Cambrian House of Calgary closed its doors recently leading many to suggest that is was crowdsourcing that was to blame, but I think Mathew Ingram hit the nail on the head:
Does this mean that crowdsourcing startup ideas doesn’t work? I don’t think so — but it shows that simply coming up with good ideas isn’t always enough. Someone has to execute them.–Cambrian House: Failure or evolution? » mathewingram.com/work |

I’ve worked at a bunch of startups over the past 4 years and work, there is always work to be had a plenty.  The ideas are almost always good, but without …read more

Checking my must-read feeds this morning I caught a mention of Robin Good highlighting collaboration tools. Given my passion for collaboration tools and Robin usually highlights interesting stuff I read straight away. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see a Canadian tech company on the list. Cozimo is highlighted for its collaborative editing toolset:
Cozimo

Cozimo is a web-based collaboration tool that allows you to collaborate on multimedia files with others. After you upload videos, images or PDF files, workgroup members can be invited and annotate, draw or leave notes on this content together. They can do this on …read more

Universities are often where the cool stuff starts (Google, Yahoo … the Internet), typically like-minded folks find each other in class and such, but that’s pretty random.  What if you take a self-selected bunch of techies who are passionate about creating the next big thing and have them all live together?
That’s the idea behind University of Waterloo’s new Velocity residence.  Increase the chance that something cool will come up by throwing people together in an environment just for that.
If this is successful I can see it being copied elsewhere.  We already do it in the business world, so starting early …read more

Thanks to Heri for posting the link to the a series of posts from LavaBlast on how their software for franchise owners was developed.  Here are some of Heri’s comments on what they did…
I like to see once in a while a web company that does things differently. They didn’t take any outside funding, they didn’t spend any time on financial projections or market studies, they didn’t chose the fashionable technology of the day (LavaBlast use .NET instead of your typical Ruby on Rails or Python framework), they didn’t spend time coming to our hyped camps, breakfasts and conferences, and …read more

The story about Bell Canada throttling traffic on its network is building steam.  I covered this a bit yesterday in my post, but Michael Geist adds a couple new wrinkles to this that I hadn’t considered:
Sources advise that the company was regularly asked about its intentions and that it consistently assured ISPs that throttling would not apply to wholesale services. Now that the company has dropped that pretense, the business community is left to wonder whether it will soon target business VPN traffic or broadcasters like the CBC for their streamed traffic.  This represents a fundamental reshaping of the Internet …read more

The news floating around over the past 24 hours has been the news that Bell Canada has been “traffic shaping” aka throttling bandwidth on their DSL service.
Okay, this isn’t great, but okay it’s their pipe, right?  Close, but there is a twist, Bell Canada sells access to the pipe to other ISPs (Telus does the same thing) and neglected to inform the resellers of this little detail:
Up in Canada, it appears that Bell Canada has decided to start implementing traffic shaping features without letting its resellers know. That means that customers are discovering that their traffic is being impeded at …read more

I don’t mind being scooped when a) the news is great and b) I’m traveling and in this case it was both–Congratulations its a Startup – Canadian Fairchildren Unite » Billions With Zero Knowledge.
Congrats guys!

Morning from SXSW.  I’ll have my travel and early morning pics up soon, but we’re all here at the b5media ranch hanging out waiting for Aaron and Mark to arrive.  I haven’t even begun to think about what sessions I’m going to, well besides a couple that hit my attention.
I saw on the Dabble blog that Avi will be here–Dabble DB Blog: Dabble DB hits the road. –and on the Building Developer-Friendly Web Service APIs panel with Carl of Defensio and Ben of Freshbooks.
On Monday Kris Krug is on the Blame Canada: 7 Ways We’re Ahead in New Media panel …read more

Matt  Cutts made his 2008 predictions and wants a “best of” RSS solution:
An RSS startup will add the ability to take a normal RSS blog feed and produce a “best of” feed that picks only the most popular/controversial/interesting items. You will be able to say (for example) “I want only about three Valleywag posts per day. Pick the best ones for me.” This new offering will cause some controversy across the blogosphere about fair use and copyright. But most bloggers will ultimately decide that they’d rather have the extra “lazy readers” than not have them at all. Source: My 2008 …read more

Checking out the list of the Webware 100 Finalist list I noticed several familiar names…
ConceptShareProductivity
CoverItLivePublishing & Photography
Dabble DBProductivity
FlickrPublishing & Photography
FlockBrowsing
MobivoxCommunication
StumbleUponSocial
WordPressPublishing & Photography
Source: All the Webware 100 finalists in one place | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone

Okay I know that Flickr, Flock, StumbleUpon, and WordPress aren’t Canadian per se, but Flickr and SU were born here and both Flock and WordPress have folks up here.
Still this list is very impressive.  CoverItLive is one of my new fav online apps.  If I have a solid net connection at a conference, be sure I’ll be using it to cover the sessions.
There …read more