This is a fascinating trend of job losses over the past 5 years -- you can clearly see what areas are growing and which ones are drowning in losses. What's particularly scary is what happens at the end in the summer of 2009. And it may still be happening. Good to see what this looks like 1 year from now.
Don't miss our next NewPath Network Meeting on October 7th at the Centre for Social Innovation. Not only will there be some great networking with interesting folks, but we've got professional sales trainer Aileen Mens from Sandler Training. For details and to register online, click here.
Cool Event
Yossi Vardi is speaking at the Rogers headquarters on start-ups next Thursday September 24 at 6:30. Mr. Vardi is a super-experienced venture capitalist from Israel with years of experience starting successful high tech companies. ICQ, that old school instant message client, was one of his companies creations. I'll most definitely be there!
Awesome Product - actually 3 combined together!
Take a look at how easy it is now to integrate order forms and generate professional estimates into your website. If you use TypePad + Formspring you can now create professional estimates automatically out of FreshBooks. Small businesses interested in learning more about how to redesign their ebusiness infrastructure should definitely check this out. Or contact NewPath and we can tell you more, as well as help you set an amazing integration to help your business succeed online and look professional!
Creative Fundraiser
HoHoTo was held August 18 2009 and raised thousands of dollars for the Daily Food Bank of Toronto. Check out the #hohoto Twitter hash tag for all the buzz around the event. It was well organized, run locally in Toronto and had terrific representation from many of the hip Web2.0 marketing and hitech players in the city.
We had over 25 people at this year's social -- some new faces and some regulars. The Pilot Patio was perfect for a summer evening with NewPath friends. Here are some photos taken by Andris Pone, a previous speaker.
Alex and Lorraine connect
Kristine Black's Latvian newcomers to Canada.
Quote:
"It turned out that his timing was perfect—a new world was forming and technologies like YouTube, Facebook, and text messaging that barely existed just four years prior had matured to become a part of everyday life. And from the first moments of Barack Obama’s campaign in February 2007, his bottom-up, revolutionary style contrasted sharply with that of Hillary Clinton and John McCain."
http://www.aiim.org/Infonomics/Obama-How-Web2.0-Helped-Win-Whitehouse.aspxAnd a great presentation from the President of AIIM -- the Association for Information Management:
Here's the SocialMedia8 presentation on the Obama Campaign Case Study mentioned in the presentation.Idealware is publishing a field guide for Non Profit organizations. A prototype of the guide is available here. Newpath is considering licensing this guide and attracting non profits in Toronto to our group to a discussion of the content within this document. Idealware is a "Gartner for non profits" so the guide will be a non-biased, realistic look at how non profits can benefit from technology innovation.
Are you interested in NewPath licensing the guide? One approach could be asking NewPath members to contribute $20/each as a business development opportunity. If we get 50 folks we can license the guide for 500 organizations. We can then offer the guide for free for non profits and collect a very good mailing list of interested organizations which we can target for future events and meetings. This will bring the non profits closer to NewPath.
Another approach would be to sell the guide through NewPath as part of traditional licensing exercise. In this case we would be hard pressed to use the data after we sold the guide to the non profit. NewPath would need to invest in the Guide up front and ask for permission to sell the guide. I wonder if a non profit would pay $20 for a 3 year subscription to the field guide?
If so please comment here or email us.
NewPath Member Cheryl Rankin who presented at our April'09 meeting shared her power point from that session on how to develop simple systems in your business that can help you focus on what really matters...customers and business development.
Are you hosted at 1and1.com? Have you ever wondered what your configuration options are? The version of Linux you are running? Versions of MySQL and Perl, Python or PHP?
NewPath is working on getting a speaker on this topic in the fall. In the mean time here's a great presentation from Brian Macdonald from Ontario's Business Advisory Services on the topic:
Also the HP photosmart premium with touchsmart web recently was launched. Tell us what you think in the comments.
Where else can you go to a free networking meeting and meet such great people? We had 19 reservations at last night's NewPath event and the following people showed up and had a terrific time networking and getting to know each other at a level that most other networking event don't even come close to. I think all of our guests will agree -- you had a great time didn't you? And it was free. Best deal in town.
Here are the folks who came out -- feel free to comment and add your own details in the comments below!
Sponsored By $30.00 By Reservation Only CONTACT US TODAY TO RESERVE YOUR SEAT Candice Green at 416-926-1588 or email Kiwanis@casaloma.org to RSVP.
Why are you flying solo?Networking (noun) a supportive system of sharing information and services among individuals and groups having a common interest. It's a word we all throw around freely, but stop and think about the specific benefits you can enjoy in contrast to 'going it alone':
Let us help you set the course for your success. Join us today!
On June 18, 2009 @ 7:00 pm
You are invited to attend our monthly networking
event at Historic Casa Loma.Are you a business owner who is looking to work smarter, not harder? Do you want breakthroughs to do things easier and faster? Are you someone who is looking to upgrade your skills to have an advantage in our competitive marketplace? If you said yes to any one of these questions, then your attendance is mandatory.
Dead Line For Reservations is Tuesday @ 3:00 pm
Seating is limited to 50 people
Bring a friend and we’ll see you there!
Pretty hilarious, if not surreal a bit... But seriously, this may be ok for kids but for adults -- they rarely like such managers... A good story here for treating people like adults, not children.
The NewPath Network is now on Twitter - look for us @newpathnetwork
Here's another edition of NewPath's "cool event, awesome product, creative fundraiser" series...
Cool Event
There is a video online of the whole presentation from U of Toronto - Rotman as well.
Also Google Wave launched for developers -- once I get my hands on it I will give you guys a heads up. CNET has some thoughts already.
This may not be for everyone -- the point of putting this video up on this website is to show what practice and mastery can do for you - in anything.
For the last few months I have noticed a very large increase of spam being delivered to my Gmail inbox. Has anyone else seen this uptick in unfiltered spam activity? Google gloated about their performance a scant 2 years ago, but things seem to have degraded in an ugly fashion recently.
These spam messages are all delivered directly to my gmail account (which I rarely publish because I have a forward set up for my newpathconsulting domain to go to my gmail account). I am suspicious because if spam is being sent directly to my gmail account without going through the forwarded email accounts, then one of 3 things are happening (or maybe all 3):
1. Spammers are getting a good list of Gmail addresses from somewhere (this discussion thread suggests that spammers are using Google services to spam other Google users -- here's a link to a search on Google for the past week's discussion on broken Gmail spam filters) or
2. Gmail is selling/sharing/leaking my Gmail email address somewhere
3. Gmail users are not reporting spam as much as they used to!
(more spam filter issues)
On May 27 2009 I got no less than 12 spams between 6 and 8:30 in the morning. I will continue to get them throughout the day and most likely end up with 20-30 spam emails in my inbox. I just got one as I was composing this post.
Anyone else having this problem?
A few interesting articles this morning on the internets.. I'll format this blog as an experimental set of soundbytes organized by 3 different themes that I hope will interest NewPath'ers everywhere:
Several consultants in NewPath do SR&ED tax credits and are always helpful in helping your organization file for a tax credit. Now the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has developed a self-assessment tool for your business that makes it easy to understand more about this important program applicable to any technology/innovation business that runs in Canada.
Check it out today!
This report from idealWare compares 4 popular open source content management systems (CMS) that non profits like to use. If you ever are in the market to try Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal or Plone this is the report for you.
The 2 second summary? Joomla and Wordpress are best for simple page-based sites, while Drupal and Plone are best for more complex, content-rich, multi-user websites. I would love to hear more from the community whether they agree with the report's conclusions.
On May 24 2009, Democrats Abroad Canada will hold their annual general meeting where a new board of directors for Democrats Abroad Canada will be selected. Democrats Abroad is an international organization that organizes all US citizens abroad to vote and be aware of the US political scene, even when they live abroad.
The organization describes itself as ".. the official Democratic Party organization for the millions of Americans living outside the United States. We work to advance the principles of our Party by spreading the Democratic message to Americans abroad and encouraging them to vote for Democratic candidates back home."
The nomination slate is online, and I have been nominated as a "member-at-large". If you or someone you know is a US expatriate living in Canada, please let them know today.
The March 2009 networking meeting had a much smaller, intimate crowd than usual but the people that come out are interesting as usual. We had to turn down the speakers a bit in the upstairs room at Starbucks but after we got our introductions together we had a chance to meet some very interesting folks. Here's a bit of a rundown of who came out to the networking evening.
Some amazing stuff happening in data visualization... I wonder when Toronto will be next? Here's a presentation by Adrian on his open-source innovation that will hopefully revolutionize news gathering at a local level. "It's all about data visualization" is my favourite quote from Adrian.
ChangeCamp was held on January 24 2009 at the MaRS Discovery District on College Street in Toronto, Ontario. It was a first conference of its kind, addressing governance in the age of participation. Probably over 200 concerned citizens, government employees, and Canadian digerati where there, on a blustery Saturday morning.
Some thoughts on the event:
It's always nice to receive a thank you letter for volunteering. We received a letter from Lisa and Greg thanking us for the work we did. As you can see there is a call for feedback as well -- so if you have any good ideas for Little Geeks feel free to visit their website and let them know.
The wording on the video for the "We are One" concert looks like it is taking responsibility for a bit more than it needs to. It's ok, HBO, you don't need to apologize to the rest of the world. You may want to instead explain why a free concert is not simply available with a Creative Commons license.
Dan Howard is moving to Victoria BC with his significant other, Jen. Just got the word this morning.
He mentioned this organization to me. Sound familiar? Their website is very design-y. Anyone know these folks?
The Movement Expands from THE MOVEMENT on Vimeo.
The government of Canada has done a bang-up job enforcing the Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules. Well, I guess some things are too good to be true, after all. A bit more transparency and design intelligence on behalf of the CRTC would be greatly appreciated. A 5 year contract with Bell Canada smells fishy too. See the video below that details how you too can grab 600,000 phone numbers in the 416 area code of living breathing, Internet-using people for the low, low cost of $1 per thousand phone numbers ($1CPM).
Call or email to remove yourself from the DNC list (I can't believe I am actually saying that). Complaint tetails available on the CRTC website.
It's quite amazing how the computer revolution got its start in the late 19th century and continued to really gather steam over the past 20 years or so. This documentary (which is hard to find and not in print anywhere) was made available on waxy.org this summer.
After watching it and noticing that it is not really available anywhere else, I wanted to make sure that this video survived elsewhere since it is so darn good and detailed. So for archival purposes only I made this 5 part series redundant on Google Video.
Enjoy...
As promised in my earlier post: video from December 1st interview with Malclom Gladwell by Rotman's Dean Roger Martin (about 1 hr)
http://media.rotman.utoronto.ca/vod?AdminView=yes&mediaid=1186
This is not a product review, but rather a bit of a plug for 3 products that really should be 1. If you have trouble setting plans, recording your books and billing and invoicing then these tools may be for you.
First PlanHQ allows you to build a collaborative plan with your partners and advisors. There is tons of accountability and realtime reports on how your organization is doing. I am not sure if there is actual business planning involved but it definitely helps you execute.
Here's a demo.
Bootstrap is a piece of software that will help you track expenses and income on a day by day level to help you manage cash flow. It also forecasts your tax payment (only for 1099 IRS forms for the US, unfortunately). It is free right now -- so get on board the beta test period. A product demo is available on their website.
Finally FreshBooks has been around for a while and is a Toronto company. They specialize in sending invoices and bills by email or regular mail. They will help you get paid on time, and even benchmark you against others in the same field as you. Their product has been integrated with Bootstrap so invoices you receive can be automagically inserted into Bootstrap to keep track of cash flow and your real-time profitability. There's nothing like knowing you are in the bold, dark black, rather than deep RED!
I think these 3 products bolted together would make one hell of a operational package for small business. If you have tried any of these please comment below and let us know how it's worked out for you.
And a little about lightweight businesses from Tim at PlanHQ...
You may have heard that Ed Norton's film studio has sold the rights to the Obama campaign documentary for over 7 figures to HBO.
I volunteer for Democrats Abroad, and we'd like to get the rights to screen the documentary in Toronto, and potentially abroad. Look at the interesting interconnections below behind the documentary. Control-click on each bubble to center the connections around who is involved. Does anyone know whether these people are Canadian, even remotely? Let me know if you do.
A comment on Seth Godin's blog entry on what to do about Detroit...
I think the reverse will probably happen - GM and Chrysler will merge and weather the storm against the Japanese and European car makers. There is tons of innovation already in the marketplace -- the problem really is that people aren't willing to pay premiums any more for crappy product. Splitting up into hundreds of brands will only confuse an already confused market place.
You don't get innovation for free -- Blueray players are still $299 a pop, although they were thousands of dollars a few years ago.
The dealer part of Seth's argument, though, is bang on -- you should be able to chip away quite a bit of the hassle of buying a car by shopping online, getting a great deal and then picking up your vehicle at a local lot, AutoShare style. Financing should be doable this way too. There are too many middle men in the car industry, and it's about time it became disintermediated piece by piece.
The Detroit car makers could do themselves a favour by revolutionizing their sales channels. That could do wonders for the price of cars.
One approach to making this happen is to split the R&D and Sales/Marketing functions of the companies.
Leave R&D from GM, Chrysler and Ford as separate companies, and create 1 corresponding sales/marketing organization that sells cars in a modern way on behalf of all the car companies. I bet if you chopped off the sales/marketing side of the big 3 you'd find that they'd be cash flow positive all of the sudden. This is the dirty little secret of the Big 3 -- it's not about how much the line workers make -- it's about how awful the sales and marketing strategies haven't evolved since the Model T.
UPDATE: Lewis Green offers this little liability tidbit to consider. Obviously this has to be thought through before dealers start being cut off at the knees. I think natural evolution will make the dealers close on their own without forcing them to be shut down.
"General Motors, for example, currently manufactures and markets automobiles under eight brands in the U.S., including Chevrolet, Saturn, Pontiac, and Buick, in a market where few customers perceive any significant difference among them. When the company did shut down one under-performing and duplicative brand (Oldsmobile) in 2004, it had to pay dealerships over $1 billion in "financial assistance" to avoid lawsuits, and four years later, it is still embroiled in litigation from former Oldsmobile dealers who declined to accept assistance or settle their claims. Their antiquated dealership structures also prevent the Big Three from instituting modern and more flexible inventory-management practices and selling cars over the Internet."
Hey now... I did vote -- who says I didn't vote? Someone's spreading dirty rumours about little old me??!??
Rick from recursivedesign.ca sent me an interesting press release on his company's website. He says that Canadian banks do not come up very high on common local search queries on Google. Rather, some seemingly random results come back when you qualify a search locally. The conclusion is that Canadian banks are missing as many as 60 million qualified leads every year (ahem $300M in revenue) That's a lot of potential customers searching for you and not finding you.
Here's my own informal survey:
Search: checking account Toronto
Switching to "chequing account Toronto" yields a different set of results but still not too much in the way of organic results returning all the big banks in Canada that have offices in Toronto. Searching for bank account in New York, does a much better job, but only thanks to Google doing a map for you of all the Manhattan based bank branches.
What is even more shocking is that a search in French "compte de banque montreal" does a much better job it seems, but that's mostly because of the name "Bank of Montreal". Searching on "bank account montreal" yields BMO but simply because of the name "Bank of Montreal", probably not because BMO actually did anything to have them come up -- that's a pretty good accident for them isn't it?
Do you see how important search engine optimization is? Call Rick to find out more at 519-993-2766 or email him at rickn@recursivedesign.ca.
Do you understand how he US election actually is decided? This video works to explain the process in plain English.
Electing a US President in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.
It is interesting to note that the US election is an 'all or nothing proposition' for each state's electors (see video to see what I mean), while in Canada the party with the majority of political ridings (similar to the US districts) wins the Federal election and therefore the Prime Minister. In America you vote for the person (and therefore the party), in Canada you vote for the political party (and therefore the person at the head of that party).
These videos from CommonCraft are really well done. Below is an explanation of phishing scams -- and what you can do to avoid getting scammed online.
