Once in an economics lecture, a very good professor said, "If a CEO says either the word Synergy or Convergence, run from the room.  Run because he doesn't know what he's talking about".

So at break, we, the MBAs of 2002, decided if we started a company we should call it Synergistic Convergence.

We never started that company.  But I have created this category on my blog.  We are one step closer to VC funding!

enjoy!

In 2006, I tried out more new applications and web 2.x services than I had in a while.  Recently I've had to get a new computer set up and I've noticed what are my can't live without applications:

FireFox - I cannot live without this Browser.  To go back to *non*-tabbed browsing is like going back to dial-up.  Also, I realize now that IE starts a new browser instance almost everytime you click on a link.  Firefox re-loads the active browser tab.  That has its advantages and disadvantages but over all its better than having 11 IE windows open.

Thunderbird Feedreader - I haven't found a better tool to read RSS feeds than Thunderbird.  I like that I can have a huge list of feeds in the left pane and scroll through them.  I also like that I can select a headline and read the article within Thunderbird.  I'm trying to get into Google Feed reader but I haven't really got into it yet.  Add feeds to my Google Homepage forces me to visit the web page if I want to read the full feed.

What's RSS you ask?  Really Simple Syndication.  Its the only way to monitor newspapers, industry journals, blogs etc.  I don't know what I did before RSS.

Apps I've stopped using

Riya.com - I tried it and it was interesting but here is another web 2.0 applications that the creators seemed to loose interest in.  It took me a while to get a hold of anyone in Support to delete my account.  In my mind Riya is a cautionary tale for Web 2.0.  There was much hype around this application from TechCrunch and others.  It really hasn't gone anywhere except into a new tool called Like.com that also doesn't seem to be overly developed.

Flickr - I wanted to try this to upload my Prague photos but its not that easy to upload a huge number of pictures for a trip.  This was a surprise for me.  Flickr is definitely meant for the take 2 or 3 pictures a day people.  I'm not like this (yet).

Once upon a time youngsters around Canada raced home to watch VideoHits on the CBC hosted by none other than Samantha Taylor.  For many, this was the only place to watch music videos because MTV was not available in Canada (generally) and Much was still new too.

What a great show that was.  Who doesn't recall the first time they saw A-Ha's 'Take on Me' video on it?  The other day the T. was YouTubing and he found the video to star Toronto band BluePeter's track 'Walk on Past'.  I had never seen it before.

So content owners?  How do I legally see the BluePeter video again?  And what do I owe you?  And what do we owe for a clip someone uploaded of  David Lee Roth sing Jump with a bluegrass band?

I really find the discussions around content missing a key point.  Media companies have too much content.  They don't have an efficient way to share it and gain revenue from their extensive back catalogue.  I can understand why MuchMusic, for example, would lose revenue or be concerned with current day top 40 videos on YouTube.  If you can watch this on YouTube then what does the big cable network offer. 

The back catalogue has always been the huge money making revenue for media companies (How much revenue did they earn from releasing The Beatles "1" cd?) And I can see opportunities for media companies in releasing video (the old 80's TV shows now occupying most of HMV).  But really the entire back catalogue... a video site is the best way to show this. 

When I read about Amazon.com's new movie download service, I was intrigued to try.  There are a few movies that I have seen (mainly documentaries, some foreign films) that I've always wanted to share with others.  But the more I read about Amazon's service the more I was put off by the DRM-madness.



I thought why not try torrenting.  How hard could it be?  Well its not that hard.  In an experiment like fashion I did some basic Google searches and pretty quickly figured out how you can get a torrent of a film.  I didn't find any documentaries.  I found some of the foreign films that I wanted to see but I quickly learnt that unless you can find a DVD copy, you may not get English subtitles.  That's a shame if you've spent 24 hours downloading a Danish film dubbed in Spanish, as I did.

But I found other stuff I did want.  I also learnt that Scandavians (with their high rate of broadband adoption) are a fantastic source of British dramas.  And I get to practice my Danish reading comprehension through subtitles.

When I mentioned my "research" to others, mainly in my family over Thanksgiving, they always said, "But isn't that illegal."  Which is a point.  Except then someone (from the family) mentioned that they use LimeWire for music.  They said, its so easy it has to be legal.  Right.  Except its not.

Downloading music without paying is an activity that has become pretty mainstream.  I think most of this is due to Mr. Jobs. But creating an easy way for people to rip their CDs ( a previously tedious task), and a reason to, people became generally comfortable with digital content and less tied to a physical media. So, movie/content producers can say torrenting is destroying Hollywood,  but the easier it gets the less illegal it seems.  On this there is no turning back the clock.

How about just producing good content?  Why not make the documentaries I saw easy for me to download legally? 

At BarCamp, the T. and I attended the fantastically named session 'Your Shiny New Tech a.k.a. Keeping up with the Jones'.  In the session, we all revealed our new on-line gadgetry.

One participant (would like to link but I'm bad with names) was one of the BarCampEarth Toronto organizers.  He showed us Google spreadsheets.  Google spreadsheets was largely panned by the blogorati when it was first revealed.  It got the usual big deal another me-too Office app.

About a year before BarCampEarth Toronto, my co-worker, the Iron Chef Email (Product Manager) pointed out to me how Google Spreadsheets was now appearing in his Gmail interface.  His point was 'Well its nice but I don't get why this has to be online.'

In BarCampEarth Toronto, the answer was nicely revealed.  The BarCampEarth Toronto team had used Google Spreadsheets collaboratively.  They were a group of 4 or 5 people co-organizing an event.  They conferenced using Skype and naturally they tracked items using a spreadsheet.  The easiest way to do this with a group is to have everyone update at once and while you are talking.  We played around with this at BarCampEarth Toronto and it works well. 

Person A starts the spreadsheet, sends a link via email to Person B.  Person A & B can now update the sheet and both see the changes at the same time.  The spreadsheet app has almost all of the functions that you would expect from Excel (at least what I would expect and I have done some number crunching). 

If you have ever had the sad task of trying to 'share' an excel spreadsheet with an email like, 'Enter your updates and send it back to me' you will know how useful a collaborative version can be.  In the past, I have seen people try to use a central copy on a network server that everyone updates.  But more and more I find that I want to update things as I am holding a meeting and let everyone see the update.  Collectively agreeing on work items and listing them off is a powerful way to conduct a meeting and allowing everyone in the meeting to enter information is even better.  This is the ideal way to conduct team work.

Most interesting for me is when I described this tool to my sister, who works in international development managing projects around the globe, she immediately saw that it could be useful to her.  She already uses Skype regularly to meet with overseas colleagues now she can work on a collective tool.  When something makes sense to someone who is just trying to do their job and is not interested in technology for its own sake then its time to take notice.

Tools or applications that start to meet our slowly changing work processes and flows are the ones that stick.  And this is where I see Google having the most impact.  Its not about taking on Microsoft.  Its about building for the changing way we work and live.

Saturday was BarCamp Earth in Toronto.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc conference.  A group organizes it and gets a space.  All kinds of people show up with some level of interest in technology ( developers, marketers, graphic designers etc. etc).  Sessions are organized by the attendees and people talk.

The T. and I attended the BarCamp Earth Toronto and it was a great event! 

The group - James, Maria, Ryan, Dave & Dmitry did a great job organizing.

This was the first time for the T. to go and he was really impressed.  It made me realize what an incredible thing that BarCamp / DemoCamp is.  He couldn't believe that it was a free event that was well organized, incredibly interesting people / ideas being shared and free food.  It sounds funny but there was great food there, water etc.  I think that the food really contributes to a relaxed atmosphere of hanging out for a day and sharing ideas.

For this BarCamp, the organizers planned a BBQ on Sunday.  Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate and that has been postponed.  But I like this idea, especially the notion that the BBQ would be family friendly giving partners and/or kids to come out.  This is a great move to make BarCamp more inclusive to those who would like to spend time with their family on the weekend and also meet up with BarCamp geeks.

We attended three sessions having arrived at around 2pm or so.

We sat in on a session on designing a web site for SEO.  Great session by LiquidDesign I believe (did not get their card, wish I had.).  This session dispelled some myths on SEO and Google.  But most important the session leader stressed that a web site should be written for humans first, optimized for the Google bots etc. later. 

We also participated in a session called 'Your Shiny New Tech or Keeping Up with the Jones'.  A group of us shared new tools / cool new things we had found.  The T. particularly loved this session as he hadn't had a chance yet to play around with the new 2.0 apps as much.  I was impressed to see Google Spreadsheets in action, more on that in a future post.

Finally we sat in a session on McLuhan tetrads.   The best part of this session for me was discussing McLuhan's ideas in relation to YouTube.  A longer post about that later.

Overall BarCampEarth was a great day.  I don't have many suggestions about what to change.  I missed the grid populating session though.  The only thing I noticed that the schedule got a little off at some point.  My only suggestion would be to try to keep to a time schedule and ask sessions to end on time.  Conversations can continue after.  The MSN offices were a great space for this as there was lots of room to keep talking outside of the session rooms.  It seems challenging to interrupt a session and end it but personally I like this bit of organizational strictness.