Miguel Carrasco's Real World

Silverlight is Here .net User Group Presentation

Hope you enjoyed the presentation tonight!  Slides will be posted shortly at:  Software Development in the Real World:  www.realsoftwaredevelopment.com.  While you await the slides, examples, and more, why not read some of the articles!

Thanks for coming out, it was record attendance, and we hope to see more faces over the year in 2008!  Feedback was pretty good, and we will try and get more food next time!  We thought because of the weather, we would get less, but we actually got more than we though we would!

Thanks,

Miguel Carrasco

iContact Community

Back in the day, before blogs where around, people used to subscribe to newsletters to get the latest information delivered to their inbox.  I actually still subscribe to a few newsletters.  However these days its very difficult to actually find good newsletters worth subscribing to.  This is where iContact Community comes in!  iContact Community uses a similar system to Digg, where the more interesting and relevant the content the iContact customers publish is, the more likely it will get votes from visitors leading to more exposure and more subscribers. The top ranked content in each category will show up on the community home page. All community content as well as the community profile will be indexed by Google and the major search engines, allowing publishers to get more visitors and subscribers.

iContact Community also allows email marketers to create a public profile, publicly archive their newsletters and blog posts, tag and categorize their newsletters and blog posts, get their content indexed in Google, participate in discussions with subscribers, and easily grow their opt-in lists.

Visitors to the iContact Community can vote on their favorite content, comment on content, view the top ranked content within each of the 18 categories like Entertainment, Politics, and Travel, create a public profile, discuss topics that interest them in the forums, and find new publishers who are creating email newsletters, RSS feeds, and blogs about topics they are interested in. It's an exciting experience to be able to vote on a newsletter that you feel has great content and see it move up in its category.

The iContact Community already has over 120,000 registered members and 212,000 pieces of content on it three days after launch.  Check it out!

Rick Mercer Talking to Americans

Get Ready for a laugh, Rick Mercer is the ideal Canadian comedian!  Smart, funny, and extremely witty.  Talking to Americans aired on 22 Minutes on CBC.  In 2000, Rick Mercer became an international name when he included the then presidential candidate, George W. Bush in one of his segments.  In Talking to Americans, Rick Mercer travels to major cities in America, and conducts basic interviews on the street.

Although this video is funny, I look on it with two sides.  On the one side, yes we laugh at how silly and uneducated they seem, but it should also serve us in Canada as a reminder of how arrogant we can be about other countries.  While we laugh that some American's might think that we only have 1,000,000 people in Canada, how many people does the United States have?  Do you come close?  Don't Google it!

Canada is such a multi-cultural country with so many people from so many different places, and we all get along so well!  Let's remember to not just get along, but also to learn about the cultures in other countries.  Lets not laugh at the American's, and then not know what the capital city of Australia is!  Sydney?  Sorry that would be wrong.

 

 

 

Some of the funny lines that Rick Mercer manages to get the Americans to say on camera include:

• Congratulations Canada on Legalizing Staplers! 
• Congratulations Canada on preserving your national Igloo! 
• Congratulations Canada on allowing Dogs as house pets! 
• Congratulations Canada on a second area code! 
• Congratulations Canada on moving to the 24 hour Clock!

I really enjoyed watching Talking to Americans, it is one of the most brilliantly put together segments CBC has ever aired.  Hopefully you don't miss the hidden message, which is how nice and genuine they were on camera.

Crack iTunes Music Easily in Seconds

As I have mentioned in other posts, it is very easy to crack iTunes and unlock all of your mp3 music.  When DRM (Digital Rights Management) made its first appearance, I immediately felt it was something conceived by paranoid executives that simply did not understand technology, and how our generation wanted to use music, videos, and other media! People will pay 99 cents to support the artists they like, as long as they can take that song or album, and listen to it anywhere they want, not just on an iPod or iTunes.  As soon as the music industry saw music coming online, they instantly tried to shut down the site, and began to invest millions of dollars into DRM protection for their content.

The Music Industry Is Changing For The Better in 2008!

Fast forward to 2008 and you see all four major record labels removing DRM (Digital Rights Management) from their media!  Fantastic.  Sony was the only one left, and as of earlier today, has also stated its plans to remove all DRM!  Why the sudden change in heart?  Well, all they really accomplished was giving complete control of their music distribution in the online world to Apple.

Trust me, in the next 6 months, you will see Apple remove DRM from iTunes as it begins to lose its grip on Digital Music.  Since they were unwilling to share iTunes with independent artists that didn’t care about DRM, and wanted people to make copies, they have forced the industry to make plans that don't include them.  Since they were unwilling to allow other companies to make iPod like devices and license the software on a per unit basis, they have forced companies to build their own iPod killers, which are starting to get better.  Will they ever be as great as the iPod?  Probably not, but if Microsoft teaches us anything, its that you don't have to have the best product to win.

A Little Bit On Apple, Steve Are You Reading?

It's sad to see that Apple has still not learned from its lessons of the past to open up its technology and be more transparent.  They invented fantastic computers with easy to use interfaces, but never let anyone build them but Apple.  It took Apple over 25 years to move to the standard computer chips everyone else was using!  They built a great operating system, but only allow it to run on Apple computers!  Have you ever stopped to think about what people would choose if they were to buy a new computer from Dell, and could choose Windows, or OSX?  I often wonder why apple refuses to learn from such obvious mistakes that they made in the past.  I guess history does repeat itself if you don't learn from your mistakes.

Steve Jobs is one of my idols from a visionary and creative perspective, but I often wonder why he has not patched his Achilles heal of being over confident.  Has Jobs become over confident with the dominance of the iPod and iTunes?  While I realize that they are locked into contracts with record companies, it's sad that they did all the up front work, and now will be left in the dust due to a closed application.  Lets not forget Apple re-invented music for everyone by negotiating landmark usage rights at the time, which included allowing users to play their DRM protected music on up to 5 computers and on an unlimited number of iPods. Obtaining such rights from the music companies was unprecedented at the time!  But they stopped there.  They closed up iTunes to third party developers.  They closed up the software the runs on the iPods.

Will they be wiped off the map in the next 10 years?  Will you tell stories of the great iPod to your kids, only to have them look at you and laugh?

The Best is Yet To Come

Amazon, Facebook, Sony, and even the independent artists (shameless plug for Flo, fantastic artist) will soon launch fantastic online portals where you can simply purchase a song, and download the mp3 to your machine.  The entire music industry is changing as we know it, and it’s pretty cool to be a part of it! Soon your Facebook profile will feature your cell phone ring tone, your entire music library, and give your friends the ability to buy the latest tunes extremely easily!

Until Apple removes the iTunes protection, you can always crack iTunes yourself by following the simple steps below:

1. Load iTunes and make sure you are logged in and authorized on your iTunes account.
2. Download QTFairUse 7.
3. Run QTFairUse.
4. QTFairUse will proceed to unlock your music!

It's that easy!  You can now upload your music to your phone, create custom ringtones, or make copies of your music to any device you choose!

Top YouTube Videos for 2007

What were the top YouTube videos in 2007?  Now that 2007 has come to an end, make sure you have seen the top YouTube videos for 2007.

1. Miss Teen USA 2007 - Southern California (Caitlin Upton)
   
   
   
   
2. Here Comes Another Bubble
   
   
   
   
3. Britney Spears at the VMA's
   
   
   
   
4. Best Wedding First Dance
   
   
   
   
5. Technoviking
   
   
   
   
6. I Got a Crush On Obama
   
   
   
   
7. Gotta Digg
   
   
   
   
8. Leave Britney Alone - Chris Cocker
   
   
   
   
9. Battle at Kruger - Filmed by Jason Schlosberg
   
   
   
   
10. Otters Holding Hands
    
    

 

What will make the top videos in 2008?  Now that Web 2.0 is here to stay, the media is now back in everyone's hands, and anyone with talent, a video camera, can get their 15 minutes of fame over night.  I hope you enjoyed the top videos on the Internet for 2007.