Praized Blogs

Pegu Club

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(original Flickr picture by SophieMuc)
I am traveling on the East Coast this week and I might have some free time in New York on Friday afternoon to meet, chat, have a coffee if anyone is interested. Ping me at sprovencher AT praizedmedia.com.

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Robert Scoble reports this morning that he’s now “heard from three separate Google employees that Google will release a news feed that will compete with Facebook and Twitter”. He gives an excellent description of the products that will serve as building blocks for that feed: Google Profiles and Google’s Social Circles Connections. Scoble says it’s [...]

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Silicon Alley Insider revealed this morning that Facebook is working on a “check-in” functionality similar to the one you can find in Foursquare or Brightkite (and now Yelp). When they reached Dennis Crowley, Foursquare cofounder, he said:
For his part, Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley told us he fully expects Facebook and others to launch “check-in” functionality, [...]

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One of the first things you learn when you launch your own startup is to actively monitor opportunities in the market and move quickly to leverage them. In my case, it happened three times in the last three years.
The first strategic move happened back in the fall of 2006 when Sylvain Carle, Harry Wakefield and [...]

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Multiple news in the last few days points towards Twitter and Facebook becoming serious forces in the world of “local”.
First, in yet another chapter of Twitter’s improvements to become locally relevant, it has started rolling out its “local trends” for a series of US cities and ome countries (probably based on the ones with the [...]

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Amongst rumors of the impending arrival of the Apple Tablet, Amazon announced this week that they’re opening the Kindle, their famous e-reader, to external application developers. Techcrunch is not impressed and says ”If you are going to try to steal Apple’s thunder just before its big Tablet announcement, you are going to have to do a little [...]

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Le Devoir, an independent French language newspaper from Montreal, recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. Jean Dion, one of their star columnists, wrote an article detailing what you could find in the first and second editions published in January 1910. Of note, the second issue saw the birth of the “Mondanités” column (society gossip). The column mentions the latest weddings [...]

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Google just launched a “status update” field that merchants can use to send real-time messages to their profile page (i.e. Place Pages) in Google Maps. Accessible from the Local Business Center dashboard (which means it’s only available to businesses who have claimed their listing), you can read more about it on the Google LatLong blog.
Excerpt:

Holding [...]

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I’m ecstatic! I just learned that I’ve been nominated for a SEMMY award in the “Local Search” category for my I Have Seen the Future of Local Media blog post. 
From the web site, “The SEMMYS are an annual awards event started in 2008 to honor the great content produced across the search and online marketing [...]

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The nice thing about having a public API at Praized Media is that people are using it to do all sorts of great “local” projects. Pierre-Luc Beaudoin, a developer from Montreal (Canada)  just launched the first version of a mapping application called “Map Buddy“ for the Nokia N900 device using the Praized API.

He writes about his experience building [...]

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At the end of December, I was graciously invited to write a guest post on Mike Blumenthal’s blog. Blumenthals.com, is a must for all hardcore local search engine optimization fans. Mike is the experts’ expert. As it was time for me to look back at 2009 and gaze into the 2010 crystal ball, I wrote [...]

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This video shows an interesting use of mobile phones in Japan. By embedding a QR code in tombstones, visitors can use their mobile phone to access additional information about the deceased. These stones are made by Ishinokoe.

(sent to me by Pascal Cardinal)
What it means: mobile + physical objects can lead to interesting, think-out-of-the-box ideas. I believe we’ve only scratched [...]

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As many of you know, Idearc rebranded itself this week as SuperMedia, exited chapter 11 protection and are back trading on the stock market (NASDAQ this time) under the SPMD symbol. For the occasion, they issued a very advertiser-focused press release with a few quotes from CEO Scott Klein.
“SuperMedia will serve as a “catalyst of commerce” for local businesses [...]

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Must-read article in the January edition of Wired Magazine: “Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem”. The theme of the monthly magazine is “failure” and there’s a lot to learn from this article chronicling the development efforts around the Duke Nukem 3D sequel, Duke Nukem Forever whose development at 3D Realms started in 1997 [...]

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