Codesta Weblog

Canada 3.0 - Defining Canada's Digital Future

A few months ago at Communitech's Techworking breakfast, I had the opportunity to see Tom Jenkins, Executive Chairman, and CSO of Open Text share a little about Open Text's Enterprise Content Management Solutions, and how they are working with clients to manage their digital assets. 

Jenkins also discussed the Canada 3.0 Forum that will be held in Stratford, Ontario on June 8th & 9th.  My initial reaction was "3.0?  Really?". Many are still trying to figure out 2.0 as others have moved on and begun to argue 3.0... Is 3.0 the semantic web, a mobile web, or digital media? While others argue that technology is moving so quickly right now it is impossible to wrap up in a tidy little box and name it. Regardless of where you stand, Richard McManus' post provides some great insight with additional thoughts on 3.0. 

Independent of which direction 3.0 goes, Canada cannot afford to sit by and wait for its definition. We must find a way to ensure that digital innovation continues, accelerates, and succeeds in our country.  Canada 3.0 is an opportunity to bring the public and private sector together to discuss the future of the web and act now to help shape Canada's digital media strategy.

With speakers from the private sector such as RIM Co-CEO's Mike Lazaridis & Jim Balsillie, Tom Jenkins, Ian Wilson, Konrad W. von Finckenstein of the CRTC, and the Honourable Dalton McGuinty, in additon to stream speakers Austin Hill of Akoha, Anthony Lacavera of Globalive, Mark Relph of Microsoft, Sara Diamond of OCAD, and Alrene Dickinson of Venture Communications and Dragon's Den fame, Canada 3.0 will have a strong cross-representation from government, industry, and education all together.

Codesta is proud to sponsor Canada 3.0 to help foster this discussion and help act on its ideas for the future of the web.

A Wrap on Communitech's Tech Leadership Conference

This past Thursday, Pat and I attended Communitech's Tech Leadership Conference, where we were a Silver Sponsor, and came away with a lot of great ideas. Jeremy Gutsche, founder of Trendhunter started the day with a very entertaining talk on innovation. Some key points were have a methodology on how you innovate - break out your steps. I would add that not only is it important to do this, but ensure that your team can talk about your methodology with people outside your company.

Seth Godin focused on the concept of ideas that spread win. It makes me wonder if too many companies and individuals are complicating things by trying to be all things to all people. This idea was echo'd at April Dunford's session at meshU earlier this year which Pat attended. Godin stressed the need to be remarkable, and tell a story that connects and engages your customers. They will spread the word. One needs to look no further than TOMS Shoes for a remarkable, compelling story. Buy a pair of shoes, and TOMS donates a pair to a child in need.

In between these sessions Pat and I split up to attend various sessions in the morning and afternoon. Some highlights - Mike McDerment, CEO of Freshbooks, clad in shorts and a t-shirt presenting with George Tsiolis of AGORACOM. How is moving back in to your parents house and having five friends come over every day to work out of the basement a great example of bootstrapping? One word... Dedication! Gerry Remers, COO of Christie Digital - where I think the only limit to 3D will soon be our imagination. Lastly, Mark Evans' Deep Dive on Social Media Tools was very informative showing how applications like Mr. Tweet, and Common Craft help you use tools like Twitter more effectively. This may be another sign of success in that people are building tools for tools.

Paul Kedrosky wrapped up the day talking about the new normal in the company. What is the new normal? For Startups it is finding customers and revenue before putting your efforts into venture capital.  Self-funding through revenue is a challenge, but as an owner, you have more options to explore ways to grow, and the confidence to say, "No," to investors who don't match your philosophy.

All told, a great day followed by an opportunity to mix afterwards over cocktails and appetizers.  Congratulations to Communitech on a successful day.

Proud to "Buck the Trend" at Communitech's 2009 Tech Leadership Conference

Codesta would like to announce our participation as a Silver Sponsor supporting Communitech's 2009 Tech Leadership Conference in Waterloo on May 14th. This promises to be a full day with Seth Godin, Paul Kedrosky, and Jeremy Gutsche establishing the focus on innovating to buck the trend of the current economic downturn.

We renewed our membership with Communitech earlier this year, and are excited to move from attendees at the Techworking Breakfasts, plus Sales and Agile P2P groups, to the role of sponsor. Although this is our third post in a row announcing a sponsorship, the common theme amongst each of the sponsorships is the spirit of entrepreneurship. Iain Klugman and his team at Communitech have done a tremendous job in the Waterloo Region helping the next round of innovative companies like AideRSS, and Well.ca launch their product offerings.

As a team, we are always excited by the entrepreneurial spirit of our clients and the innovative products that we help them build. Pat and I will be attending and we look forward to hearing the many great ideas so we can continue to help our clients "buck the trend."  

See you there.

Codesta Sponsors Toronto Product Management Association

Codesta is happy to announce our sponsorship of the Toronto Product Management Association (TPMA). We've been regular attendees at association events over the last year, and we've always been impressed by the organization, its membership and topics they cover.

Events have ranged from ProductCamp, to the challenges faced by Product Managers trying to roadmap product plans in the enterprise (a great session delivered by Chris Draper, Rogers Cable), to our very own Robert Osborne participating in a panel discussing on Web 2.0 and 3.0 technology updates.

We're very excited to contribute to this community and support the TPMA's growing membership base. In particular, we look forward to helping the TPMA develop new software tools and services to enable an even greater impact on the Product Management community-at-large.

Codesta Sponsors mesh 2009

Codesta is very pleased to annouce that we're a sponsor at this year's mesh conference. It's being held again at MaRS. We've been attending a lot of events at MaRS recently, including last year's ExperienceTech, and the monthly Mobile Monday Toronto sessions.

Yesterday we had the pleasure of attending meshU.  It's a good change to the mesh line-up as it supports 3 technology tracks (management, design and development), making it easy to customize your activities for the day. I personally really enjoyed Daniel Debow's presentation on Keeping Great People and April Dunford's discussion regarding how Smart Market Strategy Can Drive Growth. I'm sure Rob has a couple of favourites too, so keep an eye out for updates soon. Also, the speakers promised to publish their presentation on the meshU website, so hopefully those updates are coming shortly too.

In the evening I had the good fortune to attend this month's Mobile Monday presentation by Lucas Skoczkowski, CEO of Redknee. He's an excellent presenter and humourist (though he'd likely never admit to the latter), and I can share that he has a truly unique business card. For many of us, his lastname is not easy to pronounce first time through... Lucas combats this with a phonetic literation of his name on his card, including the word Scotch in it ("scotch-cough-ski"). Awesome!

A good first day and we're very excited to be a sponsor at this year's conference. We look forward to seeing you there...

MySpace going Hyperlocal?

Dave Stevens, General Manager at MySpace spoke last Friday at the Technology Innovators Breakfast hosted by BOT

The bulk of his talk was around why social networks were important to advertising and marketing, particularily hyper-targeting and it's advantages to businesses.   Stevens also discussed the Big Mac Chant campaign as an example of a PR event embedded entirely in a social network.  This part of the talk was generically useful and informative.

The part of the talk I found particularily interesting was that MySpace plans to create hyperlocal micro-communities; allowing MySpace to refine it's targeted marketing.  Stevens used the example of allowing Parent Connect programs to organize on MySpace.

Given the interest in micro-communites in general,  perhaps this is the start of the larger plan to roll out better micro-community support within MySpace.  The impact on the market share and revenue models for existing micro-community platforms such as Ning could be devastating.  Long term, with frameworks such as OpenID and OpenSocial,  the caretakers of micro-communities are going to be able to flip platforms relatively easily.  I think the social network scene is in for some changes.

HAL 9000 Impresses at Toronto’s Lunch 2.0

On September 10th Codesta and scanR hosted 20+ guests from Toronto’s tech community for a Lunch 2.0 session. It was great to meet our neighbours, catch up with old friends and discuss new tech. We learned about the great new Twitter for groups known as Yammer. We heard about (then registered for!) the upcoming BarCamp for Product Managers event in Toronto and served up some great sandwiches & cookies from Dave and Drew at Le Gourmand. To get the conversation started we had everyone write down an answer to “My first computer was…”. Our winner was Don Millman, whose clever answer was actually the first computer he wanted.  HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

On behalf of the teams at Codesta and scanR, we would like to thank everyone for coming out and making it a great time. A special thanks goes out to the folks at Idée for helping us put on the event.  We met a lot of interesting people, who work for some cool companies with great ideas, products and services right here in our own neighbourhood. There is no doubt in our mind that Toronto has some of the best talent in the world, and it’s meeting people at events like Lunch 2.0 that allow connections to be made and ideas become reality.

Codesta and scanR to co-host Toronto Lunch 2.0 September 10th

We are very excited to be co-hosting Lunch 2.0 with our neighbour here in the office, scanR . Lunch will be held on Wednesday, September 10th from 12:00 to 1:30. 

Seeing the success of Silicon Valley's own Lunch 2.0, the team at Idée Inc, brought it to Toronto to allow our local tech community an opportunity to meet, greet, and eat in a casual setting. For full details about Lunch 2.0 in Toronto, click on the link above.

Tickets are free. Space is limited, and we know with Le Gourmand catering, the food will disappear quickly, so please register now.  Full details can be found by clicking the link below.

Lights... Camera... Action!

I was at QCon London a few weeks ago, and once again I had a fantastic time. I'm always impressed by both the quality and diversity of the speakers at this conference: Banking, Architectures, Future programming languages, Agile, DSLs, and the list goes on.

I once again attended QCon as one of the people stage-managing the show. This time my job involved coordinating all 16 interviews and conducting 7 of them myself. It was quite a bit of effort - we had two cameras this time, and we opened up the interviews to conference attendees so that they could also ask questions of the person being interviewed. The new format was a smashing success - many very good questions were asked, and it really helped to increase the quality of the interviews. When those interviews start hitting the website, I would definitely recommend watching them!

The first person that I interviewed on Wednesday morning was Erich Gamma, who also gave the keynote that morning. We discussed many things including the founding of JUnit, design patterns, whether the strict application of design patterns is a code smell, how patterns are discovered, the Eclipse software development process, and the Eclipse ecosystem. We also taked a bit about the Jazz project, and I learned that it will eventually be released by IBM under the Rational name.

The next person that I talked to was Jeff Barr, who was at the conference to discuss Amazon's Web Services initiatives. We talked about many of the services that Amazon offers such as EC2 and S3, competing offerings which have begun to emerge from rivals such as Microsoft, why Amazon has been given such a free hand by organizations such as Sun, Microsoft and IBM, globalization of the Amazon Web Services infrastructure, and what was learned from the recent S3 outage. I also learned that there are apparently many large enterprises using the S3/EC2 infrastructure, but most of them won't admit to it or act as references.

The final person that I talked to on Wednesday was Alexandru Popescu, the chief architect of InfoQ.com. We did a walkthrough of the InfoQ architecture, and also discussed the new video architecture for InfoQ, which involves Amazon S3 and EC2. Another topic of discussion was InfoQ's use of DWR, and how it has helped to enable some of the features of the InfoQ site. Finally, we walked through the lessons learned and what would be changed if the project were to start from scratch.

On Thursday, I sat in on a couple of excellent interviews, one with Mark Little, one with Linda Rising and one with Ted Neward. In the first, Mark gave some very good answers to very good questions, and expressed a strong hope that the WS-* and REST camps could "kiss and make up" because a religious/format war isn't good for anyone. In the second, Ted Neward was very funny at times while discussing the topic of monads (Haskell) versus message-passing (Erlang) in functional programming languages, and there was one point where I thought he was going to throw the interviewer across the room (in jest, of course). Linda also had some excellent answers, and had a very interesting analogy of development practices in relation to chimpanzee versus bonobo community structure -- you really don't want to miss it. I also acted as the cameraman for the QCon Live video, in which we wandered around the conference and interviewed random attendees.

After that, it was time for me to conduct two more interviews. The first one was with Rod Johnson, who is always an entertaining speaker and interviewee. The interview covered many topics: the Covalent acquisition, the Spring Portfolio release train, Spring 3, the Oracle/BEA and Sun/MySQL acquisitions, and the upcoming Spring Tooling release. At the conclusion of this interview, I ushered all of the audience members out the door, and we recorded an April Fools joke which announced that SpringSource was being acquired by Microsoft. My thanks again go out to Rod for agreeing to participate in that. It was a lot of fun, and I was very gratified to read some of the reactions.

The last interview of the day was with Neal Gafter, and it took place during the BOF sessions which also took place on Thursday evening. We talked about many aspects of Java, including a stroll through the closures debate. Java 7, optional typing systems, and Google's proposed language enhancements for Java 7 were also discussed. After this interview was completed, I joined the InfoQ BOF, where we discussed things such as downloadable content for InfoQ and offering podcasts of some interviews.

Friday began with an interview with Christophe Coenraets, who was at the conference to discuss Adobe's RIA offerings. We talked about many of the recent products released by Adobe such as AIR, Flex 3, Flex Builder and BlazeDS. We also talked about the challenges of integrating RIAs with the browser controls such as Back and Forward, and ways of ensuring that RIAs are as visible to search engines as traditional web applications are. Another area of discussion that I found interesting was the current move towards open source at Adobe, and how that would continue in the future.

After that, I sat in on a couple of other interviews including Joe Armstrong and Simon Peyton-Jones. Both of these speakers are very entertaining, and they were also both very passionate about their respective areas of expertise. Joe sometimes seemed to be on springs, and would bounce out of his chair and up to the whiteboard to draw out a point. Simon also liked to gesture madly with his hands when describing something, and their enthusiasm was infectious.

The final interview of the day (and the conference) was with Dan Farino of MySpace. There was a lot of discussion of the challenges of maintaining a site of that size including the challenges of detecting a problem amongst a large server farm, how to isolate a failure to a given machine or cluster, and how to repair faults once they are detected. We also talked about MySpace's use of the .Net Framework for their website, and why they have elected to go that route as opposed to PHP, Python or Java.

After the final interview cameras were collected, lights were taken down, tapes were packed away and the conference was over. However, I believe that this new interview format was successful enough that we'll be repeating it at QCon San Francisco in November of this year... With any luck, I'll be there to help out again!

QCon London, 2 Weeks and Counting...

In less than 2 weeks, I'm going to be heading up the interview track at QCon London. It'll be my first time in the UK, so I'm looking forwarding to visiting. I'm also looking forward to it because, once the conference starts, the planning is mostly complete! From speakers to scheduling and equipment logistics, there's definitely a lot that goes on behind the scenes to ensure a successful conference track. It's all worth it though, and I find these conferences to be a very interesting and rich learning experience.

This year, I have the privilege to interview 7 outstanding people about some very interesting technologies, such as (in alphabetical order by last name):

• Jeff Barr - We'll discuss Amazon services such as EC2, S3, and SimpleDB. This is of particular interest to me because we've just finished implementing an EC2-based website for a customer (Jamloop.com)
• Christophe Coenraets - We'll discuss Adobe's brand-new Flex 3.0, AIR 1.0, the shift towards RIAs in the marketplace, and Adobe's open source strategy
• Dan Farino - We'll discuss the architecture of MySpace, the challenges of scaling the site, and MySpace's experiences with scaling a .Net-based website
• Neal Gafter - We'll discuss Java 7, the oft-discussed "next language", static/dynamic/mixed typing and closures
• Erich Gamma - We'll discuss the Eclipse ecosystem, the Jazz project, the Eclipse release process, design patterns, and the impact of jUnit
• Rod Johnson - We'll discuss Spring Integration, the TaskTop partnership, the Covalent acquisition, and the open source business model
• Alexandru Popescu - We'll discuss the InfoQ architecture, technologies used, and how InfoQ addressed some of the problems that they encountered (such as the shift to the new video infrastructure)

In addition to those listed above, several other InfoQ editors will be conducting interviews with other conference speakers. To see the entire list, take a look at the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday schedules. Also please note that there are two additional interviews on Thursday, during the BOF sessions. Those interviews are Neal Gafter at 18:45 and Linda Rising at 20:00.

For those that would prefer a Google Calendar with this information, here's one:

For those of you that are in attendance at QCon, I would strongly encourage you to attend these interviews if you have any questions. We will be taking questions from those who are watching, so this may well be your best chance to get a good answer to those questions that have been floating around in your mind. For those who are unable to attend, the videos will be posted online at InfoQ throughout the coming months.