Advice form Richard Edelman

Stuart MacDonald‘s final question to Richard Edelman during this morning’s Mesh keynote was: What three pieces of advice would you like everyone here to walk away with?

His answer:

1. Make your stories visual. PR people are great with words and not so great with visuals.
2. Don’t be defeated by setbacks. You have to fall a couple of times to ski fast (skiing was his analogy of choice).
3. Don’t let clients say ‘here is your little box’. There is this tremendous grey area. Be bold and assert yourself.

Live blogging at the Mesh conference

I’m at Mesh again today.

It is interesting to be at a conference where almost every word is being live blogged by (what seems like) half the audience. The fact is, I could be sitting on a patio somewhere subscribed to the right RSS feeds and get an almost perfect picture of this entire conference.

What I would miss out on though are all of the conversations happening in the corridors, which has been the highlight for me so far. I’ve had a great conversations with Steve Herrmann (editor of BBC Interactive), Ethan Kaplan (head of technology at Warner Music) and Michael Masnick (president and CEO at Techdirt). I’ll post some info about what was discussed shortly.

“If a little ketchup or a pickle falls on it I’m not going to loose my mind”

I’m at the Mesh conference today. The theme, at least for today, is media and society. There is lots of chat about old media vs new media. Will newspapers die as more people get their news from Google news etc?

Good quote from the session I’m in right now…

Loren Feldman: “Newspapers will never die. I want to read a paper when I’m in a diner. If a little ketchup or a pickle falls on it I’m not going to loose my mind.”

Until someone invents a screen that is foldable, dropable and, most importantly, pickle proof, I agree with Loren.

Canada (hearts) facebook

I’m always quoting figures to my non-facebook using friends about how many people in Canada are on the site (i.e. everyone). I’m also always getting them slightly wrong :(, so, here they are once and for all:

Scott Brooks over at ConceptShare has the original post with all of the info.

Doors Open Toronto

I am a little bit obsessed with modern architecture. So I’m looking forward to Doors Open Toronto this weekend where I’ll finally get a look at the perfectly preserved 54th floor of the Mies van der Rohe designed Toronto-Dominion Centre.

There are literally hundreds of interesting buildings around town throwing their doors open this weekend. Others that we’ll try and visit include:

Thomas L. Wells Public School
St. Gabriel’s Passionist Parish
SAS Building
Ontario College of Art & Design
Levitt Goodman House
Gardiner Museum
City Hall
Canada’s National Ballet School
Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts

I look forward to seeing everyone’s photos on flickr on Sunday night.

I want one!!

More at Razor Apple.

Built to test

The first book I recommend to anyone building a startup is Getting Real by the guys at 37 Signals.

Getting Real preaches the idea of rapid development: Building only what is absolutely necessary as quickly and cheaply as possible and then getting it in peoples hands.

Every once in a while I need a reminder of these principals, so I was happy this morning to get a mail from my friend Andrew with a link to a post from Trizoko. Here are the highlights:

Scenario: “Dude, we need to build a rockin’ beta-ready product first. Then, we’ll test it. Yay!”

The problem with waiting until your product reaches that beta stage?
Your financial risks increase exponentially in:
* Resources.
* Time.
* Morale.
* Lost opportunities.
* Cash, cash, cash.

Now, let’s say you build your beta-ready product 9 months later.
What if the market reacts negatively to that product?

The pessimistic side would tell you to give up.
The optimistic side would tell you: “Wait, that just means we have to refine the product to their needs more!”

You’re choosing the right path with that last answer. But when you do, it hits you:

“We wasted 9 months in lost resources, time, morale, lost opportunities, and cash — when we could’ve received the same frickin’ feedback 8 months earlier!”

Instead, do this:
Build something quickly that’s test-ready.
Then start testing the sucka.
Measure the results: Are they promising?
* If not, dump it — you just saved lots of resources for better innovations.
* If results however looking promising, juice up more investments into it.

Do that in a continuous cycle, and you’ll build one ridiculously awesome innovation machine.

Busy

Phew. It’s been a very busy week at GigPark. We’re in the process of implement design for our application and it is taking a lot of concentration to keep everything running smoothly.

I find design is the phase that makes something feel real. So as well as feeling tired at the end of each day I’m also feeling very satisfied.

Being busy has meant I haven’t had time to write much here. I am going to try to set that right this weekend. In the meantime though I’d like to point those interested to a great article I read last week about financing a technology business…

Paul Graham is a technology veteran and now runs Y Combinator, a venture firm in San Francisco that gives small amounts of funding to very early stage startups. In his latest essay he has some great, straight forward advice for dealing with VCs and angle investors. I found it very helpful.

OK, now back to my text editor. Have a good rest of your week everyone.

Taking a holiday on Flickr

For the last week Russell Davies, a blogger I read and someone I worked with briefly, has been on holiday walking across the North York Moors in England. Every morning I check my flickr page to see if my contacts have added any new photos and every morning I see Russell’s progress – snapped and sent to flickr via his cell phone.

It’s day 6 of his trip now and I’m starting to feel like I’ve been on holiday.

Cool concepts beat big budgets

My lovely wife sent me a couple of videos from the new Feist record yesterday. I thought I’d share them here.

Both are really imaginative, fun little clips that add a lot to the songs. I’m sure they weren’t cheap to produce, but compared to other videos being made these days I’ll bet they were well below average.

This is an example of a great concept (for a music video in this case) easily standing up against much bigger budget affairs. For the last few years I’ve been predominantly working on projects with smaller budgets and, more often than not, I’ve loved the restriction. What do they say about necessity being the mother of invention?

On, two, three, four:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Z-DIAthbM]

My moon, my man:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWrNCCx2p5U]