Archive for March, 2011
Are you standing between your tech start-up and success?
Mar 31st
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
“Nothing disheartens me more than meeting an entrepreneur in B.C. who says his ambition is to one day conquer the Ontario market,” Anthony Lee, general partner at Altos Ventures and co-founder of theC100, told us in an interview a few months back.
While building a globally competitive company may not be the right objective for everyone, Lee makes a key point. For any venture to succeed, its founders must have a vision that will stretch the boundaries of what they know and challenge what they believe is attainable.
But there is more to this business of entrepreneurship than being able to see, and seize, opportunity. Once a technology innovation worthy of exploitation has been identified, an entrepreneur’s success or failure will depend largely on how ready they are to take counsel and challenge their own assumptions and deeply held beliefs. In other words, are they coachable? Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook, not Twitter, is the social network for revolutions
Mar 29th
Twitter often gets the credit for being the modern-day digital medium that captures disasters, protests as they unfold – 140 characters at a time.
The micro-blogging service that was designed to be simple enough to use via SMS message has been the focus of much media attention over the last couple of years as journalists grapple with the changes social media has made to the way we codify dramatic world events. It’s fascinating to see how easy-to-use digital tools have been embraced by citizens around the globe and become an effective tool for documenting highly important events from the grassroots level. Never before has so much information been available in such a timely fashion, from so many sources, so quickly after the event.
Brian Jackson
How to develop tech products with potential
Mar 29th
By Agnes Haak
As a mentor and consultant to small and medium sized businesses, I have encountered many IT professionals and entrepreneurs who are developing new technology and are asking for help on how to turn their technology into a viable business. The first step in developing “viable technology” is by developing products with the market in mind.
Agnes Haak
Research current products
The first question I ask an entrepreneur is “is there anything like it on the market?”. Too often, programmers, developers or entrepreneurs spend too much time on the idea phase only to find out afterwards that this idea is not new, that it is already on the market, in some way, shape or form. Read the rest of this entry »
Securing the new workforce
Mar 28th
By Paul Wood
The traditional office is turning into an untethered workspace that can be located just about anywhere and operate at anytime.
Paul Wood
With instant accessibility to faster, wireless networks and collaboration tools like instant messaging (IM), working remotely is growing in popularity among businesses around the world. An IDC study estimated that the worldwide mobile worker population will grow from 919.4 million in 2008, accounting for 29 per cent of the worldwide workforce, to 1.19 billion in 2013, accounting for 34.9 per cent of the workforce.
An increase in the mobile worker population means one thing for IT professionals – an increase in security threats. In fact, recent analysis by Symantec.cloud found that remote workers are more likely to exhibit potentially harmful web browsing activity compared to office-based workers.
The reality of a distributed workforce also means that an increasing number of employees do not have a physical office or desk which can pose new security challenges. Traditionally, IT security was simply a case of securing the company network, implementing a security policy and locking-down the firewall. But with the network extending beyond the office, there can be many pitfalls when a business seeks to lockdown and secure its remote employees.
Related story – Mobile device are top security threat: survey
The security challenge
The fluid, hyper-connected work environment introduces new challenges to SMBs as it becomes inherently more difficult to manage and monitor the activity of the distributed workforce. It is likely that mobile workers will ignore their employers’ acceptable internet usage policies and visit sites deemed inappropriate for the workplace. Symantec.cloud found that downloads, for example, were 5.4 times more likely to be triggered by mobile workers compared to office-based ones. Read the rest of this entry »
The media tablet ecosystem race
Mar 26th
By Phil Newman
When the iPad was finally revealed in 2010, it took time for the market to know how to categorize the device; everyone settled on simply creating a new category.
One year on, the lead that Apple has is a replay of its iPod-iPhone momentum, but Google’s Android caught up quickly. This year will be a truly fascinating one of winners and losers. Not interested? You should be. Media tablets have re-written the rules.
iPad. You can do everything you want on one really. If you’re a high-end originator of Photoshop masterpieces or an individual with particularly fat fingers, you might not be so convinced, but if you try one for a reasonable period of time you’ll start to get frustrated with the boot-up time of your old laptop, the lack of software apps to enhance your entertainment or productivity and the whole battery-cable-charger-airport-connectivity thing. Read the rest of this entry »
What your business can learn from Chilean wine
Mar 25th
By Phil Newman
Yield management involves the strategic control of inventory to sell it to the right customer at the right time for the right price.
Book your flight to New York two days before you’re due to fly and you’ll get the idea of purchasing at the top end. Rather than considering late booking as a negative, why not apply airline pricing to your business to create demand among early buyers, or early adopters?
Tech start-ups can use advance booking strategies used by airlines to incent early corporate customers.
Twitter comes of age but still has room to grow
Mar 24th
The ITBusiness.ca staff has written a great piece on “5 memorable Twitter moments as service turns five,” as well as produced a neat video rewind to celebrate Twitter’s 5th birthday.
Gadjo Sevilla
It is hard to believe that a nerdy social media service that forced people to think in “140 characters or less,” has outlived a lot of its contemporaries like Google Buzz, Jaiku, Plurk and Pownce and created such a vibrant, speedy and robust micro-blogging ecosystem complete with link shortening services and photo and video workarounds.
What started out as a rather mundane way for people to share what sandwich they were having for lunch has, for the most part, evolved into the world’s best leveler and given hundreds of millions of users a voice. The culture of celebrity has taken over Twitter as the best way for personalities to stay in touch with their public and for their public to communicate back.
Twitter has also made it possible for consumers to whine about poor customer service or unfair business practices and get a quick and public response from companies. Small and large businesses have responded in part by hiring staff to man their Twitter feeds and provide customer service via Twitter.
Twitter has also been the best service for taking an “opinion pulse” or crowd source certain topics and ideas. It is also the fastest way to get news. By the time you’ve turned on your TV and fumbled your way to CNN, you could have all the news headlines on display on your Twitter client.
The instantaneous nature and hyper-fast speed of disseminating information has been Twitter’s greatest strength. It has also proven to be an indispensable tool for social change helping people organize and keep in touch during the recent calamities in Japan and New Zealand as well as mobilize during the political unrest in Egypt and Libya.
On the flip-side, Twitter has also been ground zero for the propagation of hoaxes, spam, morbid death rumours and wholesale trolling and hate messages as well as fake accounts.Then there’s the inevitable outages and “Fail Whales” that let users know the service is overloaded and inaccessible.
Twitter has been improving but we feel it is still the Wild West out there with a lot of room for improvement.
What are your thoughts about Twitter? Has it been a useful tool or a time waster? We would love to know, in 140 characters, or less.
Gadjo Sevilla is a Toronto-based writer who reports on technology and writes reviews on consumer and business gadgets. He is also a blogger and community manager for ITBusiness.ca.
Why I won’t replace my iPad with an iPad 2
Mar 23rd
Apple released the latest version to its super successful tablet, the iPad2 which went on sale on March 11 in the US. The iPad 2 is expected to be on sale in Canada on March 25th. 
If you are like me you will be asking yourself, should I stick with the iPad or should I upgrade to the iPad2? And if you will be purchasing the iPad for the first time then you will be wondering which one you should choose. Let’s examine the two versions of the iPad. Read the rest of this entry »
Ottawa woman gives voice to Yemeni protestors under fire
Mar 22nd
There’s a lot going on in the world for news media to cover right now. Japan’s triplet disasters, Libya’s protests and resulting military intervention, and Haiti’s second attempt at presidential elections since November’s failed first round are all stories rightfully claiming headlines.
Yet the protests in Yemen are also worth media attention. Caught up in the Arab spring, this country to the south of Saudi Arabia is the latest Middle Eastern location to demand a regime change, and the ouster of its president, 30-year ruler Ali Abdallah Saleh. Similar to the government response in Libya, Saleh has used violent means in an attempt to disperse the protests.
Ottawa-based entrepreneur Maria Al-Masani wasn’t happy with the amount of news coverage coming out of the region.
Brian Jackson
Al-Masani moved to Canada from Yemen seven years ago and has deep roots in the country – her father was a former advisor to Saleh and her uncle helped found the Yemen Times newspaper. With friends and family still living in Yemen and in apparent danger, she turned to social media to take action.
Incubation: Whose job is it, anyway?
Mar 21st
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
“Government doesn’t start companies,” Iain Klugman, CEO of Communitech, told us a little while back. “Individuals do.”
Nonetheless, government does have an important role to play in the value chain of bringing technology to market. This is particularly true at the regional and municipal level, where local economic development agencies attempt to attract anchor employers and/or support the growth of home-grown technology ventures with programs and incentives funded by the local tax base and higher levels of government. (We will explore the broader role of government in a future post.)
These efforts, however, raise a few fundamental questions:
