My husband and I went to see Avatar over the weekend. Wow. The visually stunning spectacle has been director James Cameron’s pet project for more than 10 years, his last major theatrical release being a little movie called Titanic. The movie is in 3D but it’s so unobtrusive and simply enhances the story without going for corny effects, a novel approach to an older technology, enhancing rather than interrupting the storytelling process.

It was an inspired move by Cameron to hire virtual unknowns in the lead roles, but a mistake, despite her considerable talent, that he cast Sigourney Weaver in the film because, more than once, it felt like I was watching Aliens or even Gorillas in the Mist. For the same reason he put faces to those with whom we have had little or no previous associations in the lead roles, he should have cast an unknown in Weaver’s role; this was the only distraction that took me out of the marvelous world of Pandora and back into North America, circa late 2009.

I don’t want to spoil the storyline of the movie for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it but plans to, but suffice to say that while the movie is well worth seeing and elements of the film’s story are absolutely creative and novel, the vast majority of the plot is well trodden territory. Thematic elements are very reminiscent of [SPOILER ALERT!] this, and this.

There’s nothing new under the sun, they say, and the same is true when it comes to marketing. While it’s true that in the realm of technology, there are truly revolutionary products being released, there are also a slate of products that are only slight modifications on existing offerings or have very little if anything unique about them, rather they are “me too!” propositions. That’s okay - consumers need options at different price points with different feature sets, and other distinguishing attributes, however small.

The challenge becomes how to market your offering when the basic story (of your product, your company, your industry …) has been told many, many times before. Take a page from James Cameron’s book and find novel ways to tell a familiar tale, use new technology to do so and make it compelling to your audience. In our terms, this means to use novel marketing approaches like social media to communicate your key messages to your prospects and customers, providing them with the information they need in a format that’s interesting to them and that will get them talking to other prospects about why your offering is the one to see and why your marketing campaign is better than that of your competitors.

Technorati Tags: Avatar, James Cameron, marketing

A quick browse through my Google reader shows that it’s that time again. No, not the holidays. It’s time to gaze into the marketing crystal ball and make bold predictions about where marketing dollars will be spent in the upcoming year, what communications trends will appear and how we as marketers can best lever this knowledge.

I don’t pretend to be extraordinarily prescient when it comes to these things, so I’m going to put down my own crystal ball and instead point to a few posts on other blogs that might illuminate the near future for marketers.

A LinkedIn question about New Years resolutions for CEOs has garnered 5 responses so far. What are your clients’ resolutions for 2010 and where do your services fit into those plans?

According to this post, it’s going to be all about social media and email next year.

Will portable identities take off like this post predicts? Will B2B companies further expand usage of social media and take advantage of this brand portability?

And finally, this post predicts all of the above will take place in 2010.

Do you have any predictions for the year ahead?

Technorati Tags: social media, email, marketing, 2010, predictions

This week, Amazon announced that it would be introducing its digital e-book reader, the Kindle, to more than 100 countries. Canada didn’t make the cut, much to the consternation of Canadian authors and book lovers alike. What made the announcement even more difficult to swallow is that internationally contentious and little known countries are on the list, yet Canada is not. This is a PR nightmare for Amazon in Canada as every major outlet has covered this extensively.

Why exactly Amazon is so slow to roll out the Kindle to Canada is a matter of much debate - is it our copyright laws? Our telecommunications networks and service providers? The Globe and Mail seems to think it’s our carriers (Bell and Rogers strike again!) No official answers are available. Apparently Amazon says that a Canadian Kindle is coming, but offers neither timelines nor prices.

Our clients often subscribe to the adage “if I sell one in Canada, it’s by accident,” and this Kindle snafu may be a simple extension of that. Our market is relatively small, certainly when compared with the U.S., but if Mongolia and Kirabati (?!?) are getting the Kindle, it can’t be market size that Amazon’s concerned with.

Someone made an offhand comment a few weeks ago, comparing our home and native land with a little, out of the way country in South America. I scoffed a little bit and this Kindle fiasco has affirmed my guffaw somewhat, though entirely counter to what I had initially thought… You guessed it; that little South American country is getting the Kindle, but we’re not.

My family is taking a quick jaunt to the States in a few weeks, to buy things not available here. The purpose of our shopping trip is not to take advantage of the strong Canadian dollar, a nice benefit, to be sure, but to relish in the immense selection that is available in America. We have a particular affinity for a number of clothing brands not available in Canada. Oh sure, we can ship them here from the States, for an extortionate fee, but there’s no brick and mortar or even domestic shipping outlet for these stores. Our only recourse is to gather our passports and make the journey to the U.S. The lower prices, the lower tax rate, and the great selection draw us in.

That said, I’d happily shop at these stores if they were in Canada, pay the inflated prices and hand over roughly 10% more sales tax, in order to support local jobs, infrastructure, etc. But in cases like the Kindle, we’re utterly shafted. There’s no local support, no cross-border option, nada. Zip. Woe is us.

Credit: Image a mashup by Christopher Moran using copyright-free images.

Technorati Tags: Kindle, Amazon, Bell, Rogers, Canada

For the first time in practically the decade-long lifespan of this technology-focused PR agency, I did not attend any part of the Ottawa Venture and Technology Summit held last week at the Chateau Laurier. Actually, that’s not quite true; I went to a packed StartUp Drinks in the Byward Market on Wednesday night and from there popped briefly into the thinly-attended Young Venture Capitalists OVTS networking event that was happening just a few doors away. But the point is, I didn’t see any of the company presentations, hear any of the speeches or, most importantly, glom onto any of the corridor scuttlebutt that is usually the most interesting aspect of these things.

In the days since, I have heard various reports from attendees from across the investor-entrepreneur spectrum and I have read what little reportage made the public record. Very little of what I’ve heard or read left me terribly hopeful that a new crop of exciting Ottawa technology ventures was about to get funded any time soon. The most consistent sentiment seemed to be contained in the comment VG Partners managing general partner Pat DiPietro made in an Ottawa Business Journal story on the fact that the OVTS and a similar event in Banff had a scheduling overlap. “But on the other hand there are no VCs investing, so it doesn’t really matter right now,” DiPietro said.

This caused me to wonder if venture fairs have passed their sell-by date. Can anyone remember the last company that could claim to have met at one of these things the connection that led to successful funding?

Then my pal James Smith weighed in on his newish blog, Startup Great White North. Unlike me, James not only attended the Ottawa venture fair, he also winged out west to the Banff shindig. Despite the fact he there witnessed “institutional investors focused principally on shaking off modest Thursday night hangovers and cradling Blackberrys and iPhones like long-lost friends” rather than paying attention to the entrepreneurs’ pitches, he decided in the end that investors don’t regard those pitching companies “with the attention my mini-van driving wife might give to passing picked-over roadkill on the road to our cottage.”

I’m not sure I’m as persuaded as James but he does go on to provide a solid list of techniques that serious venture-seeking entrepreneurs can deploy to improve their outcomes from such an event.

While we’re on the question of the utility of VC fairs, we might as well start asking questions about the utility of the VC model itself. We have begun work on a series of articles about this very question. We will look at who is actually funding startups in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. We’ll ask experts which pieces of the model work and which don’t. And most importantly, we’ll examine the state of the ecosystem beyond VCs that needs to be in place to help companies, especially those that will never be VC-fundable, bring their technology to market. We’ll look at the proliferation of new government funding here in Canada and compare it with what’s in place in other markets. If you believe you have a perspective on this, we’d love to hear from you. You can email me at fmoran (at) inmedia.com.

Technorati Tags: Venture capital, investment, Ottawa Venture and Technology Summit, Banff Venture Forum, Pat DiPietro, James Smith, technology, technology marketing

I read a controversial piece yesterday on Mediabistro. Apparently, President Obama has been quoted as saying that he’s open to looking at bailing out the newspaper industry. My personal opinion is that a bailout isn’t what the newspaper industry needs, for reasons I’ll get into shortly. But first, I’d like to talk about the news industry’s PR problem.

A direct quote from the president said the following, “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.”

What this says to me is that the news industry has a PR problem, is poorly understood by even the highest office in the land (one whose media-savvy campaign largely propelled him into the Oval Office) and is struggling to find its identity as news formats shift from dead trees to zeros and ones.

There is a common misconception that online news is strictly commentary, often characterized by the opinion-based content to which President Obama refers. Reliable and intelligent news is well researched, fact checked and placed in context, regardless of whether it’s online or off. Until this fundamental understanding is well communicated and well understood, and until the industry adheres to its own best practices, the news business will remain the subject of much consternation.

As to why I don’t believe the news industry should get a bailout? I had a ringside seat for the spectacular downfall of the music industry. Having studied the music industry at two post-secondary institutions (yes, Virginia, there really is rock and roll school), I learned about its outmoded revenue model and watched as the record labels clamored to find alternative revenue streams. In short, the industry failed to adapt to the consumer’s wants and needs and so those consumers simply circumvented the record companies.

In much the same way, consumers of news no longer want or expect to wait until tomorrow to see the news in print; rather, they want the news when they want it. The journalistic integrity of marquee outlets remains strong, whether people are consuming their news in print or online. Some of our clients’ most important media targets are strictly online; this does not diminish their impact nor their influence on the purchasing decisions of those holding the purse strings.

Rather than bail out an industry so that it can maintain an antiquated way of doing things, let these outlets find new and current methods for getting their product out to the consumer. Let’s hope the news industry learns something from the shoddy example set by the music industry that clearly missed the boat.

Technorati Tags: Bailout, newspaper industry, music industry, President Obama

I dipped back into my former life for a night last week when I went to Toronto to see U2 at the Rogers Centre. It was incredible.

We were lucky enough to have general admission tickets that enabled us to get as close as we wanted to to the stage, which was close. In order to do so, though, we waited in line outside of the venue for most of the day. Thank heaven for the PDA or it would have been considerably more challenging to fill the time. Liveblogging the lineup would have been far too boring for anyone not there (it was pretty boring in the lineup itself) but it was great to be able to check emails, Tweet when the mood struck, and catch up on online news.

When my phone worked, that is.

Having a Rogers iPhone on the Rogers network outside (and later inside) the Rogers Centre, one would think that reception would be stellar, that the data network would be lightning fast. One would be wrong.

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if the fact that Blackberry was sponsoring the U2 tour impacted the service. Anecdotally, those attending the show who were using Blackberries didn’t seem to have the same frustrating lack of network access that we on the Rogers network did. Good to know that Elvis Costello could check his emails on his Blackberry with impunity while the rest of us with a Rogers account had to be contented with just basking in the glow of the many Rogers’ logos that surrounded us, rather than a functional network.

More than once in surveying round-ups and reviews of the show, I came across sentiments similar to “Did your Rogers iPhone on the Rogers network work at the Rogers Centre tonight?  Mine didn’t.” The company, which struggles with its reputation as a reliable service provider, something we’ve addressed at other times on this blog, missed a golden opportunity to knock it out of the park, a park that was filled with 58,000 U2 fans, two nights in a row, that in today’s era of social media and pervasive user-created content would be sharing their experience at the show, something that extends beyond just the performance of the band itself.

Image: Open Clip Art Library.

Technorati Tags: Rogers, U2, Blackberry

When Iain Christie, president of Neptec Design Group, took the stage this morning as the keynote speaker at OCRI’s first Technology Executive Breakfast of the fall season, he made one thing clear: he wouldn’t presume to tell his audience how they should run their business, since it was challenge enough to run his own.

Nonetheless, as he shared anecdotes of the lessons learned over Neptec’s almost 20-year evolution from a one-trick pony whose continuance relied on the “stroke of a bureaucratic pen” to a more diversified technology play, it was clear that certain fundamentals crucial to business success apply no matter the industry; they simply manifest in different ways.

Neptec’s big break came in the early 1990s, when it developed an Advanced Space Vision System for NASA to help astronauts assemble the International Space Station. While this crucial contract for the company generated spinoff business, by the start of this decade, Neptec was challenged by the simple fact that it was still living from program to program with one dominant customer — obviously not the best way to build a sustainable company over the long term.

And while additional opportunities have come from NASA, not the least of which is the 3D Laser Camera System now used to inspect the Space Shuttle exterior for damage after launch, Neptec has diversified its expertise in intelligent three-dimensional data collection and processing for multiple applications in the defence and industrial automation markets.

Iain shared the following lessons that have come of the company’s growing pains and emphasized that it is still far better to learn from one’s own experience than from the mistakes of others:

1. Always have a backup plan. Before you jump in and claim to have the solution to a problem, make certain you have a complete understanding of its dimensions and its constraints. ”You’ll get a lot further ahead.”

2. Never let them see you sweat. “Amateurs talk about technology, professionals talk about process.” Technology is great, but if there is not a proven process to govern implementation and operation, and effectively troubleshoot any problems, the best technology in the world will not yield the desired result. You must be prepared for the unexpected.

3. The Perfect is the enemy of The Good Enough. In one instance with NASA, Neptec went from concept to a fully realized system that flew in space in only 16 months. The key from the outset was having a clear and unambiguous objective statement of what they had to achieve. The team had to refrain from the temptation to exhaust time and resources on making something that was already good enough even better. It was an exercise in distinguishing the “truly important” from the “merely urgent.”

4. Stick to your strengths. When the Neptec team embarked on its campaign to diversify its customer base, the key was not to chase after what the market wanted, but to instead remain true to its core strengths and focus on opportunities where it could deliver value to the customer. In other words, find problems they could solve with a solution the target market was willing to buy and could afford, rather than attempting to muscle in where larger and better-funded competitors were already well-established.

5. What gets measured gets done. Case in point: Iain was swimming against the current with his management team trying to argue in favour of expanding the workforce. The central issue was Neptec’s utilization rate: how much of each worker’s time was actually being applied to billable client work. Iain put the spotlight on it, but his managers on their own initiative tackled it and staff efficiency shot up in a matter of weeks. Which led to his next point: as the leader, his job is to ensure the management team is focused on addressing the right problem, set goals, then get out of the way and let them figure out the solution. He should not get bogged down in the day-to-day operational stuff, but . . .

6. Stay focused on what’s next. Change isn’t always desirable, but it is inevitable. While it is easy to fall into the trap of never looking past the end of the current project, or the current fiscal quarter, the person at the top must have their attention focused on what’s just over the horizon to maintain growth and profitability.

Technorati Tags: business development, R&D, product development, leadership, Neptec, NASA, Space Shuttle, ISS, International Space Station, Iain Christie, OCRI, TEB, Technology Executive Breakfast, data collection and processing

A weekend-long, competitive startup boot camp in October that will see the winning team take away $5,000 in seed funding was the most interesting piece of a coherent new programming line up announced last night by The Ottawa Network, the city’s grassroots networking club for the technology sector.

The startup camp, which will be repeated in the spring, was the second of four “program pillars” revealed by TON president Rick O’Connor. The first pillar, Network, will see TON continue to hold business networking and educational events, although at two a month, these will happen only half as frequently as last year’s somewhat over-ambitious weekly schedule. The third pillar, Finance, will feature a repeat of last year’s popular Founders and Funders dinners that saw angels and venture capitalists rub shoulders for an evening with entrepreneurs looking for funding. Details of the final pillar, Grow, will come later.

TON will also start charging a membership fee for the first time since it was founded in 2001 by a cohort of down-sized refugees of the telecom crash who gathered together to commiserate and help each other found new ventures and find new jobs. General membership will cost $25 per year in a move O’Connor said the organization hopes will lead to a more committed, targeted and involved membership.

The first startup boot camp is scheduled for October 23 to 25, and TON hopes to attract up to 75 participants who will self-categorize themselves into the various functions a new company needs, such as development, marketing and so on. On the Friday evening, as many as a dozen of the participants will pitch their ideas for a startup and teams will be formed based on who else wants to join them to work on that pitch for the weekend. On Sunday evening, each team will make its pitch, with the winner coming away with $5,000 if it incorporates as a fresh start-up.

TON’s new programming line up is a welcome evolution for an organization that significantly revitalized itself last year after a couple of years of fairly moribund existence. We’ve been big supporters of the network almost from the beginning, and I saw several instances last year where exciting new ventures got a solid helping hand as a result of a TON initiative.

Even better, in my view, is the introduction of a membership fee. As Shopify founder Toby Lutka said at a different event a few months ago, “Twenty four dollars is a slightly more annoying version of free.” His point, which I thoroughly endorse, is that if you have created something of real value, people ought to be willing to pay you something to use it. Not incidentally, in the process of charging for something, you also find committed customers, rather than just tire kickers. Those who can’t afford the fee — TON has always been attractive to those looking for work or operating ventures on a shoestring — can still attend up to three events a year without paying anything.

I’ll be a regular at TON events both for its inherent value to my own business and so that I can continue to bring its news to readers of this blog.

Technorati Tags: The Ottawa Network, startups, startup boot camp, Founders and Funders, technology

(Mark Sue is managing director of RBC Capital Markets. This blog post is a summary of his report from the recent RBC Technology Conference.)

• There’s a sense that the worst is behind us, according to key executives who presented at the RBC Technology Conference. Focus companies included Bigband Networks, Brocade, Ciena, JDSU and Sigma Designs. We noted various encouraging trends dependent on the end markets. The consumer segment seems to have led while we are also seeing firming trends in the enterprise. Service-provider-centric companies seem to be lagging, although specific names are noting improving order trends.

• Ciena CEO Gary Smith highlighted that although carrier customers remain cautious and are still budgeting month to month, sentiment has improved and orders show encouraging trends. Orders turn into deployments and, subsequently, revenues and Ciena has already endorsed sequential revenue growth for the current quarter. New products like CoreDirector II should also contribute to revenue growth in early 2010.

• Our read on F5 was encouraging, and the stable environment may provide for product revenues to start growing again. Recent F5 potential customer meetings in NY pointed to a more positive tone. F5 has a major operating system refresh (TMOS v.10) and CEO McAdams said initial feedback from customers was favorable.

• Brocade pointed to the overall health of the business and the relative strength in storage spending. Brocade has the added benefit of gaining market share, according to CFO Richard Deranleau. Brocade remains very pleased with the reception with its new Ethernet partner IBM and partnership benefits are expected in fiscal Q4.

• JDSU may see a full recovery later than some, in our view, yet CFO David Vellequette reminded investors that the March-April period marked an improvement from the January-February period. That said, inventories are lean, down to 4-8 weeks in optical components from 12-16 weeks just 18 months ago.

• Sigma Designs CFO Tom Gay pointed to modest improvements in visibility, healthy subscriber growth at AT&T and the resumption of international IPTV projects in 2H09. Positive themes on video growth were echoed by Bigband’s CFO Castonguay who pointed to opportunities in SDV and digital ad insertion.

• Samsung’s SVP of strategy Justin Denison reiterated the company’s market-share goals and its dominant position in the US in terms of units. Samsung is keenly focused on touch, which grew 10% in 2008.

Technorati Tags: RBC Capital Markets, Bigband Networks, Brocade, Ciena, F5, JDSU, Sigma Designs, Samsung

As recorded here, I started Tweeting a bit less than a fortnight ago. (Handle is @francismoran, if you’d like to follow me.) Today, I want to come up for air as I barely tread water in the Twitterstream and share a few first impressions.

1. Twitter is the most addictive thing since crystal meth was synthesized, and it has precipitated a massive relapse in my online behaviour.

I am an easily distracted guy at the best of times. So over the past few years, I have instituted some processes in my work life to diminish the potential that my focus on the task at hand will be derailed by incoming emails, news feeds or other bright shiny objects. I turned off all email alerts, stopped using instant messaging services and schedule specific times in my day when I will deal with email, my RSS feed and the like.

Then along came Twitter. At the office, at home, waiting for my Clover at Bridgehead, at the breakfast, lunch and dinner tables, at red lights while driving … hell, almost anywhere and at any time of the day, I MUST check Twitter and see what the ‘Stream is bringing me. It’s obsessive, and I’m actively seeking therapy.

2. Twitter is also incredibly seductive.

I wrote that I intended to use Twitter not as a sort of ersatz IM tool, or as a way to stay in touch with friends, or to post self-promoting updates about what airport I was now landing at. Nope. Twitter, for me, was going to be strictly business. I intended to use it to tweet about things not worth a full blog post, to draw attention to interesting things that came through my RSS reader, to promote great content secured by one of our clients here at inmedia, and to participate in Twitter conversations.

Well, it was that last one that pulled me in. (Right now, I’m channelling Al Pacino’s character in Godfather II.) Before I knew it, I was giving grammar tips, talking about what I’d name my boat if I had one, and, most un-businesslike of all, posting pictures of myself on a Jamaican beach.

3. Twitter has really goosed our blog traffic

It hasn’t all been obsession and personal indulgences, though. While the data points are still relatively few in number, we saw a tidy spike in blog traffic last week, with visitors up about 25 per cent from the weekly average for the previous month, page visits up 80 per cent and a 10-per-cent increase in subscribers. And Twitter has become the third-best source of referral traffic to our blog. All in less than two weeks. Nice.

4. The tools are a bit bewildering

Selecting a Twitter client has been a bewildering exercise. Initially, I started off both reading and posting directly on the Twitter site, hitting F5 every time I wanted a fresh deluge of tweets. Of course, as any member of the Twitterati knows well, there is a plethora of clients that can be installed.

I’ve been testing TweetDeck. It’s okay, but its constant pings are just too demanding on my too-fleeting attention span. Maybe I’ll play around with TweetDeck a bit more and explore its greater functionality but for the moment, I think I’ll continue to use my browser on my desktop.

I’m on my third client for my mobile platform, the iPhone. And it’s here that my obsessiveness really runs amok anyway. I’ve been using the free iStore application TwitterFon for the past several days. I really like the interface, especially how it uses colour to categorize incoming tweets and shows all replies whether or not I follow the person replying. Conversation threads are also very easy to follow. I think I’ll stick with this one. Until a brighter, shinier one catches my eye…

5. @snolen takes the prize for best Twitter Stream this first two weeks

The Globe and Mail’s excellent Stephanie Nolen, who was recently reassigned from the paper’s Africa bureau to its India bureau, kept up a steady stream of live tweets reporting on the Dalai Lama’s speech to his followers marking yesterday’s 50th anniversary of his flight into exile from Tibet. This is the future, kids.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, inmedia Public Relations, inmedialog, blogging, social media