Business
Backbone Magazine has just published a great overview of the cleantech sector in Canada that contains quotes from a number of notable people in the space including Kirk Washington (Yaletown Venture Partners), Victoria Smith (BC Hydro), Rick Whittaker (Sustainable Development Technology Canada), Raul Pacheco-Vega (UBC), Helen Goodland (Lighthouse Sustainable Building Centre) and me. Thanks to [...]
I’m super excited to be part of the crew (along with Bootup Entrepreneurial Society) bringing the Startup Lessons Learned conference to town via simulcast this Friday April 23rd. For those of you who don’t know, the Lean Startup movement (a derivative of lean manufacturing) was kicked off by Eric Ries, formerly of Imvu. It has [...]
If you’re looking to raise some early stage investment for your company, the Angel Forum is a great venue to get in front of local angels. Information below. Note the following key dates: April 23: next screening session. April 30: early registration deadline (save $100) May 18: Angel Forum event. See Bob’s information below: Looking [...]
Disclosure: I’m an advisor of the CO2 Impact team. I’m quite excited about the work that Boyd Cohen and his wife Elizabeth Obendiente and the team are doing and happy to see that they’re getting the coverage they deserve. They have a great article written about them on Care2.com’s site. You can read the article [...]
On April 23, over 20 awesome speakers are going to get together in SF for the Startup Lessons Learned conference. Bootup Entrepreneurial Society has kindly decided to host the simulcast in their Gastown digs. Speakers include: Eric Ries (founder of the lean startup movement), Dave McClure (the foul-mouthed, opinionated, and obnoxiously right-most-of-the-time angel), the KISS [...]
Behold the future of books. Imagine showing this to a caveman. They would stone you to death and then smash the iPad apart looking for the little people inside. This is truly awesome and inspiring as a creative work.
Check out this crazy animation of Wal-mart’s expansion over 40 years. Looks like a virus breaking out.
I’m quoted in this week’s Business in Vancouver, discussing cloud computing, along with my industry colleague Sarah Morton from Backbone Systems (a recent sponsor of the Vancouver Cloud Camp.) I’m glad Curt got my favourite line in there, courtesy of Vancouver’s world-famous sci-fi author, William Gibson: “the future is already here, it just isn’t widely [...]
This year started off with a bang with Deloitte heralding 1Q10 as a “record quarter” in terms of deals done (180 vs the previous high of 165 in 4Q09). But only $35M of the $1.9B raised was by Canadian companies. That’s a shockingly small amount of finance for such a burgeoning sector. With that as [...]
I was asked recently what I had learned from my informal survey of the local BC cleantech sector. This was my response and I was encouraged to share it more widely. I’d love your own thoughts on the following. Dear (Friend): You asked about my view on the cleantech sector after I took some time [...]
Watch these in this order. They’re like peanut butter and jam. Perfect. Kevin Kelly tells the epic story of technology from the birth of the universe until now. Then Bill Gates asks for his one big wish for humanity’s technological development: an energy miracle to help the poorest 2 billion people on the planet thrive.
Jamie Oliver pleads with us to stop killing our kids with crappy food: www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html Blaise Aguera y Arcas will blow your mind with the next generation of augmented reality mapping tools. Makes Google Maps look like crayons and paper. www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html Running more effective board meetings. Not rocket science but good basic article. www.cloudave.com/link/running-more-effective-board-meetings-at-startups It turns [...]
(EDIT: I said Milton Friedman who is of course, no longer with us, may he rest in peace. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.) Thomas L. Friedman wrote an excellent post over here at the NY Times pleading with the climate folks to go on offense with a simple 50 page grade six [...]
Check out the newly launched Climate Action Plan Indicators tool from the City of Berkeley that is based on Vancouver’s own Visible Strategies‘ “See-It” application. It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals. Congrats VS team and City of [...]
I found an awesome PPT deck today called How to Optimize Your SaaS Revenue Streams – Rackspace SaaS & Cloud 2010. How to Optimize Your SaaS Revenue Streams – Rackspace SaaS & Cloud 2010 View more presentations from Lincoln Murphy. Its authors Lincoln Murphy and Justin Pirie do a great job of articulating the high [...]
Boris Mann and the team over at Bootup Labs are stealing a great idea from some of our U.S. counterparts – the Startup Visa. In short, they (and I) want to see a visa category created by the government that makes it easier for a founding entrerpreneur to get a visa to be in the [...]
Via TechCrunch: Not Playing Around. EA Buys Playfish For $300 Million, Plus a $100 Million Earnout. I knew this was coming soon. The growth rates on Playfish and Zynga were too high not to get the attention of the majors. I love the quote about “killing EA” and then EA acquiring the team. That follows [...]
I spent much of yesterday mourning, remembering and celebrating the passing of a true renaissance man from our lives back into the Universe. On September 1, 2009, Jeffrey Walker – father, husband, son, musician, artist, creator, company builder, martini-drinker, guitar player, blogger, and all around crazy interesting soul – left us all behind for the [...]
I agree with Thorsten von Eicken’s comments over here on the RightScale blog that Amazon’s new Virtual Private Clouds are a BIG DEAL. (Jeff Barr’s announcement blog post is here.) Now any enterprise can create a secure tunnel into virtually unlimited instances sitting over at Amazon. No more need to design, buy, rack, configure, and [...]
Daya Baran has written two excellent posts over at WebGuild on the people, ideas, and capital that are fleeing Silicon Valley as the geographic center becomes less relevant. He quotes Jim Clark (of SGI, Netscape, and Healthon fame) who exited 10 years ago to Florida. Here are the posts: Part 1 Part 2 I have [...]
To quote Denis whats-his-name from Saturday Night Live, “I don’t want to go off on a rant here but….” <rant> The iPhone rocks. The iPhone 3GS rocks even more. AT&F******T (AT&FT) is absolutely awful but people put up with them in order to use the iPhone. Google, while not always perfectly un-evil, does their part [...]
Click and watch. It’s brilliant.
To all the crazy inventors out there, can you please invent this for me? I spend my days working on a computer, looking at hundreds of windows, using 20-30 different applications, chatting across way too many channels. Frankly, it’s really not healthy for us to sit so long, work on laptops, and stare at little [...]
I disagree deeply with Garett Rogers over at ZDNet who wrote: Google’s Enterprise strategy so far hasn’t produced much traction — and I’m pretty sure this new plugin isn’t a silver bullet either. If businesses find out about it, this new plugin may be enough to get some companies to switch from Exchange to Google [...]
I made a couple of posts the other day (post 1, post 2) about my (our collective) nightmare with respect to calendar and contact and social network management. Boris Mann responded with: Google Wave, under all the magic, is actually based around XMPP. I’ve been predicting the second coming of XMPP as a protocol to [...]
Okay, my Plaxo Pulse “simplify my life” quest spun out of control into exactly what I was hoping to avoid – a full-on examination of my various communication networks and channels. Too late. My question is this. For all of us uber connected networking, writing, blogging, conference-going wonks, is your system as horrendous? What great [...]
I am not normally much of a Seth Godin fan most of the time but I have to say that I really loved the TED talk he gave on tribes. It intuitively makes sense and I think he asked some really great questions and had a fantastic call to action. The key questions were: who [...]
I have been working on a cloud computing ecosystem map with my colleagues over at Dealmaker Media and MR Rangaswami kindly agreed to host our map on Sandhill.com. You can read the entire post here. Thanks to MR and his team (Maryann and Stuart) for their help and for all of the people who have [...]
(This was originally posted at http://www.undertheradar.com and I’m cross-posting it here as well.) Frank Gillett and his team over at Forrester have released “The State Of Emerging Enterprise/SMB Hardware Trends: 2008 To 2009″ reports. You can find them here (Enterprise / SMB). The summary is below with my thoughts added at the bottom: x86 server [...]
