Would be better if she let Scott talk a bit more. Although, maybe she was interviewing for a new job +1
Below is a great interview of local entrepreneur Scott Lake talking about SWIX at the GROW conference in Vancouver (which was awesome!).
Techvibes TV: Scott Lake of SWIX from Techvibes.com on Vimeo.
If you’re not following TechVibes, you should. They’re awesome for covering Canadian, local entrepreneurs and they work hard to get your story out.
Well done Scott and the SWIX team!
By Scott AnnanOn August 17, Ideavibes is officially launching their crowdsourcing application. CEO Paul Dombowsky says of his application "(Ideavibes’)…goal is to help organizations engage their communities quickly and affordably without the bloat of enterprise-oriented applications." If you want to follow the launch, over the next couple of weeks Ideavibes will start releasing some of their partnerships and customer implementations. If you haven’t already checked out their website, go for it. You can even support causes in the community by buying an Ideavibes T-Shirt!
By Carolynn LacasseJust watched this great TED talk by Cameron Herold, a well-known Canadian Entrepreneut (1-800-GOT-JUNK, College Pro Painters, etc.)
His talk is called "Let’s raise kids to be entrepreneurs", and I agree with many, though not all, of his views on that subject.
His comments about why he personally wanted to be an entrepreneur didn’t resonate with me at all, however. His childhood experiences (and later ones) were all about building business models. Finding arbitrage opportunities, discovering unmet needs for mundane products/services, hiring labour as opposed to performing it, etc.
That’s not why I’m an entrepreneur. What turns my crank is building products. Yes, there should be a solid business model behind those products, but to me, the business model is merely the thing that allows me to continue to build products, and not the end unto itself. Not saying one type of motivation is better or worse than the other, but they are very different.
Maybe there are two kinds of entrepreneurs: Those who are in it to build products, and those who are in it to build business models.
Which one are you?
By Nick DesbaratsFrom the Avitu Team
"This is Avitu’s first of many video blogs about their experiences at Shopify. Since Shopify got their new office in downtown Ottawa, they have played a big role with the Ottawa community and have regularly hosted meetups such as Ruby Tuesday, Open Data Ottawa, and Fresh Founders Ottawa. As of July 26, 2010, Shopify gave Avitu the chance to work out of one of their offices as well as provide guidence with design, programming, marketing and business. This is an amazing opportunity that we have come across and we want to share our experiences with you.
If you want to check more about Shopify check out shopify.com. If you want to see more about what we are doing you can find us at avitu.com. Don’t forget to start a conversation with us! We are always listening."
Avitu incubating out of Shopify. from Avitu on Vimeo.
By Aydin Mirzaee
Ottawa based Inspire2go is a new social travel recommendation website that helps people discover new places that match their unique taste. It’s Travel Discovery Engine learns your taste when you rate the places you’ve been to. It then uses the ratings from the most like-minded people to generate your personalized recommendations of places to go and things to do. Members can also add new places, ratings, reviews, photos, videos and "Top 10" lists.
With Inspire2go’s new website there are also a launching with a contest to find the best travel destinations in Canada. Participants are asked to vote for places they consider to be "The Best of Canada" under the categories of Family, Romantic, Nature, Beach and Golf. The Best of Canada contest is open to public voting until August 31. Anyone can vote for as many places on each list as they like and add new places if their favorites are missing. The winners in each category will be featured on Inspire2go for the rest of the year.
By Carolynn Lacasse
Ideavibes, a start-up headed by Paul Dombowsky, is a crowdsourcing app that lets you engage your target audience online and increase their participation. What’s different about this company is that it’s socially driven; a percentage of their product, profit and time is donated to the not-for-profit sector to help socially conscious organizations move their brands forward. In addition to their app, Ideavibes also provides social media consulting and crowdsourcing expertise.
By Carolynn Lacasse
If you like nachos, patios and good times the summer edition of #GenYOTT is where its at. On July 29 Brixton’s on Sparks is playing host to this monthly meet up. This time the night is ’speaker-free’, but all those ready for some great chit chat are welcome out for what is always great evening.
Register for the event here.
As always this event is brought to you by @Japman_Bajaj @Alkerton @JenButson @MattRichling
By Carolynn Lacasse
Josh James, December 8, 2009 from Rollins Center at BYU on Vimeo.
I’m a big fan of successful entrepreneurs who visit schools and play a big role in the entrepreneurship classes. I recently watched this video of Josh James going back to Brigham Young and sharing some insights. Here are some of the tidbits I took out of it:
Josh dropped out of school, but took the most out of his classes. The only reason he dropped out was that he had learnt so much from his economics, statistics, and entrepreneurship classes, and applied them so well, that it didn’t make sense for him to stay in class when he was bringing in $125 an hour building websites for companies.
As a 4th year student, him and his buddy turned a $12,000 investment in a CGI script business into a $200,000 sale of the company, which he describes as being “really cool. Like really cool. It beat selling out billable hours by a longshot, even at $125 per hour.”
In their next business, they had 50 employees, and in February 2000, they were sure they were going to fail. They moved to a paid model, and converted 0.05% (that’s not a typo) of customers. They were losing 800 customers a month, mainly small businesses. Of the 50 employees they had, 48 were working on retaining small business users, and just two were working on building the enterprise side. Then, they got calls from eBay and CNet encouraging them to keep doing what they were doing, at which point they took 46 people off of the small business side and put them on the enterprise side. That’s when it really took off, almost exponentially, ultimately leading to the $1.8 billion dollar sale of Omniture to Adobe last October.
Things he did personally that helped make it work:
1) Reads a ton. Was reading books and magazines by the truckload. He used to read between 30-40 magazines a month, cover to cover.
2) Take alot of vacation time. Never work Saturday and Sundays, but work like a dog during the week. And when he vacations, he makes sure he vacations really, REALLY well, not just for himself, but for his kids and his family too.
3) Puts the same passion at home as he does at the office. There are responsibilities at home that need to be paid attention to (i.e kids, family) that will help fuel you even more at the office.
4) Get an Assistant as soon as you can afford one.
On where he got his ideas for business:
“They say necessity is the father of invention. Things that annoy me end up fuelling my ideas. Then I heard someone in an entrepreneurial lecture series tell us to make ideabooks. The idea is you write an idea down, you write the marketing plan, the sales plan, the employees you’re gonna get, the profile you want, your competitive advantages, and you just keep writing and writing and writing, and the next day, you move on to the next idea, unless you’re still so drawn to the last idea, in which case keep writing. And when you find one that you just can’t stop thinking about, that’s probably a good one to pursue.”
On starting a business:
“First of all, you have to make sure you have the right profile. If you’re too averse to risk, just don’t start a business. The number one problem people have is that they have ideas and they talk about it, talk about it, talk about it, but never do anything about it. And then they go to some professors, and the professors tell them “well you have to think about this this and that”… NO YOU DON’T. Just start it, and I promise you, when you’re spending your own money on it, you’re going to pay a lot of attention on it!”
On getting your first sale:
“Do anything .. ANYTHING.. you can to win your first customers. As long as it’s not … (long awkward pause)... immoral… it might be borderline not legal, but as long as it’s not immoral, then whatever it takes. You gotta win those first customers. We had a customer come visit us, and i had all my friends come visit us wearing suits like they’re working on who-knows-what, pretending like they were working on stuff! Do whatever it takes to get those sales”
More on the first customers:
“Never give anything away for nothing. You may find you need to discount your price, but never give stuff away for nothing. If someone wants to pay less, you have to come back and ask them what they’re going to do to make up that difference. What kind of press release are you going to get? What kind of events are you going to speak and tout us at? What else are you going to do to make up the price difference? Never give away stuff for nothing”
On First-Time Entrepreneurs:
“It boggles my mind that people aren’t focussing more on revenue, revenue, revenue. Who cares if the desk isn’t put together, or some guy sent you an email you haven’t replied to, or some other guy wants you to attend some chamber of commerce meeting? Go after revenues. Sales is all that matters in the beginning. And if you can’t get a sale, THEN you go back and fix the product. But as soon as it is barely good enough to sell it, you sell it!”
On Business Ideas:
“For the most part, I don’t want a unique ideas There’s maybe a couple unique ideas that have turned into big businesses. But if there’s alot of people in the space, it’s vindication that people are willing to pay for it, it means there’s a market, it means you can make some money, it means you can compete, and it means you can be better faster stronger, especially if there’s only small players in the field.”
There’s a ton of good stuff in this video, and this is already a way longer blog post than I like to write, so I strongly suggest you check it out.
By Japman Bajaj
Come and join us for a full day of mobile software development technical sessions on August 28, from 10am to 4pm, at Adobe Klondike Room, 343 Preston St.
We have five speakers from different parts of the mobile space. Here is the agenda of the day,
Speaker Bios,
Paulo Fierro is a Norwegian born developer with a passion for User Experience and over a decade’s experience of playing with the Flash Platform. Over the years he has worked with clients such as People Magazine, the New York Giants, the Kentucky Derby, SAS, Nickelodeon and Telenor to create both compelling experiences and strategic proof of concepts. In recent years he has switched his focus over to mobile and has been lucky enough to work together with some great designers, developing award winning iPhone apps and reaching the #2 spot on the App Store. A few months ago he left the big city lights of Oslo for Brighton, UK where he has been setting up Jade Hopper, a micro agency focused on web and mobile, with his partner Niqui Merret.
Julian Dolce is a Senior Flash Developer at QNX Software Systems, specializing in mobile AIR applications. Julian has spoken at numerous conferences around the world where he has taught workshops on moving from Flash development to iPhone development, as well as a number of AIR for Android development workshops. He also maintains a personal development blog, www.deleteaso.com, where he writes about his life as a Flash developer.
Mo Jangda is an web application developer with an unhealthy obsession with JavaScript. During the day he builds mobile websites and social applications for Vortex Mobile, a Toronto-based Mobile Marketing firm. At night, he putters away at WordPress plugins and other coding adventures. You can follow him @mjangda or http://digitalize.ca
Tariq Zaid is the CEO and co-founder of SelectStart Studios – an Ottawa based mobile development studio. You can find their portfolio at http://selectstartstudios.com/work
Colin Melia is the Principal Architect for DreamDigital, a hands-on Architect for over 17 years, a speaker and trainer on Microsoft technologies, as well as a user group leader in Ottawa. He has expertise in the areas of rich UI with WPF/Silverlight, cloud development with Azure, and BI with SQL Server, along with in-depth knowledge of core technologies such as .NET, OData, WCF, WF, LINQ and WIF. He has developed award-winning simulation technology with rich UI, cloud-based learning portals and workflow-driven BI systems. He also created the first streaming video community site with Windows Media. Colin has worked in the finance, telecoms, e-learning, Internet communications, learning and gaming industries, with his latest business solutions currently in use by thousands of users world-wide in corporations like GE, HP, O2, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft & Reuters.
By Aydin Mirzaee
Dual Code Inc., an Ottawa based start-up have recently lauched slide-casts.com, a free online service that allows people to easily convert their Powerpoint, Keynote or Impress presentations into multimedia slide shows and share it with others. By uploading a PDF version of your presentation and audio files, Slide-Casts allows you to share your presentations online, or limit access to your employees, co-workers or students.
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