Cambrian House of Calgary closed its doors recently leading many to suggest that is was crowdsourcing that was to blame, but I think Mathew Ingram hit the nail on the head:

Does this mean that crowdsourcing startup ideas doesn’t work? I don’t think so — but it shows that simply coming up with good ideas isn’t always enough. Someone has to execute them.–Cambrian House: Failure or evolution? » mathewingram.com/work |

I’ve worked at a bunch of startups over the past 4 years and work, there is always work to be had a plenty.  The ideas are almost always good, but without that bit of hard work and luck, things can go off the rails.

At yesterday’s Victoria Entrepreneurs Lunch, I was sitting across from Joshua McKenty and we chatted about the Buried Life project (I wrote about this a while ago).

Folks at the table asked about it and Joshua filled them in and said that what they really needed was someone to work on it full-time.

And with that he followed up with a statement that I think we have to remember (I’m paraphrasing):

To be successful, you have to work in your startup full time

I can already hear you saying that you don’t have to work at it full time to be successful.  Okay, but from all the startups I’ve worked for and seen, the ones that floundered were the ones where key people couldn’t or wouldn’t work at it full time.

The things that needed to get done, didn’t or not quickly.  A delay here and there just ripples.  When you “get serious” about your startup, the VCs often say, call us.  Serious meaning, when you’re ready to pour everything into it and work at it full time.

See also: Cambrian House gets the axe | Techvibes Blog

Related to this is a great map of startups in Canada on StartupIndex.  Ali announced it recently on his blog, and what struck me is how there are, essentially three centres of activity, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.

Yes, I know there are great startups in Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, and even Victoria, but look at the map.

The bubbles don’t lie.

Ali, great example of taking Google Maps data and giving us a new perspective on the business climate in Canada.

Photos by Tris Hussey, Screenshot from StartupIndex.

Checking my must-read feeds this morning I caught a mention of Robin Good highlighting collaboration tools. Given my passion for collaboration tools and Robin usually highlights interesting stuff I read straight away. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see a Canadian tech company on the list. Cozimo is highlighted for its collaborative editing toolset:

Cozimo

Cozimo is a web-based collaboration tool that allows you to collaborate on multimedia files with others. After you upload videos, images or PDF files, workgroup members can be invited and annotate, draw or leave notes on this content together. They can do this on their own or they can work together with any number of workgroup members in live real-time review sessions. Free.
http://cozimo.com/ Source: Online Collaboration Tools - New Technologies And Web Services - Sharewood Picnic Mar31 08 - Robin Good’s Latest News

In case you missed it, I chatted with Cozimo during DEMO08:

If you don’t need video editing, ConceptShare is an awesome solution for image work. In fact I think they do image collaboration the best and have set the bar very high for tools that follow.

Universities are often where the cool stuff starts (Google, Yahoo … the Internet), typically like-minded folks find each other in class and such, but that’s pretty random.  What if you take a self-selected bunch of techies who are passionate about creating the next big thing and have them all live together?

That’s the idea behind University of Waterloo’s new Velocity residence.  Increase the chance that something cool will come up by throwing people together in an environment just for that.

If this is successful I can see it being copied elsewhere.  We already do it in the business world, so starting early makes complete sense to me.

Hat tip to Wirelessnorth.ca

Thanks to Heri for posting the link to the a series of posts from LavaBlast on how their software for franchise owners was developed.  Here are some of Heri’s comments on what they did…

I like to see once in a while a web company that does things differently. They didn’t take any outside funding, they didn’t spend any time on financial projections or market studies, they didn’t chose the fashionable technology of the day (LavaBlast use .NET instead of your typical Ruby on Rails or Python framework), they didn’t spend time coming to our hyped camps, breakfasts and conferences, and actually shipped a product (and got solid revenues) within a year… Source: LavaBlast’s story, or how two students created a successful software company from scratch | Montreal Tech Watch

I suggest, very strongly, that you read all three parts of the LavaBlast story–part 1 - part 2 - part 3–and think about how you and your teams work together.  What technologies are you deploying?  What are you building on top of?  Is it the language du jour or is it something that you are really comfortable with?

I’m reminded of ThoughtFarmer, they didn’t develop their Intranet system on PHP and MySQL, they used Microsoft as their platform.  Why?  Because that’s what their prospective market uses.

Kudos to LavaBlast.  Now, let’s see if we can do it again.

The story about Bell Canada throttling traffic on its network is building steam.  I covered this a bit yesterday in my post, but Michael Geist adds a couple new wrinkles to this that I hadn’t considered:

Sources advise that the company was regularly asked about its intentions and that it consistently assured ISPs that throttling would not apply to wholesale services. Now that the company has dropped that pretense, the business community is left to wonder whether it will soon target business VPN traffic or broadcasters like the CBC for their streamed traffic.  This represents a fundamental reshaping of the Internet in Canada as we pay (literally) for the dire lack of competition and independent ISPs gear up for likely legal challenges.  Regardless of those outcomes, it will become increasingly apparent that the regulators and politicians can no longer remain silent. Source: Michael Geist - The Bell Wake-Up Call

The specter of my ISP throttling back VPN traffic is pretty scary.  How can Canada expand and improve it’s tech industry when we have to worry about ISPs degrading the performance of one of the essential parts of our work?

Will politicians get involved now?  There is a Facebook group (I joined as a show of support) that has over 450 members and growing asking to prevent this kind of activity by Bell, Telus, Rogers, and others.

Ben Lucier has more commentary on this and it has hit the Globe and Mail as well so what can we really do?

Without real competition, as Michael points out, we’re quite stuck.  Couple this with the appallingly high cost of mobile data rates in Canada, we’re looking at Canada, once a tech leader, becoming a tech laggard.

There are statements from Rogers and Telus about traffic shaping, but nothing I’ve seen from Shaw as yet … as tech professionals we need to keep this issue alive and kicking, maybe the politicians will notice–eventually.

The news floating around over the past 24 hours has been the news that Bell Canada has been “traffic shaping” aka throttling bandwidth on their DSL service.

Okay, this isn’t great, but okay it’s their pipe, right?  Close, but there is a twist, Bell Canada sells access to the pipe to other ISPs (Telus does the same thing) and neglected to inform the resellers of this little detail:

Up in Canada, it appears that Bell Canada has decided to start implementing traffic shaping features without letting its resellers know. That means that customers are discovering that their traffic is being impeded at times and their own ISP has no clue about it. And it’s blocking perfectly legitimate activities. In fact, one person points out that he’s having trouble downloading the show that the CBC is purposely offering on BitTorrent. Source: Techdirt: Bell Canada Decides To Throttle Traffic Without Telling Resellers

Love that Bell Canada blocked the CBC.  Like the CBC doesn’t have enough trouble getting people to watch their shows!

This has been making the tech news rounds about the perils of an non-neutral net (some coverage):

• Alec Saunders
• Michael Geist
• Arstechnica

My question is, with really very few access providers here in Canada, if Telus and Shaw (for example where I live) started doing this, what is a net pro to do?  I can’t afford getting a T1 to my apartment (like I’d really need that much bandwidth).  The only game in town is Telus or Shaw.

Should it be legislated that ISPs can’t do this?  Or that consumers have an option to get an “unthrottled” account (of course we’d probably pay through the nose for that)?

I’m not seeing any solutions on the horizon and with Bell’s little stunt, it’s really only the consumer and the reseller who is going to get screwed.

I don’t mind being scooped when a) the news is great and b) I’m traveling and in this case it was both–Congratulations its a Startup - Canadian Fairchildren Unite » Billions With Zero Knowledge.

Congrats guys!

Morning from SXSW.  I’ll have my travel and early morning pics up soon, but we’re all here at the b5media ranch hanging out waiting for Aaron and Mark to arrive.  I haven’t even begun to think about what sessions I’m going to, well besides a couple that hit my attention.

I saw on the Dabble blog that Avi will be here–Dabble DB Blog: Dabble DB hits the road. –and on the Building Developer-Friendly Web Service APIs panel with Carl of Defensio and Ben of Freshbooks.

On Monday Kris Krug is on the Blame Canada: 7 Ways We’re Ahead in New Media panel which my patriotic pride will enjoy tremendously.

Now the question is what other Canadians are here speaking…

Matt  Cutts made his 2008 predictions and wants a “best of” RSS solution:

An RSS startup will add the ability to take a normal RSS blog feed and produce a “best of” feed that picks only the most popular/controversial/interesting items. You will be able to say (for example) “I want only about three Valleywag posts per day. Pick the best ones for me.” This new offering will cause some controversy across the blogosphere about fair use and copyright. But most bloggers will ultimately decide that they’d rather have the extra “lazy readers” than not have them at all. Source: My 2008 predictions

Matt wait no longer…aideRSS is your solution and, actually, you’re wrong.  The best of feeds are proving to be very popular with readers.  I’ve done them for conference coverage and Marshall Kirkpatrick has as well, both were well received.

I don’t know how many times I have sung aideRSS’ praises (hmm I’m wearing a shirt from them right now), but it is a huge time saver for me.

My Best of Canadian feed (which needs another refresh I think) is a great slice of what Canadian’s are saying online.  Oh and Matt, here’s your “best of” feed from your blog.

Checking out the list of the Webware 100 Finalist list I noticed several familiar names…

ConceptShare
Productivity

CoverItLive
Publishing & Photography

Dabble DB
Productivity

Flickr
Publishing & Photography

Flock
Browsing

Mobivox
Communication

StumbleUpon
Social

WordPress
Publishing & Photography

Source: All the Webware 100 finalists in one place | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone

Okay I know that Flickr, Flock, StumbleUpon, and WordPress aren’t Canadian per se, but Flickr and SU were born here and both Flock and WordPress have folks up here.

Still this list is very impressive.  CoverItLive is one of my new fav online apps.  If I have a solid net connection at a conference, be sure I’ll be using it to cover the sessions.

There are also several companies on the list who aren’t Canadian, but are ones I really like:

BlogTalkRadio
Audio

Carbonite
Utility & Security

Delicious
Social

Feedburner
Publishing & Photography

FeedHub
Browsing

Firefox
Browsing

Gmail
Communication

OpenDNS
Utility & Security

Picnik
Publishing & Photography

Scrabulous
Social

Skype
Communication

Techmeme
Browsing

Technorati
Search & Reference

ThinkFree Online
Productivity

Twitter
Publishing & Photography

Congratulations to all the finalists … this is a great time to try a new app or three.  Sure some of the folks (IE, Yahoo, and all the Live services) are nothing terribly new or innovative, but they do influence the Internet and how we use it.

Update: Thanks to Greg at TechVibes for pointing out that I missed Toronto-based Octopz in my list of Canadian companies.  Cool, another company to check out!