e-Commerce: Finding, Keeping and Converting Website Traffic

Note that this free event is being held in Ottawa on November 19:

Successful e-commerce is all about finding, keeping and converting website traffic. While first time visitors are likely your largest underperforming segment of website traffic, investments in search and email also make them your most expensive. So whether your conversion is about revenue, registrations or downloads, how can you improve the online experience to optimize results? Join Carolyn Gardner, Director of Customer Experience at Sitebrand, as she discusses the realities of driving traffic, building visitor personas and creating personalized messaging to maximize the conversion of first-time visitors.

The Evolution of Open Source Software

Tristan Rhodes has an interesting post on the trend of proprietary vendors becoming more open and open source vendors becoming more closed. As stated, "The line between these categories is going to become very blurred as they converge around a common middle-ground."

Upcoming Events (Ottawa)

These events didn't make the publication deadline for the November issue:

November 25

2008 Social Innovation Challenge


Ottawa, ON

Those attending will have the opportunity to vote for the top ideas from the following six finalists:

* Forming a Community Institute in the Mayfair Theatre Building
* Helping Ottawa's Street Youth to Redefine Themselves
* Ottawa Blue Book Search Engine Tool
* Royal Ritchie Drummers (a music initiative for youth at risk)
* Transit Library Kiosk in Ottawa
* YUP - The Youthful Useful Program

Please RSVP by November 17th

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December 1

DemoCampOttawa11

Ottawa, ON

At a DemoCamp you can show off your software or hardware and get feedback from an informed audience. A DemoCamp is a small unconference-style event. The demos listed so far are:

*Dex - a business relationship management tool for professionals & small businesses
*ChoiceBot for e-Retailers v2.0 - decision-assisting tool for shopping sites that allows shoppers to figure out which TV, car, washing machine, etc. to buy in under 2 minutes.

November Issue Available

The November issue of the OSBR is now available in HTML and PDF formats at the OSBR website. The theme this month is "Health and Life Sciences" and Brian Barry and Peter Tanner from Open Health Tools are this month's guest editors. The articles in this issue include:

Brian Barry, CEO of Bedarra Research Labs and CTO of Open Health Tools (OHT), covers OHT's planned development of a common platform. In his article, he applies his experience with the founding of Eclipse to the problems of interoperable healthcare.

Mark Yendt, Duane Bender and Brian Minaji of Mohawk College describe their reference implementation of the Canada Health Infoway pan-Canadian Electronic Health Record Solution. They see the need to involve a range of partners from both the private and public sector to achieve success for the project.

Jacob Brauer of WebReach describes the Mirth Project, an open source healthcare interface engine and interface repository created and professionally supported by WebReach. Mirth attacks the interoperability issue directly through providing an interconnecting middleware for health information systems.

Skip McGaughey, Executive Director of OHT, and Ken Rubin, a senior healthcare architect, describe the requirement for a more out-reaching community which encompasses end users, operational users, and developers.

Jon Siegel and Richard Mark Soley explore the relationship between open source and open standards by examining the results of their interviews of developers of open source tools based on open standards.

The editorial theme for the upcoming December issue is "Enabling Innovation" and the guest editor will be Steven Muegge from Carleton University. Submissions for this issue are due by November 22.