Global Nerdy

The New York Times has an article titled Sorry, Boys, This is Our Domain that opens with “The prototypical computer whiz of popular imagination — pasty, geeky, male — has failed to live up to his reputation. Research shows that among the youngest Internet users, the primary creators of Web content (blogs, graphics, photographs, Web sites) are not misfits resembling the Lone Gunmen of ‘The X Files’. On the contrary, the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls.”

This Monday, February 25th, marks the 17th DemoCamp Toronto, the regularly-held gathering where the bright lights of Toronto’s high-tech and startup scene get together to show off their current projects and presentation and exchange information and ideas. Instigated by David Crow, Toronto’s hardest-working tech evangelist and stewarded by him, Leila Boujnane, Jay Goldman, Greg Wilson and Yours Truly.

Unfortunately, all the “tickets” to this event — most of which are free and a few of which were available for very reasonable sponsorship fees ($5, $10 and $200) — sold out in a couple of days.

For those who managed to get tickets, DemoCamp 17 will take place at the Toronto Board of Trade in First Canadian Place. Here’s the schedule:

• 5:00: Doors open
• 6:00 – 7:00pm: Demos
• 7:30 – 8:00pm: Ignite Presentations
• 9:00: Duke of Westminster for drinks!

Hope to see you there!

The Demos

SceneCaster

Presenter (and my former co-worker) Alain Chesnais says: “We will demo the SceneCaster 3D solution with our recently announced SceneWeaver technology that allows you to view inter linked 3D scenes on any XHTML ready device. If you have native 3D support available, we will take advantage of it. But you don’t need to be on a high end gaming PC to work with SceneCaster. We will show the solution working on an iPod Touch to demonstrate that we have ‘3D anywhere” technology ‘available today.”

PlanetEye

Here’s the word from presenter Mark Evans: “PlanetEye is a new online travel guide with a difference. We’re combining beautiful travel photographs, mapping technology and advice from locals and travelers to give people a real sense of destinations around the world.”

AskItOnline

Presenter Kaitlyn MacLachlan tells us: “AskItOnline is a ‘web 2.0’ online service that allows you to easily create and deploy your surveys online. Using a drag ‘n drop interface along with AJAX and other client-side code, creating a survey has never been easier!”

GigPark

Pema Hegan and Noah Godfrey will be presenting this one. They say: “GigPark is a way to find services with the help of your friends. TorCampers have already recommended their favourite web designers, blog hosting companies, startup lawyers, commercial real estate agents, office cleaners, accountants, and logo designers. We’re going to show everyone how they can use GigPark to find the service providers they need to help run their startups (and their lives).”

.NET Development on a Mac

The word from presenter Geoff Norton: “The Mono project has just released our first version of MonoDevelop running natively on the Mac (no X11). We think its a compelling (and free) alternative to booting up VMWare/Parallels and running Visual Studio.”

The Ignite Presentations

Social Services Mashup

Here’s the abstract from presenter Clara Severino:

The Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) and Partnership Platform, which acts a catalyst between non-profits and the IT sector, have partnered to explore more intuitive and user-friendly approaches to locating services and organizations of interest in Ontario’s neighbourhoods.

The main objective for the project is to amalgamate both privately and publicly available data from various online sources, to develop a centralized database of services and organizations of interest to newcomers to Ontario’s neighbourhoods in order to provide users with an interactive visual representation of desired services mapped to a specified region. The potential for expansion of services and customization in the future is huge! A number of non-profit organizations have already expressed interest in using this application for their own audience.

Our intention is to get feedback from the tech community to improve our solution and raise awareness of the impact of technology on the non-profit sector.

This innovative initiative is a great way of getting both the non-profit sector and the tech community to come together to improve quality of life.

The Future is Simple

Presenter Geo Perdis tells us:

I would like to talk about the future of communications and my belief that it is simple. That is to say that simplicity will rule in a world where more and more media come at us faster and faster and compete for our finite attention.

This presentation would be an extension of a micromedia riff that I did back in November 2007 for a micromedia meetup. See http://micromediameetup.pbwiki.com/FrontPage and
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/11/01/answers-are-in-whats-the-future-of-communciations/.

With respect to selecting this talk, I think that I can provide a balanced perspective on some unique services possibilities and opportunities that the Toronto-area technology and media community can lead in defining, developing and deploying here and around the world.

In turn, I would hope that the community would get some additional insights as to what we can do locally that is unique and original to our circumstances, conditions and location.

Leveraging Things Wide Open

This will be a presentation by Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner.

How to Rock SXSW

Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan will give us a taste of the presentation he’ll be giving at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Here’s the abstract:

Where should you go? What parties are cool? How can I meet those people that are *gasp* Internet FAMOUS! Learn this and more at this welcome panel for SXSW Noobs. This panel will provide useful tips for SXSW virgins and veterans from a diverse panel of SXSW Interactive attendees, speakers, and personalities. Come for the laughs, anecdotes, and useful tools that will equip you to “Rawk Out” during SXSW Interactive. I mean, why should Music and Film attendees have all the fun?

The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks

Even war-ravaged Rwanda has better mobile rates than we in Canada do! Presenter Tom Purves explains this sad state of wireless affairs.

A couple of articles have already appeared in response to Ideas to Steal from Silicon Valley and Seattle:

Chris Ragobeer: An Open Letter to Toronto’s Technology Community

Over at The Toronto Marketing and Technology Blog, Chris Ragobeer wrote an article titled An Open Letter to Toronto’s Technology Community. In the article, Chris lists these things:

• Things that Toronto already has that will help in turning the city into a high-tech hub.
• Things Toronto needs to establish or acquire in order to turn the city into a high-tech hub.
• Some suggested actions that the local high-tech community can take.

David Crow: Harnessing Hogtown’s Hominids for High-Tech Hijinks and Hubs

David Crow (who recently was voted Toronto’s best tech evangelist at BlogTO, running against some pretty stiff competition including Yours Truly) also responded to my article in a piece with an extremely alliterative title: Harnessing Hogtown’s Hominids for High-Tech Hijinks and Hubs. In the article, he makes these points:

• Where is our “Fairchild” that creates our own “Fairchildren”? “Can you name big successful software companies that have started in Toronto? More importantly, can you name successful companies that have started because the founders were members of another “parent” company? Why has RIM or Nortel not created a strong spinoff culture?”
• One possible source of “Fairchildren” might be people who’ve spent time in Silicon Valley and other hubs, who’ve either returned or migrated to Toronto to start companies here. They bring with them experience and connections and “might be a better hope for new wealth creation in Toronto in the high-tech sector.”
• ICT Toronto is a joke. David’s feeling about City Hall’s attempt to bolster Toronto’s standing as a high-tech hub is similar to mine: “We have a fascination with self-congratulatory bullshit efforts!” Last year’s TechWeek was a non-event that registered on almost nobody’s radar, and I have my doubts about this year’s. Their goals are misguided, and they have no idea of what it means to be local technology company. They seem to be focused on on turning Toronto into a place to do “nearsourcing”, in which case they might as well come up with a marketing campaign like “Toronto: The Bangalore Next Door” and resign us to the fate of being a call center hub.

Animation courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

They see it in pretty much the same way that Grandma sees the remote:

Montreal!

I fell in love with Montreal in my late teens. It’s quite unlike most cities in North America — you can practically feel the place’s history, and everything from its architecture to the “feel” of its streets just seems different. It’s like having a little bit of Europe, but closer by and cheaper to get to. If you’re from North America and looking for a different vacation destination and on a budget, I recommend Montreal.

Today’s Montreal Gazette features an article titled Silicon Island?, which takes a look at their high-tech community’s grassroots movement:

Inspired by the collaborative nature of the Internet, local geeks with bright ideas started meeting at informal, community-organized events called BarCamps. The global movement that began in the Silicon Valley was the grassroots retort to stuffy, invitation-only tech conferences. In a BarCamp, computer whizzes show the first drafts of their garage projects to anyone who will listen.

This type of networking results in lasting connections that can pay off. Now when [George Favvas of Montreal-based SmartHippo.com] needs someone with a particular skill, he puts the word out on his blog, his Facebook profile or on his LinkedIn page, a social network for business contacts. Other bloggers write about it. Someone who knows just the guy gets wind of it, and Favvas has a candidate in a few hours.

This way of doing things has been so fruitful that it’s being seen as a model for other sectors of the technology industry, like telecommunications and life sciences.

“The young entrepreneurs today are different from the IT entrepreneurs of the ’80s and ’90s,” said René Barsalo, the director of strategy and liaison for the Society for Arts and Technology, which has become the preferred venue for local tech gatherings.

“They are very good at organizing themselves. … It’s sad to see more established companies not seeing this as a core of business,” he said.

There’s also a gathering called YULbiz, a monthly get-together for local business bloggers (YUL is the airport code for Montreal’s Pierre Trudeau airport). Montreal StartUp encourages successful entrepreneurs to become angel investors. Guy Kawasaki’s Garage Technology Ventures has a branch office in Montreal.

Map of Montreal’s subway.

As with Toronto, the chicken-and-egg problem also plagued Montreal. As the article puts it: “Do risk-takers attract smart money, or does the availability of money encourage risk-takers? Ideally, both factors are at work, in a mutually reaffirming symbiosis.” The seed money is now coming in, and things are looking up:

With its pool of tech talent, the emergence of seed money, and a budding network of mentors, “Montreal has the right mix of elements and we’ll see it really flourish next year,” [Austin Hill] said.

The next step is to get people from different tech and business sectors talking to each other. René Barsalo, the director of strategy and liaison for the Society for Arts and Technology (“the preferred venue for local tech gatherings”) says that in his ideal world, a presentation by a 3D animator would have engineers, musicians, medical technicians and furniture designers in the audience.

The article closes with a line that people in the Toronto tech community will find familiar: “The grassroots is moving up quite nicely, but a top-down movement isn’t happening at all.”

Seattle Taps Its Inner Silicon Valley

Jenny Lam, Hillel Cooperman and Walter Smith of the software company Jackson Fish Market.

Seattle Taps Its Inner Silicon Valley is a recent New York Times article that opens with a pretty dramatic statement that I hope we’ll someday say about this weblog’s home city, Toronto: “Many communities dream of becoming the next Silicon Valley. [Seattle] is actually doing it.”

The city has its share of big players: Microsoft has its headquarters the nearby suburb of Redmond as well as satellite offices in Seattle proper, Amazon is based there, Google has a research lab there and Nintendo’s American headquarters is also in the area. However, the real topic of interest — from both the article’s point of view as well as mine — is the city’s startup ecosystem. “More young companies are moving in downtown,” says the article, “near the art galleries and bookstores around Pioneer Square. Still others are spreading into the surrounding suburbs.” A number of these startups fall into interestingly-named categories:

• The “Baby Bills”, startups formed by ex-Microsofties. The name comes (obviously) from Microsoft co-founder Bill gates and (less obviously for those of you who might be too young to remember) the “Baby Bells” that emerged from the breakup of AT&T.
• The “Baby Jeffs”, startups created by former Amazon employees, named after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
• The “Baby Sergeys”, startups run by former Googlers, named after Google’s Sergey Brin.

Silicon Valley got its start as the “Fairchildren” left Fairchild to form their own companies, whose employees moved between them or formed their own spin-off companies, creating the atmosphere of cross-pollination that turned the area into a high-tech Mecca. The same thing seems to be happening in Seattle, according to Walter Smith of Seattle software company Jackson Fish Market: “Seattle is like an adolescent version of Silicon Valley,” he says.

Just as Silicon Valley has Stanford, Seattle has University of Washington, which the article says is fostering the area’s entrepreneurial spirit in the same way. Another similarity is the area’s old industry: aerospace, which provided an earlier boom in the Seattle area, just as it did in the Valley. Now the entrepreneurs and venture capital are moving in, and there are social networks, support businesses and a business culture that views failure as a badge of honour, not shame.

How Green Was My Valley

Scenes from the Valley’s El Camino Real (left) and Seattle’s Pioneer Square (right).

The New York Times article on Seattle inspired this response on Seattle-based Redfin’s corporate blog: How Green Was My Valley. Where the Times chose to focus on the similarities between the Valley and Seattle, How Green Was My Valley takes the opposite tack and focuses on the differences. some of which are:

• Seattle has become unrecognizably wealthier in the past decade, yet is oddly unhappy about it. While Seattle has people who get nostalgic for the city’s good old days, the amnesiac Valley — most of whose denizens only came there for the tech gold rush — have neither the history there, nor any real connection to the place.
• People live in Seattle because they love Seattle — the lifestyle and schools, the mountains and the lakes. Contrast this with the blog article’s author’s story about his first roomate: “My first roommate spent four years building a company in San Francisco without ever buying furniture. When his startup went bust, he packed for the trip home to Toronto the same day.”
• The high cost of living keeps the Valley in a sort of post-adolescent collegiate state. A two-bedroom house in “Shallow Alto” (that was our nickname for it during the OpenCola days) will set you back $1.5 million, which prevents people from buying a suitable place for starting a family. “In Silicon Valley,” goes the author, “Seattle’s 28 year-old family man is still working his tail off for a hit.”
• Stanford is the Valley’s “Hogwarts”. “…without Stanford the Valley would grow old and die,” says the author. “Native Seattleites hardly notice Seattle’s Stanfordlessness; Valley expats never get over it.”
• Here’s something that reminded me of Paulina Borsook’s book Cyberselfish: In Seattle, “High-tech entrepreneurs are expected to be pillars of the business community…not, as Silicon Valley’s establishment likes to think of itself, pirates of the Caribbean.” Techies get involved in non-tech community organizations like the Rotary Club and seem to have a mindset connected to “a set of civic virtues bigger than any one company”.
• Seattle has a sense of “helping out” that’s much harder to find in the Valley: “And it has nurtured a rookie CEO like me. A Seattle journalist e-mailed me while I was still loading the tiny U-Haul that brought me here. A VC who should have eaten my gizzard for breakfast invited me to his lake house for dinner. A startup CEO who offered money-raising advice over lunch diverted us from Quiznos to Carmines.”
• The new-for-new’s sake ethos of the Valley isn’t so pervasive in Seattle. While techies in the Valley chase fashionable ideas, techies in Seattle have the freedom to work on less cool projects that work. Redfin itself is in the “uncool” business of real estate.
• There’s a sense of dedication and loyalty in Seattle. While many of Google’s engineer’s are “plotting their next startup on the company dime,” “ten years on at Microsoft, engineers deep in Redmond’s rain forests are still writing the next version of Office.”
• And finally, one similarity: both the Valley and Seattle have the weather as their selling point, for completely opposite reasons. Says Zillow’s Rich Barton of Seattle: “You work hard here because it’s gray. Then you go hiking or fishing or skiing.”

Toronto’s Challenge

A whole mess of Toronto tech people. Can you identify them all?

Along with Leila Boujnane, David Crow, Jay Goldman and Greg Wilson, I help put together the DemoCamp gatherings here in Toronto. As part of this group, as well as a Toronto-based techie and a long-time resident of this city (since 1975!), I have an interest in making Toronto a great place to work, live and play, in both my geek and non-geek modes.

As I’ve written before, I think that Toronto is an underappreciated gem of a city and that a lot of the elements required to make Toronto a high-tech startup hub are in place. We’ve got:

• A vibrant city,
• with a strong creative class,
• a healthy number of techies with a strong entrepreneurial bent,
• interesting neighbourhoods with lots of character,
• youth and liberalism,
• a local culture with strong social networks,
• a number of good universities in the area,
• and the Accordion Guy!

Okay, maybe the last item in that list isn’t absolutely necessary, but it couldn’t hurt.

There are a number of hurdles that we need to clear, not the least of which are the timidity of local investors and the sense among a lot of people here that “making it” means getting a job in a big company, not starting your own. Perhaps it’s a symptom of the national character; after all, Canada was founded by people loyal to the British Empire, people who said “Hey! We like being a colony! Taxation without representation? Fine by us! So King George talks to trees…who doesn’t?!”

I’m glad that there are a lot of people in Toronto who are thinking about this sort of thing, and I look forward to talking with them, making plans and putting them into action. Over the next little while, I’m going to talk about what it would take to build up Toronto as a high-tech hub and a livable city. Watch this space!

Earlier Articles on Toronto as a Startup Hub

In case you missed them, here are some links to older articles of mine about what it would take to turn Toronto into a startup hub:

• How to be Silicon Valley: My take on Paul Graham’s article, How to be Silicon Valley.
• On “How to be Silicon Valley”, Part 1: Comments on How to be Silicon Valley
• On “How to be Silicon Valley”, Part 2: Even more comments on How to be Silicon Valley.
• On “How to be Silicon Valley”, Part 3: In which Toronto high tech finds common ground with Toronto fashion.
• Silicon Valley Fight Club (or “How to be Silicon Valley, Part 4”): A private fight club made up of developers and engineers in Silicon Valley, and what it says about life there.
• On Becoming Silicon Valley, Part 5: Toronto developer David Janes’ take on How to Become Silicon Valley.
• On Becoming Silicon Valley, Part 6: My comments on Guy Kawasaki’s article, How to Kick Silicon Valley’s Butt.