Psyched to be attending The Ottawa Network’s first Mobile Application Showcase tomorrow night (June 22, 5-7 pm) at the Velvet Room in Ottawa. About time someone got all these great companies together to showcase Ottawa’s innovative talents and unite the many entrepreneurs running around town with mobile apps these days! Rob Woodbridge (of Untether.tv) will be presenting, and the following companies will be showing off their apps:

GlitchSoft
(makers of BarStar game for iPhone)
GlitchSoft is about to launch their first title, BarStar, which is a time management game about bartending
www.barstargame.com

Zeebu Mobile
(makers of SuperBabyGo! and other toddler games for BlackBerry)
www.zeebu.com

WickSoft

(exchange/sharepoint software for BlackBerry)
www.wicksoft.com

Magmic
(mobile games, apps, and more)
www.magmic.com

QContinuum
(makers of Planets for iPhone and iPad, downloaded over 3M times)
www.qcontinuum.org

Come have a drink and mingle with Ottawa’s mobile edge! Just heard that they opened up some more tickets ($10 each) so there’s still time to register here.

Be sure to look for me and say hi or ping me at http://twitter.com/frasercole.

The Ottawa Network » Blog Archive » TON App Showcase.

Slides from the Offerpal Monetization Workshop « The Offerpal Media Blog

Two informative slideshows from the monetization experts at Offerpal on best practices for generating revenue from social games. Many of these guidelines can apply to other connected game platforms, as well (console, mobile?).

My takeaways:

• Keep your content compelling and fresh
• Have multiple currencies (e.g., Green Bucks and credits)
• Work on getting the right balance between perceived value and inflation
• Users have different motivstions to share, allow flexibility

Lately I’ve been noticing that I tend to fire up TweetDeck before my browser or even my e-mail. This is apparently just fine witht he developers, and the’ve just dropped an update designed to increase the stickiness of their awesome little Air app. The latest version adds the ability to upload and view YouTube videos, as well as share photos through Flickr and other sharing sites.

This all builds upon recent updates that have added columns for Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace feeds and many, many other features that bring some of the most useful features of the social web under one umbrella application.

They haven’t buyild a webkit browser into TweetDeck yet, but if and when they do, I might just have to uninstall Chrome. But not yet.

Features « TweetDeck.

Facebook redecorates yet again, changing-among other things-the name of Live Feed and News Feed to the equally confusing Top News and Most Recent. Expect tons of complaining and bellyaching, over a service that is both free, useful, and completely optional to use. If demographic information was determined by resistance to change, then Facebook’s age would skew decidedly higher.

Facebook | A Guide to Facebook’s Home Page.

This is huge news for the internet marketing crowd, as bit.ly opens its doors to publishers large and small, allowing beta users to utilize the powerful redirecting service on their own domains. More importantly, you also get access to bit.ly’s impressive analytics tools, which really make this service shine in a very crowded market.

Currently, it looks like you are limited to 10,000 shortened URLs per day, which seems insanely huge to me. However, as a marketer who has been trying to find better ways to track short links through our campaigns, I am fairly excited by this news.

Welcome to bitly.Pro.

This is another landmark to take note of as we march toward a future where UI design and Information Design become everything (and hardware disappears into the scenery).

Add this one to the list suggesting touchscreens will be everywhere in the future: A Portuguese company has announced a stick-on transparent plastic film with multitouch technology embedded inside that can make 9-foot displays.

via Multitouch Future: Stick-on Plastic Film Can Make 108-Inch Touchscreens | Technomix | Fast Company.

• You start Tweetdeck before you start your web browser.
• You look for a Twitter @username before you look for a website.
• You DM before you e-mail.
• You check the Twitscoop cloud before you check the web for breaking news.
• You can’t decide whether to auto-tweet from your post or auto-post from your tweet. Bonus points if you can do both.
• You do not know how many applications are linked to your Twitter account.
• You know that @GuyKawasaki is auto-posting but you follow him anyway for reasons you cannot explain.
• You have stopped trying to explain Twitter to anyone.

Today, Seth Godin posted about art, summing it up as “art is what we we’re doing when we do our best work.” Good advice for those who feel that their job is not creative enough or allowing them enough freedom to innovate. If you find yourself in that situation, ask yourself how you could do the best possible work in your job, and what changes would have to happen to get to that point. Then make those changes happen on your own. In short, no one is going to help you, you have to do it yourself.

Innovation is, by its nature, a lonely business.

Seth Godin is good at practicing what he preaches, at least when it comes to his credo: the more you give, the more you get. I just stumbled across this post over at the Lava7 blog with a link to Godin’s free eBook What Matters Now. Essentially a collection of quotations from today’s big thinkers in business, blogging, marketing, and beyond, this serves as a good pep talk for what is sure to be one of the most challenging years in our careers, but one in which we can make possibly the biggest impact on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.

You can download the free eBook here.

All you tecktonic kids need to know that Bernadette Yao invented this in 1973 on ZOOM.