One thing I did notice amongst everything being presented is that with the exception of CakeMail that many of them obviously didn’t invest too much time in their graphic design department. Freshbooks wasn’t anything special to look at, Investmate to its credit was more of a technical demo, and SlashID was nothing to really write home about. Defensio wasn’t bad, though they’re going for a more understated feel. CakeMail had an original looking logo, and their website follows suit. Maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough, but it seemed all the presentations seemed to be more focused on the technical side then they were the aesthetics.

I’ll admit that yes, it was a StartupCamp so there were a lot of fellow techies there but there were also a lot of people who were obviously from investment groups. If you’re going to demo a product to anyone other that a Developer, Project Manager, or an otherwise tech-savvy individual, you gotta make it pretty. It doesn’t matter if you’ve programmed Skynet or a program that actually calculates Pi. If it’s ugly, you’re going to have way more of an uphill struggle with your audience.

I was a little let down on this point, because I was really hoping to glean some information on how new startups are presenting themselves to an increasingly-diverse populous. Globalization has sunk its claws into everything, and these startups are having to compete on a global scale, right from launch. They need to make sure that they stand out to the crowd. What’s the difference between them and their competitors? Why should we, the internet population, spend our dollars on you? What’s going to make us remember you more than anyone else? These were things I was hoping to see, and sadly I was a bit let down.

I was impressed with some of the ideas that I saw though. Investmate had the most of my attention, and most of the crowds as well. Their product was basically “stock market for stupid people”. Yeah they didn’t say those exact words, but the meaning was there. Their idea was sound, and they got a lot of good feedback on how to improve the presentation. They also got a lot of advice from people who have been in the investing industry for a while, and as such had much in the way of helpful comments. In the end I don’t see their idea being feasible as is, but if they changed their approach to working with a brokerage instead of against them, they’d probably have solid end product.

Another observation is that everyone in the startup community seems to be really, truly helpful. As long as you are not in direct competition with them, they seem more than willing to help you succeed. As the presentations went through, and comments made, I noticed that though blunt as the questions they were never meant in malice. Granted watching the FreshBooks guys catch fire, get ripped to shreds, and then basically got the red light was painful to watch. They got ripped into, but again not out of any sense of meanness merely just based from observations. I hope they learned something from it in the end.

It was a very educational experience and I am looking forward to attending more of them in the future. Thankfully there’s one happening in Montreal in January and another in February so I haven’t got to wait too long!

P.S. Did I mention that I was approached by a man who mentioned that he was the creator of Expedia.ca? Well I did. He’s a stunningly smart man, and really easy to talk to. He apparently sold it and helps startups now. That must be a fun life.

Highlights of the week include:

I hate InfoPath:
I know the idea behind the program is sound, and I’m impressed with the level of integration that Microsoft has managed to achieve with SharePoint 2007 and InfoPath. What I don’t like is all the very, very moronic design choices they made with the InfoPath GUI, the blatant limitations with the items therein (what program doesn’t allow tables to have id’s honestly) and the very depressing requirement of absolute URL references for important items. Items such as data sources, links, validation servers etc. I also dislike how trying to get a form from one server to another has way too many manual steps required. I shouldn’t have to upload the form, and then have to change the references in said form manually. There should be some sort of stream-lined upload process for that.

The concept of the product is great, but the execution needs work. Much work. I can only cringe as I see more work with this product coming down the line. At least I got it done on time, against the wire I should add. I didn’t even care if I got praise or not for this one. I just wanted it done.

A Half-missed Concert:
Richard got us some tickets to go see Spoon and The Ponys in Toronto. The tickets clearly stated that the show started at 10:15 pm. We whined because it was a late show and would be pathetic-looking at work but whatever. Suffer for the music and all that. We ended up getting there early so we decided to wander around Toronto’s harbor-front. It’s really pretty in a weird sort of way, especially at night. We found a whole wack of used book stores and had a look around. We both ended up buying copies of I am not myself these days: A Memoir. We made it back to the concert hall around 10 and walked in. We saw guys on stage setting things up, so we figured “great, we made it just in time. We’re so cunning.”

The band came out on stage and played… and played… and played. Don’t get me wrong: I love concerts and music, but an hour and a half set (without encores) is a little much. In any case they walked off stage and we waited for the next band to come out. Then the first band came out and played an encore. Richard and I were both rather confused by this taboo behavior but figured “it’s an indie show, they can do whatever the hell they want.” They finished up their three-song encore and walked off stage. Then they came on again. Now I’m getting annoyed. The lead singer had basically been masturbating with his guitar all night to the crowd and after nearly two hours I was getting sick of them. They finished their second three-song encore and walked off stage, this time saying they were done. Hurray!

Then the houselights came on, and everyone started leaving. Both Richard and myself were now suffering from a complete mindfuck, and it honestly took us like 4 minutes to realize we missed the first band completely. Apparently the time changed when they moved venues (originally at The Phoenix, they moved to the Kool Haus for reasons I don’t understand). On the plus side, we got a new book to read and got home about 2 hours earlier then we thought we were.

Coincidentally we don’t know which band we saw. We think it was The Ponys but we’ll never know for sure.

Oh and as an aside, I’d like to write a quick letter:

Dear Indie crowd,

Stop smoking so much fucking weed. Seriously. They didn’t have any smoke machines at that concert, and yet the air was hazy. And if you are going to smoke that crap, at the very least blow your smoke upwards, and not directly into my face. Actions like that tend to make me punchy.

Thank you.

Corey.

Friendsgiving:
Though not yet an official holiday, it was great to get so many of my friends together in one place. What made it even better was the fact that everyone brought something to contribute to the night, whether it was food or games or whatever. Dinner was fantastic, and the turkey was fantastic, the potatoes were great, and I did not know you could use maple syrup in so many ways. My pies were well received, and by the end of it all we were happy, stuffed little people.

Then the drinking started. And the games, and the Guitar Hero followed shortly after. The title of this post is actually the utterance of Bart’s brother as he played a game of Aliens vs. Spacemen, a game we created using a Jenga tower and some plastic aliens/spacemen. Believe me, there was much debate within the creation of the rules but I think we got something marketable.

I really hope this becomes a yearly thing, because it’s a great chance to catch up with people you haven’t seen much of, as well as an excuse to eat really yummy food.

I’m sure there were other things, but as my brain as the recall ability of a rock, this’ll have to do. Stay tuned for more reviews and the like. As an aside, I dislike the “More” tag. Don’t like how it works or looks on the site.

So i called up Marie; she’d have sex for free,
but for 10 bucks an hour she’d listen to me
Talk about rock stars and models on dope,
and why I can’t cope with this scene.

Every Monday – The Marvelous 3

Corey signing off.

With that out of the way, I figured I would list off the plugins I’ve currently gotten running along with validation as to my use of them. So here is the list (thus far):

• AdSense Manager – This baby makes handling, inserting, and the all around management of my Google AdSense advertisements. It allows for me to easily change the styles of the ads (of which I can create an unlimited combination therein) as well as insert them into my posts with little to no effort. Easy to set up and totally worth it.
• Category Cloud Widget – An elegantly simple plugin that allows me to show my categories displayed in a sort of cloud on my sidebar. Many people display these using tags as their cloud feed. I felt that I’d have too many cloud items in there and so I opted for this instead. Maybe one day I’ll swap ‘em up but until then I have this.
• Cryptographp – This plugin is actually disabled at the moment, though I had it running for a while and works like a dream. The idea is that it can stop spam-bots from commenting in your blog by requiring the user to enter a series of characters that are dynamically generated. Works well, I just turned it off for now.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – Simply put, this takes all the hard work out of adding JavaScript to each post as it does it for you. If you are wondering what Google Analytics are, it is a very impressive site statistics management system. Even better is the fact that it’s free, and if you sell ads with Google, it ties in with that as well.
• Hello Dolly – This is a default plugin that recites lines from the song in WordPress. What can i say? i like it
• NextGEN Gallery – A very impressive image gallery system. It allows for the management of images, galleries, and albums. It has additional functionality to display galleries as a flash-based slideshow, and uses some crisp JavaScript to handle the imagry (LightBo, ThickBo, etc). On top of all that it has a wide variety of customization options, and even comes with a sidebar widget to display images from your gallery (this is a separate plugin that I do not have enabled). For the record, this is the same plugin I use for all my posting images, as well as the wallpapers and Photos section.
• Share This – This plugin adds the ability for the end user to share your post on a variety of sites such as Digg and del.icio.us. No interface built into the back-end, which makes me a bit sad. Maybe in a later release.
• Twitter Tools – A plugin that integrates Twitter into your WordPress blog. The end result for this gives you options to create digest blogs of all the tweets you’ve made throughout the day, create tweets when you post, and display your tweets (or current tweet) on your site. I used the custom php portion of it to add a custom Tweet feed to the top of this site. It also allows you to write tweets from your WordPress site, allowing greater ease of use and less site-hopping.
• Smart Update Pinger – This plugin makes sure WordPress doesn’t ping my list of services every time I edit a post. And considering my spelling ability, that’s a lot of pings.

As you can see with the last item there, I have become a part of the Twitter community. What this is is a sort of micro-blog wherein you simply answer the question “What are you doing?” With the added plugin, updating this is fairly simple, though i have noticed that even though I’ve added a new item the plugin does not get it automatically. This indicates to me that it’s cached in some way. I’ll have to see if I can tweak that. I figure it’s a neat way to possibly generate traffic, and it can’t hurt to try and get out into the interweb communities more.

My friend Bart recently brought up the idea of fonts in coding, and what people use. He was flat out disgusted with my choice of “Verdana, 8px” not understanding why I generally choose it. The fact is with the small font i can simply see more code on the page at any one time. My workstation has a monitor that is flipped on its side, allowing me to have a resolution of 1024 x 1280 that I use for coding and branding purposes (1024 width).

I did realize that it is not a monospaced font, and after thinking about it I came to the conclusion that he was probably well-justified in his font-racism. I reviewed the font he uses, and I gotta say that it’s pretty slick. As a result I’ve swapped up for “Inconsolata, 10px.” I also got my hands on the new Komodo Edit 4.2, which I’m going to try out as my source editor to see if it can possibly replace EditPlus as my main IDE. I will state that I work with VS.Net practically all day, so this is more on a personal level.

And to end things off I will point out that I have been making subtle changes to the sites layout to get it where I want it. It seems to be coming along nicely.