Arstechnica.com has an interesting story about NBC's VP of Digital Innovation, Sab Kanaujia, and his on-again, off-again post on what NBC Universal is going to do to compete with upstart media companies YouTube and MySpace. It turns out that Kanaujia did not want to spill the beans so the post got pulled - except, it didn't. Thanks to Google cache:

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.

Okay, we've all done this - hit the submit button only to realize we forgot to spell check or fact check or . . . In this case, we can guess that people at NBC did not want their tactics to reach the competition. That's the problem when blogs become the stream-of-consciousness tools they were meant to be, people say things that would never see the light of day in the print world. But that's fine. The transparency of ideas is building a momentum of entrepreneurship that will launch the next economic golden age; or, maybe it will destroy us. I wonder what Kanaujia thinks.

Many in the business community believe in Malcolm Gladwell's maxim, "Don't think--blink!" When a CEO of a company is well-versed in the issues and functions of their company, often decisions have to be made on a moments notice. Having insight in how to make better snap decisions can make the difference between success or failure.

Gladwell's book, Blink, was partially based on science and partially on anecdotal evidence. Yesterday, the BBC ran a science story that adds legitimacy to his argument. Researchers have determined that in some situations people make better decisions in a fraction of a second than they do when given time to study a problem:

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.

All of this goes a long way in supporting those successful people who credit their success to so-called intuition. That is a very human trait: when we don't know the reason for something we assign it to a category that embraces the undefined.

The truth is we can prepare ourselves to make good, fast decisions. It is called hard work and preparation. Welcome to the future -- and the past.

It is that time of the year again: time to look back over the last 365 days, admire your accomplishments, cringe at your failures and plan for the new year.

Did you learn anything in 2006? Do you have what it takes to succeed in '07 or are you and your team ready for a hard landing? Business 2.0 is offering advice from 50 well-known, successful people. Gagglescape.com brings you eleven of the best. These are people who recognize that successful businesses need people power and innovative ideas in order to rise to the top. How do you get innovative? Take a look at my story on the key lessons of innovation. After you've done that read through what these eleven success stories have to offer:

Sergey Brin
Co-founder, Google
SUCCEED WITH SIMPLICITY

Chris DeWolfe
Co-founder, Myspace
KEEP SOCIAL NETWORKS SOCIAL

Chad Hurley
Co-founder, YouTube
GIVE YOUR STARTUP A FIGHTING CHANCE

1. Test first. Launch your product or service before you have funding. See how people respond to it before you have a PowerPoint and business plan - have something people can use, and go from there.

2. Seek outside feedback. As you start building the product, don't assume that you know all the answers. Listen to the community and adapt. We had a lot of our own ideas about how the service would evolve. Coming from PayPal and eBay, we saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn't see anyone using our product that way, so we didn't add features to support it.

3. Give partners what they want. Approach your business partners with concepts that they can get their heads around, and try to respond to their needs. An interesting example is what we've done with the music labels. With Warner and others, (...read more...)

What started as a hobby for lawyer Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, a Web 2.0 blog, is now so profitable he's taking time away to think about what the future might hold (Gagglescape aspires to such a fate). The San Francisco Gate has the story.

In the 18 months since he started the blog, Arrington has emerged as a major player in a tech scene that is quickly changing the media landscape. Bloggers, using inside information and posting at all hours of the day and night, are often beating traditional media to big stories and are setting the news agenda from Silicon Valley to Washington.

Last night's attendants of the MIT Enterprise Forum got to see what makes a company stand out. Touted as Canada's IPO success of 2006, Evertz Technologies went public with a $67 million offering in June of this year. They now boast a market cap of one billion dollars. How did they do it when every other IPO of the season seemed to stall from a lack of interest? The big answer is through exceptional execution by a talented management team. But as we all know, big answers are made up of hundreds of smaller, critical details.

Brian Campbell, the EVP of Business Development for Evertz, is a details guy. Trained as an engineer, he has an MBA and years of experience in Toronto's financial community. More than that, he has the ability to understand the numerous functions that come together to create success. He shared his insight with the audience last night. Campbell explained how Evertz took a $2 million dollar a year company to $150 million in eight short years. It was not luck. The team executed with clinical efficiency on the key factors behind their growth: Engineering, self-financiing, innovation, and team-building.

I'll write more about this remarkable story later in the day.

Update: Let's take a brief look at how the management at Evertz took a series of small steps over time that resulted in building a very successful company. Campbell explained that in 1997 two former Leitch Technology employees identified an opportunity to buy a stable, 30 plus year old tech company with about 17 employees. At the time, they surveyed the market horizon and decided that high-definition television - HDTV - was going to be a big industry once governments settled on regulatory standards. Thus they began focusing their company's products towards HDTV. Smart move.

WIth support (...read more...)

If you haven't had the opportunity to attend the MIT Enterprise Forum yet, then this Wednesday's scheduled topic is a good reason to come. Event coordinator Mark Lawrence of North Crest Partners writes this update today:

Look at Today's National Post - Financial Post for Cover Story on
Evertz Technologies - IPO Success of 2006 - The Story of How This Company Achieved A Successful IPO without ever needing outside VC funding - A Business Case Presentation and Panel Discussion

Back by popular demand is our Business Case Study with Brian Campbell EVP Business Development of Evertz talking about the trials and tribulations of how Evertz, now with a $1 billion market cap, became a world leading provider of equipment to the broadcasting industry. Join Brian and our three leading industry panelists to hear them talk about and critique, question and examine the path that Evertz has taken. The event is interactive with participation and questions from the audience most welcome.

We also have a guest mini presentation by the Ontario Centres of Excellence about the resources it provides entrepreneurs.

The Toronto Chapter of the MIT Enterprise Forum is one of 24 worldwide. We invite participation from alumni of any institution. You do not need to be an MIT Grad or be invited by one. We are a not-for-profit organization designed to be a forum and networking event for technology entrepreneurs, investors and service providers.




Register today at: https://alum.mit.edu/smarTrans/user/Register.dyn?eventID=7737&groupID=921

This video was shot at a Web 2.0 conference in Ireland. Canter gives a four minute overview of Web 2.0's end game.

The synergism of social-networking and the Net are just now beginning to gel. This short video provides a glimpse into where market forces are taking us.

I am on my way to New York to present at an urban design and sustainability symposium hosted by the United Nations.

I decided to take the only mass transit option to get to the airport rather than take a cab. I hiked to the TTC subway station and had a relatively easy 23 minute ride to Kipling station. Then things got funky. Instead of the 192 "Express" bus arriving on time, it was ten minutes late. One normal city bus connects the subway to Canada's biggest airport. It runs every twenty minutes. Sort of. There wasn't room for one additional passenger and their bags when the bus left.

Can you imagine if London, England or Paris offered similar system? Not easily. This is why Porter Air is allowed to exist. people have no faith in our public infrastructure and, if today's experience is an indication, it is understandable.

Think of how fewer taxis would be polluting our air if we could do something as simple as having a real express bus system leaving the Kipling station every five minutes. It would be an inexpensive solution to a grave problem. Even if it cost $5 more I know many people would pay if, only if, they could depend on it.

This Thursday evening I am moderating a panel (see Sunday's posting) with some local politicians. While the panel is not about our transit system per, it is about community development. Without a sustainable, effective transit system community development in our city will always be an illusion no matter how well-considered.

OK, if I sometime come across as being critical of the Canadian VC industry it is only because A) I am a somewhat frustrated entrepreneur, and B) I don't have to make the same decisions they have to make with other people's money.

Malcom Gladwell has a brief posting on his blog about the concept of "Degree of Difficulty." In essence it is about an insider's view of a situation versus an outsider's view. Good reading and it prompted me to give a hats-off to Brightspark and JLA Ventures this morning.

Sorry for the pun but the unstoppable Sean Wise offered Gagglescape.com this short video clip on the do's and don'ts of elevator pitching. It is a worthwhile 1:30 seconds long so take it away Sean . . .

Loewen and Partners launched its guest speaker series at the National Club this week with Dr. Michael Power's talk, "The Great Game of the 21st. Century."

Dr. Power is a portfolio manager and equity strategist at Investec Asset Management. Working in South Africa, Dr. Power is a long time specialist in the African resource market. His talk Wednesday night explored how the 19th Century geopolitical struggle named, "The Great Game," has returned to today's Asia.

The difference today is rather than China and India being subjects of colonial powers, they are emerging super powers -- the so-called Chinese Dragon and Indian Tiger. And they are beginning to flex their muscles. Dr. Power predicts that in less than ten years these countries will rival western economic performance. To support their exponential growth, both have engaged in a strategic pursuit of natural resources. That search has come to Africa and that continent is about to emerge as a resource powerhouse. Is Canada next?

Power draws some parallels to Frank Herbert's science fiction novel, "Dune." If you haven't read it, well, now is the time to pick up the trilogy. Herbert's forty year old description of a universe driven by the dominance of one scarce resource, "spice," predicts many of the geopolitical dynamics now facing the western world. Think O-I-L in the place of spice here, but also steel, copper, gold . . .

For commodity market managers these predictions suggest that the current downswing in the resource market is a minor retreat in what will be a prolonged and sustained bear market. Don't forget politics though. WiIl the US stand by as the world's resources are locked up by its economic partners? That is unlikely and recent activities in Iraq and Afghanistan may well have more to do with the "new" great game (...read more...)

Getting good advice is always welcome. Knowing it is good is another matter. Business Week Online interviews some of the Net's most successful names to find out their secrets for success. Here are some highlights:

Hoovers Online (a division of Dun & Bradstreet)
Launched in 1994
Dwayne Stradlin, president

Advice: Avoid anything that doesn't focus on the unique thing that your company does well. Protect it, invest in it. The other thing is to focus on scaling -- small companies sometimes run into a wall. They can't scale.

Bluefly
Founded in 1998
Melissa Payner, chief executive officer

Advice: Don't do something that's already well covered or already exploited in the marketplace. If you're the small guy, you're not going to come in and get noticed unless you have something different. We made sure that we identified our focus from a brand perspective. It wasn't like any designer could be on Bluefly. There was trust established that it would the "in" designers and [the] "right" designers and would [follow the latest] trend. We were arrogant about who would be on Bluefly. Once you decide, you have to be true to it.

Craigslist
Founded in 1995
Jim Buckmaster, chief executive officer

Advice: Don't do what users don't ask you to do. If you want to control your own future, don't accept outside money, like from VCs. Don't do marketing or advertising. As a startup company, those are some of the costliest things you can do. Those can chew up an enormous amount of money.

The story has more words of wisdom, some more wise than others. As an entrepreneur your job is to determine which words will make a difference to your company.

Friedman's The World Is Flat, How Companies Cope, Lesson #4:

The best companies are the best collaborators. In the flat world, more and more business will be done through collaborations within and between companies, for a very simple reason" The next layers of value creation -- whether in technology, marketing, biomedicine, or manufacturing -- are becoming so complex that no single firm or department is going to be able to master them alone.

The world -- especially the world of technology -- is so complex and specialized that no one company can dominate their market landscape: not even GE. What can smaller companies do to make sure they remain competitive in this environment? Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate says Friedman. There are millions of opportunities out there for companies who can put complex pieces together in new ways. Think of world flattening as a kind systematized version of what Buckminster Fuller use to describe as the Creative Generalist. These generalists, so it goes, are people who are highly skilled but who have chosen not to put blinkers over their eyes by narrowing their world-view through specialization. Fuller maintained that it is these people who piece together things that were formerly unassociated and thus create new wealth.

Friedman calls this the connection of knowledge pools through world-flattening and declares it a paradigm shift. I'm not sure that's what Thomas Kune had in mind when he developed the phrase but it is a shift in how we organize strategic information. Companies that are able to dip into these pools through the process of collaboration will have an advantage over their competitors as a result.

Rolls-Royce is an example of a large company that does collaboration well. Back in the 80s it decided to become more international in focus. They had long since divested themselves of (...read more...)

Friedman's The World Is Flat, How Companies Cope, Lesson #2:

And the small shall act big . . . One way small companies flourish in the flat world is by learning to act really big. And the key to being small and acting big is being quick to take advantage of all the new tools for collaboration to reach farther, faster, wider, and deeper.

There are always holes in markets that are poorly served by the larger players. Often a very small company with specific expertise in, say, a region can use a number of techniques to leverage their way to success. Friedman points to the logistics company Aramex as a example how a small, regional delivery service has grown large enough to take on the big, entrenched players. How is it done?

In Aramex's case their success begins with a strategic partnership. Aramex contacted a number of large logistics carriers offering the small company's knowledge of Middle East countries. Why build a network here when we can do it for you? Airborne Express jumped at the opportunity and Aramex was able to build its organization because it served the needs of its much larger partner. Over the years Aramex gained expertise in the software side of the logistics business and, with that capability, was able to embrace the new trend of Internet hosted logistics services. This unique offering overcame the "legacy" computing systems older competitors had to deal with. The result was Aramex could move more quickly than its competitors.

There are other examples of small companies acting big. In Canada, there was a time when Canada Trust (now TD Canada Trust) was a small trust company operating in and around London, Ontario. They were small but thought they could do something the much larger banks did not want to (...read more...)

Thomas L. Friedman's bestselling book, "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century," offers seven rules for how companies and even governments can deal with an increasingly flattened world (By "flattened" Friedman means technology-driven globalization). If you have not read the book and you run a technology sensitive business, well, start turning off the lights and locking the doors now because odds are your company is in for some big, not necessarily positive changes.

As a public service for all Gaggelscape's readers, we are going to review each of Friedman's seven rules. The first rule is:

When the world goes flat -- and you are feeling flattened -- reach for a shovel and dig inside yourself. Don't try to build walls.

So, what does Friedman mean by rule #1? First, almost everything can become a commodity. Cars, computers, accounting services, translation, software, etc., are all businesses that are becoming increaingly commoditized. In other words, those businesses are in a race to perpetually lower costs through global outsourcing. How does a company fight that trend? Do we continue to invest in process improvements and cost reductions that leave us with reduced margins? Dean Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Business says that design is the value-added differentiator in a world that is increasingly competitive. He argues that at some point making incremental process improvements only can go so far and odds are that a Chinese manufacturer or Indian Software company can drive costs lower than you can.

Friedman uses Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream as an example. Vanilla ice cream is a commodity, Cherry (Jerry) Garcia isn't. Imagination and product design are differentiators. Strangley, this surprises the investment community who are good at looking at historical cash flows but really bad at understanding dynamic market variables. That's one (...read more...)