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David Crow

Connector of dots. Maker of lines. Rider of slopes.

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SMS and Canadian Phone Numbers

by davidcrow

Photo by
Photo by UggBoy♥UggGirl

I’m a huge fan of Google Voice. I’m not alone the team at TechCrunch also seem to be fans. I would really like to use my 416 number with a provider like Google Voice that let’s me keep this as my primary number but forward calls and SMS messages to a device or application I am using. Basically, I’d like to have my 416 follow me to a T-Mobile number of my choice in the US or a Wind Mobile number or a where ever. Basically I’d like something like Google Voice with a Canadian number.

Why?

I have a Rogers Wireless phone that until very recently has been my primary phone, but with the introduction of the Wind Mobile’s outrageous holiday rate of $40/month I decided to get a new phone. However, because I do travel out of the Wind coverage zone I kept my Rogers phone (it has a 1Gb North American data plan that I use when in the US and rural Ontario). I think MG Siegler has captured by desire to take control of my phone number (which is increasingly my SMS contact point). I’d like to port my 416 number and have access using the devices that are important to me: Android, iOS, SIP phone, softphone, and SMS.

As part of this I started looking at business solutions for the Influitive offices. Theand I’d really like to set up a Canadian business solution. But it seems that the SMS piece particularly for inbound Canadian numbers seems to be the bottleneck. This makes me suspect that the issue is either with the CRTC and a whole bunch of stuff that I just don’t understand (or care to understand) or with CLECs and SS7 hardware and a bunch of other stuff I just don’t understand. Anyone know why I can’t get SMS messages on VoIP providers for Canadian numbers?

I’m trying to find an alternative to Google Voice and a Canadian number. I’m thinking that I will try OpenVoice and Anveo as a SIP provider. I’m hoping this should work.

Provider Cdn Number Port a Cdn Number Inbound SMS to Cdn Number iOS Android Blackberry SIP access Comments
Google Voice Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Limited support of Canadian area codes (403 in Alberta)
Toktumi & Line2 Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ No inbound SMS for Canadian #s, No SIP phones
Phonebooth.com Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
VoxOx Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ No SIP phones
RingCentral.ca Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ No inbound SMS for Canadian #s
Phone.com Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ No inbound SMS for Canadian #s
Skype for Business Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
OpenVoice & Tropo Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
OpenVBX & Twilio Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
Cloudvox Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
Teleku & OpenVBX Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Supports Teleku and Google Voice SMS forwarding with Gizmo5
Ribbit
Grasshopper
Asterisk & SIP phone

  • Les.net or VoIP.ms plus RentPBX.com
Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Great services. Managing a asterisk install was too much for me. LES.net rumored to have SMS inbound in Feb 2011.
Anveo Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ Icon by http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/

What are other startups using for their office phone system? I’m leaning towards RingCentral.ca. I know a few others that are using OneConnect, but it bugs me they don’t list their prices.

But hoping others have thoughts? Opinions?

Posted on January 28, 2011 Filed Under: Articles, personal, Technology Tagged With: openvoice, sip, startup, voip

Recommendation Engines

by davidcrow

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/good_day/41798369/
Photo by good_day

I started using Netflix and I’m both impressed with the recommendation engine and curious. Amazon does a great job using a combination of items and behaviour to present thing I might like to purchase. I find the Netflix Canada content recommendations good but not quite as good. This could be the difference that my Amazon history dates back to June 24, 1999 with my @davidcrow.ca email address. I started thinking about how simple these recommendations seem, i.e., basic inputs and outputs but potentially very powerful business implications. You can see recommendations at Amazon, TiVO, Netflix, Pandora, etc. It’s a great tool for discover and can potentially increase sales and business metrics (back in 2006 Amazon was reporting 35% of sales come from recommendations). Recommendations can be incredibly valuable business drivers (see Digg Recommendation Engine to drive traffic) and I was very curious at how others had  approached this problem, specifically if there were methods or techniques that I could leverage. (I’ve been following the creation of a taste graph or interest graphs by companies like Hunch and Quora and Gravity). The other interesting spot where I see a lot of people discovery is on dating sites, however, I think the success metrics of profile matching for certain dating sites is very different (think eHarmony vs Ashley Madison).

  • Rethinking Recommendation Engines
  • 10 Recommended Recommendation Engines
  • The Art, Science and Business of Recommendation Engines
  • The Netflix Queue – How’s it work?
  • Netflix Prize: Grand Prize awarded to team BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos
  • Greg Linden
    • What is a good recommendation algorithm?
    • Early Amazon: Recommendations
    • Early Amazon: Bookmatcher
  • Collaborative Filtering
    • Wikipedia
    • Open Source Collaborative Filtering
  • MapReduce
    • Apache Hadoop & Mahout
      • IBM DeveloperWorks Introducing Apache Mahout
      • Recommendation Mining examples using Mahout
    • MySpace’s C# based Qizmt
  • Dating Sites
    • How does the matching algorithm of the popular dating service suggest potential mates?
    • Analyzing the Algorithms of Attraction
  • Latent semantic analysis
    • Ruby; Python
    • Tutorial
  • NLTK
  • Bayesian Inference
  • Open Recommender

There is a lot of really great tools. I built a Hadoop instance and had Mahout up and running on my MacBook Air in about an hour. It’s not as fancy as the backend at Backtype (check out all of their tech). I’m curious at what others like EventBrite are using to power their social discovery of events and Chomp for mobile apps.

Posted on January 14, 2011 Filed Under: Articles, Business, Technology Tagged With: collaborative, greglinden, recommendation+engine

Moderizing my television subscription

by davidcrow

Photo by Solacetech
Photo by Solacetech

I was reading Wired 18.09: The New TV Guide which comes as I’m re-evaluating my cable TV usage and evaluating every cost savings as I try to free myself from expenses while starting up a new company. I decided to switch from Rogers Home Internet to Teksavvy. Teksavvy cable provides me (currently) with 15Mbps download and 1Mbps upload with 200Gb monthly usage for $42.95/month. This compares to essentially the same service from Rogers for $59.99/month (HighSpeed Internet Extreme – 15Mbps download/1Mbps upload and a 80Gb usage). I figured for approximately the same service I could save ~$17.04/month or about $200/year. Once this decision was made I started to look at our cable expense and watching patterns.

Basically, the F1 season ended and I my blood pressure can’t bear to watch the Steelers. I watch very little television, it was mostly morning news, kid shows, a few sitcoms and movies. I like watching TV in HD. I had Rogers VIP Ultimate with TMN that was approximately $100.47/month. We had a digital cable box plus the HD PVR. My cable bill was averaging approximately $140 after taxes (about $1680/year). What was watched:

  • Franklin The Turtle on Treehouse onDemand
  • Dora the Explorer
  • Formula 1 on TSN
  • The Big Bang Theory
  • Cougar Town
  • The Ultimate Fighter
  • In Search of Perfection
  • Top Gear
  • Good Eats
  • Breakfast Television
  • a little bit of live NFL football and hockey
  • and movies on The Movie Network

On December 21, 2010 at midnight was the day the cable turned off in my house. I was really scared. It was the first time since 1997 that I hadn’t had cable television. I had Time Warner in Austin. I had Rogers in Canada. It’s been a long time. But I decided to shake things up and see what our TV watching experience would be like. I figured I had a rough budget of $200/month including hardware or about $2400/year. Here is my current setup.

  • Xbox 360 (previously owned)
  • Wii (previously owned)
  • Motorola SB62010 cable modem – $99 + $10 s&h
  • AppleTV – $129
  • Netflix Canada – $8/month
  • Teksavvy Extreme Cable service – $42.95/month

Using a very simple amortization algorithm (divide the price of hardware over a 12 month period) plus the basic cost of content I spend $79.98/month (TekSavvy + Netflix + Hardware) versus $200/month for home internet plus HD cable. This is a very basic comparison and assumes that my total content is provided by Netflix or other internet source.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with Netflix. Perhaps this is because the only 2 movies I’ve seen in a theatre in the past year are The A Team and Tron. And the only other movies I’ve watch on planes. There are all six seasons of Franklin the Turtle and Dora the Explorer. And I’ve caught up on some of the movies that I missed on The Movie Network (500 Days of Summer; I Love You, Beth Cooper; Taken; The Day the Earth Stood Still – not the best selection but when you haven’t seen them they are sufficient entertainment). Plus the documentaries are great (Crips and Bloods: Made in America; Empires: Medici – Godfathers of Renaissance; Blood into Wine; MacHEADS; Between the Folds; Vice Guide to Travel; and a bunch of other stuff). It’s not perfect but for $8/month it is perfect. I’ve rented 2 movies on iTunes at $5.99 (Predators and Cargo) plus purchased TopGear Season 15 HD from iTunes ($14.99) and DVDs of Shrek Forever After ($19.99); WALL-E ($12.99); Toy Story 3 ($19.99) and ripped them using Handbrake. So for December I’m all in for $425. Not bad given that it’s about 3x from my previous bill but includes hardware: cable modem and AppleTV. Using my rough calculations if I continue to rent 2 movies @ $5.99/month and purchase 6 movies (or TV shows on iTunes) @ $19.99/month I should break even after 4 months compared to my previous cable + internet bill.

The set up is not perfect. I feel like I miss local news even with a digital antenna for the TV and the CityTV application on the iPad. I’ve added the CityTV podcast to my favorites, and we’ll see if that satisfies my coffee and the news fix at 7am. I miss watching football, well technically I miss falling asleep watching football with a beer on Sunday afternoons. Television has been the most difficult. Season Passes to HD shows on iTunes are about $60 (The Big Bang Theory Season 4 – $55.99) and we’re part way through the season and I don’t feel compelled to purchase the full pass. Season 3 was 23 episodes at $3.49 – $80.49 purchased individually vs $64.99 as a Seasons Pass. I could download torrents of most of the shows but that’s not my style. I’m leaning more towards DVDs given the unfavourable ownership rights of digital content purchased on many of the services. We’ve tried watching episodes on Boxee and CTV but the quality is just not right on a 37″ 720p capable TV. And I have no idea what I will do for Formula1 in 2011, this is still up in the air, hopefully the mobile application for 2011 will work. But I’m hoping Bernie Ecclestone is reading I’d pay him directly for a live stream (may have to purchase a VPN connection to watch BBC or other broadcaster).

Kids are just as happy. There are movies and TV shows they watch. Essentially no change. Spouse is mostly happy. TV is a little weak but that’s because Boxee and iTunes are different. Netflix and movie consumption is up, which balances the displeasure of traditional broadcast. My assessment is that it’s a wash. We’ll break even in another 3 months and my TV watching behaviours will have changed.

Next, I’m considering purchasing a proxy or VPN service. Anyone have any recommendations? I’m also looking at hacking my AppleTV or jailbreaking the iPad to stream content from any app using AirPlay. Fun stuff.

Posted on January 10, 2011 Filed Under: Articles, Geek Life Tagged With: appletv, boxee, citytv, hacking, rogers

Building communities, not products

by davidcrow

Photo by Lawrence Whittemore http://www.flickr.com/photos/lawrence_evil/149197406/in/photostream/
Photo by Lawrence Whittemore http://www.flickr.com/photos/lawrence_evil/149197406/in/photostream/

I’ve been feeling a little rusty this week. I received feedback that my focus of the past 5+ years on community and evangelism was not necessarily a benefit to an early-stage technology company. This came as a shock as I had to justify and rationalize the past 9 years that I’ve lived in Toronto and why I have been relentless about the need to build a stronger ecosystem and community in Toronto.

I moved to Toronto in November 2001. I had left Austin, TX in July 2001 after spending a great few years working at Trilogy Software and at Reactivity Inc. I had spent the previous years doing interaction design, presales, and product management for a sales force automation company and then for early-stage and pre-product clients at Reactivity (this was before the transition from startup accelerator to a product firm aka the XML firewall company that was sold to Cisco). I worked with more than 15 clients including Living.com, AllMyStuff, eLaw.com, Zaplet, MetalSite and others. It was a great time, I learned a lot about small teams, venture funding, and how to effectively build products for undefined markets, undefined customers, and undefined budgets.

When I moved to Toronto there was (and continues to be) a very strong agency culture. There were firms like Cyberplex, BlastRadius, Organic, JWT, ModemMedia, MacLaren McCann, Critical Mass and others. There was a hub for this community with Spadina Bus, TechSpace and AIMS. The problem was there wasn’t a strong Internet application or product culture. I wrote about my investigations looking for TO software companies part 1 & part 2.

As part of the return to Toronto, my spouse started her optometric practice. One of the requirements of the financing to get this off the ground was that I get a regular paying gig. And then strangely September 11, 2001 happened. I took a job working at CIBC in the Retail Markets group as the lead Usability Consultant. I lasted about 6 months at CIBC, big corporate culture was not an environment where I thrived. I found a gig at Ryerson University rolling out the self-service component of their Human Resources Management System. Turns out my first recommendation was to scrap the Oracle 8 Forms based application in favour of new HRMS selection and patching functionality in the existing system using web applications. It looks like the front end of the applicant tracking system I built is still running 5 years after I left (if you’re curious the system built using Fusebox 3.0 running on Coldfusion 6.x against Oracle 9i on Windows Server 2000/2k3). This was as close to product I got until about 2005.

In 2005, I decided I really wanted to be back in the startup game. There was a flurry of activity and events in Silicon Valley, Seattle and Boston that were attracting my attention. I thought I would benefit by replicating the ethos and DNA of these communities in Toronto — see my post on TorCamp. This was the beginning of DemoCamp, StartupNorth and my attempt to facilitate a community of like minded individuals in Toronto doing great things. Did you know that I met Jay Goldman, Jon Lax, Geoff Teehan, Leila Boujnane, Reg Braithwaite, Mike Beltzner, Mark Surman and others at the first BarCamp Toronto?). At the bar after the second day of presentations, hacking and meetups, Albert Lai and I hatched a plan to do a lighter weight monthly gathering modeled after DEMO where entrepreneurs and developers show what they’ve been working on, aka DemoCamp.

And I started thinking about the role that community plays as the framework for making Toronto a stronger ecosystem for software, Internet, mobile startups. I was trying to build my own future. I was trying to create a strong, dense community of companies where designers, developers and entrepreneurs can find employment, inspiration, a sense of belonging. Why? Well this is what I was missing. But it meant that I stepped back from representing a single company or a single product. My role was to build a stronger community. John Oxley and Mark Relph at Microsoft understood this mix of community, product, technology and rabble rousing.  They took a chance and hired me. This allowed me to focus on helping to enable a stronger community. And my particular focus has always been startups, early stage technology companies, etc. It required me to take a role in evangelism marketing. To continue to be a social media enabled and facing presence in the community. To host events and continue to identify, nurture and develop influencers particularly in the unfriendly to Microsoft community.

So it was funny this week to hear from someone in the industry that I respect deeply make comments that my product abilities are substandard and describe the focus of the past 10 years as counter productive to my career. It brought up a lot of personal turmoil about past decisions. And generally it has left me thinking about my role in the community versus my career as product builder. I started all of this community activity because I wanted to build emerging technology products in Toronto. There wasn’t a strong community of product builders and entrepreneurs (or I couldn’t find this community in Toronto). I think there is a much strong network of entrepreneurs, developers, designers, funders and others that have emerged. StartupNorth and TechVibes provide local coverage of events and activities. There are world-class startups like Dayforce, Rypple, Idee, Well.ca, Kontagent, CiRBA and others.

But I think it’s time for me to focus on building a company and products again. To shake off the rust of the past 9 years. And go deep on the product management, design and customer development needed to design, build and ship a world-class product. It leaves me wondering about my pedigree which 9 years ago I thought was stellar: Waterloo, Carnegie Mellon, Trilogy, and Reactivity (an Accel funded startup with spinouts funded by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia). I get it, this was a lifetime ago. But really have I gone from being an asset to a detriment? And what do I need to do to change this perception. Time to focus on my career and not the community for the time being.

Posted on November 24, 2010 Filed Under: Articles, Community 2.0, personal Tagged With: career, funding, personal

Goodbye Microsoft, so long and thanks for all the bits

by davidcrow

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/2049233526/
Photo by Stuck in Customs

Can you believe that it has been 1230 days since I announced I was joining Microsoft? I’m guessing a lot of people lost out on that one in the over/under pool. Well, it has been a fantastic 3 years, 4 months and 7 days so far, unfortunately there are only 4 days left until it’s over for me. Effective Friday, September 24, 2010 I will be leaving Microsoft Canada.

I’m heading back into the fray. Or as John so eloquently puts it, I will be starting on a new path, with some old friends and the plan is actually quite simple:
Have fun and try to take over the world responsibly. I’ve spent the past 3+ years talking to entrepreneurs about programs like BizSpark and trying to help them build on the emerging Microsoft technologies and platform. I’m looking forward to getting back in the trenches and using customer development to build and ship products.

I’m not alone. There are a few of the folks that I’ve worked with or been lucky enough to call a friend that have also left Microsoft in the past year including: Don Dodge, Adam Kinney, Scott Barnes and others. This didn’t impact my decision to leave, it’s more just a curious observation.

As a sidenote, I’m pretty sure that John will be looking for a ISV DE (in non-Microsoft acronym speak: a developer evangelist focused on independent software vendors). What does an ISV DE do? Here’s the ISV DE job description from Belgium.

The ISV Developer Evangelist mission is to drive platform adoption and revenue growth with depth and breadth ISVs. The ISV Developer Evangelist is focused on winning ISV adoption of Microsoft platform technologies by working with ISV senior technology decision makers within these organizations. This is accomplished by collaborating with the ISV PAM (Partner Account Manager) to build a well-managed, mutually beneficial alliance that drives revenue growth and expands the reach of strategic Microsoft products within the partner’s solution portfolio.

It was a great time to be a part of the Developer & Platform Evangelism team at Microsoft Canada. And if I’d consider working with John Oxley (@joxley), Mark Relph (@mrelph) and the team again in the future. If you’re looking for a fun gig working with ISVs including startups and emerging companies, make sure you follow up with John.

Posted on September 20, 2010 Filed Under: Articles, Entrepreneurship, personal Tagged With: bizspark, davidcrow, Microsoft, startup

Meet with me in Vancouver

by davidcrow

Grow Conf, Aug 19-21, 2010 Vancouver, BC

I’m heading to Vancouver for the Grow Conference. If you’re a startup, an investor or a service provider in Canada you should be at this event. Read my Top 5 Reasons to go to Grow. (Random note: I’m surprised that Peer1 or Q9 or MyHosting or iWeb or RackForce didn’t see this as a potential sponsorship and marketing event. Further evidence that tech startups are the Rodney Dangerfield‘s of Canadian businesses).

Bootup LabsI’ll be in Vancouver Monday, August 16 through August 20. On August 19 & 20, I’ll be at Grow Conference (I am currently open for breakfast on the Thursday August 19 if you’re interested). I am staying downtown so if you’re up for breakfast, lunch or dinner and you want to talk startups, product/market fit, marketing, BizSpark, technology, or better yet if you can show me where to get a bourbon manhattan. I’ll be working out of Bootup Labs, 163 West Hastings Street – Suite 200, Vancouver, BC and WavefrontAC, 1055 West Hastings Street, Vancouver BC.

I’m looking to talk to entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, investors, policy makers, technologists and designers. I’d love to learn about new companies in Vancouver that are:

  • Building on the Microsoft stack including Azure, SQL Server, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, IE9, and other emerging Microsoft technologies. I’m happy to chat about BizSpark and other programs available for startups.
  • Not building on the Microsoft stack, I’d still love to talk to you. I’d love to learn about your choices whether they be PHP, Rails, Android, iPhone, AppEngine, BigTable, Hadoop, Solr, Cassandra, RIAK, VoltDB, open web, etc.
  • Startup fund-raising and Vancouver. I’d love to get an entrepreneurs take on the funding scene. What’s it like to raise capital form W Media Ventures, GrowthWorks Vancouver, VanEdge. Who are the angels? What works? What’s broken?
  • Pitching StartupNorth. We get a lot of submissions of standard press releases. I’ll tell you what works in getting our attention and maybe this can help you get the attention of other bloggers and more credible press.
  • How to demo like a demon! I’d like to see entrepreneurs demo their wares. Come show me your software, the coolest thing about your solution, something that changed your life. Real software always makes me happy.
  • Emerging business models and go-to-market strategy – I’d love to talk about new pricing models, new consumer advertising models, economic and growth models that will allow startups to monetize and survive.
  • Health 2.0 – I’d love to see startups in the patient care space, new health tracking, personal health informatics, aging population support. I think this is a fantastic market segment, though highly regulated, but it’s a area that I have a personal interest in.
  • Social CRM – Microsoft just release CRM5 (ok CRM 2011). Salesforce continues to evolve their platform. There are new competitors like Jive and Lithium. I keep looking at HighRise and BatchBook for my personal contacts. Love to chat about the space, the players, what customers are looking for, etc.

These are all just suggested topics. I’m in town, I actually don’t have an agenda for 3 days.

Find time on my calendar and book a meeting with me at tungle.me/davidcrow


Posted on August 12, 2010 Filed Under: Articles, Community, Geek Life, Startups, Vancouver Tagged With: bootuplabs, davidcrow, meetup, Startups, Vancouver, wavefrontac

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