GetConnected TV hosts Mike Agerbo and AJ Vickery are hosting a night of networking with the Toronto's business leaders on January 15th in partnership with Globalive Communications. Tickets are $19 each and include a variety of appetizers and an opportunity to win some great tech prizes. More importantly, your company might be lucky enough to be featured in a future episode of Season 5 of GetConnected TV.
What’s meshU?
meshU is a one-day event of focused workshops on design, development and team management given by those who have earned their stripes in the startup game; people who can talk knowledgeably about everything from interface design to using Amazon’s S3 distributed server network. We hope this addition to mesh will meet a growing need in Toronto: the need for practical, down-to-earth information about tools, knowledge and expertise for startups, web designers and developers of all kinds.
Who is meshU for?
You know who you are. You live and breathe technology - what it can do and what it can mean in people's lives. Every new tool, new approach and new technology? You're there first. As a developer, you were using AJAX when most people thought it was only a cleaning product. As a project manager, you were deploying agile development across your team before the term even existed. As a designer, your passion for designing great user experience is so profound it hurts. And when others catch up, you've already moved on. Pushing, innovating, leading. It's what you do.
meshU is scheduled for April 6th, 2009, the day before the main mesh conference, and will be taking place at the MaRS Collaboration Centre in downtown Toronto. The meshU 2009 speaker line-up has yet to be determined. Get your ticket before they’re gone.
Toronto's geeks are getting together for a Christmas party on Monday, Dec 15th called #HoHoTo. From the event description:
Join us at the #HoHoTo holiday party at The Mod Club - Monday, December 15, 2008, 7pm till late. Cash bar, DJ’s, and lots of twitterluvvin’ - what more could you want? It’s for geeks, phreaks, webheads, twitterfiends, techies, media, marketing, and PR types and all their friends. And everyone else! DJ’s, interactive media, and loads of holiday cheer, all for a great cause - The Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank.
The organizers have decided to increase the ticket price by $5 each day. So the ticket is available for $15 if you buy it today, but wait 5 more days and it will be $40! They say its 70% sold out already. You can follow the organizers along on Twitter over here.
The event would be streamed live and selected Flickr photos, YouTube videos and Twitter posts submitted by attendees would also be broadcast at the event. Sounds like a lot of fun and if you are in town, hope to see you there :)
The 3rd annual Canadian New Media Awards were held recently in Toronto as part of the nextMEDIA conference. The event was MC-ed by the comedian Sugar Sammy at the gorgeous CiRCA nightclub. The winners at the event included Viigo, a Toronto-based mobile RSS startup, and marblemedia, among others. The complete list of the winners (along with the finalists) is below:
COMPANY OF THE YEAR
MOST PROMISING COMPANY OF THE YEAR
EXCELLENCE IN SOCIAL MEDIA WEBSITES
EXCELLENCE IN SOCIAL MEDIA APPLICATIONS
EXCELLENCE IN GAMING
EXCELLENCE IN CHILDREN'S
EXCELLENCE IN CROSS PLATFORM
EXCELLENCE IN NEWS/INFORMATION
EXCELLENCE IN CULTURE, LIFESTYLE ARTS
EXCELLENCE IN LEARNING
EDUCATOR OF THE YEAR
PROGRAMMER OF THE YEAR
PRODUCER OF THE YEAR
DESIGNER OF THE YEAR
Viigo™ is revolutionizing the way users access information on their smartphone. Every day, people around the world rely on Viigo as their gateway... [more]
marblemedia is a content creation company on the forefront of television and new media production, devoted to telling stories that entertain and... [more]
With CanUX over, I found myself looking for all the links to templates and other information that were mentioned during the sessions. I thought I might as well share my list with others! Here it is (if you have something to add please let me know in the comments):
Web Form Design – Luke Wroblewski
UX Swimlanes – Yvonne Shek
A Better Method for Designing with Developers – Jerome Ryckborst
Sketchboards: Good Design Faster – Brandon Schauer
Visual Thinking in Practice – Dave Gray
Microsoft Surface – Dennis Wixon
Books
The next event from nForm will be the Web Strategy Summit, taking place in Calgary on May 4th & 5th, 2009.
If you’d like to read more about CanUX 2008, see my posts on Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3. I also posted some sketches here, and a list of attendees on Twitter here. My photos are here, and you can find other related photos on Flickr here.
The Financial Post reported yesterday that Toronto's MaRS project has been put on hold. The $300-million Medical and Related Sciences complex in Toronto's hospital district had been billed as an innovation centre for early-stage companies in the science and technology sector. MaRS developed Phase I of the project on its own however for the second phase it leased the land to a development company that is responsible for building and renting the space.
Hence the problem - many of the potential tenants for the building are dependent on venture capital funding, a market that has all but dried up as wealthy investors refuse to part with cash on risky investments.
MaRS received $70-million in funding from the Ontario government and another $20-million from the federal government but it has been largely funded by the private sector. The company's board of directors reads like a who's who of Toronto's elite, including Royal Bank chief executive Gord Nixon, First Marathon Inc. founder Lawrence Bloomberg and Roy-L Capital chief executive Joseph Rotman.
MaRS connects the communities of science, business and capital and fosters collaboration among them. This happens physically through location of... [more]
Today was the third and final day for CanUX 2008 (you can read about day 1 here and day 2 here). I had a great time at the conference, and I’d highly recommend attending if you’re considering it for 2009.
We started off with a session on Sketchboards from Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer. He took us through his process of sketching and idea generation. It starts with a six simple sketches. From there you pick one to focus on and flesh out a bit. Finally, you take your finished sketch and add it to the sketchboard, which will contain all your sketches and inputs. It was pretty interesting! You can find slides, templates and more at Brandon’s blog.
Our next session was presented by Dave Gray before and after lunch, called Visual Thinking in Practice. He shared with us some simple techniques for drawing, and expressed his frustration at the common response, “I can’t draw!” Dave has made it his mission to change that outlook, and was quite passionate when talking about how visuals are important for effective communication.
Our final session of the day was from Dennis Wixon, a researcher at Microsoft working on Surface. Despite being right at the end of the day, everyone was captivated by the presentation. Dennis did a nice job of explaining how Surface, as a Natural User Interface (NUI), fits into computing history. He was hesitant to talk roadmaps or product features, but offered a number of insights into the design and importance of Surface. He confessed that the technology existed long before anyone at Microsoft knew how it would be useful!
I’d like to thank the nForm crew for putting together an excellent event! It was great to meet some of Canada’s User Experience community, and I learned a lot.
My intention to live blog and microblog the nextMEDIA conference were dashed by the almost total lack of Internet connection and only one power outlet in the place. The venue CiRCA, is not appropriate for a conference. I've been here before for a conference - or rather unconference, CaseCamp - and the novelty of being in a trendy nightclub (complete with S&M figurines) was cool but the novelty wears off when one is spending an entire day here, let alone two days in a space designed for clubbers to bump and grind rather than sit and learn. Symbollically, the S&M figures were covered up today so as to not offend the less-hip conference go-ers. Waiting almost an half an hour in the cold to get in to then register started the day out for me in a grumpy mode, but fortunately I was able to recover due to the caliber of speakers. Grade A line-up of speakers with reps from YouTube, eBay, Google, CBC, Nokia, Rogers, Canwest, comScore, the infamous SuicideGirls.
The conference was sold out, so much so that quite a number of people didn't even get a seat. There seemed a better mix of people - young and old, content creators and marketing types, men and women - than at most Toronto Internet or tech events.
The theme of the nextMEDIA conference is monetizing digital media . A great topic as having lived through the first dot com bubble I was wondering how these web 2.0 darlings were going to make some money. As the opening keynote speaker, Shelly Palmer, declared the Internet is good at creating value, but not so good at creating money from that value. (There did seem consensus that no one could figure out how Twitter was going to make money.)
If there were common points from today's presentations, it would be that it is possible to monetize digital media and industry-standard metrics for digital media are needed. Regarding the latter, the term engagment was used a lot. While most bandied it about as the holy grail of digital media, Palmer pointed out that this terms means different things to different people due to various ways of measuring this and until we can agree on a common definition it is hard to sell deals based on engagement. Thus we are left with metrics such as impressions or click-throughs that may not work for us.
Some of the tips for monetizing aren't that earth-shattering: affiliate marketing, storefronts, transactions, corporate sponsorship, advertising.
Interestingly, the keynote was to be "Economic Meltdown: Will 'Free" Save the Future" but Palmer changed topics as that one was "too depressing". While some of the digital media projects presented today, whether cool mobile apps or online television, are really excited both from a consumer and insider perspective, I would have like Palmer to have addressed the topic. Having lived through a collapse of online advertising dollars, I am curious who and survive and how.
Next year's Canadian Financing Forum takes place on January 29, 2009 at the Hyatt Hotel in Vancouver and with the first Selection Committee meeting scheduled for December 2nd, now is the time to apply. Presenting companies are split into two streams - Cleantech & Advanced Technology and Information Technology - and will have an opportunity to get to know the Venture Capital Community and promote their company at this premiere event.
The Canadian Financing Forum is one of the most respected resources for North American investors who seek to recognize, gain exposure to, and facilitate partnerships with the best and most promising Technology entrepreneurs and companies that are based in Canada.
Past presenters have raised over $1,080 Million and 47% of the presenting companies attending the Canadian Financing Forum have successfully raised funds over the last 7 years (2001-2008).
Visit the Canadian Financing Forum website for more information.
Just got back from day two of CanUX 2008. The schedule was packed, but it seemed to go quite quickly which means I wasn’t bored or overwhelmed. There was a nice balance of content and activities, and again, great food!
In the first session, Luke Wroblewski from Yahoo talked about web form design and why web forms suck. He spent some time talking about forms in general at the beginning, but devoted most of his talk to redesigning a Boingo form. He listed his ten best practices, and had clear and thorough reasons for each. I thought it was a good way to illustrate the concepts. Luke finished by advocating gradual engagement, and challenged everyone to consider whether or not a form is actually needed. I’ll definitely be picking up a copy of his book.
The second session was on UX Swimlanes, presented by nForm’s own Yvonne Shek. A UX swimlane is a document that provides a bird’s eye view of where you are in a project, by communicating a story or scenario. The document consists of vertically stacked lanes for different audiences, all illustrating the same concept. The executives have a lane with a comic strip, the UX/creative types have a lane with a workflow diagram, etc. It’s a neat concept, and I wish we had more time to explore it. You can find some comic panels to use here, and a Visio template for swimlanes here.
After lunch we had a long session on creativity, facilitated by the Banff Centre. We broke into three groups: one worked on collages, one explored drumming, and the group I joined focused on improv. Everyone seemed to enjoy the session! I found the activities we took part in were more applicable to leadership than to creativity, but I still had a great time. My favorite activity in the improv group was the last one. Working with a partner, you start off by saying “I have this great idea for a party…” and they follow with “yes, but…” and you keep going until the facilitator stops time. Then you switch, and do “yes, and…” instead. It’s incredible how wild the latter ideas became! Great tool for brainstorming.
The final session of the day was A Better Method for Designing with Developers. Jerome Ryckborst shared with us his experiences using the “Five-Sketches-Or-Else” method of getting developers and potentially other team members involved in design. It’s a really intriguing concept that I’m keen to try out. You can find most of Jerome’s presentation here.
After dinner was a “Show & Tell” reception where anyone could get out their laptop and show others what they are working on. It was neat to see some of the projects that attendees are focused on. Tomorrow is the final day of the conference, and the schedule is packed once again! You can read about day 1 here. I’ve been uploading photos here and I posted a few additional thoughts here.
