Torontoist

Marc Lostracco from Torontoist tracked me down this week to answer some questions about the Dose covers. I thought their interest was a nice compliment for the whole Dose team, and in particular the extremely talented art department. Talking about the covers brought back some nice memories.

The story is here and if you’re in the mood you can digg it here.

George Lois and Esquire magazine

When I worked at Dose I found the Esquire magazine covers created by the legendary George Lois in the sixties a big inspiration. They were original, thought provoking and gutsy. I was doing some research today and found that George has a fancy new site that showcases the covers nicely. You can check them all out if you like but here are a few of my favorites:

Countries I’ve visited

Create your own map here.

The world is a big ol’ place isn’t it?

Dose lives…

…as an umbrella rack ;).

Thanks for the link Duncan.

The patio at Fresh is open for business

This is big news for the queen west vegetarian crowd ;). Seriously though, Fresh is one of my favorite patios in the city – and not just because it’s across the road from my flat.

Daisuke Matsuzaka

Tonight I’m heading to the Blue Jays / Boston game to get my first look at Daisuke Matsuzaka and his crazy pitching arsenal. Very excited!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UL7cb699f8]

UPDATE: 2-1 to the Jays! Nice close game and Daisuke was impressive for the first few innings.

Avoiding the hype cycle

Startups and hype seem to go together like women in Vancouver and yoga pants – they’re inseparable.

Women might need pants, but my question is do startups really need tech hype? Do they always benefit from it?

Valleywag re-posted their hype cycle chart today…

This kind of technology hype is obviously important for companies targeting the web2.0 crowd. It will make or break brands like twitter, Joost and Justin.tv. But for companies with a different target why not stick to the tried and tested model: identify your audience and approach them with a compelling proposition and a solid product.

Sometimes I think startups are too quick to target the tech media, hoping for coverage and, well, hype. Maybe they think this is the only way? The classic marketer in me would ask: If your target audience isn’t reading TechCrunch then why do you need a story from them so badly? Do you really need all of the visitors that will come from an appearance on the front page of Digg if they’re not the type of customer that will stick around and make your business a success?

Of course all businesses have several target audiences, and one that IS reading the tech media are investors. So maybe my point is that there is a time for tech hype – and that some startups can get ahead of themselves. Let’s see if I still agree with that in 9 months when I have been through a bit of a hype cycle myself ;).

Office sports

There is a long history of elaborate office “sports” at tech companies. Maybe it is the kind of people tech companies attract or just the fact that you need a fun break from all of the lines of code.

Flickr have something called Faceball:

The rules are simple. Contestants sit 10′ (3.048m) apart and throw a small blue or pink beachball. If you hit on the face (no hair whuffs, no chest, no ear grazes) you get to throw again. If you miss, your opponent gets to throw. Winner is the one with the most hits in total. (In tournament play, there are five rounds and records are kept for the longest hitting streaks.)

And the tiny Apple Macintosh office in 1980 sounds more like a Nerf ball fort than an office:

The favorite game, which was usually played at least once a day, just after lunch, was a form of tag played with Nerf balls. There were dozens of brightly colored Nerf balls scattered around the office. The rules would be improvised, but usually the person who was “it” had to confer it-hood on someone else by hitting them with a Nerf ball. This inspired everyone to surround their work area with barricades made out of cardboard, to provide cover during the game, making part of the office look like a cardboard maze.

There are only 3 of us at the GigPark office at the moment (more news about that next week). We’re surrounded by office “sports equipment”, but the favorite game is still the cross office three pointer. I think I’m winning at the moment ;).

The “Ball” and “Basket”

The “Sports Equipment”

270 Dose magazine covers

Before GigPark I was lucky enough to be part of Dose, as the founding editor-in-chief. Helping to build, launch and run this Canadian media company was one of the most exciting projects I have ever been involved in. The team were incredible and CanWest gave us a lot of freedom to have fun and build a good product.

Here are a few stats about Dose:

Magazine, website and mobile platform launched on April 4th 2005
Approximately 70 staff bassed in Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver
By May 2006 we had:
> 331K daily readers of our magazine
> One-in-ten 18-24 year olds read the magazine daily
> 200K monthly unique visitors to dose.ca
> 76% brand awareness amongst 18-34 year olds
Dose was closed on May 17th 2006

One of my favorite jobs at Dose was helping create the cover each day. We would come up with a few ideas in the morning news meeting and then at noon would huddle up and answer the following questions:

1. What subject are people talking about or could they be talking about today?
2. What is the one simple idea we want to communicate about this subject?
3. How can we express the idea in the most simple, powerful way?

Our creative director, deputy editors and culture editor were always at the noon meeting along with one guest contributor. Sometimes the meetings were a fun 15 minutes, and sometimes they were a difficult hour, but the results were something we were proud of more often than not. Maybe the most amazing thing was the fact that after the meeting the designers, editors, photographers and illustrators had only 7 short hours to execute the idea and create the cover.

Every single member of the Dose staff contributed to our covers, but these people were instrumental:

Jaspal Riyait, Creative Director
Duncan Clark, Deputy Editor
Ryan MacDonald, Deputy Editor
Basem Boshra, Deputy Editor
Ronit Novak, Photo Editor
Jordan MacInnis, Photo Editor
Celine Wong, Culture Editor
Teena Aujla, Associate Art Director
Daniel DeSouza, Designer

Here are a few of my favorite Dose covers. Click on them to view the full flickr set:
(I promise to put all 270 of them on flickr when I find the time)

Madman

Completely unrelated to technology, me, our startup or Toronto, but I had to post it anyway.

Off road unicycling has got to be a contender for the most extreme and extremely ridiculous sport on the planet. Looking at this photo I cant help think that he is going to have an incredibly painful landing whether he manages to stay on his unicycle or not.