Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Have gorgeous flight uniforms modeled after the clasic glamour of the jet age. Find a trendy venue and invite the glitterati of toronto. Good wine, a chance to socialize and wrapped up in just time to get on with the rest of friday evenings engagements. As someone myself planning a launch party in a few short weeks, some excellent inspiration.

As an aside, as a downtown resident I am a huge proponent of the *expansion* of the island airport… Over-politicized harping of Oliva Chow and others notwithstanding. I believe Pearson airport taxes (up to $170 a ticket), it’s isolation (expensive, unpredictable and traffic congesting taxi fares) to be absolutely egregious. Not only do these factors cause untold expense to area business, but they also cut off ordinary and lower-income residents from affordable air travel. Compare the incredibly cheap cross european fares (sometimes $30-$40) to the up to $170 Pearson airport taxes plus $40 taxi fares each way. Sigh. In the memorable words of Reboot Thomas at Lift06, “EasyJet has done more to unite the european people than the European Union ever could”

I believe a revitalized downtown air hub is one of the best things that could happen for both the business and residents of Downtown toronto. Cheers to Porter airlines, best of luck to you.

Link to my flickr photos of the event.

Scoble tipped me off to this great story this morning about GM using flickr. GM has a blog I find out but not only have they embraced this simple way to reach out to their more enthusiastic fans, but they also said why not release all of our internal PR images and promotional event images on to a public flickr stream as well? In his blog post Diego Rodriguez of metacool has this to say about GM (great quote):

Corporate blogging is about trusting the judgment and intuition of individual contributors instead of relying upon a rule-based central authority. It’s about releasing control and rules, but embracing judgment and character. In general I think that’s a better way to market, because it comes across as more real and authentic because it is [..a..] trusting stance is a wonderful way to engage the outside world in creating contagious action around your offerings — which is the fundamental (if often forgotten) goal of marketers in the first place.

Very well put. Now can you imagine applying that logic to not just to Marketing (a no brainer) but also to internal corporate environment as well? I’m working on a technology project these days that we hope could enable businesses to do just that. [stay tuned…]

I’ll leave you with this: When was the last time that you felt that your parent company really, and authentically, thought about releasing control in order to “embrace your judgment and character”. Imagine how that would transform your loyalty, work ethic and commitment to them if they did? hmmm [and can you tell I used to work for a big bank?]

link: GM uses Flickr, do you?

picture: A snap from GM’s flickr photo stream showing what looks to be a concept GM hybrid or electric vehicle being tested at the Bonneville salt flats.

I’ve been using my desktop for a long time as my primary media source for some time having thrown out my cd changer and dvd drive a long time ago [though i’ve since invested in a record player which i love]. So I was interested to read about these new audio features of Vista (MS’s immenent, if long delayed next version of windows). Windows can use a microphone to calibrate your speakers for frequency response and room positioning etc.. And it can do this, correcting/tweaking on-the-fly all audio singals output from a computer, in software, by just stealing a few cycles of CPU along the way. Neat. yet another reason to start thinking about throwing out your home stereo components. Now if MS could just do something about the general mediocre quality of integrated soundchip hardware found in most computers…

in Vista, we have a perceptually tuned version of room correction. Because we don’t expect everyone to own an instrumentation microphone, we have designed it so that you can use [most any] cheap microphone costing a few dollars to do an excellent job. IF you have a more expensive microphone, you can calibrate your room very accurately. All of this is implemented in in-box Vista software, using less than 5% on 3GHz CPU. Our room correction will equalize frequency response, time delay, and gain between all of your main channels, as well as build a first-reflection-cancellation filter if one or more of your speakers are near a reflective surface. If you do have a high-quality microphone, the room correction system will also flatten the overall frequency response and adjust the subwoofer delay accordingly.

more here: link