DISQUS

Yup. An enthusiastic +1 to all points.

Of course, Toronto did have its own set of incubators once. Seems like decades ago now, but we really only have to look as far back as the turn of the millennium for examples.

There was the spectacular rise, and then equally spectacular flame out, of itemus. They weren't a pure incubator, although one part of the operations was heavily based around the original IdeaLab tech incubator model. (Disclosure: I was closely involved in the whole itemus thing from incept to untimely demise. To say I learned a lot is the understatement of the decade).

The UofT also had its sadly short-lived Excelerator program out of the Innovations Foundation (which saw a couple of interesting semi-exits and plenty of genuine innovation, but no big news or enduring successes, as far as I recall).

The climate and expectations back then were very different, of course. Incubators were pretty-much dominated by a bubble mentality, very unlike the mindset evident in Rick Segal's excellent Farm Team post. Back in '99/2000, even as the market was failing, all eyes were on the liquidity event - less focus on the quality of the innovation and the native positive value inherent in entrepreneurial energy, more focus on the quck path to exit.

I think we're calmer and smarter now, but that also likely means we're more cautious. Once bitten, etc. Anyone who lost a lot of money the last time the bubble burst is naturally going to be both rather more reserved and perhaps more demanding this time around.

And that could be a big roadblock. I don't know, I'm not in the capital business - but I'm certainly not seeing a lot of deals announced in the last year or so. As you point out, there are serious funding challenges related to a zero IRR. Maybe that's precisely what was so wrong with the incubator approach the last time we tried it in Canada. Even in the current market, there are still sources of IRR and NPV-based funding available for early stage companies with demonstrable traction. The term sheets may be ugly, the deals and valuations may suck, but there is money out there if you want to follow the "traditional" routes .

But if you don't yet have traction, and haven't yet proven a model that will satisfy an external investor's IRR calculations, it's a tough haul trying to get your idea fleshed out into something that makes the $$ look attractive enough to a traditional thinker in the VC world.

Again, Rick's call for "lower dollars in, smaller exits, rinse-n-repeat" thinking makes a lot of sense here. You can't apply VC models to incubator practice - the economics just don't work. We did that last time, and look what happened. As the needs and goals of a startup in an incubator environment are different, so to the entire approach to funding, support, and investor expectations needs to be completely different. Yes: it's reasonable (and necessary) to expect, plan for and even demand tangible ROI - but the rewards shouldn't always be measured in terms of a 10x return on hard $$ invested.

Feels like the time and the market is primed for this kind of thing to grow again. I know there are a lot of great ideas and smart, budding entrepreneurs out there who are struggling for access to capital, access to advice, even access to fundamental infrastructure. I'd gladly lend some hours to help out with something like this. I walked that incubator road before and, while I don't know that I have any solid answers, at least I learned a lot about what not to do.

"Could microblogging and social media undermine the tech conference industry?" - actually, I'm kind of inclined to think the exact opposite.

I have a couple of good friends in the conference planning business and know from them that the more social and open conferences are pretty much the ONLY ones that are thriving right now.

Events like mesh and SXSW - where the buzz and the conversation overflows out into the much, much broader global tech community: they continue to attract sponsors, advertisers and, yes, paying attendees. I think social media is one of the biggest driving factors here: that, plus the overall seismic shifts in attitudes towards marketing we've seen over the past 10 years or so.

The old tech conferences were generally built on a heavily vendor-supported model: you pay for a huge chunk of floor space at our tradeshow, and we'll let you pontificate at the conference next door.

Two problems with this:

1. People grew tired of listening to thinly-veiled canned vendor pitches, and;
2. Vendors got tired of spending vast chunks of their marketing budgets on untargeted schmoozefests.

The tech conference circuit had devolved into a sequinned meringue of high-cost/value-free content being pedalled by the clueless to the uninterested. Expense account schmooze FTW!

This is particularly true in Canada. When I first arrived here from the UK, 13 years ago, there was a full complement of major tech conferences: many of them modelled on their bigger cousins to the south. We had a Comdex in Canada, plus ITWorldCanada and many, many other big conferences and exhibitions right across the country.

Of course, if you're a tech company in Canada, in many, many cases you're far more interested in that giant market to the south - so why would you spend your limited marketing $$ to talk to the same old buddies every year at ComdexCanada, when you could be partying hard (er... *cough* "extending your market") with the A-list in Vegas?

I'm consciously leaving gaps in the argument here. Not because I want to, but because I'm in a hurry.

In short: I believe phenomena such as mesh, the unconference scene, and social media in general have both already killed the tech conference industry at the same time as they're resurrecting it.

Conferences are being redefined and reinvented to create something much more useful and valuable. Both for those who participate live on-site AND those who enjoy the event vicariously through the ever-expanding sphere of conversation that emanates from the epicentre of any high-buzz event.

I'll let others weigh in on the "what did I miss" question. A lot, IMHO. A small thing, but you'd have realised that Calacanis was a no show, for starters. And that Masnick wasn't involved in any Tropicana discussion - that was the Pepsico Social Media chief, Bonin Bough.

But those sound like nitpicks on my part, and I didn't come here to nitpick. I'm sorry we missed you at mesh. It is a fair chunk of change, I agree, but it's also the single best Web event in Canada's terrific and vibrant technology community, and I wouldn't have missed this mesh - or any of the previous three years' sessions - for anything.

"Shakespeare And Twitter Make an Odd Couplet."

-- there. Fixed that for you.

Ack, think we broked it. Currently down hard, for me anyway. :-(

Outstanding news, Mathew, and the Nieman's gain, for sure. Congratulations. I look forward to following your commentary at the Lab's blog as well as here.

Thanks for this Mathew.

Once again, I find my head spinning at the way this "World of Ends" online works. All the bright ends individually connected into the thrumming hivemind of Twitter and its ilk seem able to forge faster, closer connections than any offline, real-time experience could possibly have prepared us to expect.

Of the 10 other people involved in pulling this together, I've met four previously - and all of them fairly briefly. I wouldn't say I really know any of them, in the usual sense. And yet here we are, firm friends a few days into this thing, and working seamlessly together in our off hours and spare moments to create something that is amazing and delighting us. It feels like a triumph of unorganization.

I think we're proving Reed's Law here too, as it's the compounding effect of adding our various individual networks together that's helping to drive so much goodness, so fast. It's not that any one of us is necessarily all that influential on our own - but between us, we know a whole lot of people who can, and have plenty of ideas and connections to contribute to the cause of getting things done.

The key question you haven't addressed, though: are you coming?

*cringe* Very glad you liked it, Leona. Thank you. Fantastic presentation at Talk is Cheap the other night, btw. You guys rocked.

And here's the thing I really like about that scenario. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that something like this transpires, and La Palin really does earn the nomination - somehow - as a partially credible Republican presidential candidate for 2012.

How is that a bad thing? Wouldn't pretty much guarantee Obama a second term? :-)

Brilliant in its almost child-like simplicity. Nothing quite says "fat canary" like a picture of a...um...fat canary.

Don't have the time or, to be honest, sufficient skill to draw this myself, but I think it needs to be a FacePlant.

Nasty version: cartoon of Monsieur Zuckerberg, hitting the pavement. Hard.

Nice version: quietly sleeping random dude, with various greenery growing up out of nostrils, ears, etc.

FacePlant.

Wouldn't it be so much nicer if directly Twitter supported something like this themselves?

I mean, I do like what Rick, Darren and others have done on their Twitter pages, but at the same time it's really annoying that the only way to do this is with image files.

Look at all those seemingly useful but essentially useless URLs. Useful, as they give us pointers to other places of interest. Useless, simply because you can't click them or even select the text (as they're just images, well duh).

There has to be a better way.

My guess would be Plinky.

It's an old, old post - and, technically, it's about both my parents - but what the heck. For all the things you brought me, and everything you taught me, and every time you caught me... I love you Dad: http://snurl.com/2ietd

Trust me, Jason, if it was down to me you would certainly have been going home with a super-thin AQUOS TV from our booth :-)

Heck - if it was down to me, I would have been taking one of the prototypes home myself!

Great to meet you at CES and thanks for stopping by.

Happy Blogiversary to you, Zoe.

Conblogulations on making it this far and

How very mature. Evidently some Turkish script kiddie has been misusing his parent's dialup connection. If you Google his soubriquet, you'll find his personal home page (not very stealthy there, silly boy), as well as a bunch of other sites (mostly Wordpress) he has managed to "hack".

Even though this invasion is almost pathetically inconsequential, as you point out, it's probably still worth reporting to both your web host and the Wordpress chaps. The hacker may be just polishing his basic skills as he works his way up to some bigger stunt.

It's grim, isn't it? You see this kind of thing popping up all over the place. Even - get this - in news releases. Check this out: http://tinyurl.com/35ylp5

Ack.

http://tinyurl.com/2doaya

:-D

Truly extraordinary - and I love the low-key way Drew presents it. His zero-hype pitch style makes it even more remarkable.

I think the SMS Shakespeare thing has been tried a couple of times (with mixed results, as you might well imagine).

In similar vein, though, there are a couple of absolutely terrific webby renditions of the Bard out there, in particular:

- Brian Millar's hilarious PowerPoint Hamlet, complete with SWOT analysis (that link opens the .PPS file directly)

- Tales for the L33t's outstanding stick-figure Romeo & Juliet rendered in hacker speak. Had me positively snorting with laughter the first time I watched it (I'm such a geek).

I'm just glad I sent my stunt double along for the night, he's evidently a lot smarter than me.

That's just dumb, isn't it? I'm sure Nintendo must have account managers - like your cola company guy - whose job it is to drive around and police stuff like this. What the heck was the store merchandiser thinking?

Your headline also reminded me of the terrible story of that lady in Sacramento who died during the week as a result of taking part in a "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest. She basically drowned her internal organs (story here). Awful stuff.

Good to meet you at 3rdTuesday, btw.

I agree with Rob's last comment there - the new hotness of this, if hotness there is, probably exists in "trying to amp up the involvement that people have with the content by applying social media tools to it".

But I also think that KZSW's decision could be seen as a good example of what Doc Searls calls the "because effect" - that is, while other people look to make money with something, KZSW in this case may be exploring ways of making money because of something.

Sure, KZSW may be missing out on potential TV ad revenue, and sure they're most likely going to end up screwing with their CPM - but the experiment is still worthwhile. And CPM is such a crock anyway. It's a crock upon which an enormous industry has been built, I know, but 'tis no less a crock for a' that.

Who knows what kind of extra viewership this could generate for them, and what goodness might spring forth from that...?

Good stuff - that's a pretty close summation of the way I've been thinking about this thing too.

And yes - Jimmy's points at PaidContent are well put. His "apparently unbought voice" is a nice coinage.

I also like the fact that he's one of the few bloggers to choose to focus on what is (to me) the root issue here. Leaving aside the sequence of events after they were rumbled, I'm much more interested in how the hell these guys (who I really do genuinely like and respect) managed to wind up screwing such an obvious pooch in the first place.

It's startling that such a smart company was engaged in such a horribly ill-conceived campaign. There's no schadenfreude in it for me, though - it's more troubling than anything.

"Inimitable" - gosh. Thanks. At least you didn't say "inimical", as one friend once did :-) I've never been entirely sure quite whether he really knew what he meant.