The V5 is here ! To use it, just update your back office by clicking on the button in the top bar.


Here are the 116 news of this last version :

We have launched the beta V5 on the first day of spring.
More than 250 websites have subscribed to this program and we thank you for your interest.

This version is not stable yet, there is still few bugs to fix so we chose to open it for only half of the subscribers for the meantime.

100 websites will receive a mail that enables the activation of the back office V5.
If the support does not get enough feedback, we will expand the panel of testers. Do not be impatient, you will all have access to the new version very soon...

This is the outcome of a long hard work, it will be completely finished for next fall.
We rewrote all of the pages of the back office, using features based on CSS3 and also on a new framework javascript JQuery.

The new back office is more elegant and faster. To make long story short, it's more efficient. There is as well more than 100 new features. We will introduce them with all details.

In order to deliver it the soonest, we organized the development in two parts: the back office first, then, following the front office.

The final version of the V5 will be launched on the 16 of May.

In June, we will start the new front office (website part), the development process will be then different.
The modular architecture of WM enables to update module by module, changing to the new version will be more gradual than for the back office.

We have not communicated about the back office development because there was a substantive work to achieve on our side. But we rely on you for your suggestions on the website part. Do not hesitate to share your ideas, we will open a dedicated category on the support.

Last thing, end of spring is always a rich period for novelty at WM. This year, we also have a surprise for you, something that will make WM CMS unique!

About 3 years ago, Christophe Paoli from University of Corsica conducted in our office a seminar in order to show us the power of semantic web. Since then, he regularly keeps us up to date with its research.

Last year On2 Technologies - a leading video compression solution, was acquired by Google for $106 M:). 
At WMaker we have used this paid technology to compress your videos, but Google decided to cease the licence starting from 31/12/2010.

 

The web  for and by the new generation. This theme became a tagline of the TechCrunch France Remix  conference held in October at Microsoft France HQ in Paris. 

I had the pleasure to attend this great event with @fxcardi , @dsiacci  and @Francescu . And here is a brief overview of the event.
 

-According to the figures provided by Delphine Gatignol from ComScore, 15-24 year-olds spend more time on social networking sites (YouTube and Facebook) than on the traditional web portals. At the same time, more and more people access these sites via mobile platforms.

- Thierry Debarnot from Media Etudiant  explained us that he targeted different niche groups of 12-25 year-olds. He first subdivided his target audience into different groups and then addressed in a different way college, university students and graduates. Even though all of them are interested by quite the same things (sales, parties, dating and search for study programs or jobs), their priorities vary according to the age group. When the approach to each niche group is right, it’s quite simple to create traffic. However, gaining the loyalty of targeted audience it’s much more complicated. And affiliation is the major component of Media Etudiant‘s business model.

- Blaise Vignon presented the Microsoft Bizpark global program that provides startups with software, support and visibility. The program is easily accessible, to get access to BizSpark offerings  you must:
1/ create your software, 
2/ have a private company,
3/ have a company  that is less than 2 years old,
4/ have less than $1 million in revenue.

- The first workshop gathered  Pierre Bellanger from Skyrock, Pierre-Eric Jacoupy from MS/Windows Live, Eric Chaurial from Allocine, Tristan Collombet from Prizee and Nicolas Gaume from Mimesis Republic.There was a lively panel discussion with lots of questions asked via Twitter. The members explained how they repositioned their services against Facebook. The skyblog started losing their audience. Therefore, the offers were adjusted to match advertiser intent. Even though Windows Live was not very affected by Facebook chat, their discussion typology still changed. Those who prefer short charts (less than a minute) moved to FB. And MSN discussions became longer. In case of Prizee, the player’s motivation changed. Before he played to break his own score, now he plays to break the score of his friends etc.

- Loic Lemeur enlightened us on the spirit of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. From the very beginning, the entrepreneurs there aim for the worldwide market. Throughout  the Valley, people can build a powerful professional network to promote their ideas and projects. The VCs are highly solicited there.

 - Séverine Grégoire from Monshowroom  talked about her project and how  Alven Capital accompanied her in this adventure. She owes her success to her determination and straight speaking :)

- The next workshop attracted everyone’s attention. It was designed for the entrepreneurs who started their career very young and gathered 3 members: Maxime Valette from VDM  (started when he was 14 years old), Olivier Issaly from Owlient  (started when he was 22 years old) and Eric Bennephtali from Mediastay  (started when he was 15 years old). They all managed to build profitable business without the help of investors. It’s only later that they recoursed to investors to grow their businesses and capture a larger market segment.  

- The speech by Frederic Montagnon from Overblog was my favorite one. He talked about Overblog’s beginnings, and reminded us that: 
1/ when you are 20 years old it’s easier to  devote 100 percent of our time to a project
2/ learning capacity of students and graduates is very high. They should take this opportunity to launch their own projects.
3/ every project can be modified during its life cycle. Frederic Montagnon’s advice: just launch your project and the good ideas will come naturally.
 

He concluded by saying that taking account of his present experience, he is not sure he would have invested in Overblog today. So to say, all in due time.
Unfortunately, I could not take part in other workshops (I had my flight back to Ajaccio). 

Thanks to the TechCrunch France team for this great event! Hopefully at the CampusPlex we could organize similar events in the near future. Roxanne, who already visited us last summer, and Cédric are always welcome at the CampusPlex!

 

The field « opt-in » in the subscription form to the social network displays a check box, which (if it’s required), can be used to oblige a future subscriber to read and accept the General Conditions of Use, for example.
But you should give your potential subscribers access to the GCU.

There is a little trick to do this:

As you may have noticed, it’s possible to modify the title of the fields by clicking on it.
For example, if you click on “Opt-in”, you can modify the text. This is how you could make a link to GCU.

Everything began with a skype discussion between @fxcardi  and @dsiacci  :

"Only fancy that if I had invested $10100 in Apple in 2004, today I would have won a fortune. F$$$ !!!"

So the CampusPlex  got down to work:  Mapize  and DuoApps  on the idea and development, EastPad  on social sharing and  WM   on the page design ( Margaux D ).

F$$$ My Stock  is now online. And you can simulate your profit on the NASDAQ stock market (for top 11 IT companies). All the data is collected based on Google Finance API.

Have fun at  http://www.fmystock.com  ;)

Have you already noticed that the profiling page of your website has been updated? 

At WMaker, the websites that have the profiling feature are called Expert Portals and Pro Portals. The profiling feature allows to create different groups of users and enables these groups’ members to view some pages inaccessible to other users. 

You can find below an overview of  recent updates.

In the middle of August, we got in touch with Microsoft. With the help of Martin Duval from Bluenove  and TechCrunch , they were preparing to launch Windows Phone 7 then.

They appreciated our offer apps.wmaker.net  and proposed us collaboration to make a switch to Windows Phone 7. 

After that, we teamed up with DuoApps  to study apps portability for this new OS. 

Within the framework of this project, we discussed with Marianne2.fr team the opportunity to make an application for WP7. Then, on October 15 Dominique Siacci went to Paris to showcase the Marianne2.fr application for WP7 at Microsoft France headquarter.  

We received the OS-equipped pattern to test and finalize the application. And last night Marianne2.fr app for WP7 was sent to Microsoft. The application will be publicly available starting from the WP7 official launch on October 21 in WP7 marketplace.    

It’s no coincidence that this new application for the new OS has been launched. There is actually a lot of research work, skill and expertise involved. Here is a short history of events leading up to this project's launch. 

The store’s statistics page has recently been updated. While answering one of your questions in the support we realized that it became difficult to extract the needed information from the statistics page.

We thus decided to make it clearer. For this purpose, we divided the statistics page into 2 parts:
- The table that gives a global view  of total store results

- The list  detailing results per item