With CanUX over, I found myself looking for all the links to templates and other information that were mentioned during the sessions. I thought I might as well share my list with others! Here it is (if you have something to add please let me know in the comments):
Web Form Design – Luke Wroblewski
UX Swimlanes – Yvonne Shek
A Better Method for Designing with Developers – Jerome Ryckborst
Sketchboards: Good Design Faster – Brandon Schauer
Visual Thinking in Practice – Dave Gray
Microsoft Surface – Dennis Wixon
Books
The next event from nForm will be the Web Strategy Summit, taking place in Calgary on May 4th & 5th, 2009.
If you’d like to read more about CanUX 2008, see my posts on Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3. I also posted some sketches here, and a list of attendees on Twitter here. My photos are here, and you can find other related photos on Flickr here.
Even though I only have enough air miles to buy a blender, I still dream of the day when I finally have enough points to book a flight, only to be thwarted by airlines not having any award seats left. Yapta is taking care of that problem - their new service provides award seat alerts on flights on Alaska Airlines, Continental, Delta, United, and U.S. Airways, so that you can know exactly where and when you can 
redeem your award miles.
Yapta (which stands for Your Personal Travel Assistant...cute) also offers price change alerts that have saved travelers over $90 million since the company was founded in 2006. If the price of your flight drops after you've booked on an airline's website, you're eligible to a refund or travel credit. The free service also tracks price and availability of flights of any flight that you choose, every day.
"One of the biggest frustrations for frequent travelers is not knowing when they can actually redeem their miles to book an award seat," said Tom Romary, president & CEO of Yapta. Romary is also looking at it as a service to airlines: "Airlines want their frequent fliers to use miles because it strengthens their loyalty program,"he says. "Our award seat alerts stimulate the usage of frequent flier programs and therefore will have a positive impact on the airline's balance sheet and income statement."
Our purpose is to make it easy for you to secure the best airfare deals available on the Web. We do this by giving you a tool to "tag" the trips... [more]
The 2009 Northern Voice website went live today and they're looking for speakers. As Canada’s largest Blogging and Social Media conference, this is THE event to present at if you're experienced and passionate about social media and blogging.
While Nothern Voice is celebrating its 5th year, some of you may not be familiar with the conference. In that case, check out last year's speakers schedule to get a feel for what they're looking for. The call for speaker’s deadline is December 19, 2008.
Logo and artwork by basco5.
This announcement is long overdue but at least two of you will be happy.
Brother Canada was kind enough to sponsor our Small Business Week contest and have provided Techvibes with two Brother Colour Multi-Function Centers (valued at $350 each) to give away. In order to enter the contest, all you had to do was comment on one of the following Small Biz profile blog posts:
And the winners are... Jess Sloss and Rory Hansen. I'll be in touch to coordinate delivery and/or pickup.
Thanks to everyone who entered.
Brother International Corporation (Canada) Ltd. markets a range of business machine products known for their originality and creativity. A Japanese... [more]
Via Jevon MacDonald of StartupNorth, Toronto startup Clutterme.com has put themselves on the auction block at eBay.
Clutterme.com a do-it-yourself website builder and domain purchasing site is for sale, on ebay. This isn’t the first startup to put themselves up on Ebay, Toronto based Tucows bought kiko.com in an ebay auction for almost $260,000 a few years ago.
Will Clutterme get bids well past $200,000? Probably not, but I think the service is worth something, and a registrar such as Tucows, GoDaddy or another could really make good use of it. Clutterme is what they say it is: A really, really, easy way to make a website. It is the kind of really simple website builder that your mom would be happy to use. They also have a really slick domain purchasing system set up that lets people get their own domain and website builder all wrapped in to one.
Most established domain name registrars already have a free or cheap website building tool in their product mix but the Canadian domain space has a large number of registrars that don't do retail. Why is that? For a domainer, getting accredited with CIRA as a registrar is the easiet way to guarantee wholesale renewal rates for your own portfolio and get unencumbered access to expiring domain names.
Acquiring an established site like Clutterme.com could turn a domainer with accreditation into an instant competitor in the website builder space. Current bidding is at US $51.00.
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is a not for profit Canadian corporation that is responsible for operating the dot-ca Internet... [more]
Clutterme Inc is website creation for dummies. Make a free website in seconds or upgrade your simple website to a .com, .org, or .net domain for... [more]
The date for the next Ideas On Tap has been announced and it's on January 22nd from 5:00 - 8:00pm at the Yaletown Brewing Company.
Ideas on Tap is a light business networking event for hi-tech professionals in Vancouver plus internet advertisers, social media marketers, bloggers, video game developers and other fans of the tech community.
This free event will feature a competition where 5 contestants deliver a 60 second pitch, idea, recruiting message, or elevator pitch from a milk crate. This could be talking about their company, a start-up idea, new technology, hiring, or raising capital.
The audience will vote for their 2 favourite pitches and prizes will be awarded. The event is being held in the Yaletown Brewing Company, Vancouver's favourite brewpub. In sticking with the theme of the venue, voting will be done by tapping beer glasses on tables or bars.
The re-launch event in October drew over 250 people from the Vancouver Tech community and was a huge success. Wondering what you missed? Check out the Flickr stream from the last event and be sure to register for January's event now.
Do you love intuitive and simplistic designs? Do you love playing or watching sports? Do you love short contract projects? And do you love working with fun people? Then we have the project for you…
We are currently looking for a talented designer to give us a much needed overhaul/re-skin of the site template we’re using for our website TeamPages.com. The task at hand, if you wish to take it, is to tweak our current design and turn it into a very polished, sporty, and energetic, parent friendly (looks REALLY easy to use), web 2.0 template for TeamPages that gives us a beautiful site that people will love to use and want to come back to. Pretty much we want our users to “Oooohhh…awww…wow, that’s cool!” and at the same time “I can’t believe how easy this is.”
This project will include:
Project start date: ASAP
Project deadline: December 30, 2008
If you’re up for the challenge, or just want to chat to guy who write this, send over your portfolio and resume to mike.tan@teampages.com.
TeamPages is an online social network and utility for amateur sports that makes it easier for coaches, team managers and players to: manage their... [more]
The Financial Post reported yesterday that Toronto's MaRS project has been put on hold. The $300-million Medical and Related Sciences complex in Toronto's hospital district had been billed as an innovation centre for early-stage companies in the science and technology sector. MaRS developed Phase I of the project on its own however for the second phase it leased the land to a development company that is responsible for building and renting the space.
Hence the problem - many of the potential tenants for the building are dependent on venture capital funding, a market that has all but dried up as wealthy investors refuse to part with cash on risky investments.
MaRS received $70-million in funding from the Ontario government and another $20-million from the federal government but it has been largely funded by the private sector. The company's board of directors reads like a who's who of Toronto's elite, including Royal Bank chief executive Gord Nixon, First Marathon Inc. founder Lawrence Bloomberg and Roy-L Capital chief executive Joseph Rotman.
MaRS connects the communities of science, business and capital and fosters collaboration among them. This happens physically through location of... [more]
Google has released a major update to their Google Mobile App for iPhone with a nifty new feature that you'll see geeks demoing at parties for weeks to come. That feature is voice recognition. Launch the app, hold the phone up to your head, speak your search query, and in about six seconds you'll have a list of results. If your query is location-relevant, like, per se, "sushi", you'll be given a list of results that are closest to you. Beyond the voice features, the location-awareness is also unique to the app, as a Google search in Safari has no way of knowing your location. Also, the results page that it returns is better formatted for the mobile screen than searching in the browser.
Is it gimmicky? Somewhat. Is it faster than typing? Generally yes. How well does it work? Acceptably well. Andy Baio of Waxy.org attempts to deconstruct how the voice recognition works. The recognition happens server-side, with the app seemingly sending only 100-300 _bytes_ of pre-processed data.
In my testing, the app worked well with common terms, place names, and names of notable people. Being Google, you can also use it for unit conversions like "100 Canadian dollars in US dollars" or "50 miles in kilometres". Fans of the Simpsons will be amused that it took two tries to get "beat up Martin".
