Grover Righter - General Manager & VP Marketing, iMobileInternet.com explains the Web 2.X business case.

Toronto's MaRs Centre hosted another in its series of Web technology conferences following in the success of MESH 06 & 07. "Experience Tech 2008" was less a celebration of the excesses of consumer tech culture, and more an in-depth exploration of how to monetize the opportunities the cultural shift Web X.0 generates. While there were few moments of deep insight at this conference, what became apparent is that the language described as Web 2.0 is now an integral part of the business idiom. According to speaker Grover Righter, companies now more than ever realize that they have to understand the new ways customers are empowered or they'll lose touch with the marketplace. Even worse, they'll be unable to respond to customer complaints on sites like the consumerist and will lose customers as a result.

Grover's message to entrepreneurs was uplifting: money can be made from good ideas and good execution. No market is too small. Get revenue up to $5 million and sell your company for multiples of 5 to 10 times revenue (really). In his world, $10 million dollar companies routinely sell for $50 million to the right buyer. Because business is embracing Web 2.0, any company that is well entrenched in the market now can expect to be pursued. Market makers are jumping into the market, so be prepared.

There were a number of useful panel discussions including one on Web 2.0 aptly led by MESH co-founder Stuart MacDonald (Moderator) and including David Crowe – Microsoft, Jeff Fedor - Founder Ardesic, Covarity, and Leila Boujnane - Idée Inc. Another useful discussion was on the growing influence of mobile moderated by Randall Howard – Verdexus, David Neale – TELUS, and Grover Righter - iMobileInternet.

The (...read more...)

Mark Evans interviews Craiglist CEO, Jim Buckmaster.

Some notable quotes:

"People can assemble their entire lives off the site."

Q: Someone estimated that Craiglist could make 20 times its revenue if it were slightly more aggressive.

A: "The way we do things is actually a lot more fun than worrying about making more and more money."

"Classifieds is an enormous business... it is moving on line. The Internet is a spectacular medium for classifieds."

"The newspaper business is about twice as profitable as the average business in the U.S."





And more...

"eBay acquired a pre-existing stake in the company in 2004... they have been a good partner."

"The one thing we may worry about is what government might do around net neutrality."

"The number of users and page views keeps doubling every year."

An interesting metric: 175,000 pageviews /kwh

Stuart MacDonald begins day 2 of MESH 2.0

This morning's keynote is from Richard Edelman, global CEO of Edelman PR.



Here are a few memorable quotes from Edelman:

"PR best used creates a runway of trust."

Every year Edelman does a "trust barometer."

Persuade companies to give up control of the message. "Too much control, not enough credibility..."

"Free media (read blogs here) is so much more powerful than traditional media."


I hate it when PR people are sincere and likable, it messes with my world view.

Chevy Tahoe... they benefited from not putting their fist down and by letting the discussion run its course. If you are in trouble... in the soup, let the soup cool off before you put your finger in it.

The example of Michael Scoble at Microsoft... mid level is best to start. Let the mid levels talk.

"The word spin has no place in our company." "It is the single thing that has the most potential to harm our company.'

"I don't want to be a spinmeister!"

Austin Hill

Further news from this session - the conference web site, http://meshconference.com has this posting about Austin Hill:

Now, this is cool: Austin Hill and Ron Dembo are launching a program called Dark Green PC that will use open-source software to help people reduce the amount of energy used to power personal computers. Hill said the key to making Dark Green a success is making it a social and fun activity by letting people broadcast on Facebook, on their blogs, etc. how much energy they’re saving. The question is how much energy could we save just by turning off our screen savers: Hill said if 100 million people installed the software on their computers, it’s equivalent to planting 13 million trees, or taking nine million cars off the road, and not building 200 power plants. “This is an example of something small that can have a huge impact,” he said. Dark Green is looking for a open-source project leader, and hopes to have some early code developed by the Fall.

Tom Williams


His shoes

I'll come back to this segment of the day later but before then let me leave you with some quotes from this session.

"Return on generosity" "Inspire Forward" Want to be part of "moments of inspiration" "We become obsessed with a solution before we understand the problem." "There is so much skepticism around good intentions."

"We are still seeing the "failover" of Internet 1.0" Being able to have "Human agency" "Just because it is online doesn't make it good." "Consequences of your permanent record"

The MaRS Centre, Toronto, at 8:00 AM, Wednesday May 30th.

It is a perfect morning for the start of the MESH 2.0 conference - not that we'll want to venture too far away from the darkened MaRS auditorium. Today's speakers include TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington, Deborah Kaplan from ZeroFootPrint, and, of all people, money-manager turned Liberal politician, Garth Turner. In between their talks will be a host of others all riding the wave of Web 2.0.

The audience is part of the mix of course. As Time Magazine noted, WE as in people power on the Net, are a monolithic force of radical change-makers who are disinter-mediating traditional media and politics in a way that no one truly understands. Yet. In spite of the hype associated with such ideas there is truth in the assertion. Companies that were cutting edge in the first Internet era are struggling to reinvent themselves. Cultural institutions who basically ignored the first Internet wave are now doing back flips to position themselves as change leaders. Some will succeed. Others won't.

The reason I like MESH is because it is not a traditional tech conference. The founders - all industry experts - came together to re-imagine what a conference would look like in a post-barcamp world. MESH 1.0 embraced that ideal. It looks as though 2.0 will do the same.

I'll be doing as much blogging as I can today, but I really want to absorb the major ideas presented here and have some time to reflect before discussing them on this site. Stay tuned.


The MESH 2.0 audience


Stuart kicks off MESH 2.0


Michael Arrington, TechCrunch


How many people filter the MESH conference, through their cellphone cameras


Micahel Arrington explains, patiently I thought, how to get covered by Techcrunch

Tomorrow MESH 2.0 kicks off. I have to admit to being more than a little curious about what great ideas will surface this year. Last year I live blogged the conference. I might do a little of that this year but I really want to take the time to dive into MESH's zeitgeist a bit more. Until then, here are some thoughts from last year's MESH by RadiantCore's Jay Goldman:

I asked some audience members to send me their thoughts on the conference for posting on Gagglescape. Jay Goldman of RadiantCore, one of the BarCampTdot organizers, offered the following:

Some thoughts on Mesh:

- I've been to many conferences that were planned in much longer amounts of time, most of which where chaotic and disappointing. Stuart, Rob, Mark, Mike, and Matthew did a wonderful job of pulling together an informative and interactive two days in a remarkably short amount of time.

- The network connectivity, especially on day one when they had many of the ports blocked, could have been much better. Conferences for the tech crowd need gobs and gobs of bandwidth almost before they need anything else.

- The mix of tech and marketing folk was fantastic and made for some excellent networking. The two sides of the fence are often divided by great chasms where collaboration and mutual respect go to die. Mesh really helped to build some bridges, at least in the Toronto area.

- I liked the mixed streams of sessions because it made it easier to plan my day.  It would have been interesting to also cross the streams and have some panels made up of marketers and technologists -for example, I would definitely have attended a debate between Steve Rubel and Chris Messina on the relative merits of blogging as a marketing and information (...read more...)

Matt Thompson, director of Save the Internet's award-winning "Independence Day"video, joins City TV's New Media Specialist Amber MacArthur; online expertKris Krug; and consultants Mark Kuznicki and Jason Roks to talk 'net neutrality' at nextMEDIA: The Future of Digital Content, Canada's premiere event for digital content producers. The sister event to the Banff World Television Festival, nextMEDIA takes place June 8 - 10, 2007 at the Fairmont Banff Springs in Banff, Alberta.

Dubbed the ‘First Amendment of the Internet' in the United States, ‘net neutrality’ has been called "THE central issue in the development of the architecture of the media platform of the future." It aims to ensure the public can view the smallest blogs just as easily as the largest corporate Websites. Although the issue has yet to gain the same momentum in Canada as it has the United States, that could all change if a report by the federally appointed Telecommunications Policy Review Panel that recommends changes to the Telecommunications Act is implemented.

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...)

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.

One of Web 2.0's recent offsprings is http://www.twitter.com. Here is the site's pitch:

A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!

OK, so, why is that interesting and who the hell cares? From a socio-political perspective I suppose the fact that thousands of people are posting to say "look at me, this is what I am doing right now," says something about who were are as an increasingly wired world. But saying something and meaning something (or having meaning) are entirely different things.

The site is probably best described as a venue for people who don't have the patience to wait for their fifteen minutes of fame - thirty seconds now and again will do just fine thanks. McLuhan foretold an coming age of increased tribalism and this is just more evidence of his thesis. Oh, and for those of you who think he meant that uncritically as a good thing, well, go back and read him again.

Still, the site has a degree of potential -- it may over time become a meaningful tool to unite diverse people. It may even me a good way to propagate your URL across the Googlebot searched webiverse. But it seems a shame that the best we can do with these potentially powerful tools is to twitter.

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...)

Want to know what it takes to be innovative in your company? here is Bob Sutton's personal advice:

I talked about what I’ve learned about teaching people to innovate from academic research, teaching classes in the d.school and Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and from working with companies like IDEO, HP, and SAP. I emphasized five points and their implications for policy. I doubt that many of you will be surprised by any of these ideas, but knowing is not the same is doing. Few of these practices are used at the university level – not just in the AER, throughout the world. Here are the five points:

1 Producing smart individuals is the first step; teaching them to collaborate is the second step.

2 Teach people how to fight as if they are right and listen as if they are wrong.

3. Teach experts to seek out novices, and novices to seek out experts.

4. Teach people to treat innovation as an import-export business.

5. Teaching people how to succeed isn’t enough; teach them how to fail too.

I also added that renowned innovators – from Charles Darwin to Steve Jobs – not only have good ideas, they also always seem to be able to sell their ideas or to hook-up with people who can do it for them.

I like point 4. Too many of us don't understand the economic value of innovation. Shifting mental gears to consider it as an exportable product may be a good first step to overcoming that inertia.

For anyone in the financial community who is interested in the potential of what Don Tapscott calls "Wikinomics," this weekend saw the Toronto technology community embrace the collaboration form to generate new ideas for the TTC's obsolete website. The one day event -- held at the popular Gladstone Hotel on Queen Street West -- brought together the TTC's top brass including Chair Adam Giambrone and Commissioner Joe Mihevic with some very smart and enthusiastic brainstorming participants.

Organized by many of the people who bring the city its successful BarCamp and DemoCamp Wiki-organized gatherings (David Crow - thanks), the Toronto Transit Camp is a case study in how the "Wisdom of Crowds" phenomenon can be applied to difficult problems.

In his opening remarks to camp participants Jay Goldman, of Radiant Core, said the day would provide answers to these three questions:

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?

The day's events provided answers to the first question. It seems everyone left on a high knowing that they'd contributed to improving the city and "Bettering the Better Way." Mark Kuznicki, of ReMarkk Consulting, framed the day's events as an approach or system that can be used to tackle city-related issues. Here is an excerpt from Mark's blog:

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...)

Gagglescape's sister blog is http://www.corporateknightsforum.com. We have a series from the Davos World Economic Forum Conference that you may enjoy.

By Toby Heaps: Editor of Corporate Knights magazine which publishes the annual Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations list each year at the World Economic Forum.

----------------------------

Environment themes and their relationship with the economy, particularly climate change, are hot this year in Davos.

Case in point. Last night I was waiting outside the Belvedere, the main Davos Hotel where the glitterati gather at night. As I was running a little late and it was quite a long line to get inside the hotel through the security check, I wondered if anyone would notice if I budded a little. But when I noticed that the Premier of Quebec was waiting behind me in the cold line, my better instincts suggested that was not a good idea, especially in Switzerland.

The Premier and I were both heading for similar events. He was off to speak on a panel with UK Conservative Leader David Cameron on climate change and energy security, and I had a dinner to co-host. I was looking forward to the dinner for two reasons: to hear what the world’s leading investment bankers had to say on taking the good fight (climate change, human rights) to the political stage, and I was curious how the red-blooded Wall Street crowd (Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Swiss Re) would appreciate the 100 per cent vegetarian-meal I had ordered for all of them.

It turned out that the hi-carb but low-carbon veggie-lasagna was a big hit, but my dinner conversation was interrupted when a senior Canadian aluminum company executive had to go outside to answer questions from a newspaper survey on whether his company supported the Kyoto Protocol and what they were doing about it. (...read more...)

For Gagglescape.com readers who just can't get enough of Apple's new products, we have this fan video from New York. Apologies in advance to James Blunt fans: