Most of us in Canada are no doubt familiar with that amusing commercial from Rogers about a fellow bragging to his friend about his new high-definition flatscreen television, despite the fact that the picture quality is horrible because he lacks the HD box for his television to display a true HD signal.

Well, this week my eight-year-old antique gave up the ghost. I had long ago decided that, should the day come, I would go with a Sharp Aquos 1080p LCD television. Within 24 hours of the old TV’s death, I had the new one on the wall.

Now, to set up the new TV, I simply connected my standard cable without any HD box, fully expecting to be confronted by god-awful picture quality that would be unbearable to watch.

But, to my utter amazement, the picture quality was at least as good as it was on my old TV. There was none of the blurry distortion dramatized in that Rogers commercial. Maybe I am not enjoying the full HD experience, but I certainly do not feel a pressing need to rush out and buy the HD box.

Granted, this is my personal experience after having the new TV set up for only an hour. Perhaps I am missing something.

But before I even got the TV home, I was in the electronics store shaking my head at a split screen comparison of the quality difference between a regular DVD picture and a high-definition Blu-ray disc picture. Again, there appeared to be a little exaggeration at work. Later at home, I played a standard DVD movie on my standard DVD player through the new LCD TV. When compared to the split-screen comparison I saw in the store, the picture quality was much closer to that of the Blu-ray than it was to the standard DVD as it was portrayed.

Comparisons can be a very effective means of selling buyers on the merits of your product or service, but in the bid to create that ”wow” factor that allows your product to fly off the shelves, be cautious about massaging the facts. Your product may clearly be better than your competitor’s, or the status quo, but be careful about trying to present those advantages more dramatically than they really are. Sure, you may dupe the unsophisticated buyer, but, guaranteed, there are plenty of savvy people who will see through the gimmick and out you on — oh, I don’t know — a blog, perhaps?

Technorati Tags: high definition, HD, Sharp Aquos, LCD, Blu-ray,  DVD, Rogers, marketing, advertising, product comparison

All right, just to make sure everyone is caught up and on the same page now, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did not have a heart attack over the weekend.

But all it took was a bogus posting to CNN’s online citizen journalism portal to demonstrate once again just how viral the web can be and and sucker punch Apple’s stock price. This has sparked plenty of commentary and navel gazing today about the risks of allowing average citizens to break so-called “news” without their scoop first being subjected to scrutiny and third-party verification. Check out Scott Karp’s take on how this was a failure of open systems and Matthew Ingram on how this was not a failure of citizen journalism.

This incident does reinforce the importance of trusted and reliable sources to bring us news and information that has in some way been confirmed and verified. The fact that CNN’s citizen journalism site, iReport, allows such misinformation to be uploaded and broadcast to the world, should serve as a wake-up call that content that’s been judged in some way is more important now than ever.

Sure, the nature of the web allowed this false report to be corrected as quickly as it was initially broadcast. But that’s irrelevant. For a period of time, those who were paying attention believed the CEO of a major publicly traded company was in a potentially life-threatening condition, with the hit to Apple’s stock price only the most obvious example of the chaos that can quickly ensure from such misinformation. As Karp says, such uncensored citizen journalism is an open invitation to those with malicious intentions to manipulate the public for their own ends. And the intent doesn’t have to be malicious for damage to be done. Someone with the most honourable of intentions can do similar harm simply by being wrong.

Of course, there should be a distinction made between eye-witness news – such as providing an account as a bystander or participant, or capturing on video a disaster or other dramatic event –and broadcasting unconfirmed rumours or outright lies. Even in this always-on world, we still need gatekeepers of some sort to make that judgment call.

Technorati Tags: citizen journalism, media, Steve Jobs, Apple, news reporting

Last week was quite an extraordinary one for Ottawa’s start-up community.

Wow. When was the last time over the past six or eight or 10 years that I could make a bold statement like that and not have the guys in the white coats start measuring me for a jacket that buckles in the back?

And no, I’m not referring to a spate of product launches or company foundings or even venture capital funding announcements that would have been the basis of such enthusiasm in the past when Ottawa’s technology sector was dominated by capital-intensive efforts to invent a better telecom system or new semiconductor.

Instead, my enthusiasm today comes from a series of events we attended last week, all of which we blogged about and all of which contributed to a subtle but undeniable sense that something very exciting is afoot.

On Monday, I joined a warm and standing-room-only crowd at DemoCampOttawa9, where developers from six companies demonstrated their applications and received scads of intelligent, creative and constructively critical feedback from their peers.

Tuesday night, several generations of Ottawa technology entrepreneurs helped Ian Graham celebrate the official opening of his novel and creative co-working and collaboration space, TheCodeFactory. A series of short speeches was book-ended by veteran Denzil Doyle and emerging company founder Scott Lake. We here at inmediaare such big fans of what Ian is doing that we’ve signed on as founding partners of TheCodeFactory and we’ll be watching with more than passing interest as he builds a facility that is much needed in this town.

Wednesday night was The Ottawa Network’s regular monthly Start-up Drop-in at LaBarge Weinstein and this was when the penny really dropped for me. As I wrote here Friday, every speaker was, among other things, sounding the consistent notes that Ottawa’s start-up community is focused on exciting new opportunities in the online world, is actively supporting its individual members and is building a broadly collaborative and globally minded ecosystem that may just yet spit out the next Facebook.

Thursday night I took a pass. But my colleague Leo Valiquette attended an event that in many ways emphasised one of the key realities of this exciting new world. In a session titled, “Buddy, keep your million, but buy my product,” The Ottawa Network in collaboration with the city’s various technology clusters came to the inevitable next stage of its now three-year-old series on how to tap into venture capital.

The first year, the title was, “Buddy, can you spare a million,” emphasizing the traditional route to building a company — beg for whatever venture capital you can lay your hands on.

The second year’s title, “Buddy why should I give you a million,” betrayed the fact that most of the begging was going wholly unanswered as VCs shut their wallets and became unyieldingly skeptical about the business plans they were seeing.

Last week’s title brought the whole thing full circle. If you can’t beg funding from VCs who either don’t have it or won’t invest it, then you have to build a company the old-fashioned way — develop a product and find someone who wants to pay you money to buy.

What a concept.

Fortunately, this reality now aligns with what Ottawa’s startups are doing anyway. Exciting and promising new ventures really can be launched on a shoestring. When a budding entrepreneur needs help, there is a wealth of events to attend, or many willing peers in the community who will contribute counsel or even hands-on support. When the venture grows a bit larger, places like TheCodeFactory will give it an affordable home. And by the time the VCs come calling, they really won’t be needed very much.

Hold the buckled jacket. It really is an exciting new day here in Ottawa.

Technorati Tags: Start ups, DemoCamp, The Ottawa Network, TheCodeFactory, entrepreneurship, venture capital, technology, business, bootstrapping

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