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.

Recommended Reading

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.

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.

Assless Chaps + Twitter = Business Opportunity

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.

What is WebsiteSpark?

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 When You Join WebsiteSpark?

What do you get with WebsiteSpark? I put together a little graphic that explains it pretty quickly:

• Visibility: By being showcased in the WebsiteSpark marketplace as well as through opportunities creating through The Empire’s marketing and business networking programs.
• Support: You’ll get hooked up with an entire ecosystem of Microsoft support, network and hosting partners, and web developers and designers so you have a wide range of technical and business resources.
• Tools: Full-on access to full versions of current Microsoft web tools and technologies, such as the goodies listed below:

What You Get	What It Is
	Silverlight For building rich internet applications that can do multimedia, access data from the web and can also be run on the desktop.
	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.
	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).
	Visual Studio Professional The IDE (integrated development environment) that has it all. You get up to 3 user licences of Visual Studio Pro.

Are You Eligible to Join WebsiteSpark? Answer These 2 Questions.

If you can answer “yes” to the two questions below, you are!

1. Is your company a professional service firm whose primary business is providing Web development and design services for its clients?
2. Does your company have 10 or fewer people, including owners and employees?

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.

I Don’t Have a Fee-For-Service Web Shop, I Have a Startup. Can I Get in on This?

No, but we have a program for you – it’s called BizSpark.

I’m a Student and Have Limited Money, and It’s for Books and Beer. Can I Get in on This?

Dude, we have something just for you! It’s called DreamSpark.

How Do You Find Out More?

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.

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:

• BrightSpark Ventures
• Microsoft BizSpark
• Rogers
• StartupNorth

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.

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.

Local business search site Canpages has just acquired GigPark, the social networking site for employers and job-seekers.

Here’s a snippet from Canpages’ news release:

"Online recommendations, especially those from a user’s social networks, are increasingly important when choosing which local businesses to buy from," said Olivier Vincent, President and CEO of Canpages. "With the acquisition of the GigPark, we are thrilled to be the first local search and directories publisher in North America to embrace social recommendations in a relevant way."

(I thought I was the only person to refer to the company as “The GigPark” – although ironically, as in “The Facebook” or “The Twitter”.)

GigPark are based here in Toronto, and founders Pema Hegan and Noah Godfrey are pillars of the Toronto tech community as well as all-round great guys, as are their team: Gianni Chiappetta, Paul Dowman and Tony Targonski. To echo the words of Jevon MacDonald at StartupNorth, it’s hard not to like them.

GigPark answers a few questions about their acquisition in their most recent blog entry:

Who is Canpages?

Canpages is the fastest growing local search and directories publisher in Canada. On its way to becoming the market leader in local online search, Canpages’ website gets more than 3.5 million unique visitors per month and is a pretty awesome place to find a local business. Its iPhone and Blackberry apps are pretty sweet too. They also publish 84 print directories that reach 8 million households and business across the country.

And the icing on the cake is that Canpages is run by a bunch of really smart and nice people (shout out to our new colleagues!)

What’s going to happen to GigPark?

GigPark is not going anywhere. We will continue to be the easiest place to find the local services your friends use. And with Canpages’ support and resources, GigPark will become even more useful.

How will GigPark play with Canpages?

The acquisition enables Canpages to integrate GigPark’s recommendations into its online and mobile search platforms. Like we said, Canpages is already a pretty awesome place to find local businesses and the addition of GigPark will make this local search experience even better.

Beyond that, Canpages is also excited about the prospect of adding some of GigPark’s social functionality to better connect users with advertisers through recommendations from friends.

I’m a business owner on GigPark. What does this mean for me?

It means A LOT more people are going to see the testimonials for your business and you’ll likely get even more business. You’re welcome! :)

The acquisition was also covered by The Globe and Mail.

Congrats to the folks at GigPark!

The New York Post is a “scandal sheet” tabloid newspaper that’s best known for its sensationalistic, hilarious headlines. A few examples:

• When beer magnate Freddy Heineken was kidnapped, they ran a story titled No Deposit, No Return.
• When New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was linked to a prostitution ring: Ho No.
• On the possibility of a “Deep Impact”-style collision of a cosmic object with Earth: Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye.
• When Newsweek retracted its story about the interrogation tactic of flushing copies of the Qu’ran down the toilet: Holy Shiite.
• A famous one from 1982: Headless Body in Topless Bar.

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:

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:

• The credit card processing life cycle
• Key industry terms and actions
• JavaScript code for validating & detecting card types
• Code samples for the ActiveMerchant Ruby module
• A “getting started” checklist & account information

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.

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.

…

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.

…

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.

…

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.

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:

Intro

• It’s easy for an advertising career to tank, especially if you live in New York and drink too much
• I started drawing comics at bars, on the paper that just happened to conveniently be around: the backs of business cards
• I’m not in the VC business, nor am I in the tech business
• I’m greedy — who here’s greedy? [Many hands go up]
• What really drives us? The "C" word: creativity
• The reason we work in this field is that we want to build stuff — fun stuff
• If it pays the bills, so much the better
• The "we’re so fucked" thing is pretty long term
• What will get us out of the hole? Creativity. People like yourself, doing and building cool things
• I’m in my 40s — what motivates me now is seeing bright ambitious kids coming out of the colleges
• When I was a kid, there was no internet — not even computers! I had to write my term papers on typewriters
• I want to talk about creativity to the young
• I now present 12 little tips for you people just getting started

1. Ignore everybody.

• When you come up with a really great idea and show it, people won’t get it
• You yourself might not even get it
• Imagine the early days of search: “Why would you want to do that?”
• “Good ideas have lonely childhoods”
• If you’ve had a good idea, you were probably called a fruitcake at the start
• Good ideas alter power balances in relationships, which is why many people resist them
• Your boss doesn’t want you to have a good idea that makes you richer than him
• Good ideas will meet resistance – not because of the idea, but because of power and hierarchy

2. The idea you have doesn’t have to be that big.

• Jewish proverb: “A rich man is one who can satisfy his wants”
• I grew up on TV, watching shows about people who had more than us
• Fast-forward 20 years later, I get to do what I want every day:
• Haven’t had to set my alarm clock in years
• Just me and a couple of pens
• And yeah, I read Fast Company, BusinessWeek — “business porn magazines” – they feed greed
• Anyone seen No Country for Old Men? I live in that town!
• One of the locals is Harry, the master brewer, who moved out there and opened his own bar. He makes $500 a day and is the best businessman I know. He does what he wants and everything he does has some meaning to him.
• Meaning scales!
• We owe it to the generations to come to find meaning

3. Put the hours in.

• Nothing happens overnight
• People look at what I do "Aren’t you worried about people ripping you off?" or taking my idea and doing the same thing
• My response: "I’ve already done 10000 cartoons and 7 years blogging"
• Inertia stops a lot of people. Know anyone in a dead-end job? Ever been in one? They say "One day, I’m going to open that cheese shop. But right now, I have to write a report…"
• I have a book coming up. Didn’t quit my job to write it; just woke up an hour earlier every day to write it and posted it on my blog. Penguin eventually contacted me. All I did was put the hours in.

4. If your business plan relies on you being discovered by a big-shot, you will fail.

• I once got a book contract offer. The terms in the contract were terrible and I turned it down
• The publisher, it turned out, was in the business of finding people so desperate to have their moment in the spotlight that they would sign anything
• We now live in an era of cheap, easy, global media — we don’t need middlemen
• I’m friends with Rick Segal…but probably because I don’t need venture capital!
• Where I live in Texas, you can live really cheaply. Part of this is because you run out of things to spend on
• When I hear about people talking about VCs, I think of people looking to have their sorry asses saved
• Don’t get me wrong: it’s great to have VC, but it’s even easier when you get one because you don’t really need one
• "If you’re looking for advice, ask for money; if you’re looking for money, ask for advice.”

5. Do it anyway.

• You don’t know that your idea is the right one at the right time – no one does!
• Do it anyway — that’s how great ideas start out
• Seco0nd-rate ideas are all about the immediate "yes!" response because it keeps them alive longer

6. Everybody is born creative.

• “Everybody gets a box of crayons when they’re young .”
• We turn adolescent and for many of us, somehoe, “our colour gets turned off”
• Suddenly, it’s not about coloring anymore, but concerns like “Got to get a 3.5 GPA, got to get that job…”
• Then you get an idea that you can’t turn off
• It makes you start avoiding your poker buddies
• Most people get scared off by that idea. Doubt creeps in: "What if I get a bad publisher? What if nobody likes my idea?"
• That’s not your idea, that’s your grown up boring self fighting that idea
• Your idea came to you because your soul needs it
• If you don’t nurture that idea, it dies. It also takes a lot of you with it.

7. The “Sex and Cash” theory.

• If you have a creative life and you make money doing it: you generally bounce between two kinds of jobs:
1. The sexy creative job
2. The one that pays the bills
• In movie stars’ cases, that means alternating between parts in popular hit movies and critically-acclaimed art films
• For a photographer, that means alternating between doing work for indie art mages and paying the bills with photo shoots for catalogs
• Consider Martin Amis: he writes critically acclaimed novels and supplements his income by teaching courses and writing newspaper and magazine articles
• As for me: I do comics on the back of business cards, and I do work for Microsoft and Dell
• It’s a balance of artistic sovereignty and making a living
• “The moment you accept this is when you take off .”

8. Remain frugal.

• This particular lesson took me the longest to learn
• Living in New York City, I was in the top income bracket, for all the good it did. I had so much outgoing cash in rent and other expenses.
• You can live like a king where I do, in Alpine, Texas quite cheaply
• I now have “West Texas expenses, New York wages”
• This is hard to do if you want to be seen in “all the right places”
• Remember: we become creatives because we want freedom, and that includes freedom from avarice

9. I’m going to skip this one.

• It’s too corny!
• [He capitulated later; see the end of this article.]

10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need props.

• At any advertising agency, it’s always the second-rate art director who’s the first to get the newest model Mac
• If you go to any magazine office, it’s the second-rate writer keeps an old Remington typewriter on display
• You see this at startups too: the loft office in the hip neighbourhood with the foosball table
• Remember: the Gettyburg address was written on borrowed stationery!
• We use props to hide behind or mask our inadequacies
• I know a woman who recently IPO’d — she didn’t start in a fancy office, but on her dining room table
• It’s not the props, it’s the good idea and the effort

11. The best way is not to stand out from the crowd, but avoid the crowd altogether.

• Bartenders are the great social enablers of New York City
• No under-50 bartender is really a bartender: they’re actors, musicians, whatever
• They have plan to become famous photographers, musicians, whatever
• The thing about the arts to me: what often drives people isn’t just the money or business, but the prestige: “I want to be like that guy, because he’s really privileged”.
• Ever noticed how few really good writers have blogs? You don’t see literature, you see shit like what I write
• A lot of authors are enamored of books and the prestige attached to them
• The worst thing you can do as a creative is fall in love with a privilege model

12. If you can accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.

• When my sister was born and my mom was in labour, the pain was unbearable — "Why is this happening to me?" she asked
• The midwife replied: "You’re giving birth to a baby. It’s supposed to be painful."
• Mom accepted that and got on with the birth
• Trying to do something worthwhile and creative is really hard
• As you get older, you realize that pain is part of the process

9. Okay, here’s point number 9, since you asked: We will fail, but we will be forgiven.

• Failure is part of the process
• The important thing really isn’t about reaching the summit, but setting out for it.

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:

Boulder, Colorado

• Why did I come here today? Because I’m hearing more about Toronto every day
• I started out in development
  • Did three startups
  • Then went to the dark side: angel investing
  • Started all kinds of companies in all different ways
• I’m based in Boulder, Colorado
• Two of my companies are ZOLL Data Systems, Earfeeder
• One of my startups failed, but there’s no evidence on the net that it ever existed
• What’s Boulder known for?
• Mork and Mindy
• “4:20”
• Nearby skiing
• University of Colorado
• It’s northwest of Denver and has a population of 125,000 – with students! Denver has about 1 million people

VC in Boulder vs. VC in Toronto

• VC in boulder
• $311 million in Q1 2008 in Boulder County
• Taking into account its population of 125,000, that makes for about $2,500 in venture capital for each person in Boulder
• VC in Toronto
• $130 million in Q1 2008
• Taking into account its population of 5.5 million, that makes for about $23 in venture capital for each person in the Toronto area
• Toronto has a chicken-and-egg problem
• We learned in Boulder, VC follows innovation
• A UFO didn’t land in Boulder and drop off VCs
• There was a strong telecom industry that grew up there (Colorado is the home of telecom and storage)
• People who got rich off those industries stayed in Boulder and asked "What can I do with this money?"
• 2nd- and 3rd-time entrepreneurs decided to become angels
• Most angels are driven by more than just the money
• Companies in Boulder: Lijit and Newsgator to name a few
• The VC followed

The TechStars Concept

• Along with me, other people mentoring at TechStars are:
• Brad Feld: Invested in Harmonix, who are behind the Rock Band games
• Jared Polis: He was behind Blue Mountain Arts online cars and ProFlowers — he got elected to congress on Nov 4th
• TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund
• It’s been referred to as "Incubator 2.0, boot camp for entrepreneurs", but to me it’s mentorship-driven
• The big benefit for companies in the Techstars program is not small amount of money we provide, but the people we surround you with
• At Techstars, you share ideas early, get the feedback
• 10 teams of typically young entrepreneurs come to Boulder for the summer
• If you get in, you get this incredible mentorship experience
• Mentors spend time with the 10 companies
• Atmosphere of camaraderie between the companies
• Companies get integrated into the tech scene
• Our “New Tech Meetups” are the 2nd largest in US, after NYC
• We make our companies uncomfortable – we make them pitch often
• First month: we ask them not to work on their product so much; it’s laregly about learning
• At the end of program, they get just enough funding to get them to the next point
• Techstar’s progress so far:
  • 2 summers = 20 companies
  • Only 1 of the 20 companies is now defunct
  • 2 of the 20 companies experienced positive exits (SocialThing, IntenseDebate)
  • 13 of them have acquired angel or VC funding
  • All told, we’ve invested under $600K in 2 years — positive ROI
• Benefits
• 40 jobs in Colorado created (probably 40 more elsewhere)
• AOL set up an office in Boulder after SocialThing acquisition
• 9 of the 20 companies have stayed in Boulder

Lessons

• Try not to focus to much on VC. Focus on product and customers
• Your community can be more powerful than you imagine if it works together
• Promote your community when you promote your company
• Mentorship is the scarce resource that matters

“Never ever take the title of CEO,” said Rick Segal between speakers at yesterday’s Startup Empire conference. “We fire CEOs all the time. Be a founder instead.”

Later on in the afternoon at yesterday’s Startup Empire conference, Howard Lindzon took the stage. Howard manages a hedge fund and is the creator of the finance news humour site Wallstrip, which he sold to CBS in May 2007. He also has a very popular financial blog at HowardLindzon.com.

I shot some video asking Howard about his idea of “social leverage”; I’ll post it a litter later on. In the meantime, here are my notes from his presentation, Why Now is a Great Time to Start Your Startup.

The Current Situation

• Capital, which was so plentiful, is now gone
• Reminiscent of the real estate bubble in Phoenix (where I live half the time)
• Really important right now to shut out the noise
• From 2002 – 2006, it was fun to read Valleywag, TechCrunch and make "me too" products. You can’t do that anymore
• It’s also a bad time to base products on:
  • Freemium
  • Eyeballs
  • Advertising
• Sometimes you have to shelf your ideas for when the times are more suitable for them
• The headlines are all doom and gloom these days:
  • "Financial Ice Age" – BusinessWeek
  • Startup Depression – Calacanis (I’m not a fan)
• You must remember that even during good times, 80 to 90% of businesses fail
• The VC model isn’t broken

Social Leverage

• Financial leverage has come home to roost
• We’re in a period of deleveraging: there is no bottom, because we don’t know what everyone owns
• P/E ratios — it’s all about expectation, people expect less
• You can’t get what you got six months ago
• Expectations are in "this ratchet-down mode"
• I also think that "we’re going into a depression" is crazy talk
• I’m anti-financial leverage
• Social leverage is all-powerful
  • Nothing you do in social leverage will haunt you
  • It’s a gift from the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
  • Perhaps you shouldn’t start building social leverage with a blog unless your passion is for writing
  • Start small: work with people
  • Be mindful of the etiquette of social networking tools
  • The time to ask people for something is when they’re least expecting it

Too Small to Fail

• Wall Street was all about "too big to fail"
• I’m not seeing signs from the presidents about being small – they seem too concerned with conglomerations and unwilling to bust up things
• Bailouts just prolong the process
• This is not a headline, it’s a state of being
• It’s a great time to start a web-based business
• If you’ve ever played the board game “Risk”, you know:
  • If you’re starting all your armies in Europe, you’re screwed
  • Start off in New Guinea
• Consider one of my projects, Stocktwits.com
  • I like to stay in businesses I know
  • Started in Twitter — thought it was dumb in the beginning
  • Guys, this should be about ideas
  • Wrote post about how there should be a message board for stocks using the reputation model in Twitter
  • Twitter allows you some sort of reputation — everything you say is there for people to see
  • Stocktwits — one employee, $30K to start
  • Twitter offers possibilities: dating, betting — supports an ecosytem
• Be careful in whom you trust
• Embrace social leverage
• Be too small to fail: do the one thing you do very well
• Take as little money as you need; things will get better
• Ignore the people saying that this is “a new Ice Age” – they’re idiots

Fear

• Zig while others zag
• Take a look at this graph, in which the pink line is the Vicks index and the blue is RRSPs: 

  

• From 2003 – 2005:
  • Fear level low
  • Calacanis’s company, TechCrunch and other stupid tech businesses wree founded when fear was low
• It’s always a good time to start a web business
  • The truth is that it’s never a good time to start any business
  • Successful business can be started anytime
  • 80 – 90% of businesses fail anytime

Why businesses fail

• It’s important to have structure right from the beginning
• Mistakes made at start can come back to haunt you
• Sometimes partners fight, so rules and agreements at made at the the start are valuable
• The keys: Structure, funding and realistic valuation
• When it comes to spreadsheets and plans, keep in mind that it’s important to do one thing, do it well and get that customer – this is far more important than the spreadsheets
• Make sure you’re fishing where the fish are
  • “Swim near the shark”
  • Be around certain ecosystems

My Advice

• Social leverage: good
• Financial leverage: bad
• Be an expert at something
  • For good or bad: mine is finance
  • "I don’t really like the people in my industry"
  • Applications of my expertise:
    • Wallstrip: Its purpose was to lay humour on Wall Street
    • MyTrade: sold to Investools
    • and, as mentioned earlier, StockTwits

The second presenter at yesterday’s Startup Empire conference was Austin Hill. Austin’s one of the founders of the Company Formerly Known as Zero-Knowledge Systems (they’re now Radialpoint), where he served as both Chief Technology Officer, Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President. He’s the co-founder of Montreal-based tech startups Akoha, where he serves as CEO and Standout Jobs, where he is Chairman. Austin’s blog is Billions with Zero Knowledge.

Here are my notes from his presentation, Slow Down and Speed Up: Handling a Fast-Moving Startup in Turbulent Times.

Reality Check

• It’s time for a reality check
• The general attitude: things are bad out there — there’s a lot of fear
• Summed up in Sequoia’s presentation, R.I.P. Good Times
• The collapses of companies are mirrored by collapses of infrastructure in the U.S. (shows picture of bridge in Minnesota)
• The reality: There is a very rough recession out there

Business Models

• Mary Meeker’s take: advertising is get killed, and the upcoming downturn will be worse than the last one
• I don’t believe advertising is a business model
• A business model is something that answers the "How can I get customers no one else will get?"
• Advertising is just a way to get revenue
• Look at the tech blogs: you’ll see lots of stories on firings and layoffs
• Blogs like TechCrunch are becoming "Fucked Company 2.0"
• Most of the companies laying off people have a burn rate of $10,000 per employee per month
• Companies like Mahalo had a burn rate was $600,000 a month — in many cases, without a business model
• This is not the model Canada exists in
• You hear stories saying that the VC model being broken; the truth is that it’s been broken for years
• The IPO market has been closed for tech since the last downturn
• The VC model will only get worse, especially in the US — the economics do not hold up
• "In a tornado, even pigs get to fly"
• The guys who weren’t serious and didn’t provide real value will start going home
• Everyone in US is playing "lemming meets ostrich"
• The myth of tech startups went like this:
  • You have a great idea
  • People throw money at you
  • You flip the company
• Can’t do that any more
• Top-tier VCs and investors are looking at these times as an opportunity to create real value

Canada

• In Canada, we’ve already washed out the hosers and posers
• VCs in Canada have funds ranging from $5 to $150 million
• They’re well-sized and can pay off their entire VC with one fund
• The remaining funds are solid
• US VC funds got a reprieve
• Here in Canada, our entrepreneurs know how to operate lean
• Back in 1996, my ISP’s customers were estimated to cost $1000 per year
  • Held strategy meeting to find out how to turn away customers — couldn’t afford infrastructure to maintain the customer base
  • Sold the company for less than 1x revenue
  • Company we sold to went on crazy ride: for a $35K investment, they got a $13 million return
• 2001: Zero-Knowledge
  • Fortunate to raise money at the end
  • $2.5m revenue, but expenses like mad
  • A "crazy, crazy structure"
  • We survived it very well — went back and bought out VCs and sold a minority stake to a large private equity fund — all in the middle of the worst downturn
  • How did we do it? We cut expenses, but cozied up to a few key customers whom the big vendors ignored: Telus and Bell Canada, who’d been dumped by Symantec and McAfee
  • If you can get in good with key customers, they’ll feed you good requirements

Self-Assessment Test

• The title of this presentation, Speed Up and Slow Down, is about self-assessment
• Runway: How much cash do you have?
• If you’re 2 or 3 people, you can be "Ramen Noodle Profitable" — a handful of founders, mostly programmers, can be profitable this way
• If you’re a larger company:
  • Know exactly where youre going
  • Be efficient
  • Watch the gauges
  • Don’t go on "sightseeing trips"
• You need to have a cash flow model and be able to answer the question "What is the minimum amount of cash to take us to the next risk reduction milestone?"
• You need paying customers
• If you’re running any type of decent burn rate, your #1 job is to not hit the wall
• Watch the gauges:
  • How much cash do I have?
  • Are we accomplishing what we’re committed to doing?
• Keep an eye on the end game too
  • Some businesses may pay you but not scale
  • Think about what the market will look like in 3 – 5 years
  • Can you get a defendable customer acquisition strategy that will be profitable?
• Think of the company as a motor vehicle:
  • How far will our gas take us?
  • Many people come to me presenting companies based on a "rickshaw" model — a good "lifestyle business", which pays the bills, supports them and their families, but really isn’t set to grow and not really a VC candidate
  • Can’t go with a "Tesla" concept car model for your company either
  • Nor a "Hummer" model where it’s all brute force
  • Go with the "Prius" model for your company: practical, goes easy on the gas
  • The most dangerous model for your company: the "Submersible RV":
    • The car that tries to do everything but as a result accomplishes nothing
    • It show that you don’t know what you are
    • You need to be able to answer the questions:
      • "What kind of company are we running?"
      • "Is it the right size and structure for where we want to go?"

Where are You Going?

• Need to paint a picture of what your business will look like in 3 – 6 years
• This picture needs to be based on the market, not your feature set
• "You’re pitching a product, not a company!"
• There are big trends and shifts occurring:
  • Cloud computing
  • Environmentalism
  • Social software
  • Time spent online
• There are huge demographics that don’t go away just because Wall Street had a hiccup
• Store metaphor: your business can’t be like a convenience store or bodega — investors don’t go for that
• Your business has to follow the model of either:
  • The Apple Store: a profitable niche
  • Walmart: a big box
• Learn to pitch!
  • I’ve seen CEOs who couldn’t pitch their way out of a paper bag
  • Practice your pitch and get good coaching
  • 95% of Canada sucks pitching
  • In the Valley, you see people working on their pitches and honing them
  • You have to get across the idea of why your biz is viable
  • When you step into an investor’s room, make sure you’re ready
  • There are lots of people who can give you coaching on your pitches
• Analytics
  • You need to know your numbers
  • Go to SlideShare and look up "Pirate Metrics"
  • Go to Startonomics
  • You need to have a waterfall and cash model
  • You need to be able talk about your business in that flexible way: "With x money, we can do this, and with y money we can do this…"
  • Have a risk reduction model
    • You need to talk to investors and existing shareholders about this
    • If you’re in web properties, use Product Planner — it helps map out user flows
    • Shows what you should be tracking every step of the way
    • It’s a YouTube for user flows for the most successful companies
  • "Pirate Metrics": the mnemonic is "AARRR!":
    • Acquisiton
    • Activation
    • Referral
    • Revenue
    • Retention
  • Balsamiq
    • It’s a wireframing tool
    • When you talk to investors about what you will build, you need to be able to show wireframes and sitemaps
    • What part of your app drives acquisition? Investors need to be able to see this

My Advice

• Ask "Who is losing the most money? How can I help them?"
  • Cozy up to customers who have needs
  • Standout jobs saw this coming and made money helping HR companies feeling the pain of the current economic/job situation

• Go talent shopping
  • People say "Fire, fire, fire!", I say "Topgrade!"
  • Ask yourself "Am I getting the best people?"
  • Watch the layoff rolls. We were doing this actively — I watched companies I admired and who were laying off people and talked to their HR departments
  • Build up a "bench" of good people, even if you’re not hiring now
  • Get good at outsourcing. There are a whole bunch of freelancers out there and you can make use of them if you can write small specs — but don’t do at expense of having a tech team
  • Use communities and open source to get leverage

• Think very wide on your fundraising strategies: build your pitch so you have angels, advisors
• Fire for culture, not expenses
• Having "double vision" is critical: you need to have both an immediate and long-term view of your company. It’s like driving a car — you need to look at your dashboard instruments and down the road

Why am I giddy like a schoolgirl?

• It’s now a great time to build meaning
• Over last 4 or 5 years, we’ve been building "hammers for carpenters"
• Nerd tools like bookmarking, sharing video, vertical social networking: we can now use this stuff for real-world meaning
• If you have a way to make real-world meaning rather than tools for technologists, you can do well

Q&A

What if you have great ideas, mediocre people and no VC contacts?

• Go join a startup and gain experience
• Ideas are a dime a dozen
• I have never seen an idea so time-specific that I leapt on it — the quality of the people in the company are far more important

How do people show that they an understanding of their market?

• DO NOT QUOTE GARTNER REPORTS! It’s the surest sign you don’t know what you’re talking about
• You need to be able to talk intelligently in a 10-minute conversation about your market
• Most people fall down when it comes to talking about their competitors: "No! They don’t have this feature!" — your end customers don’t care about that
• You need to be able to talk about:
  • Global trends and shifts
  • Unique ability
• Come in with customer references — be able to say "We’ve done specs with x customers who’ve agreed to be beta users…"

What are the red flags for hiring?

• A lack of passion. Luckily, most programmers can’t fake passion
• Note: sales and business development people can fake passion — it’s their job!
• Can’t pass practical exams
  • When hiring a community manager, I gave him five days to answer a set of questions using community tools
• Bad cultural fit
  • Don’t hire a 9-to-5er for a company that requires lots of dedication outside 9-to-5 hours
  • You can’t afford a culture clash right now
• Someone who can’t talk about results
  • They need to be able to answer the question: "Can you hit these targets in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days?"
  • Great top performers love having specific requirements like that

What is meaning?

• Meaning always translates to money
  • Consider the meaning provided by Youtube: "Explore your world through someone else’s stupid videos"
  • They’re still working on how it’ll make money, but no one who invested in it feels bad
• My preference is for companies that:
  • Provide entertainment or
  • Promote or assist energy conservation or
  • Have strong social goals

Austin Hill / Rick Segal discussion

• The rule about pitching is: "Hearts, minds, wallets". Hearts first!
• The elevator pitch, where you don’t have very much time, is always about the heart
• Answer a question and place that question in the person’s mind
• Don’t talk features; talk about end results. Say "we had a beta customer who saved money and got their info organized thanks to our product/service"
• The next step is to walk them through the revenue model.
  • An examples: Real-world asset sales for online game — player average revenue per user is in line with teen casual games
  • Used a reference to Webkinz, a point of reference that both customers and investors will understand
• Need to be able to answer the "Where are you?" question: need to have a specific answer "60 days out of beta"
• Believability is key when you pitch an investor
  • When you say unbelievable things like "We can do a 10x return", it means I have to retrain you
  • Say "Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know"

The first speaker at yesterday’s Startup Empire conference was Microsoft’s own Don Dodge, Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team and author of the blog Don Dodge on the Next Big Thing.

Don’s been in the industry for over 20 years. He started with Digital’s database group and went on to work with five startups over the next dozen years: Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet and Groove Networks. He now works with VCs and startups in my home away from home, the Greater Boston area.

I got a video interview with Don about BizSpark that I’m currently encoding; in the meantime, here are my notes from his presentation, Starting a Company in Difficult Times.

It’s a Good Time to Start a Company

• In spite of the business news out there, it’s a good time to start a company – it’s a tough  time, but a good time
• Markets are driven by two things:
  1. Fear
  2. Greed
• Fear is rampant now
• Even Microsoft is down 40%, Google down 60, maybe 70%
• When fear takes over, markets get irrational
• But remember:
  1. Fear is temporary
  2. Greed is permanent
• Greed will eventually take over and markets will get better

Why start a company now?

1. People are the most important determinant of success
   • #1 hurdle is finding great people
   • When the economy is in a shambles, great people are available
   • During the AltaVista/Napster era, it was the boom times, and it was hard to find people
   • In bad times, companies entrench and do just the core things
   • The good people at companies get bored doing just the core things — it’s a hiring opportunity for you
   • Great people get bored during lulls
   • Startups are fun — they’re challenges, but people like challenges
   • Startups create tremendous value that allow great people to make a lot of money
2. When the economy is bad, customers want to save money
   • If you have a product or service that will save them money, they’ll buy it
   • Tough times make customers willing to try new things if they believe they’ll make times less tough
   • You have to demo to customers how your product/service will save them money
   • Productivity boosts are not enough
   • Ask yourself: "Is your product or service a vitamin (a nice-to-have) or painkiller (a must-have)?"
3. VCs are sitting on tons of cash right now
   • In Boston, 10 VC firms are sitting on $2.5 bn
4. Infrastructure is cheap

It’s Who You Know

• In the recent past, in Silicon Valley and Boston, even marginal ideas got funding
• Times are tougher now, and “me too” ideas will no longer get funding
• Of the 200,000 companies that got VC funding since 2001; only 380 went public
• That’s a small percentage of successes, but those 380 were enormous hits
• Venture capital is like the music industry; it’s a hit-based business – just as one hit single or album can pay for dozens of so-so ones, so can one great investment
• Ad-supported models will be questioned
• Do the math to figure out what how many hits and what CPM you need to make a million dollars from advertising — it’s shocking, I tell you
• Experienced people with great ideas will always get funding
• Investors will fund people they know or ideas they understand
• The difference between angels and VCs
  • Angels are easier to convince to invest in you:
    • If they know you or know people who vouch for you, or
    • If they understand the business and have an affinity for it
  • If they don’t know you, they’re more difficult to convince
  • VCs are easier to convince in you if your situation isn’t suited for angel investment — they take more risks and are more willing to “think outside the box”
• Networking is incredibly important
• In Silicon Valley, "we have events like this [Startup Empire] every week"
• Investors get comfortable with people they see all the time
• Take time to do some homework on the investors, know who they are and who they’ve invested in

Infrastructure

• Infrastructure is cheap
• When we were starting Napster, it was the boom times
• Finding people and getting office space were incredibly difficult
• Our office’s landlord made us pay 2 years’ worth of rent up front in cash and also demanded stock options
• In these recessionary times, the tables are turned
• Several companies have renegotiated their leases — one has cut their lease down to one-quarter of the original
• You can sublease spaces — many companies have leased too much space and are looking for people to fill it for peanuts
• Office equipment: you can buy used

BizSpark

• Another way to save money: Microsoft’s BizSpark program
• BizSpark provides software for startups, basically for free
• Your startup is eligible to participate in the BizSpark program if:
  • Your startup is less than 3 years old
  • and makes less than $1 million per year
• Program members get full-featured software:
  • Development tools like the full versions of Visual Studio and Expression
  • Platform tech like  Windows Server, SQL Server and Sharepoint
• You’ll get visibility from being promoted on Microsoft Startup Zone
• We’ll connect you with a united global community of support resources
• It’s so easy to start a startup right now — everything is in your favour
• Cloud computing make things cheaper — you can go with Amazon, Microsoft or other cloud providers
• For more about BizSpark, contact David Crow, Mark Relph or Don Dodge

Q&A

Q: What’s the idea behind BizSpark?

• Microsoft can’t succeed without lots of companies building on its platform and technologies, using its tools
• We’re competing with open source
• When startups are tiny and just getting started out, they take the easy route and go with free software
• Why not level the playing field and make our software free for startups for the first three years or after they get $1 million in revenue?
• So we give them free software, support and visibility

Q: Is Microsoft’s cloud service available through BizSpark?

• Yes. It’s not just the tools, but the cloud services are also available for free
• More details on the site

Q: Are there any particular types of applications that BizSpark is looking for?

• BizSpark is open to any application
• If you’re building an application that adds value or fills a gap, we want to talk to you
• MS acquires about 20 companies a year
• Those companies are generally filling gaps in our product line, doing things better than us or opening new markets
• We partner, and if things go well, we acquire

Q: Do we sign NDAs before going on BizSpark?

• We don’t get into that
• Don’t tell us your secrets
• VCs are the same — most will not sign NDAs
• In my experience as a VC, not a single NDA was invoked — they’re kind of pointless

Q: Could you provide some examples of the types of companies you’ve acquired?

• Powerset
• Fast
• aQuantive
• Currently, the “hot spots” are advertising and online services, but our acquisitions are all over the map

CNN/Fortune hated the idea so much that they listed it in their 101 Dumbest Moments in Business article. In 2007, Radiohead made their album In Rainbows available for download before physical copies were available in stores. You could choose to simply download the album or voluntary pay an amount of your choice. Radiohead didn’t reveal any statistics related to the download; the known data comes from comScore, who reported that:

• 62% of the downloaders chose to pay nothing
• The remaining 38% voluntarily paid an average of $6 for the album

Based on these numbers and Radiohead’s silence, the CNN/Fortune article inlcuded the sneering line “Can’t wait for the follow-up album, In Debt.”

It turns out that Radiohead’s experiment was actually a success. Techdirt points to a report on Music Ally that says that Radiohead’s publisher Warner Chappell will tell all about the In Rainbows experiment at the “You are in Control” music conference now taking place in Iceland.

The “success” of which they speak isn’t the hand-wavy “artistic”, “critical” or “proving a point” kind, but the sort of success that bottom-line thinkers like: In Rainbows made more money before the the album was physically released than the total sales for the previous album, Hail to the Thief. Even when preceded by a free or “pay what you can” downloads, In Rainbows has still sold 1.75 million copies of the CD to date, and it’s still in the top 200 selling CDs in the U.S. and U.K..

The Music Ally article has more details and includes these statistics:

• After being made available online for free for 3 months, In Rainbows hit number one on both U.S. and U.K. charts.
• 30,000 copies were sold on iTunes in its first week.
• 1.75 million CDs of the album have been sold since its release.
• 100,000 box sets have been sold through Radiohead’s sales and merchandising site, W.A.S.T.E..
• 17 million plays on last.fm.
• 1.2 million fans will see their tour.
• The digital income from the experiment made a material difference to Warner Chappell Music’s UK digital revenue this year.

I like Penny Arcade’s take on the current Seinfeld/Gates TV ads for Windows:

Click the comic to see it on its original page.

My favourite line from the article accompanying the comic: “Trying to associate Microsoft with “fun” is like trying to associate Satan with aromatherapy.” Mind you, I think they managed to pull it off with the XBox 360.

Updated!

Hello, Boing Boing readers! (And thanks, Cory!) I’ve added a whole whack of new videos to this entry including John Cleese’s 1980s ads for Compaq, Tom Baker’s ads for Prime Computer, plus celebrity ads for Intel Centrino, Apple, Nintendo DS and more!

What’s Up with That?

By now, you’ve probably heard that Microsoft latest move to counter the incredibly popular “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” ads was to hire Jerry Seinfeld as their new pitchman. The new campaign, which is rumored to be based on the slogan “Windows, Not Walls”, is expected to cost US$300 million — $10 million of which is earmarked for Seinfeld — is expected to debut on September 4th. As Jerry would say in his own stand-up routines: “What’s up with that?”

Gawker sums it up best:

Yes, because if there’s one surefire way to convince everyone Vista is cool, cutting edge and not liable to get frazzled by life’s minor complications, it’s hiring a 1990s sitcom star and professional kvetcher! Who, um, very visibly owned a series of Macs on his show. This is Microsoft’s worst promotional concept since, well, since its last Vista campaign, the Mojave Experiment, which decisively proved that people hate Vista but will use it if they are tricked into thinking it’s something else, like a stable, functional tool. Here’s how Madison Avenue is responding:

“They are not seen as cool,” says Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, a New York branding firm. “Apple is cool. Can anyone even recall a Microsoft ad? No.”

And they won’t be able to remember this one either, because using Seinfeld humor in ads was already considered tired three years ago.

Microsoft’s hiring of a celebrity who peaked back in the 1990s is a perfect metaphor for a two of their biggest problems:

• They’re hamstrung by the need to maintain backward compatibility with 1990s applications (Raymond Chen’s blog has the best stories about these issues).
• They’re still using their 1990s approach to marketing: throwing a lot of money around.

I expect that Microsoft’s ads will be the exact opposite of Apple’s: instead of two unknown (at least prior to the ads) guys against a plain white background, they’ll feature a celebrity against a glitzy background. Also unlike Apple’s ads, I suspect theirs won’t be all that effective.

To borrow another Seinfeld line: “Good luck with all that.”

Seinfeld in One of the Old “Think Different” Ads

Mark Evans found this old Apple “Think Different” ad — one of those “Here’s to the crazy ones” ads with Richard Dreyfuss doing the voice-over — that features, of all people, a young Jerry Seinfeld.

Seinfeld in an HP Ad

In this HP ad, Seinfeld promotes not just one, but two flops: Windows Vista and Bee Movie:

A Brief History of Celebrity Computer Endorsements

Microsoft’s hire of Seinfeld led me to search for computer and videogame system ads featuring celebrities. Here’s what I found:

Commodore: William Shatner

In the original Star Trek series, Shatner’s character Captain James T. Kirk actually destroyed a number of computers just by talking to them. That’s why I always thought Shatner was an odd choice as Commodore’s pitchman. In the ad below, he’s promoting the Vic-20:

Commodore Amiga: Tommy Lasorda, the Pointer Sisters, NASA Astronauts and Thomas “Tip” O’Neil

This is probably the most celebrity-laden ad I’ve ever seen for a computer, the woefully under-appreciated Commodore Amiga:

Bill Cosby: Texas Instruments TI 99/4

Here’s Bill Cosby, who was the spokesperson for Texas Instrument’s incredibly lame TI 99/4:

George Plimpton: Mattel Intellivision

Bak in the early 1980s, we had the first console war: the Atari VCS (later renamed the Atari 2600) versus Mattel Intellivision. Atari had an unknown — a nerdy blond kid with big glasses — as their spokesperson. Mattel went with a celebrity: George Plimpton.

While the Intellivision’s better graphics and sound made it a much better console for sports games, Atari had the far better gameplay, especially for arcade games. Star Strike, which Plimpton hawks in the video below, was far less fun than Asteroids, even if it featured “the total destruction of a planet”:

Finally, here’s an Plimpton ad that gets downright creepy at the end. It features Henry Thomas (he played “Elliott” in E. T. and was a big star at the time), who’s about to make the classic “Oh, let’s get in the playground candyman’s van…he seems legit!” mistake…

Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston: Windows 95 Training

Although this isn’t an ad but a training video, it’s still got considerable late-’90s star power in the form of Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston from Friends. This features the painful line: “Taskbar? Is that like a Snickers bar?”

Here’s part one:

and here’s part two:

Hewlett-Packard’s Ads

And finally, celebrity ads for half-decent computers (I’ve generally had good experiences with HP machines, and not just the printers).

Here’s Mark Cuban (good friend of my former employer, Tucows):

Vera Wang also did an ad:

Tennis star Serena Williams:

Pop star Gwen Stefani, who should get bonus points for the use of the word “mash-up”:

Jay-Z:

and finally, Pharrell:

John Cleese: Compaq

Back in the early 1980s, Compaq was synonymous with “portable computer”. I remember being stunned that you could actually carry a computer around! I also remember being stunned that John Cleese was doing ads for them.

Here’s Cleese asking the most important question about portable computers: “Does it have a handle?”

“We don’t need a portable. We have Bruno”:

This one’s an ad for the Compaq III that was only shown in the U.K.:

This one targets “that trendy computer” — the original Macintosh. Guess which company is still around?

In which he compares the Portable II to a fish:

Forget about our earlier commercials about portable computers, we make desktops now!

In case you’re not sure how to spell “Compaq”:

“How could a computer be made from three hundred and eighty six chips and 32 bits from a bus?”

The “Trust the well known name” ad is very Pythonesque:

Here’s one for the Compaq DeskPro: “70 megabytes. 8 mega-hertz. Two hundred and eighty-six chips. Dual-mode monitor.”

Here’s another one where he uses the “three hundred and eighty six chips and 32 bits of a bus” line:

“The decision stank”:

“I need a vaction!”

“Three cheers for it!”

Again with “three hundred and eighty six chips and 32 bits of a bus” gag:

He wants 1 million pounds in ransom from IBM:

This one plays on the old adage “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”:

In this one, he’s talking about the new Compaq plant in Glasgow:

And finally, an internal promo video for Compaq UK’s dealers:

Intel Centrino: John Cleese, Tony Hawk and Seal

It could be the opening line to a joke: “John Cleese, Tony Hawk and Seal walk into a commercial…”

Prime Computer: Tom “Doctor Who” Baker

Tom Baker played one of my favorite incarnations of Doctor Who; he also shilled for Prime Computer. Here he is with Lalla Ward, who played “Romana” on Doctor Who:

Apple

Here’s an old one for the Lisa (the predecessor to the Mac) featuring Kevin Costner:

Apple’s had a few celebrities in recent ads. Here’s an “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” one with Gisele Bundchen:

This one features Judy Greer as the cute-but-unstable yoga instructor:

I think HAL 9000 is enough of a celebrity to count, don’t you?

Nintendo DS

Why is Captain Picard Starfleet’s greatest strategist? Because of Nintendo brain training! Here’s Patrick Stewart and Julie Walters with a DS:

Here’s Nicole Kidman keeping her brain sharp:

Liv Tyler:

America Ferrera:

Olivia Newton-John:

Carrie Underwood:

Australian comedian Hamish Blake:

Microsoft UK: Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant (The Office, the UK Version)

Here’s a four-parter featuring Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant in their The Office characters starring in a Microsoft UK training video titled The Office Values:

IBM: Avery Brooks

We’ve had Kirk and Picard…why not Sisko? Here’s Avery Brooks’ ads for IBM. The “Where are the Flying Cars?” ad struck a chord with a number of friends:

Here’s another one, “Epiphany”:

And here’s one on Linux:

Atari “XL” Series Computers

In those “pre-internet” days, there were considerably fewer uses for computers. As a result, there semmed to be many more ads for the computer as an educational tool than today. Here’s Alan Alda talking about how his Atari XL computer is teaching him Italian:

Here’s one demonstrating Typing Attack, a videogame that teaches touch typing. There were a number of apps like that back then:

Here’s an ad featuring “Atari Writer”, Atari’s word processing package. You have to keep in mind that at this point in time, many people still used typewriters:

IBM: The Cast of M*A*S*H

Alan Alda didn’t just do ads for Atari, he also appeared in an IBM commercial, and so did some of his castmates from M*A*S*H. The video below features two ads: Jamie Farr is in the ad for the PS/2 series of computers, and Alan Alda, Harry Morgan and Gary Burghoff are in the ad for the AS/400 series.

Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment: my current job as Tech Project Manager at b5media marks the fourth startup for which I’ve worked; if you count Mackerel Interactive Multimedia — whose story, Burying the Fish, was written by Cory Doctorow for Wired but never published — I’ve worked at five. I like the “feel” of working at a startup, and now that I’ve got experience and real-world and blog-based reputations to back me up, startups are willing to pay me not only to be part of their team but to also be the “adult supervision”. At the ripe old age of 40, I’m an elder statesman in these parts (and playing an old man’s instrument only adds to that image).

That’s why I read SitePoint’s article Nine Deadly Startup Diseases—and How to Cure Them with a sense of deja vu, going through each item in their list of mistakes and saying “yup, did that one…did that one too…”

Put together, the startups for which I worked had all but one of the diseases listed in the article except for “Marketing Blind Spot”. For some reason, there was always a marketer in our midst, drumming it into our heads that marketing was necessary.

I’ve taken their list of startup diseases and cures and summarized it in the table below. For full explanations behind each disease and cure, be sure to read the article.

“After reviewing your public profile, blog, general google results, we’ve concluded that we can allow your firm the opportunity to review our company for investment.” Rick Segal (an investor in my company, b5media) tells a story that explains how not to approach an investor.