What does it take to build a successful business from scratch without selling your soul to the venture capitalists? Pretty much what it takes to turn any vision into reality – persistence, optimism and thinking first about qualifying the market demand for what you want to offer.

Last night at the Marshes Golf Club, six local entrepreneurs, a couple fresh out of school, the rest somewhat grayer, manned a panel to discuss how they developed their individual businesses without the aid of venture capital dollars. The event was called Buddy keep your Million – but buy my product! To my mind, their insights are key to the success of any venture regardless of who is filling your bank account.

First up was the energetic Aydin Mirzaee, founder of bOK Systems Corp. and Chide.it. For him it’s all about persistence. He told the story of how Col. Sanders, a retiree not so keen about living on a fixed income, hit the road with his family chicken recipe and endured over 1,000 rejections before finding a restaurant willing to pay him royalties.

Next came the equally young and enterprising Kareem Sultan of RaceDV. The right mentor made all the difference for him. In this case, an employer who encouraged him to use his downtime at work to pursue his interests and to “go out and learn something.”  When things began to move along, his employer continued to help him incubate his idea, and, most importantly, allowed him to retain full ownership of his intellectual property.

Moving down the line came a more seasoned entrepreneur, Scott Lake, founder of Jaded Pixel and Shopify. With his focus on open-source software development, he puts a high premium on cultivating a passionate community following around a product to generate word of mouth and provide user feedback. But in addition to that, it must be an interactive communication, in which your developers have a dialogue with this community. It’s all about harnessing the power of social media.

Next up was Paul Slaby. His latest role is CEO of Kaben Wireless, but he has a long track record in Ottawa, with start-ups that include ATMOS and VoIPShield. What he found when he arrived at Kaben was a very strong engineering culture that needed to refocus on sales and marketing. Customer money is the best money to have he said, and one of the most effective ways to get it is to develop the services side of your business early. For him, that has translated into joint ventures on product development and providing that partner with outsourced R&D services with a running royalty arrangement.

For the next speaker, Wael Aggan of TradeMerit, one truth has been self-evident since his first venture in Egypt more than 30 years ago—define a market niche first, figure out how you will engineer a product to fill that need second. His preference is always to define a niche and dominate it, rather than pursue a broader market opportunity where there might already be established incumbents or too much open playing field for “me too” rivals to muscle in.

Lastly, Rob Lane of Overlay.TV discussed how it was the right choice for his company to secure venture capital financing. For the market his company is trying to tackle and the big incumbents that are already there, an infusion of VC cash was the only way for his company to generate adequate market momentum. However, his message is that each individual must first define what success means for them. Is it a $1-million venture, a $10-million venture, or a $1-billion one? (And of course, VCs won’t bother with anything that doesn’t have the potential to become at least a $100-million enterprise). He also stressed the importance of global networking thanks to the dramatic impact of social media. 

Technorati Tags: bootstrap,  entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, Ottawa, Technology, venture capital

A lot of PR people seem to be a little nervous when it comes to dealing with the blogosphere. There exists a sentiment that there is some kind of black magic at play - and if you don’t know the magic words you might end up spending the rest of your days as a toad flack.

Fear not. Bloggers are not really any different from the media - they have the same interests, in the same topics and, for the most part, respond to PR in a similar way to the media. If approached, they are not (usually) inclined to destroy your fledgling career with a casual flick of their wand.

There are certainly some ways to make your life easier when dealing with blogs, but none of these are unique to the space. Like the media, bloggers prefer to know about stories in advance, so embargoes are appreciated and usually honoured without question. And in the same way as the broader media despise receiving news that is irrelevant to them, so too bloggers rail against such indiscretions. Basically, if something usually pisses the media off, then you can be pretty sure it’ll piss off a blogger too.

In fact, continuing to refer to bloggers and the media as two separate entities is probably well past its sell-by date. The large numbers of media sites that have now recast themselves in a blog-style format is surely proof enough of this. They must be considered one and the same by PR people and should not be avoided out of fear of the unknown.

Technorati Tags:  blogging,  PR,  public relations

The official theme was “Ottawa’s digital media industry,” and the gamers, social networkers and content developers were there in spades. But what I heard at Wednesday night’s regular Start-up Drop-in put on by The Ottawa Network at LaBarge Weinstein had as much or more to do with propagating and supporting the entire start-up — indeed, the entire technology — community in Ottawa than it did with digital media per se.

In keeping with the format now well established by LWLaw partner and event host James Smith, we heard briefly from several different actors before the headline act shared what is billed as “words of wisdom.”

First out of the gate was a quartet of self-described “next generation” entrepreneurs who see themselves as having a serious role to play in cultivating and supporting their fellow tech entrepreneurs. Putting their blogging skills where their mouths are, they run StartupOttawa.com, an active blog by and about the start-up community. Mercury Grove’s Scott Annan, Shopify’s Scott Lake, TravelPod’s Luc Levesque and Jean-Sylvain Sormony of Fuel all talked about the importance of cultivating “our generation of entrepreneurs,” as Lake put it.

Two start-ups whose very business model is all about propagation went next.

David Thompson described his company, Noleo, and its platform that hosts social networking applications, allowing them to simply and simultaneously run on a number of social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Alan Isfan’s FaveQuest is also all about propagating content across social networking sites, in this case taking broadcast television material and packaging it for redistribution to the social networking ecosystem.

Ben Houston, a fascinating young developer whose computational magic has been seen in several Hollywood movies, was an example of the propagational potential of the Start-up Drop-in itself since that’s where, a few months ago, he first met Keith Taylor, the business executive he has now recruited as president of his company, Exocortex Technologies.

I was momentarily stuck when Distil Interactive CEO Robert Thompson began to share his words of wisdom since it was not immediately clear to me how his comparison of Ottawa to other tech-savvy centres in which he worked would fit into my propagation theme. But his talk was really about challenging the 50 or so company leaders and managers in the room to propagate their obvious enthusiasm, commitment and empowerment throughout the rest of their company employees and, indeed, throughout the rest of the community.

It was a high energy evening, as have been the last several of these drop-ins.

Technorati Tags: Ottawa, start-ups, entrepreneurs, technology, digital media

It’s true, a lot of a PR consultant’s time is spent writing; writing news releases, backgrounders, bylined articles, biographies, blog posts (ahem)… all in the hope that interested journalists or editors will take what we’ve written and repurpose it or use it as source material to develop their own coverage of our client or its product. But an integrated approach to media relations recognizes that while a lot of the stuff we’re pursuing is print or online coverage, there are other media channels and formats that strongly influence decision-makers in the B2B marketplace, including radio and television. Each format has its place in your program and can have valuable impact when properly incorporated into your media relations activities.

The Buggles had it wrong, I’m afraid - video did not kill the radio star, at least when it comes to B2B marketing.

According to a recent article from btobonline, radio is very influential in this arena. “A study by Media Audit found that 55% of business owners, partners and corporate officers listen to the radio between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m., compared with 45% of the general population. The telephone survey, which took the pulse of 6,860 business executives in 88 U.S. cities in 2006 and 2007, also found that on an average day, 75% of these executives tune to radio, compared with 68% of the general market. According to the survey, the top radio formats for reaching business executives are: news/talk (21%), public radio (17%), country (12%) and talk (11%).”

We are lucky in Ottawa that we have a supportive and interesting radio program in CFRA’s Business @ Night. We often have our clients appear on the show, capably hosted by Greg Hebert, and have had a lot of anecdotal feedback from interviewees that not only does Greg do his homework but that they’ve been approached by customers and prospects to say that they heard the interview. When targeting a local initiative, this penetration can be very valuable and help achieve goals relating to local investment, attracting and retaining staff, and building corporate goodwill by highlighting the company’s activities in the community, among others.

National radio programs, like the Business Network on the CBC every morning at 5:45am, hit a much larger audience both numerically and geographically, and can provide a useful venue for your company’s leadership team to demonstrate their subject-matter expertise or contribute worthwhile dialog to conversations about pressing business issues.

Television has not yet been eclipsed by the internet as a key influencer of the business elite in America, those top executives who have the final say on purchasing decisions. According to the Ipsos’ BE: USA 2007, The Media Survey of the United States’ Business Elite, 70% have watched network television and 60% have watched cable television in the previous day, where just over 50% went online. The convergence of video and the web, though, has gained traction with nearly half having streamed or watched a broadband video from their computers in the last month.

As other bloggers have previously reported, print remains king. “The business elite turn to national newspapers first for deeper understanding of the issues that matter to them, particularly financial and business news (18% of the projected C-suite universe), as they trust newspapers to have the best journalists (28%) and reliable reporting (23%) … For keeping abreast of technology, this group of decision-makers prefers business magazines (22%), such as weeklies BusinessWeek (20%), bi-monthly publications such as Fortune (18%) and Forbes (17%), and monthly publications like CFO (15%). Business magazines are also this group’s primary resource for informative advertising (15%), general business help (32%), and information to manage their career development (29%).”

When targeting your customers, keep all forms of media in mind, not just print and online. There may be other channels that are more appropriate to deliver your message and your PR agency should recognize and pursue these avenues to ensure that your coverage is having the greatest impact on your target audience.

Technorati Tags: radio, television, B2B marketing

Now we’ve got it, let’s put it to good use.

Last night was the official launch of TheCodeFactory, a private business accelerator/incubator intended to help fill the gap between a great idea and a commercial product gaining traction in the marketplace. It’s the cherished baby of business consultant Ian Graham and its launch attracted plenty of interest from the local business community, including remarks from Denny Doyle, the “Don Cherry of Ottawa’s tech sector,” Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, and Scott Lake, founding partner of both Jaded Pixel and Shopify and blogger on Startup Ottawa.

First up, I’ll freely admit inmedia’s support of TheCodeFactory and my role as PR flack for its launch. But my personal interest and support for this project goes right back to my previous incarnation as editor of the OBJ and my favourite hot-button topics. We need to foster a culture of true entrepreneurship in this town defined by people who want to build a successful company versus those in search of a paycheque who are just trying to give themselves a job. Problem is, having that mindset is only half the battle. You need the means to get from the idea stage to the cash-flow stage. Plenty of great ideas with talented, committed people behind them wither and die thanks to a lack of support for the earliest stages of the start-up lifecycle.

That’s where TheCodeFactory comes in.  

What Ian is offering up is a combination of office space for start-ups looking for a desk without all the administrative and costly aggravation of setting up their own office. That’s the fourth floor. What’s truly unique is what’s on the second floor. There he offers co-working space with the relaxed atmosphere of a coffee bar (with full connectivity, of course) where entrepreneurs at every stage and code warriors from local schools can network, collaborate, troubleshoot and refine their ideas, even connect for potential employment opportunities.

It’s this unique community approach, the emphasis on creating a “vital, vibrant, ecosystem” that truly sets TheCodeFactory apart from other venues that fit into the business accelerator category. And Ottawa couldn’t need it more. We’ve seen a host of anchor tech tenants of one stripe or another downsize, pull up stakes or get bought out over the past while. There’s plenty of volatility and uncertainty our there, the perfect breeding ground for startups as people decide it’s time take hold of their destiny and go into business for themselves. It’s been referred to as the “supernova effect,” as experienced and savvy individuals disperse their knowledge and expertise throughout the tech community like seeds cast to the winds. 

In this environment, TheCodeFactory is just the kind of place we need for those seeds to sprout into new ventures or for that kind of experience to be made available to others. As Scott said in his remarks last night, it’s “a place for innovation to grow.”

Technorati Tags:  business accelerator, Business incubator, Denzil Doyle, Doyletech, Eclipse Foundation, entrepreneur,  entrepreneurship, Ian Graham, innovation, Jaded Pixel, Mike Milinkovich, Scott Lake, Shopify, TheCodeFactory

A fascinating array of new applications, ranging from a web site allowing private pilots and other airport nuts to share their enthusiasm and knowledge, to a sophisticated new system to reduce intellectual property contamination while writing software code, were demonstrated to a standing-room-only crowd last night at Ottawa’s ninth DemoCamp.

A new twist on the well-established forum for code jockeys and entrepreneurs to show off their latest projects was its move to the second-floor Velvet Room in the Byward Market, a literal and figurative step up from the grotty basement venue in which it had appeared in the past. While there were a couple of glitches, most notably a speed-challenged internet connection, the new room was a great venue.

As an inveterate traveller and wannabe pilot, my favourite demo of the evening was David Megginson’s Our Airports. David’s information-rich web site, clearly a labour of love, features details on virtually every airport in the world, with the site’s users adding their own particular insight, everything from the cheapest aviation fuel and reviews of the customs facility to where the closest java can be obtained, the latter being critical information for what David called “coffee-starved” pilots.

You don’t have to be a pilot to enjoy the site. Anyone can join, create a list of all the airports they’ve ever been to, and plot those airports on a map of the world.

A presentation by SIMtone CDU of what it called a “virtual personal computer” had at least one member of the audience scratching his head. I missed a good bit of this first demo but others clearly were wondering about its utility. The concept seemed sound and a logical extension of utility computing. Put everything — storage, CPU, applications, printing, the works — in the cloud and allow access to it from a browser, soft client or hardware terminal. Problem is, you need a computer to access your virtual computer which kind of obviates its value proposition.

Protecode, an Ottawa company that rolled out a few months back, demonstrated its intellectual property management system that allows every piece of code, whether originally created or imported from some other source, to be reliably classified and tagged, with code that might create IP contamination issues down the road flagged as soon as it is imported. The benefit, its developers argued, is that the exact provenance of every line of code is established.

An interesting application, Stockify, allows value investors to calculate whether a stock is fairly or over-priced, or represents a buying opportunity. I remain a bit confused by the application’s ability to amend an inputed growth rate for the company being researched, with the tool altering the growth rate both historically and going forward. I have promised to get together with the developer to further thrash out our competing math theories.

And, finally, PicSphere appealed to the former commercial photographer in me with its nifty browser-based application allowing on-site shooters to swiftly organize and offer for immediate sale the pictures they take at sporting and other events.

Technorati Tags: DemoCamp, OurAirports, Protecode, SIMtone CDU, PicSphere, entrepreneurs, software

Small is the new big.

These words came from Jerry Everett, director of sales and founder of six-year-old conference services firm onconference Inc. Everett was part of a panel of speakers reflecting on six years of entrepreneurship in Ottawa at an OCRI event this week with the catchy title of “Blood on the Tracks.”

Small is the new big wasn’t the overarching theme of the event, but it certainly struck a chord with this nascent PR practitioner. Everett’s point was that consumers (and I’ll use that as the broad term for anyone on the receiving end of a service or product) have had enough with the kinds of customer-service experiences typical of large, monolithic organizations. They are ready and willing for a more customized personal approach typically found only with a smaller company. Peronalized service will increasingly become a key differentiator in the years to come.

We’ve heard this before, of course. A business strategy that focuses primarily on your product or service’s features likely has a short shelf life. New features and fancy bells and whistles come along all the time. It’s difficult to maintain an edge over the competition for long. As for price, well, somebody is always going to find a way to do something cheaper, be it with outsourcing, tightening up the supply chain, or simply focusing on volume over margins.

Service, on the other hand, falls into a whole other category where the emphasis is on behaviour and the relationships built with customers. When customers feel that their concerns and needs are being taken seriously and made a priority, they’re much more likely to become repeat customers.

At inmedia, our mantra is “global reach” with “high-touch local service.” How? By maintaining a laser focus on our client niche and the range of services we offer to them. By having a small, veteran team of counsellors who work together on each account to ensure continuity for the client regardless of who’s in the office. By holding ourselves accountable for the results of our media outreach efforts on behalf of our clients. Small is the new big has been a guiding principal for inmedia from day one.

Wake up call

But the emphasis of the event was much more specific to Ottawa. In an already-sour venture-capital climate, the question was asked, why has Ottawa fared so much worse in recent years than other tech centres across the country?

Panellist Debbie Weinstein, of tech-centric law firm Labarge Weinstein, spoke largely of the retooling of the Ottawa tech sector, from its heavy emphasis during the boom on telecom and semiconductors to emerging sectors such as clean and green, represented by firms such as Plasco, Iogen and Menova.

That may be part of it, but other tech veterans on the panel, namely David Vicary and Rainer Paduch, were somewhat more blunt: Most of the VC cash these days is coming from U.S. VCs and U.S. VCs will back a B-grade technology if there is an A-grade team behind it. The problem with Ottawa, is that the reality (or at least the perception, which often carries more weight than reality) is that we have A-grade technology but B-grade management talent.

(Then, of course, there was the argument from Everett of whether or not a company should even focus on VC capital for growth rather than bootstrapping, but that’s a topic all its own.)

Mr. Paduch emphasized the fact that as Canadians, we’re just too timid. We’re not ballsy enough compared to our American cousins.

Perhaps that’s partly to blame for the fact that we have this habit of hiding in a lab and engineering the hell out of a product before we even validate the need for it with potential customers. There’s too much upfront development cost and far too little initial marketing effort. We need to do a better job of getting out and selling an idea and gauging the market’s interest before putting all the money, time and effort into building the product.

“Entrepreneurship is part of the American dream. In Canada, an entrepreneurial economy is almost shunned,” Brian Hurley said in his opening remarks.

So why is Canada, and especially Ottawa, languishing when the experts say there is plenty of investment capital out there? What keeps us from building more anchor companies for the local tech sector that don’t end up a branch plant? Maybe the answer is only as far away as the nearest mirror.

Technorati Tags: Boostrap, entrepreur, investment, management, OCRI, Ottawa, startup, technology, venture capital

I’ve written here before about the abject failure of most technology implementations intended to assist in the delivery of customer service. And I know criticising customer service is such an easy target that it makes shooting fish in a barrel seem a highly skilled undertaking. Still, my experience last night with Rogers, one of Canada’s two major telecommunications and cable television providers, really did take the cake.

Now, Rogers is so pathetic at customer service that I used to have a Treo phone on its wireless network that consistently — and erroneously — told me the operation had failed every time I tried to perform a call-forwarding function. I lived with the problem for nearly four years rather than try to find the Rogers person who might be able to fix it.

Last night, I had to call them. Although the company has a web portal that is supposed to allow me to manage my wireless services, it almost never is able to do what I need it to do. If Rogers really cared about service, I would be able to do what I wanted to online or, at least, seamlessly switch from online self-service to an operator-assisted session, with that operator able to see what I had been trying to do, able to co-browse through the online portal with me and actually help me get what I need.

And lest you think I’m describing some kind of crazy wonderland here, let me assure you that the ability to do just that exists today in the form of our client ciboodle and its customer interaction software.

But enough of a client plug; back to my story.

I couldn’t get what I needed online so I had to call. (Insert shudder o’ loathsome horror here.) The IVR system was a little changed, and seemed to be intended to drive me to the right department within Rogers’s customer service operation so I followed it down the rabbit hole until it concluded I wanted to talk to someone about my business wireless service.

Sorry, Alice; wrong hole. The agent who answered asked me my name, pulled up a record, asked my postal code and said it didn’t match what was on his record. Of course it didn’t because, helpful IVR notwithstanding, he had pulled up my residential cable account, not my business wireless service. And then he knew almost nothing about what I wanted, which was to upgrade my data plan, and I had to tell him what his own product offerings were so he could sell them to me.

But at least I eventually got what I needed. I wasn’t even that minimally successful with Black & Decker, whose online store was also my starting point yesterday to source a new battery for my cordless grass trimmer. Unable to find the product anywhere online, I used a form to send an email asking where I might find a replacement battery. I listed my part number and the model number of the trimmer and asked where online I could find one or who here in Ottawa, Canada, might stock them.

I received a reply in suspiciously swift order and, sure enough, it had all the hallmarks of a machine-generated — and therefore nearly useless — response. Not only was it hopelessly generic, it actually directed me to click on a URL that took me to one of those advertising services that squat on like-sounding domain names, in this case www.blackanddeckertools.com.

Dear Black & Decker: Do you care so little about your brand and its reputation that you can be so careless in safeguarding it? Do you have so many customers that you can afford to send them to a wholly unaffiliated domain-name squatter? Is this maybe one reason why your stock price is languishing near its 52-week low, about two-thirds of what it was a year ago? Does lousy customer service damage the bottom line?

Just another day in customer service paradise, I guess.

Technorati Tags: technology, customer service, customer interaction, IVR, Rogers, Black&Decker, ciboodle

Having previously worked in the music industry where copyright was king and the profligate flouting of said rights has resulted in that industry’s expected implosion, I feel especially passionate about the issue, as any of my close friends will tell you should they admit in my presence to illegally downloading music… But I digress.

Copyright is a relevant issue for PR professionals and for our clients alike, as highlighted in a recent article on Bulldog Reporter’s web site. In a nutshell, the article gives an overview of the reasons for the increased attention that we must pay to copyright and to outlets’ more stringent enforcement of their rights in the hopes of quelling infringement. This is a stance that may not be popular, but certainly one that I wholly endorse; unfortunately, movements such as these come too late for a dying music industry, but if other industries where copyright forms the backbone of the revenue model hope to survive, a tougher stance is indeed required.

That is not to say that media coverage is of no useful marketing value; quite the contrary. As in the entertainment fields where copyright infringement is rampant, it’s merely a case of the proper copyright owners receiving fair and appropriate a) recognition and b) restitution for their works.

The next time you are thinking about posting a clipping to your site or photocopying and distributing at a trade show that great article in which your company was mentioned, pay close attention to the guidelines set out in the Bulldog Reporter piece to ensure that you’re not illegally distributing copyrighted material. Your PR agency should be able to help you navigate these rules and guidelines and make recommendations to make certain you get the most value out of your clippings while staying on the right side of the law.

Technorati Tags: copyright, media clippings

Print is dead.

That was the sentiment floating around when I returned to school to study journalism in 1997. The internet will be king, was the thought of the day, and that was still years before the pervasive, bandwidth-sucking web services we take for granted today.

But here we are and print still lives, though it is taking a back seat to the avenues for “citizen journalism” presented by the blogosphere and Youtube, as well as RSS feeds and other means of getting the latest news anywhere at anytime in the palm of your hand.

Nontheless, a media executive in a prime position to sing print’s funeral dirge still believes it has a future, even if it is likely to be somewhat diminished compared to the past. That man is Paul Miller (pictured), CEO of Tech Insights – a division of United Business Media that operates the prestigious tech journal EE Times. His team was in town recently to meet with local marcomm professionals and, among other things, explain how their company is incorporating the operations of local reverse-engineering firm Semiconductor Insights into its range of services.

Miller discussed the premature claims about the death of print in the broader context of the death of traditional media as the prime source of news and information. We live in a chaotic time, he said, in which companies with marketing dollars to spend don’t know what to do. Should they focus their spending on Google AdWords? Should they try to stimulate interest in their company’s technology and their own subject matter expertise in the blogosphere? Is there still value to be had through traditional media, be it in print, online, or both?

His take was that, despite all the sound and fury surrounding the funnels of community discourse now available online, there will always be a need for trusted sources of information with a track record of accuracy and impartiality. And for a company to adequately generate the right kind of buzz about itself, it can’t depend on any one avenue.

As we agreed in a chat after the event, it’s difficult to vet much of the content and the sources of that content in the blogosphere, never mind ensure what kind of audience is being reached through that avenue. As for Google AdWords, well, it can be a powerful tool. In the past week I’ve heard two different CEOs say how most of their new business now comes from Google hits. But once you have drawn that traffic to your website, what will visitors find? Are they greeted with concise and impactful information? Can they easily find what they need to have a clear understanding of your value proposition?

In other words, have you generated the right content to sell yourself with what visitors find on your website? And that brings me back to the start of this piece – the often exaggerated death of print. Print may diminish in importance, but the need to generate clean, accurate and compelling content will not, no matter which side of the PR-journalism fence you’re on. In this age of internet chaos, the need for expert storytellers as part of a well-rounded public relations and marketing strategy is greater than ever.

Technorati Tags: The death of print, EE Times, Semiconductor Insights