By Alexandra Reid
The Canadian startup community rang in another win this week as RIM, the maker of BlackBerry phones and the new PlayBook tablet, acquired calendar and scheduling application Tungle.me.
RIM’s move to incorporate this new tool, as a continuation of its “development by acquisition” strategy, was essential because of the criticism RIM received for releasing its PlayBook prematurely, without native email, calendar and contact applications. While there is no official word that RIM will integrate Tungle into its tablet, industry experts expect it as a necessary move to compete with Apple.
I used the tool for the first time yesterday to schedule this interview with its CEO and founder Marc Gingras. Having never met Marc before, and having never used the tool before, my first impression was that it was a rather impersonal move, so I tried him first through Twitter as a (in my view) more personable engagement before also trying him on Tungle.
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This is the next contribution to this blog by Associate Bob Bailly, a Calgary-based neuro-marketing practitioner.
By Bob Bailly
In my first posting, I promised that this blog would investigate how human evolution has impacted the way we do business, why we are the way we are, and why we act and feel the way we do in our personal and business lives. When it comes to evolution, two areas of investigation are of interest: first, the evolution of the human brain as it relates to how we make decisions, and second, how and why we like to live and operate in tribes.
A few weeks ago a Globe and Mail column by Margaret Wente, The Amygdala Election, provided an eloquent discussion of both phenomena visibly on display in the current Canadian federal election.
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By Linda Forrest
One thing you can rely on in the media game is change. The media industry, as ever, has been aflutter this past week as trade publications both in North America and Europe either swallowed whole their counterparts in a high-profile merging of brands, or print editions of long-standing B2B trade publications announced their intentions of moving strictly online. In reaction, many proclaimed, once again, the death of the trade magazine.
There are various perspectives on why these shifts in the magazine world are taking place, including this detailed piece, written in a funerary tone, from Adweek’s editorial director and longtime prominent media figure, Michael Wolff. Meanwhile, as quoted in a Guardian piece that questions whether trade magazines have a shelf life,
David Levin, United Business Media chief executive, draws a comparison between the situation the trade press finds itself in today and 1912, “when there were a lot of blacksmiths about and we were about to get the motor car.”
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This is the 13th article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
In our various interviews for this series, one of the most elusive topics of discussion has been culture of risk. Elusive in that it strays into the realm of stereotype and generalization.
Can it be defined by borders, or is that a naive misconception? Is it somehow encoded in the DNA of one nation’s culture more than another, shaped and influenced by how much public policy favours free-market capitalism versus socialism, or all of the above?
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As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked serial entrepreneur Jason Flick to share some of his insights on getting tech to market with lean thinking. This is the first of his commentaries and we welcome your feedback.
By Jason Flick
You would have to be living under a rock not to have heard about the billions in venture capital flooding into the Valley. Venture firms raised over $60 billion in Q1 2011 alone. Some companies are ramping from zero to billions in revenue in years rather than decades. Students fresh out of school are being offered six-figure salaries, four-month signing bonuses and iPads to come on board. (VentureBeat summed it up well in this recent story.)
Of course, these stories seldom report that for every company like this, there are 99 others that flounder and end up as large financial craters.
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PR lessons from Playbook
April 19, 2011 by Linda Forrest
Happy Playbook release day, everyone! Today is the fateful day when Canada’s own Research in Motion begins selling its long awaited Playbook tablet. You might have heard that this was coming, as the media has been very hungry for news on tablets set to compete with iPad; it’s a topic we’ve covered here as well […]
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Taking the lean approach to market
April 18, 2011 by Francis Moran
It’s fitting that we follow up last week’s post on the strategic value of marketing in its purest sense as a process for enabling customer validation and iterative product development with a definition of this thing called lean startup.
Strategic marketing is a fundamental aspect of the lean startup methodology, a methodology first defined by Eric Ries almost three years ago […]
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Earth to startups: They won’t come just because you’re on social media
April 15, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
Earlier this week, we explained that so many startups fail because they adopt a “build it and they will come” mentality and neglect to define the market opportunity for their product […]
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Microcarbonated marketing mush
April 14, 2011 by Francis Moran
There may be few products more reduced to commodity status than mass-produced beer. (As Monty Python almost said, “Why is mass-produced beer like making love in a canoe? They’re both fucking close to water.” […]
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Conventional wisdom, common sense and that feeling in your gut
April 13, 2011 by Nick Quain
They are becoming the adages of management gurus and startup experts everywhere. So many popular catch phrases, they make your head spin. Build a great team. Know the right people. Learn from the experts. Manage your people. All young business leaders need to learn how to do these things, right? I say wrong […]
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What the Chilean miner rescue capsule can teach us about bringing technology to market
April 12, 2011 by Linda Forrest
This past weekend, my family went to the Canada Science & Technology Museum. I’m ashamed to admit that I hadn’t been there since I participated many, many moons ago in Encounters with Canada, but was pleasantly surprised that some of the things I remembered and liked were still there but that most of the museum had been updated since my last visit, nearly 20 years ago […]
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For the last time, they won’t come just because you’ve built it
April 11, 2011 by Francis Moran
“Companies that can’t clearly articulate their customer and market are not real serious companies, they are research projects … Engineering and marketing need to work together from the get go.”
We began this series a couple of months ago with this timeless quote from Band of Angels’ Ronald Weissman. It strikes to the heart of what all of us here take as gospel […]
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Don’t worry: It’s only your reputation on the line
April 08, 2011 by Anil Dilawri
Have you ever seen a bad presentation before? Of course you have, everyone has. The next time you see a bad presentation, and I’m guessing it will be soon, take 20 seconds and write down three adjectives to describe the presenter […]
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It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]