So just a shout out to about 70 people I just culled from facebook. Sorry… I thought I was removing you from a list when in fact I was removing you from facebook. UI issues do things like that. feel free to refriend.
I had one of those complain on Twitter get an explanation moments. I thought I’d throw props where they deserve to be.
Dell (recently) introduced a program for downloading their drivers called Dell Driver Download Manager. Probably great if you own a dell, not great for people like me who don’t (though, I’m buying one in a week for school). I use an Acer Aspire one – Great for portability slow if you over burden it. More programs equal more windows load times…
All I needed was a Printer Driver – just one driver. Our office printer is a Dell and I wanted my Aspire One to print on it. Pretty simple. But first I discovered I needed Dell Driver Download Manager and then I discovered it would not download in Chrome (or not that I could get it to). Firefox also failed – but I now see that was an issues on the PC. But anyways a pretty big fail on this end. I fired up Internet Explorer to download Dell Driver Manager then download the file to get it to download the Print Driver I needed. Annoying.
And I said as much to to dell on twitter.
Today Lionel (over at dell), pinged me a response. A bug on their end, and a fix and an explanation. I’ll just say it, there’s something nice knowing that they heard me, they agreed, they fixed it and they directed a response to me. Small things for some odd reason that make Dell seem more personable and responsible to their customers. Now I’ve got to order my mini12.
Well the word is out, I just got Twittered by a couple people outside of my ‘discreet’ group of friends, and so I think I should probably share the news here.
On July 26, 2009 Sarah Palin will exit as Governor or Alaska and just under a week later on July 31, I’ll be leaving Wesley Clover to pursue my MBA at the Richard Ivey School of Business. My goal was always to outlast Mrs Palin and it seems that I have accomplished this goal with a few days to spare.
More seriously, I’m going to miss being here at Wesley Clover and working with some awesome people on cutting edge stuff. I guess you’ll never feel quite comfortable about leaving friends, colleagues and cool work (& salary) for a new chapter – but if there was ever a time for me to move to get the MBA this felt like the right moment. With Ivey having a spectacular reputation I really feel like I’m heading to a cool, challenging environment.
Since, I’ve still got a few weeks to go and I only shared the news internally in the past couple weeks it doesn’t seem quite real. So I’ll save up a proper - I’m Leaving Post – for when I’m really actually leaving. Between here and there I’ve got a busy few weeks. 
This is what happens when you focus on other stuff – you miss people talking about things you’ve worked on. Last week Simon Gwatkin (our VP of Strategic Marketing) made a presentation at the Mitel Partner Forum in Vegas on the Wesley Clover Technologies group (our incubator). A number of our early stage companies use the Mitel channel to accelerate their sales and growth – its symbiotic and works quite well.
Nancy Jamison who works over at Unified Communication Strategies has a good post on our program that i only just got around to seeing. I take a bit of an exception to the parallel to Cisco. Their internal skunkworks projects (they called it ‘ideas from the floor’ back in 2002) has never created a spin off company or a focused vertical product – they partner or buy to create these opportunities. Google’s one day a week program is another example of a company creating products – but again no spin offs. If I wanted to be a bit negative on their processes versus our I’d say they kill the entreprenurs at the root but keep the stalk. Seperatley, I think unaligned incubators, accelerator or whatevers (Ycombinator and their like) don’t bring enough to the table to make a go of a real standalone business (think IP, competive unassailable advantages, etc). But I digress, maybe when i have some more time this summer I’ll expand on these thoughts.
Read Nancy’s article – great props for Benbria in the coverage.
It seems like there’s an award ceremony every week now. We have the OBJ’s top 40 Under 40 coming up in a week or so, and today i got both an email and a Tweet about BDC’s Young Entrepreneurs Awards (Contest).
When I get these things I blindly forward them to someone I think might find it relevant and forget about it, and BDC’s YEA looked like it would be no different – until I heard some incredulous comments about the criteria. You see BDC takes their little contest very seriously. You should include:
- the duly completed nomination form
- your company’s financial statements for the past 12 months (if they are not yet available, submit the balance sheet and internal statements for the past six months together with the previous year’s financial statements)
- any relevant attachment (clearly identify the appendix if applicable, section and question number)
Fair enough – they don’t want a company with no sales winning a prize. Then they also essentially ask for the Capitalization table, names of shareholders (and their ownership) and set a minimum threshold of 20% ownership for the entrepreneur to be considered for the prize. Why? So really if you guys have raised any serious VC money, you’re out, or if you have brought on other partners, no dice.
A company down in Toronto that a friend started 8 years ago has done two VC rounds and went public. He won’t qualify – he owns somewhere near 13% – $230 Million in wealth generated but success and pragmatic entreprenurialism isn’t enough for BDC. Coupled that with the fact they think 35 year olds can still be young and we’ve got serious mindset issues behind the eligability criteria here.
That said, if you do qualify – and want to give up all that proprietary info – go ahead and apply. I’ll also point out its easier to fill for an IRAP grant then it is to fill out these forms.
Two totally unrelated things that bug me. And since its friday:
Starbucks has decided in their infinite wisdom to stop brewing Decaf Coffee AFTER 7 pm. Its a nation wide corporate policy, funny thing is, they brew decaf all morning long. The Barristas at my local ‘bucks don’t get it either. You’d think people drink Decaf at night – not first thing in the morning. Other than the ‘no-decaf ever crowd’, don’t people ask for decaf at night?
&
Audible’s spoken word books (audiobooks). I have a subsciption, have perhaps 40 books and use it nearly everyday – walking, busing, driving or flying audiobooks are awesome. But not when they won’t work any of my linux devices or on the Android phones that are avilable. DRM Sucks and stealing is easy – I’d rather not – so Audible, don’t make me.
/rant done.
