The Russians were kicking our ass at hockey and, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, our farm was in the blast radii of Montreal and Ottawa! (I blame trying to expand my English vocabulary with Reader’s Digest for my alarmist outlook).

I remember reading a Bertrand Russell book, I think it may have been Has Man a Future?

in it he had a quotation that I can’t seem to find anywhere that went something like this: “Man’s Intelligence far exceeds his wisdom”.  Essentially, Russell is saying that we invent technology before we as a species have developed the wisdom, rules, ethics, or laws to effectively use said technology.

Now social media won’t threaten the existence of our species, like nuclear weapons or genetic modification, but the analogy still fits.

The technology of social media which, from what I can tell, grew out of the technology of internet dating sites in the early 2000s, has taken the world by storm.

Music, TV, books, photography, telephony, dating, either have been or will be disrupted.  This second phase of the digital revolution will change the way we consume information on a scale that will rival the invention of the Guttenberg press or the Renaissance.

Our lawmakers are stumbling around trying to make sense of the  technological paradigm shift or, better still, are trying to use it to political advantage without understanding it. Their lack of wisdom in the face of this technological upheaval is sadly too obvious.

The actual quantitative study of what is happening is only now emerging as a science. It involves elements of graph theory, big data know-how, sociology, anthropology, and a whole lot of math.  There are many names for it. I am partial to Physics of Society but, then again, I am really not that great at naming things.  For non-math explanations I would turn to the seminal Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, “Linked” and “Bursts”.

It’s not going to be easy and there are going to be uproarious debates and symposium’s and mistakes and foolish interpretations, but we can safely say, as far as social media is concerned, wisdom may begin to catch up to technology.

By March we were already 3 people and had moved across the hall from StationC.  We used the meetings rooms extensively to handle more client and investor meetings and the desk when we needed quiet time.   In September 2008 we hired what we like to call our zeroeth employee, the intrepid Guido Vieira and already needed more space.  Guido got our desk at StationC.  Along with meeting other startups and networking at StationC this co-working space was proving itself in the Montreal startup ecology.

Not only did StationC help us with our spacial growth, StationC’s rich community of freelancer’s were key in helping us source much needed talent, Dan Mireault did our logo, Patrick Tanguay designed our site, Duncan Moore did our branding and  Adriana Palanka served as Nexalogy’s official voice.  So now we are at 7 employees and  in the process of hiring our next 3 still in the same building, just two floors down.  As we moved down to a larger space we gave our old offices next to StationC to WhereCloud.  Which have since also moved out of that space and taken larger offices in the building.  In fact in the last few years, several startups grew out of the fertile ground which is StationC : Nimonik, Metakine, StatusNet.  The organic flexibility that is co-working is perfect for the quickly changing dynamic which is the reality of startups and startup communities.  Thanks StationC.

We’ve had a pretty active couple of weeks, the highlight of which has to be attending CIX on Dec 1 at MaRS. Nexalogy was selected to participate as one of the top twenty innovative startups at CIX. There were great presentations of startups to a room packed with VCs. In spite of a a technical hiccup, we managed to place fifth overall and were chosen to participate in a three month stint in Silicon Valley courtesy of the Canadian Technology Accelerator. We’re following in the footsteps of Context.io, who won the same award last year. It was a huge honour to be selected by CIX and the result certainly exceeded our expectations.

On a personal note, it gave me occasion to make connections with a couple of entrepreneurs – one of whom lives in my own backyard of Montreal – at the speakers dinner. Mark O’Sullivan of Vanilla Forums is facilitating communities everywhere a phenomenal 300,000+ forums around the world. Over dinner I had a great discussion with Allen Lau, CEO and Founder of Wattpad on different forms of social data (ebooks are social data too!). I learned about the surprising intersection between commercial real estate architecture and Virtual worlds from Colin Graham, CEO of Arcestra.

In the meantime, the team is hard at work putting the final touches on the UI for our first product, Nexalive.

Exciting times!

From the get go, one of the major themes from this festival was startup demystification.  Chris Shipley (CEO, Guidewire Group) gave us a sobering helping of mythbusting on the hype around startups that’s been building in the last few years. Sarah Prevette (CEO, Sprouter) had hand drawn slides as she explained the startup journey with her characteristic mix of humility and charisma. Tara Hunt (CEO, Buyosphere) personalised the entrepreneur’s struggle: startups are hard, they’re risky, and they will test you in every way. She also gave this talk on her birthday.

Upon reflection, success in academia is just like success in the startup life. The first keynote by Dave McClure (Founder, 500 Startups) really brought this home to me with his presentation “Why NOT to do a startup” where he emphasized the insane levels of dedication, energy and self-sacrifice it takes to realize your vision while knowing the odds of success are miniscule. Many of these points below were inspired by his talk where Dave may or may not have dropped an F-bomb:

• You need to be passionate enough about a subject that you could think about it 70 hours a week (for me it was supermassive black holes)
• You must find a problem/need that no one has solved before you start working on your solution (for me, that was a just the beginning of my PhD)
• You are your own marketing and sales department (“publish or perish” is no cliche – for me it meant non-stop travelling to conferences, networking like crazy with my peers, which by the way, won’t help you a whit if your research sucks)
• You have to produce world class results on a shoestring budget; “living large” = $30K a year in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Paris.
• You need to inspire your team with vision – enough so they’ll give up the security of a Real Job.

Startups ARE hard, especially in a town that is far away from all the action in Silicon Valley. Startup Fest opened a lot of doors for the community. Thanks JS Cournoyer, Alistair Croll, Phil Telio, Julien Smith and Chris Shipley for bringing little bit of the Valley to Montreal.

By the way, Startup Fest was indeed very good for us. We placed #1 at the Demo table competition! We were ranked first using Guidewire Group’s G-Score – thanks Chris Shipley, to my wicked team: Mathieu Ouin, Maxime Martineau, Guido Vieira and to our investors at Environics (ERG and ECI ).

Read the Gazette’s round up here!

Before I left on postdoc I ran across a job application that was looking for particle physicists or astrophysicists to help improve pedestrian traffic in Monaco.  It made sense.  People individually are very hard to predict, (duh) but thousands of people bunched together with strict constraints on where they can move , wouldn’t be that difficult to model.  Lots and lots of people =~ fluid dynamics.  A very viscous fluid but a fluid nonetheless. I had scored a postdoc fellowship and I was already commited to NYC or Paris.  But the Monaco job did peak my interest… It was a premonition of my future work here at Nexalogy.

One of the sources of “big data” is the never-ending stream of material emanating from the social web. People are taking many approaches to analyzing this kind of data, but at the end of the day, the goal of any approach is the same: to gain a better understanding of the whole stream.

To demonstrate how we approach this problem here at Nexalogy, while I was gone I had my team in Montreal gather every tweet that contained the main hashtags used at Strata (#strataconf & #stratconf). There were 4616 tweets between February 1 to February 7 from a total of 1455 individual Twitter users.

We have built an interactive lexical map of the entire dataset – go to http://strataconf.nexalogy.com to view and interact with the data.

In the article, the founders of Tweetfeel said that the best they could get at recognizing sentiment with automated systems was 70-80% effectiveness. After our brief, inexaustive trial of Tweetfeel we feel it was more around 50-75%. It is a safe bet that it will take a long time before automated systems will be effective enough to make a quantitative evaluation of sentiment.

Solutions such as Tweefeel and ScoutLabs are excellent for gauging the zeitgeist or the direction of the wind, and they are cost effective for that purpose. But business questions are often impossible to formulate simply – and emerging trends almost always start as eddies in the main wind. The mathematical sophistication to find these eddies in torrents of data must be coupled with a human analysis at some point to understand the particular linguistic and cultural differences that arise in each particular business context.

Sentiment mining is a great term, but a little optimistic when not coupled with some form of qualitative analysis. When processor power grows even cheaper and when the tools now used by folks such as our local Nstein move out of the enterprise software domain and become more available to consumers, sentiment mining might simply become part of a normal web search… at that time, and not before, could we say that the new (aka semantic) web has arrived.

I was encouraged to see that Social Network Analysis was working its way out of the “trough of disillusionment” and onto the “path of enlightenment”. We have been working from the get-go on advanced analysis techniques to mine knowledge from these masses of information and have gone from explaining what blogs are to dealing with the “disillusionment”.

Many of our clients (mostly those in big PR firms), have tried web-based social media monitoring/analysis services and have been disappointed in the actual amount of added value for business these services provide (in fact, just this morning one of our clients made that exact comment). Online social media monitoring services have made excellent advances in designing dashboards for presenting collected social media data and are completely sufficient for illustrating the most obvious trends in data, but the analysis part of social media analysis is usually quite light, as automated “one fits all” analysis tends to be.

The maturing of social network analysis spells a bright future for providers who have the expertise to adjust the analysis of social network data to create concrete solutions and solve real problems businesses might have. The NYT described this well earlier this month in an article about the increasing role of statisticians in social media analysis.

Let’s just hope that we can keep riding the wave onto the “plateau of productivity”.

Well, not that funny, because after painting a dismal picture of the print media industry in the US. Ibbitson concludes that blogs and other web 2.0 based tools will answer the call.

For an interesting graphical analysis of the Iranian election debate I highly recommend reading the Internet and Democracy blog at Harvard: mapping Iran’s election.