Recently, I attended Confoo, a 3 days Web Techno conference in Montreal. The schedule was great, the speakers were amazing and the organization was superb! Only one glitch in the overall picture: the Wifi sucked… But hey, it’s exactly what geeks need to be able to fully focus on the person speaking in front of you!

I attended great talks including “HTML 5: where are we so far” (http://confoo.ca/en/2010/session/html5-where-are-we-now) by Mark Pilgrim from Google, “PHP 5.3 == Awesome!” by Ilia Alshanetsky, “I’m going to tell you what MySQL is bad at” by Morgan Tocker and “Can Twitter Make Money” by Jon Hansen. Read more…

Tomorrow, the Confoo conference starts for 3 days at the Hilton Boneventure Hotel in Montreal. Previously known as the PHO Quebec conference, Confoo is the first Wen Techno Conference gathering experts from Java, .Net, PHP, Python and Ruby. More then 100 different talks from the best experts in their domains.

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In the last few months, we have created four video tutorials related to the ImpressCMS Persistable Framework. The IPF is a native part of ImpressCMS since version 1.1. It allows rapid development of ImpressCMS modules, by taking care of 80% of what is needed when creating new modules or new functionalities: adding, editing, deleting, listing, sorting, filtering objects, and much more.

In addition, the imBuilding module, using all the benefits of the ImpressCMS Persistable Framework,  allows you to easily create modules in a few minute. You simply define what kind of module you want, what objects you wish to manage, what are the fields of these objects, and imBuilding will create all the files you need to install your new module in matter of seconds. You will then have a fully working module which you can start to use and improve.

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For anyone who has been around longer than the Internet, fond memories may come to mind when you hear the term “Ma’n'Pa” Store. For me, it was a little shack of a shop with game room in the back, next to George’s Lake in Florahome, FL. The atmosphere of that quaint shop took me back to a simpler time.

Was it the rustic look, the location, the lack of hustle and bustle? No, it was the warm welcome when you walked in the door, the idle banter about fishing and the weather. It was being able to stop by, just to say “Hi” with no need to buy anything. The owner actually cared. Moreover, they were a contributing member of the community, always giving something back. This is the essence of Altruistic Marketing. Read more…

One of the very crucial elements of a company’s web site is to generate opportunities to make connections with people. When connections are made, you get an opportunity to help someone, to solve problems, and, ultimately, to gain new clients, to sell products or services.

When your business is small, managing your contacts and tracking your interactions with them can easily be done with Gmail, with Outlook, or even with a simple spreadsheet. However, once your business grows, you quickly find yourself needing more powerful tools to manage your clients.

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