Author Archive
Tom’s Best of 2011 Music Mix!
It’s back! Thomaspurves.com’s traditional regularly irregular mix of awesome and slightly irregular music. Basically here’s a track from all the bands that kept my earbuds spinning this long year. As usual the list is autobiographical more than canonical. I’m never one to color perfectly amongst the lines. It’s already a few days past 2011 and [...]
Book Review: the Impulse Economy
Nevermind the hype, the ongoing explosion of mobile could either be the best or worst thing to hit ordinary retail business since the internet. Imagine you are in the business of selling things at retail. What does it mean when you see your customers predaciously roaming the aisles armed with smartphones and suddenly better informed [...]
Gone West: Heading to San Francisco
Probably time I should mention this. In a few short days I’ll be heading west. For a longer trip this time. This October I start a newer, bigger gig with Visa Inc. at the head office in San Francisco. I’m pretty excited about the big move. Of course, lots of daunting little details still left [...]
Circle overload and the trouble with Google+
Google+ is about 1 week old and people are already posting stuff like “G+ for noobies guides“. I, for some reason, find this hilarious. On the other hand, I’m already starting to struggle with this wünder-socialnet myself. The big problem right now is friend management. Google has this concept of circles. It’s based on this [...]
DemoCamp Toronto 29 WrapUp
Cross posted from StartupNorth.ca Last night marked amazingly the 29th event of Toronto’s increasingly supernumerative DemoCamp scene. To warm up the crowd we had a little help from legendary Canadian investor and the man with a few more twitter followers than you, @howardlindzon. In case you didn’t make it, here’s my notes for you, of [...]
Is this the future look of augmented reality?
I have this vision of nerds everywhere staggering around the city with big slates in front of their faces only seeing the world through shared web tablet camera experiences. I’m guilty of looking something like this in public myself, even hoisting a tablet onto my shoulder boombox-style to make skype calls. And that’s a part [...]
ANNOUNCING: PowerPoint Karaoke Toronto 3
It’s back! Once again, to close out Social Media Week Toronto, we are going to be hosting a rocking session of PowerPoint Karaoke. The rules of Powerpoint Karaoke are simple. A set of presenters and local social media luminaries will be asked to play the role of an earnest expert speaker on classic topics like [...]
Tom’s Best of 2010 indie music mix
This is what happens I fail to publish my “seasonal” podcast mix, the list I keep in iTunes just gets longer and longer. With a little time over the holidays and the clock on 2010 having officially run out… I present you with Tom’s best of (mostly) indie 2010 mix. As usual the list makes [...]
Pizza Libretto as transformative mobile business model
Pizza Libretto doesn’t take reservations. What they do do is make some of the most delicious Neopolitan style pizza in the city. Libretto finds themselves smack in the middle of the (for the moment) uber-trendy Ossington strip of hipster bars, restaurants and galleries in the west end of downtown Toronto. As a result, demand for [...]
Visa Debit rolls out in Canada
This is a project I’ve been working on and involved with in one capacity or another for a long time, including building the first business case and running the product development for CIBC as far back as 2005. More on the launch of Visa Debit in Canada: Toronto Star: CIBC rolls out Canada’s first Visa-branded [...]
Kodak update: when all else fails, sue the iceberg
A lovely visualization by Design language that’s been making rounds connects a couple dots from recent posts on this blog. Somewhat randomly, I had been musing both about how Kodak had the foresight to invent a “consumer” digital camera 35 frickin’ years ago and yet how did the whole camera industry completely miss the boat [...]
The dawn of mobile in retail
One big idea I’ve been focused on a fair bit lately is what I call “Augmented Retail”. Augmented retail is about the potentially disruptive outcome of the inevitable convergence of mobile technology, ubiquitous connectivity and retail. Mobile technology is not necessarily good news for your average retailer. I’m sure by now almost all of you [...]
Dead media watch: the web is dead
Somewhere on a dusty shelf or storage box, I have this old issue of Wire Volume One two containing the strident prediction: “Tired: lynx, Wired: Mosaic”. Lynx is/was a text-only terminal app used for navigating a relatively obscure hypertext protocol, fancifully called the World Wide Web. NCSA Mosaic, was the first popular graphical web browser, [...]
The future is already here, it’s just not worth distributing yet
In 1975, Steve Sasson of Kodak invented the first portable digital camera. It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images – a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to [...]
Why the hell don’t all cameras have SIM cards in them yet?
It’s been half a decade or more since phones started getting cameras, and yet cameras still don’t have cell phone connections. WTF? To me this is classic case of industry disruption. An entrenched industry refuses to take seriously a disruptive new technology. Holding their noses high, no serious Photographer (with a capital P) would shoot [...]
Teksavvy cable is *faster* than advertised
You may remember my experiment a few weeks back with the worlds most desperate way to increase broadband speed while sticking with an indie ISP. (Previously: In Which Tom attempts to bond two DSL lines into single home internet pipe of great power like Voltron). Well the folks fighting the good fight at Teksavvy (thanks [...]
Apple related sentence of the day
In response to Apple become the world’s largest consumer of semiconductors (computer chips). Apple, which already has a tendency to leapfrog competitors like a showboating amphibian, will overtake Samsung as a consumer of chips, Isuppli explained, as the fruit themed gadget flogger continues to order shedloads of them for its shiny offspring, the Ipad and [...]
Augmented surveilance getting closer to reality
This week Toronto police proudly announced they would be using face recognition software to identify and catch G20 hooligans. In Tokyo this week, a company announced of new billboards that use cameras to recognize age/sex of passers by and serve-up demographically targeted advertisements. Having networked cameras passively watch us as we move through public spaces [...]
Thomas Purves
is a technology executive specializing digital payment systems, a futurist and sometimes entrepreneur living in the great city of 
