April 21, 2008

MeshU Schedule

The mesh guys have finalized the MeshU schedule with a great line-up for startups, and anyone building for the web. MeshU is a one-day seminar, separate from the Mesh Conference, that focuses on web startups. The day features 12 workshops and 3 streams ( design, development, management ).

I think the series highlights for me are probably Jon Lax, from Teehan+Lax, on getting through the design process. I’ve gone through several site re-designs both a refresh and previously at Autotrader. Its a difficult process, or atleast it should be get good results.

The Oauth session with Leah Culver looks pretty interesting too. I’ve been following Oauth for awhile and how it relates to Identity. I’d be interested to see how easy it is to implement, especially compared with SlashID integration on refreshclassifieds.com.

It looks like most of the talks are family platform agnostic but alot of the speakers do develop with PHP and Rails. Both are great platforms for startups and I think most of the knowledge learned could be applied to .NET platforms as well. Microsoft also has some free packages for early stage startups to use .NET.

April 21, 2008

Early funding, for early exits?

I attended Rick Segal’s VC round table last week, which was also attended by Susan Dingwall Williams and Scott Pelton. It was a good forum to discuss the VC community and the funding process for startups. One area I was surprised with was the agreement from both Rick and Scott that they wanted to involved early in the funding process. Generally the area where Angels would have traditionally been involved.

Then over the weekend I read about Xnobi being approached by Microsoft, from TechCrunch. Xnobi makes a social networking for Outlook and it would make sense that Microsoft would want to purchase them. Xnobi has just recently, probably has no revenue and very little business model.

Is this the state of startups today? With early funding and early exists? This would certainly explain the decline in VC funding, with smaller startups and earlier exists, there is less need for huge capital investments. VC’s will need to be nimble about how and when they invest, and startups will also need to be equally as quick about how they invest.

April 17, 2008

Well.ca gets Funding

Well.ca has announced funding today from a group angels, including the Maple Leaf Angels in Toronto. I first met Ali Asaraia, Well.ca founder & CEO, at a Maple Leaf Angels breakfast meeting. I was impressed with how well Ali presented the opportunity and I knew it was only a matter of time before he’d getting funding. I think Well.ca will have great success with their business.

Maple Leaf Angels has also been active with funding for Homestars.ca recently. Maple Leaf Angels is a relatively new group but has invested in 9 companies for a total of $4m since its inception in 2007.

Its great to see both a Canadian startup, in Well.ca and a Canadian Angel group like Maple Leaf Angels working together.

April 1, 2008

Adobe openning the door for Silverlight?

Adobe has announced some major security changes in Flash 9. Many of these changes break network enabled Flash applications. Most notable applications that use any of the following:

or

The full release on the security issues are available here. These changes mean that many Flash applications which have worked for years under Flash 7, will need to be re-written for Flash 9. Some of these changes are so extreme that porting might not even be possible.

This looks like a real opportunity for Silverlight to pick up some market share. I would Microsoft to put a big push on about there network security model and how it would be easier to support Silverlight rather dealing with the new Flash 9 security model.

March 31, 2008

No Refresh for Yellowpages.ca

For disclosure I think its important to get out that I use to work for the Yellowpages Group when they purchased Autotrader.ca. It was with some humour today that I got a call from the local Yellowpages rep about a free business listing for Refresh Partners.

YPG ( Yellowpages Group ) sells advertising as a print and online bundle with an annual commitment that his billed monthly. The directory is also divided regionally, and Toronto for example has 4 different books we’d need to purchase for print ads for coverage.

This is the beginning of the problem with Yellowpages advertising. Refresh Partners focuses on marketing in social networks, which is most cases is Facebook Marketing. I would only want Yellowpages.ca advertising related to “Facebook Marketing” keywords. Similar to what we purchase with Google.ca.

The Yellowpages pricing starts at $64/month for 3 lines in the print directory and matching keywords online. There is no option to purchase the online keywords only, or to purchase keywords on a CPC basis. Yellowpages.ca also offers a web line to Refresh.ca for $70/month but a great bargain for just a link…

Yellowpages.ca also back fills their search listings from Google.ca. This means that since nobody is currently purchasing ‘Facebook Marketing’ keywords, Yellowpages.ca displays the Google.ca listings. In effect we get full exposure for our Google.ca ad spend on Yellowpages.ca today. A quick check of my Google.ca adword reports shows no impressions coming from Yellowpages.ca. So nobody is searching Yellowpages.ca for “Facebook Marketing”, we can ignore Yellowpages.ca as an ad channel…

The other interesting problem with Yellowpages.ca is that we’ve had our business lines for about 6 months now. The YPG ad sales process is annual so Yellowpages.ca listings generally only get updated annually.

March 25, 2008

Metronauts Launches

The Metronauts.ca site has launched and is accepting registrations for the next TransitCamp. I attended first TransitCamp it and it was great event for discussion various transit related issues. I think this time around the TransitCamp is looking for a more diverse crowd and I think I would just be another internet geek, when they really want to get feedback from soccer moms and other hard core commuters.

March 25, 2008

Lots of attention on Canadian Startups

There has been a lot of attention lately on the technology startups in Canada. We’ve had very successful StartupCamps in Waterloo, Montreal and Toronto and even mainstream media is starting to notice. There are also a number of events focusing on helping startups:

Canadian Innovation Exchange

This is probably one of the bigger events and has a good line up of speakers. The event features a contest for startups to present and win some funding. Unfortunately the cost is $495 for companies that are accepted to present. The contest has also had a major security breach.

MeshU

The Mesh Conference has been the biggest web conference in Toronto for the past 2 years, and this year is also looking strong. MeshU is still a little vague and focuses on a variety of areas from using S3 to monetizing your site. The cost is a more reasonable $239.

Rick Segal RoadTour

Rick Segal is running a VC Roadshow across the country with 15 sessions in different cities. The schedule for sessions is not tightly defined but having seen Rick present and read his blog I’m sure it will provide a lot of information. The events are also free.

StartupCamps

StartupCampMontreal2
StartupCampToronto2

StartupCamps provide an opportunity for startups to pitch their ideas and receive real-time feedback. I really enjoyed the last 2 attended and I think SlashID really benefited the feedback and interaction. StartupCamps are largely free unless you want to sponsor.

If you know of any other Startup focused events leave a comment below.

March 24, 2008

The dark side of Cloud Computing…

Over the last few years I’ve been a strong advocate of moving most of my computing the cloud based services. I’ve been using Gmail for all my email, including my business email. I use Google Reader now for all my RSS feeds and often I’m using Google Docs to share files with colleagues. I’m also a big fan of using social networking sites like Facebook to consolidate alot of my social communications like photo sharing and status updates…

Recently though I’ve had a few bad experience with cloud services and I think its important these services to have good systems in place for outages. The most recent was with Facebook. On Friday it seems Facebook decided to enforce a new policy of not allowing test accounts as application developers. I’d read different reports about using test accounts as developers and the Facebook wifi indicates that its not supported. As part of this new enforcement Facebook decided to disable all applications that had test accounts as developers. In our case this effected 4 applications that we’ve developed, 3 of which were for 4 clients. One application was just launching and we were able to contact someone at Facebook to get it re-enabled. One application was still in developer so we re-created new application keys without any problems. The last 2 are still missing and have now been offline for 4 days. Not great in terms of a customer service experience and I think really highlights the need for better customer service with Facebook…

And then this morning I’ve been having a hard time getting into my Gmail account. When I try to login I get a 502 error ( temporary web problem, try again ) and Gmail displays the following message:

This seems to be taking longer than usual.

If you are using a slow Internet connection, you can wait a bit longer for this page to finish loading, or just use basic HTML view for now.

If you are using your normal Internet connection and you usually get past this loading step without any problems, please refresh this page in your browser. If you continue to have trouble loading your account, please visit the help center for troubleshooting information.

Which sounds like there is a problem with my internet connection. A quick visit to the “Google help center” leads to nothing useful but after a quick search of the Gmail discussion forum I find this:

Gmail Alerts Manager

(1 user) Mar 24, 1:54 pm

From: Gmail Alerts Manager

Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:54:02 -0700 (PDT)

Local: Mon, Mar 24 2008 1:54 pm

Subject: 502 errors on login

Reply |   Forward | Print | Individual message | Report this message | Find messages by this author

We are aware that a subset of our users are currently experiencing 502
errors upon login. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.
Thanks for your patience.

Ok, so it is a Google problem, they are aware of issue. I can use their basic HTML service while they resolve it. It would have been better if they connected this message with the login error message though instead of having me spin my wheels.

I guess the move to Cloud based services is not without its growing pains. I’m currently in the process of backing up all my Gmail and removing all test accounts from developer access.

March 17, 2008

IE 8 Virtual Machines

I’m a little late on this but one of the funniest announcements of out of MIX08 was the IE 8 Virtual Machines announcement. I’ve been running the IE8 Beta which was also launched at MIX08, mainly because I badly broke IE 7 trying to get a version of IE6 installed for testing.

The new IE8 virtual machines, or Internet Application Compatibility VPC image, let you run old version of Internet Explorer. In order to make your website work with Internet Explorer it often required several ugly work-arounds to get the different versions to run together. In my case these ended up breaking my version of IE 7.

I’m glad that Microsoft is actually taking this situation seriously and releasing the IE8 Virtual Machines. I think its really telling though how much damage Microsoft and IE has done to web compatibility though. Other browsers like Firefox aren’t perfect but they don’t see to suffer from anywhere near the compatibility issues and it doesn’t see that IE 8 is going to be radically better…

February 27, 2008

StartupCampWaterloo2

Last night was StartupCampWaterloo and I made my first trip out to the Waterloo Acceleration Center. Having gone to a lot of events around Toronto the Waterloo Acceleration Center is awesome, with an open lobby area for presentations. I think there was about 80 people in attendance but it was still an intimate environment for the Q&A.

Stefanus Du Toit provided the first presentation as an overview of this experience with RapidMind. I haven’t heard of RapidMind before and seems they provide tools for rapid development of 3D environments. They’ve done work with the IBM cell processor and a variety other GPUs.

In keeping with the Barcamp theme, everyone that wanted to present needed to pitch the crowd with a 60s overview of the presentation. I think there were about 8 companies/groups that wanted to present and in the end 5 presentations went forward.
The presentations were:

SlashID by Ross Bennett

I’ve worked with Ross before and I’ve been involved with SlashID for awhile. For disclosure, I am also an investor in SlashID. I think the original plans was for a 15 min presentation and it ended up being 5 mins, with 10 min Q&A. Ross did a good overview of SlashID and I think the feedback from the crowd was great. Key improvements for the pitch would be to address the differences between SlashID and OpenID earlier, and place less emphasis on the revenue from users.

Tagiton.com by Adam Joncas

I really like the initial pitch from Adam, about the goals of Tagiton.com in terms of moving a lot of emal discussions out of email. When they demo’d their product though didn’t find the filtering options or the ability to follow conversations to be too great. I think Gmail probably provides better tools today. Tagiton also seemed to be trying to introduce a different definition of the term “Tag”. I think the key take away would be to really look a how they can improve the email flow without launching new browser windows and creating new terms around their “Tagging” engine.

Garageentrepreneurs.com by Natalie McNeil

Garage Entrepreneurs are planning to develop a social network to let entrepreneurs to connect. I found there assertion about competitive sites like Facebook and Linkedin to be very weak. David Crow has some great feedback when Garage Entrepreneurs suggested charging entrepreneurs for access to the network. I think the key takeway for Garage Entrepreneurs is to focus on how to create some unique value for entrepreneurs ( outside of Facebook, or other social networks ) and a better business model that’s not based on users paying.

SmartPatterns.com

The pitch for the SmartPatterns.com presentation was really weak but I thought they made up for it with your demo and discussion afterwards. The company is in the process of moving their software from a desktop package to an online service. They provide the ability to quickly create custom knitting patterns online. While knitting is probably a fairly small market there are a number of opportunities to grow the business. I think the key take away was to get the service online fast and think about opportunities to work expand beyond just the knitting patterns.

Ghoti Studios by Majid Mirza

I don’t think the Ghoti Studios pitch and presentation were in alignment. I was excited initially about the possibility of more efficiently with graphic designers. It wasn’t clear from the presentation how Ghoti Studios planned to make working with graphic designers easier. There are a number of online tools designed to make working with designers easier, like ConceptShare, Octopz, and Kuzimo. I wasn’t certain where Ghoti Studios planned to fit into this process. I think the key take away would be to define the business plan a bit more and try to include the various feedback/suggestions.

Austin Hill wrapped up the night with a presentation of his experiences and recommendations for startups. I thought some of this experiences were one sided, for example his experience with service businesses. I think a lot of business can self-fund through services . I did really like his line about “Code talks” when dealing with financing. I thought this was a great summary of why startups need to get a working prototype.
Overall it was a good line up of companies and I think the interaction with the crowd was great. Jesse and Simon did a great job of trying to get discussions going. Simon was one the best MC’s I’ve ever seen and he should definitely continue with the MC duties.

February 26, 2008

DemoCampToronto17

DemoCampToronto17 was last night at the Board of Trade. It was a packed house again with tickets selling out a few weeks ago. About half the crowd was new to DemoCamp again. It’s a strange trend that so many new people are coming out.
The Demo’s for the night were:

AskItOnline.com by Kaitlyn McLachlan, Clear Sky Media
AskitOnline.com is an online survey tool, similar to survey monkey and a lot of the other online tools. The interface and the process for creating the survey is really what sets it apart from competition. The interface looked really great and I having struggled with other solutions I can see how it could have an advantage.

GigPark.com by Pema Hegan and Noah Godfrey
GigPark.com is a recommendation based social network. You can ask your friends to give you a recommendation on different services or see which services your friends are recommending. Having tried a few recommendation based services in the past I think it’s a very competitive market. Services like Yellow Pages can easily add user reviews and start competing, Ziplocal.com for example already has a basic review engine and friend network.

Mono Project .NET by Geoff Norton
The Mono project provides a open source .NET development environment. I had heard of Mono before but I’ve never really looked into it. Geoff did a great job of demo a fairly dull topic and didn’t let the hardcore developers in the crowd suck him down and any rat holes, like the licensing situation with Mono.

PlanetEye.com by Butch Langlois
Planeteye.com is a travel related site that lets users upload photos of different geographic locations around the world. The site is absolutely beautiful and the interface between the photos and the map has really been thought out. I’m not too clear how they intend to make money though. The Travel advertising industry is a tough nut to crack.

SceneCaster by Alain Chesnais
I saw SceneCaster briefly at FacebookCampToronto a few weeks ago but it was great to see a longer version of their demo. I think technology is really great and its impressive to see 3D environments coming to life in the browse. I’m not too clear on their business model and how many businesses will really want to create 3D models to promote their businesses. It will be interesting to see the product and probably the business strategy evolve.

Overall the demo’s were awesome, one of the best demo line-ups I’ve seen in awhile. All of them were really well presented and I think all were trying to solve a problem.
The Ignite presentations were:

The Future Is Simple by Geo Perdis
Geo’s presentation was how the web and the innovation is often about eliminating unnecessary components. He had a few different examples of how business were more successful once they simplified their business.

Social Services Mashup by Clara Severino
Clara’s presentation was about creating a mashup of different social services and connecting them using online mapping. It was a good presentation and I think its really showing there is a huge opportunity at the hyper local level for a variety of services to co-exist. It would be great to see social services publishing map co-ordinates etc..

How to Rock SXSW by Rannie Turingan
SXSW is a large interactive conference in Austin and Rannie’s presentation was about how to get maximum value. I haven’t been to SXSW but it looks like a great time and I’d really like attend at some point.

The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks by Tom Purves
Last year started a flurry of discussion around the state of wireless access in Canada. His presentation was in a similar line and included a number of highlights about how Canada’s wireless data rates are not competitive with the rest of the world. With most companies looking very hard for a wireless strategy is disappointing that Canadian wireless provides have been so limiting.

Leveraging Wide Open by Mike Beltzner
Mike Beltzner’s presentation was around how businesses can benefit from being open and using an open source philosophy. It was an interesting discussion and Mozilla has certainly benefitted from the process.

Tom’s presentation was definitely the highlight of the Ignite presentations. Oddly the ignite presentations were a lot rougher than the demo’s this time around. I was really impressed with the quality of the demo’s, I think the Ignite format just presents too make challenges for good communication.

January 31, 2008

Flash in TO v66

I went to Flash in TO again last night, which turned out to be about all things not flash. There was a good crowd of people there and free pizza for everyone. The event also featured a little bar which makes for a good night. The presentations for the evening were:

Unity 3D by Cam Warnock

Cam presented the Unity 3D environment and library. His presentation was following the Pecha Kucha style so it was pretty rushed. He gave a quick overview of the Unity 3D capabilities, the developer IDE, down loadable modules and the network functionality. I was disappoined that there wasn’t a question period after. I would have liked to find out what % of browsers have the Unity 3D module already installed. I expect it is small and most designs will need to consider that the 3M+ download will need to installed before interacting with the user.

FlashPress by Alex and Raz (sp?) from PHUG.ca

The idea behind FlashPress is to develop a WordPress front-end that is based on Flash. The WordPress backend could be used for the content management but a Flash front end would handle the presentation in a more interactive format. I think its an interesting idea, and if it were done it would be worth checking out, but I think implementing it will take a lot of work and probably be very specific to certain Flash presentation schemes. I haven’t seen alot of good examples of Flash front-ends working with any content management systems, let alone one designed to output HTML and CSS. It will be interesting to see this project evolve.

Intro to SilverLight by Paul Laberge, Microsoft Canada

Every now and then you see a presentation that is a colossal train wreck and at the same time being very well presented. The Silverlight presentation was one of those. Paul took us through the process of creating a SilverLight animation, while a relative smooth presentation, the process just looked horrible. For starters you create you vector in Expression Design, which is suppose to be like Adobe Illustrator, then you animate the Expression Blend, which kinda like Flash, then you program in Visual Studio. Afterwards you get a Silverlight file that is not playable in all browsers. In the Adobe world all of these functions are contained inside Flash and you don’t need to learn how to use 3 different program or UI paradigms. Microsoft will really need to clean up this process if they want to get the Flash crowd to convert.

Intro to Processing by Rob King and Ken Leung, OCAD – Mobile Lab

I had heard of processing before and knew it was based on Java but hadn’t really looked at it. Rob and Ken did a great job of highlighting the benefits on the processing environment and how it further abstracts the Java functionality. The examples of Processing implementations were really interesting and all the demos were presented as video’s to simplify the presentation process. I thought the presentation was a little long though, especially following the Silverlight presentation.

I didn’t stay for the Virtools presentation and I think my feedback on the whole event is that its too long. The presentations should all be much shorter, 15 mins tops, and have more options to engage different people.

December 7, 2007

StartupCampToronto1 Review

StartupCampToronto was last night and it was awesome. A much more business focused crowd than DemoCamp, the crowd was a mix of startups and funding options. It was a No Regrets, which is a more intimate environment to have a drink and watch the presentations.

The presentation line last night was as follows:

Freshbooks

I’ve seen Freshbooks present many times and even tried using their software. I didn’t really liked the direction they chose in their pitch as a more service oriented, high touch, service offering. In using their service it does work quite well and eliminates a number of problems for small businesses. Their Q&A session also focused around how to grow the business while maintaining
the same level of service. I think there are some great opportunities for them to grow their business through partnerships and channel sales.

Defensio

Defensio is a tough situation in that they are competing with a free service from wordpress to prevent comment spam. Their algorithm focuses on eliminating spam and false positives through a more detailed analysis of the blog content. I thought it would have been good to high light the accuracy difference between Akismet ( wordpress solution ) and Defensio. I’m also not clear the market
opportunity for the product with many blogs not reaching the level of comment
spam where Defensio would provide a substantial benefit.

CakeMail

CakeMail provides a white label mail delivery system through an API. As someone who has run a number of mass e-mail campaigns ( always opt-in ) I know frustration with sending emails. There are many services available though in this space and its not clear the opportunity for growth.

Workspace

Workspace provides an online IDE ( integrated development environment ) for developers focused on web projects. I like the idea around this in that I’ve always been frustrated with the time required to setup development
environments. The environment also provides some collaboration tools and I really like to see them do a DemoCamp to see more about their product. As a
business I’m a little concerned about competition with free IDE’s and its ability to support commercial software platforms which are more proprietary.

Investmate

I really like the enthusiasm of the Investmate team and they reminded me of the JobLoft team last year with their energy level. They have an interesting solution to target smaller and less experienced investors with investment information. The big problem I see in this model is the licensing and regulation around providing investment advice. There was a number of suggestions around licensing the technology to existing brokerage firms, which is probably a good plan but might not be inline with the brokerage firms goal of landing big
clients.

A great selection of companies and basement of No Regrets was opened for startups that didn’t make the presentation list to run table top demos. The SlashID team and Ogrant were both among the teams running demos and were swamped with questions most of the
night.

Night also featured an announcement of a new venture capital company started in Toronto called Extreme Venture Partners. I met Amar from EVP a few months and have been impressed with his involvement in FacebookWeekend. I think its great to see a few firm forming in Toronto around the technology sector.

The Startupnorth guys did a great job organizing and I’m sure this is just the first of many events.

December 5, 2007

DemoCampToronto16 Review

DemoCampToronto16 took place on Monday night and was back at the Board of Trade. The BOT is a great venue but seems to bring out a lot of people in suits and create an overall
more formal atmosphere. I was again surprised at the number of new DemoCamp attendees. I’m not really sure why DemoCamp always seems to always have about 50% new people…

The demo line-up was as follows

SlashID

I’ve been working with SlashID for about the past year on their business model and marketing strategy. The technology is very cool and it really empowers the user with their identity information but it doesn’t make for the most interesting Demo. Ross and Zeev did a good job of covering the advantages of SlashID.

Utest

Igor presented the Utest software to teachers that want to students to solve a programming assignment. Igor’s demo was very slick and it looked like he had an eclipse pluggin setup for the assignments. I’m not a huge fan of eclipse or IDE’s in general but I thought it was pretty cool that Utest pluggin worked within the IDE.

FacebookWeekend BETA

I got to present on the Facebook Weekend BETA that just
finished and specifically the Pet Food Testing project. I hope I was able to represent all the different people and activities that took place over the weekend effectively. One comment I got afterwards I didn’t spend enough time on the business processes around the testing. I also got a lot of questions about my Firefox bling and the 3D tab switching, for anyone that wants to add their own its called Tab Effect and it’s a Firefox plugin.

Healthspoke

I had a hard time following this demo because a lot of people were still talking to me about Facebook Weekend. From what I saw it looked pretty slick, after listening to the discussion at the end I’m a little concerned about the privacy.

ShapeShop3D

I met Ryan briefly at DemoCamp15 and I was blown away by the ShapeShop software. He did a great job demoing his software and the capabilities that are possible with a gesture driven interface. He quickly created a variety of 3D shapes with the software and I think anyone in the 3D creation space would benefit from his software.

All of the demo’s went smooth and I was really impressed by the quality of them. I’m not certain but I think the time for the demo’s was more flexible too, I didn’t really see anyone have any problems with getting cut off.

The Ignite sessions were as follows:

Co-creating the Creative City

I’ve never seen Mark present but I’ve met him many times and been impressed with the projects he’s involved with. I really like the concept that he presented of a community using technology to help improve itself. He talked about Fixmystreet.com and how it’s a site not run by the city but my citizen and they are organized to follow up with local government. He did a great job and presented one of the best ignite presentations I’ve seen.

AdaptiveBlue

Fraser presented on some of his learning from the AdaptiveBlue start-up, which is a Firefox plugin. His presentation was good in providing information about how AdaptiveBlue has evolved. I don’t think he did a job of explaining some basics though, like how/what AdaptiveBlue is or how they were able to execute the different components.

iStockphoto

Patrick did a great job of re-counting how iStockphoto has been able to succeed as a stock photography site. He provide some great examples of how iStockphoto was able to develop their business model differently and use crowdsourcing instead of expensive in house staff. I really enjoyed his presentation I thought he shared a lot of information the iStockphoto culture and approach that separated it from other stock photo companies.

Overall it was great night and I met a bunch of new people afterwards. One area I think needs some tweaking is the sponsorship support. As a sponsor I’m not really sure its necessary to have 2-5 min presentation/messages.

December 4, 2007

FacebookWeekend Beta Wrap-Up

First of all, thanks to all of the organizers and volunteers who participated in the planning and running of our event. Your efforts are greatly appreciated and it’s great to see so much support for entrepreneurship.

Facebook Weekend BETA was very productive and a number of different teams made significant progress on their projects. All groups were able to access a Joyent Accelerator account with 12 months of free hosting for their Facebook Applications

The Pet Food Testing team, including Refresh Partners, Ron Smith, and Lanny Geffen were able to establish their business goal, create the branding and logo and get a functional Facebook Application working. Their Facebook Application is live and you can use it: http://apps.facebook.com/petfood
Martin West was able to form a great team around his collaborative educational Facebook application and they were able to complete the initial business case/plan, user scenarios, and build the base for their technology platform. They are moving full-steam ahead to try to turn this application into a business.
The Tippsee team also made progress on their business plan and are moving into the market validation phase of their project. They’re still looking for developers to join the team, if anyone is interested.
Libin Pan continued to refine and develop the ideveloper application, which provides developer support inside Facebook.
Alex Sirota was able to refine his Healthbook concept and benefited from great feedback from a number of people who dropped by.

Finally, we also had a lot of interest and encouragement from the investor community including Keith Bates from Cinnabar Ventures, Bryan Watson from the National Angel Organization and Robert Koturbash from the Maple Leaf Angels.

We’re looking forward to working closely with these groups and the investor community to ensure their success.

We already have an open invitation from the Maple Leaf Angels to allow one of the teams to pitch angels directly.

We’re looking forward to more great initiatives in 2008 around entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. Stay tuned!

November 29, 2007

Flash in TO v65 Review

Flash in TO v65 was on last night, it was my first Flash in TO event and I knew almost nobody there. The event was at Element 156, which is on Augusta St, near Dundas. It’s a pretty neat environment with the front of the store setup as a shop/bar and the
back of the being used as an art gallery. For the event the basement was setup with chairs and a projector.

I don’t know if its typical but the FITO ( Flash in TO ) team had an awesome lined up of sponsors, including free beer from Adobe and free food from Manpower. They also had bunch of swag to give away including T-shirts, Yoyos and mini-Oreilly books on Adobe
AIR. As someone that’s organized a few events and tried to reach out for sponsors they did an awesome job.

The presentations consisted of Pecha Kucha style presentations which are very similar to the Ignite style presentations that they’ve tried a DemoCamp. I’ve already expressed my disappointment with this style of presentation and lack of pace control by the presenter. I don’t really feel it ads any value to audience except to lower the quality of the presentation and create a awkwardness. I did like that the FITO ( Flash in TO ) team was pretty laid back and didn’t hard enforce the slide time limits, just overall presentation time limit. They also had a audience facing clock with slide countered which used the audience to enforce pace on the presenter instead of a hard time per slide time limit.

I could only stay till the break so I missed about half the presentations. Of the presentations I saw I really liked Allan Estabillo presentation and the focus presentation by
someone who’s name I cannot remember.

Allen’s presentation was based on the idea that you could an abstract source, in his case climate change information, and create art something from it. He showed how the climate change data could be developed into various different images.

I thought the focus presentation was kinda cool in that as non-designer I rarely think about using out of focus effects and motion blurs. The presentation showed a variety of different out of focus effects and how they could be used.

I was disappointed I didn’t get to see Ryan Creighton’s presentation which was on in the second half.

Overall a great event and I’d definitely like to check it out again.

November 27, 2007

Creepy Friends Invalidate Social Networks?

Cory Doctrow, a Canadian writer who I have alot of respect for, has just written an article about Facebook, and social network in general. Cory believes that social networks come and go because people eventually encounter an awkward social connection. A friend from highschool, college or co-worker that you don’t really want as a ‘friend’. After reading the article I think Cory is way off the mark.

First off, I think social networks have come and gone because they fail to achieve a critical mass. People left friends, and myspace because their friends weren’t on in any regular or consistent basis. This has gotten better with each generation of social networks ( friends->myspace->facebook). In Canada Facebook has achieved an incredible market penetration and its similar to Orkut in Brazil in Latin America. Soon after Orkut launched it took off in Brazil and remains the dominate social network today. Not because its innovation, but because it achieved critical mass in social circles to the point where it was efficient not to be on Orkut.

I think another comparison would be email. The ratio of real email to spam has been out of whack for years now but people are still using email because its still the primary means to connect with people. There is enough value and effficiency to make it worth while. As long as social network can do the same it will remain popular.

The article also made reference to Facebook allowing profile pictures to be used in sponsor advertising. While Facebook does claim ownership over this information I was able to find any reference to Facebook use profile pictures this way. The link included in the article just talks about Facebook adding profiles to Google search which I don’t think is the same thing or not atleast in anyways I can understand.

November 21, 2007

CaseCamp Toronto 6 Review

CaseCamp Toronto 6 was last night at the Century Club. CaseCamp is marketing version of DemoCamp with marketing case studies instead of Demos.

As always the room was packed and there was a lot socializing going on before the event. This time the Century Club was divided so that there was a socializing area and a presentation area to make the mingling easier without all the chairs. I would guess there was close to 200 people there and most stayed for all the presentations.

Eli started the night with announcement that CaseCamp has partnered with nextMedia to provide sponsorship and logistics support. Eli’s has negotiated a deal that will ensure that sponsors are available and the event will continue to be free.

The Cases studies were:

1/ Mobile Marketing for Levis @ Virgin Fest

The Levi campaign revolved around selecting random people at Virgin Fest to be a local Levi spokesperson and be featured in local Levi’s advertising. To be selected as a Spokesperson they got their photo taken and gave them friends a unique code + an SMS short code to vote.

Vortex Mobile ran the mobile campaign and recorded 22,000 SMS votes for the short code and a peak of 24 Facebook groups from people that wanted their friends to vote for them. It was an interesting campaign but I thought it could have benefited from more online support, for example a Facebook Application to let people self-promote would have been great.

2/ Treehugger.com

Treehugger.com is one of the leading green focused blogs and they have recruited writers to provide content around the world on green related issues. Initially they were one of the only green blogs but have had to adapt to a variety of competitors. It was interesting to hear about their focus on getting traffic Digg.com and their focus on getting articles submitted to different categories.

3/ GlobeandMail.com, Comments and Beyond

This case was focused on the GlobeandMail.com and how they added the ability for users to submit comments. The GlobeandMail.com had been struggling with how to enable users comments and maintain its ‘high-touch’ content service with an army of editors. After struggling to review every single comment they have decided on different levels of comment control, some articles have only community comment reporting, others have no comments allowed and some articles have only reviewed comments allowed. It was a good example of traditional media struggling to be relevant in the online world, nothing about it was that exciting and I think it just shows the struggles that the Globe will face going forward.

4/ Will Pate, Community Evangelist

The last case study was a little different in that it feature Will Pate and his process to become a community evangelist for Flock and now ConceptShare. Will is only of the most networked people I know and spends a lot of his time networking with people online and off. One message area I thought was really interesting was his messages about being authentic and being present. I think a lot of people seem to forget the being present part of the process and lose relevant conversations that eventually isolates them from their community.

CaseCamp was another great night and with the exception of all the pillars the Century Club was a great venue. I’m interested to see how the relationship with nextMedia will impact things and if it means we’ll see CaseCamp events more often.

November 14, 2007

Facebook Weekend BETA Announcement

refresh partners has been working with Innovation Toronto to help organize a weekend focused around developing Facebook applications. FWB ( Facebook Weekend Beta ) is a combination of the Barcamp adhoc unconference and the StartupWeekend concept. It brings together entrepreneurs, Facebook developers, and designers to create products over a weekend. It’s a fun (and productive) way to spend a weekend and a great way to build an app, start a company, or meet talented people.

Anyone can participate, whether you already have a team and an idea or if you want to lend your talents and join a group. At the end of the weekend, teams present their applications and business plans to a panel of experts including venture capitalists, successful entrepreneurs and Facebook industry experts. Teams have own their idea and decide how to they want to develop the idea/company or project.

MORE INFORMATION

To find out more check out the Innovation Toronto Facebook Weekend BETA web site:

http://www.innovationtoronto.com/facebook-weekend-beta

Check out ideas/groups and companies that forming here:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6900744045

And register for the event here:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=5803124517

November 12, 2007

Openness

I wrote earlier about StartupCamp and I was impressed to see all the companies that have applied disclosed as part of the review process. Anyone can see the applicants here:

StartupCampToronto1

I’m a big fan of openness as part of a review process. I think it helps both the quality of the event and the community overall.

November 8, 2007

FacebookCampMontreal Review

FacebookCampMontreal

We were in Montreal last night for the FacebookCampMontreal event, its was our first time in Montreal as part of their Barcamp community. The FacebookCampMontreal event combined both the developer and marketing tracks into a single night and was able to get nearly 200 people in the SAT (Société des Arts Technologiques ).

SAT is great venue and was easily divided into the 2 tracks when required and most importantly had an open bar the whole night.

We bounced around between the different tracks most of the
night. Some thoughts on the different
tracks are blow:

Introduction

Montreal is #9 in overall Facebook city networks and the power of Facebook as marketing platform has certainly spread to the city. I think when Facebook does actually launch a French version it will absolutely take off in Montreal.

Keynote

Roy and I did a keynote for the night, trying to balance both the developer and marketing interests in the room. Our goal was to provide some updates on the Facebook Platform and some real numbers on Facebook in the world and Canada.

Developer Panel

I attended the develop panel because I find the developers often have interesting ideas and solutions. Jerome Paradis was also part of the panel, who met at FacebookCampToronto2 and wanted to hear his views on the Facebook platform. The developer panel was good mix of developers with lots of experience with online and interactive development. The panel included developers from a variety of platforms, .NET, PHP, ROR etc… Many of the Facebook developer challenges and problems were discussed.

Demos

I’ve also been a big face of live demos so I stayed through most the developers demos.

BabyTel Demo

BabyTel was the first demo of the nite and unfortunately had some problems with the internet connection. They demo’d their Egg phone application which lets you call Facebook friends that also have the application installed. The application will soon include the ability to call real phones. I think this application will be great when it can be installed on an Business Page as a ‘Call Me’ button.

BlipCast

My first reaction to the BlipCast demo was yuck!, when I saw the iframe inside Facebook that didn’t fit the Facebook style or design. As the demo progressed I thought it was interesting to see all the different media options that they are bring into Facebook. The application presents videos similar to Youtube but provides more of the Facebook social context. I think this is a big advantage
for users that don’t want to invest in a Youtube account and friend network. I do think the application would be more appealing with a more Facebook similar style.

Bok

Bok’s main business is providing cheap long distance using
an SMS call back system. They have created an application that lets you go through this process inside Facebook. You click on a friend and
choose the call them and you receive a call back shortly from Bok with your friend on the phone line. Again I see a lot of advantages for this type of service for business pages.

Facebook Roundtable

The final panel was made up of a variety of people including, Sebestian Provencher, who I know quite well from Yellowpages. While the discussion was a mix of English and French it was hard to follow the fast past discussions in French. From what I did pick up it was interesting to hear the perspective of the panel members on the value of Facebook to their lives and businesses. The discussion also covered the Microsoft and Facebook relationship and the impact on the trust level with Facebook. There was a lot of comparisons with Google and their “Don’t be Evil” culture and if a similar culture is possible with Facebook.

Overall a great night, I met a lot of interesting people and the Montreal tech community certainly has a lot going on. There was also a lot of marketing and advertising agencies in attendance so there was some great discussions around the marketing tracks.

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