Who

How much: $5-million from RBC Venture Partners and Ontario Emerging Technologies Fund. In 2008, IGLOO raised US$4-million from RBC Venture.

The Quote: “Social networking for business has reached a watershed moment, with most companies either actively using or evaluating social technologies,” said David Unsworth, board member and partner with RBC Venture Partners. “As a pure cloud solution that supports both internal and external collaboration, IGLOO is uniquely positioned to not only enable companies to get up and running quickly, but also scale their efforts as their social strategy matures.”

As adults, listening is just as important but it’s something that many people don’t spend enough time doing. We live in a multi-task world in which listening happens at the same time as surfing the Web, watching TV, writing blog posts and updating Twitter. As a result, our listening skills have deteriorated. A case in point is a blog post by Mitch Joel on how people attending conferences are more intent on using Twitter and other social media tools during presentations as opposed to listening. If you’re not going to be paying attention, why go to a conference other than to network?

Within the social media world, listening is as important as ever but it’s shocking to see how many companies are not listening to the conversations happening around them. Whether you’re using free tools or premium services such as Sysomos’ Heartbeat, listening should be a top priority if you want to know what your customers and potential customers are talking about.

If you’re not listening, then you’re doing what you’ve been done for years – talking or broadcasting your corporate messages. It’s a one-way practice that doesn’t work any more. Consumers want to be engaged, they want to contribute and they want you to listen to them. If you’re not having two-way conversations, stop what you’re doing right now, and then reload on your communications, marketing and sales approaches.

The lessons we were taught about listening as children as just as relevant and necessary now. The problem is many people are so happy hearing their own voices that they’ve forgotten how to listen.

While a strange approach, you could argue the NFL wants to protect the integrity of the game by making sure players are focused on playing as opposed to updating their social media statuses. A ban on using social media tools until after post-game interviews are completed could, I guess, be justified given the media plays a key role in marketing and selling the game.

But where the NFL has gone completely off the rails is a declaration that people who attend games can’t use Twitter to provide play-by-play coverage. The NFL said that if it identifies people who are live Tweeting, it will ask them to stop. If they refuse, the NFL could sue them.

This policy is really dumb for a couple of reasons. First, the last thing you want to do is threaten your paying customers about an activity that in no way undermines or damages your business. I mean, how could live Tweeting seriously impact the NFL’s lucrative broadcasting contracts?

Second, Americans seem to have this thing about freedom of speech so if the NFL ever does file a lawsuit against someone, someone will go after it for violating the First Amendment.

Over the past 30 years, the NFL has established itself one of the premier pro sports business by controlling the product, including strict rules on how players conduct themselves on and off the field. But trying to control how its fans use social media is something else entirely. It’s misplaced and downright evil.

For developers, upgrades mean the opportunity to add more bells and whistles. If an application was great before, the upgrade is their way of making it even better based on the assumption that more is better.

The problem is more is often not better. In fact, more can be worse if it makes the software/application more difficult to use and unnecessarily complicated.

Case in point is Ecto, which makes a blog publishing tool for the Mac. Ecto 2.4.2 is solid, albeit lacking in frills and the add-ons that many of users like to use to pimp our software these days.

Unfortunately Ecto 3.0 is a different beast. It has a slicker user interface and an easier way to add blogs. Unfortunately, it’s really a downgrade when it comes to usability. It’s more difficult, for example, to add photographs and images, and inserting a URL now features an option to add a name/description, which is unnecessary.

Not to pick on Ecto – okay, I’m picking on Ecto – but it’s a perfect illustration of how you should really avoid upgrading to a “new” version if you’re happy with what you’ve got.

Technorati Tags: blogs, ecto

What a novel concept; actually paying for online tools that you find useful and valuable. At a time when the economic landscape for online services is arguably broken, you have to wonder how long it will be before the something gives.

At some point, people may start to be willing to pay for services they use on a regular basis to more them more productive, efficient and more profitable. It this such a wild concept; the idea of paying for value?

In any event, here’s a list of the services that I pay to use:

Fused Network – great hosting services.

Performancing Metrics – blog statistics

Freshbooks – kick-ass invoicing

And here’s what I’d happy pay to use:

- Read it Later: To have a place that stores all the stories and blogs for consumption later, I’d pay $5 to $10/month.

- Twitter: It has become a valuable communications, resource and content tool that provides tremendous value. I’d happy pay $5/month for a reliable service that includes some bells and whistles such as analytics, a central place to read all the items I’ve made a favorite, and some filtering tools.

- WordPress: I have three blogs running on WordPress, and would pay a few bucks for premium customer service, analytics and access to themes and a developer database

- iDesktop.tv: I’d easily pay $10 to $20/year for a service that provides access to thousands of videos, including the ability to download them, which makes it an essential tool when putting together presentation

- GMail: For more storage, I’d pay $10 to $20 for GMail. That said, I’ve soured on GMail a bit because some of my mark@markevans.ca e-mails are ending up in peoples’ spam boxes – I think because there’s a conflict when spam filter also see gmail.com

- PrintFriendly: To save some paper and the environment, I’d pay $5/year.

So what do you pay to use, and, as important, what would you pay to use?

Technorati Tags: social media, twitter, WordPress

Launched last year, meshU takes place the day (April 6) before mesh at the MaRS Collaboration Centre. It consists of small workshops focused on the design, development and management markets.

We created meshU based on the belief that people wanted hands-on sessions led by industry experts where they could learn first-hand about the leading technologies, the hottest trends and the key issues.

To be honest, we probably under-sold meshU last year because we weren’t exactly sure how it was going to resonate with people. Much to our surprise and delight, meshU was a huge success. Not because there were 150 people attending but more so because it was an engaging, education and dynamic event with some amazing speakers. Every session was packed and the discussions were top-notch.

This year, Mike McDerment has put together an impressive list of speakers for meshU, and it’s shaping up to be even better than last year. Ticket sales are brisk but you can still purchase one here.

Technorati Tags: mesh, meshU

What’s interesting is that for all the hype about Web 2.0, meeting the computing and Web needs of a huge population hasn’t received nearly as much love or attention.

London, Ont.-based SoftShell is looking to fill the “senior’s void” with software that makes using a computer simple and easy to use. Sitting on top of Windows, Softshell lets people do four things and four things only: e-mail, games, photo-viewing and Web browsing. There’s no bells and whistles. It’s no-frills computing.

At first blush, SoftShell looks like a no-brainer given the market is potentially huge. There are, however, two major challenges: developing a business model where people pay for the software directly or indirectly; and getting distribution, whether direct through retail channels or deals with computer makers.

SoftShell hopes to take an interesting forward by seeking $200,000 in funding from the Dragon’s Den – a venture capital reality show now in its third season. SoftShell co-founder Stephen Beath wouldn’t spill the beans on whether SoftShell was successful but he did answer Five Questions with….

Q: So, how did SoftShell get started?

A: Our story started two years ago. For me, my family thought about getting my grandmother a computer to keep in touch. There was no way I was going to give her a Windows or Apple interface – the fonts are tool small and there’s too much going on. We looked around for a simple interface so we could e-mail. There was nothing around so we decided to build an interface.

We want to get this generation that had been left behind by current computers engaged. We had alpha version of the software. It is an interface that takes over the whole computer. It provides e-mail, games, photo viewing and Web browsing – the four most popular things that seniors are interested based on our research. It puts really simplified easy high-visible intuitive interface on those functions and strips out a lot of the functionality.

Q: Where are you in terms of development?

We have had an alpha version for eight months. We have been in beta testing of the past eight months. We have been testing with individual users, retirement homes, senior centers and geriatric centers. The software will be publicly available on Monday. You can download it for free from our Web site.

Q: What’s SoftShell’s business model?

Eventually, we are going to go with a two-tier system. You can pay or maybe you can have an ad-supported or partnership-supported version. We could build Skype into it. If the user goes for a Skype subscription, maybe Skype could pass along $5.

Q: How much money are you seeking from the Dragon’s Den?

A: We asked for a $200,000 investment on the show. We now have a product people love, we see it as marketing issue. We are looking to hire a marketing focused CEO; that would be the main purpose of that money to promote software and get us into other channels. It would be amazing to go into Future Shop or Shopper Drug Mart and see the product.

Q: Are there are companies focused on the seniors market?

A: There is a couple – none quite like ours. There are two Silicon Valley start-ups. Presto and Celery.

Technorati Tags: dragon’s den, softshell

NitroDesk aims to solve this problem with the launch of software that makes it easy to upload your photos and videos from your desktop to multiple photo sharing sites at the same time. It also allows you to transfer photos from one site to another, as well as synchronize photos from your desktop with your online albums.

Among the sites supported by NitroDesk include PlanetEye, SmugMug, Zenfolio, Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, Shutterpoint, Windows Live Spaces, Vimeo and YouTube. The software (Windows only) can be downloaded here; people will want to purchase a license can get $10 off $29.99 retail price by using MARKEVANS in the coupon area.

NitroDesk is the self-funded creation of Goutham Sukumar, who started it as a side project. I had a chance recently to do a Q&A with Goutham about NitroDesk and why he created it. (Click the “more” button at the bottom for the second part of the Q&A)

What’s the genesis of NitroDesk? What problem did you see and why did you decide to create NitroDesk to solve it?

I have been taking pictures for a long time. Naturally, sharing photos online is something I always do. However, different photo sharing sites are slanted towards different goals: PlanetEye is for travelers to highlight the places they have visited, Flickr has a good community slant to it, SmugMug and Zenfolio are typically used by professionals to host their portfolios and PicasaWeb is simply great for sharing with family and friends.

When I started using more than one site, I realized the need to use different tools to upload the same pictures to multiple places. I also quickly lost track of what I had uploaded and where. Having come from an EAI and thick-client world, I came to realize too, that the same principles we use for integrating legacy backend systems could be leveraged to make all photo sharing (and similar) services work/play well with one another. Photo site integration is just one example which I decided to tackle right away.

Can you give me an overview of NitroDesk’s features? What does it do, and how do you expect people to use it?

I think i can best answer that by talking about how I use NitroDesk:

Multi-Loading
Every time I take pictures at an event or a trip, I put them on Picasa and do the necessary corrections to the images (back-lighting, auto leveling etc.) Once I’m done, I select the pictures that are worth sharing, and upload them through NitroDesk to one or more sites simultaneously (SmugMug, Picasa primarily, and now PlanetEye). Waiting around for uploads to finish is something I did not like to do, so NitroDesk has a mechanism where the images are uploaded in the background without making the user wait. This was especially useful when loading the hundreds of MBs of HD video to SmugMug for showing in the challenges page on our Web site.

Management:
If you had 100 photos in an album, 20 of them being taken at Niagara Falls and you wanted to set their titles to “Niagara Photos”, you will quickly see some pain points. I use NitroDesk to multi-select these photos and set the title/keywords once and apply them in bulk. Same thing with privacy settings, categories, etc. This is not unique, Flickr provides you with some bulk-editing functionality, but NitroDesk extends it to all other sites that allow individual image property editing. You will also notice that each site has its own unique set of properties that you can edit. NitroDesk handles that too. Depending on the site you work with, some functionality may be unsupported, but we take a best-effort approach.

Transferring:
Once in a while, I feel that some of the photos I have on my Picasa or SmugMug albums are probably going to fetch me a fortune on ShutterPoint (it has never come true but there’s nothing wrong in dreaming). Or maybe a friend on Facebook asked me to share pictures from an event, which I had originally uploaded to Picasa. For this, I drag and drop the pictures from the source album to the destination (say PicasaWeb to ShutterPoint/Facebook).

Technorati Tags: NitroDesk, Photography, PlanetEye

Synchronization:
This is for people who want to keep their online photos synchronized with folders on their desktop. To perform synchronization, you need to first specify a few things:
- The album to synchronize (or an entire site)
- The folder on your computer to sync to
- The schedule for the synchronization (manual, every N hours, every day at a specific time)
Once you set it up, the following happen:
- If you drop a photo into the folder, it will be transmitted to the site/album linked to it
- If you upload a photo into an online album from elsewhere (say you are travelling), the new photo will be copied over to the specified folder
- If you delete a photo from an online album, it will be moved away from the folder on the synchronized PC (not deleted..)
- BUT, if you delete a photo from the folder, it will be refetched (this is because sync never deletes media from the online site automatically)
- All of the above rules apply to albums/travel packs too.
Thus, you can always be guaranteed that what you have online is reflected on your home PC (or multiple PCs)
One of our customers actually plans to use this to keep two online albums with thousands of photos in sync using some crazy wiring

How is NitroDesk different from what is available currently, and how people are handling, editing and managing photos online?

There are lots of uploaders out there. Most of them are created due to a developer being passionate about his own personal photo sharing needs. But NitroDesk is probably the first commercially supported product which does multi-loading (loading to different sites). Seamless drag and drop inter-site transfer is another pain point, around for years that NitroDesk addresses. Once you have uploaded your photos online, the browser, and the UI provided by the site is probably the only option users typically have. While the specific scenarios might be a little different, NitroDesk aspires to be for your online albums what LightRoom is to your local photos.

What’s the plan to get NitroDesk into the hands of as many people as possible?

We did a beta in February, and have had over 300 downloads, and had some great feedback (some of which is reflected in features such as multi-selected updates, Video uploads and management on YouTube and Vimeo, synchronization etc.) Given that NitroDesk is a self-funded effort, I don’t think you are going to see NitroDesk ads at the SuperBowl ever. Marketing avenues are still being explored, but one of the possibilities is to have the sites themselves promote NitroDesk, which is good for the sites (more photos being uploaded per minute) and good for their users. There is always free licenses and coupons for bloggers who talk about it.

What’s the road map in terms of new features?

There are a few ideas being toyed with. Faster uploads and better visualization are always at the forefront. However, having a presence on the desktop means we can innovate a lot on the experience. This might mean more ways to get your photos from disk to Web (Windows Explorer context menu/ system tray icon, a web-bin), better sharing options (to your Facebook buddies/ Gmail contacts/Outlook contacts), more straightforward site-to-site synchronization, and maybe even face recognition – driven cataloging. But, of course, almost everything driven by customer feedback and satisfaction. There are also several other integration scenarios possible that have nothing to do with Photos but everything to do with online service integration.

Earlier this week, one little upgrade of a Firefox extension (Better GMail) suddenly caused my GMail password to stop working. We’ll see if it returns to life in four days when Google lets me answer a security question.

This morning, Apple wanted me to upgrade iTunes and Quick Time. No, thank you. Unless it’s a major security flaw, I’m sticking with the status quo.

The beauty of Web 2.0 is that everything happens through the browser so you can dabble with all kinds of different services without threatening the health of your computer. It’s a long way from the days when you had to using a dial-up connection to download cool-sounding shareware.

More: One more thing – I shouldn’t have been so excited to upgrade from Tiger to Leopard. If I was smart, I would have waited a couple of months before taking the leap.

Update: Google Operating System has a post looking at how small new features are making GMail 2.0 better. Given my experience, the new and improved GMail is not necessarily a good thing.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Google

“Vista is much prettier than previous versions of Windows. Its icons look better, windows have translucent borders, and items in the taskbar and in folders can display little previews of what they contain. Security is supposedly vastly better; there are some new free, included programs; and fast, universal search is now built in. There are hundreds of other, smaller, improvements and additions throughout the system, including parental controls and even a slicker version of Solitaire.”

My take on Vista is pretty much the same as Mossberg’s. Vista is a definite improvement from a user-interface perspective with some really nice, user-friendly features, particularly the multi-media players. That said, my overall reaction is akin to what my mother says when goes to a movie or play that’s alright but not amazing. Her default phrase is “It was very nice”, which is a mild praise, at best. (I’ll provide a more in-depth review of Vista in a few days.)

As one of the bloggers who received a Ferarri laptop pre-loaded with Vista, one thing I can say is I’m more impressed with Vista than the laptop. The Acer machine has a great screen but it’s fairly heavy, difficult to open and the exhaust fan blows on your hand (if you’re right-handed).

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Vista, Walter Mossberg