I got a laugh today when I checked out my LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn shows a “who viewed you also viewed” section. I can see how they would check out several other Ad 2 members who have had a similar career path. These included San Diego iPhone development company Treeline Interactive.

Barack Obama though? Are we underestimating ourself or is LinkedIn’s algorithm a little out of wack?

Justice was my first friend when I interned with the Indians back in 2002. He has provided guidance throughout my whole career. Its fun to work together now in the online world. Check out his stuff at Czar Justice.

Wishing you the best in 2010!

Since I left for my Euro-trip, I haven’t been able to stay current with my Mad Men episodes. I purchased the first two episodes on iTunes and will buy the rest before my flight back to San Diego.

I love the stories about advertising life in the 50/60’s. During my trip to Amsterdam two weeks ago, a friend of mine was smoking Lucky Stripes. That is a brand featured on the show. I’m not a smoker, but I haven’t seen that brand in the US. Is it still around? Anyways, I look forward to catching up on the series. Stay classy Donald Draper!

In this article, we will be discussing a smattering of business applications for: Google Android offered through T-Mobile, Apple iPhone with AT&T, Blackberry Storm from Verizon, and HTC Touch Diamond with Sprint. Innovation has flourished in the software market, leading to many software platforms; today, however, comparisons will focus simply on a phone’s applications, not on the software platform the applications are based upon.

Google made many headlines with their landmark Android software, and their initial foray into the cellular world has many buzzing, simply because an open source device has not truly been done yet in the US market. Google’s open source platform has allowed many user friendly programs to help the business person develop their brand: Locale, a service that allows users to specify where geographically to be silent, loud, vibrate, or any combination, a file sharing service (Mshare), and an Easytranslator for those of us who aren’t language savvy. This just scratches the surface of the many business uses the Google Android has.

Appple’s iPhone made a huge splash in the pond when it debuted, and it still is a landmark phone for its users, and a source of consternation for the competitors. The applications for the iPhone are as broad and well developed as the Android, if not more so, for the iPhone has a decent head start. Some applications for business are: Timewerks, a client tracking and invoicing program, Goal-Tracker, which allows business professionals to create, manage, track, and develop goals, a file beaming service called iBeam, among literally thousands of options. The iPhone has been and continues to be an application dream.

The Blackberry Storm is the first RIM device to display a touch screen, yet their software has been legendary both in the start up phase of cell phone and PDA device merging, and throughout their company’s history. Applications for Storm user are less broad, given the Verizon mantra of proprietary software management, however, adventurous users can download various applications from sites like fandango and be on the cutting edge of business application. The foremost feature of this phone is of course the push email, which allows users to see when an email is sent, delivered, and whenever one is sent to their phone as well. Other business applications include: Documents to Go, which allows users to navigate the different file formats easily, MyCaption, which allows a voice to text resource for emailing, and Beyond411, which allows users to specify any sort of search in a variety of ways. This Blackberry didn’t take the market by storm, but this RIM device has made it’s place secure.

Sprint’s Touch Diamond has business applications, and a broad range of them hail from the windows platform of software, which is what the Diamond boasts. Alongside the platform, the Diamond also can reorient a webpage from wherever you are in your phone. Applications like Contactmanager2.0, Fileshare1, and PocketInformant 8.51 all help you with your business needs all while having simple titles. HTC’s Touch Diamond is a phone mane users can enjoy.

When comparing applications, it is important first to know what your needs are. When that has been decided, and you know what cell phone carriers cover your business area in a comprehensive way, you must decide which phone, and which applications, are right for you. You have been shown many doors; happy app hunting!

Andrea started with a general introduction to search engine optimization. I was scared that this event was going to turn into a Search Engine 101 session! The event description made it sound like this was a more advanced session. Generally, for a good seo presentation, you have to be aware of your audience before hand. It is very hard, if not impossible, to speak effectively to beginner and advanced seo practictioners at the same time.

She did know her stuff and progressed up the SEO hierarchy. She pointed out Google Caffeine and changes that you should look for. I would love to see her in an advanced SEO session.

Darren Rush spoke about Cloud Powered WordPress at WordCamp La. Darren is a serial entrepreneur who is currently working on Koders.com, breitbart.com and biggovernment.com. His talk was geared towards wordpress performance, search and user experience.

Darren really emphasized the importance of cloud servers to help improve your site’s performance. Cloud servers allows you to utilize multiple (thousands) of servers to handle spikes of your traffic. You pay only for bandwidth, not the hardware. Rackspace just launched cloud serving in late 2008 and Amazon is one of the largest. I like to use MediaTemple, based in Los Angeles for my cloud hosting.

Darren also spoke about the importance of search. It is a critical part of your site’s uer experience. Search often gets pushed to the side because it is isn’t visually appealing. There are some good search plugins: sphinx, lijit and solr are some of them.

Solr hasn’t been adopted by the wordpress community yet. It was initially built for cnet, netflix, digg, aol and some other huge sites. The reason why it doesn’t work well with WordPress is that it’s based on java. PowCloud, a cloud hosting company does offer Solr with their hosting packages.

A good search function should have:

• Ajax – autocomplete
• Did you mean auto completing
• Suffix checking

If your site gets a ton of comments, then you may want to look into a cloud comment vendor. Automattic purchased intense debate, and disqus and echo are also in the space. Most of these tools are free right now.

Beau Lebens presented the meet the WordPress family at the WordCampLa Seminar. He is a lead developer at Automattic and has been there for over 4 years. This seminar took place at the beautiful Loyola Marymount university in Los Angeles.

The WordPress family consists of five projects:

• WordPress
• WordPress MU
• bbPress
• BuddyPress
• backPress

I’ve spoken before about my love for WordPress, I’m just going to speak about the other 4 WordPress projects.

WordPress MU

WordPress MU isn’t WordPress! It uses more server resources (memory, processing power) and it’s more complicated to run. The site admin is also responsible for updating plugins. Blog admins can’t install their own themes or plugins.

WordPress MU is going to merge with WordPress during version 3.0. If all goes well, you can set a configuration options and you can load directly all of the multi-user functionality. You can simply decide if you want to run MU or WordPress. Most companies just need to run the WordPress.

Example sites that run WordPress MU are wordpress.com. There are a thousand servers that run WordPress.com. They have a Hybrid system that allows it to work smoothly across all servers. WordPress MU has a ton of tables in the database. If you are looking to downgrade WordPress MU to regular Wordpress, good luck. We briefly attemped this for the Ad 2 site and quickly changed our minds.

bbPress

bbPress is a totally separate platform from WordPress; however it does share user tables (profiles, options). bbPress also shares login cookies. It is a very lightweight forum. I’m using it on the SDGCSA.com site, but it hasn’t been used very much. You can’t use a normal theme for bbPress, but it’s very easy to use the CSS from your normal theme. You really just have to stylize the header, background and footer.

bbPress runs the WordPress.org forums. I use this forum on a daily basis, and it’s as clean as it gets.

Buddy Press

BuddyPress started out as a project that started out as a social network called “chic speak”. It is a social network in a box. It’s WordPress MU + set of plugins + bbPress. Beau said that BuddyPress is a “make your own Facebook and bring your own terms of service”.

BuddyPress has a real clean interface and lets you set up a lot of the same functionalities as WordPress. Automattic uses BuddyPress as their intranet. Buddypress will be powering the new profiles on WordPress.org

backPress

The only project that I haven’t heard of before is backPress BackPress is Automattic’s latest project. backPress shares code library between WordPress and bbPress. It provides common web app functionality. This is more of the coding library, so it won’t appeal to the masses. It handles more of the scripting, handling and advanced functionality. The cool thing is that you can take WordPress code and then use it on your own project that is external to WordPress.

This project sounds awesome! There is a ton of great code in WordPress and BackPress lets you use it. Kudos to Automattic for creating this project.

If you ever get a chance to go to the Playboy Mansion, I highly recommend it. The grounds are absolutely beautiful and the scenery there isn’t too bad as well . A lot of speculation is going around about Hef’s health. Although he only came out for a half hour, he looked good to me. What a guy!

There are many things shaking the grounds where Motorola stands. In the past year, many cell phone corporations and other equipment companies have been trying to figure out what is the best way there is to regain their popularity and their status in the market. Motorola is one of them. While its popularity drops considerably, they leave an entire past of glory behind.

Motorola has been trying to find its way back to the surface. They’re struggling to come up with more efficient phones and more appealing advertisement campaigns for those who still don’t know about their services and products availability.

Although Motorola is within the top decliners list with a Stock Exchange drop index of 2%, their top engineers have been working the hardest they ever had. They’re trying their best to keep up with their competitor’s technology and at the same time looking for fresh material themselves, so they can also build up new trends.

Motorola has held a solid lead on the two way radio product line. They introduced feature rich radios like the Motorola XPR6550 in the winter of 2007 and have been building on its platform yearly.

There’s a new Motorola mystery phone that has brought a state of great commotion to the world’s media. The anticipation of the company’s newest cell phone has been making the speculative investment increase around the company, bringing Motorola’s name back into the game. This mystery phone is called Motorola’s A3300 and it has launched in China. The new phone’s operating system is Windows based, proving that Motorola has not given up on their old partner entirely, something that will compel Windows admirers and supporters to purchase more Motorola phones than the competitors’ options.

The countries where Motorola seems to have the most recognition are Argentina, Venezuela, Romania, Russia and Malaysia. Their sales have been increasing in those countries while dropping in US.

Many other endeavors from Motorola top executives are also bringing the company into a new world of promising associations. Blockbuster has just proclaimed it officially that their OnDemand service will be available as an app on Motorola phones exclusively. This combination between the two companies will bring a new audience for their new products. The new phone owners that will enjoy the use of a fully equipped Motorola cell phone will also be able to enjoy movies whenever they want. This partnership seems promising since both of these companies have been struggling with sales and popularity drop in the past year.

Motorola has also teamed up with Google as a new way to bring attention back to their electronics. The company’s first smart phone is equipped with an Android engineered by Google that will be used as the phone’s operating system instead of Windows. For Motorola this is a way to bring back all its glory and make this corporation profitable again.

Due the tragedy of Typhoon Morakot in Taiwan, Motorola has announced a large contribution to the victims of this recent tragedy, giving away US$50,000 to the Federation of Red Cross for relief aid. The Taiwan based Motorola employees also participated in many fundraising activities coming up with an extra US$33,000 to the International Federation of Red Cross. The company keeps finding different ways to bring the spotlight back to their work whether it’s in the technological or humanitarian field.

Whether Motorola is going to be able to get back on their feet by regaining the market’s trust with their new products or not is still unclear. But there’s no doubt that this company has a history of bringing innovation and new ideas into the world, stirring the competition and creating new opportunities for an advanced technological growth. All we have to do now is wait and hope that whatever Motorola is going through will be over soon so their efforts will not be in vain.