The ICE Conference (formerly iSummit) is over for another year. Lack of electrical outlets and a usable wireless system capable of handling a geek-filled audience made live-blogging pretty well impossible. That said, this conference unlike, say, MESH, did not require live blogging. Why? Well, ICE 07's theme could be described as "How do big media companies monetize all this digital stuff anyway?" We are talking big, juggernaut companies like Bell, Telus, and Rogers who really don't need Gagglescape's help promoting themselves.

Not that we hadn't heard the messages all before. Let's face it, digital media is now mainstream and is a money-making commodity managed by accountants who, by their nature, are concerned with the bottom line of the industry. The corporate presentations were trade-show stuff. Not to say many in the audience expected more. They probably didn't. But if you came looking for the latest Web 2.0 and social-networking trends you were left unsatisfied.

Still, the organizers did a great job and the conference went on without a hitch. Lots of old friends reconnected and new friendships were made. At the end of it all I suppose that's the important message (along with there is money to be made in this industry and we - big companies - know how to do it).

One event that snuck in some younger thinking was the CHUM U-Pitch challenge. Hosted by the always knowledgeable Amber Mac and including as a panelist TorCamp's David Crow, the presentations had a bit of that "American Idol" flavour to them. Who would win? In the end my favourite from the Murmur guys came second.

Grand Prize Winner
Where'd You Get That? by ChickAdvisor Inc.

2nd Prize
Torontopia by Gabe Sawhney

3rd Prize
Reach For The Starz by Digital Goldfish

I'm off to OCAD's Mobile Nation Conference today. Stay (...read more...)

I'm blogging the ICE 2007 conference semi-live from the Carlu in Toronto.

Keynote speaker: Robert Sawyer, Futurist.

Moore's Law is impacting media channels... In the next ten years we will have seven times more computing power than we have today.

Small mobile screens are a stepping stone and will be around for about eight more seconds.

Rate of change is ramping up exponentially - asymptotically which is ten years down the road. The future is VR.

Storage capacities will become almost infinite -- think bigger and grander.

This is a "Dancing Bear" moment. Initially cool but after a while you are not interested. Mobile is like that now. Aim high in what you are trying to do.

Star Trek fan clubs are showing the incredibly high quality films. People on desktops doing professional special effects.

Gap of VR and reality is closing. Soon simulations will be indistinguishable from reality. The creative and nimble will lead the marketplace.

There is money to made in aggregation - like YouTube. However, we are competing with amateurs.

Branding becomes enormously important in this kind of distribution. Brand yourself!!!

The future is a drunken slut you can take home every night - you have to be prepared to engage with it.

Think bigger, more open, and wider. Be a visionary. The future will be here before you know it.

In the digital world there is infinite economies. It is no longer based on scarcity.

GeoFencing is a ridiculous notion. We are trying to force the market backwards.

"No media organization can cancel the future." U.K. quotation.

We need an end to silo thinking... then end to things that we once considered separate. Find synergies or combinatorics.

Broadband is the new crustaceous asteroid: today is the age of the blurring between the professional and the consumer.

Image from the John Street Media Corridor Project CD-ROM, 1995/6

The Ontario College of Art and Design announced earlier today that their Mobile Media Lab has received a $360 thousand dollar research grant from the federal government. OCAD plays host to next week's Mobile Nation conference, from March 22 to 25.

OCAD President Sara Diamond was instrumental in bringing this area of exploration to OCAD, and sees its evolution as essential to the near future of the Ontario and Canadian economies. She says, "Mobile media and communication is the future of entertainment, education, tourism and even health care provision. We're developing products that consumers all over the world - from the UK, to India, to Argentina - will want to use. We're collaborating with the best children's media producers in Canada on this project as well as top tier fiction and arts entertainment media. Imagine your computer game-playing child as an active physical participant in playing and learning outdoors with the help of a mobile device, instead of sitting at home."

Portage will create a virtual theatre, a vibrant entertainment park, on a downtown Toronto street, installing a number of experiences in the John Street corridor that are triggered or controlled by cell phone users. These experiences are "locative" - that is, they provide cultural or information content relevant to a specific geographic environment. They're also interactive. Players can change content, upload information and experience the environment they're in by interacting with content that changes as they move through the street. And cultural producers can use the underlying technology, a new design engine called MEE, to port their content - be it an "indie" film short or a virtual museum tour - to the cell phone.

Just a follow up to the John Street Corridor project noted above: I designed the (...read more...)

The last two years or so have seen an ebbing of Canadian venture capital activity in the early-stage sector. Why is that? The reasons are varied and too detailed to explore in one posting -- just read back over Gagglescape's numerous postings on the subject.

The trend does seem to be influencing the entire sector and boils down to one basic principle: bigger deals generate bigger returns.

Venture Capital legend Apax Partners typifies the trend. This week the venerable VC institution closed its doors to new venture investments in its new 10 billion Euro private equity fund. Here is what VCRatings has to say about Apax:

The changing nature of the venture capital market is pushing some firms into a hybrid model. And the firms such as Apax that pursued the hybrid model are concentrating on private equity. The reason is to be found in the numbers. Apax's 4.3 billion 2005 fund has already returned 57%. No time to cultivate many, small deals when fewer, bigger ones are so lucrative.

Of course this could just be a mature firm expanding into new markets as its ability to compete in them grows. The fundamental market need for early-stage funding hasn't gone away. What has changed is that the mechanisms to generate return on a capital investment have become so efficient that lower return/higher-risk markets are not as appealing to investors.

About six years ago I was working feverishly on an acquisition for thinkthinkthink Inc. Our target? We wanted to buy a company founded by a professor at the University of Toronto. That company used A.I. algorithms to create natural language based online ad placements. The deal fell apart after the Internet market meltdown. It turns out the idea was ahead of its time.

Venturebeat.com has a story this month about "peer39," a New York startup that is using natural language and machine learning to increase ad conversion rates.

That company has raised $3 million from New York-based Dawntreader Ventures according to chief executive Amiad Solomon.

Natural language is the holy grail of the online ad industry as most everyone in the industry realizes that the next surge of revenue growth will be from non-geeks -- people who are not comfortable with the existing Internet.

Former digital titan Xerox is creating a Google-killing natural search engine according to Endless Innovation:

"A subsidiary of Xerox has signed an agreement to jointly develop and license search engine technology that they hope could lead to the next Google or Yahoo!. The agreement between Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and Powerset, both based in California, includes a long-term collaboration and technology licensing, with the Xerox subsidiary providing technology in exchange for royalties and an equity stake in Powerset.

Powerset’s search engine work focuses on “natural language,” which involves using ordinary, familiar sentence structure in searches, leading to easier, more accurate search results. The two firms have been working together since 2005."

Is there a company in Canada working in this sector?

The Seaboard Group released a report yesterday critical of Canada's big cellular providers. Titled, "Lament for a Wireless Nation - A Cross-National Survey of Wireless Service Prices: Canada, the United States and Europe," the paper says Canadians pay too much for their wireless services. More importantly, that additional cost means fewer people per-capita use mobile devices in Canada and we continue to fall behind countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

"Canada is dead last in the 30-country OECD measurement of wireless penetration. Oddly enough, Canada's wireless prices lead the world — there may well be a correlation," the report said.

The report's conclusions are as follows:

• Heavy cellphone users in Canada pay 1.5 times more than their U.S. couterparts

• Canadian wireless penetration rests at 58%, second last in the OECD.

• It's a full 20 percentage points behind the United States, the country's main trading partner.

How does Canadian cellphone penetration compare with other major industrialized countries?

• Canada has 56 cellphones in use for every 100 Canadians, less than any other industrialized country.

• The United States has 75 cellphones for every 100 Americans.

• Britain has 102.2 per 100 people.

• Germany has 86.4 in use per 100 people.

Of course, the Canadian cellphone providers are saying that the Seaboard report is a biased publication paid for by companies who are trying to enter the Canadian market. CBC reports:

Telus Mobility vice-president of wireless, broadband and content policy Michael Hennessy dismissed the study, saying he viewed it as the first salvo in an attempt to allow other companies to piggyback on local carriers and enter the wireless industry.

Whatever the reason for the report, these figures show that Canadians are losing out on the growing and economically essential mobile infrastructure marketplace. If we fall (...read more...)

Gagglescape's sister site, http://www.corporateknightsforum.com announced the CKmagazine's $100 Billion environmental challenge. Here is the text:

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Climate change presents a unique challenge for economics: it is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen. The Investment Proposition: If we start investing 1 per cent of our annual global GDP today, we can avoid GDP losses of 5 to 20 percent tomorrow.

"Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it"—Commonly attributed to Mark Twain, 1897

That was true back in 1897, but not anymore, according to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The report, which is an expert-reviewed synthesis of the most up-to-date scientific research published on climate change from around the world, upped the ante. It concluded that it is "very likely" humans are causing global warming, or, in quantitative terms, more than 90 per cent certain (up from "likely," or more than 66 per cent certain, in 2001).

So now that we have proved Mark Twain wrong, what are we going to do to fix it?

Most people, from the leader of the Green Party to the chief executive of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, as well as our current Prime Minister, genuinely agree that it is time to pull back on the high-carbon throttle and carve out a new low-carbon path for our economy.

Just after the IPCC report was released, Prime Minister Harper made clear which path Canada would take: "I think the first realistic step in any such plan will be to try over the next few years to stabilize emissions and obviously over the longer term to reduce them." A few days later, the usually laissez-faire economist told an audience at the Canadian Club in Ottawa that he was going to crack down on industrial (...read more...)

This weekend at Ryerson University another "Unconference," an example of the BarCamp phenomenon, took place. PodCampToronto, as this one was called, was a two day extravaganza about all things related to podcasting and vloging. The user-organized conference model where a loose association of people gather without so-called "experts" to learn about what is going on in the community, is revolutionizing how we learn. Oh, and it may just put regular conference organizers out of business. Think disintermediation here.

The technology that provides the armature for these conferences is, of course, the Wiki. Here is what the WIkipedia says about the medium:

A wiki (IPA: [ˈwɪ.kiː] or [ˈwiː.kiː] [1]) is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, typically without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring.

People who have something to say book themselves as speakers. People who want to attend sign themselves up. This conference also added real-time video feeds online. Go to the link above and follow it to the calendar page. There you can link to videos of the event.

More about wikis and BarCamps later. Today, however, I'm off to a conference -- the old fashioned kind.

In case you are one of the three people who have not seen this remarkable film, well, here it is:

Story by Nate B. Habermeyer of the Ciris Group

The creation of the OrganizeMY Electronic Filing Cabinet For Dummies, the first major global software release from the For Dummies brand, is a case study of how a small company can play in the big leagues. Mike Schweizer, CEO of Org-Matters Solutions Inc. and the software's creator, designed the life-organizing software to grab, save, file, and track important documents and save them locally in encrypted form. The application provides the means to organize those documents in a file structure while also enabling users to track necessary actions, such as doctor appointments or bill payments.

Schweizer’s new software impressed BMO so much that it is giving away a promo version of the software as a free download to all its Mosaik MasterCard customers. BMO saw that Schweizer's software could help them help their customers to simplify their lives.

Schweizer's software won over management at John Wiley & Sons, who saw the connection with their For Dummies brand. Between the two, BMO and For Dummies assemble a user-base of millions through their world-recognized brands.

As Michael Schweizer said:

"…we’re thrilled to bring the Electronic Filing Cabinet to market under the umbrella of the For Dummies brand. When it comes to delivering simple, easy-to-understand "how-to" reference material, For Dummies has a unique leadership position. When people see For Dummies, they know it’ll be easy."

The Web 2.0 crowd wonders when an online version will be launched . . .

Here is the report in its entirety. Seems like the previous Liberal government did a good job of managing the country's economy . . . So much for spin.

Background

After surging in the first quarter of 2006, real GDP growth in Canada slowed subsequently, in part reflecting a cooling in the United States, and 2006 growth is estimated to have eased to 2¾ percent. Nonetheless, employment gains have been significant, and the unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent, its lowest level in more than 30 years. This has partly reflected large regional disparities in economic performance, with output, wages, and prices, especially housing prices, growing much faster in the resource-rich western provinces, particularly Alberta, than in the rest of the country.

Domestic demand remained the main driver of the economy, with private consumption expanding a robust 3¾ percent and business investment growing 8 percent. Residential investment, however, started declining in the second quarter, finishing the year as a whole only 2½ percent above its 2005 level. Net exports continued to be a drag on activity, reflecting the effects of past currency appreciation and a slowdown in the United States, especially on the manufacturing sector.

A sharp decline in natural gas prices and a fall in real net exports combined to reduce the estimated 2006 current account surplus to 1¾ percent of GDP. In recent months, the Canadian dollar has also weakened somewhat, partly in response to the decline in world energy prices and diminished market expectations of a narrowing of the interest rate differential vis-à-vis the United States, but the currency still remains roughly 35 percent higher against its U.S. counterpart than it was in late 2002.

After seven ¼ percentage-point hikes through May 2006, the Bank of Canada has since left its target rate unchanged at 4¼ percent, reflecting (...read more...)

One of my favourite business researchers, Dean Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Business, explodes another myth in today's Globe and Mail. In a direct attack on the venerable Bill Gates, Martin says Canada doesn't need to graduate more technology students. No, what we need more of is business students.

I've attended a number of presentations by Roger Martin over the past few years and one of his dominant themes is the debunking of media "superstitions" concerning the economy. The technology education myth is another one.

Bill Gates propagated that myth when he argued in the Globe that the secret to American economic dominance rests in the number of technologists that country produces. Not so argues Martin. Then he gets out the stats. The financial services sector alone in the U.S. is 67% larger than the high-tech sector. Wages are 18% higher.

According to Martin, Canada produces 11% more science and engineering students per capita than the United States. But we are not proportionately more competitive. Where Canada doesn't eclipse the U.S. is in the production of business students. In the U.S. a full 21% of students in universities are in business courses. Canada, on the other hand, restricts its business school enrollment. We produce just 57% per capita of the U.S. business graduates.

Here is how Martin ends his story:

From the narrow perspective of the software industry, Mr. Gates may see the obvious prescription for Canada. However, if we discipline ourselves to look at the facts rather than superstitions, we will head in a dramatically different direction than that advocated by the science and technology lobby's most prominent member.

My experience backs Martin's position. Think about it. Canada has great researchers and engineers. We produce remarkable products that, more and more, have to go outside the country to (...read more...)

The Conference Board of Canada made some waves in the Canadian economic policy world this week when it released its report on the global competitiveness of Canadian cities. It turns out major cities like Toronto are falling behind in their ability to compete with other major cities. "Mission Possible: Successful Canadian Cites" puts forward the case that the provincial system that equalized representation between rural and urban constituencies is failings us. The system worked 100 years ago but in today's global economy cities are playing a much greater role on the economic prosperity of their host companies.



While not advocating city-states, the report concludes by saying Canada must give "major cities the power and resources they need for success." Anyone who spends time travelling the world for business or pleasure understands how international cities are pouring money into infrastructure in recognition of the growing role those places play in regional economic prosperity. Toronto has suffered -- ask the TTC -- because of our political mandarins have ignored the shift.



Here are some excerpts:

We are becoming less competitive. In just two years, we have slipped from 3rd to 12th place in comparative measurements of macroeconomic and microeconomic performance, according to the results of benchmarking by the Conference Board. Canada lags behind most developed economies in productivity growth. Our resource sectors require significant new strategic investment if they are to meet global competition, and our biggest cities are starved for investment in comparison with global cities elsewhere. In vital sectors of our economy, we are not keeping up with our competitors.

The Conference Board makes clear in this report that strategic investment in our major cities is urgent. Nowhere is the gap between Canada as a global society and our political, fiscal and regulatory architectures more apparent than in our largest cities. (...read more...)

Voip-News had a column yesterday on how to best use your personal Skype communication software. For you big Skype fans in the crowd, be prepared for a wealth of great users tips. I'm part of a Skype "swarm" with about forty or so other people. The experience is a remarkable one for a host of reasons. The experience is like working in a small office with a bunch of really smart people. Great ideas come bundled with small-talk.

Here are my five favourite ways to improve the Skype experience:

1 Call Forwarding
Whether you've set your Skype account up on your home or work computer, the fact is, you are occasionally going to get important calls when you aren't there. Thankfully, you can simply forward those calls to another Skype account or even a cell phone or land line. That way, even if your computer at work is shut down, as soon as a call comes in to your Skype account, the call will immediately ring on your cell phone, your home computer and your home phone line, meaning that no matter where you are you'll be sure to get it.
To forward a call click on the "Tools" menu and select "Options." From there set the forwarding number in the "Call Forwarding & Voicemail" section.

2 Providing Customer Support
Got a small business online? Want to offer some customer support without spending a fortune on telephony costs? Skype's graphical click-to-call SkypeMe buttons are ideal for this. Create your SkypeMe button (free account needed) and embed the code in your website, weblog, template, email, or wherever you want it to appear. When someone views your web page (or email message), the button will indicate whether you are online and accepting Skye calls, busy, or offline. If you're on the go and (...read more...)

[H]Consumer writes about the imminent demise of the print magazine industry. It's all about economics. The web allows publishers to delve into stories to a much greater depth than print simply because the cost to produce and distribute extra words is negligible in the online world. The same can't be said about print. Every 700 words or so in a magazine adds about one page. Guess what? it costs money to ship tons of paper around the country. So, given the right reach, online publishers can pay more for writers while spending less on print and logistics.

Speed to market is another problem. In the old days it might take weeks or even months for reviews to get to the marketplace. Now, turn-around time is down to hours. Think of it this way, if you have a new tech product with a shelf life of six months or so, what channels are you going to favour with your marketing? Slow print magazines or near instantaneous websites?

Here is how [H]COnsumer writer Josh Norem sums up the trend:

All of this is not good news for the old guard of magazine editors, obviously, but in most cases, magazines are still superior to websites when it comes to the quality of writing, photos, and layout. There is definitely a level of pride and craftsmanship (not to mention time and money) that goes into every page of every magazine issue. But will nice photos, a good presentation, and great writing be enough to save the magazines in the long run? For the sake of my former colleagues, and friends, in the magazine business, I hope so. But a more sober assessment would be that tech magazines aren’t long for this world, and simply cannot compete with their online contemporaries.