After Microsoft won the battle for the investment in the social networking site Facebook against Google and Yahoo the first unofficial counterattack from Google already sees the world the name of this attack is "Maka-Maka". Last week Microsoft invested $240 Million dollar for a stake in Facebook now Google counterattacks with the plans to develop their own Social networking tool. The power of this tool will be that it would be integrated in all their applications going from Google reader, Gmail to Google Maps and this could well be their power. Another big thing is that they would open their API from Orkut (the social networking site from Google) to developers to make it easy to build applications around this shell and again attracting more users to their network. Although everything is not official yet it will surely be a topic to watch closely.

You can read the full story on TechCrunch.

As I'm a big fan of the EOS series (I started with a 300 a non digital SLR and now I got the 400D, you can see some examples here of my little family), I went last Friday to the EOS discovery tour a seminar organized by Canon (of course) to do some product promotion on their EOS Series (where the 40D is one of their latest products). Till here nothing special cause normally you would expect this to be a night full of product presentations but not at all! I was really surprised by the quality of the seminar, the product placement was really well done and everything was explained trough some clear examples. The photographer who presented all this was Andy Earl a man who has shot pictures of very known stars like Madona, Any Lenox, Prince, ... and has also some great stories about those pictures. Also the whole event was very interactive as all the pictures appeared immediately on some big screens with the help of the wireless file transmitter on the device. I also really liked that they commented some pictures that where send by the audience. To resume a night very well spend with lots of interesting information and a great presentation.

I found on Cut the Crab the making of the latest Telenet (A Belgian Internet provider) spot. It all seems simple when you look at the commercial but when you look at the making off I guess it was really a big effort.

Common Craft know for their plain English series launched a great viral in their known style to celebrate Halloween "Zombies in plain English", just that you recognize one if you have an encounter with them.

On Buzzing Bees I found a funny commercial for Mercator insurances. Well what can I say a man will always be a man I guess!!!

This week 2 big companies specialized each in a different area launched the same product namely Unified communications, these 2 companies are Microsoft and Cisco. Now what is this "Unified communications" well if I quote Microsoft "it bridges the gap between telephony and computing to deliver real-time messaging, voice and conferencing to the desktop environment". Now if we take the definition of Cisco it says "Unified Communications is helping you integrate communications more closely with business processes, ensuring that information reaches recipients every time and everywhere, no matter what their working environment, through the most appropriate medium". They both look at the product from a totally different point of view, one as a software vendor, one more as a hardware vendor and they say it differently but they actually mean more or less the same thing. Maybe if we look at a little movie that I found on Geert's blog everything will become more clear.

You can also find an explanatory movie and site from Cisco here. I guess in a few months we'll see who wins this fight.

Yesterday I saw on Marketingcharts that Nielsen issued another rating of the top social networking and Blog sites we  see in the rating that MySpace sites still has a comfortable top position with 58.6 million visitors followed by facebook but with on 18 million unique visitors.

In the blogging world Blogger form Google still stands strong with 29 million visitors and followed by Typepad and Wordpress but with only about 10 million visitors. The most impressive move forward was from Wordpress with a jump of 290 % from 2.5 million to 10.

My wife is a teacher for kids from 6 till 7 years now sadly enough one of the kids in her class has cancer which makes her stay quite a lot at home. In Flanders they created a really nice initiative called bednet which is for children that can't attend the lessons for a longer period and have to stay at home due to their illness. Now what do they do concretely for those children; they install a dedicated line in the class room and one at the home of the child. In the classroom they install a laptop, a webcam, a scanner and a special camera to take pictures of the blackboard. At the children's home she also has a webcam and laptop so that the child can follow everything that happens in the classroom. I think it's really great that technology can server a higher purpose and give these kids a better life. This initiative is made possible all kinds of sponsors like the King Baudouin Foundation, Vlaamse Overheid, Belgacom or The Belgian Lottery. Once everything is installed I'll do some more posts to tell how everything works.

Today we launched the new site for the "kinderrechtencommissariaat" which is the rights for the children in Belgium. The site has a part for adults, one for from 12 till 18 and one for children below 12. All  the parts that we find in the different sub-sites are really build for the target groups. All the cartoons and images came from Vero Beauprez. It took us some time to get it online but the result is really nice.