Effective basically immediately, our team is moving over to become the in-house crew responsible for building all of Zerofootprint's products, including the Kids and Youth Calculator, the One Minute Calculators, the Facebook Calculator, and the Personal Carbon Manager. We have a few great projects to wrap up before everyone trades in their old Radiant Core punch cards for their shiny new Zerofootprint ones, so keep an eye out for a few more announcements on this very blog.

Longer term, we're happy to announce that we've been working really hard to find a home for all of our great clients and we're delighted that The Jonah Group will be taking over from us on some of our accounts. We're still working out some of the specifics, but they're an excellent shop and we're really delighted that we can end our professional services practice on such a high note. We've spoken to all of our clients and they've been very congratulatory and supportive, which just goes to show that we really did have the best customers a firm could ask for.

For all of you Foundation users out there, we're also thrilled to announce that we'll be releasing the full product under and Open Source license, with the Jonah Group picking up the bulk of the ongoing maintenance and development. We're still weighing a few Open Source license options (though we're leaning toward the Mozilla Public License), so if you have a favourite please leave a comment below.

This is one of those rare deals which is truly a win-win for both sides, and I know I speak for Ron and the whole team at Zerofootprint, as well as for Michael and the Radiant Core crew, when I say that we are all very much looking forward to saving the world together. We've spent the last four and a half years building websites and web applications, and although we've had a wonderful time and worked on some great projects, very few of them served an altruistic purpose beyond promoting a product or selling more widgets. We're now in the very enviable position of knowing that each feature we spec, each line of code we craft, and each bug we squash brings us that much closer to reducing the world's CO2 footprint. I don't know about you, but that's pretty inspiring for me. Keep an eye on the Zerofootprint site for some big changes over the coming months, and we'll see you at the next DemoCamp, Rails Pub Night, CaseCamp, TransitCamp, etc.

I had the privilege of attending this morning's press event and live Twittered, so if you'd like to know more about what was said, see my Twitterstream. Press coverage is starting to appear (the Toronto Star is up with Website measures local carbon footprints), and watch the news tonight for footage from CBC and Citytv, both of whom sent camera crews. Mayor Miller apparently loves it and was there to say lots of nice things, which is always a good endorsement. Check it out for yourself!

6:00pm
Demo: AskItOnline.com (Kaitlyn McLachlan, Clear Sky Media, http://www.askitonline.com)

6:15pm
Demo: GigPark (Pema Hegan, Noah Godfrey, http://www.gigpark.com)

6:30pm
Demo: Mono Project .NET Development on a Mac (Geoff Norton, http://www.mono-project.com/)

6:45pm
Demo: PlanetEye (Butch Langlois, http://www.planeteye.com)

7:00pm
Demo: SceneCaster (Alain Chesnais, http://www.scenecaster.com)

7:15pm
20 minute break

7:35pm
Ignite: The Future Is Simple (Geo Perdis, http://mediaworks.ca/)

7:50pm
Social Services Mashup (Clara Severino, UofT, Partnership) 

8:05pm
How to Rock SXSW (Rannie Turingan, http://PhotoJunkie.ca)

8:20pm
The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks (Tom Purves, http://wirelessnorth.ca/)

8:35pm
Leveraging Wide Open (Mike Beltzner, http://www.mozilla.com)

8:40pm
20 minute wrap up and social

9:00pm - 11:00pm
Duke of Westminster (http://westminster.thedukepubs.ca/) will have finger foods for us and is staying open an extra hour so you can get your drink on :)

We didn't have a chance to work on this release, but we're really looking forward to a whole bunch of the new features. There's a great rundown on Mozilla Links' A Deeper Look at Firefox 3 (even if they did call our work "washed out" :), which is well worth the read if your browser blood runs red. Some of our favourites:

• The Proto native theme for Mac OS will finally give Firefox a truly platform native feel on our favourite operating system
• A number of changes to the toolbar and tabstrip which make a lot of sense from the perspective of optimizing the browser experience (the Go button is gone! Let the rejoicing begin!)
• Places, which will bring some sanity to our extensive bookmarks collections
• Blocking JavaScript from resizing windows without permission (and various other nefarious message control tactics — take that marketeers!)
• Our good friend Madhava's awesome work on the Add Ons manager which brings browsing and installation of Add Ons right into the browser chrome. It's about time!
• Our other good friend Johnathan's equally awesome work around security, site verification, and anti-phishing measures, summed up in Larry the Security Guy.

Date: Monday, February 25th, 2008
Time: 6:00pm to 9:00pm
Location: Toronto Board of Trade, 1 First Canadian Place, Toronto, ON
Cost: Free (cash bar if you're thirsty)

Dinner will be served, the Demos will be excellent, the Ignites will ignite, and then we'll adjourn to The Duke of Westminster for more food and drinks.

As always, details are available at on the BarCamp's  DemoCampToronto17 page, 'tickets' are at Eventbrite, and those wishing to sign up for a demo or ignite session can do so via the Wufoo DemoCamp form.

We've seen a lot of turnover at recent DemoCamps and we're always happy to welcome new faces into the crowd. Since this is the first DemoCamp of 2008, we're going to change the old "bring a new person" rule around a bit and ask everyone to "bring a new person AND an old friend who hasn't been out in a while". Things have changed a lot since our humble beginnings around the BubbleShare board room table, so let's bring them back and show them what's new!

Lastly, we're always looking for individuals or companies who would like to put up $200 and help make the event possible. If you're interested, please contact me directly and I can give you a rundown of what's involved.

Hope to see everyone there!

SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists, artists, and technologists for a weekend of talks and discussions. It will take place at Hart House at the University of Toronto on the weekend of March 15-16.

Bringing the academic and entrepreneurial communities together is one of Greg's big passions and this event is a clear move in that direction. Should be a lot of fun! Plus, it's sponsored by our friends at MindTouch who make the awesome DekiWiki, and if past evenings out with AaronF and the crew are any indication, this should be good! Hopefully they'll make it up for the weekend.

There are magazines about business, and then there's the Harvard Business Review. If you're at all involved in doing business in the western world, odds are you've read an article from HBR or even have a subscription. It would not be an exaggeration to say that a whole generation of thought and business leaders have been shaped by the content HBR has published. And so, along with my co-authors Eli Singer and Mark Kuznicki, it is my incredible honour to annouce the publication of our article, titled Sick Transit Gloria, in the Breakthrough Ideas for 2008 section of the February issue of the Harvard Business Review.

Our short piece shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience. We're in great company and I highly recommend you take a few mintues from your busy day to read through some of the articles on the Breakthrough Ideas for 2008 site. We'd also love if you would take an additional moment (we're so needy!) to vote for TransitCamp in the Best Unconference in BlogTO's Best of Independent Toronto Poll.

For those of you who aren't familiar with TransitCamp, our article tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together in an innovative new way to solve problems together, using technology and social media and the BarCamp unconference toolkit to change their relationship. We're very proud to have helped the Toronto Transit Commission to usher in a new era of collaboration with its customers and community stakeholders! For more information, read the article in Harvard Business Review or check out the HBR page on the TransitCamp wiki for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp.

As authors, we want to be clear that while our names may appear in the byline of this article, these ideas and the event itself were created and inspired by a group of local community participants and peers and global thought leaders who both helped and inspired us. We would like to acknowledge those contributions and inspirations here:

Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen

Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood;Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O'Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the $5 philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

The existence of Office on the Mac platform has always been a bit of quandary for Microsoft. On the one hand, they sell a lot of copies and make a good chunk of revenue on it. On the other hand, they sell it to people who don't buy Windows (unless they're going to run it in Parallels or Fusion) and are therefore helping to support the existence of a platform which directly competes with two of their primary money makers (Windows and Office for Windows). There was actually a point in history, back in the dark days of 1997, when Microsoft invested $150m in Apple and pledged to continue to develop versions of Office (and InternetExplorer!) for Mac OS — a move which may well have saved Apple's bacon. Fast forward 10 years and we have a new release of Office, so what's changed?

On the surface, this is a great update. Lots of thought has gone into the UI, which resembles a Mac OS native version of the Ribbon seen in Office 2007 for Windows. It's Intel native, which makes it much faster on modern Macs than Office 2004 was (mostly because it's no longer running in the Rosetta emulation layer). What's not to like? Well, there's one thing. It's a small thing when you read it in a long list of changes, but when you actually stop to think about it, it's not such a little footnote.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac OS no longer supports Visual Basic for Applications Macros. VBA has been the standard Macro language for Office releases on both Mac OS and Windows for a long, long time and there are probably millions of Office documents out there that have embedded macros. I regularly use two such documents, an Excel spreadsheet which we built internally and which helps us calculate accurate estimates for clients, and a Word document which was provided to me for a project I'm working on and which I have to use to complete my work. Opening our Costing Workbook in Excel gives the following error dialog:

The first time it came up, I didn't read it properly and thought it was the old security warning that Excel used to give when opening a document with macros in it. It was only on the second pass that I realized what I was seeing: we will never be able to use our Costing Workbook again. This is a little more insidious in the project document I have to use, as it opens without a warning but none of the built-in functions and buttons do anything. Clicking on the "Learn more about macros and Office for Mac" shows a Help window with the following contents:

Cause: Office 2008 for Mac cannot run Visual Basic macros or load add-ins that contain Visual Basic macros.
    Solution: Keep the macro in the file.
    Solution: Remove the macro from the file.
    Solution: Save the macro in another macro-enabled file format.
    Solution: Create a new macro by using AppleScript.

The first three are just solutions which allow you to keep the macros from getting destroyed when the file is saved in Office 2008 format. The last one is the real kicker: the only actual solution is to recreate your macros in AppleScript format. Kudos to Microsoft for beefing up AppleScript support for the suite (and it does look pretty thorough), but what they're basically saying is that you can no longer interop with your Windows colleagues and you have to recreate any macros you had in a completely new language. You may find yourself scratching your head at this point, much as I was when I made this discovery. Why would they do such a seemingly stupid thing? Erik Schwiebert ("Schwieb"), a member of the Mac team, explains in an excellent blog post Saying Goodbye to Visual Basic (have I mentioned how much I love Microsoft's approach to corporate blogging? No? It's awesome. Everyone should learn from them). I completely sympathize with Erik's description of their plight and I agree that a two year delay would have been unacceptable, but I also think this decisions has some very serious consequences for Apple's potential in the corporate market.

We basically run Office only because our clients do. If we had our choice, we'd probably run Pages for word processing, we would definitely run Keynote for presentations (and I use it for any of mine already), and would be stumped to replace Excel (Numbers is a nice start but it's a long way from ready). If we felt that there were other applications out there which would flawlessly handle our clients' documents, we'd probably switch today (we've tried NeoOffice and OpenOffice with mixed results — suggest alternatives in the comments). We're a small shop though, and we get to set our own IT direction. Many of our colleagues work in large organizations who have IT departments which have been actively hostile toward Macs until recently and have only just started to come around (if they have at all). A big reason for that change has been Office, since Mac users can work seamlessly with their Windows colleagues (particularly in an Exchange environment using Entourage). If you work in an organization large enough to have an IT department, there's a pretty good chance that your company has also got some complex documents with macros in them (likely in Excel, which sees a lot more scripting than Word). The very rock and hard place described by Erik is about to crush your chances of getting a Mac on your desk, since any new Mac will be Intel-based and any new license of Office will be 2008 and now you'll be back into no-interop land. I'm not the only one who finds this so disheartening: in an opinion piece published in Macworld way back in December 2006 (when Microsoft first announced that they were removing VBA support), Rob Griffiths said:

Microsoft Office isn'€™t among the apps that will run natively on Intel-based Macs, ”and it won't be until the latter half of 2007, according to media reports. But when it does ship, Office will apparently be missing a feature so vital to cross-platform compatibility that I believe it will be the beginning of the end for the Mac version of the productivity suite.

He also points to a thread on Ars Technica, which includes 3 pages of angry feedback from people who will be seriously affected by this decision. I feel for the Microsoft Mac Business Unit (MacBU) team members who had to make this decision, even though I'm sure that ditching VB's ten year old implementation was a weight off their shoulders. Unfortunately for me, and for many of you, it was really just a transfer of weight onto our shoulders.

So, if you're feeling that weight, MacTech Magazine published their Moving from Microsoft Office VBA to AppleScript: MacTech's Guide to Making the Transition guide in their April 2007 issue (which is now entirely available online), which I recommend as a fantastic starting point. I agree with their introduction in that there is an advantage for Mac users who take the time to learn AppleScript: it's the scripting language for the whole platform so you can easily build scripts which integrate Office into other apps, and you'll know how to script non-Office things as well. I actually do a fair bit of AppleScripting from time to time and have made some great little scripts (particularly Copy Path, which copies the path to the current Finder window onto the Clipboard), and I encourage Mac users with a programming bent to learn it. I'm just not sure you should be forced to do so in order to keep using your own documents.

I think the talk went well despite yesterday's incredible wind actually knocking out power to the venue (they were worried the projector might strain their backup generator and it sure did and the power died as I wrapped up :). The crowd's tech knowledge spanned everything from very casual web use to bloggers and SEO-fanatics, so I started off with a quick review of the basics (e.g.: Web 1.0's one way street vs. Web 2.0's participatory conversation), and then jumped into blogging, social media, search, ecom, and collaboration. We covered a lot in an hour and some people were starting to get a bit of the Information Overload glaze in their eyes, so I wrapped up with an encouragement to take advantage of the wealth of free software and opportunity and get out there and experiment. I'm on the train on the way back to Toronto now, but will post the slides to SlideShare from a more reliable net connection for anyone interested.

We resolved to stop making resolutions we couldn't keep — did you make any fun resolutions? Leave 'em in the comments and we'll drop by your blog later this year to remind you about them :)

While you're here, why not help make the world a little better in the new year? Our good friends at Zerofootprint, with whom we've been doing quite a lot of work lately (stay tuned for some exciting announcements!), have been nominated for a very prestigious TechCrunch Crunchy Award in the "Most likely to make the world a better place" category, and they could really use your vote! Visit the Crunchies site and vote for them right away. The world appreciates it!

Click for the full size card

1. Tractability: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
2. Obviousness: Is it clear why people should use it?
3. Deepness: How much value can you ultimately deliver?
4. Wideness: How many people may ultimately use it?
5. Discoverability: How will people learn about your product?
6. Monetizability: How hard will it be to extract the money?
7. Personally Compelling: Do you really want it to exist in the world?

If you're developing a new product — or even just thinking of doing so — do yourself a favour and read the post to get a sense of where you stand. It's obviously not gospel (and sometimes the best ideas come out of left field and can't even be charted on existing metrics), but it's a really good step further down the road and will help you prepare for some of the questions investors are likely to ask if you go in that direction.

The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.

The fruits of their labour is already visible in things like the compliance reports for various email clients (Apple Mail [Excellent], Gmail [Poor], Outlook 2007 [Poor], and Windows Live Hotmail [Average] to name a few), and in their development of an email Acid Test to compliment The Web Standards Project web version. Standards make the world better for everyone, so if you work with email, read it, or send it (which should cover just about everyone who reads this blog), you should stop by their site and lend a hand.

So, it was with much sadness that I read the news this morning. As reported on blognation by Marc's close friend Oliver, he suffered a massive coronary sometime between 7:30 and 8:10 am yesterday and was rushed to the Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he remains in critical condition and is not expected to regain consciousness for the next 24 - 48 hours. Our thoughts go out to Marc, his wife Sue, and his son Jason, as well as to the entire tech community who have been touched by his generosity. If it were possible for this world-spanning network of people to produce full and rapid recoveries as well as we produce the technology Marc so lovingly reports on, we would do nothing but.

For those of you wishing to send cards, gifts, or other happy thoughts in physical form:

Presbyterian Hospital
Cardiac Care Unit Bed #3
1100 Central Ave SE
Albuquerque, NM 87106

The hospital also offers a service through which you can send patients a virtual card.

Update: Oliver Starr is blogging status updates on Marc's condition on his blog. Please visit there for the latest news and link to that page rather than the original Blognation story.

The apple is red.
It is John’s apple.
I give John the apple.
We give him the apple.
He gives it to John.
She gives it to him.

1. Profile Information (user data)
2. Friends Information (social graph)
3. Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Looks like OpenSocial won't have its own markup language (Facebook, for example, requires the use of FBML), which means developers will have one fewer thing to learn. The platform is launching with a bunch of partners in place, including Orkut (owned by Google), Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster (apparently they still exist), Viadeo and Oracle (not well known for social networking, but they've got an impressive sounding internal app). They've also worked with some of the bigger Facebook developers to get them on the new platform, including Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.

This is interesting, if for no other reason than that Google has managed to perform a buzzword bingo coup and cram two of the hottest words of 2007 into a single name. Sometimes it feels like the sky is raining social from giant buckets, and you'll be seeing a lot more about open in the coming months as the open source world continues its mainstream push. We're big believers in (and supporters of) openness and I'm glad to see some of the walls around the garden come down. The is brilliant in a lot of ways (particularly in their ability to scale and to solve the security issues which typically ruin similar efforts), but your data is very much locked into their site. We'll have a better idea of how OpenSocial will change that when the API is actually released later (and particularly about whether a layer could be developed which allows developers to build Facebook apps on it), and will report back.

We stayed at the City Inn, which turned out to be a refreshingly modern and simple hotel with free ethernet in the room (courtesy of a lovely pink CAT5 cable). We rallied the troops for a fun night on the town, taking advantage of The Commercial House's pretty fantastic pint, burger, and chips for £4.95. Tuesday morning saw us up bright and early for a walk to the University of Bristol campus, to pay a vist to 3CResearch, a member company doing "convergent technology research for digital media processing and communciations" (in case you're wondering — and I certainly was — the three C's are Communications, Content, and Creativity). We were given a demo of their Visualise project, which delivers streaming video to mobile devices (currently over WiFi but soon over faster and more pervasive delivery channels like HSDPA and WiMax). It was designed to offer a better experience to fans of events like rally racing, which generally involves standing in a cold, wet field for hours on end in the hopes that a car will hurtle past you for an exhilirating 15 seconds. Visualise means you can still stand in the same damp glen, but now you can watch the race from multiple viewpoints on your mobile, as well as peruse stats and driver info (assuming the touchscreen still responds to your frozen fingers). In all seriousness, the technology can be applied to any kind of event and would be great for things like music festivals like Coachella, at which you would need to clone yourself several times over just to catch half the bands you wanted to see. The demo was followed by a presentation by Dr. Geraint Jones about a number of the other 3CResearch projects, including Intelligent Content Based Retrieval (ICBR) (analyze video archives and index based on content, motion, etc.) and Motion Ripper (extract motion data from video and apply captured motion signals to computer animation — i.e.: analyze a video of birds flying and animate an electronic bird). Their research is very interesting, if not entirely cutting edge, but I thought the more interesting part was the conversation which erupted over licensing of technology and how pure research facilities can successfully commercialize their ventures. Sutha suggested they take a look at the MIT Media Lab model, which is basically pay-for-play (i.e.: companies can pay an upfront and quite large fee and then have access to all of the research), and I would think there's a lot to be learned from the MaRS Discovery District and from the University of Toronto's Innovations Group.

We spent the late afternoon and evening at Watershed Media Centre, a facility that reminded me of The Bookshelf in Guelph, a favourite haunt during my University years. Watershed includes a few cinemas, a caf&eaccute; and some meeting facilities, and was our home for a great mini-trade show event which consisted of 40 South West companies meeting and greeting our Canadian crew. Steve Collett (International Trade Advisor from UKTI) started us off, Ian Kelso (from Interactive Ontario) gave a quick state the union of New Media in the New World, and I followed him with a quick Introducing the Canadians rundown of the companies in the mission (and including a photo of a polar bear cub, two bears making out in the woods, and the poster from South Park: draw your own conclusions). I was followed by Mark Leaver (Director of Development from South West Screen), who mirrored Ian's talk but focused on the South West region of the UK, and then we were treated to a fantastic presentation by Adam Montandon, Director of HMC Interactive, who have built some truly amazing interactive experiences for Cadbury's Purple Planet and The Royal Obeservatory. He also has the excuisitely good taste to have fallen in love with a Canadian girl and is working on a (longish) term plan to move to our fair lands to be with her. I cornered him after and insisted that we line up a DemoCamp demo on his next visit, which he heartily agreed to (or maybe defensively, so I'd let him out of the corner — hard to tell). The trade show was a great success and I met a number of interesting people doing interesting things in which we might well take an interest, including John Bradford from jbsh, LLC (who are working on an educational product for the Canadian market), Paul Bason from University College Falmouth (who was delighted by Michael Wesch's latest and who was really interested to hear what we looked for in students and in whether we'd be into a distance-learning based partnership), David Karney from Potential Difference (a swank Bristol web shop who are basically Radiant Core's British counterparts, but on .NET), and James Ovenden from Ball Fusion (who are marketing an amazing video on street soccer skills — check out some of the tricks on their homepage). Apologies to the gentleman from Sanoodi, whose slightly odd application name I've managed to easily remember but whose much less odd personal name I've completely forgotten (owing to his lack of business cards, of course). We had a great chat about his app and where it's headed, and I showed him Toronto's own Planet Eye and the Specialized Riders Club (run by our friend Chris Matthews) for some inspiration. We ended the evening with a delicious dinner for fourteen at the Severn Shed (don't worry Mike: I didn't pick up the tab!), during which I had the pleasure of chatting about documentaries, music, books, and television with Julia Bennett (from White Pine Productions), Jason Krogh (from Zinc Roe), and Paige Chambers (from the Canadian Business College).

Stay tuned for Day 3, which will mostly be a train ride to Glasgow!

Back in early July, I was having a coffee with Ian Forrester from the BBC Backstage at our local Balzac's, when in strode Ian Kelso from Interactive Ontario. Ian to Ian (i2i?) introductions were made, and Mr. Kelso (my former boss from many moons ago!) laughingly suggested that we should join them on the Trade Mission they had just announced so that Mr. Forrester could buy me a coffee in his hometown. And here we are, three months later, sitting in the Tower 1 Meeting Room at The Tower Hotel in London, listening to John Davies, Technology & Strategy Adviser from United Kingdom Trade & Investment, talking about his country's strategic direction.

So, we're here until this afternoon, then off to lovely Bristol for a tour of 3C Research and a mini-trade show, then to beautiful Glasgow on Wednesday for some networking and a tour of the Hillington Innovation Centre on Thursday. I've got a criminally early train on Friday (5:50 am!) back to London, where I will sadly not have coffee with Mr. Forrester (who will be en route to Berlin) but rather lunch with his colleagues, a pint or two with Ian Hayward from Glaxstar (the company, not the alien galaxy), and a lovely dinner with the team from eBay UK (with whom we did the eBay Firefox Companion and are now working on a top secret new project).

I've got my trusty Rebel XTI and have been trying to capture some shots while keeping it out of the rain (no mean feat), which I'll make sure to post and link to. Many thanks to Sutha Kamal for playing tour guide yesterday and showing me around the banks of Thames, the Tate Modern, a few Starbucks (a charming little chain of coffee shops!), an historic pub (Lamb and Flag, which has been around since Charles II), and a great Vietnamese dinner at Cay Tre. More as it happens!

Some of those things are familiar from my own days as a student (7 hours of sleep was definitely not), but some of them have definitely changed. I think, to me, the most compelling series of sheets in this movie is the one about graduating into a job that doesn't exist yet. Stop and think about for a moment: are you doing what you trained to do in school?

A quick poll of the office shows that we're feeling ready. Are you?

quiesce tablespaces for table dogfood

• Building software is a three phase process (the Art of design, the Engineering of the actual product, and the Science of debugging — see Seattle). This manifests in the way FogBUGZ breaks down into separate components (Wiki for specs and other documents created during the design, Project Management and Evidence-Based Scheduling (EBS) for managing the development, and bug tracking and email/discussions for handling the debugging).
• Joel has spoken at length about how to pick a release date for your project which is reasonable and which you stand a good chance of hitting (see Picking a Ship Date and Painless Software Schedules among many others).  This used to seem a bit like black magic, particularly if you were trying to pick a date that you had some faith in rather than just, say, throwing darts at a board. The new Evidence-Based Scheduling features in FogBUGZ 6.0 are pretty remarkable in that they provide a very realistic view of your probability of meeting your ship date as your project progresses, based on the ability of your team members to accurately estimate the time required to complete their tasks. Joel explained how the calculations work (Monte Carlo Simulations!) and it's all quite clever, but the important thing is that it lets you look at a graph that says our probability of shipping on January 3rd is 8% while our probability of shipping on April 20th is 98%.
• He told a story about how they've been using FogBUGZ internally for many years, but even up to v5 he noticed that he would come in every morning and open a little Notepad window to track the two or three things he needed to do rather than actually open cases. So they ate their dog food for v6 and created a method to open new cases which is as easy as typing lines into Notepad, and now he stores everything in FogBUGZ properly.
• FogBUGZ doesn't support the idea of pooling people into a single resource for handling a task, largely because they feel that you should have a single person responsible for every task. Likewise, you can link cases together but there isn't a concept of dependencies like there is in Microsoft Project, because they believe that they don't actually occur that often in software (which led to a funny story about how the Project team at Microsoft doesn't use Project to manage building Project because when they tried, it produced a Gantt chart 9,000 pages wide).

Download the Quicktime or Download the MP4

• Don't launch your webapp in December, unless you're doing it to make January's sales look particularly good.
• Language choice doesn't matter: pick the one you like and get on with building it already.
• 1% is a pretty consistently advertised figure for the conversion from free to pay accounts. Only inflate this number if you're about to do a dog and pony show for a VC, otherwise you will only have yourself to blame when you manage to achieve 1%.
• The one number that's missing here which would help to provide a sense of scale is the actual user base of each app. It's almost like pulling a Michael Moore: the murder rate in the US is way higher than in Canada (they have 10x the population, but sssssh! Don't tell anyone or the numbers are less impressive!)
  
• Remember that, along with a bigger user base comes a higher support cost. Look at RegOnline's support calls/day compared to even FeedBurner's.
  

My talk went well (The Anatomy of a Facebook Application notes, courtesy of Jordan Christensen). I got a chance to chat with our favourite Citytv reporter, Amber MacArthur, as well as our new friend Eli Glasner, National Arts Reporter for the CBC Radio News. He generously provided us with an MP3 of the interview, which is included below for your listening pleasure:

© CBC Radio News

Update from Allen Gelberg, Director of the Collaboration Centre at MaRS and the man who generously donated last night's space for FacebookCampToronto:

FYI overall attendees were 453. That is 400 in the Auditorium and 53 in CR-3 where we were simulcasting into.

6:00	Social/Mingling
6:30	Introduction by Colin, Roy & Andrew
6:40	Best Practices around Product Design and Viral Marketing (Meagan Marks, Facebook.com)
7:30	Anatomy of a Facebook Application (Jay Goldman, Radiant Core)
7:50	FBML Overview (Sunil Boodram, Trapeze Media)
8:10	FQL Overview (Craig Saila)
8:30	Updating the Facebook Profile (Colin Smillie, Refresh Partners)
8:50	Demo: .Net Sample Application (Ricardo Covo)
9:00	Demo: Carpool by Zimride (Rajat Suri)
9:10	Demo: My Aquarium by Greg Thomson
9:20	Wrap-up & drinks

If you're reading this after the fact, welcome to Radiant Core! Don't forget to check out our Careers section for some great positions, including Facebook app development :)

Not to be copied, reproduced or broadcast without the express written permission of the Toronto Transit Commission - Copyright 2007.

So, we'll leave it as an exercise to someone else who feels like tangling with the TTC's legal team. In the meantime, watch for the amazing old footage of the streetcars, the cool rebuild of a streetcar's drive system, concept footage of the new Light Rail and Subway cars coming in the next ten - fifteen years, and talk of the new transponder system currently being installed which allows for the nifty automated station announcements and (ominously?) for the possibility of automated train control. Is it just us or does the TTC's new command centre remind you of 1983's War Games (that was twenty four years ago?!)? And also, where are all the women in this futuristic nerve centre?

It's great to see material like this which goes deeper than a simple puff piece to really give a sense of the complexity involved in running North America's third largest transit system (following New York City and Mexico City). Suddenly makes it seem entirely reasonable that they have trouble paying for it when you realize that it's not just about having buses and subways run but about all of the infrastructure that goes into running them.

DemoCampToronto14
Monday, September 17, 2007 6:00 pm ET - 9:00 pm ET
Toronto Board of Trade

We're trying a new venue out this time, with the generous support of the BoT (who are subsidizing their regular rental fee for the room). We're also trying out a new format, featuring 6 demos (5 minutes for demo/5 minutes for questions), followed by 6 Ignite! style presentations. If you'd like to demo or do a presentation, contact the esteemed David Crow, keeper of the DemoCamp flame. See you there!

That's right folks: it's that time again! We've just about finished our massive office renovation and now we have all this empty space to fill, so we sat down and filled up an entire white board of things we could fill it with. A sample:

• Elephants (too heavy, too many peanuts)
• Clowns (too scary, too many clown cars)
• Origami Cranes (too many paper cuts, too many dead trees)
• A Bigger Team (too much... fun?)

And there you have it! We settled on a bigger team, though I still haven't ruled out elephants provided we can build some kind of code input device that doesn't get crushed under their massive feet (Ed: trunk based?).

Effective immediately, we're looking for two key positions:

• Integrator/Web Developer
• Business Development Manager

All the instructions you need are in the posts, so go read 'em and send in your info! If you know someone who matches the description, please forward along, and if you write a blog which gets read by the kind of people we're looking for, please make a quick post on our behalf.

First Richard Florida, author of such well known (and loved) books as The Rise of the Creative Class, Cities and the Creative Class, and The Flight of the Creative Class (notice a trend?), appeared on the Colbert Report on Monday and sorta announced that he's moved to our fair city to take a job teaching Business and Creativity at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management (he hasn't made the faculty list on the website yet, which I'm sure it's just a matter of time, but they do have a very happy press release). You may be able to tell, from the run-on-ness of the first sentence, that his arrival in Toronto is very exciting and yet another herald of our coming of age as a global city.

Speaking of global cities, the July issue of Fast Company includes an article (Fast Cities 2007), in which they break down their list of the world's Fastest ones. The numbers came from Carnegie Mellon's Kevin Stolarick (who, in a matter of cosmic coincidence that will baffle the mystics forevermore, was the statistics guru behind Richard Florida's research!), along with data from CEOs for Cities' CityVitals survey, authored by Joseph Cortright of Impresa Inc.; sustainability data from SustainLane; and insights from the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. Toronto was listed in the Global Villages grouping (along with Johannesburg - my birthplace - and Berlin), although we probably could have made it into any of the groups except Unexpected Oases and, sadly, Startup Hubs. I have to take some umbrage with their description of Toronto: it reads more like it was lifted from a clueless guide book than that it actually talks to the concept of Toronto as a Global Village (Gehry's building is hardly part of the skyline, I would hardly call all 29 of the festivals 'major', and they sacrificed any mention of our amazingly varied dining options for a course at U of T which is probably offered by all major universities). All the same, it's an impressive list and it's a pleasure to be listed. Go us!

(Hat tip to Global Nerdy).

I was drawn to this session because we're big advocates of the semantic web, particularly focused on making sure that we implement client sites in semantically-correct HTML with embedded data like microformats. I've also had a long-standing interest in Natural Language Processing, both out of general curiousity and as a user interface mechanism. It's one of those technologies, like virtual reality and voice recognition, which has been just around the corner for the last twenty bends in the road, so I was really curious to hear what the panelists had to say and about how close they are to releasing products based on it.

It was a great session with an excellent conversation between the panelists, who were all very knowledgeable about the topic. Panels often degenerate into promos for the represented companies but the hard (and soft) sells were kept to a miminum. A quick summary of the most salient points (raw notes follow below):

    
• The much-maligned labels 'Web1.0', 'Web2.0', and 'Web3.0' could really just refer to decades (1990-1999, 2000-2009, 2010-2019 respectively) in which the priorities of the web community shifted from inventing the backend of the web to improving the user eperience and frontend, to returning to the backend and building in intelligence in the form of semantic meaning (Nova). Think of it as the shift from plumbing to meaning, over a thirty year period (Barney).
    
• The web to date has been focused on producing content for human consumption rather than on content for machine consumption and processing (Barney). The web needs to move from being a file system to a knowledge system in order for humans to be able to more efficiently extract meaning from it (Nova).
    
• The semantic web is going to require humans to add all of the semantic information, which is where search engines like Mahalo are going (search results augmented with human-created information). Radar Networks is taking this approach by building community networks which help people add and augment the semantic understanding of the web (Nova). Sometimes people aren't very good at adding that information because of the complexity of the context required (e.g.: the difficulty is in things like email messages which just say "Yeah! Let's do it!", which could mean "Let's go for lunch!" or "Let's commit securities fraud!" but which can't be understood without the context of the related emails in the thread). Humans are only right about categorization about 60% of the time but Cataphora's software has been independently evaluated as being 99.6% accurate (Elizabeth).
    
• There's an element to the semantic web which is heavily based on the concept that the work one human does can have benefit for another human, and that giving your time in one place will save you time in another (e.g.: tagging, Wikipedia, etc.). This is the begining of the semantic web and future search software (like Powerset) will need to understand the meaning that we are now creating (Barney).
    
• One of the really interesting things in this space is finding the impossible problems and figuring out how to solve them. The question of "who said a specific thing" is really hard but could be a killer app for people like journalists (Barney).
    
• The basic technology at play here is nothing new and has been around for decades.     
• Trust is a big factor affecting the success of all of these systems. It's really hard to assess how