Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

# (community is much more than blogging*, but ahem) Forrester just released two fat ROI papers on corporate blogging. For real ROI, save yourself $600 and read Jevon’s version here.

# Have you noticed? Week by week more people are taking “us” seriously in this tech community of ours (un-community, camp people, “bloggers”, “we should be talking to the bloggers”, “will those bloggers talk about us?”. The mainstream has noticed, may even suddenly be taking us more seriously that even we do ourselves. Scary though? But then things in this community really are afoot (from DemoCamps to(o) ManyCamps, to the TTC, TTW, ICT Toronto, OpenCities, Wireless cities, innovation playgrounds and many I’m no doubt forgetting).

# Somewhat related, David Crow comments further here Community-driven leadership. I can’t say I know yet where he’s heading with that (reads a bit like writing your next job description Dave?) but what the hell, sign me up. That’s one fearless un-leader I would sponsor.

* someone (was it Anthony?) said roughly this last night: if the virtual interactions never lead to offline interactions, what’s even the point?

It’s not the social media, it’s what you can do with it silly.

just wait til you see what’s happening next week…

The good news is that freemium services could introduce a lot of companies to technologies they might never have purchased five years ago. They are also being used by people who aren’t necessarily in a traditional IT role, because they were developed with the needs of line-of-business personnel — the managers, the admin staff and even the CEO — in mind.

“In some ways, the approval cycle has gotten a lot easier,” Mr. Purves says.

“Instead of it being something where I want to buy a piece of enterprise software and have to engage the tech people, where there’s a window of installation some time next September, now people can access these programs through a Web browser.”

Insightful article by Shane Schick from the globe and mail today on web services and the “Freemium” model. I had a chance to chat with Shane earlier this week about some of the challenges and opportunities of selling Web services and the “freemium” model [the modern equivalent of shareware, where you offer a free version and try to make your money by holding back features to the pro version].

We talked about some of the challenges of the Freemium model in terms of getting users to pay, but at the same time how in the business world, the model is working as Web services can deliver a lot of value to companies relative to traditional installed IT – and your typical business manager has a higher discretionary spending threshold than, say, the average myspace teenager. Freshbooks for instance is a great example of a Canadian Web2.0 company that has successfully take a big bite out of a small business market traditionally dominated by the likes of Intuit and other desktop applications.

I would add to the conversation is that freemium is not the only model going. Charging for it directly, is just one way to monetize a Web service. because of the service/community rather than from it. Advertising is one example, or building your app “as a feature rather than a service” that can sometimes create much greater value (much greater than you could have earned on your own) once plugged into a larger existing brand community or infrastructure. YouTube is of course the spectacular example of this as an acquisition play, or closer to home, bubbleshare and no doubt Nuuvo will follow as well.

Full article: ‘Freemium’ services: A Web surfer’s paradise

The Two Mind behind New Mind Space

With 168 pre-registrants this could be the biggest Camp we’ve had yet. Kudo’s to Eli for putting together another great event. Here’s my notes and meandering editorializations on the evening.

1) Parent Blogging in Toronto, MommyBlogsToronto
Catherine Connor

Evening started off a little slow for me but then I’m not a parent myself. She talked about growing a network of blogs around parenting in Toronto. Catherine did raise some interesting points however of a balancing authority and the trust of your audience with any direct means of monetizing your traffic. My response to this is, if you want to make money, let the opportunities come because of your blogging not through it. Ad networks are for nickels and dimes. The trust and professional/personal/social connections you build through your blog is more valuable can best be leveraged in to much bigger things (in or out of the blogosphere).

2) Urban Capture the Flag in Toronto, Newmindspace
Kevin Bracken & Lori Kufner

Damnit, these kids are all right. While urban capture the flag may have been tried before, but not with the flare and the enormous popularity of the New Mindspace. All without ever getting a single permit. If you are one of the few on the internet who haven’t seen the video, go check it out here.

3) The C02 Black Cloud, WWF-Canada
Tara Wood & Eli Singer
This was a true social media case study, showing what you can do with tools like liveblogging, flickr and youtube (and a little help from the New Minds crew) to build a snowball of buzz and media attention over the course of the day of an event. Cool stuff, check out the website and the flickr photos for more.

4) Embracing the Membership, Zipcar
Saul Colt
An engaging presentation by Saul. Great to see how with little budget and a lot of personality this one-man marketing machine has been able to build impressive brand awareness and loyalty for the ZipCar service. Autoshare was also in attendance and I was keen to suggest a Rebel Without a Cause-esque road-racer showdown to settle this rivalry once an for all. Sadly though, they seem to get along charmingly as it is.

Lastly, be sure to check out CaseCampJobs! http://jobs.casecamp.org/

And next week is World Class DemoCamp It’s going to be big.