Canada’s startup landscape is healthier than ever, as evidenced by the recent International Startup Festival in Montreal.

Putting aside the ambitious name (I would have selected something like the Canadian Startup Festival), the fact that it was well-organized and well-attended suggests there might just be some real traction within the startup community.

For too long, the landscape has been dominated by a supply and demand problem – lots of enthusiastic entrepreneurs chasing too little capital. That meant there was a lot of talk but not a lot of walk, because without financing, it’s difficult to develop an idea and drive growth.

A few key things have changed in the past year or so.

First, I sense entrepreneurs are more sophisticated, experienced, and creative about how they start, operate, and finance a new business. We’re talking about people who have been in the startup trenches, and are now starting to see the benefits of their toil.

Second, there has been a surge in the amount of seed and startup capital available. It’s far from a financing tsunami, but it’s a solid start. It means (hopefully!) entrepreneurs can get the money they need to take a real shot at building something. It doesn’t have to be millions of dollars, although it would nice it if that kind of dough-ray-me were available. Many entrepreneurs can go a long way with $100,000 to $250,000, using a lean and mean approach.

Third, we’re starting to see exits; nothing spectacular, but acquisitions nonetheless. The recent hit list includes Pushlife (acquired by Google), Tungle (RIM), PostRank (Google) and Five Mobile (Zynga).

What’s more encouraging is that, if you scratch beneath the surface, there’s an awful lot going on. In my consulting business, I’m doing a lot of work with startups and, as important, coming across a lot of startups during my travels. These are companies with great ideas working away in relative anonymity, until the time comes for some of them break out.

All in all, call me optimistic that Canada’s startup community is starting to see some serious traction after too many years of struggling. A lot more can be done but at least we’re getting there.

First published on markevanstech.com.

PARIS – It is a curious thing, to host the lions of the digital world in a series of tents in a public park. But that is what French President Nicolas Sarkozy did this week in Paris, for the so-called eG8 forum, a prelude to the G8 forum 173 km to the north-west, in Deauville. The police were out in full force along rue Rivoli, the hectic thoroughfare adjoining les Jardins de Tuilleries, as one might expect for an event commingling billionaires and high-level politicians. I watched a motorcyclist inadvertently bombard a roped-off side street, defended by a cordon of police, and thought he was lucky to escape with his life, as opposed to the scolding he got.

But the digs thrown up for the conference were decidedly déclassé. Were the usual likely venues in Paris all booked-up? Or was Sarkozy signalling to the mostly American attendees – the likes of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and John Perry Barlow, formerly lyricist for the Grateful Dead and more recently co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — that they oughtn’t get all up in that – that he and the other real world leaders would decide how the internet should be developed, while the digirati need only learn their place as electronic street performers?

In any event, Canada was as absent from the conference as you might expect. The subject was intellectual property, and, while we produce our fair share, we are not in any significant way a player in its distribution — not like the Americans and the Europeans (represented on the dais by Bertelsmann and Universal Music France). So there’s no point in feeling snubbed; we aren’t important enough to be snubbed.

But our lack of profile and influence in l’age d’internet doesn’t bode well for our economic fortunes in a world where silicon is increasingly the international currency. The lack of Canadian start-ups that might turn into players, the failing fortunes of our one major hardware manufacturer, RIM, and the Conservative government’s disinterest in creativity, the driving force behind all the achievements and innovations in technology represented onstage at the eG8, suggest we will remain largely hewers of wood, drawers of water, and processors of tar sands.

By the way, Parisian police apparently dealt with protests with a novel approach: simply not tolerating protests. Students of irony will note that this takes some of the power out of the G8 leaders’ endorsement of the “Arab Spring,” comprised as it is of nothing but protests. Meantime, a few thousand dissidents were tolerated last week in the city of Le Havre, across the river from Deauville. There, when property violence broke out, of the same sort seen along Yonge Street during the G20 last year, the protestors took care of it.

Nice job. Note to Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair: That’s how it’s done.

Last year at this time I predicted that a small revolution in web apps would occur in 2010, thanks to the introduction of Google Chrome OS, and may have implied that this would have a negative effect on the iPhone. I also expressed the opinion that, if all went well with the Google branded Nexus phone, Microsoft would follow with one of their own.

This year I will have to revise and amend somewhat, since Google did not introduce Chrome OS mid-year as planned, so the fallout from that will have to wait until the first half of 2011. Daniel Eran Dilger has written a piece on this over at appleinsider.com. Perhaps not surprising given the source, it has a bit of a pro-Apple bias. Dilger notes, for example that “Unlike the Chrome OS, these machines [Apple laptops and desktops] can run native Mac apps, can host X11 Linux apps, and can even run Windows apps in a virtualization environment.” This suggests that he doesn’t get it, in spite of having extensively quoted Google’s intention earlier in the article:

”Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems,” the company blogged last summer.

“We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up,” the company explained.

“They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.”

It is Google’s intention to out-iPad the iPad by offering a world where you don’t have to worry about apps or backups or where your data is, a world in which everything “just works.” A paranoid geek like myself won’t allow Chrome OS anywhere near any of my devices, because I care about where my data is and who has access to it and things like administrative access. It’s bad enough that they have my email, I’m not handing over everything to the buggers, even if they are my favourite corporation.

But that’s just curmudgeonly old me. If they can deliver on this vision of drop dead easy computing, Steve Jobs will find himself in the position of having to play catch up, and Microsoft will then play catch up to Jobs. Technologically it won’t be difficult for either of them. The killer will be that while they sell their stuff, Google gives it away free. That could be a very difficult dime for them to turn on.

In other 2011 news: I’m not going to predict the demise of the iPhone. That’s one area that I think is fairly secure for Apple. Though with Nokia’s introduction of the N8, I wonder if the iPhone won’t become just a normal smartphone, ceding the high end to others.

You may have seen articles like this one over at pocketgamer.biz, suggesting that Nokia isn’t doing so well against Apple since the iPhone is outselling the N8 by six to one even in Nokia’s home territory of Europe. (Pro-Nokia site noknok.tv offers a rebuttal.)

This is a little like comparing sales of Rolls Royce to BMW, and, if Apple doesn’t up the ante soon, maybe Lexus. The techno-elite have already turned in their iPhones, and now it is just for little girls. (I’m only partially kidding — Sara Yin over at pcmag.com reports that when considering the purchase of a smartphone, men prefer Android, women the iPhone.)

Microsoft did not release their own branded smartphone this year, instead simply releasing a new OS for phones, Windows Phone 7. I’m not going to predict a Microsoft branded phone for 2011. I think Google’s motivation for the Nexus was sluggish uptake of Android by third parties, and if Microsoft finds themselves in a similar situation, perhaps they will adopt a similar strategy. But if they haven’t copied Google by now, I don’t think they’re going to, especially if it is strongly adopted, or even moderately well adopted.

So if I can’t predict the death of the iPhone, whose demise can I predict? Ah, yes, the overused and much abused Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash. And who will kill it? A new specification for web pages, HTML5. This specification provides for much greater support of multimedia content. When those Chrome OS web apps come rolling out, they won’t use Flash. Look for them to be written in HTML5 with other supported specifications (for example, the latest in cascading style sheets [CSS]), and associated technologies. Flash will be a thing of the past.

The revolution has not been cancelled. Merely postponed. Until then, best wishes for the holidays and the new year.

Good, original content is the first and most important factor in getting and growing traffic, Peach explains. It not only draws potential customers in, but also keeps them browsing around and clicking on links and ads. For Lennard, creating content has had another plus side. “Sometimes it’s a struggle to find the words,” she says, “but I’ve been quite surprised to find out that I can actually write. I’m very proud of the writing I’ve done.”

Optimizing websites by using keywords is also important. Keywords are the terms — “pole dancing” for example — that visitors enter into a search engine to locate relevant information. When optimized, a site can more easily be found and categorized by search engines, improving its ranking and hence how easy it is to find.

That may seem like a lot of new jargon and esoterica to learn, especially for people who grew up in an era without computers. Fortunately, there’s just as much help to be had. “When I first started,” Peach says,”I knew very little about websites, but the hosting service I use has a self–study course that showed me how to put it all together.”

Now that Peach’s traffic has gone from under 100 unique visitors a day to over 400, she’s moved on to creating “pole dancing for fitness” DVDs. With retail and wholesale services like Kunaki and Amazon, it’s fairly straightforward. Once the video is produced, all she has to do is copy it to her hard drive and then upload to Kunaki along with the cover art. Getting on Amazon is a little more complicated and not as financially rewarding, but she says it gets her name out in cyberspace and drives more traffic to her site. “Though I don’t make as much with Amazon, I’ve already got one video up that’s bringing in $300.00 to $600.00 a month. If I could get three more up there, I think I’d be set!”

Like many Canadian women, Peach is branching out, exploring new employment territory, learning new skills, and stretching her comfort zone. Thirty–three percent of entrepreneurs in Canada are women and of those, over 58 percent are between the ages of 35 and 54. The largest growth rate in entrepreneurial endeavours, however, is being seen in women over the age of 55. In a tough economy, they’re finding innovative and creative ways to make a buck and stay sane.

And while not all will succeed, the gamble has more than paid off for Peach. Her directory has grown to contain listings for pole dancing studios in nearly every American state and Canadian province, as well as from countries all over the world, including a huge representation from the U.K. AdSense revenue has also been increasing steadily and her site’s ranking is improving daily. Not bad for a former 9-t0-9er, now turned pole-dancing WebMatron.

Quick Tips for Building a Web-Based Business

1. Find a niche market that is specific. Fitness and Health are broad topics. Narrow it down to something more specific like pole dancing for fitness or eating vegan on a budget.

2. Don’t monetize your site until you have at least 25 pages of content produced. There’s no use putting AdSense on your web pages if no one visits them. Google chooses the quality of ad that’s put on your website. If you don’t get much traffic, you won’t get the good ads.

3. Make sure the content on your site is relevant and well-written. Repeat traffic means increased revenue. If visitors find irrelevant or poorly written information on your site, they won’t come back.

4. Do link exchanges with related websites. Have a recipe for blueberries on your site? Find a site dedicated to blueberries and ask the webmaster if they’d like to put a link to your recipe. In exchange, you’ll link your recipe to their website. Spiders love sites with outgoing and incoming links.

5. Add video and pictures to your website. Make a how–to–video on how to make a blueberry cake. Upload it to YouTube, link it to your site and watch the traffic and AdSense revenue increase.

After a lot of hype and venture capital, Blekko launched today. For those of you not familiar with Blekko, it’s a new search engine that, like most of the search start-ups in recent years, has been billed as a new threat to Google.

While I haven’t had much of a chance to put Blekko through its paces, here’s hoping it is able to survive its debut to live another day. In other words, it would be good to see Blekko be given the benefit of the doubt rather than be hit with the criticism that cut off search start-ups such as Cuil and Wolfram at the knees.

Even before Google emerged as the industry Goliath, search has been a competitive and nasty business. Pre-Google, being king of search was a short-lived experienced. One day it was Lycos, the next day it’s Excite.

And since Google, the biggest challenge facing search start-ups is that the acid-test has been benchmarking its performance against Google. Wolfram, for example, which set itself up as a research tool, was savaged by critics because it paled in comparison with Google.

Another problem has been that many search start-ups have suffered from a bad case of hubris and over-hype. Cuil boasted about the billions of pageviews it had indexed, while Wolfram did little to dismiss the buzz it was the next Google. This is the kind of material that critics love to chew on because it provides a story with drama.

My first impressions of Blekko are that it provides good search results, although its real value may be the ability to make vertical searches from an original search query. I haven’t had time to fully explore this feature but it appears to be a smart way to differentiate itself from Google.

I was also impressed by how Blekko quickly responded to a comment that I made on Twitter this morning after I read a New York Times story about its debut. If you are a new search engine looking to win over consumers and technology watchers, being engaged on Twitter is a very smart idea.

Like many people, I did a query for my name. At first, I was surprised to see I ranked second, while Google ranks me first. According to Blekko, Mark Evans Art is the king of “Mark Evans” because it was recently bought by Boing Boing, which is sending a lot of traffic its way.

For more thoughts on Blekko, check out the following

- Danny Sullivan: “Blekko the “Slashtag” Search Engine Goes Live.

- Rafe Needleman: “Blekko Launches the Biased Search Engine”

Originally published on markevanstech.com.

The ever-changing Google homepage logo is usually my first clue that it’s Earth Day or that PacMan has turned 30. It’s informative, whimsical, and a Thing To Look At while I type in my search terms. But today’s logo, made up of colorful balls that seem to flee your cursor, has people so baffled that they are trying to figure it out. Which is itself baffling.

People have been slinging out theories with Tuesday-after-a-long-weekend-like zeal. Is it to celebrate Google’s birthday? A charming theory, but Google doesn’t technically have a birthday, PLUS a series of bouncing balls is not a cake, nor a present, nor birthday beats. But maybe it alludes to the birthday of Friedrich Kekulé, whose chemical valence theory came to him in a vision of bouncing atoms? Google’s doodles can be random, but this is slightly whoisthisguyandwhatisavalence. Is it to show off how fast Google is? Because even though there are things moving on the screen, it can still find your shit? I can also pat my head while I rub my stomach. Will we all find out tomorrow? <- This is an actual theory, and now my go-to theory for all mysterious happenings.

This is like trying to suss out why the star makes Super Mario invincible, or what classes Bella was taking besides Biology the year she met Edward. There’s probably an answer, but the fact that we’re looking for it means we have Too Much Time on our hands. As this article clearly indicates, I have too much time on mine.

Apple’s iPad has been out for awhile now, long enough for tons of opinion pieces to be written, so no need for me to add to the noise, especially when so many of my reservations have been so well expressed by none other than Adolph Hitler. Apparently, for him, the final straw was the iPad’s lack of multitasking.

 
Hitler’s final verdict is to wait for the HP Slate. More generally, one could simply say “wait.” The competition will no doubt include more features at better prices.

Remember, Google’s Chrome OS is on the horizon, and it could be just as much for tablets as for netbooks, as speculated on over at hothardware.com.

It would be an understatement to say that Hitler was wrong about many things, but in this case I think his take on the iPad is correct. Competitors won’t even have to scramble to come up with something better, they’ll simply include those basic features which people, dictators and regular folk alike, want.

Why did this happen? Was it a case of rushing so that they could enjoy the same first to market advantage they did with the iPhone? The inevitability of this product niche seemed pressingly tangible, though that was in part driven by the hype about their tablet, fueled by their own leaks. Was it as crunchgear.com implied, a play to squeeze extra money out of customers by selling them add-ons? There isn’t going to be a multitasking add-on, that’s just how the thing works, so some limitations can’t be explained that way.

Whatever the reason, it won’t be long before the iPad fails to carry with it the panache of other Apple products. Even the Apple fan boys may find themselves saying along with Adolph, “This is the first time in a long time that Apple has disappointed me so much.”

2010 could prove to be the year of the iPhone killer, but, if so, Apple’s bereavement will simply be collateral damage in the ever-raging battle between giants Microsoft and Google. Google’s Android on a Google phone won’t deliver the death blow, but it will be a sign of the end times.

Android is an operating system for mobile phones. Rather than come out with a device of their own, Google created an operating system and waited for device manufacturers to snap it up. An interesting strategy, but somewhat flawed, given that manufacturers didn’t exactly stampede over one another to release Android-based phones.

Perhaps compensating for their over-optimism, Google has now decided to release a Google phone. The official announcement is scheduled for tomorrow, January 5th, but Engadget is offering a sneak preview.

In terms of geek chic, I predict that this will be the phone to have in the first half of 2010, especially while it’s hot, new, and unavailable in Canada. But an iPhone killer? At the risk of sounding jaded, I have to say, no, it’s just another smart phone. A great deal of its geek appeal will be simply that you can’t get a googlier Android phone than one from Google themselves.

The real iPhone killer will emerge towards the end of the year, or perhaps in 2011. Peparing the way will be Google’s own operating system, Chrome OS, scheduled for release mid-year. While not quite the same as the Chrome web browser Google recently released, it might be regarded as a natural extension — a completely netcentric OS.

Initially Android OS and Chrome OS will exist as independent operating systems, but eventually they will merge. At that point it may not be any specific hardware that kills the iPhone, nor even Chrome OS. It will be the so called “cloud” of cloud computing, where all your apps are “out there.” No need to buy little apps from app stores, all will be free, whether from Google Apps or other cloudware providers. Chrome OS will merely be the harbinger, the herald trumpeting the new day. Well, not that new, actually, since Google Apps has been around for some time now. But to the desktop user, Google Apps is just more free stuff from the fine folk at Google, whereas with Chrome OS it will be The Way.

So, the main contenders in the OS wars of the future will be Google and Microsoft, and Apple and Linux merely unfortunate bystanders. All a mobile phone will need to access the cloudware universe will be net access and a good browser. Opportunity for device mystique will be diminished, possibly even to the point of neutralizing Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field. Meanwhile, the netbook niche will be even more challenging for Linux if it has to compete not only with whatever Microsoft comes up with to replace XP on netbooks, but also with a new contender, Chrome OS.

Of course, this only so much speculation. What seems certain, however, is that once the dust settles on the Google phone, if it looks like success, count on seeing a Microsoft phone as well, perhaps as early as the end of this year. Microsoft always comes late to the game, but then makes up for it by leveraging their virtual monopoly on desktop operating systems. Given that this has little to do with the desktop and that Google has a significant lead, it will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple of years.

I was chatting with a friend about the high cost of textbooks, and he recalled a young woman of his acquaintance from his university days who made some extra cash by selling photocopies of textbooks. I didn’t ask how she did this. Did she hang around on campus wearing a big raincoat lined with illegal photocopies going “Psst, wanna buy the psych 240 text? Only $40, less than half what the bookstore is charging”? Or perhaps she had a table in a smoky corner of the campus drinking establishment and people would pass her an envelope of cash and the name of books to be copied.

We could do the story of Textbook Tammy as a movie in the film noir style. She is wanted in 20 states for copyright infringement, and is top of the FBI’s most wanted intellectual property infringement list. We could fit it to an appropriate formula, with lots of danger and exciting escapes from federal agents, but if we showed the photocopying at all, it would be in a montage that lasted less than a minute. That montage would represent hours and hours and hours of photocopying, and illustrate that Textbook Tammys have never been a real threat to the university textbook publishers. On a per hour basis, their operation simply wouldn’t be profitable enough to justify the extreme monotony of copying books on a flatbed copier or scanner.

Today, of course, duplicating books is a piece of cake for a large organization like Google, which can afford automated page turning scanners in the five figure range. But that sort of kit is out of Textbook Tammy’s range. Does this age of high tech wizardry have nothing to offer her and other villains seeking to make or save a few bucks off the ridiculous price of textbooks, perhaps in the process doing damage to the spines of the source texts? In the end is low tech print the best form of DRM — totally open, but a royal pain in the arse to reproduce?

Daniel Reetz to the rescue! Turns out you can make a book scanner from odds and ends and garbage you find lying around! Granted, it doesn’t automatically turn the pages for you, but something like this should be in every university library — so much better for books and journals than a flat bed copier or scanner.

 
In making the plans available, Daniel appears to have started something of a movement, the hub of which appears to be the web site http://www.diybookscanner.org/. It has been apparent for some time now that digitized information “wants to be free,” but with this tech in the hands of legions of do-it-yourself types . . . well, let’s just say that if publishers are concerned about Google digitizing everything, their concern may be misplaced.

G-MAN #1: Damn it, Textbook Tammy’s given us the slip once again!

G-MAN #2: Don’t worry, she’ll show up again on some campus somewhere. She’s a bad penny.

[Shot of Textbook Tammy driving on the highway in her little MG convertible, cigarette hanging out of her mouth. ]

G-MAN #1 (voice over): I don’t know if it even matters anymore. With this crazy new technology, what if other kids get the same idea?

G-MAN #2 (voice over): My god, a whole generation of Textbook Tammys!

[Shot from behind of Tammy's MG driving down the highway into the sunset.]

That someone was Scott Madry. According to National Geographic, Madry got the idea when he read of an Italian who accidentally discovered an ancient Roman villa while doing the first thing most people do upon discovering Google Maps — checking out where he lives. If archaeologists have money in the budget, it can be worthwhile to pay for services where one can do fancy tricks like look for things in the infrared, but for the archaeologist on a budget, much of interest is discernible in plain old visible spectrum satellite images. Madry discovered 101 features in Central France using Google Earth.

It is said that Arthur and his knights still descend from the hill on Midsummers eve to drink from the well of the church at Sutton Montis. I had assumed that was the church in the bottom left corner of the Google Maps image above. I stayed across the street from it one Midsummers Eve way back in a time before there were ISPs, but didn’t hear any body of knights or Roman style cavalry trotting about outside.

Perhaps, though, that wasn’t the location of the mystic well from whence they drank. The sharp eyed will note a strange circular feature in the lower right of the image. Let’s zoom in on that.

For the amateur archaeologist or tourist Google Maps can be useful not only for discovering the undiscovered, but also for investigating the already discovered. There’s no excuse now for blithely walking by mystic wells without even knowing.

Here is another interesting thing I discovered in another part of the world.