David Crow

Keep on rockin’ in the free world

Some rights reserved by Frank Wuestefeld

Don’t go in to the light! A couple of days ago it was the 5th anniversary of my heart attack at DemoCamp. I am really luck to have friends like Jay, Joey, Sutha, Leila and Greg who understood the symptoms and were caring enough to protect me from myself. I’m very lucky we were at MaRS, because for the heckling I do, the first rule of real estate was my friend. Location, location, location. And I’m really thankful for the spectacular care I received at Toronto General Hospital.

I missed what was one of the most important early DemoCamps, it takes almost these 5 years to play out, but look at the schedule.

Skydasher/Feedcache: Skydasher is Tucows latest super-secret attempt at bringing great services to Webhosters and ISPs and their customers. Feedcache is a big, queryable cache of syndication feeds that application developers can play with. Presented by Ross Rader and Joey deVilla, developer relations dudes at Tucows.

BlogScope: Online analysis and visualization tool for blogosphere. By Nilesh Bansal, grad student from database group, University of Toronto.

BumpTop: Next-generation desktop organization software powered by a physics engine. Presented by Anand Agarawala. Video also available.

Joshua Wehner – Rails based web application

semanticPAL – learnable natural language user interface from nSM Semantic Modules Presented by sasha uritsky

On the schedule were BumpTop and Blogoscope which eventually became Sysomos. Both of which were acquired approximately 3.5 years after their inital DemoCamp presentations.

I often get asked why I continue to do this: DemoCamp, StartupNorth, Founders & Funders. I’ve tried to write about my motivations about this community of crazy, under-appreciated technologists, designers, entrepreneurs. I think that this is a special place. I’ve met a lot of good friends. I’ve learned a lot about great people. I hope that I’ve been able to make Toronto a better place. And I wonder what my role should be going forward. This is my hobby. This is my passion. This is my distraction. I do it because it makes me feel better. It’s just too bad that this isn’t a real gig. I tried at Microsoft. Mark Relph and John Oxley really understood the power of a strong Canadian emerging technology and startup community. It was time to move on. Others think they can manipulate, own and harness the power of loosely connected pieces where the only benefit is in providing a space for the collisions to happen. I like to think of my role as conductor. How do I get the right people to collide so sparks happen.

I’m left thinking I’m very proud of all of the entrepreneurs that I’ve met in the past 5 years. I’m thankful for how much each of you has helped me. And if you feel like I’ve been dishonest or untruthful, please let me try to rectify that. If I’ve ignored you, it’s because your message wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Help me hear you. And to everyone who has become a friend. My table, my bourbon bottle and my office is always open. Please keep on making Canada a place that I am proud to be a citizen.

Articles / Canada / Conferences / Toronto — 2 comments
23
May 11

Mesh is TO’s most important DIY conference

Mesh Conference is Toronto’s most important DIY conference.

That’s right Mesh Conference is a DIY event. It’s the Do-It -Yourself endeavour of small dedicated group of individuals. And you can see each of their personalities and interests in the schedule and speakers. Rob Hyndman (@rhh), Stuart MacDonald(@stuartma), Mark Evans(@markevans), Mathew Ingram(@mathewi), and Mike McDerment (@mikemcderment) have been working very hard since 2006 to build a world-class that has attracted renown speakers, mayors, and attendees. The secret is that Mesh is an event that all of them want to attend. The reason they invest time and effort into this event is because it is really for them.

Why is Mesh Toronto’s most important DIY event?

There are great events ranging from my DemoCamp to EcommerceCamp, from MakerFaireTO to Open Toronto, TechTalksTO to HackTO. There are a great number of local events that have emerged. The thing about Mesh is that it started in 2006. Over 5 years ago, shortly after the first BarCampToronto. And since the very first Mesh, it has always had an air of professionalism that others should strive to obtain. Mesh from the very first event was an event that was world class. It was Canadian in size (about 1/10th the size of a US event). But it has always been DIY, it has never felt DIY.

Rob, Stuart, Mark, Mathew, Mike and Sheri deserve true accolades for building an event that defines the emerging technology, emerging culture, emerging policy in Canada. Thank you!

I hope to see everyone at the Allstream Centre this week.

Articles / Entrepreneurship / Events / Healthcare — Comments Off
19
May 11

Apps for Heatlh

I am not a huge fan of design contests as a motivator or educational tool. However they seem to work, there are business plan competitions like Moot Corp, SIFE Student Entrepreneur Competition, MIT $100K, among others. They do define external criteria, timelines and rewards help structure the process. That aside there is a new competition happening at Mohawk College in Hamilton focused on building “technological solutions to real-world challenges sponsored by health care organizations”.

Ever since I had a heart attack at DemoCampToronto6 I have had a renewed interest in personal health technologies. This shouldn’t be a surprise given that my undergraduate degree in Kinesiology in the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences (ask me about how a 17 year old makes decisions about educational programs, and I did seriously want to be an orthopedic surgeon until I realized I’d have to work with sick people). I’ve been interested in reimagining personal health technology:

I have friends at BodyMedia, Massive Health and other organizations that are doing some amazing things. I am fascinated with the change in delivery and practice engagement that Canadian companies like HelloHealth and Myca. So I am impressed to see Apps for Health that presents a series of challenges:

Teams are then required to do the necessary research, design and iteration to build a presentation. You can think about this as the initial pitch session whether for funding, recruiting, customer development, etc. Teams create a 10 minute presentation that “demos” the solution. The goal is to concisely present your idea and demonstrate:

Must demonstrate a thorough understanding of the health care problem
Must be clinically useful in the health care environment
Must be created by team for purpose of the competition
Must be technologically feasible
Degree of completion
Cohesive presentation

What’s the best way to present this? Technical details? Screen shots? Demos? Simulators? etc. Up to each team. You need to demonstrate impact and win hearts and minds. I think I’ll look at forking out the $50 to attend including the drive to Hamilton.

Articles / Marketing / Social Media — Comments Off
11
May 11

Social Media Monitoring Tools

The folks at KISSMetrics and oneforty have co-produced a great infographic about Social Media Monitoring Tools. Great to see my friends BackType, PostRank, HootSuite and Radian6 mentioned. The guys at Lymbix need to do a little more work acquiring customers with TweetTone, maybe next year. There article ended with some interesting observations about the Social Media Monitoring marketspace including:

Relationship with vendor was noted as the least important factor in selecting a social media monitoring tool, while metrics were seen as the most important. Why do you think that is?

The vast majority of people said their budget for a social media monitoring tool was less than $500/month. Many tools start at $500/month. What ways can social media professionals prove the value of their efforts to get more budget for measurement/management tools?

Most people responded with indifference toward their choice of a social media monitoring tool – 60.1% said it was “okay” and that they’d try something different if it came along. What features would your ideal social media monitoring tool include? If you’ve already discovered it, which one is it and why?

From What are the best social media monitoring tools? or download a high resolution PDF

Articles / Microsoft / personal — Comments Off
06
May 11

The problem with Microsoft…

Some rights reserved by Nick, Programmerman

Gary Rivlin at Fortune Magazine has some recent articles about Steve Ballmer and Microsoft senior management (The problem with Microsoft… & Why insiders think top management has lost its way). The articles make great fodder given the rise of Apple to be larger than Microsoft in both market capitalization and revenues. What is strange is that I love both of these companies. I’m an ex-Microsoft employee. It was a great place to work. And I have been an Apple fanboy for a long time (spending my entire signing bonus in 1997 on Apple stock). Let’s be clear Microsoft is still a large powerful company, they have just lost their way in defining the next generation of technology, business models, and customers.

Still, Ballmer needs to do something to shake Microsoft from what, at best, seems to be a textbook case of corporate ennui: MIT’s Michael Cusumano, who has featured Microsoft in several books, including the new work Staying Power, sees a company hopelessly stuck in neutral, in no small part because Microsoft has a weak board and no one expects Bill Gates, the company’s top shareholder, with about 5% of shares outstanding, to oust the CEO, who was the best man at his wedding. “Ballmer has been a good steward of Windows, and that’s about it,” Cusumano says.

Gary Rivlin nailed my feelings and analysis on Microsoft in The problem with Microsoft…. Microsoft is a juggernaut. But the markets and choices are evolving. There are a few successes like Silverlight, Kinect, XNA and Office. But generally the article highlights deeper structural and cultural issues.

Windows Platform dominance – Licking the cookie
Politicized management culture with “Made men” and “political assassins”
Lack of urgency – Massive existing businesses SharePoint is the last $1B revenue business
Killing products too early or too late – see Courier (too early) and Kin (too late it should never have made it to market)
Stock stagnation – this has a lot of impact on hiring new talent, retaining talent that should retire (under water ESOP buys)

There is lots to love about Microsoft. But I think there are even more concerns for the future. Just look at what the latest generation of big web companies are building on: Yahoo! (PHP, MySQL, Hadoop), Google (Java, Python, BigTable), Facebook (PHP, memcache, Cassandra, Linux), LinkedIn (Solaris, Tomcat, Oracle), Groupon (Java, Salesforce, EC2, Zynga (PHP, MySql, AMF), Quora (MySQL. memcache, PHP). Sure there are shining examples of companies building on SharePoint and SQL Server and Azure, but do they have the size and scale of those previously mentioned? And look at the fight for mobile developers. Appcelerator’s quarterly developer survey shows percentage of developers “very interested” in developing for different platforms: iOS (91%); Android (85%); Windows Phone (29%); sure it’s a head of Blackberry (27%). But this just reinforces my concerns and disappointment. Microsoft is a huge company. And I hope they can continue to build world class products, markets and inspire future developers.

Articles / Business / Sales — Comments Off
26
Apr 11

Impact of Social Media on the Sales Funnel

The team at GetSatisfaction have put together a great overview on the impact of social media on the sales funnel. It’s an interesting evolution in my understanding of the buying process:

Awareness » Interest » Trial » Evaluation » Decision Attention » Interest » Desire » Action

The simplification of “Decision” to “Action” makes perfect sense. I’m guessing that the goal of the “Evaluation” phase is to drive “Desire”. It’s different than my experience with the Diffusion of Innovation and the 5 step process presented by Everett Rogers. I need to spend some additional time thinking about how this impacts the customer focused sales funnel described by David Skok (@bostonVC).

The rise of social media and the lowered social capital expenditure and effort it has evolved to:

Attention » Interest » Desire » Action » Advocacy

The goal is to build happy customers that want to spread the company’s message (whether you call them brand ambassadors or citizen marketers or just advocates). Great job by the GetSatisfaction team on helping to evolve the understanding of the social involvement in Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Articles / Conferences / Toronto — Comments Off
28
Mar 11

Mesh 2011

Apparently I’m late to the game with the recognizing that Mesh Conference 2011 has announced a new location and their schedule.

New Location

The conference moves to the Allstream Centre at the CNE grounds. This is a first year Mesh won’t be at MaRS. I’m hoping the new space allows for new conference experience. MaRS is a fantastic venue, but Mesh has really outgrown the space. It will be interesting to see how Sheri and the team organize lunch, social events, and other interactions to build strong connections between attendees.

Speakers

I’m excited there are a lot of my friends who are speaking at Mesh. These folks are just world class and it will be interesting to hear about their experiences.

I’m also incredibly stoked about Gabe Zichermann (LinkedIn) from GamificationCo. Gabe wrote Game-Based Marketing and hosted The Gamification Summit. Looks like another conference that covers marketing, culture/society, business, and media. It’s a great Canadian take on the web, technology, politics and culture.

I am disappointed that MeshU did not survive the fiscal constraints of running a conference. I know from our past experiences running StartupEmpire the lack of sponsorship and revenue that a smallish conference can generate. I’m hoping that there will be something for design technologists and entrepreneurial technologists in Toronto in the near future.

Articles / Geek Life — 3 comments
25
Mar 11

185 Days Later

It’s been like a great zombie movie. There’s interesting zombies, lots of gore, non-cliche characters, man vs zombie, and at least one human idiot (hello, my name is David).

Actually it’s been an amazing 185 days (just over 6 months) since I announced that I was leaving Microsoft.

The good news is that as a Microsoft shareholder, my departure did not appear to greatly affect Microsoft’s stock performance (closed Sept 20, 2010 at 25.13 vs Mar 23, 2011 at 25.81). This means technically my leaving added 68 cents a share. While my giant ego would be incredibly bruised being the cause of $5.712B increase in value because of my departure (8.40B shares outstanding * $0.68/share change). I am pretty sure that most of this change is unrelated to me, and more related to Kinect, Phone 7, and other product sales performance). But as an egomaniac, I’ll claim I’ve added $5.7B of value to the economy . But I digress.

I found a co-founder. We started a company. We’ve hired a team. We’re raising money. We’ve built a product. Talked to potential customers. Threw that product out. Started again. Talked to potential customers.Listened. Formed a hypothesis. Gathered feedback. Iterated. Measured. Tested. Deisgn. Built. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

It is completely different than my experience at Microsoft. And completely worth it.

Don’t get me wrong. It has been difficult. There have been arguments. I’ve been sick as a dog, twice. Payroll is still a bitch. Dealing with government agencies full of red-tape. Trying to write here and at StartupNorth has been difficult. I’ve been on planes. Trying to build products. Trying to raise my girls. Trying to stay healthy (unsuccessfully – see SxSARS below). I keep helping other startups: here’s looking at you BuzzData, Attachments.me, and TribeHR.

I’ve been heads down for so long that I forget that there are other things going on in Toronto and around the world. I skipped SxSW for the first time in a few years, though I still managed to get the dreaded #SwSARS. It is a very strange experience being sick and not being able to work, even when you want to, versus just taking a sick day when you work for a big company. The fact that I’ve been mostly unavailable because I’ve been stuck in bed and medicated, makes me wonder how long this will continue. I can’t wait to feel human again, and I can’t wait to get back to talking with customers and building. But since the team kicked me out of the office yesterday, I’m home again fighting this zombie virus.

It’s been a fun 185 days. I’m looking forward to the next 185 days and the changes it will bring.

Articles / Geek Life / Technology — 6 comments
18
Mar 11

Building a mystery aka my Hackintosh project

My television watching and content acquisition saga continues. Since cancelling my Rogers Cable TV subscription, I’ve found myself consuming content using:

Netflix on AppleTV
Netflix on Boxee Box
Netflix on Wii
CityTV app on iPad
DVDs on my XBox
Shows on Boxee Box (Project Runway on Slice; The Big Bang Theory on CTV; Cougar Town on City)

I haven’t had to worry about TUF, Formula 1 and I’ve taken multiple strategies for shows like TopGear (think TV Shows, BBC iPlayer, and other mechanisms). I have bought more DVDs (Shrek4Ever, Toy Story 3, Megamind, Penguins of Madagascar: Operation DVD, I was a Penguin Zombie, and others) for the kids. And I have watched 5 movies on iTunes (Cargo, Predators, The Kids are Alright, How to Train Your Dragon, Top Gear Season 15). And I watched the Superbowl in HD on CTV using an antenna. It has been a really good experience. Though Kristin describes our TV as “the most complicated TV ever, but it works”. I think the Harmony 880 remote makes the experience tolerable, without it I don’t think I could have done this.

One of my thoughts has been about reducing the number of devices (Boxee Box + AppleTV + XBox 360 + Wii). Currently the Boxee Box, the AppleTV and the XBox are all connected to the main TV. I was thinking about getting a Mac Mini and running Boxee, iTunes and Front Row and eliminating the XBox, Boxee Box and Wii (well I’d move the AppleTV upstairs to use in place of the Wii). But why would I buy a Mac Mini for Cdn$1145.82($749 Base Configuration +$165 Core 2 Duo upgrade to 2.66GHz + $100 4Gb of RAM = $1014 + tax). Sure, it’s small, it’s sexy, it would fit right near my Airport Base Station Extreme. But approximately $1100, I should be able to do this for less.

I run a HP MediaSmart EX490 for our internal home network backup device. I figured I’d either upgrade the processor & RAM, buy an inexpensive barebones PC to run Windows with Media Centre or Linux with Plex. But we are an almost all Apple house and I really wanted a machine running Mac OS X. Then Adam (@AdamMeghji) told me about his Hackintosh. And I figured I could build my own.

My Hackintosh Build

I decided to budget the price of the Mac Mini. And see what I could accomplish. Here are details and specs.

Motherboard: Gigabyte H55M-USB3
CPU: Intel i5-760
Video Card: Gigabyte GV-R577UD-1GB
RAM: Corsair XMS3 4Gb Dual Channel DDR3
Harddrive: Western Digital Caviar Green 1.5Tb
Power Supply: Corsair TX650
Case: Lian-Li V351
CD/DVD: Sony AD-7260S-0B SATA DVD Writer
OS: Legal purchased copy of Mac OS X 10.6.3

I followed Adam’s advice and used the tonymacx86 CustomMac. The builds looked great. It allowed me to customize the case, power supply, CD/DVD drive to my specifications. My fight was mostly with the case (this had implications for the motherboard, the CPU cooler, the video card, the power supply). I was really hoping to build a Home Theatre PC (HTPC) or something that was as small and eloquent as the Mac Mini, but the desire to build a more powerful machine drove me to a bigger case. I looked at HTPC cases but I had a few concerns including heat dissipation, size to fit video card (to fit the proposed video card I needed minimum of 228.6 mm) and cost. I did not want to sink $700+ as some HTPC cases apparently cost. My three leading contenders were:

Silverstone Fortress FT03
Lian-Li V351 or Lian-Li V352 (Mini ATX vs Micro ITX)
Antec P183 V3

I really liked the Silverstone Fortress FT03 and the reviews almost convinced me to purchase it, but as my price was creeping upwards I decided on the slightly less expensive V351 based on the reviews of custom builders. The Antec got great reviews about being silent, but it’s huge. It wasn’t going to fit in the spot in my media cabinent (aka the shelf). The Silverstone Fortress FT03 got great reviews about flexibility, configuration and use. Again it was a space constraint coupled with the price ($70 more).

What doesn’t work, yet

Infrared: I bought a USB IR dongle knowing full well that this wouldn’t work. I have ordered a Twisted Melon Manta TR-1 USB IR solution. This includes the IR receiver and logic board. Coupled with Mira I’m hoping this will let me configure Boxee and/or Plex to work with my Harmony 880.
HDMI + HDMI Sound: I followed the instructions in tonymacx86 iBoot and Multi-Beast installation guide using the Kabyl Chameleon2.0 r748 build. I have DVI video working but I’m still trying to get HDMI and HDMI sound up and running. This is a very frustrating experience.
Bluetooth: This one is totally my fault. I did not buy a Bluetooth dongle.

Thoughts on the process

This has been a fun project. I have probably spent about 10 hours researching, purchasing, and building the Hackintosh. If I were monetizing that time, it would be a complete waste. However, this is a hobby decision. I wanted to build a Hackintosh. The worst case outcome is that I install Ubuntu or Windows and I have a solid PC to use in the office. And technically I have a smoking hot Macintosh that doesn’t support HDMI. This thing runs Photoshop and X Code unlike any other machine in my arsenal.

I plan on spending my free time after 9pm for the next 7 days trying to overcome the challenges with this box.

Anyone interested in building a Hackintosh? I was thinking about doing another big build.

David CrowCommentary about high tech happenings in hogtown