I have to admit that this month's Ottawa Venture & Technology Summit (OVTS) had a scary dimension. The news on VC fundraising was ghoulish in the face of the ongoing credit crisis. To add urgency to that fear, as you listen to OCRIRadio.com's Holloween podcast, recorded at OVTS, it's clear Ottawa’s angel and venture capital investment community believe their newly elected government representatives on Wellington Street don’t grasp the opportunity offered by the tech sector.

OCRI President and CEO Jeffrey Dale said, “Our innovation economy is producing more jobs than the auto sector and the resource sector combined but we don’t seem to have much focus on it. Our public policy better pay very close attention to the challenges.” Indeed.

One challenge to the innovation economy that requires immediate attention is a couple of paragraphs in something called "Section 116" said Irving Ebert, a former Nortel executive who has invested in 27 Ottawa technology companies as part of the Purple Angel investor network. Section 116 is an esoteric part of Canada’s tax code that makes it unduly difficult for foreign investors to get their money out of the country once a tech company is bought or goes public. (Check out Charley Lax's peHUB blog post for more on 116.)

“This thing has no impact on revenues flowing into the Canadian treasury,” said Ebert. But it does stop many high tech investors cold at our border, and causes Ottawa companies to locate in the U.S. or elsewhere when they grow enough to warrant venture capital investment. He cited the recent local example of MODASolutions Corp., an e-payments company that moved out of Ottawa to relocate in New York.

What difference would such changes make? Israel has no such barriers to investors, according to Ebert, where the population of the entire country (8 million) is less than the population of Ontario (12 million), and the amount of venture capital there is greater than that invested in all of Canada.

With such barriers out of the way and a concerted focus on building the tech sector, does Canada have what it takes to succeed? Absolutely, believes venture capitalist Bernie Zeisig, who has just launched a new Ottawa-based fund called Great Northern Capital concentrating exclusively on emerging growth-stage technology firms with established products and revenues of approximately $5 million. “Canada has strong technology – nobody’s going to question that,” said Zeisig on the podcast. But he also points out Canadian entrepreneurs need to be encouraged to think on a global scale.

With a quick fix to the tax code and some globally scalable thinking from the politicians on Wellington Street, Canada's tech sector can easily beat back the ghouls of the credit crisis and contribute more wealth ($140 billion a year right now) and jobs (600,000-plus). Check out our podcast and see what you think.

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency, and founder of the OCRIRadio.com tech business 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 

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.)

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.

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.) 

The original plan for the October podcast of OCRIRadio.com was Part II of our interviews from the Ottawa Venture & Technology Summit (OVTS). Look for those interviews next month. Last week, Cisco Systems' Chairman and CEO John Chambers came to town to speak to 800-plus Ottawa tech execs, students and no doubt, competitors, with what was no less than a global vision for the future of the Internet and its potential to change of lives of people all over the planet. In other words, he ain't no gear peddlar.

We got the audio of the speech, Jeffrey Dale and I added some observations and an interesting anecdote about how his 13-year-old son Alex attracted enough backstage interest from Chambers to receive not just a business card (no one else did) but a job offer to work at Cisco (ditto), and we think it makes for a fairly fascinating hour of your time.

Some highlights:

• John Chambers gets social networking. Corporate decision-making at Cisco has become a Web 2.0-inspired non-heirarchical mash-up of ideas framed within a vision of where the company wants to go. Project leads are chosen based on merit/competence vs. years in or budget power. Command and control - an approach Chambers admitted he learned to master and feel comforable with - is dead at Cisco. And to use a bit of Ottawa Valley speak, teams there "git er done" using IM, teleconferencing, wikis, and blogs. At market2world, we're with you John.
  
  
• He also gets global competitiveness. Listen to his arguments for I.T. investment vs. the current North American trend to chop I.T. spend in favour of plowing more money into social spending. If we accept 1% GDP growth, that means we're content to double our standard of living every 75 years. My Ukrainian grandfather didn't dig ditches, lay track and work in a pulp mill so my Mother and I could end up doing the same thing. But that's the scenario we're heading towards with our current social spending priorities as opposed to countries like China and India. As the Stephen Harper-led Conservatives appear poised to create a majority government in Canada, I can only hope that a few of the policy wonks close to the Prime Minister give this podcast a listen and decide to get more strategic about our nation's I.T. sector.
  
  
• John Chambers is using Cisco as a test-bed for his ideas on the Web 2.0-enabled company, and it's working. As of this writing, Cisco's market cap is US$188 billion. Alcatel-Lucent's is $21 billion. Juniper's is $17 billion. And Nortel's is ... $7 billion. Check it out yourself on Yahoo Finance.
  

Okay, that's enough from me, except to say that John Chambers worked the Theatre Hall of the National Arts Centre like a cross between Mick Jagger and The Rev. Jesse Jackson. He paced up and down the theatre, not just making eye contact, but bounding up the isles to talk to people as he was making his points. No script, he barely looked at his slides, and it was the most compelling CEO speech I've ever heard. I've heard more than a few.

Enjoy our John Chambers podcast! Let us know what you think.  

(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.)

Valiquette takes aim at the Freedom 55 government mindset that equates entrepreneurship with social maladjustment (why take risks when you can just chow down in the cube-farm for 20-odd years waiting for your indexed pension), then goes on to take the piss out of the quality of entrepreneur presenting at last month's Ottawa Venture Technology Summit. He says we've got to "embrace change and leave the comfort zone behind. If this is lacking in our collective psyche, the game is over before it's even begun."

Waitman, a straight shooter who runs Ottawa's – and one of Canada's – largest VC funds, and who has made recent investments in local companies like MODASolutions and dna13, says while we're good at keeping score of cash coming into tech, we're bad at keeping score on the ROI. The result that we have no proof of consistency or scale. Andrew points down the road to Kitchener-Waterloo's success with Research in Motion (valued at $50 billion at the time of his column, now valued at $65 billion) and Sandvine (valued at $800 million).

I think Valiquette's playing our strings. As someone who dates back to pre-IPO Cognos (the last project I worked on there as an employee was their first annual report) I've never encountered a single tech CEO from Cognos founder Mike Potter on down who is informed by, inspired by or envious of the collective psyche of civil servants.

As for the quality of entrepreneur presenting at OVTS, I did see one lame presentation by someone who had no idea what his business model was or how he'd produce a return on the VC money he was seeking. But I saw several other on-the-money pitches  – judge for yourself on the upcoming October edition of OCRIRadio.com where we interview two of those entrepreneurs. Still, there's nothing wrong with having our butts kicked once in awhile, and Leo Valiquette is correct that every OTVS presenter should have his or her act together. Keep it coming Leo, but don't pay so much attention to the out-of-work whiners that populate the OBJ forums. They're not entrepreneurs, just people who should find a geek-fattening cube to safely grow old in.

Waitman's butt-plant about tech Ottawa's need to get better fast about demonstrating ROI hits closer to the target. I'd like to see the score-card idea extended beyond the companies ready for Andrew's VC money, down to the many boot-strapped tech firms that are the vast majority of local employers. If data on revenue growth, employees, R&D investment etc. is aggregated by a trusted third party that as Andrew says has "institute" or "association" in its name, we'll have another way to show the world we're on the move.

And yes, I've heard the apologist speak that this is a lot of work and hard to do and entrepreneurs won't share that kind of info and blah blah blah. I think it's B.S. Ottawa tech works like a great big small town. If we make this a tech community priority and explain why ROI scorecards are necessary to the health and wealth of our industry, and point our ample resources at it, it'll happen. By the way, if you want to hear more Waitman, click here for his thoughts on last year's "Big Money" podcast. He's got a fine mind and a big wallet.

OK, it's Friday night after 7pm and this entrepreneur is hungry for more than ROI data right now! L8r.

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Canada's tech PR and product launch agency. This entry has been cross-posted at The New Way Things Are blog at market2world.)