By Francis Moran
The official theme was “Ottawa’s digital media industry,” and the gamers, social networkers and content developers were there in spades. But what I heard at Wednesday night’s regular Start-up Drop-in put on by The Ottawa Network at LaBarge Weinstein had as much or more to do with propagating and supporting the entire start-up — indeed, the entire technology — community in Ottawa than it did with digital media per se.
In keeping with the format now well established by LWLaw partner and event host James Smith, we heard briefly from several different actors before the headline act shared what is billed as “words of wisdom.”
First out of the gate was a quartet of self-described “next generation” entrepreneurs who see themselves as having a serious role to play in cultivating and supporting their fellow tech entrepreneurs. Putting their blogging skills where their mouths are, they run StartupOttawa.com, an active blog by and about the start-up community. Mercury Grove‘s Scott Annan, Shopify‘s Scott Lake, TravelPod‘s Luc Levesque and Jean-Sylvain Sormony of Fuel all talked about the importance of cultivating “our generation of entrepreneurs,” as Lake put it.
Two start-ups whose very business model is all about propagation went next.
David Thompson described his company, Noleo, and its platform that hosts social networking applications, allowing them to simply and simultaneously run on a number of social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Alan Isfan’s FaveQuest is also all about propagating content across social networking sites, in this case taking broadcast television material and packaging it for redistribution to the social networking ecosystem.
Ben Houston, a fascinating young developer whose computational magic has been seen in several Hollywood movies, was an example of the propagational potential of the Start-up Drop-in itself since that’s where, a few months ago, he first met Keith Taylor, the business executive he has now recruited as president of his company, Exocortex Technologies.
I was momentarily stuck when Distil Interactive CEO Robert Thompson began to share his words of wisdom since it was not immediately clear to me how his comparison of Ottawa to other tech-savvy centres in which he worked would fit into my propagation theme. But his talk was really about challenging the 50 or so company leaders and managers in the room to propagate their obvious enthusiasm, commitment and empowerment throughout the rest of their company employees and, indeed, throughout the rest of the community.
It was a high energy evening, as have been the last several of these drop-ins.
By Francis Moran
A fascinating array of new applications, ranging from a web site allowing private pilots and other airport nuts to share their enthusiasm and knowledge, to a sophisticated new system to reduce intellectual property contamination while writing software code, were demonstrated to a standing-room-only crowd last night at Ottawa’s ninth DemoCamp.
A new twist on the well-established forum for code jockeys and entrepreneurs to show off their latest projects was its move to the second-floor Velvet Room in the Byward Market, a literal and figurative step up from the grotty basement venue in which it had appeared in the past. While there were a couple of glitches, most notably a speed-challenged internet connection, the new room was a great venue.
As an inveterate traveller and wannabe pilot, my favourite demo of the evening was David Megginson’s Our Airports. David’s information-rich web site, clearly a labour of love, features details on virtually every airport in the world, with the site’s users adding their own particular insight, everything from the cheapest aviation fuel and reviews of the customs facility to where the closest java can be obtained, the latter being critical information for what David called “coffee-starved” pilots.
You don’t have to be a pilot to enjoy the site. Anyone can join, create a list of all the airports they’ve ever been to, and plot those airports on a map of the world.
A presentation by SIMtone CDU of what it called a “virtual personal computer” had at least one member of the audience scratching his head. I missed a good bit of this first demo but others clearly were wondering about its utility. The concept seemed sound and a logical extension of utility computing. Put everything — storage, CPU, applications, printing, the works — in the cloud and allow access to it from a browser, soft client or hardware terminal. Problem is, you need a computer to access your virtual computer which kind of obviates its value proposition.
Protecode, an Ottawa company that rolled out a few months back, demonstrated its intellectual property management system that allows every piece of code, whether originally created or imported from some other source, to be reliably classified and tagged, with code that might create IP contamination issues down the road flagged as soon as it is imported. The benefit, its developers argued, is that the exact provenance of every line of code is established.
An interesting application, Stockify, allows value investors to calculate whether a stock is fairly or over-priced, or represents a buying opportunity. I remain a bit confused by the application’s ability to amend an inputed growth rate for the company being researched, with the tool altering the growth rate both historically and going forward. I have promised to get together with the developer to further thrash out our competing math theories.
And, finally, PicSphere appealed to the former commercial photographer in me with its nifty browser-based application allowing on-site shooters to swiftly organize and offer for immediate sale the pictures they take at sporting and other events.
By Francis Moran
I’ve written here before about the abject failure of most technology implementations intended to assist in the delivery of customer service. And I know criticising customer service is such an easy target that it makes shooting fish in a barrel seem a highly skilled undertaking. Still, my experience last night with Rogers, one of Canada’s two major telecommunications and cable television providers, really did take the cake.
Now, Rogers is so pathetic at customer service that I used to have a Treo phone on its wireless network that consistently — and erroneously — told me the operation had failed every time I tried to perform a call-forwarding function. I lived with the problem for nearly four years rather than try to find the Rogers person who might be able to fix it.
Last night, I had to call them. Although the company has a web portal that is supposed to allow me to manage my wireless services, it almost never is able to do what I need it to do. If Rogers really cared about service, I would be able to do what I wanted to online or, at least, seamlessly switch from online self-service to an operator-assisted session, with that operator able to see what I had been trying to do, able to co-browse through the online portal with me and actually help me get what I need.
And lest you think I’m describing some kind of crazy wonderland here, let me assure you that the ability to do just that exists today in the form of our client ciboodle and its customer interaction software.
But enough of a client plug; back to my story.
I couldn’t get what I needed online so I had to call. (Insert shudder o’ loathsome horror here.) The IVR system was a little changed, and seemed to be intended to drive me to the right department within Rogers’s customer service operation so I followed it down the rabbit hole until it concluded I wanted to talk to someone about my business wireless service.
Sorry, Alice; wrong hole. The agent who answered asked me my name, pulled up a record, asked my postal code and said it didn’t match what was on his record. Of course it didn’t because, helpful IVR notwithstanding, he had pulled up my residential cable account, not my business wireless service. And then he knew almost nothing about what I wanted, which was to upgrade my data plan, and I had to tell him what his own product offerings were so he could sell them to me.
But at least I eventually got what I needed. I wasn’t even that minimally successful with Black & Decker, whose online store was also my starting point yesterday to source a new battery for my cordless grass trimmer. Unable to find the product anywhere online, I used a form to send an email asking where I might find a replacement battery. I listed my part number and the model number of the trimmer and asked where online I could find one or who here in Ottawa, Canada, might stock them.
I received a reply in suspiciously swift order and, sure enough, it had all the hallmarks of a machine-generated — and therefore nearly useless — response. Not only was it hopelessly generic, it actually directed me to click on a URL that took me to one of those advertising services that squat on like-sounding domain names, in this case www.blackanddeckertools.com.
Dear Black & Decker: Do you care so little about your brand and its reputation that you can be so careless in safeguarding it? Do you have so many customers that you can afford to send them to a wholly unaffiliated domain-name squatter? Is this maybe one reason why your stock price is languishing near its 52-week low, about two-thirds of what it was a year ago? Does lousy customer service damage the bottom line?
Just another day in customer service paradise, I guess.
By Francis Moran
I have been soliciting opinions all this week on a story by the Canadian Press, carried in the Globe and Mail on Monday, that said the Business Development Bank of Canada‘s venture capital wing had been urged by a federal government-ordered study to “cut its losses more often, abandoning the dogs in its portfolio in favour of the stars.” With the government-owned bank a key investor in many Canadian technology companies, the implications of this could be bad news for those still working on achieving their business plans.
(In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that the BDC is a welcome lender to inmedia and I have always been very happy with its service of our operating loans, even if the money does come at a bit of a premium. Additionally, we have a further, if indirect, dependency on the bank given that many of our clients count the BDC among their investors and, therefore, the source of the funds they use to pay for our services. Some of these clients have a happy and valued relationship with the BDC as VC; others are considerably less enamoured.)
“BDC seems to have some difficulty to walk away from non-performing investments to concentrate on winners,” the CP story quoted the report’s authors saying. “Build winners, walk away from losers.”
I asked several people in the community for their reaction to the story and their opinion of what it might mean if the bank became a less patient investor.
Most sidestepped that issue entirely and went straight to the heart of what they thought was a more relevant criticism of the bank, an apparent unwillingness to take the lead on new investments. BDC’s venture capitalists, many told me, are happy to have another investor do the initial due diligence and offer the first term sheet and only then will they pile on.
One person I spoke to noted that the bank’s charter is very clear that it does have a mandate to be an engine of economic growth for Canada. While not suggesting that BDC should become as interventionist an instrument of government economic policy as, say, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, it clearly should play a more nuanced role than your average cold-blooded VC.
Perhaps, in the end, BDC has the balance right. Allow some other more hard-headed investor to validate the investment before joining the syndicate, but then be a little more patient in waiting for the investment to pay dividends. There certainly was no appetite among the people I consulted to have the bank become more cut-throat in its treatment of what the CP called “the dogs in its portfolio.”
I’d love to hear from others on this issue. Should BDC walk away more swiftly from its underperforming investments or should it play a waiting game? Either way, what would that mean for Canadian technology companies?
By Francis Moran
In the ongoing, mainly good-natured battle between the ink-stained wretches of the journalism trade and the spin doctors of the public relations game, it is generally acknowledged by both sides that they (the journos, that is) are seen as the forces of goodness and light while we, the spinners, are evil incarnate. (Personally, I have found PR to be a more honestly straightforward, if more obviously commercial, proposition than the necessary compromises, deals and half-truths of journalism, but that’s an entire other blog post. Or three.)
I am lapsing into this philosophical musing today because we have won another one over to the dark side, and we’re proud of it.
Today is the first day at inmedia — indeed, the first day in PR — for Leo Valiquette, who spent nearly 10 years on the other side of the great divide, the last eight or so at the Ottawa Business Journal where he most recently was editor of the weekly. Leo is well known around the city and, if the number of congratulatory emails I’ve received since news of his move first slipped out are any indication, is also well respected.
We know Leo from many years of effective dealings with the OBJ on behalf of our clients and have always found him to be a good writer, with a firm grasp of the issues and a decent guy. We’re delighted to have him on board.
Welcome to the dark side, Leo. The plans to the death star are on your laptop.
