In case you were wondering if Gizmodo’s fight with Apple over that ill-gotten iPhone prototype might be affecting their reporting, consult this screenshot from Techmeme, taken at 8:45 p.m. EDT, above.
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Tech Evangelist Joey deVilla on Shopify, startups, software development, tech news and other nerdy stuff
In case you were wondering if Gizmodo’s fight with Apple over that ill-gotten iPhone prototype might be affecting their reporting, consult this screenshot from Techmeme, taken at 8:45 p.m. EDT, above.
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How’d I miss this video? At TechDays Winnipeg, Dylan Smith of ANVIL Digital (and speaker in the “Fundamentals” track), showed me this it’s-funny-because-it’s-true video that’s been around since May that looks at the vexing expectations that clients have of vendors in IT and the creative industries:
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
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As the decade draws to a close, you’re likely to see more and more articles and charts with a “decade in review” theme. Since technology is both my passion and the way I pay the rent, as well as an amorphous, unpredictable beast, I make note of those that look at changes in the field.
One that caught my eye is this chart from the Wall Street Journal comparing the top companies in 1999 against the top companies of 2009 (click it to see the full size version, a 500K PDF):
Tech companies made the majority of the top 25 in 1999; in 2009, energy and finance companies were the leaders. Other changes that took place over the decade include:
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Tech companies (shown in dark blue) that were in the top 25 in 1999 (left side of the chart):
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Tech companies (shown in dark blue) that were in the top 25 in 2009 (right side of the chart):
Companies that were also in the top 25 in 1999 are shown in bold italic. |
NYU professor William Easterly, in his article at the Aidwatch blog, writes that the changes between 1999 and 2009 suggest that this is more evidence of consumerization and that the “consumer” is king (I don’t like the term but can’t find a satisfactory substitute; I agree with Jerry Michalski – it makes us sound like “living gullets whose only purpose is to gulp down products and crap out cash). “The consumer,” he writes, “wants iPhones in their Xmas stocking and not whatever Worldcom had been pretending to be producing.”
The bringing of technology to consumer markets before business markets means a number of things:
It’s food for thought as you make your personal and career tech plans for 2010.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
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I have no idea if WIND Mobile is going to be able to deliver what they promise – a mobile phone company that listens to its customers and provides better service than the sad players in the Canadian mobile phone oligarchy – but they’ve got the right ideas and some rather funny videos that perfectly illustrate what the Canadian mobile customer has to contend with.
What if Toronto’s hot dog vendors had a pricing model like Canadian mobile phone companies? Buying a hot dog would be like this:
Canada is the only country in the world where mobile companies lock you into three-year contracts for mobile service, and this situation is illustrated in the video titled Bike Lock:
I always look at the service packages offered by U.S. mobile companies with envy. Here, the mobile companies love nickel-and-diming you:
WIND is a new entrant into the Canadian mobile phone market and a branch of Globalive Communications, who already have a presence in Canada in the form of Yak Communications, an alternative phone and internet provider. They seem to be taking a very “social media” approach to their marketing, what with the “viral” YouTube videos and a “conversational” website in which readers are encourage to actively participate in online discussions.
They look like an interesting company to watch, and hey, if they can get me a better deal than Rogers, I’ll switch.
Tom Purves has been one of voices leading the battle cry against Canadian mobile companies for the past couple of years. Back in 2007 at DemoCamp 17, he gave what I consider to be the best ignite presentation ever given at a Toronto DemoCamp, The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks. Here’s the slide deck from that presentation:
He recently revised his presentation for 2009 when he presented it at the FITC mobile conference in September, which mentions WIND mobile:
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
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This morning’s sessions in TechDays’ Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform focuses on both the ASP.NET MVC web app framework and recommended object-oriented programming practices, namely the Model-View-Controller pattern with Colin Bowern’s presentation earlier this morning and now (at the time of this writing) the SOLID principles in Bruce Johnson’s session, SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC Applications.
You might remember Bruce from the “Assless Chaps” story. The story can be summarized in the three tweets shown below.
First came Bruce’s response to my article about CodeCamp back in April, in which I forgot to mention the session he was doing:
I tweeted him back and then decided to throw in a jokey reply:
My thinking was: Hey, this is a conference of Microsoft developers! Yes, they’re a bright and talented bunch, and I like them, but they’re an older, corporate, more buttoned-down crowd. They’d never go for renaming a session from “Data Binding” to “Data Bondage”.
But Bruce and the Toronto Code Camp organizers surprised me – he changed the name of his session very quickly:
And since he responded to my challenge, I had to fulfill my end of the bargain:


The “Assless Chaps” story doesn’t end there. Yesterday, while we were hanging out by the Windows 7 lounge and the “Assless Chaps” story came up. Bruce told me that our conversation on Twitter about the assless chaps actually landed his company, ObjectSharp, some business. A local developer got curious as to what the “assless chaps” business was all about in Bruce’s and my conversation on Twitter and the ensuing conversation got them talking about ObjectSharp’s services, which in turn became a contract.
The moral of the story: there’s actual business value in Twitter and assless chaps. I may have to go buy a pair (I rented the ones pictured above).
There’s a tamer version of this story in Canadian Developer Connection.
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If you run or work at a small web design or development firm, WebsiteSpark might be for you! WebsiteSpark is Microsoft’s new global program who goal is to help small web companies succeed.
What do you get with WebsiteSpark? I put together a little graphic that explains it pretty quickly:
What You Get
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What It Is
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Silverlight For building rich internet applications that can do multimedia, access data from the web and can also be run on the desktop. |
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Expression A suite of tools for building websites, user interfaces for Silverlight and desktop applications, making web and application graphics, encoding video and building prototype applications in a hurry. You get: - 1 user licence for Expression Studio - Up to 2 user licences for Expression Web |
| SQL Server Web Edition Microsoft’s database platform for data needs of all sizes, from the simplest web form to full-on enterprise applications. You get a 4-processor licence of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition. |
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Windows Server 2008 (and 2008 R2 when it becomes available) A server that’s both powerful and easy to maintain, featuring the IIS 7 web server and the Web Platform Installer, which makes it easy to install and upgrade popular web applications. You get a 4-processor licence of Windows Server 2008 (and for 2008 R2 when it comes out). |
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Visual Studio Professional The IDE (integrated development environment) that has it all. You get up to 3 user licences of Visual Studio Pro. |
If you can answer “yes” to the two questions below, you are!
Once you join WebsiteSpark, there’s a simple obligation: in order to continue participating in WebsiteSpark, you must deploy a new public, internet-accessible website developed using the tools and tech given to you by WebsiteSpark within 6 months of joining.
You can stay in WebsiteSpark for up to 3 years. On the first and second anniversary of your initial enrollment, you must update it – that is, confirm your company hasn’t gone public or its ownership hasn’t changed.
No, but we have a program for you – it’s called BizSpark.
Dude, we have something just for you! It’s called DreamSpark.
The details about the program are at the WebsiteSpark site. Check it out, and if it’s right for you, sign up!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
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Yossi Vardi, according to Wikipedia, is one of Israel’s high-tech entrepreneurs and for over 40 years has funded or helped build over 60 high-tech companies in the fields of software, energy, internet, mobile, electro-optics and water tech. If you’ve used ICQ or the services of my old company Tucows, you’ve used something he helped fund. He’ll be speaking tomorrow evening in Toronto at the Velma Rogers Theatre.
Here’s what the event page for Yossi Vardi’s speaking engagement has to say:
Yossi Vardi is one of the leading individuals in the Israeli software/Internet industry.
Yossi has extensive experience in the public and private sector. In the private sector, he is probably the most respected investor in Israel; has served on many boards including Amdocs, Maariv, Elite, Scitex, Bezeq, Arkia, Elisra. In the public sector, he has extensive experience in technology, including helping to set up the VC industry in Israel via Yozma. He serves on the board of governors of Weizmann Institute and the Technion. He was the chairman of the Jerusalem Foundation, council member of the Open University of Israel and serves on the board of trustees of the Hebrew University. Vardi acted as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program on issues of energy policy and strategy in the developing world. He is a member of the World Economic Forum, serves on the Research Visionary Board of Motorola, and on the Future Trends Forum of The Bankinter Foundation of Innovation. He serves on the advisory board of Blackberry Ventures in Ontario, and served on that of 3i, was advisor to the CEOs of AOL, Amazon.com, Allied-signal, Siemens-Albis and others.
Yossi was the founding investor of Mirabilis, inventor of ICQ – the well known Internet-wide Instant messaging product. Among the companies he invested in, or helped to build are Answers.com, Gteko (sold to Microsoft), Airlink, Tivella, Scopus, CTI2, Foxytunes, Tucows (Toronto based), and Starnet.
In recent years Vardi has been active in fostering a culture of innovation and creativity in Israel and abroad. He founded the Kinnernet conference, an annual, three days gathering of creative people from all over the world.
Vardi won the TechCrunch Europe 2009 "Best investor personality" award; He received an Honorary Doctorate from the Technion, Honorary Fellowship from the Open University, and twice received the Prime Minister award for life achievements in the high tech area; he was nominated as one of The Most Influential International Executives by The Industry Standard.
Yossi, most recently, is an Angel investor in many Israeli startups and is now focusing on unique models of investing in startups. He is currently invested in many startups. Yossi is just returning from San Francisco where he attended the TechCrunch50 conference as one of the Panel of Experts.
This event is sponsored by a number of groups:
An Evening with Yossi Vardi takes place tomorrow night, Thursday, September 24th at 6:30 p.m. at the Velma Rogers Theatre, which is inside the Rogers building at 333 Bloor Street East (at Jarvis).
The free student admission tickets to this event are sold out as of this writing, but the regular admission tickets are a dirt-cheap $5 and some are still available – go there to purchase a ticket.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
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Anthony Suarez suggested a possible upside to Disney’s purchase of Marvel: there’s potential for a really interesting sequel to the game Kingdom Hearts.
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The New York Post is a “scandal sheet” tabloid newspaper that’s best known for its sensationalistic, hilarious headlines. A few examples:
There’s even a book that features the best (worst?) of their wacky headlines.
So when you read the Fear Grips Google story in the Post, you should remember that tech really isn;t their forte and that you might want to take it with a grain of salt. I think Search Engine Land sums it up best:
Bing is probably better than Google anticipated and early indications are favorable in terms of user adoption; however not on any scale to threaten Google’s position. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is taking Bing seriously and trying to carefully assess its algorithm.
Still, the graphic accompanying the Post’s article, Fear Grips Google, is amusing:
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Even though we now have over a decade of e-commerce history under our belts, credit card processing is still one of the most stone-knives-and-bearskins primitive aspects of web app development. It seems like a lot of trouble and arcana just to move money from buyer to seller, an action that at its essence is as old as civilization itself.
Making matters worse for the developer is the sad state of documentation on credit card processing. It’s often unintelligible, written as if it was given as an unwanted task to an intern who couldn’t care less. Sometimes it’s outright wrong.
Enter the folks from the Freckle time-tracking web application: Amy Hoy, Thomas Fuchs and Dieter Komendera. They decided to do a good deed an create a guide titled Jump Start Credit Card Processing, a 15-page PDF guide that explains credit card processing in a manner that’s not just comprehensible, but fun to read. Here’s a sample page:
Among the things explained in this guide are:
Best of all, this guide is available for download absolutely free of charge. If you’re new to the world of e-commerce apps and want to make sense of credit card processing, I strongly recommend Jump Start Credit Card Processing. Grab it from the Jump Start site.
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First, Andy Serwer, managing editor at Fortune magazine wrote an article titled This Crisis Could Have a Happy Ending. In it, he calls this first decade in the 21st century “one big washout for investors” and “a lost decade”.
He also wrote:
I believe that in order for the market to achieve a sustainable advance that is above the mean, we are due for some unforeseen positive event or events. Think about it. In the 1990s stocks went way up because of an unanticipated revolution in technology, i.e., networking and the Internet. In this decade we had a slew of unexpected negative events – bookended by 9/11 and this current meltdown. At some point, and it may be a few years from now, we will likely be subjected to an unforeseen positive.
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson used this article as a launching point for his article, A Lost Decade – But Not for Everyone. In it, he examines the stock prices of some of the big players on the Dow – 3M, Citigroup, GM, Intel, Johnson and Johnson and United Technologies – and declared the Dow “a mixed bag”:
A few disasters (GM, Citigroup, Intel), a bunch of so so stocks (like 3M) and a some winners (like J&J and United Technologies).
For the best examples, he says you have to look beyond the Dow, where you’ll find Apple (“still up 3.5x in nine years”)…
and Google (“still up 2.5x from its IPO in mid 2004”
Based on these observations, he writes:
When I think about what’s really going on in this "lost decade" it occurs to me that we are finally witnessing the impact of the end of the industrial era and the emergence of the information era. That’s not to say every "information stock" has done well. Intel and Microsoft have been a disaster. IBM and HP are down for the decade to date. But we also have to realize that the late 90s drove all information stocks up to crazy levels in anticipation of exactly this shift taking place. The market got it right, but as usual it overshot.
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It will be stocks like Apple, Google, and companies we don’t even know about yet that will lead us back out of this downturn. And I bet there will be a bunch of companies from what we used to call the "emerging markets" that will lead us out of this mess. I think I’ll call them the "emerged markets" from now on.
Howard Lindzon, whom I met recently at Startup Empire, chimes in with his article, Has it Really Been a Lost Decade in the Stock Market?
If WE are to learn one thing from the ‘Lost Decade’ of S&P, Nasdaq and Dow returns is that any idiot can make money in an up market. It is the down markets that separate the winners and losers.
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The ‘Lost Decade’ will spawn many great winners in the decades to come, and the smallest investor has the biggest chance to reap the rewards from a more level playing field of transparency, reduced supply, stronger companies. Don’t be cynical at exactly the wrong time.
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It’s time to build the business of your dreams and quit hoping for anything else.
The underlying message in all three of these articles is that the businesses that will thrive in this down economy will address some kind of need rather than a want and be “underowned” and “non-leveraged” – in other words, small and not owing any money. Sounds like small businesses and startups to me.
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The second-last speaker at yesterday’s Startup Empire conference was Hugh MacLeod, whom most of us know for his comics drawn on the back of business cards and his blog, Gaping Void. Here are my notes from his presentation:
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Another afternoon presenter at yesterday’s Startup Empire was David Cohen, founder and Executive Director of TechStars, which provides a unique opportunity for early-stage startups. Here are my notes from his presentation:
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