Martin Hofmann

a personal blog about technology, communications and other stuff that interests me

Canada

Voice 2.0 conference a success

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Alec Saunders posted a great summary of yesterday’s Voice 2.0 conference in Ottawa. The brainchild of a group of people who attended BarCamp Ottawa in April 2006, the organizers brought together leaders from the telecom community to discuss the future of the telephony and communications industry.

“My takeaway was that Voice 2.0 is healthy and whole and heading for a bright future.  With our focus on user-centric communications paradigms, it seems clear to me that the telecom model of the past 125 years, including IMS, might finally be headed for oblivion.”

Alec Saunders, saunderslog.com 

Disclosure: High Road’s Ottawa office supported the Voice 2.0 organizers and partner OCRI.

Get the new Canuck PR Toolbar – version 1.0

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As promised a couple weeks ago, here is a first version of a Canadian PR toolbar. Download it at http://canuckpr.communitytoolbars.com/.

The toolbar is based on a very cool, free service by Conduit. I am looking for a few people who are willing to test it and provide feedback. I hope this will be a community effort.

It is now called Canuck PR Toolbar because somebody else must have already reserved the term “Canadian PR Toolbar” (Ed?) on the Conduit site. Anyway, the Canuck PR toolbar includes:

SEARCH BOX

Google.ca is set as default but once you download the toolbar, you can change it to other search engines. I’ve added Technorati, MSN, Yahoo!, MSN News, Yahoo! News, Google News and Wikipedia. Other wishes?

It also comes with a “highlight pen”. If you put in words in the search box and click on the highlight button, it highlights those words on the current site in your browser.

PR BLOGS

The current list of Canadian PR blogs is just a start, it has nothing to do with a ranking or a “top list”. If you have or know of a Canadian PR blog that is missing, leave a comment and I will add it. Don’t be shy (you are in PR, remember). Nominate yourself and others. It makes it easier for me. 

The cool thing about this toolbar is that once you have it installed, your toolbar will be automatically updated whenever I update the list on my end. So it doesn’t matter if your blog isn’t on the initial list; everybody who has the toolbar will still get to see it once I’ve updated the list.

Question: do we want other related blogs (marketing, news, U.S. PR bloggers etc)? Let me know your opinion. I can include submenus to differentiate between different blog types.

PR RESOURCES

This is a list of links that includes events, associations, podcasts, publications and services. It will serve as a directory of PR resources. Again, just a start. If you have an idea for additional links, please leave a comment.

PR BLOG NEWS TICKER

The news ticker provides the latest headlines from Canadian PR blogs. Right now, everybody included in the blogs list is also included in the news ticker (except for one of the blogs where, ahem, I couldn’t find an RSS feed). Also included are two del.icio.us feeds with PR headlines from Constantin Basturea (Daily PR Digest – okay, let’s call it an honourary Canadian feed) and David Jones to broaden the scope a little bit.

I will try to include all new blogs that I am adding to the blog list in the news ticker, too. Since this toolbar is based on a free web service, there may be restrictions for the number of RSS feeds that can be added. It doesn’t say so but I am still trying to figure out the whole system, so I will add Canadian PR blog feeds for as long as possible.

OTHER FUNCTIONS

The toolbar also comes with the option of adding a few other features including weather forecast (you can input the city), a pop-up blocker tool, an email notifier (works with Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail) and buttons to open Windows programs such as Word, Media Player or a calculator. With the exception of the search box, all items can be activated/deactivated. 

Again, according to the instructions by Conduit, it is not necessary to download new versions of the toolbar to receive updates to the installed features such as the blog list, the resource list or the blog newsticker. A new download would only be necessary for a major change. So if you send me suggestions for Canadian PR blogs and sites, I can add them in (just give me a bit of time, I do have a day job).

So much for now. It was a fun project putting a first version together. Please go ahead and try it out if you are interested. And let me know if you like it or think it is a waste of time. Feedback welcome. 

[Please note that I have only tried the toolbar with IE7 Beta. There is a Firefox version for download, too. But I have not tested it]

The fastest growing tech companies in Canada

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The 2006 “Fast 50”

Deloitte published its annual list of Fast 50 winners a couple days ago (press release). The full list can be found in Simon Avery’s Globe and Mail article. Here are the top ten winners:

  1. Westport Innovations
  2. Redline Communications
  3. Airborne Entertainment
  4. RuggedCom
  5. DragonWave
  6. Imaging Dynamics
  7. Tira Wireless
  8. Rutter
  9. Digital Oilfield
  10. Elluminate

Under-funded nation

The article points out that the level of Canadian venture capital investment today is down to about $1.7 billion from $5 billion in “the boom days of 2000”. According to Deloitte, more than half of the Fast 50 are self-funded and receiving no venture capital support.

“As a nation, Canada is under-funded from a VC perspective, and it’s exacerbated by the tech downturn.”

David Ferguson, managing general partner of VenGrowth Private Equity Partners Inc.

Lunch with David Crow

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Boarding the cluetrain is one thing. Getting your clients to board another. And then there is the whole matter of staying on. A couple clicks from now you may find yourself behind it, watching its taillights fade. Then you turn around and there it is again, about to run you over (“We are watching. But we are not waiting”). This whole 24/7-participatory-attention-intention-economy-slash-Me2-revolution can be scary. But it doesn’t have to be.

That’s why it is always good to talk to people who’ve been riding the cluetrain for a while. Last week David Crow (bio) came to High Road for a lunch discussion. We had a great discussion about blogging, Web 2.0 and his adventures in unconferencing. Thanks again, David!

Since David started TorCamp/BarCamp/DemoCamp in Toronto, the number of DemoCamp participants, for example, have increased from 26 in December 2005 to 151 in March 2006. Clearly, David and his fellow organizers are on to something.

Based on all the grassroots enthusiasm out there, the mesh conference in Toronto seems to become another success story; one blogger suggests that it may have even helped push the professional event management firm for Syndicate Canada to cancel their conference.

The same principle that has made blogging popular and forced traditional media to incorporate new online features into their offering, also seems to change event management: the participatory model has become a hit. While I doubt that the old top-down organization of conferences will die out any time soon, it will make other tech conferences continue to re-think their approach.

Many bloggers, including David, have debated what makes a good conference and what makes un-conferences different or better, so I won’t repeat it all here.

But during our discussion David mentioned the rise of sponsorship and support enquiries for BarCamp/DemoCamp [Disclaimer: High Road offered to host one of the Barcamp/DemoCamp events]. It will be interesting to watch how much – if any – ‘commercialization’ they will agree on and what kind of changes Barcamp/DemoCamp will undergo when continued growth turns this startup idea into a mature event series.

‘Commercial grassroots’ events are not necessarily a bad idea. The key is the participatory element where people can help decide what they will see and how they get the most out of a conference. The mesh conference, for example, has a blog and – thanks to David – a wiki where people can provide their input and exchange ideas and information before the conference.

The new model is all about participation and engaging in conversations, and that includes new approaches to conferences. As long as long as particpation means more than banter between soap boxes, and those conversations actually contribute to better outcomes, I’m all for it.