What Are You Trying to Prove?

Today, John Battelle posted an interesting article on the Amex blog in which he states that Every Great Business Is An Argument.

I think this is a really interesting way of describing how entrepreneurs think. Starting a new business is a risky endeavor where the most likely outcome is failure so you have to believe that you have some additional edge otherwise it’s just not worth it.  As an entrepreneur, I believe that I have a unique insight into how technology is evolving and that gives me an advantage over my competitors. Will it pay off? I don’t know, but I’m willing to try and prove that it will.

So what is your business trying to prove? The easy answer is that all business are trying to prove that there is a market for their product or services, but I think that if you look at truly great companies you’ll see that they tie that thesis into a larger scale argument about society. They have a vision of the future and they are prepared to take risks now so that they will be prepared to take advantage of future trends.

Brainstorming reBookMe.com

This past weekend, I took part in Ottawa Web Weekend. The event was an opportunity for entrepreneurial minded people in the Ottawa area to get together for a weekend and launch a web product in just 48 hours.

On Friday evening about thirty-five of us got together at The Code Factory collaborative workspace in downtown Ottawa and started brainstorming product ideas. For four hours we pitched, debated, voted and re-pitched ideas until we had something that everyone could agree on; a reservation swapping service targeted at event organizers. I’m proud to be a part of Ottawa’s newest startup, reBookMe.com!

The Dip by Seth Godin

Yesterday I bought and finished (its a short book) The Dip by Seth Godin. I wasn’t planning on buying it but the premise of it really struck a chord with some of the challenges I’ve been dealing with as an entrepreneur and business owner. The main theory presented in the book is that most projects follow one of two curves, the Cul-de-sac or the Dip.

The Cul-de-sac is a slow steady decline that ends in failure; a dead-end job, a death-march project etc. The Dip is trickier though because it represents both successful and unsuccessful projects where you encounter a major setback mid-way through the project (which Godin argues happens more often than not) . This dip can either break you or give you a significant push ahead of the competition depending on how you handle it. So what differentiates the ‘good’ dips from the ‘bad’ dips. Well according to the book, its all about picking the right size of dip and making sure that you have the time a resources to completely overwhelm the problem rather than just scraping by. This means quitting other side-projects and committing fully to dip that offers the greatest pay-off.

Camped Out

Monday night was DemoCamp 5, the last camp of the the season here in Ottawa until the fall. All in all it was a great event with some new and innovative products being shown for the first time. The presenters where:

• Steve Lecomte – Lead to Close – Lead Management/Asterisk
• Darcy Whyte – JumpSocial – Event Sharing System
• David Nadeau – YooName – Unsupervised Named Entity Recognition
• Aydin Mirzaee – bOK Systems – Who will you bOK today?
• Jerome St-Louis – ECERE Corporation – Cross Platform SDK/GUI/3D/New Prog. Language
• Scot Lemieux – Gizmo Logic Studios Inc. – Education, Bilingual Children’s Video Series

The one presentation that really stood out for me was YooName by David Nadeau which does Named Entity Recognition in English text. Basically what that means is that it will read through a page of text that you give it and it will pick out all the “things” like people, places, products, events, etc and classify each one for you so that you know which terms are events or which ones are products. What makes YooName unique is that it can classify 100 different types of entities where most system only group the entities into 5 or so more general groups.

Back to Work

It’s official, I’m finally getting back into blogging and I’ve moved my blog to WordPress from Blogger to help turn over a new leaf.

Recently, I also started my own consulting company, Shawn Simister Consultant, to formalize all of the contract work that I’ve done over the past couple of years and to provide a platform for some of the contacts that I’ve been making over the last couple of months. Right now, I’m working on some very cool projects that I can’t wait to write about. So as soon as they’re ready for the masses I’ll post some more details up here.

Last month I attended the Mesh 2007 conference in Toronto and I had an amazing time meeting a lot of really passionate people who were all interested in the potential of Web 2.0. While I was at Mesh, I ran into Jeff Parks of I.A. Consultants and he showed me their new design for the web site, blog and the podcasts that he does. Seeing everything that Jeff and the other conference attendees were doing helped give me the kick I needed to get back into blogging and start building up my profile online.

Also from Mesh…

• An impromptu podcast about user experience and community that I sat in on in-between sessions.
• For those of you who missed the conference mDialogue has some high quality videos of the keynotes.

Toronto Time-Lapse

This past Monday, I was checking my RSS feeds and I noticed some amazing time-lapse photography of downtown Toronto on Sam Javanrouh’s photo-blog Daily Dose of Imagery.