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Hostility reigns at Ottawa Network event

• Posted by Francis Moran
• October 09, 2008
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By Francis Moran

Defiantly channeling the “greed is good” credo of character Gordon Gekko from his self-avowed favourite movie “Wall Street,”  venture capitalist Paul Dawalibi from St. Lawrence Capital ruffled more than a few feathers at an Ottawa Network event at TheCodeFactory last night.

“Arrogant putz,” one attendee said to me as I headed out the door, while another, accused by Dawalibi of asking a “hostile question,” retorted back, “That was a hostile presentation.” Other opinions were equally scathing. “Why would any self-respecting entrepreneur submit themselves to that,” one audience member asked me rhetorically, while another wondered, “Is this is what it’s come to in Ottawa that we have to put up with the likes of that,” after commenting that Dawalibi’s presentation and approach seemed rather barren of ethics.

Indeed, at one point Dawalibi, whose fund claims an interest in backing green technology, told the 40 or 50 people in the room, “If it (an investment in a company’s technology) earns me a 10x return, I don’t care how badly it pollutes.”

It was a remarkably unrepentent and jarringly discordant approach at a time when greed and unrestrained capitalism have toppled so many of Gekko’s modern-day Wall Street compatriots.

Dawalibi’s “I am not your friend” pitch to entrepreneurs was also in sharp contrast to the other funding source represented at last night’s event, the Ontario government’s Accelerator Investment Fund. Investment manager Shirley Speakman put as much emphasis on the friendly and nurturing support structures the fund offers its portfolio companies as she did on the half-million dollars she could invest.

Francis Moran

Posted in:

• Technology marketing

A splash of joy in the city

• Posted by Francis Moran
• October 08, 2008
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By Francis Moran

Okay, this has nothing whatsoever to do with technology or marketing but I just had to write about this joyous new oasis in the heart of our city.

All summer long, as I trundled to and from work, I have been monitoring activity at a small city park on Main Street in Ottawa east. The neighbourhood, badly mauled when the Queensway — what our British readers would call a motorway and our American readers a freeway — split it in two more than 20 years ago, is gradually recovering. New residential developments have gone in, a lively farmers market on the grounds of Saint Paul University draws crowds every Saturday and the highly desirable blocks between Main Street and the Rideau River contain, by my reckoning, some of the most attractive housing to be found in Ottawa.

A couple of weekends ago, there were crowds of children and adults working on the park site so I knew some big changes were pending. Just what they were up to was immediately evident when I biked down Main Street on my way to work the following Monday and was greeted with this joyous burst of colour and life. It was such a happy scene I actually burst out laughing as I pedaled past.

One of the mainstays of Main Street, in operation for more than 100 years, has been Lady Evelyn Alternative School, which my two lads attended, first at the excellent Rainbow Kids’ School, a preschool housed in the same building, and then through eight years of kindergarten and elementary school. A few blocks up from the park, Lady Evelyn is an amazing institution in this city, even if its decided lack of emphasis on academic performance has teachers at other schools rolling their eyes. It is, rather, a warm, community-oriented and nurturing place, where a dozen or more languages can be heard spoken at any school gathering and where my boys thrived in their personal development and did well enough academically to qualify for competitive arts and enriched programs when they moved on to junior and senior high school.

The new kids park, formally known as the Old Ottawa East Children’s Garden, is very much a partnership between students at Lady Evelyn and a group called Sustainable Living Ottawa East. According to a story in the Ottawa Citizen, each student at the school painted one of the 300 pickets that border the park while corporations such as Home Depot, Microsoft Canada and UPS kicked in materials and money. Despite a late start, an organic vegetable garden has yielded some produce this year and other plants, many of them donated by neighbours, abound.

It’s a beautiful thing, and I salute everyone involved.

Francis Moran

Posted in:

• Random thoughts

All it takes is one bad apple

• Posted by Leo Valiquette
• October 06, 2008
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By Leo Valiquette

All right, just to make sure everyone is caught up and on the same page now, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did not have a heart attack over the weekend.

But all it took was a bogus posting to CNN’s online citizen journalism portal to demonstrate once again just how viral the web can be and and sucker punch Apple’s stock price. This has sparked plenty of commentary and navel gazing today about the risks of allowing average citizens to break so-called “news” without their scoop first being subjected to scrutiny and third-party verification. Check out Scott Karp’s take on how this was a failure of open systems and Matthew Ingram on how this was not a failure of citizen journalism.

This incident does reinforce the importance of trusted and reliable sources to bring us news and information that has in some way been confirmed and verified. The fact that CNN’s citizen journalism site, iReport, allows such misinformation to be uploaded and broadcast to the world, should serve as a wake-up call that content that’s been judged in some way is more important now than ever.

Sure, the nature of the web allowed this false report to be corrected as quickly as it was initially broadcast. But that’s irrelevant. For a period of time, those who were paying attention believed the CEO of a major publicly traded company was in a potentially life-threatening condition, with the hit to Apple’s stock price only the most obvious example of the chaos that can quickly ensure from such misinformation. As Karp says, such uncensored citizen journalism is an open invitation to those with malicious intentions to manipulate the public for their own ends. And the intent doesn’t have to be malicious for damage to be done. Someone with the most honourable of intentions can do similar harm simply by being wrong.

Of course, there should be a distinction made between eye-witness news — such as providing an account as a bystander or participant, or capturing on video a disaster or other dramatic event –and broadcasting unconfirmed rumours or outright lies. Even in this always-on world, we still need gatekeepers of some sort to make that judgment call.

Leo Valiquette

Posted in:

• Social media

iPhone gets political

• Posted by Danny Sullivan
• October 03, 2008
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By Danny Sullivan

The Beeb reports today on an iPhone app designed by Barack Obama’s campaign team. What next?

This article proves again that Apple, for so long cemented in its position as the outright PR leader among technology companies, continues to generate waves of positive ink without even having to try.

If built on any other platform, this would have been just another article about an interesting mobile web app. The headline would have read “Obama targets cell phones to win support” or something similar. If it had been developed on Windows Mobile, do you think the article would credit Microsoft in any way?

Nope, of course not, but because the developers picked the iPhone to roll this out on, the article ends up with iPhone all over it. The casual reader might even think that Apple was behind it. Lovely!

But I’m just envious. It’s great when your PR is self-propagating – but for most of us, there’s a whole lot more work needed to get the ink!

Danny Sullivan

Posted in:

• Public and media relations

Old media habits will die hard

• Posted by Leo Valiquette
• October 02, 2008
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By Leo Valiquette

I’ve commented before on the impending death of print and how this funeral dirge has evolved to include all traditional media since the rise of social media in all its various incarnations. Many enthusiastic proponents would have us believe that social media will soon emerge triumphant as the medium of choice for people to keep abreast of the latest news and information.

Who needs such staid institutions as daily newspapers and national television networks when citizen journalism can deliver in real-time a street-level perspective of what’s going on in the world through such avenues as Twitter, YouTube and the blogosphere?

Well, perhaps we’re turning in that direction, but there’s a long way to go yet, at least according to a report carried this week on Bulldog Reporter. According to a survey of more than 1,000 adults across the U.S., television, newspapers and radio (in that order) are still considered the most reliable sources of information ahead of online sources.

Now, we are left to assume that “online sources” refers to sources on the web other than the websites of those same television networks, newspapers and radio stations.

I contend that there will always be a distinction between in-depth coverage and analysis of the day’s news and events and the quick blurb or sound bite, from whatever source, that can be easily digested while on the go. They compliment each other, rather than cannibalize. And when it comes to seeing social media displace traditional media, I wholeheartedly agree with the viewpoint that there will always be a need for trusted sources of information with a track record of accuracy and impartiality.

As we increasingly turn to online sources of news and information that we can readily access while mobile, non-traditional sources of information will compete for our attention with the traditional. And print, radio and television will increasingly have to offer competitive online services to grab and hold readers. But it’s the commercial printing industry, in the business of killing trees, that will feel the most profound pain from this shift in our habits as consumers of news and information.

Leo Valiquette

Posted in:

• Random thoughts
• Social media