If you’re not familiar with the Association of Computer Machinery’s (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) sponsored by IBM Corp., just think of it like the “March Madness” of computer programming.

Just like the NBA recruits top basketball talent from the top teams that compete in the annual NCAA tournament, the world’s top software companies will recruit the students taking part in this contest that was spawned in 1970. Also, there are a lot of confusing acronyms that confound newcomers. Indeed, IBM has sponsored this event since 1997, dubbing it “Battle of the Brains” and uses it as a recruiting mechanism, giving blanket job offers to the teams that finish in the top 10 – and may other competitors as well.

Under Big Blue’s guidance, the contest has exploded in the level of involvement and competition. There are regional competitions leading up to the world finals that 30,000 students and 2,2000 universities participate in. The 122 teams here at the University of Warsaw for this year’s finals come from 85 countries across six continents (they’re still trying to find an organizer for Antarctica).

The main event involves a gruelling, five-hour programming contest in which the teams of three students gather around a single workstation and solve problems. There are typically about 10 problems available to solve, which would normally constitute an entire semester’s worth of work, yet the winning team will solve around 80 per cent of them in this brief period. The teams compete in close proximity to each other in a large, arena area, complete with a spectator booth and score board. The teams also collect a balloon for each problem solved, tying their visual bragging rights to their workstation.

Brian Jackson, Associate Editor, ITBusiness.ca

The finals are a big deal. Last night the opening ceremonies held in Warsaw’s Palace of Culture featured dignitaries such as the mayor of Warsaw, and Poland’s president was scheduled to attend, but ended up sending a representative instead. The finals are even streamed live to the Web so spectators can cheer on their home team, and the broadcast production level is equal to that of many professional sports events. This year, viewers will be able to choose from multiple feeds to stream, including individual Web cams at each work station.

It’s a real culmination of the best computer programmers in the world. Contestants are either Master’s level in computer science, or some are senior-year undergraduate students. The sampling of talent is representative of upcoming worldwide talent pool for software programming, and allows us to take the pulse of the industry. Here’s a couple of the trends apparent this year:

Lack of female competitors

During the opening ceremonies, each team was introduced on a large video screen. You could literally count the number of female competitors on one hand. Though it was more common to see female coaches, as is the case with the University of Toronto’s Carolyn MacLeod.

Last year’s winner, Zhejiang University from China, had a female student on its team and that was likely a the first time a girl won the trophy. The lack of female competitors here underlines the overall dearth of women choosing computer science as a field of study and career choice.

North America’s decline in computer science

The ICPC competition became much more international after IBM began sponsoring it in 1997, and 1999 was the last time a North American school won the top spot – Canada’s own University of Waterloo. Last year, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbour surprised many by coming in second place overall. But North American schools have occupied the top 10 spots less often in recent years, with teams from China and Russia dominating the contest.

It makes sense that the Asia region schools are more competitive, as they must rise above more competition to make it here. Although there are proportionally more students in the Eastern continent competing to get here, they do not get a matching number of teams entered. In order to make space for other teams from around the world, they get squeezed out.

But the trend also reflects a cultural difference that should concern North Americans. While computer programming is considered “geeky” and socially undesirable in the U.S. and Canada, the contestants from China here actually have fans rooting for them back home. The other contestants often speak of the Chinese students’ reputation for rigorous practice schedules and ability to write out sections of code on pure muscle memory.

It’s almost as if those students are taking this contest as seriously as basketball is taken in the U.S. during March Madness.

by Christine Wong

Startup Grind is the newest entry on Canada’s red hot tech startup scene.

The U.S.-based organization, which already has branches in Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Tx., San Francisco, Tempe, Az. and Marin, Ca., just opened new bases in Ottawa and Toronto. The group’s goal is to foster startup activity in each of those regions by bringing together local entrepreneurs, investors, designers, programmers and mentors.

Christine Wong, staff writer, ITBusiness.ca

The Canadian startup scene seems to be turbocharged. It also seems to be getting crowded.

Within the last few months alone there’s been a string of additions like the Startup Grind announcement: new incubators and accelerators (Jolt, Hyperdrive, Driven, and one within InvestOttawa), new organizations (Startup Canada and the aforementioned Startup Grind), new funding (including about half a billion dollars for startup ventures in the federal budget) and new media outlets (PostMedia bought Sprouter which begat BetaKit, respected blogger Mark Evans just launched a weekly newsletter, newcomer Startup Canada now sends out a daily digest, we here at IT Business Canada are doing a daily startup news round-up, and the National Post and Globe and Mail have beefed up their small business and entrepreneurship coverage with a heavy emphasis on the tech scene).

There’s even a service called Clarity.fm offering startups advice from successful businesspeople over the phone, launched by east coast serial entrepreneur Dan Martell.

Will this onslaught of funding, support services, and media coverage actually translate into stronger Canadian tech startups?

Too early to tell.

But having more players in any game usually breeds competition. And that can’t be a bad thing. It probably means all these startups are vying more fiercely for talent to hire, which admittedly causes headaches for recruiters and tech firms trying to fill key spots on their teams. It might also mean, however, that all these groups, services and media outlets will be forced to constantly improve their offerings to survive.

It’s easy being the only game in town and enjoying a monopoly. New competition in a market that’s getting a bit crowded makes you take a look at yourself and up your level of play, to not only stay afloat but beat your rivals.

Survival of the startup services fittest, you might say. It’s a game playing out not just among the emerging tech firms themselves but perhaps among the services catering to them now here in Canada.

Startup headlines vs reality?

There may be a disconnect going on between all the headlines trumpeting the flurry of global startup activity and what’s really happening in the world of entrepreneurship.

The U.S. startup business creation rate hit an all-time low of 7.87 per cent, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. The startup business rate peaked at an all-time high of 13.02 per cent in 1987.

Entrepreneurial companies accounted for just 12 per cent of all American employment in 2010 compared with 20 per cent in the 1980s, the study showed.

Entrepreneurs’ share of job creation has also fallen to 30 per cent in recent years, down from over 40 per cent in the 1980s. And only 35 per cent of all American companies are within the startup range (in business for five or less years), down from almost 50 per cent in the early 1980s.

The takeaway: despite all the media coverage about startups and president Obama’s Startup America initiative to fund and support entrepreneurship, new business creation is hitting new lows, at least south of the border.

It’s not something to be taken lightly. A Reuters story on the data quotes warnings from some U.S. economists and researchers that without stronger rates of entrepreneurship, the American economy will continue to stagnate and not really recover from the U.S. recession that officially ended in 2009.

It’ll be interesting to check for similar statistics in Canada a year or two from now, to see if all the startup activity and coverage will really translate into more new businesses and jobs up here.

Ontario’s public service workers will soon be working with Web technology that is slightly less obsolete with an upgrade from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8.

A memo from the Ontario Public Service’s IT service desk says that the upgrade will be deployed across all workstations by May 11. The subject is simply “Upgrade of IE6.”

The thought that anyone is still using a browser that will celebrate its 11^th anniversary on Aug. 27 is astounding. But according to Microsoft, 7.1 per cent of the world’s Web browsing population is still using this software artifact. The Redmond-based software giant is encouraging its users to upgrade, with a goal of seeing worldwide usage drop below one per cent. In Canada, usage is currently pegged at 1.2 per cent.

Prolonged use of IE6 may lead to chronic frustration syndrome among Web surfers. The lack of tabbed browsing to manage multiple pages, an aged Javascript engine that may actually run on crude oil, and general lack of privacy controls are enough to horrify any modern Internet user.

As Microsoft itself says, “friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer 6.”

The pain for Web developers who still feel pressure to support IE6 is even worse. One of the more obvious gaps of support is IE6’s inability to display transparent PNG images. Users simply see a grey background instead. But developers won’t exactly be popping the champagne in celebration of this latest upgrade victory. IE8 has its quirks too. It calculates the spacing of elements on a Web page differently than any other browser. To properly centre an image for IE8 users, Web coders must write a separate piece of code instructing on margin padding and border sizes in addition to the code they’ve already written for other browsers.

By moving to IE8 instead of IE9, the Ontario government will miss out on convenient features like a unified search and URL address bar, or an add-on manager. But most significantly, they’ll miss out on the HTML5 features of natively embedded video, audio, and interactive graphics that Microsoft supports in IE9, and competing browsers like Firefox and Chrome also support. HTML5 is fast becoming the go-to Web standard for modern pages because of its flexibility of design – one page can be optimally displayed on a desktop monitor, smartphone screen, or tablet.

Likely the Ontario government can’t migrate to IE9 because it is also using a decade-old OS in Windows XP. That would also mean the clock is already ticking on a bigger upgrade project, migrating to Windows 7. Microsoft will cut support for XP in April 2014, and unless the government is willing to risk using an unpatched OS across its environment, it will have to upgrade. That will also mean an inevitable move to IE9.

Of course, two years from now the rest of us will probably be using augmented reality goggles and brain-computer interfaces to browse the Web.

Toronto’s startup community has been somewhat deflated by a recent blog post from the Startup Genome project.

The irony is that Startup Genome had been the source of that misplaced pride just several days prior. The European researchers unveiled a list of 25 startup ecosystems with a detailed post on TechCrunch. The list featured the usual players at the top of the list – Silicon Valley, New York City, and London, England. But many were surprised to see Toronto placed just after those hi-tech meccas in the fourth spot on the list. The story was picked up by many media organizations and blogs covering Toronto’s startup scene, including ITBusiness.ca in a brief that I wrote.

Headlines on those sites took the list at face value and reported that Toronto had been ranked as the “fourth-best startup eco-system in the world.” But that turns out to be a misnomer. The researchers didn’t intend for the list to be a ranking of the top 25 startup eco-systems around the world at all. Rather, it was just a tabulation of the number of businesses that have used Startup Compass – a tool the researchers developed to allow startup firms to benchmark themselves compared to others.

“This list should not, and wasn’t intended to be used to determine which ecosystem is best,” Max Marmer writes in the blog post. “Activity is simply one factor to determine the quality of an ecosystem.”

Brian Jackson, Associate Editor, ITBusiness.ca

So the list simply tells Toronto it is the fourth-best user of a Web tool with about 100 firms registering with it, not the fourth-best startup eco-system in the world. Vancouver and Montreal were also ranked further down on the list, and have far fewer users registered.

I can see how the error transpired. Even TechCrunch framed the list as presenting the world’s best startup eco-systems. It also contained a comparison of the top three eco-systems across several metrics such as number of companies started and the success rate of those startups. Silicon Valley dominated those metrics over New York and London, and New York also performed better on those marks than London. So the logical deduction was that the rest of the list was ranked based on those same metrics. But it wasn’t.

Researcher Danny Holtschke filled me in on this last week over a phone call. It’s one I now wish I placed when first reporting on the story. But Danny is based in Germany, six hours ahead of my time zone, meaning I wouldn’t be able to interview him until the next day. The pressure to report the news won out and I went with the information available on TechCrunch’s post and the Startup Genome site.

It also raises new questions about how Toronto’s eco-system will stack up against other cities on the list once the researchers have more opportunity to flesh out the details. The Startup Genome team is not only doing research based on its Startup Compass tool, but is also conducting qualitative interviews to assess the cities (I provided one myself about Canada’s startup supports in general). So given some time, the project will reveal a true ranking for Toronto compared to other cities.

Then we’ll see if our collective pride can be re-inflated.

Is there a startup bubble forming?  

I’d have to say yes – but not the same kind we saw a decade ago when the dotcom bubble burst.  

Christine Wong, staff writer, ITBusiness.ca

This most recent spate of bubble babble was touched off by the one billion dollars (it sounds nefarious when you say it like Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies) Facebook just forked over to buy Instagram.  

No one’s disputing that it makes good business sense for Facebook to buy a startup superstar like Instagram. But the valuation seems outrageously high. Now everyone’s asking: is a billion-dollar acquisition price for a startup – one that’s not even publicly traded — a sign that a bubble is nigh in the startup ecosystem?  

It brings yours truly back to the heady days of the late 1990s. (Okay, I may look 25 but I’m actually old enough to admit I chased Michael Cowpland’s Porsche through the gates of Corel’s parking lot in 2000 to try to get a real quote from him after he quit as CEO of that sinking software ship. He didn’t give me one.) Back then the bubble involved startups with little or no revenue stream (and sometimes no business plan) doing IPOs that netted hundreds of millions of dollars overnight.  

Today I think another startup bubble is forming.  But the vehicle driving it this time around isn’t an insanely overvalued IPO market – it’s insanely overvalued acquisition deals. I’m guessing the Facebook/Instagram deal will be the tipping point we all look back on as touching off the current bubble when we reminisce about this another decade from now.  

Not everyone agrees with me, of course. Alkarim Nasser is a Toronto-based serial entrepreneur (Bogaroo, AndroidTO, Bnotions) who’s also the CTO of the Decode Ventures seed fund. He chatted with me by phone from Silicon Valley, where he heads twice a year to catch up on the startup and financing scenes.  

“What happened with Instagram is an anomaly that hasn’t really happened in a while,” Nasser says. “The average (startup acquisition) price is only about $25- to $30 million.”  

One big difference between the 90s bubble and today’s startup scene, Nasser adds, is that tech IPOs today are totally not hot: Groupon, Zynga and others have seen their stocks fizzle after their initial debuts.  

Luckily, there’s another key difference between the 90s bubble and today’s startup mania: the money being overspent unwisely in 2012 doesn’t belong to Joe Sixpack and Betty Housecoat. When the dotcom bubble burst and ridiculously overvalued tech stocks sank like stones in 1999 and 2000, millions of regular people – direct retail investors or folks who unknowingly held those stocks in their mutual or pension funds – lost a ton of money. 

(This is no urban myth: two of my former coworkers at separate Ottawa media outlets lost over $100,000 each simply because they ignored advice to dump Nortel shares in the misguided hope they’d bounce back one day. These were not members of the wealthy set but hardworking guys in their late 40s saving to put their kids through university.) 

Though Nasser argues convincingly that there’s no bubble in tech stocks or IPOs now, he does agree with me that a startup acquisition bubble may be looming further off in the distance.  

“What (the Instagram deal’s) gonna open up is a tidal wave of acquisitions over the next couple of years,” he says. “There will be a lot more people with money and that’s quite possibly when a bubble will form on the acquisition side … We’ll see the financing of too many companies and there won’t be enough second, third or fourth round financing for these companies. So we’ll hit a (financing) wall. Is that really a bubble? I’m not really sure – but it’ll weed out great companies from not-great companies.” 

So yes, I’d say there’s a startup bubble out there right now. You can see it in the flurry of acquisitions being made, the sudden abundance of blogs and news coverage focusing on the startup scene (yep, I’m guilty as charged), and now, the crazy amounts of money being thrown around to acquire fledgling tech firms. 

The key differences between now and the last bubble are: today’s bubble is based on acquisitions, not IPOs or overpriced stocks. And thankfully, fewer people’s money is being put at risk with the current bubble compared to the millions of people hurt when widely held tech stocks crashed and burned in 2000.

By Brian Jackson

The federal government continued limping along in its support of the Do Not Call List with the budget. The stop-gap funding was tagged on as an afterthought to support what was intended to stop unwanted phone calls harassing Canadians at the dinner table.

Since it launched in 2008, the Do Not Call List has been promising to regulate unsolicited business phone calls made to consumers. What it has actually been doing is raising the ire of a business community fed up with its bureaucracy, and stoking the frustration of consumers who find the list ineffective.

It’s hard to find any staunch supporters of the Do Not Call List. Yet it limps on.

Meanwhile, the feds are ready to launch another initiative to rescue consumers from pesky business communications. The Spam Reporting Centre has been given its funding, assigned final regulations to work by, and should start its enforcement activities this year. Its mandate  will be to identify trends and aid in the prosecution of those sending out unsolicited electronic messages – e-mail, text messages, instant messages, and so on. It has been nicknamed The Freezer.

Brian Jackson, associate editor of ITBusiness.ca

Synergy. To use a buzz word, the operations and functions of The Freezer and the Do Not Call List have obvious similarities. Both are mandated by the federal government with an eye to further regulate communications between business and consumers. Both offer a place for consumers to report businesses who break those rules. Both are to enforce against breaking the regulations using fines.

Why not put the Do Not Call List in The Freezer? Merging the two centres could create a one-stop-shop for Canadians to manage their communications preferences. They could report the unsolicited communications they receive, and inform consenting companies ahead of time that they don’t want to be contacted.

Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law, made an attempt to fix the problem in 2008. His idea was to launch a Web service called iOptOut that would allow Canadians to pre-emptively opt out of communications (phone calls and e-mails) simply by selecting them from a list and clicking a button. Great idea, but the site isn’t currently running – a placeholder promising a relaunch in January 2012 can be found at iOptOut.ca.

Managing the communications preferences of millions of volunteers shouldn’t be left up to volunteer work. The government needs to step in and get its act together on this.

With the Conservative government releasing a belt-tightening budget, much of it at the expense of the public service, every opportunity to create efficiencies should be taken. Merging these nuisance-prevention services under one roof would be a sound budget-saving move.

The government has set aside $700,000 annually for operation of The Freezer. Funding for the Do Not Call List totaled $3 million between 2010-2012. It has exacted about $2.1 million in penalties, so is operating at a net loss.

Much of that funding goes to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), which is responsible for overseeing the Do Not Call List (Bell Canada operates the list) and is one of three federal outfits responsible for enforcing the new anti-spam law. Why shouldn’t the CRTC simply hire a single operator to handle both these responsibilities? Better resources should also be put into enforcement so that fines cover the cost of operations, not taxpayer dollars.

A merger of the Do Not Call List and the Spam Reporting Centre isn’t likely to happen this year or next. The government closed its bid period for the Spam Reporting Centre Jan. 3, and the requirements didn’t include a plan to block telemarketing calls. The Do Not Call List just received another year’s worth of funding in the federal budget unveiled at the end of March.

Until then, you can expect more telemarketers to interrupt your dinner regularly. And keep that e-mail spam blocker up to date.

The 1903 Rambler.

In the next couple of days, ITBusiness.ca will be launching a “Drive” section that focuses on advancements of in-car technology and the connected vehicle. So why would a technology-focused news site launch a section about cars?

Following the technology sector in a way that assists those that use it means keeping an eye out for innovation. Innovation is about more than the new hardware and software products that big vendors push out the door to their customers. It’s about looking at the big picture – measuring the incremental steps towards a sea change that transforms the way we live and work.

After the internal combustion engine was invented in the late 19^th century, and the benefits of personal transportation that was both fast and didn’t require livestock to power was apparent, it didn’t take long to spur a frenzy of competition to offer the best product on the market – or more aptly in this case, the best car on the road.

Louis Renault broke into the auto industry by modifying a French clunker into the world’s first hot rod in just 1898. In 1902, a North American Car known as the Rambler made the steering wheel popular and positioned drivers on the left-hand side of the car. And in 1903, Henry Ford and his companies were manufacturing thousands of cars a year.

Brian Jackson, Associate Editor, ITBusiness.ca

Special Feature: In-car technology at the 2012 Auto Show

The innovation didn’t stop with the car itself. It quickly spilled over into the petroleum industry, with the industry scrambling to find efficient ways to produce gasoline. The U.S. congress reacted to the car’s popularity in 1916 by creating the means to fund road improvements. By the 1920s, a national highway system made the automobile the preferred method of travel for most Americans.

The car was an invention that put the pedal to the metal on innovation and didn’t let up on the throttle until it had transformed transportation in less than three decades. It contributed a major part of reducing the limitations of space and time on conducting business and other societal affairs.

Now we’re seeing a similar rush to innovation among auto makers. But this time the technology doesn’t focus on propelling us to our destination. Instead, it helps keep us connected to the people and information that matters to us even while we are en route.

Ford introduced its in-car IT system in 2007 with the Ford Focus. It featured voice recognition, Bluetooth connectivity, and a unified control panel to manage entertainment in your car. In the few years since then, car makers have raced to compete with more convenient ‘infotainment’ systems that offer connectivity and comfort. Manufacturers now see these systems as a key differentiator that will see customers decide what car to buy – not a powerful engine or fuel efficiency, but personal technology.

The roads paved for cars to travel on are now dotted with cell phone towers carrying broadband data networks. They’re already being used to push information into our cars through our cell phones, and increasingly more common, directly to cars via embedded computers. Cars are now powered by lithium-ion batteries as well as petroleum, and car makers are offering tech tools to help manage that new power source.

The spin-off technologies resulting from this automotive innovation are already evident. Voice recognition technology is now commonly used on mobile devices, and operating systems used first in cars are now powering portable computers.

Driving a car just five to 10 years from now might be an entirely different experience than it is today. The time we spend in our cars will be less about travelling and more about extending our work day, enjoying entertainment, or talking to our social circle.

Automotive technology is still eliminating space and time – just in a different way.

The rapid surge in the number and importance of driver-assist and mobile devices is pushing “networked” to the front of the value chain, according to Joachim Taiber, Research Professor at Clemson University’s renowned International Centre for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR).  Other market drivers of networked vehicles include the adoption of permanent real-time communication via social networks, the transfer of content to the “cloud”, the dependency of the vehicle  – especially electric vehicles (EVs) – on energy and communications infrastructure components, and the processing of payments for items like location-based services.

Speaking at a recent Networked Vehicle Association Executive Workshop, Dr. Taiber laid out three future scenarios arising from this drive to the network:

Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory car

Autonomous Driving:   The technical feasibility of driverless driving has been demonstrated, and remote-control driving has been demonstrated in the military.  The opportunity remains for finding a way to ensure permanent

Barry Gander, chair, Networked Vehicle Association

radio connectivity to the vehicle.

Unlimited Range:

The principle of wireless energy transfer via induction has been discussed intensively in research- and developer circles.  The opportunity arises from the need to optimize the efficiency of energy transfer, and reduce the costs of infrastructure.

All Mobility-related Services Are Offered Via “The Cloud”

Vehicles have been in demonstration mode for several years now, that connect to the LTE network for streaming of videos and services.  Opportunity arise from the need to provide sufficient network capacity, and to create new service applications that meet demand and are of high quality.

In servicing the opportunity for vehicle communications, a consensus is developing around a central fact:  the fact that the consumer is used to utilize newest hardware and software for communication services.  The lesson for auto makes: this demand should not be unnecessarily constraint by the vehicle or its baked-in systems.

photo source: University of Karlsruhe

Rise of the Electric Vehicle

While EVs make up a small percentage of cars on the road today, new U.S. federal standards to increase fuel efficiency to reduce CO2 emissions are important drivers for electro-mobility  -  opening the door to new opportunities in this field.

EVs have particularly aggressive needs for networking, to find the battery-optimum routes between charging stations, and to interact with payment systems.  Beyond that, with increasing urbanization more flexible and connected multimodal mobility concepts are needed. Further, the bidirectional energy flow between the grid and the EV requires a significantly high communication activity. Building up a suitable energy infrastructure (smart grid) is in the early stages.

Regional Issues and Evs

Different parts of the world are adapting to the EV future in ways either constrained by the past or looking to the future.

In the U.S., the highway infrastructure is funded largely by the gasoline tax.  These funds are declining and do not allow massive investments in the required communication infrastructure to optimize the use of the public road network.

The Express Network of China had a total length of 65,000 km by 2009, the second largest after the U.S. and roughly equal to the highway systems of Canada, Germany and France combined. In China the majority of the road network is funded from private sources and collecting tolls is the norm. The development of a powerful communication infrastructure to support the “networked vehicle”
can be implemented rapidly.

In Europe it is a difficult process to implement a unified toll collection system across borders. Traditionally the mobile phone market is fragmented on a national level, therefore the rollout of services in Europe is more difficult than in large national markets.

photo source: Alcatel-Lucent

Today and Tomorrow

In summary: today the opportunity areas for vehicle networking are in:

• Autonomous driving;
• Dynamic wireless energy transfer;
• Seamless communication of the vehicle in multiple networks;
• Permanent connectivity between vehicle and cloud; and
• Vehicle-to-vehicle-communication in a cluster.

Looking back from 2020. Dr. Taiber is forecasting that we will be in a world where:

• Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is introduced – anti-collision
  belongs to vehicle standard equipment;
• The vehicle occupants can use mobile devices and their most important applications in the vehicle in an ideally integrated manner;
• The most important communication standards to support electro-mobility are introduced;
• 4G-based mobility services can be used from the vehicle;
• Payment of location-based services is possible to do from the vehicle; and
• The range of electrical vehicles is significantly improved compared to today

by Nestor E. Arellano

A few weeks before the release of the New iPad, the United Kingdom-based Raspberry Foundation offered up for sale the device that you see in the picture above.

Looking more like a misplaced part from a computer, the Raspberry Pi couldn’t be more different from the sleek and sexy tablet from Apple. Ungainly as it may appear, the Pi holds a certain DIY charm that the iPad could only dream of.

“We just want kids to get kids programming,” Eben Upton, founder and trustee of the Raspberry Foundation was quoted as saying by the BBC News. The foundation even has plans for programming competitions offering ₤1,000 or more to children who can come up with original programming.

In the country where the computer is considered to have been invented, educators are worried that enrolment in computer courses is increasingly declining. The foundation hopes that the Pi can improve the doleful state of Britain’s computer science education. There has been a 60 per cent decline in the number of British students obtaining an A-level in computing science since 2003. Canada, as well, is facing its own tech education problems.

Judging from the massive demand for the Pi which caused the Web sites of the device’s distributor’s to crash, kids and PC enthusiasts from around the world will also be benefiting from what the Pi has to offer.

But the goal is not only to increase enrolment in computer sciences, according to Upton. The foundation also aims to “increase the range of things they (children) know how to do when they arrive (in university).”

In the U.K. and North America as well, a vast majority of children are growing up with an excellent capability of knowing how to use technology but very little awareness of how the technology works. For many people, the devices they use and enjoy are a mystery. This is indeed very sad because if today’s students are to thrive in the technological future they would need to understand its different facets and what makes it work.

Partly to blame is the flood of wonderful tech devices such as the iPad that enable users to do just about anything – play games, watch video, listen to music, collaborate online, edit images, movies and documents you name it. But sad to say, they are very expensive and built on Steve Job’s “one widget philosophy.”

As wonderful an experience as these devices  may offer,  it is a very much controlled experience. The ordinary user can’t even open up the devices without special tools.

Thewonderful thing about Pi is that it brings back that Heathkit concept that taught countless children (even Steve Jobs) how to build their own radio sets and the basics of electronics. The Pi’s programmability is not hidden behind some impenetrable shiny casing or complicated code. It is not loaded with proprietary software protected by laws that prevent users from altering them but rather relies on open sourced software.

The Pi runs on Linux flavours including Fedora, Debian and ArchLinux.

“A student can pick it up and say ‘Let’s see what I can do with it’ and actually start doing something with it,” said Max Abed, software researcher atSenecaCollegeand member of the team that work on the Pi project’s software component. It is the perfect programming toy to tinker with, he said.

Not everything the children do may turn our fine. They could make mistakes but that wouldn’t be much of a problem. They can learn from their mistakes and try again. “Even if a kid ends up breaking it, at $35 the Pi won’t be that hard to replace,” said Abed.

Patents and inflated prices has raised technology far above the reach of many users.

Jim Zemlin also points out in his bog Why the next Steve Jobs needs a Raspberry Pi not patents that  patents and the threat of litigation are holding back innovators.

“The only thing that holds back the next Steve Jobs is  being sued by the company started by the late Steve Jobs,” said Zemlin.

Nestor Arellano

Do you have a Raspberry Pi? How are you using? What are your plans for it? We’d like to know. Tell us your story or send us some images of your project.

by Christine Wong 

Tech startups are constantly reminded that even when it looks like a financing or acquisition deal is done, it ain’t over til the due diligence is done.

But who’s performing due diligence on the investors and acquirers?

Christine Wong, staff writer, ITBusiness.ca

It might seem like a crazy question to even ask in the first place. But why should a startup just accept the first investment deal that comes along or jump into bed with the highest takeover bid they can get?

Kevin O’Leary got me thinking about all of this.

As one of the original judges on CBC TV’s Dragon’s Den, he relentlessly grills entrepreneurs who pitch their wares on the show in hopes of scoring some financing.

But what do the startups facing O’Leary on national TV know about him (especially since he’s a guy who might actually buy part of their company)?

O’Leary has an impressive track record. He started software publishing firm Softkey out of his basement, grew it phenomenally, acquired The Learning Company (TLC) in 1995 for over $600 million, then sold it to Mattel in 1999 in a stock deal worth over $3.5 billion.

The glow from that deal faded fast: earnings from TLC plummeted immediately and Mattel sold the unit just two years later for a pittance of what it paid. BusinessWeek later called Mattel’s TLC acquisition one of the worst deals in history. Mattel shareholders sued Mattel, O’Leary and his TLC co-founder, alleging TLC inaccurately reported its financials. Mattel settled the suit for $122 million. O’Leary told Maclean’s last year that “none of (the allegations) was true. They had forensic accountants tear our books apart for two years.”

O’Leary has rebounded from the debacle, starting his own investment fund, joining the board of another, and seeing one of his investments, Storage Now, acquired for $110 million in 2007. He’s now starring on two other CBC TV shows (Redemption Inc. and The Lang and O’Leary Report) and Dragon’s Den copycat Shark Tank on ABC. Mattel made him a mega-millionaire –TV has made him a star.

Full disclosure here: I used to work with O’Leary and his CBC News Channel co-host Amanda Lang in the mid-2000s at Report On Business Television (since renamed Business News Network). I don’t pretend to know him as a person at all and can’t shed any light on his character off-screen.

I can shed some, however, on the way TV works and how it relates to due diligence for startups.

While filling in on O’Leary’s ROBTV show one time, he was late rushing into the studio for his daily on-air chat with Lang. She wanted to start with some banter about how the Asian bird flu epidemic was affecting stock markets.

“Bird flu? What the hell! Can anybody give me something about this bird flu?” O’Leary called out into the newsroom just two minutes before going live on-air.

I ran in and gave him a 60-second primer on the latest bird flu business news from that day. When the red light came on, O’Leary expertly riffed on the bird flu like he’d just filed an analyst report on it.

The point I’m making isn’t just that O’Leary is amazing on live TV; it’s also that what you see on TV doesn’t always give you the full picture of what goes on behind the scenes, just like O’Leary’s official bios don’t mention the downside of the Mattel deal.

And if you’re a startup vying to get on Dragon’s Den or Shark Tank, you should go in realizing what these TV shows are about: entertainment first, business second. Startups want to be on these shows to get financing. But the main goal of the TV producers is to attract viewers. The best way to go on these shows is to consider it free publicity for your idea or product, not a financing opportunity.

How does this relate back to why startups should do due diligence on investors and acquirers? Well, investors and acquiring companies may have different goals than the startups they deal with, too. They ultimately want to end up making a hefty return on their own investment or acquisition, which is not the same goal of the startups themselves. Startups must do due diligence to reconcile this gap and make sure any deal is truly a good fit for them.