8. The CIO collaborates to death.
Whether it is the character flaw of being indecisive or some middle-school notion of democracy, you are in charge. Collaboration is critical, but you also need to make the right decision at the right time. Collaborate like Captain Kirk. "Spock?" "Bones?" He gets opinions from his experts but there is never any question about who will make the final decision. And, if you never watched Star Trek then you shouldn’t even be a CIO. Source: 9 Reasons Why Application Developers Think Their CIO Is Clueless – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership

I think to really lead geeks well you need to have watched the shows we watched, read the books (and comics) we read, movies we watched … you have to know where we’re coming from.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we’ve been heavily influenced by Roddenberry, Heinlein, Asimov.  They have helped us form and conceive of the world around us.

To be able to relate to geeks, developers, sys admins, etc. you have to know this stuff.   Really you need to grok it.

But most of all you need to know the Scotty Principle.

Post from: EveryJoe

A good CIO needs to know the Scotty Principle

Which begs the question—what are those core tools?

This is my list:

• Windows Live Writer
• AbiWord
• Flock
• Twhirl
• SnagIt
• An image editor of some kind that has a small footprint.
• Skype
• Gtalk

That’s it.  I’ll get rid of MS Works and pretty much anything that isn’t going to be for live blogging or light writing isn’t going to be there.

RSS and email: web-based

So, the question then becomes…what would your kit have in it?

Post from: EveryJoe

If you got an Asus Eee 900 with XP what would your toolkit be?

I’ve managed to secure myself a beer and a photographer, in that order, and really, that’s all I need. (images coming as soon as he gets them online)

We’re getting underway here shortly….

7:15 annnd I’ve just confirmed that I don’t have a connection. excellent. This will be a really good live blog without an actual wifi connection. Rebecca has a connection. I do not. Tod is blaming it on my PC.

7:19 Darren’s introducing his case study: ThoughtFarmer. They make a wiki based intranet. Super cool products are easier to market. well, yes.

7:23 “ooh pretty slides!” that we can’t see! no projector = lack of visual aids for anyone but Darren. I’m glad he’s enjoying them. :)

7:25 people respond to originality. They value it highly. If you approach them in a creative way, you can capture the attention of the people like Mike Arrington & Pete Cashmore.

Marketing. The real definition? The thing you’re marketing.

7:27 We care mostly about ourselves. Go read “Made to Stick” – it talks about Maslow’s hierarchy, and talks about it in a way that makes sense to these sort of campaigns.

Remember: Funny beats unfunny all the time. It’s a key aspect of a campaign. We laugh at things we are surprised at.

1. The steps to create a new campaign include:
2. doing extensive research
3. finding the good idea
4. Using the above as the means to pitch or contact online influencers
   Follow up: hassle the bloggers a little bit (not much, but a bit)

The end result is that more visitors = more users = more links

7:32: Need an original idea to grab people’s attention. You’ve got to remember that, as a marketer, you’re essentially an interrupter.

Capulet made a fake company with a fake intranet called “Tubetastic“. “We make tubes, a whole series of them”. They wrote a couple funny stories, created a site. They were funny enough. Then, they created a profile of every blogger they were contacting as though were employees of “Tubetastic“. They all got goofy titles “tube shiner”, “assistant tube shiner”. they researched each blogger and created “interviews” with each blogger.

Every client gets a “social media resources page” links to blogs, elevator pitches, logos, Vimeo sets, Flickr sets, screenshots etc. They got the ThoughtFarmer to twitter, use Vimeo and more. They created a whole social media profile for the company.

Because everyone has far too much email, Capulet mailed the bloggers a ‘welcome new employee kit’. They are trading on the mystery “what the hell is this” humour, and recognition of exclusive peers. What’s the first thing they see when they go to the site? themselves. Their content. Their “interview”.

7:42 Safe is risky and risky is safe [Seth Godin]. The risk is that bloggers contacted knew that “wow, there’s my picture, my RSS feed, … um… that’s not cool…” except that most of the people they sent things to are pretty public people.

How did they find the addresses? Asked. For the most part, they asked people for their addresses. And those people, those public people and bloggers, offered them.

Make sure you’ve got your community management risk covered too. Any time you have a wiki in a marketing platform, it can sour with bad apples putting porn online or saying disparaging things about the platform.

They got on TechCrunch, and Read Write Web – the client was thrilled because those are two of the biggest tech blogs in the world. One of the risks involved in this campaign however, is that the RWW post was more about the marketing campaign than it was the client. There’s not really any way to protect against this however. If the post doesn’t mention your product, at least it mentions your marketing in a positive way.

7:54 A lot of the conversation among the technology elite has moved to Twitter. there were a lot of tweets about the campaign. Marketers need to determine the value of a tweet.

8:02 Overall, the ThoughtFamer TubeTastic campaign was considered a success. Traffic doubled, they got more requests for demos and got more links. They achieved all of their goals in a targeted manner.

Post from: EveryJoe

Live Blogging: Third Tuesday with Darren Barefoot

1. Canadians are innovative. One word: RIM.
2. Canadians are well educated.  Not only do we have some of the best post-secondary education in tech in the world (PHP was invented by a Finn–I think–who went to Western), our populace is generally well educated (we can find Canada and the US on a map).
3. Canadians are wired and connected. Until recently Canada had the highest per capita adoption of high-speed Internet in the world.  Places like Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa dialup is nearly a thing of the past.
4. Canadians adopt and adapt to new technologies quickly.  The debit card (up here called by its brand name Interac) is overwhelmingly popular, in the States debit cards are still trying to gain traction.
5. Tech savvy VCs.  Okay maybe not all VCs are tech savvy, but folks like JLA, Brightspark, Growthworks are and that’s who you’d be talking to.
6. Rick Segal.  Yeah I’m biased,  but if you listen to him talk about Canada and don’t think we’re the best place to start a tech company, well you must have skipped your morning coffee.
7. The tight-knit tech community.  We might be spread out over the second largest country by land mass in the world, but we try to connect and support each other.
8. Cost-effective.  You might not think so, but it doesn’t cost as much to run a company here.  We have some great tax and other benefits to help you along.
9. Passion and drive.  Canadians might seem all polite and mild-mannered, but don’t let that fool you.  We’re passionate about what we do and we work damn hard to make it work.  Come on have you watched Canadians at a hockey game?
10. Great beer.  Our beer tastes great and has alcohol in it–and that’s the cheap stuff.

Okay, this might be more than a little tongue-in-cheek, but in all seriousness Canada has probably one of the most underrated tech scenes in the world.  Gotta change that.

These are my reasons … your turn.  Add to the list.

Photo credits: Photo of me, by Lloyd Budd, Photo of Rick Segal by Tris Hussey

Post from: EveryJoe

Tech Channel Theme Day-Lists: Top 10 Reasons Your Tech Startup Should Be In Canada

Before I got to my writing I went out and got an EVDO card from Telus–more on that later–and by the time I got home and such I had to dash out.  By the time dinner rolled around, well it felt like a gnome was trying to break out of my skull above my left eye.

Needless to say, that doesn’t help one get writing done.

I managed to dig out of email and such before I crashed last night, but that’s it.

Interesting how this relates to the whole blogger health thing, yes staring at a screen all day isn’t a good thing.

Post from: EveryJoe

Migraines and blogging don’t mix

First off is Aidan Henry’s list of Victoria startups to watch:

A few of the start-ups that are paving the way in the Victoria pure-play Internet space include:

• DailySplice – Personalized, daily podcast radio.
• Indochino – Affordable, tailored men’s suits online.
• Teampages - Simplified team and league management tools for sports.
• Oprius – Web-based application suite for network marketers.

Two other early-stage players include Zumer and Utilium (both in private Beta) .

Then we have folks at ThoughtFarmer presenting at Convergence Integration 2008 and Kris Krug at SXSWi (thx to Heri for linking to it).  Coming up at Massive Technology Show (Apr 1) we have Rebecca Bollwitt and Michael Tippett speaking.

Last but not least, Austin discusses a new startup fund for Montreal (linking to these sharp folks as well):

• Marc MacLeod, CFO at MobiVox (who writes a great blog on CFO life at a Startup)
• Boris Mann writes about the fund at Bootup Labs.
• Heri at Montreal Tech Watch covers the announcement and the investment in Standout Jobs.

And I ran into Eric, formerly of MyBlogLog, in the BlogHaus at SXSWi and he told me about the new MBL widgets to add to my side bar (check it out) so I’m also doing the verification for MBL hence…Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification.

Post from: EveryJoe

Canadians on the Web 2.0 scene–speaking, presenting, and generally out there

The CWTA – the lobbying arm for the wireless industry – breathlessly reports that Canadians are among the most enthusiasm users of wireless voice services with monthly usage of more than 400 minutes. Of course, what the CWTA doesn’t mention is that the 60% penetration rate is pretty sad compared with the U.S. (more than 80%), and Europe where most countries have penetration rates of more than 90%.

The Canadian wireless industry likes to suggest the reason penetration lags the U.S. is the industry was launched a couple of years later than south of the border. That may be true but it would also help if there was intense competition between Canadian carriers (Telus, Rogers and Bell). It was also disappointing to see Virgin Canada’s decision to jump into the long-term contract arena, oddly abandoning a core pillar of its growth based of not binding its customers into contracts – something Virgin describes as the “The Catch”

Post from: EveryJoe

Let’s Celebrate: Wireless Penetration in Canada Hits 60%

At one time, they were a really cool meta-search engine based in Quebec City that attracted a fair bit of attention because it was innovative, interesting and, well, was based in Quebec City. Then, it was acquired by Montreal-based Mamma.com, a search engine that Mark Cuban invested in for a brief period of time. Copernic quickly disappeared from the tech landscape, which was really too bad given its roots.

So, it was encouraging – I guess – to see a press release yesterday that Copernic, which is Mamma.com’s new name, has launched an updated version of Copernic Mobile that now includes a new Apple iPhone/iPod Touch-optimized user interface.

“Copernic Mobile now automatically detects the user’s mobile device and optimizes its website for display on a standard mobile phone, an iPhone/iPod or a computer,” said Eric Bouchard, VP of Products for Copernic, who was one of original Copernic’s founders.

Post from: EveryJoe

Copernic: Still Alive and Well

Speculation is running rampant that it’s only a matter of time before Ottawa-based Cognos is snapped up as well – a move that would cost about $4-billion (not including a takeover premium). Among the potential suitors is IBM Corp. Microsoft could also be in the picture given the long-standing rumors of its interest in Cognos.

In general, SAP has not made large acquisitions but the company said it made an exception because the business intelligence market is growing so quickly.

Post from: EveryJoe

Is Cognos Next?

Post from: EveryJoe

iPhone in Canada?