Posts for June, 2009

Vampires vs. Werewolves, Pirates vs. Ninjas, Techies vs. Marketers (Beta Talk at Communitech Next Week)

June 15th, 2009 by Greg Boutin

I was invited by Communitech in Waterloo to give a talk to their Product Management peer-to-peer group. It will take place next week, on June 26th at 10am. I will test a few themes I have been playing around with, on the topic of launching successful market hits. Here is the blurb, feel free to communicate this widely:

Vampires vs. Werewolves, Pirates vs. Ninjas, Techies vs. Marketers (BETA)

A beta discussion on creating market hits, with Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures www.growthroute.com

On my left, mad-science Techies: “One really doesn’t need marketing if the product sells itself. Look at Apple etc.”. On my right: snake-oil Marketers. “It’s all about PR and advertising, not building things in the lab”. A rivalry as ancient as Vampires vs. Werewolves or Pirates vs. Ninjas. Let the fight begin (with Product Managers in the middle?)

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Excellent Video on Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web

June 15th, 2009 by Greg Boutin

The following video was pointed out to me recently and I find it to be a terrific overview of the current evolution of the web:

I got this from here. I don't know about the European Union claiming to spearhead the next web but, that detail apart, it is good material.

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Will ‘Common Tag’ Help a Publishing Assistant Alter the Web Forever?

June 12th, 2009 by Greg Boutin

This could be a giant leap forward for the web… toward a useful giant global graph.

Common Tag, which was released yesterday, is a logical extension of Linked Data. In a nutshell, it offers an accessible and open standard to incorporate semantic tags in web content. It is supported by a range of up-and-coming semantic players, the most notable among them being Yahoo SearchMonkey.

That, in itself, is a solid step forward. Its simple set of standards adds the necessary muscle to the RDFa skeleton. Common Tag ties tagged concepts to URIs, defined addresses centralized in a handful of trusted repositories, yet even advocates straightforward cut-and-paste to tag HTML. Simple and powerful. (more…)

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Are You into Growth or Lifestyle? Building on Great RWW Post

June 9th, 2009 by Greg Boutin

A great post 3 days ago by ReadWriteWeb COO Bernard Lunn on 10 Things to Be Clear About Before You Start a Company. I had the chance to meet Bernard last month at the Web 3.0 conference when we had dinner with a group of Web 3.0 business pioneers (including Alex Iskold of AdaptiveBlue and Andraz Tori of Zemanta). Bernard is one of those unassuming types with a bottomless wealth of knowledge activated on demand. You know, that type of folks everyone likes to have a conversation with, with a good glass of wine to complete the picture.

One of the many ideas that intrigued me in his post is that of checking whether you’re made to grow a lifestyle business, or to pursue a growth company. The reason it caught my attention is that lately I met a lot of tech entrepreneurs who started a business, acquired a few clients and grew revenues, and at that point started to play with the idea that they may need to raise money — and yet are far from clear on what changes this pathway will require from them and their business. (more…)

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Project analytics and risk assessment for $20M wastewater treatment station

June 8th, 2009 by Greg Boutin
Section of a wastewater treatment plant.

Image via Wikipedia

Although that is not per se a GrowthRoute project, it is worth mentioning that I supported a $20 million wastewater treatment project through financial analysis and other analytics.

I also participated in the negotiations and making the financing decision.

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