Back before we all went to big box stores to fulfill just about every need (material and otherwise) we trundled a few blocks away to a corner grocery, hardware store, or butchers’ to pick up our consumables. Growing up as I did in Vancouver, my mother used to haul me every few days to Vancouver’s Chinatown where we’d waltz into the world-famous Dollar Meats. What does Dollar Meats have to do with Relevance Engines? I’m afraid I’ll need some more of your time to explain.

Over the years, the staff there came to know my mother and I, and would offer me all manner of BBQ pork and other delicacies which I have long since absorbed into my regular diet. The woman behind the counter, despite her poor English and the frenetic pace in the store, always knew what my mother wanted and often recommended other interesting flavors and offered samples. She knew us, she always was friendly, and she always gave my mom new ideas for her cooking without being too pushy. Despite their generally abrupt speaking style, visiting the staff at Dollar Meats felt less like an errand than it did a weekly adventure. Read the rest or post a comment »

Have you read “The Tipping Point“?  Many of us have.  The growth of sales of the book itself is an example of the idea it attempts to illustrate:  ideas can spread like wildfire when they capture a zeitgeist or purport to solve a common problem.  It’s a book that contains many great ideas, and provides a pretty interesting layman’s summary of the concept of memetics.  Memetics is a concept I spent way too much time studying in University, and which has moved from circles of furry-browed academics and into popular culture since the book’s publication because many people want to “get rich quick”, and almost as many have experienced failure when attempting to put the lessons of Tipping Point into practise.  (more…)

VANCOUVER, BC–(Marketwire - January 21, 2008) - Something Simpler, a leading developer of vertical search and content matching technologies, is pleased to announce that it has received the “Best Early Stage” award at the 11th annual Canadian Financing Forum held in Vancouver, B.C. on January 16. The Forum is a respected resource for technology entrepreneurs and North American investors who seek to recognize and facilitate partnerships with companies based in Canada. Read the rest or post a comment »

Jan 16th was a big day for us. We presented @ the Canadian Financing Forum’s Vancouver event and I was shocked to be voted the winner of the “Best Early-Stage” award by the venture capitalists, angels, and tech luminaries in attendance. I believe the field was about 15 companies deep, and to be honest I was shocked (but grateful) to receive this acknowledgment of all of our hard effort. In receiving this conveniently-sized (it fits in your back pocket, honest!) award I was greeted by BC Minister of Economic Development Colin Hansen, whom I am sure was so humbled by the experience of meeting such an unwashed tech entrepreneur as myself that he’s still talking about it. Read the rest or post a comment »

Pulse, our Facebook application, quietly went live on Facebook today.

You can add it yourself by first visiting http://pul.se and installing it in your profile. What does it do? Glad you asked, actually. Pulse profiles you and your friends, develops an understanding of the things you’re liable to be interested in, and then begins to recommend things like CDs, downloadable music, and Concerts in your area.

Read the rest or post a comment »

Ian Bell, who was recently tapped by TechVibes as one of Vancouver’s “Digital Media people to watch in 2008“ will be presenting at tomorrow’s Western leg of the Canadian Financing Forum, that’s January 16th @ around 4:00PM at the Fairmont Waterfront in Downtown Vancouver.  Come and check us out, and if you’re a VC… bring your chequebooks. :) 

Apparently I’m one of the “People to Watch” on the Vancouver tech scene for 2008. As though it’s not easy enough to look into my townhouse already, you people have to watch me working, as well?

Readers of this blog and my old mailing list know that I am no big fan of Network Solutions and its long history of anti-competitive and generally dirty business practises. From YCombinator comes this nugget about Network Solutions, exploiting a loophole extended by ICANN to pre-register domain names you’ve searched for on their site, thus preventing other registrars from handling the transaction later. Network Solutions currently charges $35 for an annual domain name registration, while most of their competitors land squarely between $7 and $15.

The problem exhibits itself thus: A query at the Network Solutions web site via its whois service will cause the domain name to appear to be available via NetSol, but in performing the same search via a third-party registrar the domain name appears to have been registered via Network Solutions to a private registrant. This is evil.

The piece has since been picked up by eWeek and in some depth at DomainNameNews.

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