M&M (Massive and Meetup)

John Boll­witt did an excel­lent job of describ­ing (and pho­tograph­ing) the Mas­sive Tech Con­fer­ence this year. I took no pic­tures, as I was not in Jour­nal­ist mode. I did take some notes, though. The only thing I’d add was that some of the Con­fer­ence ses­sions upstairs (where I’d never been before at the Con­ven­tion Cen­tre) were pretty good. Open­ing remarks were by Leonard Brody, the founder of Now­Pub­lic (the impres­sive local startup that I learned about way back at my first North­ern Voice — actu­ally, Moose Camp 2006, to be pre­cise), and also the author of “Every­thing I Need to Know About Business…I Learned from a Cana­dian” as well as “Inno­va­tion Nation: Cana­dian Lead­er­ship from Java to Juras­sic Park”. The main thrust of his talk? That Canada is one of the most inno­v­a­tive, entre­pre­neur­ial, and fis­cally well-positioned coun­tries in the world, but often are our own worst enemy because of our self-image (mod­est, self-effacing, per­haps even self-deprecatory). He felt that Canada needs to get over this low self-esteem, make the most of our com­ing wealth from being the num­ber 1 oil pro­ducer in the next decade (which I have to say I’m not com­pletely in agree­ment with), and bet­ter reward small busi­nesses and investors in those busi­nesses. He offered equal parts praise and crit­i­cism for Canada, and prob­a­bly got many atten­dees think­ing about what we have here, as well as what we might have. The sta­tis­tics and find­ings he quoted alone (and I wish I’d taken down more of them) were sur­pris­ing. Exam­ples: Canada has twice the rate of entre­pre­neurs as the US. Canada is in the best fis­cal shape of the G8. Canada’s rep­u­ta­tion among other coun­tries, or rather, it’s ‘brand’ is ‘peo­ple’, and is decid­edly more pos­i­tive than that of the USA (sur­prise, surprise).

Cybele Negris, who I know from work as the COO of Web­names, gave a very good overview of the new .mobi domain for cell phones; not too tech­ni­cal, not too sales-y. This is a hard thing to do, since it’s a rel­a­tively new top-level domain (like .com or .net) and still within the realm of techies, but shouldn’t be. The main issue is that North Amer­ica has to catch up with Asia in both adopt­ing it, and offer­ing wire­less data plans that don’t charge by the byte. At the end of her talk she announced that Web­names was offer­ing every­one at the show a free domain reg­is­tra­tion (a nice pro­mo­tion as this could in some cases be worth the cost of going to the show).

As for the show floor for me, I was extremely pleased with the reac­tion to my search for employ­ment. I have a stack of busi­ness cards in front of me from var­i­ous poten­tial employ­ers and recruit­ing firms , and many of them have ‘Send Resumé’ writ­ten on them. I handed out about 6 or 7 copies of the resumé to var­i­ous peo­ple on the show floor. It was not a ‘feed­ing frenzy’, but I def­i­nitely heard the mes­sage many times that many busi­nesses were hun­gry for hi-tech work­ers, and that my skills and expe­ri­ence were extremely valu­able. In the com­ing weeks and months we’ll see how that plays out. For now, the morn­ing after, I’d say that I’m very encour­aged by what I saw, the peo­ple at the booths who I talked to, and the gen­eral employ­ment pic­ture of Vancouver.

Party at the Fin­ish Line
After a long day of meet­ing strangers (for the most part), it was nice to relax and talk to some friends. The monthly blog­ger meetup was at The Whip, a bar/restaurant at Main and Sixth (East Sixth, just barely). Despite the S&M sound­ing name, it was com­fort­able and a good venue for the 9 of us who met at about 7PM.
The top­ics included the lat­est fad(?): Twit­ter, how to main­tain (or doc­u­ment) your good rep­u­ta­tion online, google bomb­ing, the Streisand effect, and what one post ever got the most traf­fic (whether you’re happy about it or not). Notable in her absence was Isabella, the group’s orga­nizer, because she was attend­ing to her daugh­ter giv­ing birth (which some of us learned via twit­ter!). After imbib­ing and talk­ing till about 10, we all shuf­fled off, in some cases to con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tions via blogs or twitter.

Now that I think about it, it was quite a con­trast from the day I went to Mas­sive in 2005. At the party after that show, I didn’t know a soul (but did my best). Last night, I knew every­one around the table, either online or offline. What a dif­fer­ence 2 years can make.