Global Nerdy

My friend Mark Hayes, one of the marketing guys at my former workplace, Shopify, is looking for a Toronto-based social media and community manager. Shopify, in case you’re not familiar with the company, is a wildly successful ecommerce platform that’s moved over a billion — that’s right, billion with a b — dollars worth of goods since its inception about five years ago. It’s one of Canada’s biggest startup success, and a great place to work.

He’s using Reddit’s “Toronto” subreddit to find this social media and community manager. Here’s what he posted:

Hey r/Toronto:

My name is Mark and I work at an ecommerce platform called Shopify. This week, I plan on hiring someone from r/Toronto to be our social media and community manager. If you’re really, really, ridiculously good at social media and want to work at an awesome company – read on.

Why I’m on r/Toronto:

I need to hire a social media and community manager in Toronto. Last time I hired someone (a marketing copywriter), I made it a public job posting. I received over 800 applications… going through them all was awful.

This time, I’m not making a public job posting. I plan on finding our new social media manager this week on r/Toronto. Yes, I have that much confidence in the power of Reddit. :-)

I’m working out of Shopify’s Toronto office until Friday and would love to grab coffee with Toronto’s best social media people. Here’s a bit about working at Shopify:

• Exciting challenges to face, and problems to solve every day!
• Competitive salary
• Shares in the company
• Flexible work hours
• Free house cleaning service
• Free gym membership
• Office 5 min from Union Station
• More here.

About Shopify:

• We’re an ecommerce platform with over 40,000 online stores around the world.
• Profit Magazine called us the smartest company in Canada.
• Fast Company named us one of the world’s top 50 most innovative companies.

How to get hired: Shoot me an email, mark.hayes@shopify.com with a short intro and links to a couple of your social media platforms. Also please include a link to your LinkedIn, but if you don’t have one – don’t worry. No resume, cover letter or any of that stuff. I’ll respond to anyone who I would like to get to know a bit better and we’ll grab a coffee sometime this week!

Also, of course feel free to chat w/ me in the comments here. Thanks so much r/Toronto!

Edit: It occurred to me that those who want this job may downvote to decrease visibility of this post and increase their chances. Please don’t. :-) I hope to have as many coffees as possible this week, so chances are I’ll get to meet most who apply!

If you’re in the social media / community management line of work and are looking for a great gig, this is it! Be sure to drop Mark a line and tell him Joey sent you!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

During those rare lunches when I eat alone, this bowl/smartphone cradle might come in handy.

This article also appears in Mobilize!: The CTS Mobile Tech Blog.

One of the issues that we cover at CTS when helping companies devise their mobile strategy is security and risk. Mobile devices, while incredibly useful and handy to the point that we wonder how we lived without them, present many opportunities to lose important and sensitive data and leave yourself open to angry customers and legal action.

You might think that desktop security is outside our area of interest, but it’s not. After all, whether using mobile devices or not, many of our customers work from a desk, and desks present all sorts of opportunities for someone to leak data. We’ve also found that a lot of the security precautions that one can take at a desk are either applicable to mobile devices or have some applicable analogue. With that in mind, we’d like to point you to CSO Online’s latest version of their “Clean Desk Test”, which explains why a messy desk is a security hazard and why keeping your desk neat helps keep your information secure. You might want to look at CSO’s previous version of the clean desk test for more ideas.

This article also appears in Mobilize!: The CTS Mobile Tech Blog.

We’re this close to getting the coworking space up and running.

A Potential Name

One of the things we have yet to determine is a name. I put out a request to my friends on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, and while they came up with some interesting suggestions, my favourite name remains “Union Workstation”.

I think it has a rather nice ring to it. It also very clearly alludes to how close it is to Toronto’s Union Station, which is a major subway, commuter train and VIA Rail station, which makes the place easy to get to, even for people who live deep in the ‘burbs.

A Lucky Break with Furniture

On Thursday, my friend Heather Williams posted the following in Facebook:

Lovely people of Toronto — do you have an office in need of a furniture upgrade? Looking for some cubicles or desk items/filing cabinets?

My office is moving and we can’t fit the current stuff in the new place so it all needs to move out before end of January. Free to a good home – just come and get it (office is near Pearson).

We have 7 of the cherry wood desk sets (with matching shelving) and 6 cubicles with divider walls. We also have various filing cabinets, chairs and shelving units. All in great shape.

Our movers can assist with the removal of these items when they are moving our stuff if you want to coordinate that and pay for just that portion of the job and delivery to your location (or bring your own van and cart it away).

Give me a shout if any interest!!

Chris Glynne alerted me to Heather’s posting, and I contacted her immediately. Her work was only too happy to get rid of the stuff, and we were only too happy to take it off her hands…for free-as-in-we-pay-nothing!

Furnishing a coworking space is always a big challenge, and I’m glad that we lucked out with this catch. Thanks, Heather and Axiom!

Floor Plans

Once again, here are the floor plans for the space:

If you’d like to claim a desk or a whole office, drop me a line (jdevilla@ctstech.net) or give me a ring (647-985-5639). Let’s talk!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

And so the spin doctoring begins: Carmen Ortiz, the US Attorney in the case against Aaron Swartz has released an official statement its tragic outcome. Here is a transcript of the full statement:

STATEMENT OF UNITED STATES ATTORNEY CARMEN M. ORTIZ REGARDING THE DEATH OF AARON SWARTZ

As a parent and a sister, I can only imagine the pain felt by the family and friends of Aaron Swartz, and I want to extend my heartfelt sympathy to everyone who knew and loved this young man. I know that there is little I can say to abate the anger felt by those who believe that this office’s prosecution of Mr. Swartz was unwarranted and somehow led to the tragic result of him taking his own life.

I must, however, make clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably. The prosecutors recognized that there was no evidence against Mr. Swartz indicating that he committed his acts for personal financial gain, and they recognized that his conduct – while a violation of the law – did not warrant the severe punishments authorized by Congress and called for by the Sentencing Guidelines in appropriate cases. That is why in the discussions with his counsel about a resolution of the case this office sought an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct – a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting. While at the same time, his defense counsel would have been free to recommend a sentence of probation. Ultimately, any sentence imposed would have been up to the judge. At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek – maximum penalties under the law.

As federal prosecutors, our mission includes protecting the use of computers and the Internet by enforcing the law as fairly and responsibly as possible. We strive to do our best to fulfill this mission every day.

Her line “a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting” is markedly different from this announcement on the US Attorney’s Office announcement dated July 19, 2011, where it states:

AARON SWARTZ, 24, was charged in an indictment with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. If convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million.

The fact that they added an extra 9 counts of felony charges to the original four in September 2012 suggests they weren’t going for a sentence of “six months in a low security setting”. This was a “juicy” case for the prosecuting attorney, who almost has a track record for driving programmers to suicide (I agree with Sir Ian Fleming: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action, and thus far, “Suicide Steve’s” body count is steady at two).

What should also be taken into account is that Ortiz is a likely gubernatorial candidate, and is worried that Aaron’s suicide may thwart her political ambitions. Boo hoo.

I cannot write further about this topic without losing my usual Zen, and I need to get a lot of work done today. I’ll simply close with this video from Democracy Now that I found via Lessig:

Well before MAD magazine, there was the British satire comic publication Punch, a magazine that Flickr user Kip W (who found the comic above) says “pretty much did everything first, unless archaeologists should find another humor magazine that did everything before PUNCH, which seems pretty unlikely.”   Their prediction about what people would do with wireless communications, pictured above, was eerily prescient.

The comic above is from page 164 of A Century of PUNCH Cartoons, which was published in 1955. I may just have to purchase the print to hang up at the new office; if you’d like to buy one too, the Punch archive would only be to happy to sell you one at rates from £19 to £52 (about $31US – $83US).

Found via BuzzFeed by way of Cameo Wood. This article also appears in Mobilize!: The CTS Mobile Tech Blog.

Bloomberg reports that Dell, who have lost a third of their value last year, are investigating the option of becoming a privately-owned company. According to the report, they’re in hush-hush discussion with two private equity firms about buying out their own stock.

For more, here’s Bloomberg’s video report:

I’m not sure (and neither is the anchor in the video) what taking Dell private would do. Would it let them take corrective actions that would otherwise not be possible as a publicly-traded company — perhaps actions that might make shareholders balk?

Dell’s woes must be amusing to Apple fans, especially those who kept the faith during those dark pre-return-of-Steve times in the mid-late ’90s when the company appeared to be circling the drain. MG Siegler seems to have beaten me to the schadenfreude-laden punch, but it’s almost my duty as a Mac user to repeat Michael Dell’s infamous 1997 quote about Apple:

“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”