Darren Barefoot asked, "Does the Blackberry Reduce Email Response?" and I would have to make two comments:

• Structure ALWAYS drives behaviour: The computer is easier and faster. The Blackberry is clumsy at best. Therefore for any given 10 emails received on one or the other, it can be assumed that there would be a tendency towards fewer and/or shorter messages.
• The other much bigger issue for me is that i'm noticing that my email response time has dropped from 1 day to about 1 month (!) as my workload has increased and as my ability to focus on the task at hand (and ignore everything else on the 500 item to-do list) has increased.
• I don't even READ much of my inbound email anymore (I can see the first line of it in Gmail, why open it?) Or I flag it and get around to cleaning those up WAY too late. I have had it with letting my email flows dictate how much time I spend at the computer so have pretty much just decided to read/act on only the top 10% of my mail
• Too many projects x switching cost of moving my attention from Project 1 to Project 2 = lots of wasted time over a day switching from one to the other. So now I let mail on various subjects "pile up" until I have time to work on Project X and then I go and find all of my marked/unread Project X mail and process it then.

I would love to hear from my readers: How has your email behaviour changed over the past year?

I would like to offer up a business idea to an enterprising young engineering student. Develop something that operates a bit like a speeding ticket camera but that is for sound level instead. Build it so that it can sit in intersections and detect noise levels of Harley Davidsons and other bikes with modified exhausts that are so f**king loud that they echo throughout the entire downtown core at all hours of the day and night. When it senses a burst of motorcycle revving, it will send a very targeted Electro magnetic pulse blast at the bike, knocking out the electrical system on the bike. Voila. Peace and quiet and one more bike that is inoperable. If you put this on a drone balloon hovering over the city, you could also use it to detect and knock out boom box cars!

Hate noise? Check out http://www.noiseoff.org

My last post was on IBM jumping into lightweight apps and wikis. This news story from CNN covers how IBM is releasing Lotus Notes for Linux. Who's using Lotus Notes anymore? Just the poor suckers who bought in and kept it as the world's most expensive Exchange replacement? Bizarre.

Here's a good article on IBM's moves into light-weight end-user application development using wiki type tools.

And another one on IBM's move into Enterprise mashups.

Has hell frozen over? Maybe we can go skating.

Peter Rip over at Leapfrog Ventures has a great article where he compares Web 2.0 apps with PCs back in the mini-computer era:

Here's the quote but I suggest reading the full post:

Today the Enterprise seems to be The Land That Time Forgot. The IT lock-down of the Enterprise (because of TCO, security, compliance, and the complexity of legacy computing) and the innovation of Web Applications (a.k.a. Web 2.0) have set the stage for a reprise of Users vs. IT just as in the PC revolution. Web Apps are sneaking in through Port 80 just as PCs snuck in the front door twenty years ago, a phenomenon that ultimately wrestled Model, View, and Control from IBM.

The whole post is well worth a read.

Thanks to Dion for pointing this out.

Wikis are on the rise in corporations. And it's about time. One of the principles of Web 2.0 is that your user community can generate content that is better, faster, and probably easier to read than you can as a vendor. One way to enable them to contribute would be to build a wiki and let them flesh it out. Some good examples are coming up in this article: "Corporate wikis breaking out all over: MSDN Wiki" by Dion Hinchcliffe. (He has another great post as well called "Exploiting the Power of Enterprise Wikis")

Quote of the day: "Not leveraging the contributions of a company's most impassioned and enthusiastic customers is starting to be seen as a significand oversight in many business circles."

It appears in the article that eBay is using Wikis to better communicate between their users, partners, and suppliers. Now MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) is using their pages to improve the quality of their developer documentation with the MSDN Wiki. THAT is a great usage. Your users often know your product better than your engineers and product managers because they have to live with it day to day. And guess what? If they tell the truth about some part of your product being broken - that's a GOOD thing.

CORPORATE WIKI TOOLS REVIEWED:

I have looked at a lot of the corporate wiki tools in the past six months. Unfortunately we are still at the awkward pre-pubescent stage. I haven't yet found the best tool that has all of the following characteristics. I want a tool that:

• is beautiful
• is easy to use
• integrates with our corporate authenticaion system
• allows users to "email to a page"
• has rock solid WYSIWYG editing (including tables!!)
• can absorb Microsoft Word's messy HTML without barfing
• has great management tools for pruning and gardening the wiki
• allows for attachments of files
• includes great threaded conversations on a page
• is hosted but can also be used in an appliance inside the firewall
• has granularuser & group security privileges (ideally tied into Active Directory)

Atlassian's Confluence is the best of them so far. Pros: the overall design is clean, it has advanced management tools, good security, and simple attachments.Its email function has to pick mail up from a POP box which makes it a little bit less ad-hoc but still functional. And most importantly, it also has great tools for moving pages around. Cons: Text editing, like with most apps these days is a bit dodgy, and pasting in blocks of text from Word is likely to cause problems. The pricing model is reasonable but for some reason (possibly because they're from Australia), they still don't have a directly hosted option so you have to use somebody like Contegix or deploy it on your own box. This seems to be a big and obvious oversight on their part these days. Also, their pricing model doesn't encourage small deployments right off the bat. I think this is the one that we'll use more of internally at the company where I work. Summary: The best of the enterprise wikis today, and one of the best options for scalability.

Next would be JotSpot. I can only recommend JotSpot for really small deployments though. Pros: The text editor is pretty good and the tables even work reasonably well. The pricing model is good, the setup is quick, it's pretty easy to use and understand, and you can also buy it in an appliance that you keep inside your firewall and integrate with your security infrastructure. Cons: The design is quite clunky, the font sizes are huge, there is a lot of wasted screen real estate, the "applications" they can install are really lightweight and not that useable (what's up with that awful blog module Joe???) There are also bad page renaming bugs that can and do bite you in the ass. Summary: I have built several wikis in JotSpot and it's probably the best for simple wikis for smaller teams with a few pages. But I wouldn't want to scale it out very far. It isn't robust enough.

WetPaint is a newcomer that is doing some interesting stuff and that might be a better bet than JotSpot. Pros: The design is beautiful, the tool is very easy to use, the text editor is one of the best I have seen. Cons: I'm not clear on their entierprise suitability and it's not really their target market. It didn't appear that they had much in the way of administration tools, granular security, or any way to integrate into a back-end authentication system. Summary: I met one of the WetPaint guys at Gnomedex but he didn't seem to know the product very well. Hopefully next time, they'll put somebody more knowledgeable at their booth who knows the product in more detail. I think they're worth watching to see what they do in the next few months.

Socialtext: I have tried on at least four separate occasions to use and like Socialtext but I can't. Pros: Ross Mayfield, the founder, "gets it". He understands that lightweight wikis will be important in the enterprise. It includes "email to a page" functionality and you can buy the Socialtext appliance and integrate it into your back-end. Cons: the text-editor is the weakest of the bunch - they only just added WYSIWYG in the last few months and the table stuff is quite awful. The word HTML handling is poor. There are few management tools. Summary: I just can't use this application. I don't know where they're putting the money that SAP invested in them because I can't see evidence that it's improving the application. I can't recommend it for anybody. Go with one of the other three above instead.

I didn't cover all of the many open source wikis here: MediaWiki, XWiki, Twiki, etc. because most, if not all, have to be downloaded and installed and I'm more interested in enterprise quality wikis with the feature set I noted above.

This post brought to you by Joy from the album "Thankful" by MaryMary

UPDATE: I modified my summary line above for Confluence to make it more complementary. I was feeling a bit sour on the whole category when I wrote it before and had written "It is the best of the worst" - a phrase I often use when discussing the best in a category that has significant problems. But it's more fair and accurate to just say "the best so far."

I also saw a note from Jon Silver at Confluence on their blog responding to my comment on hosting.

He states:

"The question of hosting comes up now and again. To set the record straight: it's not an Australian thing—there are many good examples of Aussie companies bringing hosted software to the world! Software as service has gained a lot of attention by great companies like Salesforce.com. It's a good model. But we've found that our customers really enjoy being able to host the application themselves and fully customise it to meet their needs. For some organisations, their security policies require them to manage software themselves. Nearly 1,500 customers in small, medium, and large organisations use Confluence inside their firewalls today. As pointed out in the review, Contegix (and other Atlassian partners) are available for people who need a hosted wiki solution."

I disagree very strongly and here is why. Australia is far behind the North American market in terms of broadband penetration so your view is probably skewed by this. I'm also not stating that it's binary and that it must be one way or the other. I'm commenting on the fact that you have too many barriers to adoption that are precluding you from making the money that you could make if you would get out of your own way. First barrier: I can't just fill out a form and start using it. Second barrier: I would have to have the IT resources to find a box to run it on. Third barrier: I would have to download and install it and get it working - I have ten years of computer consulting and I gave up on your install process because it wasn't a point and click install - you're still selling to geeks. Fourth barrier: Your pricing model puts Confluence out of the range of people who want to start small and grow.

Fix those problems and you have a chance at dominating this space. But right now Socialtext and JotSpot which are far inferior to your product, are probably going to beat you simply and easily because they are hosted, they are easy to test, they are easy to use, and they have great and simple pricing models. Which will be too bad because once again, better marketing (focusing on the basics of removing barriers) will win and the better technology (your product) will lose.

I have a new favourite market segmentation acronym: VSB. It stands for Very Small Business. Zoli Erdo has two excellent articles on this market segment (article 1, article 2). The reason that VSB is now beginning to make sense is directly tied to Long Tail economics: if your production costs are lower, your customer acquisition costs are lower (using search), your sales costs are lower (online payments vs. human-based transactions), your support costs are lower (through really rigorous community planning and self-service), it is now possible to make profit where none could be made before.

It is about time software companies realized that their segmentation efforts are attempts to simplify their environment at the expense of clarity and customer focus. It may only be one more segment but it's better than nothing. Hopefully we can move to an even more granular model as vendors realize the distinct differences that exist between a 10 person company, a 100 person company, a 500 person company, a 1000 person company, and a 10,000 person company.

It is interesting to note that SAP and Gartner are teaming up for a conference called Small business vision in November 2006. Information can be found here. My guess is that SAP doesn' t have a hope in hell of selling into the VSB space and will struggle desperately even in the SME space. At least Oracle's Ellison was smart enough to invest his money in NetSuite so that it could have the bottom of the market and leave Oracle to aim at the high end.

Jupiter Research reported in June 2006 that 34% of all large companies have deployed blogs and a further 35% will deploy them by the end of 2006, totalling 70% of large companies. I find those numbers shockingly out of touch with my experience and reading. It would be interesting to dive into this report in more detail.

My company has deployed blogs internally and a small group of us are pushing for full public blogs as soon as possible. At this point, it's an embarassment not having them. Remember the old days when companies said things like "we only need one email per employee?" Yikes. As the Cluetrain guys would say, there is a conversation going on and we're not in it.

However, there seems to be a groundswell of support from the many parts of the organization that want to communicate more closely with their particular audience. Stay tuned. Hopefully I'll have my second blog over there soon so that I can move the enterprise software stuff onto that blog rather than post it here.

Joe Kraus from JotSpot calls it "The Consumer Enterprise". Ray Lane from Kleiner Perkins calls it "The Inter-Personal Enterprise".

I suspect we're naming things the way we originally called the automobile "the horseless carriage". In other words, we are naming things based on the old worldview.

We probably need a new name for the software that is created for and sold to small groups of people but that can scale from the Very Small Business (<$100M) up to the Small and Medium business (SMB) ($100M-1B) and even up to deparments of Enterprises (>$1B). What do you call software that has that range, that can be used with small teams, and that creeps into large corporations the way PCs did in the early days?

I like this article at Sandhll where Joe says that building, marketing, and selling this type of software is much more like selling consumer goods than it is like selling traditional enterprise software. I love his tag-line "expenseable, not approveable". It is the key to how these apps get in the door. People expense them on their credit cards rather than building a business case and shopping it around for executive approval. Before you know it, you have 1000-10,000 wiki pages inside your company that the IT department knows nothing about.

This is where enterprise software vendors are starting to move to....slowly. I doubt that many of them can make the switch. Too many things are different. The product development is shockingly different, the marketing channels are different, the sales strategies are different, and the ongoing support and maintenance of the relationship requires much more customer focus than most enterprise vendors are capable of. Not to mention the sheer scale of dealing with many MILLIONS of customers instead of thousands. How do you scale up your already overloaded brittle systems to bear an order of magnitude more transactions and support requests?? You probably don't.

A great example of this is the content management sector. Why would anybody spend $1M for a heavy weight content management system like Documentum these days when they can go build lightweight blogs and wikis with RSS feeds and tags that are lighter, faster, simpler, and cost $50,000 to deploy? They don't. That's why that sector collapsed.

Maybe this is why SAP is lead sponsor on the Gartner "Small Business Vision" conference in November 2006?

We live in interesting times!

I am happy to see that Vancouver has come alive in a competitive frenzy to enjoy soccer. But thankfully it's over. I have had to listen to honking horns of Italian fans for almost 12 hours now today as they drive up and down Denman Street hanging out of their cars and whooping and screaming and honking. Back to the binners, ambulances, and drunken tourists. It will be so quiet!

Today sponsored by Sola Sistim from the album "Music Feeds The Soul 6 - Sunday Morning" by Underworld

There has been a lot of talk about how Web 2.0 doesn't need VCs. The general outline of the discussion is thus:

• Web 2.0 companies are capital efficient and don't need a lot of money
• they should start small and grow efficiently
• VCs have certain size thresholds below which they won't fund because the overhead involved in managing 50 small investments doesn't make sense when they could instead manage 10 investments that are 5 times larger

So this leaves the Web 2.0 companies somewhat in the lurch (DabbleDB's recent funding round by Kedrosky/Ventures West aside - Kedrosky is an exception to the rule because he "gets it.")

I'm curious to know if there are any funds out there that are trying to place say 30 placments of $100-200K. This would only be a total fund size of $6M which is peanuts to a VC. But it would be interesting to see if the pay-off would be worth it.

Particularly in light of the recent posting about Vinod Khosla's successes having come from his smaller rounds. (No, I'm not suggesting that I can pick companies like Mr. Khosla! In fact, if you believe the numbers, firms such as his see the majority of the good deals and the rest of the world never gets to see them, which throws this argument off significantly.)

This came up again Day 2 of Gnomedex 2006 when Marc Canter and Dave Winer commented to a fellow from Intel that "any time Intel Capital funds a company - we assume that the company is going to fail" and they suggested that Intel Capital look at breaking their fund up into much smaller chunks and funding 1000 companies for a $100K each rather than 10 companies for $10M each. (I may have those numbers totally wrong - I didn't capture the full comment in my notes.)

Brad Feld disagrees with this approach.

Regardless of how it is done, for my company it would be interesting to do either a placement model or licensing model or even throwback to the days of artistic patronage and come up with some sort of "sponsorship" approach where we can, in a low-friction way, put funds into promising and interesting startups with as little contractual friction and impact on both companies as possible. I'm not sure if there is any other model other than the ones currently being employed.

What do you think?

This is brilliant. From the people over at Innovation Creators.

Includes the ever popular reflection at the bottom too!

If you haven't read the LA Times article, the Men's Health article, or the Men's Journal article on Crossfit, you might not know what it is. It is a fitness regimen/program that started in LA about ten years ago and that is now spreading across North America, and which is favoured by the firefighting, police, military, and mixed martial arts type folks.

I signed up two weeks ago and went in to do my assessment. It was an inauspicious beginning. After about 15-20 minutes, I strained my neck doing pull-ups and had to pull the plug on the day and start over again a week later. Not surprising given my various back injuries that have kept me in rehab over the past 12 years. Interestingly, both of the main trainers had serious back injuries which they managed to heal with this workout so I'm hopeful that it will continue the progress I have made by trainiing with other methods.

A week after my false start, we tried again. I did the full asssessment and then began the one-on-one classes with the instructor. I have done only three classes so far. Without a doubt, it uses more of my muscles and is more exhausting than most of the workouts I have done in the past except perhaps all out adventure racing. It feels AWESOME in a "can you scratch my back and shampoo my head because I can't reach behind my head right now" sort of way.

The primary trainers Craig and Trevor are great guys and the other folks I have met at the gym have all been really great and super supportive. Supportive in a way that says, "oh you have no idea how much pain is coming your way" ;-)

I'll report back on it in a month or two once I have gotten past the introductory sessions that one has to do before one can join the beginners class. The reason for the rigor on that is that they want to ensure that you have good form and movement pattern in all of trhe exercises before they unleash you in a classroom. It's a great practice on their part.

More soon.

I picked up a MacBook13 Black the other day with 2GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive from the good people over at the Yaletown location of MacStation. (Thanks Paul and Harald!)

This is probably one of the nicest pieces of Apple hardware I have ever had the good fortune of owning - sort of. With the Core Duo processor, the hardware has FINALLY caught up with the software. It feels almost as snappy as OS 9 on my old Pismo was about four years ago. THAT was a long wait. But OS X is of course MUCH more stable, handles multi-tasking much better, and just feels better, especially now that it's at version 10.4.

I was not keen on the glossy screen when I first got this machine but on balance, I have enjoyed the crisp colour a lot more than I have been bothered by any glare from ambient light so it has been a positive overall.

But this machine has heat problems. And apparently I am not alone. Try googling "MacBook fan constantly on" and you'll see a list of blog posts and Apple Discussion Forum threads on the heat and fan problems that are apparently plaguing the entire MacBook and MacBook Pro line.

One way to test it is to download the Core Duo Test from Versiontracker. Apparently a temperature between 45C-65C is acceptable. Immediately upon turning my laptop on, it climbs up to 78-81C and stays there. It only takes a minute or two to get there and once it crosses 80C, the fan kicks in and then never stops.

APPLE: What are you planning on doing about this? It sounds like the later firmware updates have made the problem worse for quite a few people. And a bunch of people have sent their laptop back to Apple for replacement. Remember how we suffered through the fan and heat problems in some of your earlier Powerbooks and how you eventually solved the problem? I have no doubt you will do the same here.

Here is an idea: Tell us you know about the problem, admit that you are working on a fix, and give us a temperature rating threshold above which you will immediately replace the laptop and below which you will not. In other words, don't do what you have done over the years and replace the laptops of only the loudest customers. Step up to the plate, admit the issue and we'lll help you work through it. It's not like we haven't had to work through bad hardware with you before.

What do you say?

UPDATE 1: I took the machine to the dealer today and they checked to see if there was an SMC firmware update for this model but it appears that there isn't one. Apparently the computer is scared of being sent back to the farm. Soon after returning from the dealer, it started running at about 65-70C. Weird.

As a side note, the battery life on this thing is awful. I would carry my iBook to a conference and use it on maximum energy saving mode and get a full day out of it (with breaks and sleeps in dull spots) but this one seems to burn out in just a couple of hours of meetings.

The gist of the first half of the day was "Small is Good". Small companies, small teams, small successes, small communities. It felt a little like a revival town hall meeting with people saying things like, "I'm John and I have a small company that allows me to stay home with my kids and I'm happy with that." followed by lots of cheering and clapping. We USED TO have a lot more micro-businesses back in the previous millenium (1000-2000) so it is probably just our time to swing the pendulum back there again. I wasn't sure if I was at a "Small Business Users Unite!" meeting or a Web 2.0 geekfest.

Darren Barefoot won the quote of the day with "Instead of building more 800 pound gorillas, why can't we just have 108 pound orangutans?" Then somebody else came up with a 48 pound spider monkey and it all went downhill from there. Congratulations Darren for winning quote of the day.

The other highlight was when Chris Pirillo, the conference organizer, brought out a tray of cupcakes with lit candles in it and all of us Canadians (there had to be at least thirty of us!) stood up and sang Oh Canada. Half of us didn't know the lyrics but it was still oddly patriotic in a surreal sort of way.

About the only other highlight of the day was Ethan Kaplan who was visiting from Warner Bros music. He gave a really high-energy talk about spaces and the closing gap between fans and artists.

Overall impressions of the day?

• small is good
• there are interesting things happening in the media business between creators and consumers
• social and web 2.0 stuff is alive and well and thriving
• we are building a lot of stuff without actually trying to figure out if anybody needs it
• we all need to get out more and talk to real people to figure out market pull rather than being guilty of yet another round of technology push
• there are too many damned social networking sites and apps and even WE can't keep track of them all

For reasons related to work, I spent yesterday NOT attending Gnomedex but I did manage to make the dinner and get together afterwards. There was a large Vancouver contingent there. All of the usual suspects - Boris Mann, Darren Barefoot and his lovely wife Julia, Andre Charland from e-business Applications, and the entire Qumana crew (Ianiv - the bugs are still here in Qumana's text editor - I'll show you later today!), and many more.

Since I didn't have the pleasure of sitting in the sessions over the day, I polled my fellow dinner mates to find out what the highlights of the day were for them. There were two themes that kept coming up again and again in all of the conversations. They were surprisingly similar and focused so obviously they were the keys to the day.
Portable identity: People want to be able to move their identities with them from service to service (which is currently difficult as there are few established micro-formats for identity and very little done well overall in the identity space MySpace has 67 million members. Many of the old users want to migrate their data from MySpace to other services. Or from FaceBook to Myspace. Or from LavaLife to ____. Or from eBay to _____. Or from (you get the point).

There is a potential business opportunity in acting as a conduit for people to move their blogs / dating profiles / social profiles from any system to any system (or better yet – to keep them synced). There are an increasing number of services all of which have conflicting formats and no way to exchange data. Users can’t move their blogs from Blogger to Wordpress (without losing their permalinks which are key to their online history) without HUGE pain. This could be done automatically though.

Attention trust and attention data portability and value: (I also refer to this as usage pattern data) is worth more than the content that people bring to the site. (The other buzzword for this is “database of intentions” - don’t you love this 2.0 buzzword bingo?) The reality is that what people do on your site and how they interact with it is key to: product development, increased revenues, increased profitability, and increased customer retention. Amazon does this extremely well inside their algorithm. There is a phrase called “algorithms as rockstars” which means in plain English, the algorithm that Amazon employs is worth 10X more than the really bad (and very simple) algorithm that Barnes and Noble uses to decide where to place other products and recommendations. This has been known for a while. Much of the value in that algorithm is derived from usage pattern data.

On to Day 2!

My friend Ross Waring coined a new word today. I was reading him some of the excellent poetry that I received in my spam and he said,  "Spam Poetry? You mean SPOETRY?"

I had to immediately post that to the world just in case he was the first to coin it.

For your reading pleasure below, I have attached some fine spoetry that I received this morning:

It's a bit like listening to a language CD-ROM or an idiot savant artificial intelligence robot:

In case anybody is interested, the reason for including spoetry in the spam is so that it will trick the spam filters that use statistical analysis to determine by word count whether or not spam is spam. Just part of the ongoing adaptation and mutation of the spam arms race.

You've got to love humans for their persistence and tenacity in creating arms races on all fronts: (weapons, viruses, spam, corporate battles)

Okay, this is so true it's getting painful. I am hearing all sorts of crazy valuations for web 2.0 type startups that are pretty silly.

Thanks to Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert for this excellent series. Here is the most recent one in the set:

At least, the ones that have been tagged "Mesh06" are here.

• http://meshconference.com/blog/   <-- the official blog
  
• http://www.technorati.com/tag/mesh06
• http://blogs.ebusiness-apps.com/alexei/
• http://publishing2.com/2006/05/15/live-blogging-at-mesh/#paul-kedrosky-keynote
  

Wow, what a day. I'm here at Mesh conference (sounds like a standard reporter... "I'm here at the launch of the new space elevator and the crowds are going wild!!!") and it was a fun and interesting day.

Some highlights and thoughts from the past 24 hours.

• web 2.0 is still being defined. Even the mighty Om Malik, whom I have a lot of respect for, said today that "perhaps web 2.0 means being open and transparent." Personally I just think that's openness and transparency....
• this is the first conference where the orders of business included: "where are the power outlets, what are the del.icio.us tags, and how do you log into our wifi?"
• there was a wide variety of people attending here today
• the "Wall of Ignorance" (one of the Five Barriers to Web 2.0" articulated by Dion Hinchcliffe (?) is alive and well. This is a pretty advanced group but Blogging 101... was FULL! And people were asking "what is a blog!!?!?!?!" Holy crap. And yet, 50% of our planet still hasn't used a telephone to make or receive a call. Wow.
• Michael Geist spoke on copyright and intellectual property protection. Some take-away quotes:
• much of copyright protection has nothing to do with protection of artists and everything to do with market dominance;
• blogs have changed the political landscape forever. He explained how his one blog post cascaded into the removal of an MP for her anti-sane-DRM policy and her visible conflict of interest dealings.
• many of the government ministers are now terrified of blogs because the don't follow the standard "don't publish" rules if there is something controversial.
• Overall this was an excellent talk. I would highly recommend that anybody watch Geist's talks.
• Best sites of the day:
• Rathergood.com's "We Like The Moon" : OMG, I laughed until I cried.
• Ask a Ninja

UPDATE: Here are my summary thoughts on the day:

• PR is undergoing a major transition; it's not that it will die; it will just mutate and adapt.
• The traditional printed media will need to adapt very quickly. Their foundations are being shaken by the disappearance of the classifieds and the niche trade papers are disappearing because bloggers are faster and more accurate and more knowledgeable. Again, smart people will adapt, the rest will leave the business...and that's a good thing.
• Web 2.0, blogs, and public participation are impacting government in a very real way. One blog post kicked off a chain of events that unseated an MP.

OKAY, my Ecto blog editor crapped out and is driving me crazy. Time to stop. More to follow tomorrow when we cover Web 2.0 and marketing, business, innovation, and a few other areas.

I think I have found the magic number. Every fifth article from Mark Morford is so brilliant, insightful, and articulate that I need to post most, if not all, of it here for my readers. Today is the day for another.

In one fell swoop, Mark has managed to hit on a whole bunch of my favourite subjects: the environment, structure driving behaviour, adaptation, complex system effects, social policy, cultural behaviour, global policy....he has hit it all.

The archive of his writings can be found here. The current article is below:

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree?

Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV owners. Everyone else, 10 bucks a gallon, across the board. Eleven for premium.

It would take some finessing. Maybe also give a price break to some truckers and trucking companies (so vital to the overall economy), but not so much to global delivery companies (FedEx, DSL et al.), because not doing so would force them to raise shipping rates and force you (and me) to reconsider buying everything online and hence will encourage you to shop locally once again, thus reviving a stagnant local economy.

Voilá -- gas crisis, oil crisis, warmongering agenda, pollution issues, road rage, traffic congestion, urban decay, oil profiteering -- all completely almost totally somewhat solved. Or at the very least, dramatically, gloriously shifted toward ... I don't know what. Something better. Something more humane, less greedy, more sustainable. Could it work? How outraged and indignant would you be to have to pay that much for gas? How long would that feeling last?

Take it one logical step further. Set up a national system whereby if you want to buy a vehicle that gets less than 20 mpg in the city, you pay a $1,000 Global Warming Surcharge and that money goes straight to a local organic farm, or school, or environmental think tank. And if it gets under 12 mpg, make it three grand, plus a slap to your face from a small, angry child. Got yourself a shiny new Hummer? You pay five grand extra, you can only buy gas once a month and all the truly beautiful women of the world will shun you like Charlie Sheen (oh wait, that already happens). See? Revolution is easy.

What, too far fetched? Too implausible? Not at all. Sure, 10 bucks a gallon would be extremely painful for a while. Citizens would wail. Commuters would scream and stomp and die. But then we would do what we always do. We would evolve. Adapt. Systems would quickly transform, habits would instantly shift. It would be easier to implement than the goddamn mess that is Medicare reform, far easier than Lots of Children Left Behind, more viable and livable than the toxic existence of Homeland Security and the disgusting Patriot Act.

But of course such an idea is also, right now, absolutely impossible. It will never happen -- not 10 bucks, not six, not even a buck more per gallon -- and not just because no politician anywhere on either side of the aisle has the nerve to come out and suggest that Americans might actually need to drive less and conserve and make a change in their gluttonous habits. This is, of course, absolute death for a politician. Tell Americans what to do? Dare to suggest that they're doing something wrong, or that their behaviors are dangerous and destructive and irresponsible? Are you insane? This is America! We're flawless!

No, the primary reason such reform won't happen is because, simply put, we are the most entitled nation in the world, perhaps in the entire galaxy. Americans are trained from birth to believe we deserve as much as we desire of every exploitable resource on the planet, be it water or natural gas or oil, coal or salmon or steaks, Big Macs or diapers or iPods or bizarre varieties of blue ketchup. It is, in a word, perilous. It is also, in another, slightly more devastating word, our downfall.

Look, I adore cars. I adore driving and I cherish open roads and smooth horsepower and a musical exhaust note and I fully believe most German automotive engineers should be sent gifts of candy and Peet's coffee and porn. I would, like most everyone else, be absolutely loathe to give much of it up.

But you know what? Big freaking deal. I could learn to live without so much. I like to think I would be able to step back and see the bigger picture, realize what is and isn't absolutely essential, what does and does not absolutely define my identity and my life, modify accordingly and laugh/shrug/sigh it off in the process. In other words, I could make it work. And so could you.

Ever been in a citywide blackout? One that lasted for more than a few hours and stretched on into the night? Ever see people suddenly shift gears and become astoundingly helpful and polite and sharing? Happens in a matter of moments. Disasters do it. Katrina did it, on a scale we haven't seen in years. Sept. 11 did it, emotionally speaking, before BushCo whored that tragedy and turned it into the most vile political poker chip in American history. Shocking change brings people together. Brings out the best in humans. Or at least, makes you rethink what's truly important in your life.

Another example: You know what would happen if guns -- all guns, everywhere -- were banned outright tomorrow? Well, right off, nothing much. Criminals would still commit crimes. Lawsuits would skyrocket. The NRA would shoot itself in the face in screaming protest. Crime rates would dance all over the map. It would be a little ugly.

But then something remarkable would happen. Over a short blip of time -- say about 10 or 20 years, as gun manufacturing ceased and the culture of gun violence died down and our favorite death object was less visible in the news and in video games and on TV and in every aspect of modern life, well, guess what? Guns would begin to disappear. From the culture, from the drug dealers, from the streets, from public consciousness. They would turn into a sad relic, like eight-track tapes, like the bubonic plague, like the Miami Sound Machine. Think 20 years is too long? BS. It is but an eyeblink, a twitch, a faint toe spasm in the great long orgasm of time.

This is the unappreciated, under-reported magic of the human animal. We are infinitely adaptable. We can accommodate far more than politicians and pundits and the morally knotted Christian right would ever have you believe.

Ten bucks a gallon. Imagine the mad scramble by carmakers to invent new ultra-gas-sipping, enviro-friendly technologies. Imagine communities coming together for ride-sharing and mass transit. Bike sales would skyrocket. Walking shoes would be the new bling item. We would mourn the loss of cool car culture even as we celebrated the birth of, say, moped culture. Telecommuting would explode. Sure, the superrich would still tool around in their bloated Escalades, oblivious to the world around them, thinkin' the world is their dumb bitch.

So what? The rest of us can simply roll our eyes and laugh, evolve and sharpen and sigh, and wonder what great change we can embark upon next.

Another brilliant rant from Mark Morford. See the full article here.

Excerpts below:

Look, see those tire marks? That ungainly footprint? Feel that breath of humid doom upon your skin? Yes, the president was just here. Up in Napa Valley, riding his official Trek Mountain Bike One over the rocks and down the trails and through the cool California mud, a small army of handlers and Secret Service agents and emergency medical personnel by his side and/or rumbling along behind him in big black SUVs. It was very cute, in a fingernail-yanked-with-pliers sort of way.

It was Earth Day weekend. The president talked about how mountain biking helped him "settle his soul" and "burn off excess energy when you're living life to its fullest," which apparently means blindly running your nation into a bloody flaming wall at full speed like a drunk NASCAR driver on Ambien. He talked about how he enjoyed mountain biking because it had such minimal impact on the pristine, wild surroundings. Shockingly, lightning did not strike him dead on the spot.

Later on, the prez talked up the need for wildly implausible hydrogen-powered cars to the California Fuel Cell Partnership, a group who, if they had a drop of integrity and brains among them, didn't believe a single word he said.

[...] This much we know: Bush is, it has been widely noted, the worst environmental president in modern America history. He has done more to eliminate protections and pollute the air, sell off national forests, whore the waterways, drill for oil and eviscerate pollution regulation than any president on the books. His environmental record is abysmal, shameful, and includes installing two of the worst secretaries of the interior in history, the abominable Gale Norton and now her male counterpart Dirk Kempthorne, who have turned around and reduced protections and sold off more forestland to private concerns -- oil, timber, coal, you name it -- since the Harding administration.

[...] Bush is, after all, a failed oilman. He has done all he can to ensure we will be dependent on the black death for the next two decades, minimum, which is, not surprisingly, the average remaining life span of his favoritest CEO cronies in the oil business. Serve the masters first, the Saudi sheiks second, the American people about, oh, 157th. It is the BushCo way.

[...] There is no beauty in American political policy toward the Earth. There is no poetry or grace or true heart in how politicians -- especially Republican politicians -- view our natural commodities, no respect unless it is based on fear, unless it is begrudging and resentful, like when a hurricane makes a mockery of the president's feeble and unconvincing attempts to prove he cares. Has it always been this way? Maybe. But some leaders are far, far worse than others.

This is perhaps the most frightening thing about the Bush visit, about him having the nerve, the sheer vulgar gall to discuss the quality of his soul while biking through a natural habitat his administration so violently works to defile. It is this: He actually meant it. Bush was probably genuinely heartfelt about enjoying his ride through our troubled trees. He thinks he is attuned and connected. He thinks nature is nifty and calming. And, simply put, there is no more dangerous a leader on the face of the earth who, in every policy and every law and every action, abuses and distorts and molests the world around him, and yet who can turn on an ideological dime and calmly glorify that very thing which he helps destroy.

Recall former Spokane Mayor Jim West, big scandal just recently, an outspoken and homophobic über-Republican on the outside, a guy who helped pass anti-gay legislation in Washington state and railed against gay rights in public, but who happily turned around and for over 20 years solicited 18-year-old boys in gay chat rooms at night and offered them free candy, T-shirts, sex, jobs. Bush is just like that. Abuse your issue openly during the day, screw it at night. And worst of all, give not a single thought to the brutal dichotomy.

[...]

Full article is here.

I work on a lot of different distributed teams, on corporate and non-profit projects. I have been finding it very interesting (and frustrating) to see what channels I have to use to communicate to my various peers.

Channels by environment:

For working in enterprise teams, we rely on audio-conference bridges with 1-800 numbers, file-servers, Sharepoint, Placeware/Live Meeting for sharing desktops, a little bit of Writely, and emailing of Powerpoint slides as our "collaborative workspace." Yes, it is painful. It is lowest common denominator collaboration (LCDC?) This is one of the areas that I'm hoping to drive a lot more usage of better tools including blogs, wikis, Skype conferencing, and anything else that is actually useful as opposed to cool-but-useless.

For working in startups, since they have no 1-800 numbers or even landlines (!), it tends to be cell phones, Skype for voice and IM and file transfer and chat room, wikis, Writely, and Basecamp.

Working in non-profits tends to mean email and phone. Until we build a wiki workspace, that tends to be it.

Channels by generation:

The other axis of difference is that people from different generations use different tools.

Age:

So the result is that if I'm working on a project with a group of people that work in enterprise, small business, startups, and non-profits AND if those people are across a broad range of ages from 20-60, I end up having to drop down to lower common denominator, lowest bandwidth, simplest types of communication in order to stay in touch with everybody. That means...email and phone.

If you want to move the group up the collaborative tool using curve you need to educate them on email groups, Skype, blogs, wikis, screen-sharing and video-conferencing tools....and they may or may not be interested. Many will say, "I just want to work on this project, not fiddle with all of this technology."

This puts any group into a bit of a bind. Do we use younger/faster/more agile people for the project who can communicate at a higher baud rate in a distributed setting? Or does that just lead to clueless high-speed communication? In other words, a lack of seasoned wisdom? Or do we increase the age ranges and experience on the team, but drop the baud rate and use lower common denominator collaboration tools because there will be more cross-generational discussion and wisdom that at the end of the day will provide much higher return on investment?

Am I the only person noticing this? Or do you all deal with this in your lives?

How many of you are noticing the communications channel generation gaps?

I LOVE this series. And it always kills me when Dogbert wags. Dilbert can be found here.

Thanks to Peter P for the heads up on this great little news story (okay, it's a press release, not a news story) about Jotspot's wiki platform being used to help manage a very complex financing process for an independent film. I believe that this is where the power of wikis will finally become apparent. Using them as the central document creation and linking system for major operations just makes a lot of sense.

Good job on getting the press release Joe and team!

For simple backups, there is no better application than SuperDuper. I tried Sync Pro, Tri-Backup, Data Backup, Carbon Copy Cloner and I was a dedicated Retrospect user for many years of building Macintosh networks. (I didn't bother linking them because they're all pretty awful now - Retrospect in particular started to go sideways around Version 5 and never really recovered.)

But these days, for doing basic backup of my Mac, the single best app is SuperDuper. Their website, their software, the pricing, the overall design philosophy - all of it is perfectly integrated. They are a great little company with a great little product. I hope they do well!

If you need simple backups and you have a Mac, go download it and try it. And basic bootable backups are free. You only need to pay if you want some of the additional functionality. Pay the nice people - it's rare to find software this simple or well-thought-out.

I hope the movie is half as funny as the trailers. Watch both Trailer 1 and Trailer 2. Brilliant.

My friend Boris Mann had some great things to say about Vancouver being an excellent place to join or start a company here in this posting. However, I would add "capital efficiency", great education system, and an awesome talent pool to to the list of reasons that Vancouver is a great place to build a company.

Back in November 2005 at the IT Financing Forum, Anthony Lee from Altos Ventures talked about how he was particularly interested in "capital efficiency" and he found that Vancouver companies were, on average, 10x more capital efficient than Valley companies. At the time, they had a 75M fund open and had earmarked 4 of the 20 slots for Vancouver-based web 2.0 related companies. Anthony commented that more companies dies from too much money rather than too little and that capital efficiency = a higher Internal Rate of Return = the company is more appealing to venture capitalists.

John Berchers from Crescendo Ventures  (Palo Alto, Minneapolis) whose fund had 1B under management and a currently open fund of 650M, commented that Vancouver had "great people".

And finally, Nicholas Darby from Dow Venture Capital Fund (a 400M fund inside the $48B Dow Chemical), talked about how there were only four countries that they invested in because of the great education system and good talent pool: Israel, USA, UK, and Canada.

Also, Boris was being modest and didn't include his own startup in the list. So I would add some more interesting companies to the list starting with his:

* Bryght - Boris Mann, Roland Tanglao, Kris Krug, Richard Eriksson, and Colin Brumelle's Drupal based startup that extends the Drupal platform and builds cool apps. This team works with Dries Buytaert, James Walker and Adrian Rossouw, the original Drupal team.
* DabbleDB - Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton's Access/Filemaker killer (easy database creation on the web)
* Raincity Studios - Robert Scales' Drupal/Bryght site web design firm
* Flourish Media - Karen Olsson's Web & TV production firm that produces among other things, "Universe Village" - a sustainability game/TV show for kids
* Ma.gnolia - Todd Sieling's social bookmarking application that looks nicer and does more than competitor del.icio.us.

Updates:

* EZ Systems - the open source CMS people are building a new office here with Zak Greant helping to set it up. (Thanks Ben!)

Know any other interesting companies you would add to the list? Drop me an email or add a comment!

I'm intrigued by stories such as this one in the ABC News about the plumbers union in Philadelphia who claim that no-flush green urinals are a health threat. I wonder if the union sees them more as a health threat to the UNION DUES than to the USERS.

Does anybody have any information on negative health effects of waterless urinals??

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Steven Jones, the leader of the UBC Snowstar team  - a team of UBC students who are entering the NASA Beam Power and Tether Strength Challenges - two contests that are used to encourage research and development in technologies that could be used to build a space elevator.



The challenges are held during the Elevator Games in Mountain View California by the Spaceward Foundation; a group dedicated the development of a Space Elevator. The technologies that are required to win the competitions will have many uses and one of those will be in the construction of a long cable in stable geosynchronous orbit around the earth that will allow for equipment and people to be transported to space on a space elevator at a fraction of the current cost.

In the 2006 NASA Beam Power Challenge the team has to provide a robot that is at least 10kg and capable of climbing a 60 m cable in 60 seconds but it can not have any batteries or other stored energy on board. All of the power must be transmitted wirelessly from the ground by a beam source that the team also has to provide.

In the 2006 Tether Strength Challenge teams must create a 2 gram cable that forms a continuous loop with a circumference of 2 meters and is stronger than the cable supplied by Spaceward that is allowed to weigh 3 grams. UBC Snowstar is one of the few teams in the world to have experience at the Elevator Games through their participation in 2005 and in the Beam Power competition they were given the only award at the competition: "Most Likely to Win in 2006".

The New York Times just ran a great story which the Snowstar team uploaded onto their site in a PDF.

If you are interested in helping Steve and his team by sponsoring them, please contact him directly at info@snowstar.ca.

Apple has released a public beta of Boot Camp, a small application that creates a soft partition on your existing Mac drive (without having to reformat and partition the whole drive), lets you create a CD of hardware drivers, and then lets you install Windows XP Home or Pro (SP2 only) in that partition.

On this page, they say that OS X 10.5 Leopard will have this functionality built-in but that this is a beta that runs under OX 10.4.6.

They will sell a TON more of their hardware with this option. This means that people can try out a dual life. And eventually, they may just decide to stay on the Mac side.

Very clever Apple. Very clever. I can see them doubling their hardware sales within a year with this plan. If not more.

While trying to view John Batelle's "Building a Better Boom" article on the New York Times, I came up against their standard walled garden gate. Since it was free, I thought what the hell, I'll register. No, I'm not giving you my real demographic information, no I don't want your services, no I don't want your ADDITIONAL services on the next page, yes, I would like to see my article.

What?

What do you mean I can't see the whole article?

But...I'm a member.

Oh, this is a PAID article. So even though I'm a member, I'm a lower caste member with no rights to get to articles that might actually be interesting.

But you now have my membership. I traded you my mostly fake information in order to get that stupid article. And you tricked me.

You guys really don't get it do you? That's slimy and low-integrity. Period. You deserve your steep revenue decline and your mad panic as you figure out how to make up the 3/4 of your revenue that comes from your disappearing classifieds. It is the arrogance and blindness of a dying empire.

Am I being melodramatic? Perhaps. But I'm mired in web 2.0 articles today, so it seemed particularly appropriate to be declaring the end of an age, even if it's just to keep the volume high enough to match both the utopian blather and the naysayers cries of doom.

Now what did I do with my "The End Is Near" signs that I used to use for the march?

Here is an interesting article on the Wall Street Journal about a new pattern in VC investing called "Pre-emptive financing."(hey WSJ, when did you finally get smart and open up your walled garden??)

In English, the definition of pre-emptive financing would be "get our money into the company before a fight breaks out over this ridiculous little company and sends the valuation into the upper atmosphere."

We may not have the public market exit route of the dot-com era to count on, but it seems that this has not dampened the venture capitalists' paranoia about being the least cool kid on the block.

I hear this phrase all the time: "I missed out on (some thing from 5 years ago.) I'm sure not missing out on (some current fad) this time around."

Heck, *I* have uttered the same words! (And still do!)

There is some sort of psychological fear that seems to be rooted in that game of Musical Chairs we all played as a kid. Everybody circles the chairs, the music is playing, the players are all eyeing each other warily and moving in short bursts, from chair to chair, jockeying for position. Then WHAM. It's time to invest in ..... blogs!! The pushing and shoving ensues and one unlucky soul finds himself standing up like a complete and total loser, having not been able to find a chair to sit on.

But now, with pre-emptive financing, you can sneak into the room before the game begins, find the comfiest chair and plop yourself down in that chair and just wait for the rest of the kids to discover that there's a game of Musical Chairs on.

In a time such as this where the capital is prevalent and the ideas and good entrepreneurs are in relatively short supply, this all makes good sense.

Entrepreneurs of the world....the time to go find capital is now.

On October 23, 2005 Dane Jesper Kenn Olsen, 34 became the first person to successfully run, in daily increments ranging from 14-93km, one lap around the Earth on land masses, setting a Guinness Book of World Records record.

What began from the Old Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, England on January 1, 2004, ended there 26,323 km later - One lap around the World - on October 23, 2005.

During his World Run Jesper passed through Vancouver and was immediately adopted by the local ultrarunning community. All that have met him were inspired by his humble spirit, determination and humour.

Jesper will be back in Vancouver to present "How on Earth" did he do it? During this World Run Project Lecture you will have the opportunity to hear first-hand from Jesper himself how the impossible became reality, not only from the perspective of an ultrarunner, but from that of a University of Copenhagen scholar of international politics.

If you order the tickets through me (troy at troyangrignon dot com), you can get them 2 for 1 (2 tickets for $30, or $15 each).

Mark Morford strikes again. I have been having this very conversation with everybody I know. It seems that my entire circle of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances is in the midst of this overwhelming busy-ness right now. I have been questioning the value and the lack of stillness myself and then Mark, as usual, did it more justice than my half-formed thoughts could have:

Full reprint below but the source is here.

No one is getting enough sleep.

No one is getting enough sleep because everyone is so damned stressed.

Everyone is so damned stressed because everyone has way, way too much to do and far too little time in which to do it.

Everyone has way too much to do and far too little time in which to do it because modern technology has made us a thousandfold more accessible and more wired up and more media drenched and able to communicate in 157 different instant digitized ways, has given us entree to so much astounding information at so much faster and more unbearable rates that it has, in effect, compressed time into sweaty slippery little knots we are forever trying to untie as quickly as we possibly can even though we can't.

Slathered all over this is the fact that the Internet is a gorgeous wanton free-for-all of deliciously annoying distraction, porn and Instant Messenger and iTunes, eBay and Amazon and roughly one million blogs, RSS feeds and multimedia and movie trailers and the great time-sucking killer app of the 20th century, e-mail, and did I mention the porn and the music?

It's enough, verily, to give normally sane and balanced and disciplined people a serious case of attention deficit disorder, the inability to focus for any length of time on any one project at hand without the mind and the eye and the desire immediately jumping away to the umpteen other activities and ideas and fun bits your brain felt it was ignoring by trying to focus on one measly paltry thing.

Is this happening to you? Are you not multitasking right now, calculating your to-do lists, answering your cell, text messaging your sister, reading this column, burning a new CD, thinking about sex, programming your Bluetooth, ordering some Astroglide online, processing 50 items at once? No? Something is wrong with you.

In fact, I have no idea how I am getting through this column right now. It has taken me roughly 19 hours to complete the handful of paragraphs above because I keep checking e-mail and configuring my iTunes playlists and responding to my girlfriend's IM messages and reading my colleague David Lazarus' trilogy of columns on the mad increase in sleep disorders and sleeping-pill intake in America.

And the phenomenon is, as you might expect, disturbing and telling and just a little sad, but I didn't have all that much time to dwell on it because I also felt compelled to watch nine new movie trailers on Apple.com ("Mission: Impossible III" looks just god-awful and someone really should slap Tom Cruise) and check the status of two eBay bids and read up on a new Aneros sex toy over at Blowfish.com and satiate a nagging question I had about a quote from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and read up on BushCo's nefarious plans to bomb the crap out of Iran, and did you know the newly redesigned Audi TT is coming out in April?

This is why God invented coffee. Coffee is our national narcotic. Caffeine is time's Viagra. It is no coincidence that the rise of the godlike Starbucks Corp. coincided almost exactly with the rise of the Internet and the cell-phone explosion and the dot-com boom -- that is, with the insane rise in instant communication and multitasking. Caffeine helps up keep up with the mad onslaught, even as it destroys our ability to calm the hell down and get some deep rest.

Did you know caffeine has a half-life in the body of six hours? That if you drink a big cup around noon, half of its 80-100 milligrams of nefarious caffeine are still bouncing through your bloodstream by dinnertime, and by midnight you've still got a happy glob of the stuff slapping at your exhausted brain stem like an angry wife slaps her ex-husband? Do you wonder why we're taking more and more sleeping pills and screwing with the body's natural rhythms and entering a vicious cycle of artificially jacking up/calming down to the point of, well, exhaustion?

Reminds me of Joshua Foer's terrific piece over at Slate from May 2005 about his experience taking the prescrip amphetamine Adderall (normally prescribed for ADHD), just to see what it would do to him, just to see if he could, in fact, focus better and get more work done and imitate, to some pale degree, Jack Kerouac, who allegedly wrote "On the Road" in one insane brilliant nonstop stream-of-consciousness binge while jacked on so much Adderall-like amphetamines it would've choked a llama. The upshot: Except for the weird side effects and the numbing comedown and the various health hazards, Adderall worked, almost too well.

Of course, digging out the link to Foer's piece also enticed me to read Slate's review of alarm clocks, which also led to Will Saletan's thick science-over-morality piece on South Dakota's hideous new abortion law, which in turn somehow pointed to a mention of the New York Times story about the new rash of "sleep-driving," about all the zombie-like people who are now getting into their cars after taking the sleep drug Ambien, which led me to the original NYT Ambien piece on the subject, which in turn flicked me over to the NYT Book Review, where I drifted in a literary haze until the sun shifted in the sky and the morning turned to afternoon and I realized I really needed to get back to work because the paragraph you just read took me about one hour and 13 minutes to complete. See?

Adderall sounds perfect. Adderall is exactly what I need. I could write five columns in two days! I could get ahead and forget my rolling deadlines, for once! I could start my novel, make more progress on my essay collection, learn podcasting in Garageband, finally read that 400-page book on digital photography, get all the way through "From Dawn To Decadence" and still have time to learn about Japanese sake prefectures!

Is this our national affliction? Our collective destiny? A nation of willful ADD sufferers, wired up and jittery and increasing unfocused even as we have more and more crap demanding our attention and even as we are increasingly unable to pause the chaos and sink into a moment and find some peace and actually feel the world around us?

Because I have news: We have been misled. It is one massive lie, a great myth of modern American culture that the more you think, the more you multitask, the more you process and analyze and ponder and the more stuff whirling around your brain at any given moment, the smarter and more connected you are. It is, in short, a total crock.

We equate deranged, caffeinated busyness with smarts, with success, when in fact the exact opposite is true. Just ask the yogis, the gurus, the healers of the past 5,000 years: It is actually when you calm the mind, clear things out, breathe deep and sleep deeper and clean out the toxins and the caffeine and the Ambien, that's when real wisdom, real intuition comes your way. The rest is just, well, noise. Happy delicious annoying caffeinated sexy fun infuriating obnoxious unstoppable noise, but still noise.

But not to worry. They'll soon develop a pill to block that, too.

I found this in Rob Brezny's Astrology newsletter this morning:

I like it. Very simple.

Here are the details on one of the first Sustainability Cafés:

When: Monday, March 6, 6:30 - 8:30 pm
Where: BCIT Campus (CHBA BC, Building NW5), 3700 Willingdon Ave, Burnaby, BC

SUSTAINABLE HOMES

Description: What do you consider a “sustainable” home? What do you need to get there? Where is “there”? An innovative dialogue hosted by the Sustainable Building Centre and the Canadian Home Builders’ Association of BC.
 
Moderator: Helen Goodland is the Executive Director of the new Sustainable Building Centre on Granville Island and is a LEED accredited architect with over 15 years of experience in green building design, education and construction.

Please visit http://www.sustainablebuildingcentre.com for more information.

I am very excited about our launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability. For the month of March, Vancouver will host a cornucopia of events and activities, all focused around bringing sustainability to our lives and our city.

Special features of the website include: 

Have you ever received a gift you hated? And then you either threw it away, hid it, or regifted it?

A good friend of mine is launching a new boardgame called GiftTRAP with which he hopes to raise $1M for Right To Play – an athlete driven international humanitarian organization that uses sport and play as a tool for the development of children and youth in the most disadvantaged areas of the world.

The point of this game is to "rid the world of bad gifts" by helping you learn what your friends and partners REALLY want. Their blurb is:


This is probably the first board game in the world to have most of its photography submitted by amateur digital photographers. The goal is to find 640 images of gifts from 300+ photographers from 40+ countries collected from Flickr and the GiftTRAP website where they are running a photo competition for the best images. Currently, they are still looking for more photos from amateur digital photographers of fun and interesting gifts. If they use your photo, you get a free copy of the game. Also, they are looking for companies with cool consumer brands that want to promote those brands, or charities that want to promote their cause. All three kinds of photos will represent gifts in the game.

The first 1,000 copies of the game will be sold (probably on eBay and through special event auctions) and a percentage of the revenues after that first 1,000 will also be donated, hopefully raising an eventual $1M for Right to Play.

Best wishes to the GiftTRAP team!!

The 19th Annual Angel Forum came to a successful close this afternoon. Thirty-six companies in the software, manufacturing, communications, internet, and medical device sectors presented to 70+ investors over the course of a full day of sessions.

Each presenting company was given 10 minutes to pitch their company, market, team, market problem, solution, and investment needs to a group of prospective investors. Then the investors had a Q&A period with the entrepreneurs.

In addition, we had some excellent presentations:

* Bull Housser Tupper spoke on Intellectual property protection, employment issues, and term sheet negotiation;
* PriceWaterhouseCoopers spoke on Top 10 tax issues for startups
* The TSX Venture Exchange spoke on how to go public

Thanks everybody for a great day and we look forward to seeing you all back here in Fall!

I caught this story about the death of Paul Pearce, a runner in the UK, through a Google link and had to post it. It sounds like this guy was awesome. I love that they asked for people not to wear black ties but to come in running gear instead.

Good luck Paul in the "next stage" of your race. And congratulations on having lived such a great life in the last stage.

Full article here.

During my time as a computer consultant, working with clients to clarify their software goals (or their website development goals for that matter), I had this conversation more often than I care to remember. This is very funny (or painful) to any of us who have ever worked in the field.

In a stroke of brilliance, Yahoo is now buying companies before they are even founded. This definitely wins best parody of the month. Or is it even a parody?

I wonder if any researchers have done the analysis to see how much overlap there is between Narcissistic Personality Disorder and the personality traits that are actually useful for succeeding as an entrepreneur. My guess is that these are not pathologies...but prerequisites!

I attended the Ready to Rocket 2006 session this morning, which was sponsored by Rocketbuilders , a Vancouver based market strategy and consulting firm that helps technology companies capitalize on market opportunities.

The presentation started with an overview of the successes from 2005. Next, Geoff Hansen presented an IT Outlook for 2006. This was followed by the Ready to Rocket 25 for 2006 and the "Ones to watch" - 40 emerging companies that might graduate to the full "Ready to Rocket" Top 25 in 2007. Along with those lists, Price-Waterhouse Coopers presented an overview of the M&A and IPO activity across North America for 2005, and Bill Koty, a professor from UBC presented a brief overview of a newly released Premier's Technology Council report titled "Ahead of the Future" which gives a series of scenarios and predictions for B.C.'s technology economy development from 2005-2020. The summary notes are below along with some of my opinion at the bottom.

 

NASA should be in BC - we launched a lot of rockets last year.

 

Some interesting notes came from this session:

 

• 2005 was a breakthrough year on the Rocketbuilders list.
• These companies were successful because they had a laser focus on a niche market.
• Key highlights of the 2005 list include:
• PureEdge Solutions Inc. (Victoria, BC) was acquired by IBM
• Over 45% of the 2005 Ready to Rocket companies received new investments
• 100% of the 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 30% revenue growth
• Over 60% of 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 100% revenue growth
• Over 35% of 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 200% revenue growth

 

2006 - the rise of the phoenix

 

Here were some of the highlights of the predictions for the year ahead;

 

• general projections seem to predicting that companies will increase their IT spending 5-6% across the board this year
• SMB spending is double that and includes factoring in old hardware replacement cycles for hardware purchased before the collapse.
• there is a trend away from cost-cutting measures and back to the value creation side in terms of prioritizing projects.
• Key Themes that have been identified for 2006:
• Choice: give the user what they want, where they want, in the form they want (Tivo, xFM)
• Make it easy: make it simple to learn and use
• Safe & Secure: ensure that they can store their data safely and people will trust you with that data
• Search is king: there is a lot of work to do here
• Microsoft Office enablement: now that Microsoft has opened up the APIs, companies are succeeding by building things that integrate into Microsoft Office, even more than they were before.
• Storage is still hot: Networked attached storage companies (for example) are growing at up to 300%/yr
• Make it portable: give people the ability to stay mobile: Blackberries, iPods, xFM
• Ensure compliance: people are going to spend 30% of their IT budgets on compliance

 

For more information on the 2006 IT Outlook, contact Geoff Hansen at Rocketbuilders at 866-824-8785 or at gchansen@rocketbuilders.com.

 

Ready to Rocket 25 2006 list

 

Some interesting notes came from this session:

 

• For the 2006 list, the selection team had great difficulty keeping it DOWN to 25, which meant that the Ones to Watch list expanded to 40 companies.
• There were so many interesting technologies coming up that Rocketbuilders considered launching an "Interesting Concepts" category...but didn't
• Success factors. The Top 25 shared some key success factors:
• they were heavily verticalized (we had 5 Financial service companies and 4 Healthcare companies on the list.)
• they were well-funded to grow
• Some of these companies are approaching $5 - 10M in revenues - a point at which they become a LOT more interesting as acquisition targets.

Here is the direct link to the Ready to Rocket 25 List. But they are here for review as well:

 

Abebooks AirG Inc. Axonwave Software Inc. Bycast Inc. Caelo Software Inc. Colligo Networks Inc. Convedia Corporation Eyeball Networks Inc. FinancialCAD Corporation Flowfinity Wireless Inc

GaleForce Solutions Inc. GenoLogics Life Science Software Inc. IronPoint Technology Inc. In Motion Technology Inc. Layer 7 Technology inc. MAKE Technologies Inc. NewHeights Software Corp. ResponseTek Networks Corp. RewardStream Inc. Sxip Identity Corporation

Tantalus Systems Corp. TAP Solutions Inc. TenDigits Software Inc. Vision Critical Inc. Vivonet Inc.

 

The Ones to Watch

 

This list was presented but the final list will not be out until January 13th, 2006.

 

Lane construction finally complete - traffic now moving slowly towards IPO exit lane

 

In this 2005 review of M&A and IPO activity across North America presented by Randy Garg of Price-Waterhouse Coopers , there were quite a few interesting tidbits:

 

• The IPO market has finally been resurrected.
• $100B of private equity was present in 2005.
• Private equity funds are becoming more active in M&A (25% of $100B or 25B) which is a new development.
• Local companies are going public...but not necessarily on the TSX. Some have gone to London or to the USA. This is a new development.
• Debt and subordinated debt as financial instruments have started to appear and this is a new development which is being enabled by the fact that newer companies have (gasp) revenues that can support the debt and are more financially solid and lendable from a cash-flow perspective.
• Public companies are going private again in order to lower their costs, and simplify their operations because the costs of compliance are huge (up to 30% of IT spending per above notes, not to mention other back-office charges.)
• Rule of Thumb: if you're looking to get acquired, make sure that you have audited financials
• BC and Canadian companies are now on the U.S. radar but our prices have gone up and our currency has gone up, leaving us as less of a bargain than before.
• The major M&A deals are still predominantly cross-border - U.S. companies buying Canadian ones or vice versa. There was very little activity in Canada between Canadian entities.
• M&A is still a revenue purchase decision for companies. They are buying revenues, not necessarily technologies. Once a company crosses the revenue barrier, there are a LOT more suitors.
• $5M seems to be a baseline deal size.
• 2006 is poised to be the best year yet for M&A activity!
• There is a ton of money out there - $100B raised in the U.S. in the Private equity markets in 2005
• therefore money is not the problem
• finding good deals and good teams are the problem
• M&A is still the preferred route of exit when compared to IPO, but IPOs are now back as options.

 

I'd like a micro fuel-cell powered proteomics machine for gene therapy web research

 

William Koty of UBC presented some of the findings from the Premier's Technology Council report on Emerging Technologies titled "Ahead of the Future". It evaluated 39 emerging technologies, boiled those down to a short-short-list of 12 Emerging technologies and then presented two almost contradictory charts - one from the academics and one from the industry advisory board.  It was long on research methodology and somewhat short on conclusions.

I am hoping that they will do a follow-on or that it will feed into a larger discussion where they do indeed flesh out the scenarios that they discuss very tentatively in the report.

 

At the end of the day, what did they really say?

If I had to summarize the session, I would say it like this:

 

• The tech industry is ramping up again. A lot of people had that gut sense but the numbers now prove it.
• We are building some really kick-ass companies here in B.C.
• Those companies are growing again.
• M&A activity will be at an all time high in 2006 and the IPO markets are opening up again as exit routes.

 

"Your playing small doesn't serve the world"

 

We build good companies here that are very capital efficient and that are still attractively priced for acquisition. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It brings money into the economy, it gives local entrepreneurs access to global acquisitors' systems and training and talent, and spawns more entrepreneurial ventures. A year or two ago, one of the local entrepreneurs hosted a VEF event titled something like: "Why acquisitions are gutting B.C.'s economy." The resulting talk though had every one of the entrepreneurs on the panel saying that their acquisition was a good thing and that in fact it had had a net positive benefit across the board on a bunch of different things. I remember the host lamenting at the end that he should have talked to the panel BEFORE naming the talk.

Another key point was that we are finally starting to grow our companies again to a decent size We need to keep thinking bigger. Even the statement that they are growing to a decent size is deceiving since we are referring to companies approaching $10M/yr in revenues, which is laughable in the U.S. But it's a starting point. If you are an entrepreneur, don't say, "We're going to dominate the lower mainland", say "We're going to dominate the western world" or the whole world for that matter.

I am always reminded of the quote that was incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela but which was actually written by Marianne Williamson in her 1992 book, "Return to Love":

 

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of god - your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of god that is within us. It is not in just some of us. It is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

B.C. entrepreneurs would do well to think about that and learn from it. Our playing small doesn't serve the world. So get out there, think big, and serve the world.

Thanks to the good people at Rocketbuilders for the invitation and for all the hard work in putting this together!

 

 

 

It took me 2 hours to write up the meeting notes, half an hour to fix the bullets that weren't working because of the lousy text editor in Writely (where my friends and I were collaborating on the notes), 1 minute to find out that Writely can not actually post the article to my blog, 1 hour to copy/paste the document into Word and mess with the formatting to fix the font problems that were mystifying me, and then another hour of frustration trying to get Writely, Word, and Blogware to play nicely and let me create bulleted lists.

Writely has a bullet formatting tool that has all sorts of bugs in it. Blogware doesn't even HAVE a bullet item list button. And Word has bulleting which has bugs that go back ten years. And pasting any of the Word bulleted lists into Writely or Blogware modified the bullets from little blocks to dashes or to some other character, the likes of which I have never even seen and don't know the name of. I finally settled on the dashes since they were the least confusing.

Content creation time: 2 hours
Formatting/futzing/cursing time:  32 hours

(That was a typo but it's funny enough that I'm going to leave it there because that's how I feel right now. So I was either 50% efficient or 5% efficient. It felt more like 5%. Imagine having random letters come out of your keyboard and trying to type anything.)

It's definitely a web 2.0 perpetual beta type of world. PLEASE will somebody do the planet a favour and write the worlds, bestest, fastest, simplest text editor and give it away free to everybody (or for a nominal licensing fee) and keep it updated? I for one would vote for you as having the largest pivotal impact on communication in 2006. Nobel prize? Yours. Grammy? Yep, that too.

If you can build it, and need funding tell me. I'll find it.

And here's the kicker by the way. I use Writely every day and love it. I can create a document, share it with people quickly and easily for collaborative editing, and then (theoretically) blog about it. It's a great concept, simple, easy-to-use, and I like the team building it. But there are days when one wants to step away from the bleeding edge and just get their work done, which will be less and less possible as more software as service stays in perpetual beta. Welcome to our new world.