Google today announced that they have purchased formerly Ottawa-based video game advertising company Adscape Media. (You could call them Video Game Advertising 2.0 if the sidebar picture is Video Game Advertising 1.0)
Congratulations to the Adscape team on joining the Google family. According to reports Adscape raised $3.2 million in Venture Capital from H.I.G. Ventures (based in Boston & SF).
What I found interesting was that there were no Canadian VCs involved in this company. I don’t know the players involved, but wonder if they attempted to raise capital with Canadian firms to be rebuffed or if they chose to avoid them altogether.
Unfortunately too often I see both situations where Canadian entrepreneurs avoid Canadian VCs (I’ve spoken to many Canadian CEO’s who can go direct to the US VCs and feel that local VCs don’t add a lot of value. I don’t always agree with this, but it depends on the team & VC) or the Canadian VCs don’t understand or have the risk appetite for some hot Canadian deals that end up going to the states.
Amid a growing video game marketplace and the strong Canadian talent pool of video game developers (Ubisoft in Montreal just announced another 1,100 positions to be hired, Electronic Arts has Vancouver & Montreal presence) you would think there would be more innovative gaming based startups being funded by Canadian VCs.
As many as one in three North Americans, or 120 million people, play video games for at least one hour every week and recent studies have shown that one quarter of all gamers in Canada are over the age of 50.
Parr said Canadians spent more than $933 million on video gaming last year. Worldwide, the game industry brought in more than $25 billion U.S. in revenues during 2006. That figure is expected to hit $55 billion U.S. by 2009.
During the massive industry explosion, Canada has quietly become a world leader in video game development. The top two game development studios on the planet — EA in Burnaby and Ubisoft in Montreal — call Canada home.
The number of companies developing video games in Canada has tripled in the last three years. According to a study conducted at Queen’s University in 2004, there were only 100 gaming companies in Canada that year.
The ESAC says there are more than 300 video game development companies employing more than 49,700 full- and part-time employees are scattered across the country now.
And these are not low paying call-centre-type jobs. The average starting salary for a video game developer is $60,000 U.S.
I may have missed it, but you would imagine with all the companies working around and supporting the video game industry there would be some activity by Canadian VCs.
While I think it’s great that a Canadian company has succeeded in getting an exit through an acquisition to Google, it is interesting to see that our Canadian VCs are not playing roles in Canadian companies.
They are both great examples of Canadian entrepreneurs who built and sold their companies to US firms without traditional VC investment.
In each case they recounted how VCs ignored them until the risk was almost gone and buy out offers started to emerge as viable choices to taking VC money for growth capital. They join other Canadian companies such as Flickr in having chosen to prove the business viability and let a larger company expand the market.
Early stage risk capital means taking risk at the early stage - not waiting until the company has product, traction and sales and then trying to invest to help them grow. As the cost of building, launching and obtaining traction continues to drop (at least for consumer & enterprise software) there becomes less of a role for Canadian VCs who don’t know how to play aggressively at the early stage.
Once a company has proven a product with traction in the marketplace, the US investors care less about location and are happy to invest in a winning concept. So Canadian investors not playing aggressively at the early stages when they can still put risk capital to work will end up always sitting behind the US aquirers and financing options that the best companies will always be able to get.
In today’s marketplace where innovation through acquisition becomes more common place Canadian early stage investors will have to change how and when they invest in made at home opportunities if they wish to play a role in our Canadian success stories.
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When we first started Zero-Knowledge Systems our strong stance on encryption and pro-privacy work attracted some interesting characters at times. Some of my ‘hall of fame letters’ include many people who wrote to us claiming to wear tinfoil hats to protect the privacy of their thoughts and thanking us for helping them protect the privacy of their computers.
In a recent article in Wired my good friend Jennifer Granick talks about recent advances in multivariate pattern recognition and functional MRI’s to accurately read subjects intentions.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, along with scientists from London and Tokyo, asked subjects to secretly decide in advance whether to add or subtract two numbers they would later be shown. Using computer algorithms and functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, the scientists were able to determine with 70 percent accuracy what the participants’ intentions were, even before they were shown the numbers.
The study used “multivariate pattern recognition” to identify oxygen flow in the brain that occurs in association with specific thoughts. The researchers trained a computer to recognize these flow patterns and to extrapolate from what it had learned to accurately read intentions.
The finding raises issues about the application of such tools for screening suspected terrorists — as well as for predicting future dangerousness more generally. Are we closer than ever to the crime-prediction technology of Minority Report?
This reminds me of an interesting fiction book I read a number of years ago called The Truth Machine.
The premise of the book is that the democratization of technology and weapons of destruction being in the hand of lone bad actors capable of waging mass war requires the adoption of a transparent society where every conversation and business interaction includes a fictional 100% effective truth machine.
While it’s an amusing fictional read, the book doesn’t deal with any of the hard questions about social values worth protecting.
What often goes completed unreported in the hype associated with the need for us to give up our freedoms is fearmongering regarding the state of violence in the world. Chris Anderson (Curator of the TED Conference) made his in his answer to the Edge.org New Year’s Question, Systemic Flaws In the Reported World View.
So for example, the publication last year of a carefully researched Human Security Report received little attention. Despite the fact that it had concluded that the numbers of armed conflicts in the world had fallen 40% in little over a decade. And that the number of fatalities per conflict had also fallen. Think about that. The entire news agenda for a decade, received as endless tales of wars, massacres and bombings, actually missed the key point. Things are getting better. If you believe Robert Wright and his NonZero hypothesis, this is part of a very long-term and admittedly volatile trend in which cooperation eventually trumps conflict. Percentage of males estimated to have died in violence in hunter gatherer societies? Approximately 30%. Percentage of males who died in violence in the 20th century complete with two world wars and a couple of nukes? Approximately 1%. Trends for violent deaths so far in the 21st century? Falling. Sharply.
In fact, most meta-level reporting of trends show a world that is getting better. We live longer, in cleaner environments, are healthier, and have access to goods and experiences that kings of old could never have dreamed of. If that doesn’t make us happier, we really have no one to blame except ourselves. Oh, and the media lackeys who continue to feed us the litany of woes that we subconsciously crave.
We as a society have a lot of work to do to figure out how to embedd our ethics into our technologies and how they are developed, and used in our society. While it may be easy to hop on the latest technology like functional MRI to solve the problem, we don’t understand the impact of these technologies on our society to deal with the law of unintenended consequences.
Information self determination (the right to control how our information is used) and the privacy of our thoughts are values I believe are worth defending.
There are important values we as a society need to protect and defend in the face of the rapid changes occuring in technology. I don’t have a good answer on how to do this, but it was the topic of a panel discussion I participated on at the World Economic Forum with Bill Joy who had just written his famous Wired article Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.
Computers Freedom & Privacy 2007 is in Montreal this year and I’m happy that Canada is hosting CFP again. CFP attracts some of the Internet’s most interesting thinkers an I am looking forward to seeing many of my friends and the people who have been on the front lines on the fight for privacy for many years.
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Valentine’s Day is approaching, and I have to say that I’ve always considered myself a bit of a romantic. This was a great year for my partner Kelly and I so I wanted to come up with something really great for Valentines this year.
I’m nursing a bad cold, so my Saturday morning was going to be spent catching up with my newsfeeds, finishing one of my many draft posts I’m itching to get out, and coming up with something special for Valentines for Kelly. If I had time I was going to to upgrade one of my machines to the new Office 2007 and Vista while I was reading news on Google Reader.
Instead I had my heart broken by Microsoft, fell in love with Stormhoek and Hugh MacLeod’s sense of humor and found the perfect Valentine gift for my girlfriend in the process.
Microsoft Breaks my Heart with a Silenced Paperclip Shot Not Heard Round the World
It happens quite often as I scan hundreds of news feeds that a few disparate posts all of a sudden come together and hit me in the head with an insight for a post. This time, it was my heart.
I had a passing thought about how stupid it was that Microsoft quietly killed Clippy by passing it off to UI coherency rather than acknowledging loudly it was most likely the most hated innovation in user interfaces. Almost every Microsoft employee I know hates the Clippy and has for years and everyone knows that users hate the Clippy. Microsoft was ignoring users and their own employees while defending the Clippy back when Office 2003 came out. While it’s great they have cleaned UI for Office 2007, the answers about Clippy’s death were arrogant by not saying to users “We heard you loud and clear and agree with you”.
For all the work Scoble and other great Microsoft bloggers have done, I was a little saddened that no one thought to just admit that Clippy was a condescending little shit pimping for a complicated user interface that made users feel stupid when they went to look for help.
I’m the first to admit that I love Office and am a serious power user. I use it every day and am incredibly productive with the suite. I have spreadsheet models that are too complicated for Google Spreadsheets (as of now) and I have more plug-ins running to pimp up my experience then most users. Despite some small experiments I’m doing with online office suites for collaboration with various projects, I’m generally a happy Office fan. I am looking forward to testing the new Office 2007 upgrade which I’ve been hearing great things about.
I passed it by without further thought, thinking that I have to get around to upgrading to Office 2007.
It would take a bit of time to realize what had just occurred.
Hugh Seduces me with Big Love
So it was an hour later while browsing my feeds from Gaping Void that my plans for the day where thrown for a loop.
The Hughtrain Manifesto plays a role in how I look at my angel investments, the projects I get involved with and is a central theme to my two current startups. It contains many insights into how to succeed in social media and how communities of change can be formed.
I knew from his blog that Hugh does some marketing work with a wine company Stormhoek - but since I stopped drinking last year (I’m getting healthy for my various startup projects - I’ve lost 85 lbs. since May 2006) and am not the type of wine collector to import wine into Canada, I never really explored Stormhoek further and was happy to enjoy his cartoons & blogging conversations.
So when I ran through my feeds and start to see the series of new video’s he is doing for Stormhoek leading up to Valentines my morning was lost in ensuing entertainment and this blog post that he inspired.
As you can see, Hugh has put himself out there in a hilariously naked conversation. He is inviting us to laugh with him, and share his journey. His heart isn’t just on his sleeve, it’s on his product and part of his story and I immediately wanted to show Kelly knowing that she is going to enjoy these.
Humor and love go hand in hand. When you can share your humor with someone it builds a strong bond if it’s done in an authentic way.
It was this comment from Hugh recent post that brought the pieces together,
Part of love is taking risk, being vulnerable and putting yourself out there for someone else and leaving your own sense of self importance aside.
The disparity between Microsoft’s Clippy approach and Hugh’s Global Microbrand approach to marketing caused my heart to sadden.
By experimenting with funny videos Hugh entertained me for awhile, and caused me to purchase a bunch of Stormhoek swag for Kelly and lithographs for my office. I can’t find anywhere where he is selling a good lithograph copy of my favorite Hughtrain image (which is my investment philosophy) but the Stormhoek ones are great for our the office wall at Project Ojibwe.
I ended up spending the morning checking out Stormhoek learning more about how they are building their microbrand. The entire time I was increasingly getting frustrated about Microsoft’s lack of humor, imagination and the wasted opportunity to engage and entertain me that they passed up.
Microsoft’s Marketing Muscle Mangles My Heart
Hugh’s microbrand marketing with simple authentic humor and love had me engaged and spending a couple hundred bucks on swag. Microsoft’s lack of humor or creativity in marketing Office 2007 or Vista ended up bothering me, and made me dislike them for not even trying to show they listened to users and have a sense of humor.
Amid Microsoft’s marketing muscle being flexed for Vista and it’s $500 million dollars quickly resulting in Vista everywhere marketing (Including a increasingly annoying number of interstial web ads that are annoying me across the web) we have Microsoft bungling so many opportunities to generate good will.
Bill’s quick exit from the set of The Daily Show aside, he has not been doing Vista or Microsoft any favors with his recent performance. Contrast this with his alter-ego, Mr. Jobs, who even in the face of controversy surrounding the Apple options backdating scandal can get up on stage and wow his employees, his customers and the technology community at-large. Steve is a rock star. Bill looks as if he’s been living under a rock. Check out some of his answers in a February 1st interview with Steven Levy of Newsweek:
NEWSWEEK: If one of our readers confronted you in a CompUSA and said, “Bill, why upgrade to Vista?” what would be your elevator pitch? Bill Gates: The most effective thing would be if I could sit down with them and just take them through the new look for a couple of minutes, show them the Sidebar, show them the way the search lets you go through lots of things, including lots of photos. Set up a parental control. And then I might edit a high-definition movie and make a little DVD that’s got photos. As I went through, they’d think, “Wow, is that something I could use, would that make a difference for me?”
******************** You also talk about improved security in Vista.
Yes, although security is a [complicated concept]. You’re [referring to] the fact that there have been some security updates already for Windows Vista. This is exactly the way it should work. When somebody comes to us [after discovering a vulnerability] we’ve got [a fix] before there is any exploit. So it’s totally according to plan, and that’s why we have the whole Windows Update thing. We made it way harder for guys to do exploits. The number [of violations] will be way less because we’ve done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn’t done any of those things.
******************** Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?
I’ve never seen it. I don’t think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.
How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?
Well, certainly we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.
Does the entire tenor of that campaign bother you, that Mac is the cool guy and PC—
That’s for my customers to decide.
Are you kidding me? Bill sounds a little like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, and that he is getting ready to boil Steve Jobs’ bunny. First off, Bill, after having spend an amount exceeding the GDP of several sovereign nations - $500 million - to launch Vista, don’t you think you could have spent even a little of that on media training? THAT is your elevator pitch? Sorry, Bill, but you’re not getting the VC funding you desire. You’re not even getting out of the elevator. Your answer on security: poor. Your paranoia and irritation at Apple’s successful branding and image-making? Nauseating. You’re the richest guy in the world. You do lots of great things with your money. You’re a brilliant man. The Apple threat and a changing world is making you become unhinged. Do something about this. Fast. For your shareholders sake. Please.
I couldn’t agree more. I respect Bill a great deal for the work he is doing with his foundation and think he’s an incredibly intelligent person - but his lack of vulnerability (and some media training) is hurting Microsoft.
I immediately was struck with what a wasted opportunity the death of Clippy was for Microsoft. If I were a marketing manager at Microsoft I would have gotten $250k to sponsor a prize pool for user submitted animations, videos and mockumentaries about the death of the Clippy. Eulogies to this much hated user innovation would be hilarious.
Allow users to submit videos and split the prize money with a charity of their choice. Give the grand prize to the best video that shows the Office 2007 Ribbon User Interface taking the rightful place from Clippy and leave the rest in a prize pool for various categories like Apple vs. Clippy, Tux vs. Clippy, or How a Ninja would Kill Clippy or any other funny ideas. Include special prizes for Microsoft employees or ex-employees to submit videos. Invite Google and Apple employees to join in on the fun.
Proudly admit on Daily Show and your Vista media tours that you are listening to users and show some self depreciating humor as you showcase the funniest user videos about the death of Clippy. Leverage the fact that you HAVE LISTENED TO USERS and gotten rid of an annoying pest. Hire a few joke writers for Bill and get the online community laughing with you.
Microsoft, please let us know you made a huge mistake that took 10 years to correct and publicly bury Clippy’s annoying head in a mass of funny, community generated laughs at your own expense. It’s not the death of Clippy, but rather the lost opportunity to be authentic with your users that hurts me.
With a few of the generally positive reviews of some of the features of Vista and Office 2007 you could milk a fun challenge like this for plenty of positive press and good laughs to support some of your media spending. You could engage the community instead of having us all blog about how weak your marketing is. Move the discussion away from Apple’s funny pokes at you, to your own confident self effacing pokes at yourself.
Make it easy for me to like you. I’ve worked with some of great people in Redmond including a lot of the senior executive team. There are a lot of smart people at Microsoft and say what you will about them, they work hard to release good products. They may not be cool, but the do run a large percentage of the worlds computers for more reasons then they generally get credit for.
I’ve also bitten into enough worms in my long history with Apple (Can anyone say Newton?) that I’m not a religious fan one way or another. I don’t view Apple ads as telling me I’m an ‘dullard’ for using Windows. I view them as funny because they all have an element of truth. Most people in Redmond know this. Bill knows this. We all knows this. That’s why they work and people like them.
I don’t need Bill analyzing the factual basis of the parody. I need to see him joining in and laughing harder at himself to make me like him and his company on an emotional level.
Unfortunately even when I go to find this video to show off a case where Microsoft laughed at itself I can only find a fan copy on YouTube. I know Google owns it, and Windows Media Player is nowhere to be found, but your customers look for video on YouTube and you should get any video that helps your image up there ASAP. Don’t just leave fan versions, it shows you don’t love me.
Hell any decent creativity on how to leverage Bill being on the Daily Show could have included him showing the dance scene from the end with him and John Heder on a Vista machine. Bloggers everywhere would have played the clip and laughed with Microsoft. (Comedy Central’s removal of clips from YouTube makes it hard for me to compare, but I’m sure there have been more views of his mishap on the Daily Show then the 160k views of the Napoleon Dynamite clip on YouTube)
I’m a big fan of my Tablet PC which I’ve had for 2yrs (until it’s graphics card went kaput right in the middle of writing this blog post - it’s on it’s way to Toshiba to be repaired and I spent Sunday trying to mount my hard drive in VMWare on another machine to access all my stuff easily - Arrgh…), and I also enjoy the Macintosh computers and Apple devices I have. I have 7 computers between my office and my home. I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in Microsoft software licenses throughout my career, at my various companies and at home. Yes I am now using open source for all my development projects - but I am still using your software and tools happily in many places and probably will for years to come.
Why do you make it so hard for me to defend your brand?
A Valentine Gift Emerges - I will work for Love
Instead of upgrading to Vista or Office 2007 I spent the day writing this blog post and thinking about the differences between big and small marketing. Authentic and mass marketing. Hugh’s gift of humor and Microsoft’s annoying blunders.
Bloggers work for love in most cases and that is what caused me to spend my day working on this instead of upgrading. Love. I realized what Hugh’s lesson and Microsoft’s failure to engage me could teach me and I realized how to help someone I love.
Amidst writing this blog post, an idea for a gift for Kelly emerged (in addition to the stuff I bought her at Stormhoek Swag and the mandatory chocolate).
My girlfriend is a massage therapist and does organic body & skin treatments. She has a small business and has been working really hard lately doing promotional brochures, coupons and trying to build her clientele.
She is eager for my help in teaching her how to use the Internet to market herself better but I end up not always finding the time beyond just helping her writing a few brochures. She tries her best (and has done a great job) learning desktop publishing tools and wants my help to be able to market online better, but she doesn’t want to bother me given how busy she knows I am. (She hates to bother me with her small business when I’m busy with the ‘big’ family businesses - but that doesn’t make her work or business not important to both of us).
So for Valentines this year, thanks to Hugh’s inspiration I am giving her a book of coupons I created for lessons on online marketing and helping her build her own little global microbrand. I’ve included items like,
How to set up and create an email newsletter for your clients
How to use Google Reader and Technorati to track content and industry news for your customers and networking
How to use Meetup and Upcoming to organize informational and promotional educational events
How to setup a database of her customer visits with email reminders and CRM systems
and of course….if and when she would like how to setup a blog and an intro course to blogging.
This is going to take some time out of my schedule, but it’s quality time that I’m happy to spend with Kelly and will be the best Valentine gift that I could give her. [Personal Note: Happy Valentines Day Baby - I didn't want to wait until Valentines to post this, and she reads my blog, so I'll have to add some surprise element for this week]
So now Microsoft may have to wait a bit longer for me to upgrade and play with their new toys.
Other people who love me more are competing with you for my time, and I’m sorry to say that you just don’t know how to say I love you - so for now I bid you adieu….
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My original title for thist post was: On the run since CUSEC & Democamp where I had a run in with Google but Montreal’s Mojo is Rising and me without my pants on. But while I started to write a general catch up post about what I’ve been seeing in my travels the last couple of weeks, I started to put it together some thoughts about an emerging technology and entrepreneurship community movement occuring around Canada. I see most of it in Montreal, but it’s occuring across the nation.
Things really picked up a few weeks ago with a few projects I’m involved with. Although I’ve been on the run lately I wanted write about a few of the conferences and meetings I’ve had on my travels and talk about some of what is occurring in the Montreal and Canadian tech community.
My whirlwind schedule of late started at CUSEC conference. I spoke at the event and it was a great time. There were tons of good questions from a great group of students. I also met a few really bright engineers.
I love speaking at schools for students. The air is loaded with energy, new thinking and I end up getting more out of it then most students I think. Some of my best hires in my career have been freshly graduated engineers, and I encourage any enterprising graduating student to join a good startup.
Quick side note:
Any graduating engineering student is welcome to contact me anytime to talk about finding you a hot startup job (with any of my various startup companies or with other hot startups run by my friends & other teams I’ve met across Canada). Help me help you find a position with a small startup. Join a small team and consider it your own startup. You will learn more in 2 years with a small startup then 5 years in any other company. There is a reason some great startups are created by students. Students and startups are made for each other in my opinion.
This is where I ran into a team from Google who was at the career fair looking to hire for their Montreal office. I spoke with some them and welcomed them to town.
Later that day John Kopanas did a great community goodness and pulled together Democamp Cusec. I was amazed at the incredible display of Montreal talent and community involvement. Josh over at Yashlabs has the best wrap up I’ve read. Great job Josh. Looking forward to connecting soon. Did I mention his great post. Go read it now, it’s shows some of the great projects and people in Montreal.
I then spent a couple of days in Toronto doing some business with investors, friends and meeting my friends from Cambrian House who were in town.
I met with my friend and StartupCamp co-organizer David Crow. I always enjoy my conversations with David. I’m learning a lot about how to build community from David.
During our conversation I told him I thought Montreal’s bohemian culture gave us a distinct edge in creating a ground zero for social & web innovation in Canada (web deux.zero for those with a taste for bad buzzwords translated). He of course felt that Toronto had a fair chance at this ground zero role. I would say he has a lot of reasons to be confident. Check out the work he is doing in Toronto and Alec Saunders post on the recent Toronto Democamp which was packed.
David continues to do an incredible job with his community involvement and I would say has a lot to be proud of. His post on Economics of Abundance and the Wealth of Barcamp is required reading in my opinion. David and I had a discussion of the economics of abundance when I told him what Project Ojibwe is cooking up. He’s one of the few people I wanted to share the whole idea with. He’s sworn to a DNH agreement - (Do no Harm) so he can’t disclose recklessly. Only when helping me recruit
The only reason I think Montreal has a chance to show our strengths is because we are learning in realtime from the great examples, initiatives such as Democamp, Opencities and sharing he and the community there are doing.
I’m not sure but I believe Toronto has the most active unconference community and it shows. Canada’s version of the Web 2.0 expo the Mesh conference is organized by David, and other great members from the Toronto tech community and not some tech conference company. They worry about how to keep the event affordable and high quality by bringing out the best speakers and showcasing Canadian projects. This is a full year before similar ideas are being discussed by Arrington and Calacanis. Talk about Canadian innovation. That’s shows the power of what is going on in Toronto.
I hope throughout the year, we’ll be doing some interesting things in Montreal (and Calgary where I’m going to be spending more time) that we can share with other communities. I have a number of projects I’m supporting and sponsoring that I believe will contribute to helping Canada’s technology community grow.
So imagine my surprise when I returned to Montreal and Google was back on my radar. A couple of days after Cusec the news broke in La Presse and was picked up by my friend Seb and the blog community that Google had opened a Montreal office and was hiring.
This is great news for the Montreal technology community. I think there is a change occurring in Montreal, and a little shake up on the local market for talent will be healthy for everyone.
When my friend Julien complained about the need for Montreal to show our brains, lamenting not having a hot startup scene, the community responded loudly (check out all the comments, and the follow up post).
When YULBiz showed up later that week the community show up in force and there were probably 20 local entrepreneurs that came out.
My friend Ben Yoskovitz responded when he posted this great idea for an entrepreneurs networking breakfast and got a great response. I’ll be in attendance and the event is up on Upcoming.org (Subscribe to the Montreal tag for events, I’m going to be listing more community events there shortly.)
Clearly the Montreal community is starting to come together around these events.
When I was at Garage Canada’s great Startup Canada event (which deserves it’s own post soon) Bill Reichert and I spoke about how in the Valley there are community events every night where entrepeneurs and engineers meet and interact, practice elevator pitches and get introduced to each other. These interactions help you improve your network, your skills and in many cases your pitches. In fact in the valley because of the density of people working in the technology field you don’t even really need to go anywhere. Everytime I walk down University Ave. in Stanford, or stop by Bucks in Woodside I’ll run into someone I know and have a chance to catch up.
Something similar is occuring in Montreal.
I think there is an incredible void in our city that beginning to be filled with people starting to discover what an incredibly rich technology community we have here. I intend over the coming weeks to begin to post about some interesting people and projects that deserve some attention.
Even the Montreal Gazette is hoping on the bandwagon and starting a local blog to cover the Montreal tech community. I think this is a great move by the Gazette, and frankly something Canadian newspapers have traditionally been very bad at. With some notable exceptions (Mark Evans and Mathew Ingram who are also not surprisingly part of the Mesh crew and active members of the community they cover), I don’t think there has been a lot of focus on discovering some of our made in Canada projects. Unfortunately most Canadian media like to wait until after our projects get some media attention south of the border, and then too often enjoy taking a skeptical view of the Canadian’s projects chance for success against US players.
I hope that this is beginning to change, but it doesn’t really matter since newspapers aren’t exactely the only media source around anymore. There is enough ability for our communities, podcasters and bloggers to promote each others great projects and gain the attention of those who will support made in Canada innovation - which is the users - not the media.
I invite anyone doing something interesting in Montreal that you feel deserves some attention to come out to one of these events. I have a few startups and special projects of my own that I’ll be announcing throughout the next couple of months, but I’m interested in what else is occuring in our community.
I have one closing question for people reading this, what local Canadian technology projects do you feel deserve some attention?
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I made my first blog post just over three months ago on October 19th 2006. I mentioned in that post, that an inaugural post was forthcoming. Well I’ll be posting it soon. I decided to experiment with the whole blogging thing for a few months before posting the original first post that I wrote. I expect I’ll edit it a bit based on my experiences these past ninety days.
Here are some quick statistics.
I’ve made 50 posts in the past 92 days.
There have been 147 comments left (including some of my own comments).
My Technorati ranking when I first measured it on November 1st 2006 was 471,327. Today my rank is 17,932 (as of this writing).
When I first checked, I had 9 links from 7 blogs on Technorati on November 1st 2006. Today I have 313 links from 178 blogs.
My Wordpress Slimstat plug in which is my oldest stats package says I have had 73,407 hits and 8,803 unique visitors since Oct. 17th when the blog was turned on.
My Mint statistics package which went live shortly after I launched says that I’ve had 27,746 total hits and 5,439 unique visitors.
The must subscribers I’ve had on RSS is 93, although I’ve been averaging about 75 regularly lately. (If you enjoy the blog, consider subscribing via RSS or you can subscribe via email)
I have become among the first hits on Google when you search for my name. My bio at Radialpoint and Synomos’s homepages use to be on the 2nd or 3rd page of results before I started blogging. (Thisis essential for executives today. When someone wants to know about you, they Google you - and if you aren’t putting your own voice on the first page of Google results - you are missing an opportunity to start a conversation. If you don’t have a personal blog, setup your LinkedIn Public Profile page to promote your experience and network. Google yourself and see if you are promoting your personal brand in the results.)
I’ve had visitors from 40+ countries with the single largest percentage (12.7%) coming from Montreal.
I want to thank my readers and my friends who have given me tips introducing me to the tricks of blogging. Thanks to those of you who have linked to me, or helped our Gifter project by leaving a wish. I appreciate the comments, feedback and how many old friends and new friends have reached out and contacted me through this blog.
I encourage you to reach out if you have something interesting in Canada that you are working on. I am going to be continuing to write posts about Canadian Internet and social media projects, entrepreneurs and other interesting Canadian tech community news.
I haven’t really tried to comment or track everything that is occurring in the blogosphere or the industry. I don’t write about the latest technology news, whatever Techcrunch covers or Apple releases. I’ve written about topics that I have some perspective or opinion on. I am trying to help build a conversation and a sense of community among Canadian technology executives, angel investors, entrepreneurs and technologists. So expect me to continue to write about Canadian technology projects, entrepreneurs and community related events.
I have a lot of areas that I’d like to improve with my writing style. Brevity is something that I need to work on.
I’ve most enjoyed the interviews I’ve conducted with different people who are doing interesting things in Canada. I plan to continue doing interesting interviews with entrepreneurs, social media experts and interesting people I meet in my travels.
My biggest regret is not getting my podcast going. It’s taking a bit longer then I thought. I had hoped to be a blogger & podcaster by now. Between working on our startup, some of the volunteer, advisory and angel work I do, and Gifter.org (look for some changes soon to that project) I’ve been holding off.
I’ve got some great audio interviews with Robert Scoble, Canadian author Don Tapscott, Mike Sikorsky and Jason Woodrow from Cambrian House, Mike McDerment from Freshbooks, my old friends Elliot Noss from Tucows, David Hornick (VC, podcaster), and Jeff Clavier (who is also my former VC when he invested in Zero-Knowledge while at Reuters Venture Fund). I am going to get these up in the next month, sorry to you guys for the delay.
Blogging has become invaluable in how I conduct business. I don’t think I have anything new to say about the benefits of blogging that hasn’t been captured in the great book Naked Conversations by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble.
I’m convinced that blogging is becoming a crucial activity for any entrepreneur building a company, a personal brand, raising money or wishing to have a voice in their industry.
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Venture Capitalist, author and evangelism guru Guy Kawasaki is leading a great line up of speakers with an agenda that is based on his great book The Art of the Start. He has done other Art of the Start conferences, but I believe this is the first in Canada.
I recommend entrepreneurs I advise to read a copy of Art of the Start. It is one of the best how-to guides on the basics of starting a company or organization that I’ve found. Simple, clear and jam packed of useful tips on starting something.
If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, or a practicing entrepreneur looking to network this is a great event to attend. I’ll be there with a few entrepreneurs who I’m supporting in a new startup.
My friend Tom Sweeney (Garage Canada) who is also speaking asked me to join Patrick Lor, Isabelle Bettez and Ravi Sood on a panel with Guy Kawasaki discussing the state of the Canadian startup scene.
I hope to see you there.
This shouldn’t be confused with the StartupCamp Canada that I’m helping to organize, which will be later this year.
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Sébastien Pierre our lead interaction designer & interface developer for Project Ojibwe is going to attend Democamp CUSEC on Thursday and demo Sugar. Sugar is a one of the new tools he has developed and we are using internally on Project Ojibwe. Here is how he describes it,
Sugar is a syntax for a new meta-programming tool that allows you to create Domain Specific Languages (DSL) as well as custom general purpose languages that can be very easily translated to popular languages like Python, JavaScript and C. We use Sugar to do our JavaScript programming, bringing advanced language features such as full OOP, closures, iterators and type checking, and making sure we avoid common programmatic and syntactic mistakes.
Some of our team are going to be there to support him, so look for us and come by and say hi.
Project Ojibwe is also looking for top-notch Javascript/Python developers (more on this to come), so if you want to come introduce yourself and show off your Javascript kung-fu we would love to meet you.
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I’ve met some great people through my blog. There is a incredible amount of innovative projects coming out of Canada right now in social media, communities and Web 2.0. (There are also very interesting Web 1.9 and Web 2.1.x projects occuring as well :).
When I first spoke with Tom Williams last year, I knew that we were going to get along just fine. Our shared interest in the power of plenty and online communities led to a great discussion. His project GiveMeaning is a great community giving project, and I recently asked him to participate in an interview. Please check out Givemeaning and if you happen to donate to a project, consider sponsoring some wishes with your donation receipt at Gifter.org.
What can you tell us about GiveMeaning?
GiveMeaning is the place where people come to make wishes come true. People use GiveMeaning to fundraise and donate to specific charitable projects (i.e. a tangible, specific objective). Anyone can start their own project or they can donate to any of the hundreds that other people have started. So anyone with a desire to see their world changed (whether in their backyard or half-way around the world) can use our site to make it happen.
There are a lot of ways to donate to causes and charities online, how is GiveMeaning different?
First, we charge absolutely nothing for our service. 100% of every donation (even the credit card costs) are remitted to charity (socially responsible companies pay to sponsor the projects on our site).
Second, our privacy policy is as simple as we dont and we won’t. Too often, people experience the frustration of being bombarded with more solicitations soon after making a donation online or offline to charity. No where else can you donate with total confidence that your information won’t be shared and you won’t be solicited.
Third, you can actually see where and how your money is making a difference. The only requirement we have of the charities that receive money to work on the projects on our site is that they post blog updates, photos, video and so. A good example of this is http://ugandayouth.givemeaning.com
How is GiveMeaning doing so far?
Wonderfully! We have spent next to nothing in marketing, growing totally by word of mouth. I think unfortunately, donating to charity has become such a hassle that when people come across a customer experience like ours, they want to rave about it.
Can you give some examples of the types of projects that have been supported through GiveMeaning?
They really run the gamut from development projects in Africa to animal shelters in Saskatchewan to a woman’s breast cancer treatment in Seattle. Take a look at http://babz.givemeaning.com Our community raised $60,000 for this woman’s medical treatment in 2 weeks!!!
What are some of the opportunities that potential sponsors of Gifter.org wishes can donate towards through GiveMeaning?
It’s only limited to the sponsor’s imagination.
Any thoughts on the role of small individual donors in the world of philanthropy & charity? Where can they get involved in the best ways?
Yes, harness the “power of plenty” by pooling your individual donation with 100 other people’s small donations. That’s what GiveMeaning is all about. If for some reason, you don’t want to donate through a service like GiveMeaning, then my advice would be find an organization that you haven’t ever heard of that’s supporting the cause most important to you. There are 80,000 charities in this country and most of them are operating with very little resources. Don’t do the easy thing and give to the big, national branded charities that spend millions of dollars on marketing. Do your research, and connect with one of the thousands of “little guys.”
On a personal note, how has your experience in the non-profit world been treating you? How does it compare with your background as a technology entrepreneur?
It’s very humbling to make the switch into the non-profit sector because it requires a wholly different attitude and approach to basically every aspect of running an organization. There is a LOT of skepticism about any new charitable organization and it takes a lot more to build trust, credibility and loyalty than in any other sector I have ever worked in.
At the same time, the rewards are beyond anything I had ever previously experienced.. Despite years of building, investing and advising tech companies from start-up to Fortune 500, nothing was more satisfying than the first $50 donation that came through the site.
I also think that there is much greater value in bootstrapping a charitable “venture” than in raising a ton of $$ early on. This isn’t a market that can be “bought” only earned and with a war-chest, I think I would have fallen to the belief that I could buy my progress.
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I’m also going to be at DemoCamp CUSEC that evening. If you are in Montreal and would like to meet others in the Montreal technology community, it’s Thursday evening. Please come by and say hi.
If you are personally working on some cool projects, are a Montreal company developing something cool, or have any live code you want to demo - then head over to the wiki and sign up.
I’ll be attending both events with some members of my team, so if you want to support Montreal community technology events please come on out.
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advertising company Adscape Media. (You could call them Video Game Advertising 2.0 if the sidebar picture is Video Game Advertising 1.0)
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