While it was only for a few minutes, I was incredibly honoured to share a stage in Boston this week with Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink, Dharmesh Shah and many other monsters from the software business.

First, a huge thanks for Neil and Joel for once again setting the standard software conferences need to chase. If you work in software and hate conferences, then you need to hit BOS 2011. Neil’s taken all the good parts and stripped out all the hated parts, which results in an amazing event that’ll melt your brain, in a good way.

As always, I did my best to pitch Guelph and beer to the crowd. My slides are here if you’re interested.

After attending the first first Business of Software in 2007 I recall telling Neil that I’ve set a personal goal of speaking at his event someday. While it was only a minuscule lightning talk I feel like I kinda sorta achieved that goal this week. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll speak on the grown ups stage?

While it’s only a short lightning talk, I’m very excited to be speaking at Business of Software in Boston tomorrow. By excited I mean over my head, out of my league, utterly unprepared and skeered out of my wits. Having been to two of these conferences in the past, I have so much respect for the crowd Neil and Joel get out to these. I’m glad I’m on the first day so that I can relax and enjoy the rest of the conference stress free. Possibly humiliated and embarrassed but stress free.

With Corey from Freshbooks talking as well, there’s at least 20% Canadian content in these lightning talks which we should be proud off up north.

My slides from IgniteTO 4 last week. I’ll work on getting some of text from it up here soon as well.

DemoCampGuelph 15 (skeery edition) is scheduled for October 25th, 2010. Maybe a chance to test drive that new costume? Hit up http://next.demoCampGuelph.com for details and to sign up to attend.

Invited speaker to be announced soon.

Spread the word, specifically get out there and talk a friend into submitting a demo!

I’ve been reading Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness and really enjoying it. It’s nice to read a book written by a person, ie not a ghost writer. In reading it, I’m learning about Zappos and their customer service culture. While I’ve never ordered anything from them, I find myself craving their level of service when I interact with other companies. They place such high value on each and every interaction with their customer.

A recent example I went through. First I’ll say that I’ve had a pair of Chacos flips for a couple of years now and they’re the best flip flops I’ve ever owned. About a week ago one failed on me (see pic). Now I despise wearing shoes so I was initially stressed about having to go without my flips in the summer but I knew my chacos had a lifetime warranty so I’m good. Maybe.

Cut to the fine print. Ah yes, the lifetime warranty for a product where “lifetime” is the life of the product as determined by the company producing it. Lovely. I sent Chacos a photo of my broken flip flop for them to evaluate and decide if my flip flops were dead or simply injured.

So here’s the rub. After a day wearing shoes in this heat I couldn’t handle it any longer. While I’d love to buy a new pair of chacos, the combination of trying something different and the risk of having my chacos replaced or repaired, landing me with 2 pairs, led me to buy a pair of Birk’s. I switched and chacos lost me as a customer.

Sure enough three days later I received an email politely informing me…

“In this case we believe that the broken toe pole is a result of normal wear and tear and therefore we are sorry to inform you that Chaco will not be replacing the footwear. Although Chaco products are made to endure strong activity and made to last it is normal that after a couples of years of good use the footwear has to call it a day!

We are happy that you enjoyed our product for several years and we hope that you will continue to do so for the years to come.”

So what went wrong here?

First, assuming that I’m willing to wait 3 days for you to email me a short email informing me you aren’t going to do anything. It shouldn’t take three days for you to say no, sorry.

Second, I never asked for a full replacement. They failed to offer me a way to remain a chacos customer. In fact they offered me nothing, it was a dead end, a waste of time leaving a bad taste for a brand.

Now I’ll esteem Chacos USA because the irony is that they handled this well. You see, I started this whole thread with their US entity only to realize in the end that being in Canada, they had to pass me to their Canadian entity and I had to start the entire process over again. While dealing with the US rep, she immediately told me it’s doubtful my flips could either be repaired or replaced under warranty. She immediately offered me 20% off a new pair along with free shipping. I responded saying yes please, telling her what colour I’d like and my address. That’s when she hit me with the “oh you’re in canada, sorry.”

The key difference was immediacy and the feeling that they wanted to keep me as a customer. Had I been able to finish the path I started with chacos USA I would be a chacos customer today yammering on to everyone about my new sandals. Instead I’m wearing birks while writing a blog post.

Zappos (and chacos USA?) understands that customer interactions aren’t about interpreting your company rules for the public. Being polite doesn’t count as customer service, that’s just a base requirement of having a conversation with someone. Emailing someone a “no, go away” email, dripping in politeness, comes off as sarcasm or idiocy. Needless to say my reply to them about how much I was enjoying my new birk’s was very polite.

Zappos understands the value of leveraging that one interaction you are lucky to get with a customer over their lifetime and doing everything possible to deliver them a little happiness.

We’re hiring here at Brainpark Guelph, see details here. Email us immediately if you’re interested!!

I need help from you. We need a selection committee for our next DemoCampGuelph. The requirements are to meet with me next week, likely Thursday evening. At that meeting, this group will select who, of the applicants, gets a demo spot. Then on the night of DemoCampGuelph this group will select the demo of the night and recipient of The Crowie.

So I need three volunteers who meet the following qualifications:

• Attended at least one, preferably more, DemoCampGuelph events so you know what we’re doing.
• You haven’t applied to demo at this event.
• You’re not a sponsor (I’m not 100% sure this matters but we’ll start here…).
• You will attend next event.
• You aren’t currently contributing to DemoCampGuelph in some other fashion.

If you’re interested in contributing to our event by taking this on, please contact me directly. We need three of you please.

Here’s the reason Facebook’s plan to allow individual user’s to share everything makes no sense and will ultimately fail. The simple answer is it’s not humanly possible.

When computers and software work well, they augment behaviour which humans are actually capable of in the offline world. That means they walk along side us and help us. A turn signal helps me. I don’t need to manually flick the lever up and down, up and down, etc. Cruise control helps me. Facebook allowing me to have thousands of ‘friends’ that I share my intimate life with doesn’t help me, because it’s not humanly possible for me to have thousands of friends. There’s a limiter and it’s called the human brain. There’s even a fancy term for this:

“Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.”

What happens when you try to go beyond Dunbar’s number?

“Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.”

The theory is that this is a physical limit imposed by MY BRAIN:

“the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained. On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again”

So if Dunbar’s number is correct then facebook could help me with maintaining “more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms” once I go beyond my 150. That’s how facebook’s helping me right? Even if the number’s off by 100%, that’s 300. I don’t even consider myself an active user of facebook and I currently have 285 ‘friends’.

The reality is the opposite, that facebook and others makes it all but impossible for an individual NOT to smash through Dunbar’s number. Look, we’ve all done the equivalent of sticking our employer’s cheese up our nose. This isn’t a question of privacy or whether stupid acts exist in the world, or eliminating stupid acts. Do you honestly want to live in a world where people don’t do stupid stuff? This is about what’s humanly possible. Were it not for a myriad of tools facilitating the breaching of Dunbar’s number, then the close friends of these Domino’s staff would have laughed about the cheese in their nose until one finally said “that’s stupid, stop it, you’re being an ass” and they ‘d have stopped. Done.

I worry about a world where my kids can’t actively make mistakes and do stupid stuff, learn and move on. I was afforded that, and hopefully still am, and my character is likely far more built on the stupid stuff I lived through rather than the safe, acceptable stuff I managed to intersperse it with. If you agree our kids deserve that then you’d best quickly realize we’re all kids in some fashion and we all need this.

The clear answer is facebook isn’t helping with any of this and has no intention of it. In fact it’s quite the opposite, “The most important thing to understand about Facebook is that you are not Facebook’s customer, you are its inventory. You are the product Facebook is selling. Facebook’s real customers are advertisers.”

A few weeks back, our mayor here in Guelph wrote on her blog about IT in the downtown. There are several interesting thoughts in her post but I want to focus in on “Perhaps an IT Accelerator Centre right in the downtown is what we need to achieve two important goals – downtown revitaliztion and job creation”

I realize the mayor wasn’t being literal here, however, it’s the ‘outside saviour’ mentality that scares me. You can sense some of this in the comments as well, “Provide major incentives to IT corporations (Oracle, CISCO, Microsoft, google, Adobe) to open R&D centres here. I would say make a plan and go to them directly with incentives.”

Waiting on AC or some tech ‘knight in shining armour’ to ride into town with jobs and bags of gold coins is the wrong solution. Not to mention it’s disempowering, bordering on disrespectful, to us kids slogging it out in Guelph tech today. As someone who’s created jobs in Guelph tech, including recruiting people to move here to work, most outsiders don’t get Guelph. That’s not elitist as I assume the same applies to any city. My point is let’s at least start with the people already at the table. People who have already bought homes here, built companies here and made a long term commitment to Guelph. I once read a quote that character is formed by what you commit to. If that holds water then let’s start with the people who form the character of Guelph today.

We aren’t Toronto, we aren’t San Fran and we are not Waterloo. What worked in those cities may not work here. Does that mean AC, Microsoft, google etc should be kept out or not play a role? Hell no, they just aren’t a saviour we need to wait around for.

Instead of chasing outsiders, let’s go directly to existing local companies who have a track record of building tech in Guelph. Let’s go to companies like Innosphere, well.ca, RKD, Barking Dog, etc and provide them incentives and tools to take the next step on their journeys. What do those companies actually need? My guesses…

Be A Customer
These companies need projects. I’m not suggesting protectionism but local companies can help by taking a longer, harder look locally when it comes to spending their IT dollars. I’m looking at you City of Guelph. I have a hunch you’re spending something on IT next year. How much of that is going to local companies instead of choices that ‘no one can get fired for’?

You want strong, diverse, innovative tech in Guelph? Excellent, then put your exciting projects in the hands of local companies. Take a few risks on some companies that may not be the lowest bidder or strongest contender on paper. Give a company a project that may be out of their comfort zone. Help them add to their portfolio and their bottom line. Be the first customer. Think of it as the 100 mile tech diet, well maybe not 100 miles but you get the point.

Participate
I’ve long felt that we’ll eventually realize commuting doesn’t work. The problem is most individuals don’t feel they have any choice but to drive into Waterloo or Toronto to work in tech. We have the minds already in this town. The problem is most of them get into their cars and drive to another city to use those minds. Not to mention, buy their lunches, do their shopping, etc.

If you’re commuting, start looking into companies and the scene in Guelph. It may not happen overnight but there’s a job in town for you here. Or talk to me and I’ll help find you one or help you create one. Come out to events like DemoCampGuelph, Coffee and Code and participate. Find a way to contribute. This goes for companies as well. Find ways you can contribute and grow the Guelph tech ecosystem.

Grow Talent
If you’re running a company, start explicitly mentoring people in your company to build their skills up to running their own show someday. Put yourself out of a job by building your team up to take over your company so you can start your next company. Growing the next generation of tech talent is a race that changes daily and is far from won. I guarantee you that even the rockstar tech cities are worried about this one.

I’m posting this almost verbatim from an email Regg sent out today. There are increasing opportunities to participate in the Guelph tech scene so pick your spot and get involved.

These are exciting times to work and live in Guelph.

• 3 years ago business leaders formed the Guelph Business Technology peer to peer network:
• DemoCampGuelph was established in 2007 and now boasts attendance of 100+.
• Guelph Chamber of Commerce established a technology committee in fall of 09
• Guelph Tech Business Community will be hosting a large technology conference at the newly opened “FRANK HASENFRATZ CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE IN MANUFACTURING”.

We are now becoming a centre of technology innovation and would appreciate your input on the potential development of a technology cluster. Please fill out this survey and feel free to pass the link on to others.