are going to use between 20pc and 50pc less water, while others are not using water at all but are generation more emissions of co2. So it's all compromises for now. From the slides I saw it looks like they have a 10 to 1 improvement in water consumption to make overall process for our oil to not be considered dirty oil, or wasteful. The researchers seemed optimistic that the right things are being done and that it seems that this is an achievable goal. The question is how long?

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Want to make the ground shake?

2008-09-17T13:07:00.000-04:00

Here is the device you need, let me tell ya! With probes all over in the ground they use this to get imagery of the soil.
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Great customer experience

2008-09-17T10:41:00.000-04:00

In calgary this week - there is an energy here in the air that I haven't seen in a while. Lots of construction. The weather is just fantastic.

At the hotel(hyatt) the people are on uppers - they energetic and it's contagious. Everyone from the manager to the support staff are spot on service wise, positive tone, ending their sentences with energy.

Just for the wakeup call I was taken aback both when setting it up, and this morning when the phone rang. First when I set it up, the operator was again extremely nice and professional at the same time engaging. Then when the phone rang, it was a human, not a recording, at the end of the line asking me if I wanted another call in 10min and what the weather was going to be like, and if I would be needing breakfast this morning. The whole thing is so natural, not forced, it's a work of art, it comes off so genuine.

It strikes me that in the hospitality business your energy and good spirit are essential, just like in the services business. Well here I know just after one day that every single one of the employees has gone through a customer interaction course and how to make us feel good. Or maybe people in calgary are just naturally super nice people!!!
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Google offline access and contacts

2008-09-16T23:49:00.001-04:00

So I have switched a few months back to google apps. I mainly use the email client, and calendar. The spreadsheet, text processing are not nearly as useful, as I often get - can't open this file you will have to download it... The email client is very effective, fast, productive, name it, I like it. What I truly don't like about mail and calendar is that they are still not available offline.

It's mis-informed of google to think that I will always be online. I like to work offline, not only because sometimes I'm on a plane, but because I like to shut things off - cut myself from the world in order to get things done. I will make myself unavailable from IM, Skype and etc, and just plow through my to-do list(Remember the milk, which is available offline). I need just like in the physical world sometimes to shut my door, put on my headset, and hunker down to get stuff done.

With Gmail or calendar I can't do this, without being online and interrupted by incoming mails. My problem is if emails come in my inbox I will always find one that is important enough for me to stop what I'm doing now and answer it.

I would like Google to make gmail, contacts and calendar available offline. Google can you do this? I hope Chrome is a step in this direction and not just smoke and mirrors.

Now for the real rant... Can you say "address book" - no really what is this half baked implementation of contacts in gmail. Google are the champion of new generation of internet companies, yet they see themselves as an island when implementing the address book. Contacts need to be available wherever I am, using whatever device I want. Scream whatever you want about outlook, but you can sync your contacts with just about anything you want.

Outside looking my conclusion is google is an engineering driven organization. How many engineers in your organization really care about their contacts enough to enter them religiously in their address book and are willing to sync them regularly with their mobile for example? I suspect only a few - because they don't need to have access to their contacts when not in front of their computers.

If google was more driven paying attention the non-consummers of google products in addition to their target market, the former being always bigger than the later, I don't think we would have the same features available in the gmail address book. Engineers at gmail are concentrating on making sure that the hot-keys are there, the emails are organized in a new and eleguant way, efficient and intellectually attracting.

My opinion is you see a lot of engineering prowess from Google, but not nearly the same energy in market assessment smartness. Google is about helping you find information - it's about time they get on the band wagon and live the motto in this case.

I would like Google address book to sync with my Blackberry reliably.

end rant.

culture of fear

2008-09-15T09:07:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia Things aren't pretty in the financial industry in the US these days. Everyone is now getting very nervous. Market fluidity is at risk as nobody wants to lend money to anyone else for fear of not getting their money back.

I can't help but think again of the Michael Moore movie "Bowling for Columbine". "Culture of fear" among other things - is the message that resonates for me in this movie. When we're in fear, we're easy to control, that's the theory. The medias are pushing this motto to its limit in the spirit of keeping us informed. Everyone trying to outdo every one else with more and more impact full headlines.

So now this morning with the Lehman brothers bank going under banckruptcy protection. It's very bad 600B in debt will go nearly unpaid, so many banks will be left short.

Listening to the radio this morning - we're set for another 1929 depression. I don't know what the impact of Lehman brothers filling for bankcrupty in long term will be. I know that the media have my full and undivided attention about the subject now.

email communications

2008-09-15T08:54:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia How many times do you send emails to your friends, colleagues, your boss asking them questions and you get an email back with some of the questions answered or ones you didn't ask. It's a problem, I do it, we all do it - consciously or unconsciously - we, as the email recipient, we decide on what is important to answer vs not in an email. Can you imagine doing this in a conversation over the phone or in person? We've all been raised to answer when somone asks us a question. In an email it's different, because we're in control of the keyboard, and no-body is there to remind us that it's important we answer all the questions.

I don't mean to make a thesis out of this but - here is my rule from now on - if I don't believe a question is worth answering, I will make it explicit I'm not answering it because:

I have answered it elsewhere in the text say why,
if I'm not answering it for some other reasons, then it's the perfect excuse to pick up the phone.

All our communication means are meant to work together. I have to remind myself that it's not one versus the other, but IM is good for one thing, then maybe it's a phone call to complete that IM. Email is good up until a point, then phone is best, or in person.

In bruges - movie!

2008-09-08T09:35:00.001-04:00

A movie colin farrel. What is hell and what is heaven. What is hell to one can be heaven to someone else. This is bruge a nice city for tourist and mediaval buildings, but if you're a young irish with something on your conscience it ain't the place to be. And so the movie goes to treat a very deep subject with a good sense of humour. It's a dark comedie and we're dealing with dark people, whom once in a while have good conscience but in their own ways. I really liked it, go for it if it's available in your neck of the wood.
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IBM to Snap Up Nortel?

2008-09-04T18:24:00.000-04:00

I don't know where he got this from - in any case my 2 cents - it's far fetch -
http://www.allaboutnortel.com/2008/09/04/ibm-to-snap-up-nortel/

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Business of software - mike milinkovich

2008-09-04T15:33:00.000-04:00

Mike just took the stage to discuss ecosystem creation and best practices in building one. Mike for thos who don't know is big cheese of the eclipse foundation, he lives in ottawa when not traveling the world to evangelise eclipse. My bet is he is the only canadian speaker here this week. He is also a member of osef(ottawa software executive forum) - that's why I know him and the reason I'm going to ask him all those embarassing questions.... Not!
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