Global Nerdy

If you’re going to be in Ottawa’s ByWard Market tonight, come on down to the Heart and Crown for the first Shopify Pub Night of the summer! We’re holding this get-together to enjoy what’s passing for summer this year, to get to know you and get you to know us, and to do a little community building. Whether you’re a techie, creative, business, social media or government type, it doesn’t matter – we’d like to see you there!

We’ll be there from 6:00 p.m. until 10-ish – keep an eye on @AccordionGuy or @Shopify on Twitter as the night goes on. We’ll be easy to spot – look for the guy with the accordion.

This article also appears in the Shopify Blog.

Over at the Shopify Technology Blog, Willem van Bergen reminds you that if you develop web apps, there’s a good chance that you’ll want to make use of a state machine. As Willem points out in the article, they’re useful design patterns, help prevent undefined behaviour and map quite well to a key part of the business side of your operation: they’re business processes!

If you’ve forgotten what state machines are (or more formally, finite state machines or FSMs), break out your old Comp Sci textbook, or if you sold it for beer money, take a look at SPLat Controls’ Finite State Machine tutorial. If you build your web apps with Rails, take advantage of the state_machine gem and Willem and Jesse Storimer’s state_machine-audit_trail gem.

Over at the Shopify Company Blog, we’ve got some articles with tips on how to get the most out of your online store, taken straight from our most successful customers:

1. The first article’s advice:
• Provide extra personalized service.
• Captivate your customers.
• Take pride in every piece.
• Don’t compete with Amazon.
• Engage customers through social media.
2. The second article’s advice:
• A picture tells a thousand words.
• Simple is best.
• Be obsessive.
• Timing is everything.

It’s Time for a Toronto BarCamp!

Creative Commons photo by Paul Bica.

While we hold the record for DemoCamps (tonight’s will be our 29th), it’s been a while since we’ve had a BarCamp in Toronto, and there’s a great opportunity available. Jonathan Kay of Grasshopper, one of the companies behind the BarCamp Tour (of which Shopify, the company for whom I work, is a member), would like to see a BarCamp in Toronto and so would I.

If someone in Toronto can organize a BarCamp sometime between now and the end of November, the BarCamp Tour will sponsor it, and you’ll get my able assistance to boot!

What’s BarCamp?

BarCamp is an unconference: a gathering that turns the notion of “conference” upside-down by having the attendees drive it instead of the organizers. The organizers are still needed to get a venue, handle the logistics and help the event run smoothly, but when it comes to stuff like topics and speakers, it’s the people attending the conference who are in charge. “There are no spectators,” the BarCamp philosophy goes, “there are only participants.”

While BarCamps vary from city to city, BarCamps are typically built around a schedule grid, which cross-references time slots and rooms. If you have an idea for a session (typically 40 or 50 minutes), you find an open time slot with an available room and put it in the grid. The schedule grid is usually a low-tech affair (one of the great maxims of tech is to do the simplest thing that works) using paper, Post-It Notes, tape and marker pens; I’ve included some examples below:

At smaller BarCamps, you can simply come up with an idea for a session and claim a room and time slot on the grid. At the larger ones, you may have to first get a minimum number of votes for your session before you can put it on the grid. Either way, the end result is a conference where the agenda has been set by the attendees.

Things are a little different from the standard conference even if you don’t come up with a session or present it. Sessions are meant to be more like dialogues; while the person at the front of the room is acting as a facilitator and often speaks at the beginning to kick things off, the audience is expected to participate more than they would at an ordinary conference. Once again: there are no spectators, only participants.

I’ve seen sessions of all sorts at many BarCamps. Yes, there are the usual sessions on software and technology, but I’ve also seen people talking about bicycling, liveable cities, cooking and baking, making your own beer and wine, making music and art, reforming government, education and health care, philosophy, improv theatre and more. If you’ve got a topic you’re passionate about, it’s fair game for a BarCamp session!

What’s the BarCamp Tour?

Just as BarCamp turns conferences upside down, the BarCamp Tour turns conference (or more accurately, unconference) sponsorship upside down. We don’t just simple throw money and swag with logos at a gathering like most sponsors would. We also follow the “no spectators, only participants” rule. We assist the BarCamp organizers in putting together their events, actively and enthusiastically join in sessions, we help organize the before- or after-party and do what we can to help make each BarCamp we sponsor a success. In return, we get exposure and a chance to meet up face-to-face with people who might want to use our software and services.

The BarCamp Tour is made up of five startups:

• Batchbook – the social CRM for small businesses and entrepreneurs
• Grasshopper – the virtual phone system designed for entrepreneurs
• MailChimp – the easy do-it-yourself tool for email newsletters and campaigns
• Wufoo – the easiest, fastest way to build forms for your websites
• and the company for whom I work, Shopify – helping you build awesome online stores

BarCamp Toronto

Creative Commons photo by Andrew Louis.

In a mere handful of years, Toronto’s tech scene has gone from moribund to legendary. All credit has to go to the people, who six years and 29 DemoCamps later, are still attending events by the hundreds, organizing their own meetups, pub nights and hackathons, and getting the word out. We work hard, we play hard, and we unconference hard.

“We need a BarCamp in Canada,” my teammates on the BarCamp Tour told me. “Since you’re the Canadian in the group, and you’re from Toronto, can you see about getting a BarCamp in Toronto together?”

And that’s where you come in.

I’m in Ottawa for the summer, immersing myself in my new company, Shopify. I will return to Toronto in the fall, where I will continue working for Shopify remotely. I’m looking for someone to run BarCamp Toronto, and I will assist you, both as a member of the Toronto tech scene and as the representative of the BarCamp Tour (and yes, that means sponsorship money).

Are you this person? Let me know. Drop me a line and we’ll talk.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

The Quick ‘N’ Dirty Details

• When? Thursday, June 9, 2011, from 6:30 to 9:00 Eastern
• Where? Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, 55 Dundas Street West, Toronto
• Keynote? Howard Lindzon, cofounder and CEO of StockTwits
• Can you still register? Yes! Register here and pay the “late bloomer” price of $20

DemoCamp?

DemoCamp is my friend and former coworker David Crow’s creation and it’s pretty simple: it’s show and tell for the high-tech community. The original concept was to stand in front of your peers and present your current project – without slides. The only thing you were allowed to project on the big screen was your project in action. Since then, it’s grown to include Ignite presentations as well as keynotes from notable speakers.

DemoCamp is a community-building activity. It’s a chance for techies, creatives and businesspeople working in high tech, social media and related fields to get together, see what everyone’s up to, learn and make connections. Many presenters and attendees have benefited in all sorts of ways from going to DemoCamp: they’ve landed job offers, scored VC funding, found new employees, made new friends and discovered things they would’ve otherwise missed. If you haven’t been to DemoCamp yet, you should register and find out what it’s all about!

Howard Lindzon

Howard Lindzon [ @howardlindzon | blog | LinkedIn ] is co-founder and CEO of StockTwits – a social network for traders and investors to share real-time ideas and information. StockTwits was recently named “one of the top 10 most innovative companies in web” by FastCompany and one of the “50 best websites” by Time magazine.

Howard appeared at Startup Empire in Toronto in 2008. He is a charismatic, engaging and funny guy – I [David Crow, but hey, me too!] would love to have him on my board. But more importantly, he has a unique vision for for starting and successfully managing innovative companies, he is the Managing Partner of Social Leverage, a holding company that invests in early stage web businesses. He continues to manage a hedge fund he started in 1998.

He has more than twenty years experience in the financial community acting in both an entrepreneurial and investing capacity. With a knack for starting and successfully managing innovative companies, he’s the Managing Partner of Social Leverage, a holding company that invests in early stage web businesses.

Howard also created Wallstrip, and more than 400 original web video shows, which was purchased by CBS Corp. in 2007. He is an active angel with many success angel investments including: Rent.com, (purchased by Ebay in 2005 for $415 million), Golfnow.com (purchased by Comcast in June 2008), and Lifelock (lead investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers). His new media and internet business investments also include: Limos.com, Blogtalkradio.com, Buddy Media, Ticketfly, Assistly, Bit.ly and Tweetdeck.

Howard received an MBA at Arizona State University and an MIM from The American Graduate School of International Management.

Want to catch this DemoCamp? Register here!

Want to Demo?

DemoCamp is always looking for people to demo their current project. If you think you’ve got something worthy, you should apply to demo!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

I think that when the folks at Microsoft Canada look at this picture, they sometimes breathe a sigh of relief.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

SMSified

SMSified is a service that makes it easy for you to build SMS-enabled applications. They provide a straightforward API that you can call RESTfully to send and retrieve text messages to and from phone numbers and short codes. Using SMSified opens you to the huge user base of SMS, which Wikipedia calls “the most widely used data application in the world, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers”.

The diagram below shows how SMSified works:

If you’re building an application that needs to reach the widest possible range of mobile phone users – no app required to send or receive messages, and it works even those on plain old “feature phones” – you should take a look at SMSified. They make integrating SMS into your software or service as simple as an API call, freeing you to work on what sets you application apart.

SMSified + Shopify

Shopify is a service developed in the same spirit (and company name and colour scheme!) as SMSified: we take care of the tedious parts of setting up an online store so you can concentrate on what sets you apart. Also, like SMSified, we also provide an API that lets you build applications to enhance your online store or the behind-the-scenes business of running that store (we even have a place for you to sell your apps to Shopify merchants).

There are all sorts of ways you can use SMS with a Shopify store:

• Notifying customers of a special limited-time deal or if their order has shipped
• As another way for customers to reach customer support or for repeat customers to place a quick order
• Pinging you, the store owner, when some major happens, such as a customer making a king-size order or requiring special attention

Mark Headd of SMSified put together this video showing how you can put SMSified to work in your Shopify store. In this example application, all customers with a known mobile number are sent a simple text message about an upcoming sale:

You can find out more about Shopify/SMSified integration in Mark’s post on the SMSified blog. Check it out and see how you can integrate SMS message with your Shopify store!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.