Articles pour le mot-clé ‘programming’


google is evil5 300x270 A Day in Paris at LeWeb09 (2)Google is a constant source of criticism among the “technocracy” here at the conference. Last night’s dinner conversation remained critical of Google Books and how it will further Americanize the websphere. Europeans feel especially threatened by Google, as they “own” not only American, but also European online culture. I agree 100% that these are serious issues.  To quote the first president Roosevelt (not to be confused with FDR) “Yes to big business… Yes to big government.”

Alas, day two of the conference was the source of discussion that kept me thinking about business culture and global culture – both very interesting topics. Here are some inspiring quotes and my thoughts for the day: (Quotes are not verbatim. My comments in italics.)

Online merchandising that inspires

“Whatever you are thinking, think BIGGER…culture, customer service, clothing….we didn’t spend much on Adwords…viral is the best thing to do, as well as building the customer experience online and offline.”

(Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com)

Quite amazing really, from 2001 to 2008, Zappos’ revenues grew from 0$ to 1 billion. They focus on selling a culture. Almost all their employees are on Twitter, and active on other social network sites. They are extremely focused on their HR department, and ensuring employees are a good fit. Hsieh says they have offered employees $2000 to quit after one week if they thought they had made a mistake. They have two interviews with employees: one classic interview, and one focused on assessing cultural fit. “We want people who will be able to share our culture… the definition of happiness is different for every person.”

His speech was very inspiring. I am motivated to take more time for HR and get better support for recruitment ;-)

“Be there before the sale”…let users promote your product…you don’t have to sell directly…”

(Chris Brogan, President, New Marketing Labs, Author, Trust Agents)

I agree; instead of spending thousands of dollars on PPC and Cos, it’s better to make good use of social networks. PPC is to online advertising what traditional ads were a few years ago. Everyone is spending on it but most don’t take the time to optimize it. Costs are rising as agencies are growing – it’s time to react and use social networks instead.

Let them build it for us

In response to market demand and nuances of banking regulations in different countries, Paypal is opening up its payment system. “We need programmers all over the world to work on the development of whatever remains to be done, focused on our use cases…”

(Osama Bedier, Vice President of PayPal Platform and Emerging Technology)

Smart. Paypal is letting programmers outside Paypal develop with Paypal’s APIs to accomplish their goals. I was saying this to my customers just a few weeks ago: invest more money on an API program instead of developing new features that will only be used by a few people.

…let others innovate for you…

Real-world Counter-Culture

(Danah Boyd, Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, Fellow at Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society)

Danah gave a brillant presentation. It was very likely my favorite one.

Danah Boyd does random word searches on Twitter to discover twittering outside her normal comfort zone. …from racist words on Twitter to youth video content… she looks at the power of visibility online, getting a true picture of the real world. Is it sometimes better to be stuck with televised network programming? Not a chance.

Grinda: ‘le retour du succès”

OLX is a new classified site, very popular locally… it focuses on the South-American and Russian markets. 10M$ revenues per year with ad sense only…”

(Fireside Chat with Fabrice Grinda, Co-CEO, OLX, Inc. and Loic Le Meur, Founder, Le Web)

Grinda says “Whatever you do, you have to be within the top 3 leading markets. This could include your local market, but its best to focus on your top three.” I agree but I also think you need to think outside the box…there are other markets besides the US and Europe. I remember UNYK in Quebec, they were number one in South-America! Finally, they were sold to Viadeo (in France).

Russia Roundtable: Emerging Markets: Focus on Russia

russiaday 071 A Day in Paris at LeWeb09 (2)Moderated by Jennifer L. Schenker, Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Informilo.com

Sasha Galitsky, Almaz Capital Partners

Bernard Lukey, CEO, OZON.ru

Edward Shenderovich, Managing Director, Kite Ventures

Arkady Volozh, CEO, Yandex

Google is not a leader in Russia which is going to be the largest EU Internet market (Arkady Volozh, CEO, Yandex)

Amazon is not present at all in Russia and OZON  has taken the lead (Bernard Lukey, CEO, OZON.ru)

The blogosphere is not as well set-up as it is in the west…it’s more kitchen conversation. (Edward Shenderovich, Managing Director, Kite Ventures)

There is more US investment in the US. (Sasha Galitsky, Almaz Capital Partners)

I often wonder how it will all play out in Russia. Just like in Quebec, language can protect the market – that is why Russian companies have a lot of success – but it doesn’t last forever…just think of the Berlin Wall… it came down long before we thought it would…

Have a good week-end.

damien

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Soyez API

6 novembre 2009 | par Damien Lefebvre

Comme si le web ne regorgeait pas déjà suffisamment de sigles en tous genres, en voici un nouveau dont vous allez entendre parler de plus en plus : « API » pour Application Programming Interface. Cet acronyme peu engageant pour les non-initiés, se traduit généralement par interface de programmation.

L’essor d’internet a forcé les industries à repenser leur modèle d’affaires, ainsi que leur stratégie marketing. Le principal enjeu pour une entreprise est de migrer sur le web en adaptant en ligne son modèle d’affaires traditionnel tout en évitant l’erreur qui consiste à simplement le convertir. Il faut « penser différemment », pour paraphraser la signature publicitaire d’un constructeur informatique fruité.

Oui mais, concrètement…, ça sert à quoi, les API ? Eh bien, prenons l’exemple du site web de la Société de transport de Montréal (STM), qui lancerait un programme d’API et rendrait ainsi disponible son contenu : sa base de données et ses outils de recherche. Cela permettrait alors à un développeur X (un individu ou une société) d’utiliser ce contenu pour créer différentes applications (widgets, applications pour smartphone…). Si l’application conçue est commercialisée et génère des profits, la STM peut alors conclure des partenariats commerciaux avec X ou envisager de commercialiser l’accès à son API sur une base forfaitaire. C’est gagnant-gagnant : X utilise gratuitement le contenu de la STM, qui, de son côté, bénéficie de cette diffusion auprès d’autres publics.

Les API n’ont cependant rien de nouveau, certains ouvrages spécialisés en faisaient déjà mention en 1995. Ce qui est nouveau, en revanche, c’est leur intégration dans la stratégie de distribution des entreprises et le fait que la communauté web au sens large (développeurs et organisations) s’en empare.

Le monde de la radio n’est pas en reste, et le chef de file dans ce domaine est NPR (National Public Radio), la radio publique américaine, qui a lancé en 2008 un programme d’API ayant connu un véritable succès, avec plus de trois millions de requêtes par mois et plus de 2000 membres enregistrés.

Grâce à ce programme, NPR a mis à disposition tout son contenu actuel et ses archives depuis 1995. Résultat ? De nombreux sites ont repris et diffusé le contenu de NPR, et plusieurs applications ont vu le jour, dont une qui fait actuellement un tabac sur l’iPhone : NPR Addict. NPR, qui n’a pas déboursé un sou en développement, tire des bénéfices de cette application en concluant des partenariats commerciaux.

Autre exemple, Last.fm, l’un des sites d’écoute de radio en ligne les plus populaires, a également mis à disposition son contenu et sa technologie au moyen des API. Là encore, le succès est au rendez-vous, car plusieurs centaines de sites et autres « mash-up musicaux »* sont nés grâce à Last.fm.

À Montréal, StreamTheWorld, une entreprise qui fournit des services de transmission multimédia en continu (streaming), connait actuellement un grand succès grâce à une application permettant d’accéder à plusieurs radios par iPhone. L’entreprise travaille d’ailleurs présentement à l’intégration dans sa plateforme d’API pertinentes et sur mesure pour ses clients.

La radio constitue un exemple parmi d’autres, toutes les industries sont en réalité concernées. Des sociétés comme Best Buy et Amazon ont également lancé un programme d’API et établi des partenariats commerciaux profitables.

Les API bouleversent le monde du web ; il devient donc nécessaire pour les entreprises de les intégrer à leur stratégie de marketing. Et si le côté technologique peut parfois rebuter certains décideurs, sachez qu’il est très facile, à l’occasion d’une refonte de site, d’intégrer un tel programme. Ne pas avoir une stratégie de programme API reviendrait à ne pas faire de l’optimisation pour les moteurs de recherche (search engine optimization) pour votre site, ce qui serait impensable aujourd’hui. La mise en place des API permet de bâtir un nouveau canal de distribution sur du long terme en réalisant des économies sur les dépenses en communication (coût par clic et autres médias).

1. Site internet dont le contenu provient de la combinaison de plusieurs sources d’information.

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It can be overwhelming to understand the production environment of websites, front-end developers, back-end developers, integration, programmings, what’s that? As client, you may be happy to understand a little bit more about the structure behind it.

So you are happy of your new design, what is next?

You just approved the design of your next website, you are happy with what has been done so far. What’s next? well a pretty long process. Upon approbation of the design, front-end developers take these designs and translate it to HTML. This means that your design is taken, decorticated and translated to a programming language. This might look like a simple task, but on the contrary, you need excellent front-end developers to translate your design perfectly.

How Complex?

To translate your design we use 2 languages, HTML and CSS. HTML is the foundation of your website, and CSS is what styles all your website, adds colors and images. It is not all, unfortunately the implementation between browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer and etc) of those 2 languages differs a bit, it creates the complex task of testing your website to all current browsers to be sure the integration is spot on. The front-end developer needs to be aware of the dependencies of every browsers and be able to turn around problem that could arise.

Front-end developer also optimizes your website the be the fastest possible, trying to use the fastest structure possible and optimizing your design without losing picture quality. This is what we call website integration.

A back-end developer develops features

When those templates are finished, generally a small round table is planned with designers in case front-end developers forgot some styling. When designers are happy with the templates, it’s ready to get implemented in your content management system.

It is the back-end developer’s job to develop all the features you need to be able to manage your website yourself. Like changing the text in a section for example. This is where front-end developers and back-end developers work together to integrate your design with all the website features you need.

Every web creation company should take great pride of doing spot on integration of website design with content management, and we, at w.illi.am/ sure do.

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Ask web developers what they hate most about web technologies, chances are they will say javascript, and for some parts, they are right to do so. But to understand why Javascript is so much hated we need to go back in time. In the early years of Netscape, in 1995.

In the nineties, Netscape was flourishing with between 50% and 80% of the browsers’ market and was in a intense combat with Internet Explorer. A guy at Netscape, named Brendan Eich, was given a difficult task of creating a language to make Netscape interacting more dynamically with websites. And of course they wanted this language the day before they asked it . In the time Brendan had, he did the most he could, and created a versatile language that even script kids could pick up, Javascript, he also created the DOM (Document Object Model) on top of Javascript. Now the difference between Javascript and the DOM is simple. Javascript is the basic language you use to make sentence. But the DOM is what is understanding this sentence and makes it interact with the document the way you asked it.

Microsoft was not going to let that happen

Microsoft was certainly not going to let Netscape have « Javascript » and not them, they decided to reverse engineer and implement it in Internet Explorer. Now problems began. They, very unfortunately, did not do a very good job at this implementation. Which means that for doing one simple operation on Netscape and Internet explorer, you had to code 2 implementation for both of them, because the DOM was not understanding the same sentence for both. In fact javascript, the programming language is mostly fine, the biggest problem is the DOM API, some words means nothing to IE and some other means nothing to Firefox. This is what drives web developers crazy. You have to write code specifically to some browsers because they do not follow standards, you have no choice, Internet Explorer represent 67% of your user base, you have to do an implementation for them.

javascript Javascript, the most misunderstood coding language

You need to understand that this happened in 1995. The web did not had the same needs than today. Now web applications are vastly more complex. Some people had to step up and create cross browser API’s to deal with the DOM, and they did. Which means now you write one line, and some API dispatch the good implementation to each browser. This has make the life of web developers much easier.

There is currently 3 major « all round » Javascript libraries, jQuery, Mootools and Prototype

At w.illi.am, we decided to use the jQuery framework, which is now endorsed by a lot of major players, like Microsoft. Not only this is the most use Javascript framework in the world, this is the one we found the most powerful. Writing Javascript with jQuery enabled us to create more powerful web site than ever before and this tool is one of many that make us confident that we are ready for the future of the web.

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