I occasionally post items in this blog about technology- and startup-related events in Waterloo Region that I attend or plan to attend. A terrific new resource has recently appeared that makes it easy to keep on top of these events, as well as much more. Waterloo Region Tech Startups includes a calendar, links to blogs and other resources, and a stream of related tweets. It’s the brainchild of Jesse Rodgers and Joseph Fung both of whom are active and visible in the community through various other initiatives. Great work, guys!
It didn’t rain on my parade
What do Toronto, Waterloo, and Wroxeter have in common? Apart from all of them being cities (and a town) in southern Ontario, each has an annual Santa Claus parade that happens in November. The Toronto edition for 2009 was last week, Waterloo had its parade yesterday, and tiny Wroxeter holds its 2009 parade next Friday. Actually, I think that every small town in southern Ontario has a parade of its own, but I mention Wroxeter’s as my wife knows about it!
As with Oktoberfest, it wasn’t until after I had children that I really enjoyed and appreciated Waterloo’s Santa Claus parade. This year’s edition was a big improvement over last year’s, in that it didn’t pour rain. Not surprisingly my sons all enjoyed the parade, and I got a huge kick out of it too. Between pipes and drums, Rudolph, a steel drum band, a roller derby team, and a Christmas tree made out of recycled cans, there was a lot to enjoy. And that’s just the non-traditional stuff! (Well, pipes and drums are probably traditional in many parades in Ontario at this point.) It’s really quite hard not to have fun.
There was also a toy drive and a food drive, which my sons each contributed to. Of course, Santa appeared at the end, on a flatbed trailer with his reindeer, and then it was time to head home. Great fun, and a real treat every year.
Primal Fusion gets out of the house
This week was active on the Primal Fusion front, with two milestones of a sort.
First up, we released an update to the alpha version of our thought networking service. Our initial version was launched last Spring at the DEMO09 conference. We’ve received a lot of feedback since then, and have made improvements that address the biggest issues. You can read all about the details on the Primal Fusion products blog.
Next up, my Primal Fusion colleague Tom Ayre and I demonstrated a brand new Primal Fusion prototype at StartupCampWaterloo. The prototype is an automatic website generator (“Instant web sites! Just add water!”) that’s built on our thought networking platform. While still quite rough, and not yet released in any form, we feel good enough about this prototype to have shared it with the community at this great event and get feedback. There were interesting questions, some great suggestions, and even a little healthy skepticism. It was all appreciated, and we do listen closely to what we hear. We also appreciated all the votes that we received after we made our pitch to demo — great pitch, Tom! We both also enjoyed the rest of the demos and conversations. If you haven’t been to one of these events, it’s well worth a visit.
November UX Group meeting on Thursday
The November meeting of the UX Group of Waterloo is on Thursday. This session is a group discussion on a big UX topic:
This month we want to explore the factors and issues that will have an impact on user experience design in the near future. As the world goes mobile, what does it mean for users? If everything is accessible, how can it all be managed? What does the move from point-and-click to tap-and-pinch mean? Bring your own issues and questions, and share them in a group discussion with our inquisitive and curious UX community. If you have online videos or other resources to share, let’s have a look at them.
Check out the details and make sure to come out and share your thoughts.
Entrepreneur Week in Waterloo
Entrepreneur Week is happening November 16–22 in Waterloo, and there’s a great range of sessions to attend and things to learn:
Entrepreneurs! start your engines: Entrepreneur Week, North America’s largest annual innovation festival dedicated to the entrepreneurial spirit, will be held in Waterloo November 16-22 and it promises to be another high-octane event to inspire innovation.
Entrepreneur Week is an invigorating week-long festival of events dedicated to celebrating the significant contributions of our greatest community asset – our entrepreneurs!
Waterloo Region is the best place in the world to do a tech startup. Just ask the 200 tech startups doing their thing here. And Entrepreneur Week is a festival unlike any other on the planet. Entrepreneur Week connects entrepreneurs, financiers, students, youth, mentors and the services that support them to success.
I’m still not sure which of the sessions I’ll be able to attend (work commitments make for a busy week) but I know I’ll be at the next edition of StartupCampWaterloo on Wednesday November 18.
By the way, from one the same instigators, there’s FailCamp Waterloo happening on Monday night. The theme is essentially learning from failure, and it sounds like a fun time. Failure seems to be in the air, as Scott Berkun wrote recently about failure, why it needs more attention, and recent initiatives to give it just that.
Rampaging giant ape foils startup’s plans
I’ve written a couple of previous posts on movies (The Dam Busters, The Adventures of Robin Hood) that are good metaphors for a startup company. I recently re-watched another favourite movie, King Kong (the original version from 1933), and enjoyed the startup elements in the story. In contrast with the previous posts, though, King Kong doesn’t end well at all for the startup!
King Kong features a visionary serial entrepreneur (movie maker Carl Denham) who has an innovative idea (a trip to a scary and mysterious island to make a movie like none that anyone has seen) to solve a pressing problem (putting patrons in seats at movie theatres despite the hard economic times).
Denham hires his key employees (Captain Englehorn and his ship the Venture, ship’s first mate Jack Driscoll, lead actress Ann Darrow) convincing them that his vision will lead to success (“It’s money and adventure and fame. Its the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyage that starts at six o’clock tomorrow morning.”) Denham successfully grows his startup company and hires a team who buy into his vision (he recruits a large crew for the voyage), and then goes deep into R&D mode (sets sail for the mysterious island on his ship of choice, the Venture).
Having achieved initial technical success (camera tests on the voyage, discovering the island), Denham and his company suffer one great setback (Anne is taken by islanders) after another (Ann is taken by Kong, a giant ape). Through determination and effort Denham’s team survives early trials (attacks by various giant beasts: Brontosaurus, T. Rex, Stegosaurus, Kong), recovers from early losses (they find Ann, though several crew are lost), and adjusts to new market conditions with a bold and risky plan (they decide to bring Kong back to New York, rather than just a film). Denham puts together an equity sharing plan (excitedly tells the survivors that he’ll share the money they make by exhibiting Kong).
Denham and his team take their product to market (with a plan to exhibit Kong live on stage) and appear poised to reap their rewards (lots of buzz in the sold-out theatre). The product launch is a disaster, though, (Kong escapes his bonds and rampages through New York looking for Ann) and a key employee is lost (Kong again abducts Ann). Denham’s hubris has left his company with nothing, having led to untold damage in his intended market (Kong’s rampage through New York was costly), and the loss of his biggest asset (Kong dies, falling from the Empire State Building, though Ann survives). Disruptive innovation indeed!
Son of Kong (1933), a sequel, isn’t as good as the original, but is fun and interesting for its references to the consequences (lawsuits, etc.) of the action in the earlier film.
Ignite Waterloo is ready to go with first event
There’s a lot of great stuff going on in Waterloo Region. Something that I’ve been working on for some time with a group of like-minded co-consprators is Ignite Waterloo, a local version of a global movement that presents events at which people have five minutes and twenty slides to make a presentation on just about any topic. The results are engaging, funny, enlightening, and help to build connections in local communities and across the world.
Planning and preparations have been going on for many weeks now, and it’s been a great experience to see the group come together. The first Ignite Waterloo Event is on November 25 at the Children’s Museum in Kitchener. There are 16 talks scheduled for this night, as well as a cupcake decorating contest that anyone can participate in. There will be food and drink on hand, and a chance to talk with the presenters and with anyone else who shows up for what promises to me a fun evening. I’m even doing a presentation myself on this first night.
Tickets are available today, and are free. If you’re interested in attending, get your tickets soon, as space is limited.
Co-op students at Primal Fusion
As I’ve mentioned often in this blog, I work at Primal Fusion. We’re doing some pretty cool stuff, some of which you can see in our alpha products. We have a committed group of folks in the shop, and we’re not afraid to take on tough problems. That’s not to say that we aren’t always open to getting help and hearing fresh ideas. One of the strategies that we employ in that regard is to hire students through the University of Waterloo’s co-op program.
As we approach the mid-way point of the current work term, it feels like a good time to reflect on what Primal Fusion gets from co-op, as well as on what students get from spending time at Primal Fusion.
We’re a still a small startup, and we can’t afford to waste resources. We need everyone who works here to contribute, and that includes our co-op students and interns. On the research and development side, that means we look for smart and engaged students to help us solve big problems for our products, not just take on side projects.
In exchange, our students get to do work that makes a valuable impact on real products. In some cases, the work that they do gets released in a product during the course of the work term. That’s quick validation of a job well done.
Are you a student looking for a fast-paced and challenging work term? Primal Fusion may be the place for you.
iPhone as infinite music generator
Many years ago I discovered Brian Eno’s ambient music through vinyl LP releases like Discreet Music, Music for Airports, and others. The generative aspects of these pieces were appealing to me, and I found the results to be quite beautiful. The only weakness in the pieces, for me, was the limitation of appearing on vinyl albums in short segments. I wanted the pieces to play uninterupted for much longer.
In the mid-eighties, the introduction of the compact disc provided an option that supported longer playing times, and Eno took advantage of that with Thursday Afternoon, a CD-specific version of music he had composed for a video project. That was a CD that I repeatedly played for hours at a stretch while I worked on various design projects. (More recently, the videos from the series have been released on DVD.)
Skipping ahead to the current millennium, last year Eno collaborated with Peter Chilvers to create Bloom, an iPhone app that provides an essentially infinite number of possibilities for ambient pieces. Bloom relies on the computer at the heart of the iPhone to generate music based on minimal input from the user/creator/listener. The results are wonderful, though I did notice that Bloom runs the battery down more quickly than simply listening to Thursday Afternoon does, for obvious reasons. Bloom feels like the ultimate realization of the promise of Eno’s earlier ambient pieces, and has the great advantage of working on a mobile device. As an aside, I think Bloom was the second app that I bought for my iPhone.
Recently I discovered that there was an update to Bloom available. I downloaded it right away, and discovered a few enhancements to the app. More intriguingly were the links to two new apps with a similar heritage: Trope, by Eno and Chilvers again, and Air, by Chilvers and Sandra O’Neil. I’ve bought both, as they are ridiculously inexpensive, and am slowly working my way through them.
What is that I find so striking about these apps? First, as I’ve already written, they seem to deliver on what has in the past felt to me like the unrealized potential of Eno’s generative music. Second, they play to the gestural strengths of the iPhone user experience to deliver a simple application that anyone can use to make music in collaboration with the creators of the apps. Finally, the simple update to Bloom provided a great way to let me know about the newly available Trope and Air.
A lot has been written in recent years, by more thoughtful observers than me, on the state of the music industry and its struggles with new technologies. These three apps feel to me like one way to address a new technology head on and create something new and vital in the process.
Learn about personas at the next UX Group meeting
This month’s UX Group of Waterloo Region meeting is on Thursday October 15 and features a special treat. My Primal Fusion colleague Robert Barlow-Busch will be doing a presentation on personas. Bob will draw upon his own ‘stories from the trenches’ to help you to understand how to get the best from this product design tool. Come on out and enjoy the learning opportunity, and meet other folks in Waterloo Region’s thriving UX community.