For those of you who don’t know, during the last few years (and one of the worst recessions) I’ve split my time between ChickAdvisor.com and consulting to some really great companies here in Toronto.

A few months ago I had a passing chat with Paul Keable at a MS&L client event talking to him about my consulting work regarding Share of Search (think of Share of Voice in traditional media but apply it to search engine marketing and optimization). Over that time we’ve come to realize that we have a lot of things in common and MS&L has done some pretty amazing work both locally and globally in the social media space.

Working for some of the biggest brands in the Canada with an opportunity to shine globally is just a really cool opportunity that doesn’t appear every day. From here on in the weekdays I used to allocate to independent clients will be focused directly through MS&L.

My involvement with ChickAdvisor will not stop, as I will continue to sit on its Board of Directors, but it will certainly change. ChickAdvisor has successfully grown to be recognized as one of the top new social media companies as demonstrated by the CNMA Award as Canada’s Hottest New Digital Kid On the Block. Ali and the team continue to rock the house. We’ve recently added some really skilled developers to the team who previously helped Kaboose get really, really big – some new features were just released this week for the members and we’ve migrated to an Amazon cloud based architecture for future scaling. We’ve also partnered with BBS media to take over the traditional ad sales that I was driving.

Here’s a bit of our history;
-ChickAdvisor.com is Canada’s first social network for women 18-40 that has thousands of user generated reviews of products and local services.
-Over 1.5 million women visit ChickAdvisor every year, participating in online reviews, offline shopping parties, videos and product sampling through the popular Product Review Club.
-ChickAdvisor experienced 167% growth in the last year and anticipates 2010 will follow suit with an exciting new strategy that will soon be announced.

“More than one-half (53%) of the US female Internet population of 79 million
actively participated in some type of social media at least weekly.”

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise – women by their very nature are more social than us guys.  It’s fundamentally changing their media consumption habbits as emarketer also shared another great tidbit regarding media consumption.

The Recessionista ShopCrawl is going to be held on June 18th in Toronto’s Bloor Yorkville neighborhood. All the very cool reasons you should go are posted live and we’re limiting the event to 100 people. If you’re a guy reading this you should probably be buying a ticket for your significant other.  Many a time have I had a friend IM me asking me to get them a ticket but alas these tickets disappear very cast.

What is a ShopCrawl?

Watch this video to really understand.

Why a ShopCrawl?

We created an this event because our members asked us to.  The ShopCrawl brings our members together for a night of fun, shopping, and partying with the Brands they love and the stores they visit in real life.

Why is this important?

Since we launched millions of women have used ChickAdvisor to get advice on products, services, and every day life in our forums.  We’re really grateful for their support and we hope the next year is filled with as much fun.

What is coming next?

We’re doing our best to find out how we can expand to a city near you.

While mobile is on the top of everyone’s list – it seems to me that some brands are doing much better than other making their websites mobile friendly.

Case in point – I was on the Nissan.com website using my mobile browser and it looked great but when I switched to Nissan.ca I got a totally blank page. More this weekend as I’m going to go through and do an audit.

For the longest time I’ve told people that she’s got more Entrepreneurial intuitiveness that most people I have ever met. While I get to see it almost every day it’s hard to demonstrate to people on the outside.  We founded ChickAdvisor.com almost 2.5 years ago and we’ve come a long way.

She talks about a bunch of the challenges we faced, Canadian startup founder, as a woman, and as a husband and wife team.

If you have a minute, wander on over and take a read.

Ali and the team have worked very hard to release a new series of ChickChat TV and I’m proud to say they’re now live in ChickAdvisor.com. ChickAdvisor launched ChickChat TV in 2008 sponsored by Rogers Media. The show currently reached millions of Canadians each week through the Rogers Pizza Pizza TV Network.

Just when us guys had it all sorted out – the truth is exposed on Pick up Lines.

Less than stellar parts of my experience are:

1. Migrating Machines:  Not as painless as one would think.  Time Machine and other software like Super Duper didn’t help me at all.  It took 3 failed attempts over two days even with an Apple Migration Assistant update.  Some files just refused to come over eg. /etc/private.

2. 3rd Party Software Licenses:  This is my second migration so this time i remembered that you’re supposed to “de-register” all software before you migrate or else your software licenses won’t work.

3. Blackberry Sync failure:  This is a double whammy because I just started to use Daylite for Mac which no longer supports direct sync.  I switched to Missing Sync a while ago for the the robustness and ease of use but to my shock I got this screen on my repeated attempts to link my two favorite devices.

4. itunes Rentals won’t play on my LCDtv.   I’m just really, really sad about this one.  How many consumer want to rent movies with their spouse and not be able to connect to a bigger screen.  Why you ask?  Apparently my Sony Bravia is not an “authorized display device”.

Now for the good stuff;

1. Lighter

2. Cooler

3. Faster

4. Super fast 320 gig, 7200 rpm HDD

5. Super long battery life

I’m sure my grievances will be short lived (or at least I hope so).  I highly recommend this new laptop but just remember to give yourself enough time ~ you can’t rush switching over ~ it’s like an iceberg ~ it seems easy on the surface but you’ll always find more things below the surface.

ps. I have 1 well loved but used 1st gen macbook pro for sale.

/Alex

Purists would say text editor and Terminal are the only way to code. That would be true for some but not for me and probably the 85% of people out there who aren’t at the Expert Level.

Only recently did I find Coda. It’s probably the most robust & easy to use application with a great editor built in for multiple coding languages, clean CSS markup and Transmit my favorite FTP software. It’s no doubt that these the Panic software team has won awards for their product.

So I’m writing this to say, Thanks for making my life way easier.