Mircea Baldean

55 minutes on new means of expression. Enjoy!

I’ve been a Nokia junkie for years… Howdy to my friend, Lucian, over in Finland!

Michael Dell: Today there are about 1bn people attached to the Internet. Everyday, about 500,000 new ones come on the Internet for the very first time in their lives. So that means, the Internet population in 3-4 years is roughly gonna double. About 85% of the growth comes from emerging countries.

I’m close to finalizing reading the book “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. Awesome book by the way! A good part of it touches upon outsourcing jobs to India, especially call centre jobs.

So, here’s my story: Bell Sympatico DSL users have been experiencing major service disruptions in the Toronto area over the past few days. This affects me as well, living in Richmond Hill, always hitting a Toronto server and an IP address that had a reverse name as “basXX-torontoXX.dsl.bell.ca”.

I pick up the phone to call Bell and ask them “How much longer?” An extremely polite Dominique answers my call. “Sir, before we go any further, just in case we get disconnected, is there a number I can call you back?”

Uh, ah, I thought I was talking to Bell - the phone company. Why should I get disconnected?? Because the ‘net is not working for me?

So my question to the Rep was “Do you mind if I ask where are you located?”

“No sir, in Southern part of India”. Ahaa, just as Friedman’s stories from the book I’ve mentioned above.

After convincing the person at the other end (of the world) that my modem was actually powered on - I get a new challenge.
“Sir, how can you possibly experience connectivity problems related to the Toronto area when you are living in Richmond?”

Hmm - I get it. Now I have to convince him that I live in Richmond Hill, ON and not Richmond, BC.

Two days later Bell has not fixed the problem yet. I’m posting this through my BlackBerry. Lovely!

To Bell: in addition to all screen captures of modem types in use posted on that intra/extranet, you should make available a at least a Google Maps lookup tool, as well. :)

I have just finished reading the free eBook manifesto - Trust Economies: Investigating the New ROI of the Web by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. Excellent piece!

I’m starting to think that B2C has now changed its meaning to “Business to Community”. What’s your opinion?

Great event this week-end - PodCamp  Toronto 2. Here are couple of snippets from day one:

* Same things don’t work over time - Chris Brogan
* Social media is a cultural revolution, not a commercial revolution - Collin Douma
* The “trust economy” emulates the human relationships on the web - Julien Smith

See some of the pictures I’ve taken and the whole podcamp flickr stream.

“Talking” Blackberry with PodCamp co-founder, Chris Brogan:

PodCamp Toronto 2008 is just two days away - I’m so excited to attend for the second year in a row.

In the mean time, this one - PodCampToronto.com, just slipped through the fingers of a domain name broker, so I’m more than happy to put it back to work for this vibrant community. See y’all there on February 23.

This is a good one… I was trying to get a shipping quote on UPS.com, but it seems like one app server has gone missing - 410 gone that is. And I’ve got this response several days in a row.

I’m happy to report that I’ve already met one of my goals for this year, getting the only Google certification existing out there: the Advertising Professional. Interesting experience, about 120 questions in 90 minutes. Not to mention I had to wake up at 7AM on a Sunday morning because Prometric had a scheduled maintenance at 10AM. It was well worth it at the end of the day! :)

Yet another reason to vote with your wallet and give up Rogers and their throttled Internet service.

Interesting article by Karen Wickre, Mother of the Google Blog.

I have too keep this numbers handy… Awesome! Via Chris Penn.

My Premium podcast feed is the very latest innovation brought to you by iSPINIT! Available as a personal RSS feed, it brings flexibility and convenience to a whole new level.

Once your PayPal payment is approved, simply subscribe to your feed in iTunes and automatically receive all Premium podcasts that you have chosen to purchase individually - no monthly fees.

If you like the music we play on the regular podcast, you can enjoy it in a premium version, free of commercials and other talk. Pay only for episodes that you like to build your collection on. It costs less than a Tall Caramel Macchiato, but it’s premium quality!

iSPINIT.com Premium is a chapterized AAC/M4A enhanced podcast - artist/song info being displayed for each tune. All previous episodes are available as premium content.

Give it a spin @ http://iSPINIT.com/premium/

If you are looking for a podcast hosting service, this might interest you… And you might be familiar with Libsyn.com just as well. BTW: if you are using it, you might pay more than you need to…

I have been evaluating and using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for couple of months now as a back-up hosting service for iSPINIT.com and I will definitely use this service for the upcoming iSPINIT.com Premium edition.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. That is applicable for large podcasting media files.

Let’s do the math first:

Libsyn’s highest package, Podcast Supreme, will set you back $30.00 per month for 800MB of space. Fair enough. This should cover the bandwidth costs as well.

Now this is what you would pay for Amazon S3:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

Using this calculator, you can get a price quote depending on you hosting needs. Let’s say you have about 1GB of data and 50GB (!!!) of files to ship out of the door every month: $10.36

Interested? This is what you need to get started with Amazon S3:

• an account with Amazon
• a neat Firefox plug-in - S3Fox (available on Mac and Windows)
• access to your domain DNS settings

Amazon S3 uses “buckets” as their terminology for “folders”. You can create your unique bucket - e.g. media.mydomain.com. After all, a domain name can be a folder name!

Next step: create a CNAME entry for media.mydomain.com to s3.amazonaws.com

Voila! Your cost effective hosting service is all set-up. The only thing left is uploading your data using the S3Fox plug-in in your browser. Firefox that is:

Enjoy paying only for what you use!

I don’t normally talk about my day job on the blog, but I’m extremely proud about running this web project and the way it came to life: Renaissance Investments “invest well. live better.” Merging web sites without affecting the client experience is not always easy, but it is nice to get a positive feedback in the end. I also want to tip my hat to my team - it was quite a ride!

So, if you are an investor or an adviser, check out Renaissance Investments or Investissements Renaissance. There you go - you got my next step - getting some Google juice to flow.

A new Forrester report divides the U.S. online population into six groups according to their social participation on the Web:

• Creators - those who blog, publish web sites, upload videos, or participate in other content creation activities - 21 percent own Macs, while only 12 percent own Dell computers;
• Spectators - they read blogs, watch videos, and listen to podcasts - 55 percent own Macs;
• The majority of Inactives - they don’t participate online - 55 percent own Dells.

Social Participation on the Web:

Source: Forrester. Via: Macworld.

Although I was able to attend the 2007 Podcasters Across Borders for just one day, it was a blast! So many things to learn, so many people to meet! Kudos again to the organizers - Mark Blevis and Bob Goyetche!

I had the privilege of sharing the “cool table” with Chris Penn, Mitch Joel and Julien Smith:

Some quick facts worth mentioning:

• YouTube usage growth in Canada between April 2006-2007: 616%! [Mitch Joel]
• FaceBook usage growth in Canada between April 2006-2007: 2424%! [Mitch Joel]
• If MySpace were a country, it would have been the 6th largest country on the planet! Want to buy a banner on the homepage? Be prepared to pay $1.000.000 per day! [Chris Penn]
• Canadians spend 48% of their leisure time online! Is that the whole winter?! [Mitch Joel]
• “Google couldn’t care less about your podcast!” [Julien Smith]

More:

• PAB2007 on Flickr
• PAB2007 on Technorati

Having graduated Computer Science a while ago, I totally concur to Eric Lundquist’s awesome article in eWeek. There are three Lessons you should know:

• Lesson 1: “Pay attention to the economics and politics of your profession and figure out a way to gain leverage not just for yourself but also for your peers.”
• Lesson 2: “Your leisure is your future. Your parents and your professors thought you were wasting time with YouTube, Facebook, texting, mashups and GPS social networks. They were wrong. Thanks to all that time you spent thumbing messages and sending photos and videos around the Web, you know much more about what companies need to understand technologywise than the companies themselves do. You’ll walk into the office of your new employer with a better comprehension of what the company needs than all those suits running around on the top floor. In fact, most of those suits are spending their time and the company’s money trying to buy their way into businesses about which they don’t have a clue. Don’t be afraid to clue in the clueless and, failing that, don’t be afraid to start up your own business based on what you know and they don’t.”

• Lesson 3: “Innovation versus the cubicle. There’s probably no word that large bureaucratic companies like to bandy about more than “innovation.” You’ll hear innovation championed by the company president, highlighted in companywide memos and held up as the gold standard of corporate aspiration. Alas, you soon learn that, in the cubicle culture, innovation’s high goals can be recast by micro managers as tiny improvements in current product lines, as the creation of obstacles designed to trip up competing products or as patentable concepts meant only to cast a legal chill over the economic landscape. But innovation doesn’t have to live only within the confines of corporate edicts. […] Understand the difference between innovation in a straitjacket and intelligent invention.”

You should read the whole “Go to the Head of Your Class” article!

This week I had the privilege of attending the Google Financial Services Conference here in Toronto and meet cool people like Chantal Rossi, Sabrina Geremia, Paul Botto or Chris O’Neill of Google.

There are five themes re-shaping Marketing today:

• Integration: consumers are hard to find and harder to influence!
• Innovation: today’s buzz word is “video” - online video; “click to play” geo targeted video ads can be delivered depending on your location
• Inclusive: advertise all your assets, not only what you think is popular
• Interactivity: consumers like to get involved; how does it feel to have an extra 10,000 brand managers out there?
• Informed: make the most by measuring your data intelligence!

There you go, the five “I”s of today’s Marketing.