How do we improve the dialogue between ttc and its ridership?

How do we apply the BarCamp group problem-solving model to other problems?

How do we build bridges between different creative communities in the city?

This was an experiment in bringing BarCamp event practices, social media and online collaboration tools and community stewardship practices to the rest of the world - the real world. Web 2.0 obsessed technologists (this means you DemoCamp) often forget that technology is a means, not an end. Transit Campers were challenged to become city-builders and at the end of the day an amazing new community was born armed (...read more...)

Canadians aren't exactly seasoned global traders to begin with, preferring to do the bulk of their business with the U.S., if they leave Canada at all. Their cautious, trusting nature is in sharp contrast to Chinese culture, where the word for honest, loashi, is a derogatory term meaning to be gullible or to follow blindly. "You're better off going to Vegas for the weekend," says Jim Sherry, a former federal trade commissioner turned consultant. "You'll lose money just as fast and have more fun."

(first posted at European Tribune, Jan 18, 2007)

When I took economics at the University of Minnesota in the early 1970s, one of my professors was Walter Heller. Heller was President Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisors chairman and would claim, quite seriously, that he taught Kennedy Keynesianism.

In those days, the Keynesians were utterly dominant in academe and government. There were so many of them, they had subdivided into various schools. It could be argued that Heller represented the right wing of the Keynesian school. (...read more...)

Testing was conducted in mid-December by Novarum Inc., an independent consulting firm offering comprehensive broadband wireless advisory, analysis and testing services. Novarum is developing the first standardized benchmarks for overall wireless network performance. All of the North American wireless mesh networks were tested from a user perspective with industry-standard tools and methodology in Q3 and Q4 of 2006.

“We tested 41 wireless networks in 14 cities, and the performance of Toronto Hydro Telecom’s One Zone, delivering speeds of up to 5 Mbps bi-directionally, was stunning,” said Ken Biba, one of Novarum’s analysts. “One Zone’s performance is better than my broadband connection at home and, on average, five times faster than any of the other networks we tested. Most impressive was the fact that this exceptional performance is being delivered in the challenging environment of a dense urban canyon.”

Founded in 2001 at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business, UVF is an independent, self-sustaining venture capital company committed to the entrepreneurial education of students at participating universities . . . "We're delighted that students from the Wharton School are now officially on board," said Jared Hutchings, founder and managing director of UVF. "The Wharton team of students offers exceptional expertise from previous work experiences and brings a rigorous analytical approach that reflects the strong Wharton MBA curriculum, so they will be a great asset for us. And UVF can help the Wharton students gain venture capital experience in a very hands-on way. There's no better training than investing real money in real entrepreneurs."

Founded in 2001 at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business, University Venture Fund (UVF) is an independent venture capital firm committed to improving the quality of entrepreneurial education for a diverse group of students at its participating universities. The fund (...read more...)

Gone are the Herman Miller Aeron desk chairs and the other technocrat excesses of the late 1990s when dot-coms burned through money and hype, throwing lavish launch parties, staffing up quickly and spending millions on Super Bowl ads.

Emerging in their stead is a post-crash generation of stingy startups using ingenuity to minimize the cost of turning raw ideas into viable businesses.

They hire slowly and avoid using recruiters. They take advantage of plunging technology prices. They generate buzz by word of mouth. They establish overseas operations to lower labor costs. They scrounge computers and furniture from the free section of community Web site Craigslist. And, when they raise venture capital, they hoard it, fearful of blowing their shot at making it.

Join Jordan as he describes the path that eBay has taken to its position of e-commerce leader in Canada, and how buyers and sellers alike are creating and building businesses through the eBay platform.  The event is interactive with participation and questions from the audience most welcome.  Jordan will also touch on the experience of introducing eBay to our unique market, as witnessed by the recent launch of eBay Canada’s French-language site; future trends in the modern dot com era; technology and convergence; and how eBay is adopting to rapid technological changes through the recent acquisitions and creation of technically innovative properties such as PayPal, Kijiji and Skype.

An emerging Canadian competitor to the TSX responded that shaving transaction times is a basic function in an era when trading firms jostle for space in the buildings that house exchange computers in order to take advantage of shorter signal transits at the speed of light.

"Without wanting to get into the competitive aspect, low latency is just part of what you have to provide," said Richard Carleton, vice-president of corporate development at the Canadian Trading and Quotation System, or CNQ, established last year and promising a faster and cheaper alternative to the established markets.

Trading algorithms automatically break up large orders into bite sizes and feed them directly into the market. But they can be tuned to execute almost any strategy. Some aim simply to capture the average price over a day, others to gain an edge by, say, trading more heavily at the opening and close, when volume is high, and less when it slows down around lunchtime. And they can be customized, for example, to sell stock stealthily over several weeks if a manager holds a 3% position in a particular stock and wants to cut it to 1%. Not only (...read more...)

It won't surprise anyone that my team at NBC Universal Digital Media is currently leading a major social networking initiative. I guess every online media firm is doing something in this area. We know we're already late. But unlike Fox, our approach has been different.

Instead of buying an existing social networking destination (Digital Media evaluated some candidates back in the summer before I joined the team), the decision was made to internally build the platform grounds up - we do have a few 3rd party partners to give us a jump start. The decision not to buy was mainly due to integration challenges and the inability of most of 3rd party social networking destinations to scale, a key aspect for a large media firm like ours.

Ten volunteers were shown a computer screen covered in over 650 identical symbols, including one rotated version of the symbol.

They were asked to decide which side of the screen the rotated image was on.

Given a fraction of a second to look at the screen, the subjects were 95% accurate.

But when they were allowed to scrutinize the image for over a second, they were only 70% accurate.

Dr Li Zhaoping, of UCL's Department of Psychology said: "This finding seems counter-intuitive.