web 2.0 from Red Canary

MySpace and RIM shatter download records

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:16:55 GMT

MySpace, the world's premier social network, and Research In Motion (RIM) (Nasdaq: RIMM; TSX: RIM), a global leader in wireless innovation, today announced record download numbers of the MySpace for BlackBerry® smartphones application in its first week of availability.

Since the application's launch on November 13, 2008 there have been more than 400,000 downloads which represents an all-time high for both MySpace and RIM in terms of first week application downloads. Through the MySpace for BlackBerry® smartphones application, users collectively sent and received more than 15 million messages and updated their mood and status over two million times in the first week.

"We established an innovative and collaborative partnership with RIM to address a key desire of consumers to have greater mobile connectivity and interaction with their friends and the global community at large," said Chris DeWolfe, co-founder and chief executive officer of MySpace.

"This record shows just how much of a force in the mobile consumer space RIM and MySpace have become."

"This rapid adoption is a reflection of an evolving consumer lfestyle where social connectivity and information access are more important than ever," said Jim Balsillie, Co-Chief Executive Officer at Research In Motion. "This powerful new mobile application combines social networking and mobility in a highly personalized and empowering manner and we are very excited to see such a positive response in the first week."

The MySpace for BlackBerry smartphones application is fully optimized to deliver rich content and data to users on the go. MySpace for BlackBerry smartphones integrates MySpace's primary social networking components with the BlackBerry platform to provide instant, push-based messaging to users.

It is available for download at www.blackberry.com/myspace or m.myspace.com from your BlackBerry® Browser. The application is available for a wide variety of BlackBerry smartphones, including the BlackBerry® BoldTM, BlackBerry® CurveTM, BlackBerry® PearlTM and BlackBerry® 8800TM Series, and will be available to BlackBerry® StormTM users beginning November 24, 2008.

Top 10 programming languages of the future -- Revisited

Trevor Stafford — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:54:12 GMT

A little over a year ago I asked readers which languages and environments they thought would be prevalent in 2013. Here are the results after roughly one year and thousands of votes later. You can still particpate, just scroll down and rank the languages as you see fit.

Here's the original post

I was digging around in the archives of Red Canary's predecessor when I came across this ranked list of programming languages that were most in demand by employers in 2001. MOST POPULAR LANGUAGES (BASED ON EMPLOYER DEMAND) 2001 1. C++ 2. Windows NT4 3. Oracle 4. Java 5. HTML 6. ASP 7. Visual Basic 6 8. DB2 9. Cobol 10. ANSI-C Seeing that list got me to thinking about the nature and future of coding. What languages or splinter languages would dominate the list in 2013? Certainly not Cobol and ANSI-C :) Where will .Net and Java be in 6 years? What about xml and the surging popularity of Ajax? Will PERL and Lisp coders be able to transition to Ruby? Will they need to? What about young languages like Lua? I'm not smart enough to see into 2013's crystal ball, so here's a list of 20-odd languages. Assign up to 10 stars to as many languages as you like (according to how relevant they will be in 6 years). 10 stars = extremely relevant 1 star = irrelevant no star = dead or on life-support by 2013 Remember, this is not a list of today's most popular languages, but which languages you think will be dominant in 2013.

From video to vide(own) A profile of Overlay.tv

Melanie Baker — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:55:08 GMT

Anyone can create a video that makes millions laugh. Overlay provides a way to turn a million laughs into millions of dollars.

Strangely enough, it was his wife's TV-watching habits that sparked Tyler Cope's idea for an interactive online video platform. Cope noticed that while his wife frequently used their PVR to skip commercials, she was often interested in specific products in the programs that she watched. Fast forward to February 2008, and the beta launch of Overlay.TV.

Making it easy to buy what you see

Overlay.TV’s founders – Tyler Cope, Rob Lane, and Nadav Zin – built a user-driven media platform that adds interactive 'overlays' to video. The concept? Commercialize online video without intruding on its entertainment value. Overlay.TV looks to connect content producers with advertisers, retailers, and the consumers whose attention they crave, making it simple for everyone from mobile phone-cam users to network TV execs to monetize what they create.

Video gets a second skin

The easy-to-build overlays enable content creators to enrich their video offerings with comments, graphics, and links to additional information about products and services, or to sites where users can make purchases. For the audience, the experience is interactive, immediate and entertaining. Interest has been growing since the company’s official launch in early September, and with $4.6 million in funding and a win at Red Herring’s Canada Top 50 Awards it looks like the Overlay.TV team may be onto something.

“Overlay helps everyone from videobloggers to corporate marketers answer that question by letting users add a new layer of personalization that can be easily turned into revenue” -- Rob Lane, President and CEO

Producers and affiliates make money when products featured in videos are clicked on and purchased – anything from apparel to ZZ Top cds – and the affiliate retailers share up to 50 per cent of the revenue with the video creator. With over 1000 affiliate retailers on board, including iTunes, Wal-mart, and Office Depot, content producers’ revenue generating opportunities through their videos are limited only by their creativity. Nettwerk Records has created their own channel and has integrated Overlay.TV into their online web presence for artists like Sarah McLachlan.

Understanding Overlay

Overlay.TV doesn’t host any video; they remain on the sites where they were originally published, such as YouTube or MySpace TV. This prevents intellectual property issues from arising. Overlay.TV’s core services are available free of charge to anyone online, though the company offers a number of customized services, like players, widgets, and promotional tools, to those with more advanced needs. As open and flexible as the Overlay platform is, the company has given significant controls to both content creators and viewers. Any embeddable video can be customized with an interactive content layer, or overlay. Content creators can make their videos public or private, and choose whether or not their videos are embeddable on other sites. Viewers can watch videos with or without registration on the Overlay site, and can turn overlays on and off on videos with one click. As Red Monk Analyst James Governor notes, “What makes Overlay.TV really unique is the fact that they approached this as a platform, not a medium. The advantage of enabling other sites and developers to take advantage of commerce and UGC in online video will ultimately boost the relevance of video content, and of Overlay.TV as a company.” Overlay's Developer Center makes their API available to third party developers, as well as the video player’s SDK. This enables developers and designers to customize their web presence by integrating Overlay.TV functionality into their own applications.

Screening the future

It remains to be seen how Overlay.TV’s platform will be used outside of the direct retail channel. For those who provide services rather than physical products, Overlay.TV could provide a great venue to showcase their work and make it easy for potential clients to get in touch. Given the next-generation discussions going on online currently, demand could develop for Overlay.TV’s platform to not only make it possible to deliver better targeted advertising, but also for a recommendation engine or functionality to allow the audience to comparison shop or learn more about shipping options, for example. New media journalist and tech enthusiast Amber Macarthur has created a 13-part video series, The OverView, to enable anyone to become an overlay video production pro in no time.

Through OpenSocial integration, Overlay.TV has made it possible for content creators to easily showcase their videos where they and their audiences hang out, for example social networking sites like MySpace.

YouTube is proof that anyone can create a video that makes millions laugh. Overlay provides a sales and marketing channel that can turn millions of views into millions of dollars. Whether it's for tech savvy teenagers or Fortune 500 brands, Overlay can wrap a message in an engaging format. Critics may say that Overlay.TV merely represents yet another means to subject online audiences to more advertising, but for consumers like Mrs. Cope, better targeting and more control over entertainment advertising is something that’s certainly worth a second look.

Did you know? (VIDEO)

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:27:42 GMT

Technology moves at the speed of change, and in this now-global community, that's very, very fast. How fast? Watch this video and see.

Too close to your website, too far from your customers

Gerry McGovern — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:04:51 GMT

Borrowed from the Blog "New Thinking":http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new_thinking.htm

Yahoo had gotten too close to its products and too far from its customers

The challenge in web management is to shift your focus away from your website, technology and content, and to focus instead on the needs of your customers.

Yahoo continues to underperform and be under attack. There are many reasons why Yahoo is facing challenges, even though it's still the most popular destination on the Web. One of the reasons was articulated in an article in The New York Times on May 28, 2008. The article stated that Jerry Yang, founder and chief executive, and Susan Decker, its president, admitted that "Yahoo had gotten too close to its products and too far from its customers."

The Web changes the very roots of the relationship between the customer and the organization. The customer, not the organization, is dominant on the Web. Thus you must put the customer's needs at the absolute center of everything you do if you want to be successful.

Google makes 10x more profit than Yahoo, but Yahoo has significantly more page impressions. Google and Yahoo make most of their revenues through advertising. Advertising revenues are generated by having ads on pages. Thus, the more page impressions you have, the more revenue you should make.

So, why is Google, with significantly fewer page impressions than Yahoo, making 10 times the profit that Yahoo does? Because Google's ads are more useful.

An advertiser once said that he knew that half of his advertising worked, he just didn't know which half. From a customer's perspective it is probably true to say that 99 percent of the advertising they are exposed to doesn't work, and maybe 1 percent of it is useful.

Google is successful because it puts ads only where they will be useful to customers. It's very hard to put the customer first. It's much easier to manage the website, the technology and the content. Tools and the things they make are much easier for us to understand and relate to. The customer is like a ghost in the machine. They come through our websites, often without us knowing they were there.

By far the greatest danger to the success of a website is the focus on the website itself (its content and technology) rather than what customers need from it.

For an organization it is much easier to make a product than to satisfy a shifting need. You would think that they are one and the same-the product and the need-but they are not.

The larger the organization becomes the more likely it is to create things for their own sake; because some process or some manager dictated that they should be made.

Since 1994, I have watched websites being built and managed. By far the greatest danger to the success of a website is the focus on the website itself (its content and technology) rather than what customers need from it. Web teams are among the most isolated groups within organizations. They lack that crucial and constant interaction with customers.

This lack of interaction often causes web teams to fall back on opinions and re-designs and quickly lose sight of the purpose of what they are doing. Clever, meaningless words like "interactivity", "dynamic", "portals" and "personalization" float about. Every day you must find a way to be in touch with your customers.

Stay distant from your website and close to your customers.

Tungle Secures $5 Million in Venture Financing Led by Commonwealth Capital Ventures

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:18:32 GMT

Tungle allows users to dynamically propose times to meet with one or many people.

Montréal, Canada (September 30, 2008) - Tungle, the ultimate scheduling service, announced today that it has secured $5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Waltham, MA-based Commonwealth Capital Ventures.

Existing investors, including JLA Ventures and Desjardins Venture Capital, also participated in the round. The funds will be used to accelerate the company's marketing and engineering activities.

"We chose to work with Commonwealth based on its excellent long-term track record of supporting entrepreneurs who are building successful businesses focused on professionals. As we expand our focus toward commercialization, we are excited to surround ourselves with knowledgeable and seasoned veterans in Commonwealth Capital Ventures, JLA Ventures, and Desjardins Venture Capital," said Marc Gingras, chief executive officer and founder of Tungle.

Along with closing this funding round, Tungle also unveiled the beta version of its free, next-generation web scheduling service. Tungle also allows its customers to securely share their free/busy calendar across company boundaries with any other Tungle user.

In addition to being accessible from any browser, Tungle is optimized for all mobile environments.

It is the first to work with Outlook-with or without Microsoft Exchange, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage for Mac, or on its own.

People can go to the Tungle website at www.tungle.com and start using the beta version of Tungle right away. No registration or download is required to try out the service. "Tungle addresses a significant pain for all busy professionals," said Jeffrey Hurst, general partner with Commonwealth Capital Ventures.

"The Tungle team has the experience and drive to capitalize on this opportunity and revolutionize the online calendaring and groupware market."

Jeff Hurst will join Marc Gingras; Pierre Donaldson, partner with JLA Ventures and the BlackBerry Partners Fund; Daniel Boisvert, chief executive officer of Strategika International; and Stephane Marceau, president of IPEXA Development, on Tungle's Board of Directors.

Tungle's service is based on proprietary algorithms that assure that Tungle customers will never be double booked as their availability changes. As blocks of times are proposed for a meeting, they are dynamically updated with the latest availability of the organizer, and with the other Tungle customers that have responded to the meeting invitation.

Once the meeting is booked, the organizer's calendar is automatically updated, and each invitee will receive a meeting invitation formatted for their specific calendar application. In addition to being accessible from any browser, Tungle is optimized for all mobile environments.

Professionals on the move - checking email on their BlackBerry, iPhone or any other smartphone - can respond to a Tungle meeting invitation via a link. A click on that link launches a smartphone browsing session, formatted for each device's display. No download or registration is required.

About Tungle
Founded in 2006, Tungle is the ultimate scheduling service. Tungle is a free web-based scheduling service that extends its customers' time management and groupware solutions, making it easy to coordinate meetings with other professionals no matter where they are or what time management software or groupware application they use.

About Commonwealth Capital Ventures
Commonwealth Capital Ventures was founded in 1995 by a team of experienced venture capital investors. The firm focuses on software and services, Internet and digital media, communications and wireless, and instruments and systems investments.

With more than $580 million of committed capital under management, the firm's partners have invested in over 140 high-growth companies. Tungle and the Tungle logo are the property of Tungle Corporation. All other names and brands are the property of their respective holders.

Commercialising Online Videos & Other Digital Media

Tim T — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:30:28 GMT

Commercialising Online Videos & Other Digital Media

By Tim Tang

Should startups push for end-user adoption or sign exclusive deals with media distributers like Walt Disney Studio and Sony Pictures?

According to ComScore, 3 billion videos were streamed on YouTube in January 2008. YouTube has not released the cost of streaming these videos, but here are the facts in Google's 2007 Annual Report.

"We have yet to realize significant revenue benefits from our acquisitions of dMarc Broadcasting (Audio Ads), YouTube or Postini." - Item 1A - Risk Factors. Pg 21.

"We have also had copyright claims filed against us alleging that features of certain of our products and services, including Google Web Search, Google News, Google Video, Google Image Search, Google Book Search and YouTube, infringe another party's rights." - Item 1A - Risk Factors. Pg 23.

Shooting for a profit in online video

Many companies have tried or are trying to commercialise videos online. The fallout point is not a shortage of investment. The market is still in search for a sustainable model that works better than Google Adwords and Flash banners.

Celtic House, EdgeStone, and Tech Capital are backing a startup in Ottawa, called Overlay.TV, which goes about video advertising in a different way.

It provides a platform to overlay data on top of web videos – think VH1/MuchMusic's Pop-up Video, but for the web.

Success will require not only the blessing of the content owners but also risk-taking from the retail sector.

It enables crowd interaction and personalisation after production and distribution.

The obvious application is to tag and link items to online stores from Amazon to Zara. Success will require not only the blessing of the content owners but also risk-taking from the retail sector.

Two ways to monetize

There are many strategic decisions to be made for companies looking to commercialise online video, two stand out:

1. Should startups push for end-user adoption, or;

2. Sign exclusive deals with media distributers like Walt Disney Studio and Sony Pictures?

There are benefits and drawbacks to both.

1. Detail then Retail: The end-user adoption model

An end-user adoption approach would shorten development time by engaging the end-user early in the product cycle, validate the market research, and give dividend to free word-of-mouth marketing on the blogosphere.

To date, YouTube has yet to convince major media companies to license copyrights on its platform.

This strategy also enables startups to convert more sweat equity to traffic equity before the next round of financing that may lead to a M&A exit.

However, opening the platform to raise awareness and drive adoption may be less appealing to media companies wanting exclusive partnerships due to reduced marketing potential and reduced perceived control.

2. Retail then Detail: Partnering Up

Working with content owners and forming a revenue-sharing relationship is a more pragmatic approach to organic growth.

With sufficient financial backing and the right connections, a deal with media companies and retailers could mean a new business model for online videos – one providing the same analytics as ROI-obsessed businesses enjoy with Google Analytics.

The focus for me is less whether there could be successful exits for startups that enter the space of commercializing online videos, but rather, how successful these exits will be

As part of the assumed risk that web entrepreneurs take, this important decision will have to be made blind early on.

One thing to keep in mind is that once such technology is out in the open, it can't come back due to high imitation competition and low switching cost.

Breaking an old broken model

The major misperception with startups like Overlay.TV is that media companies continue to see them as new channels that supplement existing advertising revenue.

Currently, media companies look to acquire more URL landing pages so that more eyeballs turn into clickthrough which in turn convert to sales. It works, but how effective is it?

In my vision of Web 3.0, the media companies and content owners themselves become the advertisement. Consumers see goods in dynamic action, not static text.

The business is blurring between the movie/music industry and the fashion industry in terms of marketing and customer experience.

The earlier media companies realise it, the earlier they will loosen DRM Terms of Use and convert some of the lost revenue from BitTorrent into higher quality redirects that link to real, tangible, desirable goods with higher revenue per click.

This would be a disruptive change for media companies who prefer the business model of selling more newspapers.

Not 'will it sell', but 'for how much'

The focus for me is less whether there could be successful exits for startups that enter the space of commercializing online videos, but rather, how successful these exits will be.

I believe the critical factors will depend more on choosing an audience and the "LinkedIn" networks of the investors – and less technical (like perfecting the technology to consume less bandwidth)

If done right, the purpose of video overlay ads may eventually be an unobtrusive call to action. That call may be completing an impulse purchase or joining a social movement. The length of the call may be that of a music video or that of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth".

Counting on The "Panic" Buy

In my opinion, media companies and web giants are starving for innovation in the advertising space and the burn rate of their existing digital properties like MySpace and YouTube will rush them into making an acquisition before fully understanding their opportunities and challenges.

For this reason, there may be multi-million dollar opportunities (and challenges) for the next wave of media entrepreneurs.

I leave you with this question:

With a platform that enables tagging for videos, should efforts go into tagging music videos first or full feature-length movies first Why?

Thank you for reading.

About Tim Tang

Tim Tang is an analyst on the Market Research & Intelligence team at MaRS. He provides business and strategy planning for emerging technologies in digital media, software, web apps, mobile apps, wireless, and clean energy.

Cloud Computing: Legal Implications for your business

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:48:58 GMT

Borrowed from Miller Thomson LLP

The cloud computing trend developed to accommodate the increase in processing and storage capacity that many organizations require to handle the enormous repositories of information connected with their business activities. Companies are also looking for means of rapidly accessing applications from a variety of locations and using a variety of access devices, such as office computers, laptops and PDAs.

Miller Thomson Analysis

Cloud computing gives rise to a number of legal issues, including the following:

Contract Issues

The cloud contracting trend requires the adoption of new business models to allow corporate and individual customers to obtain access to IT products and services. The “traditional” licensing model contemplates that a software company will grant a customer the right to install and use the program on the customer’s own computer located on its own premises (perhaps for a perpetual term).

By contrast, in the cloud computing paradigm, the provider grants the customer the right to obtain access to certain limited functionalities (perhaps through a web-based interface) of programs installed on the provider’s computer at a remote location. Such limited right of access and use may be granted only for a limited time period.

This different business model has implications for a variety of contract terms to address matters such as payments, warranty terms, termination, liability and protection of confidential and personal information.

Protection of Privacy

There have been concerns as to whether personal information about Canadians stored outside Canada may be accessed by lawenforcement bodies, particularly under anti-terrorism legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act.

If a corporate or public sector customer uses a cloud computing service for purposes such as managing its e-mail system, it is quite possible that e-mails sent or received by individuals within the organization will be stored in the U.S. or another country.

In theory at least, such e-mail could be accessed by law enforcement bodies in that country, possibly without the knowledge of the persons affected. Faculty and student members of a Canadian university recently expressed concern about this possibility in circumstances where the university was using a cloud computing service offered by a U.S. service provider.

Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights

The cloud computing trend also gives rise to concerns about whether rights holder will be in a position to enforce their intellectual property rights when computing resources are used for the unauthorized distribution of video, music or other content, and the location of the infringing activity may be difficult to determine.

Jurisdiction

Finally, there is the broader issue of which courts will have jurisdiction to deal with any wrongful activity such as the posting of defamatory content on storage devices located in one jurisdiction, where the customers or any affected third parties may be located in other jurisdictions.

Conclusions

The cloud computing trend is likely to lead to new business models and contract arrangements between IT providers and their customers. Whereas corporate customers may obtain significant benefits from this movement, they must also understand and be prepared for the full implications and potential risks of the new arrangements for their stakeholders.

Startup secures significant investment, seeks significant talent

Stealth Startup — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:38:29 GMT

Last week we closed a significant seed round financing with key players involved with Facebook, Workbrain, PayPal, Taleo, LinkedIn, Research In Motion, Slide, Thompson-Reuters, and Gini.

Six months ago we blogged about our new company on Red Canary

We had a great new idea. We had experience as co-founders of one of the biggest software companies in Canada.

We were for looking for talented and motivated developers with a passion for innovation and a will to succeed.

Thanks to Red Canary, we found them.

Now we have taken our vision and built a great core team, solution, and engaged user community.

We have built a small and closely-knit team of star developers focused on pragmatic problem solving. The team finds joy in tough challenges and tackles them together.

We are very hard working and like to have fun together. The agile mindset permeates our team; everyone is considered an equal.

We want smart, confident peers who will be essential in future feature development and who can contribute to our common vision.

Our customers tell us: "This is exactly what my people want"

The last half-year has been a blur of user-driven iteration and innovation.

Our solution (a web-service) solves a core social and productivity problem.

Recently, we attracted world-class capital as a result of our pace of our growth, the quality of our team, and large market opportunity ahead of us.

We continue to build a highly skilled team that can launch superb services with high impact. We move fast and expect to learn faster. We experiment and get users using our tools as quickly as we can.

Our approach:

Iterative
Agile
Data-driven
User-centered

You may be interested in joining us if you:

Consider yourself the best of the best
Want to be part of a world-beating team
Take pride in solving complex problems
Want your code to delight millions of people.
Are curious, learn continuously, and like to be challenged by smart people
Get things done quickly and elegantly
Enjoy a fast pace and constant change
Enjoy life outside the office

The people we are looking for:

Have experience building complex software
Are active online community participants
Adapt quickly, adopt early, and are web savvy
Love user interaction design
Dig rapid prototyping
Are excited by large datasets, statistics, and algorithms
Are familiar with Java, MySQL, GWT, Hibernate, SVN, Ehcache, and Glassfish

Specifically we need:

Front-End Ninja

A web development ninja who has experience on the server-side as well. Experience with large websites and web-based solutions where you implemented novel front-end designs, usability improvements, GUI metaphor inventions, etc. is required.

The ability to quickly prototype solutions using 80/20 rules while developing production solutions in parallel is core.

Star Developer

A highly flexible and experienced developer with a well-rounded background that includes some enterprise and lots of web experience. Innovation and technical know-how are expected. You should assume that quick change of pace and assignments will be common.

A strong sense of ownership and alignment with solution vision are key.

If you think that you might be the right person, please contact us to learn more about the opportunity.

Web 2.0 is about giving up some control

Gerry McGovern — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:43:53 GMT

The traditional manager is taught to command and control. Web 2.0 challenges that model.

Web 2.0 is part of the shift away from the dominance of the elite to the innovation of the collective.

Social media is just that-social. Blogging, wikis, rating and voting systems are based on the idea that there is value outside the traditional channels of power.

Web 2.0 and social media mean that for teachers a declining part of their job involves telling. An increasing part is listening to the class and facilitating them in having conversations. Teachers should help moderate these conversations and draw new learnings from them. They need to say less of: 'let's open up a book.' and more of: 'let's open up a conversation.'.

The managers are not the only clever people in the room anymore. The room is much bigger and it is speckled with cleverness. To manage in the Web 2.0 world is to converse, to listen, to be honest and upfront, to collaborate, to moderate, and constantly watch out for the trends and patterns that always emerge when many minds mingle and mix in the network.

The traditional manager is taught to command and control. Web 2.0 challenges that model. I have worked in many European countries. In Scandinavia, management tends to be very collaborative, but the further south you go the more the manager becomes a controller.

In some countries I have heard employees speak of their manager as "Sir." There is not much chance of Web 2.0 succeeding in such deferent cultures. It is, of course, hard to give up control. Even harder when your position brings with it such formal respect.

Companies are not democracies, of course. And social media will deliver little value if it becomes some giant water cooler conversation because not all the best ideas are discovered at the water cooler. Huge quantities of absolute rubbish are talked there too. So, social media and Web 2.0 are not a replacement for management decision making, but rather a support to make better, more-informed decisions.

The naive tool-centric view of Web 2.0 still exists. 'Just give them the blog and the wiki software and get out of the way' has very limited logic. But it is classic IT-thinking. As if the tool was the be all and end all, and the only purpose of life was to discover the right one. As if it was the type of quill that Shakespeare chose that made him the writer that he was.

The naive tool-centric view of Web 2.0 still exists. 'Just give them the blog and the wiki software and get out of the way' has very limited logic.

I have seen the sad results of intranets where anyone could set up a wiki or a blog. Sure, there were good ideas, but the intranet quickly filled with massive quantities of irrelevant and out-of-date junk. And I have seen countless failed attempts by government websites to 'interact' with the public by launching discussions areas that quickly became ghost towns.

So Web 2.0 and social media still need management. They rarely mature on their own. Discussions need to be moderated and channelled. Processes that allow the cream to rise to the top must be put in place. The bad ideas need to be weeded out.

But the managers are not the only clever people in the room anymore. The room is much bigger and it is speckled with cleverness. To manage in the Web 2.0 world is to converse, to listen, to be honest and upfront, to collaborate, to moderate, and constantly watch out for the trends and patterns that always emerge when many minds mingle and mix in the network.

INTERACTIVE Rank Canada's top 20 'Web 2.0' companies

Trevor Stafford — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:02:27 GMT

Backbone magazine recently selected the following 20 Canadian companies as their "Web 2.0 Winners" A panel selected these companies from an open nomination process. Red Canary is giving you the chance to rank them yourself. If you don't know enough about these companies to rank them, you can choose the top 5 option or simply view the ranking table.

Time is everything on the Web

Gerry McGovern — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:24:40 GMT

Borrowed from the Blog "New Thinking":http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new_thinking.htm

Auctions were once a pillar of e-commerce . . . these days, consumers are less enamored of the hassle of auctions, preferring to buy stuff quickly at a fixed price.

Information overload, news fatigue and WADD (Web Attention Deficit Disorder) are creating a brutal landscape on the Internet.

"Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online", the BBC states in a review of a Jakob Nielsen report on web habits. "Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave."

Many organizations' websites are out-of-sync with their customers. Marketers think flashy graphics of smiling faces attract customers on the Web. Showing a smiling face to a typical web customer is like showing a crucifix to a vampire.

Communicators have gone mad on the Web; publishing press releases and thinking people will actually read them. News is being devalued because huge quantities of trivia and vanity are being labeled as news.

As many as 50 percent of people bail out after a quick glance of a webpage

bA study of young people's news habits found that, "news fatigue brought many of the participants to a learned helplessness response. The more overwhelmed or unsatisfied they were, the less effort they were willing to put in."

Time is everything on the Web. "Auctions were once a pillar of e-commerce," a Business Week article states. "People didn't simply shop on eBay. They hunted, they fought, they sweated, they won. These days, consumers are less enamored of the hassle of auctions, preferring to buy stuff quickly at a fixed price."

Over 40 percent of people click on the first search result. Over 60 percent click within the first 3 results, and over 90 percent click within the first 10 results

The emergence of the impatient, unforgiving customer has been gathering pace for many years. Back in 2006 a study by Akami found that 75% of people would not go back to a website that took more than 4 seconds to load. It used to be that people would wait for 8 seconds. In 2008, how many seconds will they wait?

As many as 50 percent of people bail out after a quick glance of a webpage, another 2006 report stated. Back then you had 4 seconds to convince people that you had something useful to offer. They might read about 15 words before making that decision.

"If your copy targets multiple demographics, those 15 words will not work," the MarketingSherpa report stated. "Don't construct a page to appeal broadly across a wide variety of "typical" users. It won't appeal to anyone at all and your conversions will suffer."

Over 40 percent of people click on the first search result. Over 60 percent click within the first 3 results, and over 90 percent click within the first 10 results. (More people have been on top of Mount Everest than have been to the 1,000th search result. Does it even exist?)

I was told of a study where the first and second search result were swapped for a selection of searches. The new "first" result kept getting more clicks. So, what we're dealing with is a customer who clicks first and asks questions later. It's a customer with their finger on the Back button.

"About half of all people who visit a commercial website intending to buy something give up because, above all, they are confused--by product descriptions, navigation and checkout procedures," a Newsweek article stated in July 2008.

Think about that: half the customers who come to websites wanting to buy things leave without spending anything. How frustrating is that?

Web 2.0 companies flock to CATA as social networking expertise becomes vital

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 21:06:46 GMT

There is a growing belief throughout the global economy that Web 2.0 technologies - blogs, podcasts, interactive web sites, online communities, wikis, mash-ups, and similar innovations - are changing customer and employee expectations.

OTTAWA July 11 2008 - The Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance's drive to provide social networking education and access as an essential component of a successful business model for Canadian companies, has core Web 2.0 companies flocking to the association. Internet related organizations like CIRA, Helix Communications, FuseTalk, Market2World, More 411 Inc., TANJss, Go Phones, Octopus IP Communications Inc., Igloo, Iotum, and Shift Networks have recently joined Canada's largest high-tech trade association and its extensive network of 30,000 high-tech leaders. CATA is an advocate of social networking sites as a tool to increase a business's global reach.

"Early social networking sites such as Facebook have turned people from web viewers into participants who want to participate and interact online" - Barry Gander .

"Markets are now conversations," said Barry Gander, Executive Vice President, CATA. "Engagement has become the mantra of today's corporate sales model. In the U.K., these 'Web 2.0' techniques have become so prevalent that the Internet is expected to overcome television as the biggest advertising medium in Britain this year, with more than 19 per cent of total ad spend. This is a watershed in current trends! Canadian companies are jumping on the idea." "Our team is focused on helping companies find the tools and the partners to create their Web 2.0 presence," says John Reid, President of CATA. "We are both a matchmaking network and a centre for best practices in this new field. It's important that companies, in any sector, recognize that this is the new wave and get on board." Facebook, Viadeo and IGLOO have become staple applications in CATA's own business model and allow the association to post industry related news, conduct forums, share industry best practices, and promote new and innovative Canadian technologies. CATA's new "mobility" office, which provides employees with the option of working whenever they want and wherever they want, is largely based on the various applications provided by social networking sites, such as Facebook's free conference calls, and the Google platform's messaging and document sharing sites. CATA recently partnered with the Access Group to bring together 80 business leaders for a roundtable discussion to compare competitive strategies and approaches to the Web 2.0 phenomenon. CATA has also been heavily involved in the development of unique social networking sites such as First Run, a global site designed for journalism students, and a partnership with IGLOO has had them participate in the creation of an E-governance Task Force site designed for the City of Ottawa. As the web of social networks widens, CATA will likely gain even greater momentum with its initiatives and membership. For more information on CATA's latest social networking endeavors, please visit www.cata.ca.

Expert or Amateur? Both.

Gerry McGovern — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:05:28 GMT

Borrowed from the Blog "New Thinking":http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new_thinking.htm I grew up in a small farming community in Ireland. You never questioned the expert. The teacher, the priest and the doctor ruled. The idea that they might ever be wrong was not even an idea. Well, the teacher, priest and doctor don't have it so easy in the Ireland of today. They are being actively questioned. When they get it wrong, it is being clearly pointed out to them. The good ones embrace this new environment and are becoming better by continuously listening and learning. The bad ones get exposed. The Web is where ordinary people go to opine, to organize, to debate, and to hear what other people just like them think. The Web is the Global Square in the Global Village. It's very empowering. The early years of the Web have seen a revolt against the expert. This has reflected a wider societal shift towards the belief that ordinary people have important things to say. We're not just consumers anymore; we're also producers. "The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals, Tony Dokoupil wrote in a Newsweek article, Revenge of the Experts, published in March 2008. According to Dokoupil, "the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web." But has the expert ever really gone away? Wikipedia, on the surface, may seem like the ultimate experiment in the wisdom of crowds. However, as Dokoupil later states, "Last summer researchers in Palo Alto, Calif., uncovered secret elitism at Wikipedia when they found that 1 percent of the reference site's users make more than 50 percent of its edits." The Web has never been the enemy of the expert. What it ushered in is the ability to find out what "people like me" have to say. What was their experience with this product? Did they like this particular book? Is this as nice a hotel as its website says it is? The Web has also allowed the up-and-coming experts and artists to state their case for why they have created something interesting and worthwhile. YouTube and MySpace would fall flat if there wasn't a way to allow the cream to rise to the top. (Sometimes just the weird and quirky rises, but that's okay too.) I like websites like CNET and Amazon because they have both expert and customer reviews. That's a nice balance. As the Web matures, we are thus likely to see "a hybrid approach built around entirely new business models," as experts at Wharton state, in an article entitled "The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media," published in March 2008. The Web is a network and strength in a network is about connectedness and openness. 200 years ago, an expert could claim to be an authority on a particular subject. Today, an expert is someone who is expert in the network; connecting, sharing, sifting, ordering, and always taking the pulse of the wisdom of the experts and the crowd. The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media Revenge of the Experts

INTERVIEW: Charles Plant, Advisor, Market Readiness Programs, MaRS

Scott Valentine — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 13:54:00 GMT

(Read a Red Canary article Plant wrote in 2006 while a Managing Director at Q1 Capital Partners) By Scott Valentine Charles Plant is Advisor, Market Readiness Programs at MaRS Discovery District in Toronto. A seasoned executive with a Chartered Accountant's designation, an undergraduate degree from U of T and an MBA in marketing from McMaster University, Plant has enjoyed spells as a CEO, CFO, investment banker, management consultant and auditor. He estimates that he has worked with (and for) over 100 companies in his 28 year career. In addition to his role at MaRS, he is a faculty member with York University’s Schulich School of Business. You got into the tech world when the idea of a commercial Internet was little more than fancy. What was it like being an entrepreneur in Canada then? "In 1987, I founded a company called Synamics, an early player in the voice response space. Before the Internet that's what everybody was into and we had a new competitor every week. That morphed into us developing mass calling platforms. Nobody knew what they wanted or how they wanted to do it . . . the projects were disastrous. "We eventually decided to productize but even that was tough. At the time if you wanted to sell to B.C., you had to deal with the time zone issue. In Quebec, it was the language issue. In the U.S. it was 'Why aren't you American?' It was actually easier for us to sell to the U.K. than any of those places. "VC was just getting big and I wondered, what can we get? We prepped some stuff and ended up getting a term sheet from someone we'd never even met before; those were crazy times. We raised 12 million but had morphed ourselves into an area that I didn't understand, so I hired a management team out of Boston to run the thing. The company survived the telco meltdown of dot-com but nobody got any money out. "It was totally Canadian." Talk about MaRs and what you're trying to make happen there. "MaRS is a convergence centre. Our raison d'etre is to bring to together technology, capital and business. In the 10-block area surrounding MaRS, there's a billion dollars of research done every year . . . it's not commercialized in the most effective manner. "The Market Readiness Program does five things. First, there's all sorts of organizations that can help you commercialize. We provide those organizations with more resources, like putting in Entrepreneurs in Residence. They're all people who have been successful and maybe failed too, hopefully both. "Secondly, we supply a lot of market research, which can be a big hit as a start up. Thirdly, we supply a number of how to's, to answer questions like How do I put together a pitch deck or How do I write an employee offer letter?. "We also provide connections. You need a wireless apps company in Detroit? Well help you find one. And money of course. We offer up to $10,000 for project funding, and as much as $500,000 for a dozen young companies per year. People think MaRS is [purely] UofT, but we're in the business of commercializing anybody."

I think the Canadian headspace is that commercialization is viewed as a dirty thing whereas pure research is clean

One of the common challenges noted by innovators engaging in the commercialization process is that there's no federal standard for how IP is identified and assigned. And, until there is, Canada's knowledge economy will run a distant second to our southern counterparts. Your thoughts? "I know that some of the universities are struggling with that . . . I think that's a lot of whining. The universities do help out in the commercialization process. Maybe it's complex - the University of Waterloo certainly has a different approach from the UofT - but if there's a good tech, it'll still find a way out to the market. "What's more of a problem is an antipathy towards the process of commercialization. I think the Canadian head space is that commercialization is viewed as a dirty thing whereas pure research is clean. Canada spends billions on research but very little on commercialization and as a result there's a lack of a market link from research outwards." So what needs to happen to bridge that gap? Is it about bringing back something like the Labour Sponsored Investment Fund to stimulate capital markets, or is there something else that can stop the hemorrhaging of ideas and people to other markets?

There's 12 or 16 research institutions in the GTA that have come together to invest and create and an outward-looking avenue for commercializing university research. This will create probably the largest collection of IP in the world

"Canada has a systemic problem that relates to the degree of competitiveness of the Canadian industry. We have a population of 33 million people here but not really. What we really have are three catchment areas, which I define as an area with the same political and linguistic characteristics within an hour's plane ride. In Ontario, there's an area of eight to nine million. In Quebec, five to six million, and there's a smaller area in B.C around Vancouver. "In the U.S. there are seven catchment areas with more than 30 million people. There is a much greater degree of competition with 30 million, so you have to perform better. That leads to requirements to solve competitive problems, which leads to R&D that's pulled-out by someone trying to solve a business problem. "It's just not the same here. So, we're not required to be as innovative, there's not as much R&D, and not as many companies competing. That's a systemic problem that isn't going to go away. The Canadian model of feeding research and pushing it out without proper commercialization just doesn't work." Is the answer a highly regionalized model like Waterloo where you have the Accelerator Centre, the university, Communitech, RIM and such all on-the-same-page? Or is that an insular way of doing things that ultimately keeps those key catchment areas compact?? "Waterloo is a tremendous success story and it's certainly a tight community. I think that's a great thing but I'm not sure that it's a model that works at getting companies out. "In Canada, you need to start out globally and we don't spend enough on marketing to do that here. That's partially an outcome of the fact that the SR&D program pays for R&D, but R&D only. If a reasonable portion of the SR&D credit could be contributed to the marketing of what's being developed, you'd have better results on commercialization.

Another key that people miss is that there's an opportunity for government to put in regulations to drive commercialization. My bizarre example of that is the creation of the requirement for radio stations to play Canadian content created a whole music industry.

"As to the LSIF, the only people who made any money on those were the people managing the funds. The better thing to do would be to create a matching program for individual and institutional investment (to drive a spirit of partnership)." Where are MaRS, the province, and Canada's knowledge economy going in '08? "MaRS Innovation is the creation of a tech transfer office on steroids. There's 12 or 16 research institutions in the GTA that have come together to invest and create and an outward-looking avenue for commercializing university research. This will create probably the largest collection of IP in the world. In 12 months, it'll be up and running and good research identified. It's a five year plan. "On the public side, I think we're going to bumble along for a while and eventually we'll see programs like the MaRS Market Readiness Program out and accepted in the community. We can improve the stock of entrepreneurs in this country. "Over time, we'll end up with a better crop of entrepreneurs and create an ecosystem that spawns more innovation -- but it will take longer than people think." "And please keep in mind that this opinion is worth exactly what you paid for it."