Founders and Funders

When he’s not busy educating Toronto geeks on fashion style, David Crow dedicates a lot of his time to organizing and participating in tech community events.

 Now I just came across the Founders and Funders event, which he and Jevon MacDonald of StartupNorth are bringing to Toronto on June 4 - for the second time.

Started in Montreal last November, Founders & Funders is about “helping to connect the founders of early-stage, venture fundable web and technology companies with the funding community in Canada.”

Sounds like a great concept to me.

Founders & Funders is a private, invite only social event.

Founders and Funders is dedicated: to helping Canadian entrepreneurs to meet each other; meet potential funders: angel, VC or other money sources; to have fun; and see how we can help each other create the NEXT BIG successful company.

More information about the June 4 event can be found here.

Road Trippin’ for Research

Stephen Rouse over at IGLOO gave me a heads up on a new blog that tries to explore the "differences and similarities between US and European startup success stories". Created by three German PhD students who currently travel through the United States, Ventureroadtrip.com profiles entrepreneurs and investors in short video clips.

 

Ralf Schmelter, Carsten Ruebsaamen and René Mauer use the blog to capture some of the impressions from their research trip. For now they mostly seem to focus on short video profiles of startup companies. Once the research phase is over, I hope they will also share some of their insights and observations on emerging patterns/trends with us.

 

Ralf, Carsten and René are still looking for more entrepreneurs to participate in their research. For anyone who is interested, head over to Ventureroadtrip.com to get in touch with them.

Email overload through the ages

Here are two quotes from newspaper articles about email overload in the workplace.

It seems that people are so busy wading through the overload and responding that they don’t have time for real work. […] A few companies are taking corrective action. Computer Associates, based in Islandia, L.I., shuts down its E-mail system for four hours a day, between 10 A.M. and noon and again between 2 P.M. and 4 P.M. “People were spending too much time on E-mail,” said Marc Sokol, vice president of advanced technology. “We said, ‘Use it intelligently, don’t use it spuriously.’ ” Until employees got used to the restrictions, Mr. Sokol said, they found the experience similar to quitting smoking. Now, he added: “Productivity is up. It has caused people to be more thoughtful.”

 wit’s end: Coping With E-Mail Overload, The New York Times

Overwhelmed by e-mail? Some professionals are fighting back by declaring e-mail-free Fridays — or by deleting their entire in-box. Today about 150 engineers at chipmaker Intel will kick off “Zero E-mail Fridays.” E-mail isn’t forbidden, but everyone is encouraged to phone or meet face-to-face. […] E-mail-free Fridays already are the norm at cell carrier U.S. Cellular and at order-processing company PBD Worldwide Fulfillment Services in Alpharetta, Ga.

Fridays go from casual to e-mail-free, USA Today

The biggest difference between the two quotes? Eleven years.

The New York Times article is from April 1996, the USA Today article from October 2007. Apparently not much has changed in all those years, even though “experts” were already hoping for better times in 1998:

Despite the e-mail glut problems, there is optimism among e-mail experts that new solutions - both technological and behavioral - will keep pace with higher e-mail volumes.

E-mail overload drives many users bananas, NetworkWorld Fusion (via CNN.com)

Ten years later, the technological and behavioural solutions still haven’t  fully caught up with the ever increasing volume of email (numbers are up from 15.1 billion in 2000 to 97.3 billion emails per day in 2007 according to IDC research quoted in the USA Today article). Otherwise we wouldn’t continue to see the same type of email overload articles year after year after year.

No doubt email overload has been and continues to be a problem for many people. Just this weekend I read a another article (in German) about a German company prohibiting email use two days a month. But I am not a big fan of organized email prohibition, whether it is a top-down decree by the company leadership or a bottom-up idea from a group of employees.

In the end, every individual needs to take charge of how they best manage their communication - every day of the week.

Because it gets worse. Thanks to other changes in technology and behaviour, (yep, I am talking about that Web 2.0 thing and the rise of, you guessed it, social media), email overload articles are not alone anymore. We now have journalists and a whole blogosphere continually discussing the potential benefits or repercussions of using blogs, RSS feeds, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and all the other tools for communication. How do we keep up with all of this if email management still is a problem? Will we still have a social media overload discussions in eleven years?

“There’s going to be a point where culture and common sense are going to start to take over,” [Rapport Communications consultant Gary] Rowe said, “because there’s only so much of this we can process.”

E-mail overload drives many users bananas, NetworkWorld Fusion (via CNN.com), June 1998

My guess is that every person needs to find that point for herself or himself. I wouldn’t wait for your company or colleagues to do it for you.

A friend of mine for years refused to get her own cell phone even though she saw many of the benefits. She argued that “once people know I have it, they will expect to reach me 24/7″. I never bought that argument (but she eventually bought a cell phone). A cell phone can be switched off. Email - and expectations - can be managed by ourselves. And so can social media tools.

Overload, more often than not, is a fact. But it can also be a state of mind.

A new kind of telescope

From the TED conference:

"Science educator Roy Gould and Microsoft’s Curtis Wong give an astonishing sneak preview of Microsoft’s new WorldWide Telescope — a technology that combines feeds from satellites and telescopes all over the world and the heavens, and weaves them together holistically to build a comprehensive view of our universe. (Yes, it’s the technology that made Robert Scoble cry.)"

(found via Don Dodge’s blog | client disclaimer)

Ten Canadian software companies to watch

IDC Canada has highlighted ten emerging Canadian software companies in a new research study (press release; research store). According to IDC, these companies have “the potential to make an impact in the information and communications technology (ICT) market”.

I haven’t gotten my hands on the study but a ComputerWorld Canada article provides some very high level pointers on criteria and take-aways. In the article, executives from a few of the selected companies talk about what they see as key factors to success, including:

• Networking through industry associations and research groups
• Seeking the right partnerships
• Building a strong customer base
• Staying close and listening to the customers while keeping an eye on the evolving market
• Clarity of vision

The ten Canadian companies examined in the study are:

1. Apparent Networks
2. Casero
3. Coveo
4. Halogen
5. Idée Inc.
6. Loki Management Systems
7. M-Tech
8. Objectworld
9. Osellus
10. Privasoft

Toronto Technology Week - This is my City!

As part of her opening keynote for Toronto Technology Week, High Road Communications co-founder and president Mia Wedgbury (my boss) showed a video with Jay Goldman of Radiant Core, Mark Relph of Microsoft Canada (High Road client) and Ken Nickerson of iBinary talking about their view on tech in Toronto and what we can do to promote the region as a centre of excellence. Here’s the video that I uploaded to Soapbox. For Mia’s perspective, see here.

Video: Toronto Tech Week - This is my City!

Links of Note - April 10, 2007

1) “How To Live Up to the Innovation Hype” - Business Week innovation and design writer Reena Jana on former “next big thing” companies that didn’t live up to the initial hype but are now seeing an upswing in business growth because they have “refined their technologies, remade their business models, and reached out to new audiences.”

If these [new] technologies weren’t taken to market, their owners may never have found that better use,” Chesbrough writes in an e-mail. “Innovators need to learn how to play poker in pursuing these technologies, rather than playing chess, where the objectives and possibilities are clearly defined at the outset.”

Henry Chesbrough, executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business

2) “How Blogging Can Help You Get a New Job” - The Wall Street Journal

Corporate recruiters have long surfed the Web to vet potential hires, but now they are also surfing blogs to unearth job candidates, expanding their talent pool and gaining insights they say they can’t get from résumés and interviews.

PR Blogger Kevin Duggan is quoted in the article. He says that his blog generates “about one job lead a month”. 

Blogging still plays a minor role for PR hiring practices in Canada. But the importance is growing. Blogging can definitely help people get a new PR job here, too. Just ask Chris Clarke or Michael O’Connor-Clarke or Tamera Kremer of Thornley Fallis.

The blind camera: Taking somebody else’s photos

The networked camera has no objective. No lense, no zoom. It’s just a black box with a button and some electronics inside. “Buttons is a camera that actually shoots other’s photos, taking the notion of the networked camera to the extreme.” Sascha Pohflepp, a student of visual communication at the Berlin University of the Arts,  has created it:

Photography has become a networked process. It no longer ends with pasting prints into an album. Instead, making them public through services like Flickr is rapidly becoming one of the main ways how we treat our visual memories. The photographic process extends from preserving a moment to an act of telecommunication, with numerous implications on how we perceive reality, how we make our memories and how we create a narrative from it.

If you liked Michael Wesch’s video (“Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us”) that has been posted all over the blogosphere recently, you might also enjoy the concept of Between Blinks & Buttons. You can watch a video here.

A library of SMS messages

A team of researchers from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, and GWT-TUD GmbH, an affiliated company, is building a library of SMS messages. They are hoping to collect 100,000 messages with several million words by April.

Instead of testing mobile applications and devices in an artificial environment with artificial data, the researchers want to collect, analyze and use real text messages to help make technology more “natural, intuitive and human”.

On its German-language website textforscher.de (German for “text researchers”) the team is looking for people who want to earn 10 Euros for an hour of entering sample text messages. The money can also be donated to charity.

Jon Arnold and Marc Robins team up

Jon Arnold (blog), Canada’s independent voice on IP communications, has entered into a partnership with Marc Robins (blog) that “includes the two firms joining forces to provide an array of marketing, communications, strategy consulting and market research services to their growing roster of IP communications technology vendors and service providers.”  They are also planning to launch a new joint electronic newsletter. This will be good. More in the press release.

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