Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Another howler from the Globe and Mail (please hire more technology writers like Matthew Ingram who are clued in and listening rather than people like the author of this article).

The prognostication that "Web 2.0 companies cost too much to be profitable in Canada" will turn out to be just as laughable as the 1990s predictions of Apple's demise. The whole point of Web 2.0 (the read write web or whatever you want to call it) especially with affordable infrastructure like Amazon S3 and EC2 is that anybody with a great idea and great implementation skills can build a web service anywhere in the world (not just in Silicon Valley) that is useful and scalable. Not convinced? Some Canadian examples: flickr (which was reportedly profitable before being acquired by Yahoo), dabble db, bubbleshare just to name a few.

FROM globeandmail.com : Quick out of the gate, with best days still ahead:

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"You'll notice that there are no Web 2.0 companies on the list -- they just cost too much to be profitable in this country," Mr. Behr said. "We're not looking for something you'll see on the Internet, instead we're looking for applications that make what you see work better."

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I think Jon is onto something. Mesh sounded great (could people blog more podcasts and videoblogs of the conference please? That's it, my goal will be to make sure that Northern Voice 2007 is 100% podcasted and videoblogged at decent quality, sorry Tim but not everybody can do awesome HD video for everything) but we are missing the common Web 2.0 thread that "meshes" everything together which I think lies somewhere in open source, ubiquitous inexpensive broadband (fixed today and mobile tomorrow), RSS, people (not just white male Californians, but women, Canadians, Indians, Filipinos :-) , etc.) and "Silicon Valley everywhere" (including Vancouver in my biased opinion with great startups like sxip, Dabble DB, eqo, etc.)

FROM Jon Arnold's Blog: Mesh Conference - Final Thoughts:

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There was lots of good content and obviously some great energy. I'm sure the successes of the show were a happy mix of good planning and putting everyone together to share and feed off each other. I definitely learned a lot, but for someone who is on a steady diet of VoIP and telecom conferences like VON, Internet Telephony and Globalcomm, this is a different world in many ways. Didn't hear much talk about VoIP or podcasting or SIP - stuff like that. But that's ok - Web 2.0 is about so many things.

And that's where the challenge lies for me. A lot of great perspectives were put forward at Mesh - both from the speakers and the attendees. However, there wasn't a lot of connecting the dots - maybe by design - but I'm left with the feeling that for as much as I learned, I still don't have a sense how these things fit together.

This actually brings me back again to the Mesh logo. You can't help but be drawn into that image and the energy it seems to radiate - which is exactly what happened at the show - so, kudos for the logo designers. The energy was there alright, but like the logo, I didn't really feel that all the strands - yellow, blue, green, etc. - connected. They're oscillating around each other, and bumping into each other a lot, but never really intersecting or truly meshing into a unified form. At the end of the day, much like Earth at Creation, I'd like to see this humming mass of energy and chaos sort itself out and unravel nicely like a ball of yarn.

My conclusion is that this did not happen, and I'm concerned that for some, the conference was just a blur, like this....

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Instead of regurgitating material from big companies like Yahoo who are doing "Web 2.0 by acquisition", why not profile Canadian Web 2.0 startups like eqo, sxip and Dabble DB (at this rate the Globe and Mail will write about them in late 2007!) where the true innovation is happening? And also why do none of these Globe and Mail magazines ever talk about open source? Without open source there would be no flickr, in fact there would be almost no Web 2.0 companies. Finally, it's not right to preach at organizations that they "better wrap their heads around Web 2.0 or they will find themselves stuck in a 1999 frame of mind" when the same author advocated an 1999 style SEO strategy in the Globe's TQ just a couple of weeks of ago. The "authority" of the Globe and Mail is seriously undermined by flawed articles like this one.

FROM Backbone Magazine business technology news consumer technologies e-marketing news online.:

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In short, Web 2.0 may be a coined phrase, but it is also a way of using online tools in a creative and collaborative manner. Software and hardware developers, researchers and scientists, businesses -- especially those with an online customer base -- not-for-profit groups, and even political organizations had better wrap their heads around Web 2.0, or they will find themselves stuck in a 1999 frame of mind.

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Flickr rocks but this piece really adds no information (the time to write about how great flickr is, what great people Stewart and Caterina are and how much money they got would have been in Spring 2005 just after the acquisition not Spring 2006). Instead of concentrating on yesterday's news, the Globe and Mail Report on Small Business should be covering today's Canadian small businesses i.e. EQO, Dabble DB, etc rather than last year's small businesses like flickr.

From globeandmail.com : Exit strategy: Cashing out, staying in.:

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Thanks to Yahoos traffic, Flickr membership has quadrupled to

2.5 million, and the site has emerged as the linchpin of its new owners social-networking strategy--that is, to reposition Yahoo as a venue for people to connect and share experiences, rather than simply as a place they go to search and shop.

Because of that shift, Yahoo is closing in on Google, the do-everything juggernaut a few kilometres down the Valley. Which raises the question: Given Flickrs strategic significance, did Butterfield and Fake sell out too soon?

If they did, they dont seem to be regretting it. Money is clearly not this couples primary motivation. Instead of blowing their cash on Porsches or a sprawling manse, they rent a modest house in San Franciscos still-gentrifying Mission district. "We have a Prius for the fuel economy," he says. "And we share it."

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Traditional doesn't mean bad though (and props to Mark Evans, Matthew Ingram, Michael McDerment, and Stuart MacDonald for taking the time to organize this; I know how hard this is to do in 12 months like we do for Northern Voice let alone 3 months like they are doing). I really enjoyed the "traditional" part of the Northern Voice blogging conference (why? just two of many reasons: Nancy White and Julie Leung) in Vancouver both in 2005 and in 2006. But I gotta admit, after helping organize unconferences like Northern Voice Moosecamp 2006 and BarCamp Amsterdam, as well as more traditional conferences like Northern Voice and the Open Source Content Management System and Blog Tool Summit, my sympathies are with the unconferences.

A plea for somebody in Toronto: organize a Bar Camp Toronto (should be easy given the success of TorCamp and DemoCamp4, maybe call it CanadaCamp and encourage people from Vancouver and the East Coast to converge in Toronto; I wish I had time to help organize this but other than throwing out crazy ideas I don't!) before or after the Toronto Web 2.0 conference at a place with lots of rooms, central location and good WiFi and convince some West Coast people like the following to lead sessions (the following short list off the top of my head shows omits many cool folks apologies in advance):

• Boris Mann - one my Bryght partners - could lead sessions on starting and running an open source company, open source product development and evangelism since he is Drupal evangelist #1 in my book. Boris could also be a session leader on Jabber, VoIP and web application platforms.
• Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton of Dabble DB could lead a session on Smalltalk and why it's relevant to Web 2.0 as well as why doing things differently makes sense
• Dave Sifry (not a Vancouverite person yay!) could do a leadership "hack" session - the one at Moosecamp was fantastic from what I could tell
• Paul Kedrosky (a sometime Vancouverite) could talk about On why you may not need Venture Capital for your startup, just do it with your own money!
• Alexandra Samuel on what tech companies can learn from non profits and activist organizations.
• Dick Hardt or one of his sxip folks could lead a session on Identity 2.0 what it is, why we need it. Dick also knows a tonne about running an open source startup!

From Stuart MacDonald | eBusiness and Marketing Geek.:

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Our Web 2.0 Toronto Conference date and location are set. Mark May 8 and 9, 2006 at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in your calendar. The keynotes and panels are shaping up nicely, and we will have a site up by mid-March with all the details.

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It seems like only yesterday that I first started using Writely. In fact it was back in early October 2005, five months ago. Since then it's become my default cross platform way to create rich documents collaboratively despite its bugs like the fact that it can't pass the "Roland and Troy nested list test" (but then no web writing app does!). Congrats to the Writely folks.

To the fine folks at Google a few humble pleas: Please don't pull a Blogger. Keep adding features such as fixing the aforementioned nested list bug. Keep Writely competitive unlike Blogger. And finally consider picking up Dabble DB as your spreadsheet web app.

From Google? Yep, Google! .:

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Writely is now part of Google!

Yes, we've been acquired by Google, and we're really excited about this for many, many reasons. But I can hear you saying, "I don't care why YOU'RE excited - I want to know how this change will impact ME!"

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Rock on Andrew and Avi. Go Dabble DB go! More proof that the Best Web 2.0 Canadian stuff is coming out of Vancouver :-) , not Toronto or Ottawa!

From And the Winner Is…:

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The people have spoken, and the panelists have weighed in Best in Show Award: "I'd pay for that" winner - Dabble DB

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