Courtesy of Flickr's kohtzy

One of senior team members, VP of Engineering, Dave Orchard flew down to San Francisco last week to check out two conferences, f8 and Inside Social Apps. He has written a detailed blog post about the take away messages from f8, including some really cool technological announcements that were revealed. For a more detailed read, you can read his blog post on our tech blog.  I’ve cross-posted a sneak peek of the post below…

I think the biggest announcement is a combination of announcements, so let’s start with the top-down view. What Facebook can now do is be the gatekeeper for all aspects of personal information. If you like a movie, song, restaurant, article, person…whatever…on a 3rd party site like imdb.com or yelp.com, that site will notify Facebook. Then Facebook will update your profile in real-time! That itself is simply amazing, that the profile you statically filled out on sign-up and never revisited is now real-time with you. But wait, there’s more. Applications that you have added can subscribe to your profile and changes, and will be notified, typically in less than a minute. In fact, they will try up to 5 times and keep the callback for up to 24 hours.

Courtesy of Jeremy Lim

We were very happy to be a part of the F5 Expo featuring Malcolm Gladwell last week. Michael was on a panel titled, The Secret to Success: Avoiding Start-Up Pitfalls with Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite and Danny Robinson of Bootup Labs. As you could imagine, the CEOs gave their best advice to existing and future entrepreneurs about the how to avoid the pitfalls of start-up land. In Michael’s case, he advised the audience remember that as an entrepreneur you’re going to be judged not just on how well you succeed, but also how well you fail. Besides their insightful and entertaining panel though, there were a lot of refreshing ideas floating around at the day long event, so I wanted to share some of those with you.

To start, local business consultant and author Todd Maffin’s keynote expressed the importance of keeping a healthy balance between working in a highly demanding tech environment and your personal life. For him, 16-hour non-stop days took a toll, eventually leading him to crash-and-burn. His was an inspiring story of triumph to learn from. Thankfully, Todd is back better than ever.

The rest of the day’s agenda included panels about interactive marketing mostly. The cost effective ways to market online video were discussed as well as cloud computing and search engine marketing methods. I attended a panel on mobile applications and the message was clear: understand your business objectives, know your market and THEN see if building an app fits the MO (just because everyone has an app out there doesn’t mean that you need to build one too). To me, the most interesting topic was about social media and social networks and how we can use it as a tool to innovate (questions about social media marketing and the relevance of Twitter dominated most of the Q&A period). So it was no surprise that Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote addressed social media and social networking. Michael and I had a lengthy discussion about what we thought Gladwell’s main points were and we settled on this:

I think one important point he was making was this: Social media and social networking tools are very good at making connections that spread broadly through a population. This can be very good. It has the unintended consequence that the connections so created are not very deep. For this reason, it’s good at things like finding a job, or learning about how people are changing their behaviour around climate change. It’s bad at things that take high levels of trust, like revolutions. If we want to build deep trust relationships, of the type you need for revolutionary change, then we need to recognize the limitations of social networking technologies and find ways to account for those limitations.

Personally, I also agreed with others in the audience who suggested that maybe social media is not meant to start revolutions. However, when we examine how social games with a purpose, for example, could raise millions of dollars for Haiti relief or to save the rainforest, it’s a tool that you can’t ignore. When a simple game can call to action millions of users to make a big impact to real world problem, that is something more than being an “instrument of status quo,” as it is according to Gladwell. What do you think? As always you can leave us a comment or contact us.

Courtesy of Flickr's khanklatt

Last week, I read an article by Tony Wanless for BC Business Magazine called, A Cascadian Creative Corridor. It explored the potential that the interactive industries of Vancouver and Seattle could hold (and what that environment might look like), if they became more convergent. While I wanted to touch on some of the points he made, his post was also timely because the next day, DigiBC and the Washington Interactive Network (enterprise Seattle) actually signed a Memorandum of Understanding to get the ball rolling on this initiative. The partnership is intended to help foster the innovation, collaboration and foreign direct investment between the Vancouver and Seattle interactive communities. Besides the fact that our very own Michael Fergusson was invited to be a part of an executive top level discussion that took place before the signing, I wanted to mention a few points that were brought up after the event. (The VX Roundtable was an invite-only discussion.)

My take away from the presentations was that Seattle and Vancouver are both at the top of their class when it comes to being interactive gaming hubs. Citing a competitiveness study that was recently released, both cities house the best and the brightest in the interactive industries. Not only that, but our standard of living, quality of educational institutions are favourable the the folks who work in our industries.

As far as social gaming start-ups are concerned, the message from both sides of the border was similar about the potential that lies ahead in the space. The social gaming industry is changing the general way we think about games and who is playing them, which opens up new avenues for marketing and branding purposes. Furthermore, it seems that the revenue generation models with microtransactions at the heart are becoming more profitable. This is definitely something traditional media, larger gaming companies and businesses might want to take note of.  As an example, Seattle-based Detonator Games said that just a few years ago, building a Facebook game was in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, this value has almost doubled. Casual social games are starting to compete with larger multi-million dollar console games, but only cost a fraction of those games to make..and the engagement levels are unprecedented (more than 80 million people play Farmville, a popular Facebook game). Seems like a perfect formula for success.

What are some other thoughts that circulated around the event? Some people in the audience did mentioned concerns around currency and tax issues, however it seems that part of this partnership would most likely tackle them. Mr. Wanless offered some other benefits in his article, mainly that it would support talent exchange between the countries. He also mentioned putting Vancouver closer to the U.S.’s orbit of influence. He mentions that maybe through this partnership we can grow our “Cascadian Interactive Cluster” significantly enough, so that we can peek-out from the Valley’s shadow. (I personally don’t think this partnership was designed for that purpose, but that’s up for debate.) He also mentions that this partnership could bring some of that “American gung-ho, let’s-do-it, attitude” to the BC business scene (which tends to be more conservative). And who doesn’t like gung-ho? Overall, this partnership sounds promising, especially for smaller companies that might have a vested interest in doing business exclusively in the U.S.  For us, we’re certainly looking forward to seeing how this will benefit local start-ups. What are your thoughts? As always, you can leave a comment or contact us.