Critical Reading Skills
The majority of commenters in this article seem really confused. The poor people think that their city council have banned bottled water completely, while the story only states that the city council have stopped using bottled water at city meetings.
StartupNorth
I have been writing over on StartupNorth lately. It’s a small side project by a few of us and we are aiming to bring in as many authors over time as we can sensibly get on board.
We are looking for writers who can cover BioTech (well, Bio*) startups, and writers in the prarie provinces as well as BC.
Drop me a note if you are interested.
Look for posts coming from Jonas Brandon, Mark Kuznicki and a few west-coast profiles by Roland Tanglao.
There are also rumors of a uber-cool Will Pate video blog project coming up that we hope to connect in to.
An email to my friends
Friends,
  I am sure you have already done some reading, but I want to ask you to try to spend some time learning about Net Neutrality [1][8]. I feel that it is going to be a huge issue for us soon and we all have to be prepared. The impact could be staggering and the results will be painful.
  We need to start understanding the broader impact of an imbalanced internet on our social lives. Education, healthcare, science, communities, etc. We need to do this as a community and as individuals.
  Will the internet continue to be an open space, or will it become a walled garden, available only to those who can afford to pay premiums?
  Traffic shaping has already taken hold in Canada [2] with 2 of our major ISPs limiting all encrypted traffic. That means everything from secure email to credit card processing forms are incredibly slow. Is this just a test of the ISPs capabilities to shape and censor? What will they apply rules to next?
  A neutral net does not mean a wild west. Laws still exist and law enforcement will continue to, through sopenas and proper means, monitor traffic when appropriate. The right of law enforcement to do this with proper legal approval is important and recognized.
  What does an imbalanced internet look like in the future? It’s hard to say exactly, but there are a few things we do know.
  Most large internet service providers come from incumbent industries such as Telecom or Cable TV. These large companies have been good and reasonably efficient at rolling out infrastructure, but they have also been birthed in the womb of government protection, artificial market dominance and a market segment that has an inelastic demand for their services.
    Why does that matter? Well, it’s a fair bet that if it hasn’t already happened, high speed internet subscriber rates will soon start levelling off. As markets like Canada, the US and the UK see this peaking of subscribers, these incumbent companies will begin to look for ways to meet revenue growth projections. We’ve already seen what this can do here in Canada, it’s happened with our national cellular phone providers.
  The incumbents will try to generate more profit from each of us individually because they can no longer simply bring in new subscribers. How will this happen?
    You may need to buy a “Video Downloading Package” that allows you to download video off the net. This could cost 2$, or it could cost 20$. What happens if you don’t pay? You can only download video provided by your ISP, and it will most likely have advertising added on to it by them.
Perhaps you send a lot of emails? Perhaps it is time for you to upgrade to the 4$ emailing package that gives you priority email, rather than the 30 minute wait that the ISP will impose as a “network balancing queue”. Of course, sending emails through outside providers such as GMail will require the 5$ emailing package. Of course, this is done to protect you from viruses and all sorts of other things.
    What happens to the next startup that competes with an ISP’s own ambitions? YouTube was breaking all the rules for content creation and delivery and was competing directly with Cable TV and some of the existing for-pay internet-tv options offered by ISPs. Will the next YouTube be affected by “traffic shaping” ?
    In 2005, a large Canadian ISP decided to block a series of pro-union websites during a labour dispute [3] and it affected the dissemination of free speech dramatically for several days.
    What would happen if your ISP did a deal with a national chain of petfood stores called MegaPets, Inc.? The next time you do a good search for “pet nutrition” it may seem curious that the top result is for MegaPets, Inc., but the site contains no useful or relevant content. You may also find MegaPets, Inc when searching for “dog breeders” or “clownfish”.
  Are these scenarios possible? While some may be driven by fear, some of these are real and have happened, or take place to this day.
  What can you do?
  We can’t be guided by fear, but the following suggestions do contain some potentially uncomfortable steps. Consider each one carefully in your own context:
  * ISPs monitor traffic and keep extensive logs. This means that when you download a bittorrent of the latest movie or TV show, you are making yourself a target for SLAPPs [4][5]. Consider halting such downloads for now. Already, several Canadian ISPs actively send warning letters to their users who download bittorrents.
  * Start to consider how a neutral net has changed your life, provided an income to you or has allowed you to contribute to your local community. These are all important economic factors that governments need to consider.
    * There are millions of legitimate  BitTorrents out there [6]. Have you been trying to download them, but are finding your ISP is slowing them down to unusable speeds. Are they doing this unadvertised? Take personal notes or blog about these slowdowns.
    * Are you having trouble downloading Podcasts or other legitimate audio? [7] Be sure to take notes or blog about how this has affected you. It’s important to keep a public record.
* Looking for photos or stock art to use on your blog or elsewhere? Consider using Flickr to find Creative Commons licensed photos rather than things like Google Image Search. ISPs will be able to mine their logs in order to paint you as a serial offender against copyright.
We don’t know how far all of this will go, but we also know that things are starting to change. Many of the questions that remain are very personal. How does this affect you? What economic and social role do you envision for your country and the world? What impact as a neutral net had on you?
No matter how you feel, I am asking you to take this seriously. Net Neutrality needs to become coffee shop conversation and you need to be prepared to educate people on what it means to you, and in turn, what it might mean to them.
Yours Faithfully,
Jevon
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality
[2] http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1859/125/
[3] http://thetyee.ca/News/2005/08/04/TelusCensor/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAPP
[5] http://neutrality.ca/
[6] http://www.vuze.com/app
[7] http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=239295&tstart=0Â Â
[8] http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/why_net_neutrality_matters.html
Euan on IT
“Corporate drones in cheap suits getting their own back for fucked up childhoods.”
Screenshot of the day
Can you guess how this article got written?
Facebook Owns You - My Predictions
It’s no secret, Facebook is bursting with new users. Back in September 2006, there was a lot of discussion about whether or not Facebook had peaked, but it is becoming obvious that facebook is just getting started, and there are a few markets that need to be worried.
In the next year, facebook will no only double again in users, but it will start to “monetize” it’s users in serious ways.
* Online Dating is going to be massive for Facebook. They won’t explicity build a dating portion of the site, but will concentrate more on letting people have discrete conversations. The Poke is just the beginning! It’s also going to be free and Identity is not going to be nearly as much of an issue: a lot of people want to reconnect with people from their hometown if possible, and if not, it is much easier to date someone you found through your own friends than it is to date someone who randomly sends you a message on lavalife.
To get started, Facebook will add a “Share” option to Profiles. That way I can share one friend with another. Sounds creepy right? So did instant messenger when people first used it.
* Twitter is going to have a long, painful, fight against Facebook in the Social Presence world. As Facebook builds out it’s API, more and more users will regularly update their status. Because Facebook has all of your contacts already, and is getting more and more efficient at importing Gmail, Outlook and other contact databases. If there was a Twitteriffic equivalent for Facebook, I would have switched already.
* Business Networking has been dominated by LinkedIn, but the problem is that Linked-In is generally useless. It turns out that a hyper networked group of people still need a reason to be networked, and Linked-In is not getting anyone laid. Facebook provides a better measure of each person’s real social network.
* If you look at my facebook profile, it is full of my closest current friends, but also people I have befriended since I was 2 years old. Each stage and change in my life is documented on Facebook and each person is dear to me in some way.
* Long term sustainability is critical for any site, and I could lose Linked-In tomorrow and I wouldn’t be missing much, but I would truly miss the world that Facebook has left open to me.
* Online Photo Sharing has always been a big market, but if you are under 30 now, and aren’t a Flickr user (you all should be), then the only place you put your photos online is on Facebook. They will start doing some of the cheesy print-and-ship deals, but will be clean and classy about it.
* Recruiting will be the strongest profit center for Facebook if they can do it without appearing to “sell out”. The important thing for facebook users will be that they can control what parts of their profile and network they share with the recruiter. If they don’t want you to know that they are friends with 24 people in the Hell’s Angels network, then you won’t know, you also won’t see the pictures from the party they were at last week. You will, however, see the full list of courses they took at university and the 10 interest groups they are a member of such as “UWO Buzz Marketing Group” — they’ll make sure of that.
* MySpace has dominated with music, Facebook could easily push MySpace aside at the end of this year, with a Music Discovery feature and Band Pages being the final blow.
You won’t see Facebook doing many deals in the next few years. While they are still nimble and evolving, you will see a lot of creativity and change come from within. They’d rather build than partner.
I would also be surprised if Facebook was acquired by anyone, at any price at any time. In my world, and way of thinking, there is no doubt that the social side of the web is going to create the next Google or Microsoft, and it is just a matter of when and who, not if. Facebook has a scalable model which, unlike MySpace, becomes more useful and intuitive as more people use it, rather than more confusing and cluttered.
Toronto Startup Meetup - Open Coffee Club
With BusinessCamp, MoneyCamp, StartupCamp and DiscoCamp all failures, Jonas Brandon has taken it upon himself to Just Do It and with that, I am excited to link you to: Toronto Open Coffee
…is a weekly opportunity for the startup scene to Percolate, Discuss, Demo, and Meet!
…if you’re interested: entrepreneurs, developers, investors… you’re invited!
“The OpenCoffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow.”
Toronto Open Coffee is aimed at giving anyone who has a startup or is keen to start one a place and time to share ideas and offer advice. It’s also a great place for investors, advisors and veterans to contribute to the small startup community in Toronto.
So please, if this applies to you, please come and say Hi. I am sure things will start small, but it won’t be long before this is THE regular event for startups.
Zoli’s Blog :: When Funding Spoils Startups
When Funding Spoils Startups. More great stuff from Zoli.
Wink Wink, So What?
Wink.com has reinvented itself as a social-network people finder. Wink began as a social search service that tried to help people with similar search interests to connect to eachother and share various searches. The problem seemed to be that people really don’t care that much about what other people are searching about.
The success of sites like StumbledUpon and Delicious tell me that people are more interested in what other people have found, rather than what they are looking for.
So far, the people search is more or less useless. It returns no results for most people I have tried. Will Pate returns a bunch of girls, Zsa Zsa Gabor returns a fuller set of results, but I still can’t figure out why I care that Zsa Zsa is a cat, age 20, who lives in New York.
You have to wonder what that board meeting sounded like. Effectively, Wink is an entierly new project now, with new goals, a new direction, just with the same language.
We used to be worrying about the Now What? problem, sites like Wink take me in to distinct So What? territory.
Koral on Venture Capital
” I started by trying to think I could explain my concept without having to patronize everybody with artificial PowerPoint slides. I thought, what would I do if I was trying to sell to a customer. My plan: verbal 5 minutes to explain the business then straight to product demo where I could cover all of the concepts that would have been in my 2-by-2 charts in my deck. Doh Dare I steer off the course from the tried-and-true PowerPoint ritual? This approach generally works well with customers because I find it much easier to build rapport when we talk like humans than when we all stare at the PowerPoint slides being projected on the wall.
I was immediately reminded that they were interested in seeing the slides as the main partner who had courted me at DEMO in San Diego shuffled nervously through the print outs of the slides I had sent him in advance. All I kept thinking was, “if you made me send the slides in advance then why the fuck am I now going to spend 10 minutes talking you through them?†I was wrong. “Slides, please.†Okay. This is going well. “
