Need to do a perfect investment pitch? Stop reading inspirational blog posts and start hustling

posted by pete on August 3rd, 2010

Yesterday I participated in my first start-up pitch. I learned that you can prepare as much as you want for something, but you wont know what you’re going to do wrong until you start doing it.

I watched many videos and read no less than 25 eloquent articles from Hacker News on putting together the perfect deck. Things not to do in a pitch. What unfair advantages do you need?

We practiced our transitions and endlessly debated the subtle nuances of our screenshots. We needed to convey passion, trustworthiness and conviction while demonstrating the viability of our concept and being the kind of dudes you’d want to hang out with.

My preparations were not a waste. I learned a ton and was forced to ask lots of hard questions about what we’re working on. Luckily I really love business development and so even though I’ve been really anxious I can still say I’ve been having fun. People in our community like David Crow really stepped up to help, and I really encourage all of you wantrepreneurs to go through this process even if you have a rich uncle and don’t need to raise funds.

All of the preparation in the world couldn’t change the simple fact that we were doing it wrong.

Our idea is great but our first presentation was loaded down with “buzzword-laden socialist hippie kumbaya bullshit” and we failed to explain the core business value proposition on the first slide.

This was exactly what we needed to hear, and we’re already making great progress on changes. We want to nail it next time. We’re refactoring our pitch, the same way we iterate when we refactor our code. Luckily it was a “no harm, no foul” test run and all of the feedback we received was coming from a very positive place. (Thanks, Rick!)

Closing metaphor: let’s say you’re a pro hockey player who loves to skate. You could just skate all day! Thing is, your boss only cares about how many pucks you send into the other team’s net. You could be the best skater in the game, but you have to prove that you’re able to score or else they won’t let you see the ice.

Upcoming speaking engagements

posted by pete on July 22nd, 2010

I (Pete) have been speaking regularly about Open Data and Data Literacy. There are two upcoming opportunities to see what I have to say:

July 23, 2010: good people drinking wine and talking to each other in Toronto, ON

Pete believes that Open Data isn't just for geeks and economists anymore, and that Data Literacy for all would change the world. He's writing a future Oprah's Book Club title about how to get rich, expose corruption and win the Order of Canada using just Excel, some rope and a stick of gum.

August 14, 2010: FOSSLC 2010 in Ottawa, ON

The Open Data movement is picking up steam in a big way. Some government or NGO seems to announce plans for full transparency every week. Then you've got a guy like Rob McEwen creating billions of dollars of wealth when he decided to open source his gold mining company's geological data. Still, data today is like the web was in 1995... all over the place.

We need a data commons: a place for people to discover, consume, contribute, discuss and purchase data. This talk discusses how such an infrastructure could work, and how we must bring tools for working with data to non-technical individuals.

You can sign up to FOSSLC here.

What are the problems that need to be solved?

posted by pete on June 11th, 2010

As it turns out, humans are really bad at answering questions about what they need. Often if they knew they needed it, we would be competing to provide the best solution for it.

This is the difference between inductive and deductive analysis. An example of deductive analysis would be tasking a student with applying pattern matching to a known domain to find an expected result. Inductive analysis is when you don’t actually know if there’s an answer to be found. Obviously this is a bigger challenge with a more interesting payoff, but I believe inductive analysis is a skill that can be practiced.

Demand Media realized that humans were really bad at coming up with problems to solve, so they started buying bulk search engine results and harvesting queries where people did not find what they were looking for. They then farm out these non-obvious (and often highly specific) needs to videographers to produce low production value clips that nail these never sexy “how do I fix the towel rack in my bathroom?” type questions.

Demand’s properties dominate the search results advertising for the extreme long tail of semantic Q&A on the web. Last I heard they are releasing thousands of videos a day, and making hundreds of millions in revenues.

If you want to solve a big problem, apply the same inverse deduction logic to the question of which start-ups are really needed (vs. the ones people keep building over and over) and you will be the next Richard Branson.

Raising capital in Canada

posted by pete on May 14th, 2010

Today at the Toronto Software Developers Lunch there was some conversation about how hard it is to raise money for technology ventures in Toronto. I was surprised that this was considered to be the hard problem, as I’ve always felt like there’s always money nearby in Toronto if you’re talking about good ideas and have a great team.

Of course, I’m pretty outspoken about my belief that most ideas are terrible. We live in a world where someone who has no business founding a tech start-up can get investment, hire a team (who presumably need jobs) and launch to market all without talking to a single person that is neutral enough to tell you to stop while you’re ahead. I’ve personally told potential clients that they should take the money they were about to burn on a concept that would never work and invest it in an amazing vacation with their family.

So yeah, sometimes you should just stop. It can be hard, because it seems like many developers are compelled to build the same things over and over again.

But let’s say that you’re really on to something and you’re thinking about raising capital in Toronto. Sure, there’s MARS — they offer venture advice and host angel forums. There’s also StartupNorth and their occasional Founders and Funders dinners. We live in an incredibly networked city with events just about every night. Plus when you factor in SR&ED and other grants, it seems like Toronto is the best place on earth to build a start-up. After all, we get to build our products in relative secrecy if we desire it — something that would be impractical in San Francisco.

So without further ado, this is my list of resources concerning VC and angel investment. I’m not a huge fan of VC politics, so my advice will tend to skew towards angel backing.

If I launched a start-up — if you click on one link, make it this one.

Brad Feld’s Term Sheet Archives is a really deep library of raw information. Required reading before you uncap that fancy pen.

Series Seed documents are free-as-in-beer term sheets that many angels are now agreeing to use. This article discusses how they are different from from typical Series A financing documents.

All about F-shares. No, this is not a wife swap but instead an interesting class of shares separate from common stock that entrepreneurs can receive when founding a company. Many investors seem to dislike F-shares, but perhaps they need to open their minds, loosen up and pop another quaalude.

What is the right amount of money to raise at a start-up? Let me know if you figure that one out.

What’s the difference between an angel investor and a venture capitalist? This does a pretty great job of answering that question.

Angels are just people, and it pays to be able to approach them with a cause they can believe in. This is often what differentiates angel mentality from that of a venture capitalist. Did you know they used to be called adventure capitalists? This article talks about the psychology of an angel investor.

Venture Hacks has become a very good source of news and information for folks raising capital. However, what I really find exciting is their relatively new Angel List. The deal is that if you submit your pitch and they think it’s good, they will send it out to a huge list of highly influential angels — all of the big names including Ron Conway and Chris Dixon.

Of course, sometimes you really do want to go after VC money and it pays to know who the players are in Canada’s VC industry.

Finally, there are dozens of excellent interviews with founders, investors and dreamers on Mixergy which are chalk full of great information.

What am I missing? Comment and I will continue to update this.

And just before I hit post, I just want to say something real: man, do I ever hate raising money. It fucking sucks. I’m all for making money and building big dreams — some of us have chosen life paths that pretty much demand it. Sure, there are elements of all this that one could argue are relatively interesting… but I hate to think of how much human creative potential has been squashed by the necessity of knowing all of this crap to get anything substantial off the ground.

The State of HTML5 Local Data Storage

posted by joshua on May 10th, 2010

Of all the new features being implemented as HTML5, I think I’m most excited about offline storage. Despite more and more ubiquitous Wifi, despite the ability to tether our laptops to our 3G mobile phones, as web apps have become more and more sophisticated, the need to be online has often felt like the the last barrier separating the web and the desktop.

There are actually two kinds of offline storage on offer in HTML5. Client-side session and persistent storage (also sometimes referred to with the vaguely misleading “DOM Storage”, or simply “web storage”) is a simple, cookie-like key-value store. The key and value are treated as strings, but it’s possible to store more complex objects as stringified JSON.

If you’ve worked with cookies before, you’ll probably find yourself getting familiar with this storage mechanism pretty quickly. However, there are some significant differences between web storage and cookies:

• The browser sends all relevant cookies in the headers of every request, but web storage is held entirely by the browser, until explicitly sent somewhere by client-side scripting.
• Cookies have a built-in expiration mechanism, but data in web storage has no expiration – it will remain through page refreshes, browser restarts, OS reboots, etc. until explicitly deleted.
• While all relevant cookies are exposed to javascript through the cookies object, allowing scripts to “walk” the entire collection of cookies, there’s no such mechanism with web storage – if you don’t know the key, you can’t get the data.
• Note that unlike cookies, which can be restricted by server domain as well as path, web storage can only be restricted by domain. This can be a security issue for multi-owner sites that don’t use subdomains. It’s also possible to store data with no domain restrictions, making it available on any domain (but you still have to know the key).

The other kind of offline storage – variously called “JavaScript Database” (Webkit), “Storage” (Mozilla), Web SQL storage or “webdb” (various) – is far more robust. This is offline storage using real SQL – Webkit and Mozilla both use an embedded SQLite engine, and expose it through various client-side scripting interfaces.

Here’s an example taken from Apple’s developer documentation for Safari:

Unfortunately, unlike “DOM Storage”, the various browser vendors are less committed to standardizing on “webdb” – Opera’s support is still forthcoming, Webkit is fully on-board and shipping, and Mozilla has been vocally skeptical of the whole idea, and labels their API as ‘unfrozen’ – meaning it’s likely to change over time. There’s excellent documentation from both Webkit and Mozilla, but the APIs are drastically different.

Even worse than two drastically different APIs for the two major supporting browsers, the larger developer community hasn’t quite bought into SQL storage, yet. There are concerns that SQLite isn’t the most standards-compatible SQL implementation. Some had hoped to see the browser vendors adopt one of the modern, flexible, “document model” database formats, made popular by CouchDB, MongoDB and SimpleDB. For now, the W3C Working Group has officially declared SQL storage as being “at an impasse”.

In the mean-time, there are some interesting alternatives. If SQL storage sounds suspiciously familiar, it might be because it’s largely based on Google’s browser plugin Gears. Gears has some issues – like the need to handle cases when it’s not installed, or how to “encourage” users to install extra software (Gears is built-in to Chrome, but an additional install on other browsers), but it at least provides a consistent storage API across multiple browsers, and the additional Gears functions are pure gravy (background threads, desktop integration). Unfortunately, it seems development of Gears has stalled, as developer attention has shifted, with focus now on providing native support for these features in Chrome.

Another stop-gap solution is Paul Duncan’s PersistJS, which layers an abstract API interface on top of a variety of browser storage backends. PersistJS uses HTML5 native storage by default, Gears when available, and can fall back to Flash, and userdata behaviors for older versions of IE. (I should also mention that Dojo Storage has similar goals, but PersistJS seemed to cover more browsers, and has a smaller footprint.) Unfortunately, the cost of cross-browser compatibility is that PersistJS’s interface resembles the simple key-value storage you get with DOM Storage. While, as with DOM Storage, it’s possible to store serialized JSON in PersistJS (see examples here), some applications will suffer from poor support for more complicated data relationships.

I’ve been disappointed to discover that none of these implementation options provides any mechanism to support syncing data once the browser is back online! In today’s extremely social environment, the kinds of apps I imagine building with offline storage would need some mechanism to pull user data up to the server when the user is back online, and push any new data out to the browser. (Something like Caleb Crane’s Impel but without the baggage.)

I’m considering writing a javascript library that would layer jLinq on top of an implementation-obscuring storage API, but I suspect I’ll wait until Mozilla’s API reaches “frozen” status. I’d also want a library that would provide some kind of basic support for syncing, maybe something based on Thoughtbot’s Jester.

require 'date' — The 2nd Annual Ruby Job Fair

posted by pete on April 27th, 2010

We had such a blast with our science fair last year that we decided to do it again. This year we’re changing things up and going with a “speed dating” structure: 5 minute rapid fire interviews between prospects and would-be employers before rotating to the next person.

Sign up at http://rubyjobfair.ca/

The event itself will likely only take about two hours, but then we’re moving on to Part 2… we’re hosting a BBQ for all Toronto Rubyists on the roof here at Unspace. So even if you’re not interested in the speed dating rounds, you should 100% RSVP for the after-party.

The event will be on Sunday, May 30th at The Rivoli in the back room from 2pm (sharp!) until 4pm. After 4pm and until 9pm we’ll move next door to Unspace. We’re at 342 Queen St. W, Floor 3.

This event is designed to be light-hearted and fun. We want you to take it seriously, even though this might be the only formal job interview you ever have with an Old Fashioned in your hand. Make sure that you bring business cards and expect surprises. Last year we had a visit from Harinder Takhar, the Ontario Minister of Small Business!

Employment.nil? Job Fair was a success!

If you have any questions, let Meghann know. Also, if you work in a place that you could put up some postcards on a board, get in touch!

Stop trying to measure innovation and be a hero

posted by pete on April 2nd, 2010

In a recent post on his Radar blog, Tim O’Reilly asked ”How do we measure innovation?”

The variety of ways that people interpret Tim’s question supports the notion that ‘innovation’ has truly jumped the shark and become a catch-all buzzword. It is now the tech/business equivalent of describing a rock band as ’edgy’.

Science is the attempt to understand the natural world through repeatable experiments, while technology is the practical application of science to commerce or industry. Wikipedia suggests that innovation is “an invention leading to commercial or social reorganization”.

Alright, then — what are some of the many ways we can quantify innovation? Christian Gray suggests:

• buzz and profile
• impact and profits
• adoption rate
• ripple or trickle-down effect
• impact over lifespan

Bill Seitz cuts right to the chase, saying that it’s more important to ask why we care. If you type the word innovation more than once a day, you likely seek to:

• compare or rate companies and their products
• influence policy
• uncover demi-journalistic fodder

The last point sounds snarky, but it drives home Bill’s assertion that any metric — be it an index or comparison — is a filter on reality. The very notion of an innovation metric suggests that it will always support the outcome desired by its creator. This outcome is most frequently either the filing of patents… or the incessant and combative blather of tech tabloids.

In ”The Myth of Crowd Sourcing”, Dan Woods has a few things to get off his chest about innovation:

Crowds don’t innovate — individuals do.

The notion of crowds creating solutions appeals to our desire to believe that working together we can do anything, but in terms of innovation it is just ridiculous.

There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field. Frequently, these innovators have been funded through failure after failure. From their fervent brains spring new ideas. The crowd has nothing to do with it. The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing.

Jimmy Wales says that the vast majority of articles on Wikipedia are the product of a motivated individual.

There is no crowd of open-source developers ready to attack every problem. In fact, most open-source projects are the product of one obsessed individual who wrote the software to meet his own needs.

What bugs me is that misplaced faith in the crowd is a blow to the image of the heroic inventor. We need to nurture and fund inventors and give them time to explore, play and fail. A false idea of the crowd reduces the motivation for this investment, with the supposition that companies can tap the minds of inventors on the cheap.

Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere. Perhaps we’re abusing the word innovation when we should be proudly calling ourselves inventors?

TL; DR: Innovation can only be measured in the past tense. There is no way to predict whether an invention will come to be seen as innovative — or forgotten without consequence.

Saying that you’re an innovator rings hollow. It’s like referring to yourself as an Expert, or the CEO of a solo start-up. Don’t feel badly, as we’ve been trained to think in these terms by an industry that exists to profit by predicting future ‘innovation’.

And so, dear reader… which side are you on? Innovating for TechCrunch, or heroically inventing the future? Let your dreams be judged by their legacy, not some dipshit pundocrats with high follower counts and a slow news day.

unspace.ca is five today

posted by pete on March 8th, 2010

I realized this afternoon that I registered the unspace.ca domain five years ago today.

Ryan McMinn, Anthony Watts and I had gone through some hellish “branding” workshops trying to come up with a name for our new, quasi-legal partnership. We were just a project manager, developer, and designer sharing about 220 feet in an old sweatshop building on Spadina for about six months before we decided that we should band together and go after bigger fish.

Don’t be alarmed, but Unspace was almost called Orchestra.

Unspace was actually Anthony’s password (at the time, obviously) and when he proposed it, it was so much better than all of the other alternatives that we just acted on it immediately. The first Rails Pub Nite — the only one held at C’est What? before moving to The Rhino — followed shortly thereafter, which led to us meeting this crazy punk kid from Florida named Hampton.

It’s been quite the adventure. Ryan and Anthony have since moved on to other things, but we’re all still good friends. That is what’s most important to us.

Needed: Flash/ActionScript dev

posted by pete on February 16th, 2010

UPDATE: Thanks to all who replied. The position has been filled.

Are you a Flash developer with strong ActionScript skills?

We’re building a game-like web app that will play audio. We’d love to use HTML5, but browser support isn’t where we need it to be for this. We want a light-weight Flash mp3 player with a small resource footprint. It will be controlled exclusively via a JavaScript interface; there will be no visual user interface.

Here’s what it needs to do:

• load, store and play multiple sounds, possibly simultaneously (load via URL, cache with an ID, play from cache given the ID) - and able to load new sounds loaded dynamically
• expose methods to JavaScript for play, stop, pause, resume, seek to percent and seek to seconds
• register Javascript function callbacks for events such as “swf loaded”, “sound file loaded”, “sound is playing” and “finished playing”

We’re still working through the specifics of issues regarding mixing and simultaneous playback; we look forward to deferring to the experience of the right candidate.

It should also be noted that our client is open to this code becoming the basis of an independent open source project.

If you think you’re the right person to work on this short-term engagement, and have time to meet with us and ultimately complete it by the end of February, please send a brief introduction and an estimate for how much you would charge for this work. Linking to your Github repository is appreciated, so that we can review your previous work.

Attn: Joshua Wehner at audio-flash-dev@unspace.ca

The Fruits of Unspace Labour

posted by pete on January 11th, 2010

People often ask us what we're working on, and many times it's a hard question to answer. Whether it's because it's an internal system that can't be seen on the public web, or just something that takes a long time to get rolling for any number of complex reasons, Unspace often goes for long stretches when it probably seems like we're a little quiet.

Today is not one of those times!

CommunityLend

We met Michael Garrity in 2006 and were immediately impressed with his vision for social lending in Canada. He quickly brought Colin Henderson on board and we started to build the first version of what became CommunityLend.

Almost everyone at Unspace has worked on the project since, and the single most common question we get asked is "when is [CommunityLend] going to launch?" We've always explained that it's complicated; Michael had the foresight to seek regulatory approval before launching — a gotcha that temporarily shut down US competitor Prosper and got them fined millions of dollars.

Unfortunately it took several years to get all of the regulatory hurdles behind us, and in the interim there have been many changes to the original vision as well as new faces on their team, such as Duarte "ModernMod" DaSilva, who is part of the extended Unspace family now.

CommunityLend is now in a "soft-launch" state while they prepare their full rollout. They're already getting some amazing coverage in the media, my favourite so far being "Lending goes online" in the Financial Post.

Today, Michael uploaded a great video that quickly explains what CommunityLend is all about:

United Nations Global Compact

We met Venu Keesari at our monthly Rails Pub Nite event in 2007. He was a PHP developer interested in Rails that ultimately moved to New York City and took a job with the UN Global Compact.

The United Nations Global Compact is a strategic policy initiative for businesses that are committed to aligning their operations and strategies with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption.

Cloves Carneiro Jr., Joshua Wehner and Wesley Hodgson worked with Venu over the Fall season to relaunch the UNGC website on Rails. The new site went live at the beginning of January and new features will continue to be added.

One of the reasons we're excited about the UNGC project is that it's an example of an important, highly visible site running Ruby 1.9 in production. There's still a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt about Ruby 1.9 in the wild, and we're hoping that UNGC is a milestone that helps prove 1.9 is ready for primetime. Venu is pushing hard to get Ruby (and open source) solutions deployed throughout the organization.

Congratulations to all involved, both at CommunityLend and at the UN Global Compact.

VidQue and Nice Entity launch

posted by pete on December 7th, 2009

Last week Lukas Dryja launched VidQue, a major update to the site which was originally known as Nizmlab. TechCrunch says VidQue aims to build a better mousetrap by applying what you could refer to as a social filter to videos shared online.

Today Shawn Allison launched Nice Entity. Character entites serve as references to symbols, shapes and other glyphs that are not commonly encodable in HTML. They’re useful for displaying characters beyond the normal range of A – Z, 0 – 9 and the other standard punctuation marks present on the keyboard.

It’s always really exciting when the people we work with release new projects. Please check out VidQue and Nice Entity, and tell your friends.

Shiny, happy tech scene

posted by pete on September 4th, 2009

I admittedly lost interest in reading NOW and eye — Toronto’s two free weeklies — a long time ago. However, last week’s cover caught me eye.

The article essentially suggested that Toronto was a technology backwater, a series of failed promises and unrealized dreams — mostly because we don’t have Google Transit.

I have to take a particular umbrage at this notion, as most of my friends are the sort of people that work their asses off making sure the premise of this article isn’t true.

And so, I wrote a letter to the editor. Yesterday, they ran it:

What credentials does Joshua Errett have to write about technology in Toronto (NOW, August 27-September 2)?

Errett paints a dismal picture. Despite the efforts of some bureaucrats, Toronto is not “Silicon Valley North,” and hallelujah for that. Our vibrant and connected tech community actually gets results!

There have been more than 20 DemoCamp events, #hoHOTo has raised $35K for the food bank, and some of the hottest tech start-ups in the world are based in the GTA.

You can’t get coffee at Queen and Spadina without seeing a bona fide tech celeb, while geek socialites frequently have to make hard decisions about which event they’re going to hit up… on a Monday.

Errett goes on at length about Mozilla (yawn) but fails to mention that the open-source myttc.ca provides amazing transit trip planning today.

It’s significantly better than anything Google offers, and it was created by Kieran Huggins and Kevin Branigan right here in Toronto after they met at TransitCamp.

To describe Toronto’s tech scene as anything other than a shining example is just not reporting on the facts.

Pete Forde
Unspace Interactive
Toronto

200 Rubyists do it together with the lights on

posted by pete on August 6th, 2009

If you’re ever at a gathering whether a significant number of Rubyists are in attendance, don’t be so surprised if the room spontaneously erupts into a cacophony of vowel noises that sound vaguely like a Gregorian chant. This hmmmmmmm might gradually transition into “hissing and shushing” or arrhythmic rubbing and snapping noises which can be made with one’s hands.

Last year at RubyFringe there was a very important moment during Nick Sieger’s amazing Jazzers and Programmers presentation. Nick was playing short clips of jazz music as a way to illustrate the history and evolution of the art form, and how many concepts like improvisation and being in “the zone” are remarkably similar to coding. Back stage, I was genuinely terrified that people in the audience would be walking out; they came for talks about Ruby, and here we were teaching them about jazz.

Yet when I peeked out from behind the stage, everyone was paying rapt attention. When Nick played music, the majority of people closed their eyes and listened. I had a powerful epiphany: these people can learn new APIs on their own, but they came here to find meaning and be inspired. I no longer feared retribution!

My very first instinct as FutureRuby curator was to contact Misha Glouberman, a local artist, instructor, facilitator, and all around trickster. He’s best known for his long running Trampoline Hall lecture series, but what had captured my imagination was a video I’d seen online from his birthday party.

I asked Misha if we could collaborate on a version of these “Cobra” experimental noise workshops for the FutureRuby audience. This was a very risky creative decision, for both of us. As a musician and appreciator of sonic oddities, I see many connections with the spirit of the event, with Nick’s talk, with the nature of wild experimentalism that fuel folks like why the lucky stiff, whose Poignant Guide to Ruby drew me to this community in the first place.

Photo by Christian Metts

However, all of these roads go back to John Cage. He’s likely most notorious for 4’33”, a composition for piano which consists entirely of musical rests. That’s right, it’s just four and a half minutes of silence. However, his influence goes far beyond making fun of his wealthy patrons.

Could this whimsy be captured at FutureRuby? How would a room full of Rubyists respond to being told to put away their laptops so that they could make primitive, guttural noises for an hour?

Now, while I would never pick favourites I really think most attendees will agree that this session was a huge success. Not only was it a lot of fun, but 200 Rubyists did it together with the lights on. Go ahead and click on Misha to start the video.

I strongly suggest that you set aside an hour, put on a good pair of headphones, and blow this bad boy up to full screen so that you can get into the mindset. It’s pretty awesome; we had about 6 cameras going, and a really nice set of mics to capture stereo sound. You can really hear things moving around in space. I guarantee that you’ve never seen anything like this before, and certainly not with the faces of Yehuda Katz, Nathan Weizenbaum, and the jadedPixel crew in the audience. I don’t want to encourage anyone to jump around, but at 21:00 Misha succeeds in executing a sonic version of Conway’s Game of Life.

Thanks again to Misha for being an excellent performer, and thanks to the FutureRuby attendees who trusted me enough to let this happen. If you’re interested in making these sorts of noises again, Misha occasionally offers workshops through his Misha Glouberman School of Learning which I highly recommend.

Comic by Nick Wolfe of Name Removed

Logos have designers. Brands have managers.

posted by pete on July 30th, 2009

Unspace is working on a really cool design and user experience project for a client right now. Lukas Dryja (who runs his awesome boutique design consulting company Kolor out of Unspace HQ) and I found ourselves having a very interesting conversation about logos and brands.

Jayson Zaleski at Kolor had this to contribute:

An identity requires strategic thinking. If a company is to be successful in today’s saturated market of innovators and followers, it needs to command attention. Attention is gained through delivering a consistent promise within/through quality of product/service, fulfilling audience expectations in the established relationship, and brand projection. To be memorable, all of these elements require constant policing.

However, the brand starts with the logo. It is the most universally-applied element within the brand platform. Copy writing, photography, advertising and marketing all require very targeted and consistent messaging, yet the logo is the most important of all elements.

It needs to function effectively from a technical perspective:

• Does it reduce well?
• Does it hold up on screen without loosing detail?
• Does it gain attention on a t-shirt as well as on the side of a building?

Also, it needs to communicate who you are and some aspect about what your company does. It is your business card, introducing who you are when you are not around to do it yourself. If your logo fails to communicate your distinct personality, it will fail to resonate after it is out of sight (and out of mind). It needs to hold enough conceptual might in order to provide a visual palette for the brand.

A logo doesn’t just work in the middle of a white area… it requires a larger narrative, and this narrative will provide a dynamic environment for the logo to work within.

Now, I am but a lowly programmer… but I can tell you that the brand is not “just” a logo. A brand is a personality, a character. It’s a feeling that your customers associate with it when they think about you. Brand managers spend their time planning the persona of the business, and it’s a vital part of their strategy. They think of brands as people.

Close your eyes and picture Mr. Harley Davidson walking into a bar. You and I are both thinking of the same dude. That doesn’t happen by accident!

That’s why a clever logo and a catchy domain that is available is not branding. Like every other successful online business, your brand needs a visual language and identity of its own to stand out from the crowd.

Why geeks change careers

posted by pete on July 27th, 2009

I recently exchanged a few good emails with Joshua Fruhlinger, a journalist. He was working on an article for IT World about the reasons people might stop working on Microsoft tools in favour of open source solutions like Rails, WordPress or Drupal. The article came out today and I’m happy with it. My contributions are on page 3.

Thanks Josh!

I am hearing more and more geeks changing jobs, regardless of the current economic “situation”. I’m really happy that Josh focused on the role of fear in starting Unspace. Fear is a natural motivator, and on a base level it’s fear that keeps us growing.

Any readers recently switch jobs? Are you glad?