Month: November 2008

PickupPal, which describes itself as “the largest online carpooling community in the world”, is a site that allows people all over the world to arrange to rideshare or carpool. It’s used by people travelling to the same place to arrange carpools to work, rides out of town and even share a ride to see their favourite bands in concert. It’s a great way for people to save money, gas and the environment.

The only people who seem to have a problem with PickupPal are the bus companies in Ontario. PickupPal lets people seeking rides pay the people driving them, and the bus companies in the province sensed a threat to their business model. The bus companies decided to go to the Ontario Highway Transit Board, which found PickupPal in violation of the Public Vehicles Act.

The problem with the Act is that it makes a lot of ridesharing illegal. The only way you can carpool with someone is if you meet all the criteria listed below:

• Travel can only be between home and work. Carpooling to school, the ski hill, a concert or the airport are not allowed.
• You cannot cross municipal boundaries. If my co-worker David and I, who live in Toronto, were to commute to the Microsoft office, which is in Mississauga, we’d be in violation of the Act.
• You must ride with the same driver each day. If I were to ride to Microsoft with David on Tuesdays and Thursdays and with Developer and VP Mark Relph (my boss’ boss) on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, we’d be in violation of the act.
• You can’t pay the driver more frequently than once a week. If I give David gas money on Tuesday and then again on Thursday, I’ve just broken the law.

This isn’t the first time the bus companies have messed with a ridesharing service. The popular Quebec-based service Allo Stop, which was a service that allowed people to find rides between Toronto and Montreal – a very popular travel corridor – was banned in Ontario after the Ontario Highway Transit Board ruled that their service was illegal. The Board did this at the behest of the bus companies Greyhound, Voyageur and Trentway-Wagar. The “logic” of the decision, according to Felix D’Mello of the Ontario Highway Transport Board, who said "If you are transporting passengers beyond a municipal boundary, and getting compensation for it, the only way you can provide that kind of service is with a public transportation license."

Why should I be forbidden to carpool simply because I want to pay the driver for gas (or, the more likely scenario: because I want to be compensated for gas)? The bus companies are simply using a law whose intent was to protect the public as a cudgel with which to beat perceived competition out of existence.

What can be done? A BlogTO reader wrote his MPP, who responded quickly by suggesting that we exert pressure on the Honourable Jim Bradley, Ontario’s Minister of Transportation. Write him and express your concerns! He can be reached via old-school mail at:

The Honourable James J. Bradley
Ontario Minister of Transportation
77 Wellesley St W, 3rd Flr, Ferguson Block
Toronto ON M7A 1Z8

or via email at jbradley.mpp@liberal.ola.org

A Conference on Startups? In the Middle of a Meltdown?

[This article was also posted on my tech blog, Global Nerdy.]

Given the doom and gloom coming from all the business new outlets, it may seem crazy to try and start a startup in the current economic crisis. Y Combinator’s programmer-turned-essayist-turned-venture capitalist Paul Graham would disagree:

The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.

When Microsoft and Apple were founded.

As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I’m not claiming it’s a particularly good time either. The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn’t matter much either way.

If we’ve learned one thing from funding so many startups, it’s that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. The economy has some effect, certainly, but as a predictor of success it’s rounding error compared to the founders.

If the quality of a startup’s founders plays a far bigger role than the state of the economy, the question changes from “Why would would you want to start a startup when the economy is in such sorry shape?” to “How do we prepare our startup’s founders to be at their best?”

There are many answers to the latter question, and tomorrow’s Startup Empire conference’s goal is to showcase and share as many of those answers as possible. It’s a small conference with a single track and completely dedicated to providing the best advice, ideas, information, inspiration and contacts to help entrepreneurs get their startups off the ground. Organized by the people at StartupNorth and DemoCamp’s (and Microsoft’s) David Crow, the speaker and attendee list is packed with entrepreneurs, mentors, VCs and other people in both the local and international startup ecosystem. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when you gather them all under a single roof and put them in a more intimate, focused conference setting.

The conference is sold out, but I’ll be attending and providing lots of coverage and notes from the sessions. Watch my tech blog, Global Nerdy, for reports!

Who’s Speaking at Startup Empire

Here’s the final schedule for Startup Empire:

8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.
Registration

9:00 a.m. – 9:10 a.m.
Introduction
David Crow

9:10 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.
Why You Should Startup in a Downturn
Don Dodge

9:45 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
Slow Down and Speed Up: Handling a Fast-Moving Startup in Turbulent Times
Austin Hill

10:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
Break

11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.
From Napkin to First Steps
Mathew Ingram, Darryl Ballantyne, Thomas Whitiker, Mike Kirkup

11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Your First Structures: Legal, Organizational and Funding
Rob Hyndman

12:30 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Why Now is a Great Time to Start Your Startup
Howard Lindzon

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Lunch

2:00 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.
The Funding Game, from Friends to VCs
Craig Hayashi

2:45 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
The Ins and Outs of Term Sheets: Angel Loans to Preferred Shares
Suzie Dingwall Williams

3:30 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.
Instapitch: From Elevator to PowerPoint
Roger Chabra, Kevin Talbot

4:15 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.
Break

4:45 p.m. – 5:15 p.m.
We’re So F***ed
Hugh MacLeod

5:15 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Boulder, TechStars and Why VC Doesn’t Have to Matter
David Cohen

6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Microsoft BizSpark Launch Party

Links

• Startup Empire conference site
• Microsoft BizSpark site
• StartupNorth
• Paul Graham: Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy

Today, November 11th, is Remembrance Day in Canada and other Commonwealth countries and Veterans Day in the United States. In honour of our veterans and present-day soldiers, here’s John McCrae’s poem, In Flanders Fields:

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow,
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

In honour of this blog’s seventh anniversary, seven photos I found today that I though were worth sharing.

Earth from Chandrayaan-1

Here’s a gorgeous shot of the Earth as seen from Chandrayaan-1, India’s first lunar space mission:

A Scene from Critical Mass

It’s a good message. If only Critical Mass would heed its own advice:

“Fatburger” Knows Their Market

This bumper sticker has got to be part of the most nichey campaign I’ve ever seen for a burger joint:

(In case you’re not aware of the significance of 4:20, here’s an explanation.)

Better Homes and Wookies

Even Chewbacca has a domestic side:

The Case of the Missing Bacon

It just doesn’t have the gravitas of the Hardy Boys’ or Nancy Drew’s case names. Hell, this case may be too small for even my childhood hero, Encyclopedia Brown:

“Grapes” Goes Bananas

Here’s Don Cherry wearing a suit so loud that even I might not wear it:

You Can Judge a Good Lawyer by His Ad

“No evidence, no conviction!” Now that’s a snappy catchphrase. If you’re ever in need of a lawyer in southern Louisiana (that’s the area covered by the 225 area code), this guy is your man!

I wonder why he felt it was necessary to include the line “This is an advertisement” on the ad:

Click the ad to see it at full size.

Seven years ago, I was working in a dull office building in a dull office park on a dull street named after an insurance company in a dull part of Accordion City. The company for which I was working had been whittled down from exciting startup founded by people with interesting ideas to dull make-work project run by middle managers with the vision God gave oysters. My once stimulating, challenging and rewarding job, a mix of developer relations and user interface programming, had been progressively reduced until my sole responsibilities on the project were the software’s “setup” program and “about” box.

Me at my desk at OpenCola, circa November 2001.

Since my daily responsibilities could be fulfilled in five minutes on an average day (and ten minutes on a particularly challenging one), I was left with seven hours and fifty-five (or fifty) minutes of nothing to do. One of those hours could be occupied by lunch. Another half-hour could be lopped off with runs to Starbucks. That still left six hours and twenty-five (or twenty) minutes to fill.

The view from my desk at OpenCola, circa November 2001.

Luckily, I had a decent computer with a fast internet connection at my desk. I spent a good chunk of my time brushing up on my programming skills. I figured that management’s slow chipping away at my work meant that I was soon to be shown the door, so I also started lining up job interviews and clients for consulting work. Last but not least, I emailed Cory Doctorow interesting links for him to feature on Boing Boing. After several dozen of the emails, he emailed me, asking “Why don’t you start your own blog?”

“Really?” I replied. “I think I’d run out of things to write about pretty quickly.”

I went to the premier blogging site at the time – Blogger.com, now a subsidiary of Google – and set up my own blog. You couldn’t activate the blog without naming it first, and after trying to think up a clever name, decided that I could give it a temporary one. After all, I could always change it later. I entered my “throw-away” name, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, which I’d come up with in a fit of boredom-induced whimsy, and created the blog. I wrote a throw-away article as my first post and wondered how long I could keep up the blog.

How the blog looked in February 2002.
Click the photo to see an archived copy on the Internet Wayback Machine.

While there have been countless articles written about how blogging is dead because there’s no way for most people to make money from it, I don’t pay them any mind. Blogging has paid off in ways more valuable than a mere check for Google ads. My blogs have been instrumental in landing my last four jobs, provided an interesting way for the lady who became my wife to do a casual “background check” on me, helped me meet friends I otherwise would never have met, gotten me out of a sticky situation with an identity thief, landed me a number of appearances on television and in the newspaper, given me a creative outlet and kept me sharp. I consider myself very, very fortunate that I’ve been able to parley blogging – along with my other hobbies, computer programming and the accordion – into my daily work. There’s no job easier than being paid to be you and do what you’re most passionate about.

How the blog looked in June 2004.
Click the photo to see an archived copy on the Internet Wayback Machine.

On this, the seventh anniversary of the Accordion Guy blog, I’d like to thank everyone who’s read it and posted comments over the years. There’s nothing more encouraging to a blogger than a readership and the friendships and opportunities that arise thanks to one’s blog, and for that, I am eternally grateful. Thanks again, everyone!

You can file today’s Dilbert comic under “it’s funny, because it’s true”:

[This article was also posted on Global Nerdy, with bonus project management links.]

Click the photo to see it on its original Flickr page.