Month: October 2006

October 23, 2006

To the Mesh Mobile! Canada's Web Conference Returns

Stuart, Mathew, Rob, Mark and I are delighted to announce that the mesh conference will be returning to Toronto’s MarsDD this May 30/31, 2007.

We had a ball planning last year’s event and we’re just digging into the details for this years. In the meantime we invite one and all to join us on November 15th after 6:00 PM at the Irish Embassy for a mesh pissup (errr) meet up.

Ticket’s for mesh aren’t on sale yet, nor are many of the details available (ie. speakers, content, etc.), but you can expect a steady trickle of news over the next few months. Also, we’ve finally posted the podcasts of last years keynotes. I listened to a few of them recently and they are excellent – enjoy!

Read Mathew’s post. Subscribe to our mesh blog and please come join us in May.

[note: just a reminder … we sold out last year and I expect we’ll sell out again this year, so if you want to come, please do grab the feeds and stay tuned].

October 6, 2006

May Your Road Be Merry

Big news flash in the Canadian tech scene. Mark Evans – one of Canada’s best read bloggers and one of my mesh conference co-founders – has crossed over from journalism to running a start-up.

Earlier this week b5 Media received $2 Million in venture financing from J.L. Albright and Brightspark. Getting Mark to join the team will only enhance their credibility. Having worked closely with Mark in building mesh, I can tell you that Mark brings some intangibles to the table that would benefit any start-up. He’s energetic, and totally enthusiastic about what he does. He is also forthright and honest – important qualities I’d want in any team I would build. Mark also brings experience to the team as he’s left journalism to run a start-up before.

Good luck Mark – I’ll be rooting for you.

October 5, 2006

Don't Under Estimate the Significance of This

Yesterday I posted this on the FreshBooks blog:

Applications that use the web as a platform have the potential to begin an era of providing new value for their users…

All the users that profile themselves (e.g. tell us “I am a web designer”) will begin receiving useful comparative business metrics they can use to benchmark their business. For example, a web designer might like to learn:

  • What is the average invoice size for web designers?
  • How long does the average web designer take to get paid?
  • What is the average monthly revenue of other web designers?

We’re going to tell our active users their industry average AND their own average, so they can see how they stack up….Remember when you had to pay Forrester $1200 for a report like this? It’s times like this I catch a glimpse of how our service – and services like ours – will begin to move markets.

At first blush, you might say “big deal”. Mark my words – this is a *big* deal. Computing and knowledge like this is going to disrupt markets (i.e. Forrester). Stowe gets it. Take a second and ponder the implications with other sorts of applications. Let’s say you are a lawyer using Writely, you could get metrics on editing time for various classes of documents like shareholders agreements. Using the metrics gathered you could do a better time of projecting your resource allocation (i.e. time) and you could do a better job forecasting expenses for you clients which they will appreciate…or at least you could say, “well I based my forecast on industry standards…it’s *your* fault we went five times over budget”…you get the idea.

Huge value…mark my words.