If you’ve ever wondered, this is what a public relations disaster looks like…

Check out this train wreck of a video.

It was taken at the PowerSet party on Saturday night. The comments on the TechCrunch story are a good read too. My favorite: “I am a VC who has invested $100,000 in PowerSet and am desperately worried.”

ConceptShare makes it to Toronto (just) for DemoCamp 12

I’ve just got home from a fun night at DemoCamp – Toronto’s monthly tech meet-up.

Two guys deserve special mention: Scott Brooks and Bernie Aho from ConceptShare (the two people in this photo who arn’t Leo Laporte). Scott and Bernie drove through a blizzard all the way from Sudbury, crashed their car (they have photos to prove it) and STILL made it to the bar to give us all an update on ConcepShare. Apparently the site and the business are all roses with numbers of users skyrocketing and revenue doubling each month since their launch last year.

I got to know these two over a breakfast a few months back. They’re helpful, honest, passionate guys with a great product on their hands. If you are even a little bit interested in collaborating on creative projects with friends or work mates please check out their site – it’ll make your life a lot easier.

UPDATE: Mathew Ingram has a nice round-up of the event over on his blog.

Is this how you kill interest in a public Beta?

I’ve loved the idea behind Spanning Sync since the day I read about it (essentially it’s a little application that syncs iCal with your Google Calendars – very handy!). So, I’ve been watching their blog daily looking for them to announce a public beta.

Yesterday my prayers were answered but then a few hours later (before I’d had a chance to register for my account) they closed the doors again. Having a customer chomping at the bit to get their hands on your product is a great thing. But making them wait, and wait, and wait – not so good. Hopefully I’ll get an account over the weekend, then I can post about how it was worth the wait ;)

I’ve been reading a lot about running a good beta test in the last few weeks. It’s something our little startup is planning for right now. Michael Arrington wrote a great post about it this time last year, but my best research has been just watching other sites launch their beta products. The way you announce your launch, which browsers you support and your responses to customer problems all say so much about your company. People form attitudes about you over this time that might never fade, so it’s an important thing to get right.

This sounds like the party to be at tonight in Toronto…

Torontoist writes that tonight at 6pm Überave will be storming the hilarious Microsoft Vista promotional ice house to throw a party. Make sure you’re there right at 6pm though – I figure I’ll take security about 5 minutes to shut it down. Good luck Uberave!

iPhone coming to Canada

Looks like Rogers will be bringing the iPhone to Canada. I’d love to know how soon and for how much?

A reason to get (a bit) excited about the iPhone

Sure, I tuned into live blogging coverage of MacWorld last week. I didn’t however get that excited about the iPhone. See, in my mind I already have a better MP3 player and a better camera phone (the brilliant Nokia N73) and if I really wanted to watch movies on a device more portable than my 12 inch laptop I’d buy a PSP.

What I do find really cool about the iPhone is the touch screen interface. The idea of pinching a photo to make it smaller feels like something new and something very natural. The guys at 37 signals have picked up on another cool touch screen feature – creating your own shortcuts.

The general idea is that you’ll be able to program certain movements on the screen to do things. For example you could draw an O with your finger to start an IM session with someone. Or an = to call your wife. Pretty cool.

Linked where?

Found this today on Linked In. It seems they are sharing info about their members with 3rd party sites to help them better target ads. Maybe I’m way behind on this, but it seems a little shady to me. I’ll bet this is a big revenue generator for them.