Initially, I thought that I should wait for the second-generation iPad, which would likely contain forward and backward facing cameras, a faster processor, more RAM, better resolution, 4G network support (WiMax, LTE), etc… needless to say, I’m not too upset that I made the switch earlier than originally anticipated.

The ultimate use cases include the ability to connect to all my cloud-based documents, spreadsheets and presentations using documents-to-go premium (connects to Google Docs, Dropbox, MobileMe and other services) and to have a form factor that allows me to easily read RSS feeds (using Feeddler) and quickly clip news stories to Twitter, Facebook, email and Evernote. It also doubles as a good mobile blogging client (writing this post from Wordpress for iPad).

Speaking of Evernote, I have also recently made the switch to clip and tag various elements of my life through its MacOS, Windows7, Google Chrome (browser extensions), iPhone and iPad apps — awesome!

Some essential news apps include Bloomberg, WSJ, NY Times, AP and Globe2Go (if you subscribe). For weather, get Accuweather Cirrus.

One disappointment was that I couldn’t download and register with Netflix, which I wanted to use for streaming movies and TV shows; Netflix, if you’re listening, please come to Canada soon!

I’ve included screenshots of my first 2 pages of apps for your complete review and you’ll notice that a few legacy apps from the iPhone have still made it to my list including Skype, which allows me to easily call anyone using Skype-out minutes (bonus: connect via Bluetooth handset for a very phone-like experience.

Page 1

Page 2

So, what am I still missing?

The theme for Toronto’s 2^nd annual TEDx conference is “A Call to Action”. We, the organizers, want to see real change come out of the event. We want speakers to challenge attendees and we want attendees to challenge themselves and each other. A Call to Action is our challenge to everyone who comes across TEDxToronto to be passionate, excited and driven to make positive change happen.

So far, we’ve got an extremely good lineup of inspirational speakers who are doing magnificent things. The line-up (so far) includes:

• Bruce Poon Tip, Founder of GAP Adventures
• Tonya Surman, Founding Executive Director of the Centre for Social Innovation
• Dr. Catherine Zahn, President and CEO of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)
• Trey Anthony, Creator and Star of Global TV’s “Da Kink In My Hair”

My role in this event is to help drum-up some sponsorship activity. After all, what company or organization doesn’t want to be affiliated with thought leadership, passionate and driven individuals and folks that change the world?

We are currently seeking sponsors for the following categories:

• Innovation Sponsor: $10,000+
• Inspiration Sponsor: $6,000+
• Conversation Sponsor: $4,000+
• After-Party Sponsor: $2,000+

Most companies and organizations choose to sponsor TED events because they want to leverage ideas, technologies, design, and education to help create a better future; because they will be investing in the creation of a community who believe in the power of ideas worth spreading; and because they believe in bringing together corporations and individuals who want to be change agents surrounding remarkable thinking and ideas.

Please contact me or leave a comment below with your contact details if you’re interested in sponsoring this year’s TEDxToronto event. I’ll make myself available to answer any questions, concerns or comments that you have and make sure that your organization gets the spotlight it deserves at the conference!

More info @ TEDxToronto 2010 Announcement

The Five Whys

The Five Whys, which has its origins in the Toyota Production System, believes that the root of every problem (including technical problems) is actually a human problem. As demonstrated by Eric Reis on the HBR Blog, here is The Five Whys applied to a startup:

1. A new release broke a key feature for customers. Why? Because a particular server failed.
2. Why did the server fail? Because an obscure subsystem was used in the wrong way.
3. Why was it used in the wrong way? The engineer who used it didn’t know how to use it properly.
4. Why didn’t he know? Because he was never trained.
5. Why wasn’t he trained? Because his manager doesn’t believe in training new engineers, because they are “too busy.”

The Three-Minute Rule

This rule can and should be used to better understand your customers. The Three-Minute Rule should be used to better understand the broader context around how your customers are using your product (and what other features may make sense, given their typical use cases). If you’re a CEO or a Product Manager, chances are you are living and breathing the product. Typically, surveys and focus groups can tell you a lot about your customers, but sometimes other approaches can be much more valuable. Enter, the Three-Minute Rule: call up a customer and ask them what they are generally doing three minutes immediately before using your product and three minutes immediately after using your product. Having them run through this scenario allows you to better understand their challenges and complexities; you may learn new sales techniques, develop new insights for potential product features or identify a cross-selling opportunity with another product/service that your company already offers. Anthony Tjan offers some additional insights on this at HBR.

Back to the main point of this thread — I’ve been talking about this situation for roughly 3.5 years now — first in the biotech/life science VC community in Toronto and now with the ICT community. I believe there is one problem at the root of both sectors — we need a kick-start in Canada.

What does that mean, a kick-start? Well, most people believe that there is a fundamental funding gap in Toronto’s venture community between pioneering research (in universities, by startups, etc…) and venture capital finance-able deals. That may be the case, but that is a different argument for a different day. I believe there is a more substantial funding gap that exists once a ’successful Canadian company’ reaches the point of raising a round of capital greater than $15 million. The existing VCs in the community (generally) just can’t get those kinds of deals done. It’s not in our Canadian cards (given the average fund size, risk thresholds, etc…). Canadians need later-stage financing options (or Government money) to back those deals and to create a better later-stage ecosystem.

So, what happens instead? Great Canadian companies knock on the doors of VCs South of the border who are flushed with cash and willing to invest larger amounts in later rounds. For the record, I love US VCs. However, for the purpose of this discussion, or monologue rather, they have tended to bring companies close to home to minimize their geographical risk with the investment. Now, as companies continue to grow and are eventually sold, the successful founders and key employees of those companies often (not always) stay South of the border to further progress their careers — joining US companies, or launching other companies in those locales. Worse for Canada, those successful folks often reinvest in US VC funds or Angel invest in other local US companies rather than Canadian startups.

Envision that cycle reoccurring over and over for the last 30 years. The trend becomes large enough that a substantial amount of capital, and human capital for that matter, gets lost from the Canadian startup ecosystem.

Some say that there is a lack of venture capital in Toronto because there just aren’t great deals. I disagree. I think that there is a lot of talent in Toronto and in the surrounding areas, like Waterloo for example.

Now, the scenario I’ve described may not be the only reason for the lack of capital in Toronto (or Canada), but I feel that it is a significant part of the problem. What are your thoughts?

Of course, there are several approaches that you can take to figure this out. In fact, I’d love to hear feedback from others below. At the onset of determining your feature set, it helps to have a good understanding of what your users want. However, please keep in-mind that the features your business chooses to develop must also fit the long-term vision for your product. If you stay short-sighted for too long (i.e. fulfill immediate needs of your customers), you may fall into a habit of being reactive as opposed to proactive in developing new and innovative feature sets.

One method that I like to use is taking a holistic view of each feature that would be under consideration for development and figure out its net business value ROI, where [Return = (measured) Business Value] and [Investment = Development Time spent (on a given feature)]:

Step 1. Approximate how long it would take to develop/integrate each feature into your product.

Step 2. Measure the Business Value that each feature would add. Business Value could be things like increase user retention, increase monetization, increase viral or other distribution, increase engagement or any other metric that you find adds value to your business. You may need to approximate a business value here. Choose a scale that works for your metrics and try to stick to it.

Step 3. Work our your ROI = (Business Value / Development Time) for each feature. You will begin to see which features are going to be big payoffs in the long-run.

Most recently, I have been using SCRUM processes to manage products. Do you use SCRUM? If so, what tweaks have you made to the SCRUM process that you’ve found improved teamwork, decreased iteration time and led to better product-wide planning?

I recently read the book called Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data by Stephen Few. Although it took some digging to find real value, there were great nuggets of wisdom scattered throughout.

Getting back to the sole premise of a dashboard – its purpose is to act as a visual display of the most important information (note: not ALL information) needed to track progress toward your stated goals. In designing your dashboard, it is extremely important that the information is consolidated onto a single screen so that each metric being tracked can be viewed together – at a glance – so that the user can pick up on any trends and relationships between metrics and overall goals.

The book cites two great quotes that drives this concept home and explores a new facet of this equation, our visual perception:

“Dashboards and visualization are cognitive tools that improve your ‘span of control’ over a lot of business data. These tools help people visually identify trends, patterns and anomalies, reason about what they see and help guide them toward effective decisions. As such, these tools need to leverage people’s visual capabilities.” (Source: Richard Brath and Michael Peters, Dashboard Design: Why Design is Important)

“[We should be interested in visualization because the human visual system in a pattern seeker of enormous power and subtlety. The eye and the visual cortex of the brain form a massively parallel processor that provides the highest-bandwidth channel into human cognitive centers. At higher levels of processing, perception and cognition are closely interrelated. However, the visual system has its own rules. We can easily see patterns presented in certain ways, but if they are presented in other ways, they become invisible… If we can understand how perception works, our knowledge can be translated into rules for displaying information. Following perception-based rules, we can present our data in such a way that the important and informative patterns stand out. If we disobey the rules, our data will be incomprehensible or misleading.” (Source: Colin Ware, Information Visualization: Perception for Design, Second Edition)

Limitations of Man

Unfortunately, even the best of us are limited by our biological construct. Humans have limited short-term memory capacities and this is the main reason why information that belongs together shouldn’t be fragmented across multiple pages or dashboards. Once one set of information is no longer visible, it loses its position in short-term memory (unless you have a photographic memory, I suppose); on the flip-side, if all information is within one field of view, your brain can rapidly process information to and from your short-term memory. [HR Moment: If you’re hiring, consider those with photographic memories for data analyst positions!]

Effective Design

To design a most-effective dashboard, ensure to only include information that you absolutely need, in its most summarized form (without the loss of crucial value). This is where the KISS principle (”Keep It Simple, Stupid”) shines bright. The information should be well organized, condensed, specific to its audience/objectives and displayed concisely and clearly with emphasis on the data itself and not on background graphics or fancy designs (which tend to lose meaning and value quickly).

In reading the book, there were a few graphs that I found used space in a very effective way, whilst also allowing the dashboard reader to effectively take in a number of data points in a glance. The first of those graphs is called the “Bullet Graph” (details of how it works in diagram):

The second graph is called a “Pareto Chart” and below is demonstrated in a sales capacity, which quickly shows off what proportion of overall sales is contributed to by each product. Think about measuring the sales quota of each sales employee as a percentage of total sales (this will help sales managers know who to keep and who to let go using a clear and measurable decision-making tool:

My favourite graph, however, is the Sparkline. Its simplicity is unmatched and its span can be adjusted according to the scale you which to present. It is also great for summarizing large datasets into a small graphics that can be displayed alongside each other in dashboards. Sparklines are particularly good for analyzing trending data. In fact, this is used by Google in its Google Analytics product (below, Sparklines on the left of data and represent 3-month trending curves).

At the end of the book, Few shows a few sample designs of dashboards. I think these are among the best dashboards I have ever seen from a design, usability, trending and notifications standpoint. I have included images of dashboards for both sales managers and CIOs below, as designed by Stephen Few and presented in the book.

Sales Dashboard

(Source: Information Dashboard Design, by Stephen Few)

CIO Dashboard

(Source: Information Dashboard Design, by Stephen Few)

Here are some of the key take-aways:

1. Number of registered users: 105,779,710 (1,500% growth over the last three years.)

2. Number of new sign-ups per day: ~ 300,000 (More recently, 60% of new accounts were from outside the U.S.)

3. Number of new tweets per day: 55 million

4. Number of unique daily visitors to the site twitter.com: ~ 180 million. (That’s actually dwarfed by the traffic that flows through twitter’s API – 75% of traffic is through the API.)

5. Number of API requests per day: 3 billion

6. Number of registered apps: 100,000 (from 50,000 in Dec/2009)

7. Number of search queries per day: 600 milion

8. Twitter’s instance, of their recently open-sourced graph database (FlockDB), has 13 billion edges and handles 100,000 reads per second.

9. Number of servers: “… in the hundreds”

10. BlackBerry’s just released twitter app accounted for 7% of new sign-ups over the last few days

11. A NY Times story gets tweeted every 4 seconds.

Sporting Life 10k For Kids with Cancer
The Sporting Life 10k is scheduled for May 2, 2010 and is supporting Camp Oochigeas, a camp for children with cancer. With no government funding, Camp Oochigeas relies on the generosity of volunteers, donors, community participants and the Hospital for Sick Children to provide year-round programs for children affected by childhood cancer at their campsite in Muskoka and at no cost to their families. I am personally raising at least $250 (update: at least $500) for this charity — please support me in my fundraising efforts.

Gearing-up: Nike + iPod
To get in-gear for the 10k, I joined Nikeplus.com (my profile page) and consulted their “coach”. Unfortunately, Nikeplus only offers a 12-week program — not 42 days (as at yesterday) — so I figure I’ll follow the first 5.5 weeks of the program to get in-shape for the big run. Yesterday, I was assigned my first run from coach — I had to run 4.82km! Talk about being thrown into the deep-end. So, I ventured to the University of Toronto gym to run the indoor track with my Nike + iPod sensor and iPhone to track my progress.

Although I had to walk for a few periods of time, here are my net results for run #1:

• Distance: 4.82km
• Duration: 30:42
• Pace: 6′22″ /km
• Fastest Kilometer: 5′42″
• Calories Burned: 371

If you join Nikeplus, add me as a friend (username: jsookman).

More Details on the 10k Race
It is Canada’s easiest and one of the fastest downhill 10k’s (a good starter, I think…), and it runs right down the middle of Canada’s most famous street—Yonge Street! The start line is four blocks south of Sporting Life (at Yonge & Roselawn). From there, the course heads south on Yonge Street all the way to Richmond Street. It then turns west on Richmond, south on Peter/Blue Jays Way past Gretzky’s to Front St. The course then goes west along Front, south on Bathurst, west on Fort York Blvd. to finish! See the map below.

Course Map/Overview

Once again, please consider contributing to Camp Oochigeas. It is performing miracles for these children.

The video has a ton of very powerful stats on targeting and communicating effectively and honestly with consumers and show consumer trends that have only continued to accelerate in the direction indicated by the video.

“Over 96% of Generation Y-ers have joined a social network.”

“Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web.”

“1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.”

“Facebook added over 100 million users in less than 9 months”

“iPod application downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months”

“If Facebook were a country, it would be the 4th largest.”

“80% of companies use LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees.”

“The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.”

“>80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices — people update anytime, anywhere.”

“YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.”

“Wikipedia has over 13 million articles – studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica.”

“There are over 200,000,000 blogs. 54% of bloggers post content or Tweet daily.”

“25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.”

“34% of bloggers post opinions of products & brands.”

“People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them.”

“78% of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 14% trust advertisements.”

“Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI.”

“25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video … on their phone.”

“35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle.”

“24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation.”

“More than 1.5 million pieces of content are shared on Facebook daily.”

Still think social media is a fad?

As a long-standing recipient of the Silicon Valley [Startup Digest], I was always pleased with the quality of events that were mentioned in the curated list emailed once each week. The Toronto [Startup Digest] will maintain this quality and will include and highlight the top tech and entrepreneurship events in the Greater Toronto Area (and Waterloo). We won’t cover all of the events, only the best ones!

Here are 5 things that [Startup Digest] will accomplish:

1. We want to promote the entrepreneurial lifestyle and the culture of DOING, to help change the world into a better place.

2. We want to strengthen the pre-existing entrepreneurial communities no matter how small or large they currently are

3. We want to create stronger bonds between entrepreneurs through relevant events where the startup community physically meets each other.

4. We want to promote the cross-pollination of ideas and people that would not otherwise interact.

5. We want to empower the leaders in these startup communities and give them the tools and inspiration to create a huge difference.

(view source)

If you would like to subscribe to the weekly [Startup Digest], please register online.

Otherwise, if you are running an event in Toronto (GTA) or Waterloo, please leave the details in a comment below, email me or contact me on twitter. If the event is targeting rock stars, it’ll get on the list!