December 9th, 2010 by Andrea Simmons
As we prepare to pack-up for Washington and set-up our booth for this year’s American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) Technology Conference next week, my mind is focused on the challenges this market is facing. Just like for-profit companies, Associations are struggling with staying relevant to their members in this tough market and are looking for new ways to increase non-dues revenue. One such channel is though their publications. Association publishing is big business and will continue to grow in the years to come. According to the recent Folio Magazine Survey, 29 percent of associations publish five or more magazines, and 12 percent publish 20 or more titles. But today, revenue from these publications is still low, with 24 percent of associations saying that magazines account for between one and nine percent of their entire revenue stream. Read more on Preparing for the ASAE Technology Conference…
Tags: ASAE Technology Conference, Association, Folio magazine, Mobile, Publishing, survey
Posted in ePublishing, Trends and Technology | No Comments »
November 25th, 2010 by Andrea Simmons
Last weekend, the TED phenomenon came to Montreal in the form of Relentless Curiosity, a TEDxMcGill event. The TEDx program offers communities, individuals and organizations the opportunity to deliver TED-like experiences at the local level. TEDxMcGill attracted nearly 600 attendees, making it the largest TEDx event in North America to-date.
The event was very much in the spirit of TED, a non-profit organization devoted to “Ideas worth Spreading”. It featured a combination of local speakers from the academic community as well as some interesting community speakers. The organizers also aired some select TED talks that fit nicely with the local programming. Ideas discussed throughout the day ranged from stimulating curiosity among managers, through to saving a million lives by spending time online. Read more on TED Phenomenon Hits Montreal…
Tags: INM, innovation, Montreal, TED, TEDxMcGill
Posted in General | No Comments »
November 19th, 2010 by Vahe Kassardjian
Earlier this month, the Economist ran a special report on Smart Systems, otherwise known as the Internet of Things. The piece, entitled “It’s a Small World”, looked at the convergence of the real and digital worlds and the potential impact this has on us as a society.
If we think back, two decades ago the world was revolutionized by a similar type of network that provided people with a way to interact with each other – the Internet. In the last decade the evolution of the Internet, defined as Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly in 2005, added user-generated content and created the concept of software applications engaging with each other directly. Read more on The Economist Tackles the Internet of Things…
Tags: Economist, Internet of Things, iPhone, RFID, Sensors, Web 2.0
Posted in General, Trends and Technology, User Experience/User Interface | No Comments »
November 11th, 2010 by Andrea Simmons
Today is World Usability Day, an international celebration marked by 144 different events in more than 43 countries. This year’s theme, “Making life easy!”, is focused on creating awareness for designs, products, and services that improve and facilitate communications.
In celebrating this event, it’s a good time to sit back and reflect on how our experience with software applications has changed over the years. Years ago, software was focused on features and capabilities -the more an application did, the better it was. The role of the user was to learn now to work within the constraints of an application. There were guides, training sessions and thick manuals for each application a user needed to master. If a user needed help, he could always hit F1 and filter through reams of text-based content to figure it out. Read more on Celebrating World Usability Day…
Tags: design, user experience, World Usability Day
Posted in General, User Experience/User Interface | 1 Comment »
November 5th, 2010 by Laurent Brigaut
Late last week a number of posts popped up online talking about the “death of Silverlight”. These posts were roughly based on a piece by Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet, who had reported on Microsoft’s change in strategy around Silverlight. Based on what Mary Jo saw at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) last week, Silverlight was more in the shadows than at previous conferences, so she spoke with Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s President in charge of the company’s server and tools business and got the scoop on Microsoft’s change in strategy with Silverlight. Bob stated that “Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone”, and he went on to state that it also has some “sweet spots” for media and business applications. However, he stated, for cross-platform development Microsoft was putting its weight behind the only real alternative at the moment, HTML5. Read more on Death of Silverlight Greatly Exaggerated…
Tags: HTML5, Microsoft Silverlight, TechCrunch
Posted in General, Rich Internet Applications | No Comments »
October 29th, 2010 by Jason MacDonald
Back in January we posted about the coming slew of tablets that were slated to hit the market. Now, heading into the holiday season, nearly 11 months later, it’s interesting to see where things stand. Just looking at my favorite source of tablet news, Goodreader.com, there are pages of announcements and reviews of new devices in the last week alone.
When I wrote the original article back in January, the iPad was still just a rumor, lumped in with a bunch of other “in development” products. Now, in just the first two quarters of the year, the iPad has generated nearly $5 billion in new revenue for Apple. This number is continuing to grow as Apple rolls out the device to a broader global market this week and US-based AT&T and Verizon start selling it in the US. Read more on State of the Tablet Market – 11 Months Later…
Tags: Android, Apple, Blackberry Playbook, HP, iPad, Microsoft, Samsung Galaxy Tab, tablet
Posted in General, Trends and Technology | 1 Comment »
October 21st, 2010 by Laurent Brigaut
With the changes to the iPhone developer agreement a few weeks back, the Adobe Packager for iPhone gained new life. The packager, which is a feature of Adobe Flash Professional CS5 software and the Adobe AIR SDK, offers a way to use existing Flash code to create native applications for the iPhone and iPad. We’ve been working on native iPhone and iPad development for some time now, so we were curious as to how this application could be used to port over some of our existing Flex-developed client applications. We took a sampling of applications we’ve built over the past few months, some simple and some more complex, and used the Adobe Packager for iPhone to convert them. What we discovered is that there are some significant limitations with this tool. Read more on Testing Out the Adobe Packager for iPhone…
Tags: Adobe, Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash, Apple, iPad, iPhone, Silverlight
Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Trends and Technology | 3 Comments »
October 15th, 2010 by Andrea Simmons
We’ve just scheduled two new webinars for the month of November. The first session, “20 Tips for an Effective Website Revamp” provides organizations embarking on a site redesign with an end-to-end guide through the common trouble points. It brings forth 20 key tips that every organization must keep in mind, including details such as how to plan your project, analyze key requirements and user needs, and choose the best technology. We’ll also look at how to optimize your site so it can be easily found by search engines, which performance indicators are important to monitor, and how to promote your new site to your stakeholders.
Read more on Two Upcoming Webinars – Register Now…
Tags: INM, Integration New Media, magazine archive, webinar, website design, website revamp
Posted in General | 1 Comment »
October 8th, 2010 by Andrea Simmons
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the Canadian Society of Association Executives National Conference and Tradeshow in Quebec City. At INM, we’ve worked with associations now for a number of years, providing a variety of services, including online and CD-based membership directories, Interactive publishing solutions, abstract management solutions for large meetings, and recently, design and development for website revamps. However, we haven’t really spent time with this audience disucssing broadly the challenges that this market is facing. Associations are unique organizations, funded primarily through membership revenue and sponsorships. In this recession economy, both of these sources are frequently cut from budgets. Read more on The Challenges Facing Associations Today…
Tags: Associations, CSAE, Mobile, social media, web design
Posted in Trends and Technology | No Comments »
September 30th, 2010 by Vahe Kassardjian
Earlier this month I attended an interesting conference called BIF-6, hosted by the Business Innovation Factory. This was the sixth installment of this event, held in beautiful Providence, Rhode Island. The organizer, Saul Kaplan, and his team did an excellent job pulling this event together in a very appropriate matter – comfortable enough, but not overly extravagant.
Each speaker had 15 minutes to tell a story related to innovation. Some speakers used support images, but PowerPoint slides were strictly forbidden. In general, the speakers were excellent. Some of them took certain liberties in extending personal experiences into doubtful generalizations, but most stayed within the limits of recounting their stories or connecting them with established knowledge. Read more on Innovation Stories at BIF-6…
Tags: BIF-6, Business Innovation Factory, innovation
Posted in General, Trends and Technology | No Comments »
