If you're one of those OCRIRadio.com listeners who tunes in occasionally throughout the year (it's OK, just admit it, besides, our Web stats know who you are, where you live, and the kind of car you're going to drive three years from now :) and is now looking for earbud nuggets to take to the cottage, we've done the work for you with our "best of show" podcast.

Click here to check out why:

• ANY tech entrepreneur can learn marketing and succeed, with Geoffrey Moore, “Crossing the Chasm” author and Mohr Davidow Ventures Partner

• EVERY tech entrepreneur should be selling to India, with Mike Manson, Partner with the Taraspan Group

• ANY tech company can learn from the Web 2.0 transformation of Cisco, as told by Cisco Systems Inc.’s CEO John Chambers

• EVERY Canadian city can learn from the strengths of Ottawa’s tech
  cluster, with University of Toronto Professor and economic cluster expert David Wolfe

Enjoy the podcast! And have a great summer,

Yours hosts,

Nathan Rudyk and Jeffrey Dale 

By Steve Reside

In the March episode of OCRIRadio.com, market2world President and CEO Nathan Rudyk interviews five Canadian and Indian executives in attendance at last month’s Telfer India Forum at the University of Ottawa. Four technology executives and one experienced India observer are quick to push aside the myth that India’s only role in the technology sector is as a supplier of outsource labour.

In fact, a compelling argument can be made that India’s most important role moving forward for high tech Canada will not be as a supplier of talent, but as a market for Canadian technology products and services. And Ottawa’s technology sector is well placed to take advantage of this growth — especially in the booming Indian telecommunication, health care and software industries.

Consider the evidence:

• India’s economic growth is forecasted to exceed 8% percent for 2008
• India is projected to be the world’s seventh-largest economy by 2020, up five spots from where it sits today
• According to Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, Canadian exports to India reached $1.7 billion last year — a 54% increase over 2005
  
• The number of new mobile telecom subscribers in India rose from 16 million in 2003 to 65 million in 2006. With 156.31 million subscribers across the country, India has become one of the fastest growing mobile markets in the world
• According to the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority, the Indian healthcare industry has the potential to show the same exponential growth that the software industry showed in the past decade

To get more insight into the opportunities available for Ottawa high tech companies in India, listen to Nathan's interview with Peter Nesbitt — Export Development Canada’s (EDC) Chief Representative for India International Business Development. Nesbitt says that EDC is focusing on India’s middle-class because "it represents the fastest growing consumer market in the world”.

In a separate interview in the March show, Mike Manson, Partner with the TaraSpan Group — a company that accelerates market entry to India for Canadian companies — says that the economic opportunity in India is “at a scale where most Canadian’s can’t comprehend”.

“We’ve exploded this myth that only the big players can play in India. What we’ve found is that if you have a product with a value proposition, Indian companies are moving at such a pace that if they get the value proposition there is definitely room for smaller Canadian companies to enter the Indian market.”

Other guest on the show include; Gary Knee, Vice President of R&D and Operations, Redknee Solutions Inc., Sonam Devgan, CEO of Algol Semantics Inc. and Dr. Praful Naik, Chief Scientific Officer of Bilcare Ltd..

Listen to the entire show to learn how Ottawa high tech companies can leverage their experience to take advantage of opportunities in the rapidly growing Indian market.

Play podcast now or download as an MP3

By Nathan Rudyk

Technology marketing guru and Mohr Davidow Ventures VC Geoffrey Moore sees big green in clean. In an exclusive half-hour interview with OCRIRadio.com, Moore says global warming is no longer a cause, but a market. A HUGE market.

I'm proud to say Ottawa appears well positioned to capture a fair share of this market – in November six local firms were named in the national "Next Ten Emerging Clean Tech Leaders of Tomorrow" by Corporate Knights magazine.

Referring to his takeaway from the 2008 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Moore says “People have completely, completely bought into the notion that this is going to be a global re-engineering of business practices and industrial practices, and it will possibly be the largest market in the history of the planet.” In terms of an investment opportunity, “I think it will dwarf I.T.”

Moore’s statements draw on his VC experience plus his wisdom as the author of four books including Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game, Living on the Fault Line, and his latest, Dealing with Darwin.

Our Geoffrey Moore interview also covers his opinions on the promise for technology’s role in “the entire reconstruction of consumer life around digitized media” and “the enormous opportunity to take the lessons we’ve learned in the computing industry and apply it to things like molecular diagnostics and catching disease states earlier.”

With sage advice that applies to any entrepreneurial technology company, but especially to the vast majority of Ottawa tech firms sized 50 people or less and in the midst of crossing the chasm, Moore states that marketing is much more about mastery than mystery, and that tech CEOs in any sector can apply the same systems approaches to marketing that they do in building their products.

Many thanks to Avoca Semiconductor's VP of Marketing and Sales Peter Fillmore (who introduces our featured guest as well as Avoca's digital audio entertainment technology) for connecting us to Geoffrey Moore! Peter's longtime association with Geoff gave OCRIRadio.com listeners a half-hour of inspiration and great advice that translated into in-person speaker's fees, would have required a five-figure investment. And of course many more thanks to Geoffrey Moore!

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's Web 2.0 tech PR and product launch agency, and the founder and co-host of OCRIRadio.com.)

By Nathan Rudyk

Should government workers be banned from social networking sites like Facebook? Not if they listen to OCRIRadio.com.

As a smart team of tech PR and product launch experts nestled next to the nation's capital, it’s inevitable that market2world's Web 2.0 communications expertise gets tapped by both government departments and associations eager to understand the ramifications of citizen journalism, the wisdom of the crowds, and the tools such as blogs, podcasts and social networking sites that enable the long tail to lengthen. Over the last few years, our government and association client list includes the National Arts Centre, Transport Canada, Canadian Nurses Association, Canadian Bar Association, City of Ottawa, MADD Canada, the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, and the City of Ottawa.

So it was interesting to get tapped for comment in this month's InterGovWorld.com feature article by Rosie Lombardi entitled Web 2.0: Government's social networking debate.

The Ontario Government has chosen to ban social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube, meanwhile CEOs like Cicso's John Chambers are championing social networking technologies as key sources of competitive advantage. (Have a listen to our OCRIRadio.com podcast of John Chambers' speech in Ottawa last October - well worth your time whether you're in the public or private sector.) For the time-challenged, here are some key quotes from that Chambers speech:

“We will learn how to social network together as many of the young people in this audience already do. And that social networking will be the way that we institute and change business structure, organization and drive productivity at what I think will be a three to five percent pace for between seven to ten years.”

“This is the hard part. Moving from hierarchical organization, command and control – which most of my leaders including myself – got to where we are today by being good at command and control. And yet we’re saying you’ve got to empower, trust and have a replicable process.”

 
The crux of the government and social networking debate comes down to command and control, empowerment and trust. Government organizations are great at command and control, and struggle with empowerment and trust. Yet they are desperately seeking workers from the Facebook and YouTube generation. The Conference Board of Canada estimates that as a result of current retirement trends, governments at all levels could lose up to 44 percent of their workers by 2010. 

As I discussed with Rosie in her article:  

"[Rudyk] warns the Canadian government risks becoming irrelevant to citizens if it cuts itself off from widely-used social networking sites. "Ontario's Facebook ban was a tragic decision, and should be reversed. It cuts off the bureaucracy from experiencing the information diet of the very near future." Young people don't use e-mail anymore, and increasingly rely on handheld devices and social networks to remain constantly connected to the hive.

"If government sites aren't designed to operate that way, you've just cancelled that 14 to 24 year-old demographic." he says. "And if the government can't understand the dynamics of social media and non-hierarchical collaboration, it will be on the losing end of the battle for talent."

The light at the end of this Facebook-banning tunnel, for Ontario at least, comes from e-government head Karl Cunningham, who assures us in Rosie's article that his province's ban is a "play for time" as they develop a Web 2.0 strategy that could come out this summer. That's good, but what John Chambers did was better.

While his competitors played for time, Chambers leapt into the social networking fray, re-engineering not just his communications technology tool-set, but his entire managerial culture, to embrace versus ban the possibilities offered by Web 2.0.

Is Chambers a misguided revolutionary or is he on the money? Click on this comparative market cap chart, and do not adjust your set. As of 9AM on Jan. 30th, the stock market – perhaps the ultimate arbitrar of the wisdom of the crowds – says Cisco is worth more than 10X its nearest rival, Lucent, and (this is the very, very sad part) more than 26X Nortel's.

As a taxpayer, my observation is Canada currently has an excellent competitive position in the world, much like Nortel did in the late 90s when Cisco was a comparative peer instead of today's networking industry goliath. Embracing social networking technologies and associated collaborative management styles will, I believe, help us maintain and even increase our position. Banning them, and by virtue of that tarnishishing the attractiveness of a career in the civil service, cancels an opportunity to remain one of the best countries in the world to live, work and play.

I don't know about you, but I think the job of government is to help create winning conditions for its citizens.

By Nathan Rudyk

With the sale of Cognos to IBM this week, the young-ish tech pundits of Ottawa have expressed yearning for the big company era of the 90s. With headlines crying "Branch plant City" and "Silicon Subsidiary North" there's a lot of concern that our entrepreneurial mojo has been sold to the highest multinational bidder and we'll never again give birth to what Celtic House VC Andrew Waitman in his Money Matters column calls "companies of scale".

BarcampOttawa's energetic organizer Peter Childs blogged about how Cognos "surrenders control of its destiny to IBM" and how the sale "makes clear ... how little depth the Ottawa tech sector has". The Ottawa Citizen's Mark Anderson, after laying out the compelling business case for the Cognos acquisition, writes about his "ineffable sense of loss" and pronounces the local tech scene "deadwood". Ouch!

For an antidote to the bummerization of high tech Ottawa, check out what the geezers have to say - guys who were around when cows dotted the fields between the Mitel and MDS Nordion campuses, and who helped will the sector into one that employs tens of thousands versus hundreds of workers - and more entrepreneurs than ever before in the city's history. In this month's National Capital SCAN, in article titled "Past is prologue for OttawaTech", Denny Doyle quipped to SCAN founder/editor Tony Patterson that "“If things are so down, how come there’s no place to park [in Kanata].”

Doyle worked as an engineer in high tech Ottawa when Methuselah was a girl, founded hardware manufacturer Digital Equipment Canada, and has an Order of Canada for his contributions to tech as both an investor, entrepreneur, author and mentor. He's also released his long-awaited Doyletech family tree of locally-generated technology companies with research that shows last year high tech employment rebounded to 78,000, almost 7% above the previous peak reached in 2000, with more growth this year. BUMMER!

Patterson meanwhile, says "I’ve been writing about technology in Canada for more than forty years and I’ve been working in the field for more than twenty. I think these present days are just a lull before the tsunami. We’re on the verge of the most spectacular technology boom the world has ever known." BUMMER MAN! Oops. I mean, go man go!

Although I'm closer to the vintage of Childs and Anderson than Patterson or Doyle, as a former employee of both IBM (co-op student, 82-83) and Cognos (co-op student then newly minted communications coordinator, 84-85), I do remember those cows between Nordion and Mitel. I scurried back to TO for a few years (a woman was involved, and it all worked out three kids later!), but after serving the branch-plant product launch needs of clients like Xerox Canada, EDS Canada, Microsoft Canada, Dell Canada and IBM Canada among others, I came back to Ottawa in the pre-boom early 90s to do much more satisfying work for a host of Ottawa tech start-ups - work that meant more than a decimal point of difference.

Many of those companies, like JetForm and Databeacon, got swallowed by larger fish like Adobe and Cognos, as did my own start-up, digIT Interactive, by Quebecor's nurun. When an exit occured, we didn't antipcate the future with dread. We went and created another one. I think - no, I know - the geezers have got it right. Tech Ottawa's got it goin' on. But don't take anybody's word for it. Check out the November podcast of OCRIRadio.com where we talk to two next generation Ottawa tech firms - eSight and IPeak Networks. Most of the founders are by-products of previous exits. And they're not planning branch-plant futures for themselves.

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Canada's Web 2.0 tech PR and product launch agency, and the founder and co-host of OCRIRadio.com.)