Verdict: a waste of time.
You do not need to try it and you do not need to feel left out if you do not have an account. And if anyone approaches you to start a business around it laugh at them. What is sad is just how long its been since Google launched something useful for me to use, I love a lot of their services, this one is in the needs work category. That said – Google Voice and Gizmo – awesome match.
If you have $25 – I’d try ScanR that is available on the iPhone, Blackberry & Android and has truly improved my life, other than the price I can’t recommend it enough.
So, in between classes today, I got some good news and oddly I heard it first through David Crow.
The Canadian Innovation Exchange has announced their 20 presenting companies at this years show, and my dad’s start up, GaN Systems, was selected to present. Some of Canada’s best VC were on the selection committee and my old boss Terry (Matthews) will be presenting at CIX. Its happening on December 2, in Toronto – and I think I’ll try and attend, even with the MBA on the go.
GaN Systems is doing some very exciting things in the clean tech area and I’ve been lucky to be at a stage in my life (experience, some maturity) where I can work with my dad as an adviser to his company. Well done to the GaN Team and all the others who will be presenting.
Sorry that I haven’t updated since I arrived at Ivey. As I type this I’m literally in the middle of a 24 hour Accounting Case at School, so really busy.
But procrastination is sometimes allowed so in my breaks I’ve been reading Jim Bagnalls excellent series on the demise of Nortel. Its been in the National Post this week and I assume the Ottawa Citizen as well.
Have you ever thought that you’ll blog about X-event that’s coming up, and when X-event comes and goes, you just never do… and then it eats away at you in the back of your head. Its this little evil devilish thing so that when you think about doing another post on your blog it pops up, its become this little nagging thing in your blogging life…
Well I have two of those little things. One post was supposed to be about me leaving Wesley Clover and another that I promised about Why I chose Ivey for my MBA. Both are in unfinished drafts…. so I at least started them.
But this is my mea culpa, I might never finish and post those or I might… but in the mean time I’ll probably post about other stuff and the internet gods can’t make me feel guilty about it.
Wesley Clover was kind enough to say I could keep my number so I had planned on porting it over to a VoIP provider for at least the time I was in London but thats looking like it’ll be a nightmare.
So my new number is 613-454-5286
Feel free to call me whenever, it’ll follow me wherever I go. My old one should work for a bit but I’ll be adding an annoying message telling you to change it.
“So, Matt after your MBA, are you coming back to Ottawa?”
This is a question I’ve been getting hit with a lot. And it’s one I’m struggling to answer. After the recent demise of Ottawa’s ‘Flagship’ company certainly we’ve got a problem but I think it goes back several decades and Nortel’s recent death is a just a symptom. Ignoring the National dimension here, how is this going to affect my hometown. Adam Chowanieac, (Tundra’s former Chairman) was recently quoted by Andrew Wahl in Canadian Business saying, “No matter what happens and who picks up Nortel’s pieces, they’re just going to be R&D branch plants in the end.” For Ottawa that doesn’t matter all that much.
You see, Ottawa has always suffered from the Branch Plant problem – we are one.
NT’s Head office was in Brampton and for all the good it did Ottawa it may as well have been on Mars. From Ottawa’s point of view, who cares if your HQ is in Brampton or in the US or Europe you will be dealing with the same issues. So for all the idiocy at Nortel just remember this, you don’t hear that it’s a problem with their technology or technological staff. In fact this bankruptcy has shown just how valuable they are. In any event, I truly believe in keeping the Sales and Dev groups in close proximity to one another, I’d think those who’ve tried both systems would agree.
I keep hearing from friends (I’m looking at you Ian Graham) who think there will be a wave of startups after each Nortel layoff. There’s a lot of talk, but not much else.
You see, when a layoff hits Nortel they lay off Engineers who have very little to no direct sales or business development experience, because those guys are in Brampton or Toronto – they got laid off too – but they stay there. Thus each Ottawa ‘Nortel -Alumni’ startup is essentially an R&D group. And no VC is interested unless they’ve taken it to (at least) the Customer interest stage or further. The vast majority of them wither after 3 months, usually after they attend one or two local OCRI Events/Courses and decry the lack of available funding. Those that do persevere do so not as an R&D group but building a product for someone they were consulting for usually 12 months after they got laid off, those typically are the gems -they’ve developed sales and biz dev experience. And like Gems they’re pretty rare.
So why were there previous waves of startups? Well Newbridge and JDS all had their sales and marketing staffs here. Cognos (and Watchfire) is a great recent example, I’ve seen startups by alumni, and several of our startups have hired their sales people. Startups need that sales/marketing/bizdev experience; and importantly we need a company to anchor here to bring them to Ottawa.
But from a Nortel-Ottawa point of view, we’ve been a R&D branch plant for years…. If we wanted to fix the problem of Ottawa’s lack of sales and business development experience then government bailout of Nortel isn’t going to fix that structural issue, in that we’ve been answering to Brampton for years now. It takes years to develop that specialized portion of a business cluster.
So, am I coming back to Ottawa after my MBA? Who knows? But if the year was 1999, after an MBA – I’d have been moving to Brampton.
