Mark Evans

Hey, We’re Talking Tech

The big news on the Talking Tech scene is we’ve grown by bringing Duncan Stewart on board. Duncan has been a well-known tech analyst and fund manager for the past decade, as well as being one of the most quotable people on Bay St. With his financial background, sharp insight and sense of humour, Talking Tech should be better than ever.

So enough about Duncan; what’s on Talking Tech this week. We start with Guelph, Ont.-based Geosign, which had been an extremely low profile company until it raised $160-million of private equity earlier this week. Geosign operates 185 Web sites, which attract about 35 million unique visitors a month. For more on the company, check out an interview I did with CEO Ted Hastings.

Another company raising a lot of money was Clearwire, which did a $600-million IPO. Clearwire is a company that I’ve never quite my head around all the buzz that surrounds it. The company was stated by well-known wireless entrepreneur Craig McCaw, which puts it on a different level than your average start-up. But Clearwire is in the Wi-Max, a business and technology with uncertain prospects. Perhaps the leading question is whetherWi-Max service is anything other than a niche service given the dominance of DSL and cable.

After a chat about high-definition TV channels, we end Talking Tech with some discussion about the growing number of high-tech events happening - conferences, meet-ups, DemoCamps, etc. - and whether this means we’re in the midst of a dot-com boom again. It’s something I posted on recently.