Thanks to AOL, Instant Messaging is now an ecosystem. This morning they announced OpenAIM, effectively a programatization of the OSCAR protocol, AOL’s long-since-reverse-engineered network interface for Instant Messaging. This effectively legitimizes what has become common practice — hacking IM for fun and profit. Both Adium (for OSX) and Meebo use the open-source libpurple library to access the various Instant Messaging networks. At my insistence, EQO implemented this as well.

That AOL is now embracing, rather than oscillating between pretending they don’t see and vaguely threatening to block and/or sue third party developers leveraging and enhancing their Instant Messaging platform is a huge leap forward — both for the third-party developer community and for AOL and AIM themselves. This should not be considered to be a strategic advantage for AOL: I would hope that this should cause YahOo and MSN to follow suit.

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People always ask me who we compete with, and I have become accustomed to unsheepishly responding with “Google”. That’s not to say we’re trying to topple the 800-lb. gorilla, mind you, but anyone who’s in the Personalization business and Recommendation Engine development world ultimately has to concede that the most likely generic player in this category is indeed GOOG.

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In our investor presentation, which I gave a version of a few weeks ago at the Canadian Financing Forum, I [almost] jokingly use the phase “Web 3.0″. Originally it was intended to inspire Marc Canter to rush the stage and force the organizers to call security, however the audience seemed nonplussed by such a bold pronouncement and I was almost disappointed that my presentation was allowed to proceed unheckled.

It was a nice way to tie a bow around a new kind of movement. And despite peoples’ resentment and guffaws, back-handed sneers, and general griping the phrase is starting to get thrown around more liberally. Whereas Web 1.0 was defined simply as “the Web” and whereas Web 2.0 was defined within the tight little circle surrounding Tim O’Reilly, what Web 3.0 means will be negotiated out in the open. For now, Web 3.0 seems to be all about context and personalization.

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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…)

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 »

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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I was pretty overjoyed to report a few months ago on Letterbox: a three-pane email plugin for Apple’s mail.app written by Aaron Harnly, which has made my email life blissful indeed. With Leopard came some unexpected changes to mail.app that broke most of the plugins out there, so it was back to the drawing board for Aaron.Thing is, he’s been stuck on “any day now“ for releasing his update for two weeks or so, and the comments from others are turning from words of encouragement to sheer hair-pulling frustration. Read the rest or post a comment »

Telecom has, generally speaking, become a zero-sum game. In fact it probably always was, despite numerous attempts by governments at deregulation. The fact of the matter is that even today, full-duplex voice conversations between two parties is almost entirely controlled by a cabal of international telecom companies, both wireless and wireline, who manipulate and milk their effective monopolies with customer lock-in and draconian pricing. Furthermore third-party access to these networks is hugely restricted thanks to highly limited and uneconomical network-side interfaces, fundamentally incompetent internal provisioning and support, and of course the omnipresent threat of lawsuits, manipulation of regulators, and political pressure.

There is, in most respects, not much room for the little guy. (more…)