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.

Claude spoke at TedxMcGill on November 12, 2011 and the video is now live for your holiday viewing pleasure. Sit back and let Claude entertain you with a shocking tale of the challenge social data presents for those of us who make our living from making sense of the web.

It was held at the unconventional venue of Bain Mathieu – an urban swimming pool built in 1931 that has since been repurposed as a theatre for everything from educational programming to rock bands.

Click the photo below to see the entire slideshow of a great event by talented event photographer Eva Blue!

With Fabric Engine’s Server technology its possible to take current backend infrastructure and redeploy it to scale and gain impressive performance increases. In Nexalogy’s case we have to do a lot of back end processing on blog posts for our SDAS (Social Data Analysis System), so in order to get an idea of how much faster Fabric was we ran a standardized co-word analysis on 20,000 blog post snippets (time in seconds):

Using our PHP Engine: 105s
Using our Java Version 1 Engine: 18s
Using Fabric Engine: 2s

The results speak for themselves.

Fabric Engine Server has other advantages too. In addition to using a language very similar to Javascript for the high-performance operators (vanilla JavaScript/node for everything else), which reduces the need to learn or bring in C++ coders, you can avoid the whole code-compile-run cycle with its sometimes long delays, and use a more immediate execute model.

Fabric Engine Server is currently in alpha deployment with just a handful of startups including Nexalogy. The Fabric Engine team is very smart and responsive, and are currently building out new functionality to the Server constantly as it moves through Alpha. Turning performance into a commodity, this could be a game changer for startups needing to go to the next level. Fabric Engine is currently in Silicon Valley strutting their stuff with other top notch startups at C100′s “48 Hours in the Valley”. We wish them all the best!

Nexalogy became a partner by creating a Startup Weekend Toronto Nexalive microsite here. Creating it is simple; just plug in one #swtoronto hashtag. We captured some 3128 tweets and counting!

Sarah Jane Morris – Head of Developer Relations at Context.io – got to feel the electric atmosphere first hand. You can see she was one of the most active tweeters during the event according to Nexalive and you can read her account of this microcosm of the startup experience here.

We’ve got two microsites going for this event. One for the event as a whole – check out the #webcom microsite here!

The other one is for the Open Government stream – check out the #opengouv stream here!

We’re fast approaching our launch for Nexalive, our first product using the technology we’ve featured on this site. The final touches are being put on the product but thanks to our willing test subjects like Webcom, we’re well on our way.

What is Nexalive? It’s a turnkey Twitter visualization tool for events. Nexalive takes your event hashtag and turns it into an eye catching data visualization as unique as your event.

Not Mars the planet! MaRS Discovery District, the Toronto-based incubator for science, technology and social entrepreneurship plays host to CIX this December 1, 2011.

Nexalogy is proud to have placed in the top 20 Canadian companies for The Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX). We’ll be heading to Toronto to represent Montreal startups alongside Recoset, Vanilla Forums and Woozworld.

CIX is an annual event that expertly curates for potential partners and venture capital to watch a demo and meet the entrepreneurs. Companies are judged on a number of key factors including: product/service offering, depth of management, market opportunity and business model. There were hundreds of startups that applied so it’s a great privlege to be selected.

If you think you want to come along to cheer us on in person, you an also register here. And check out the schedule too; looks like it’s going to be a packed day!

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!

Implementing a new system can be costly in subscription fees alone; some enterprise SMA solutions will set you back over $100,000 per month! I argue they’re vastly more damaging to the organization in an intangible way: it’s a huge blow to morale to adopt and abandon if the tool is simply not right for your needs.

We thought it worthwhile to amalgamate the collected wisdom from these critical minds that have tried more solutions collectively than any SMA supplier could ever possibly do on their own. I’ve got a few notes on things to look for and things to avoid:

1. Make sure what you’re getting from your solution is actionable. Infographics are trendy but it’s strategy you want. Charts are useless if they don’t give you a clue as to what to do next.
2. Make sure your solution captures networks of information and not just reporting on social-networks-as-silos. The real insights are in network effects and amplifications, not in short, non-linear relationships.
3. Do for data what hi-def did for TV. This means Natural Language Processing and sentiment analysis that are better than “positive, negative and neutral” and pull the qualitative gems from the quagmire. This goes for reporting on metadata that can tell you the who, what, where and when to give you a sense of the diffusion and discourse.
4. Filter spam. Don’t just say you do it; actually do it. Paying through the nose for a SMA with poor spam filtering is like going to Le Cirque and being expected to bus your own table.
5. Creating linkages between networks is what you pay the big bucks for and you want something that uses “sleuthy techniques”, algortihmic-ninja fancy footwork to open up that pandora’s box of the non-obvious.

Before going into any of the above however, I will recall two beautiful latin words “caveat emptor”, which means “don’t be a sucker” in plain english. Writing on Microsoft Word, WordPerfect 5.1 or on parchment has no real bearing on the quality of the prose. Ergo, an SMA tool will never define your problem for you. Dedicate some quality time to your business objectives, how social media impacts them and how you want to measure that.

Resources:

Nexalogy White Paper on Social Media Intelligence vs. Monitoring

The other keynote address was given by John Kelly from Morningside Analytics, whose approach highlights the importance of segmentation in the blogosphere when it comes to telling the difference between ‘fake sharks’ and ‘real sharks’ in the waters of partisan blogosphere activity. John’s presentation was very interesting and he was nice enough to compliment Nexalogy’s approach as being a “very advanced semantic analysis capacity” that compliments link-driven analysis, which is Morningside’s strength.

The two presentations from the National Research Council were a highlight for me, with Dr. Mohammad Saif presenting the current state of NRC-developed sentiment mapping and Dr. Roland Kuhn presenting the potential for sentiment mapping and machine-translation to be applied to national security priorities. I am hoping to learn more from them about the subject in the future.

The day before I presented at the Public Security S&T Summer Symposium where the focus of discussion was on identifying social media signals from emergency situations; a challenge to be sure but one where a social media analysis solution can be a big benefit. The whole experience was positive, and the discussion definitely emphasized the importance of social media activity in terms of big data and public security.

A few selected areas of work for participants from government that were identified and that I am happy to have on my radar included:

• Knowledge governance
• Human capital utilization
• Empowering the public servant
• Government 2.0, 3.0 and beyond
• Forecasting, forewarning, foresight
• Participatory culture
• Multi-lingual information processing

If you want to download my presentation : click here to download (PDF)

I just spent the last two days at the MARCOM conference in Ottawa at the newly opened Ottawa Convention Centre. The conference was organized by CEPSM and we were happy to go live with a dynamic twitter graph of #marcomforum related tweets in real time.

I enjoyed learning about the differences between public sector marketing and private sector marketing and how social media can bridge the two. Jim Mintz‘ talk on Wednesday morning focused on public sector branding and emphasized that determining brand position and competitors is essential, especially given that branding takes place in social media whether public sector actors expect it or not. Jim made a good point that public sector branding doesn’t have to be expensive if you communicate to clients and stakeholders with a consistent effort over time. Josef Jurkovic discussed the special concerns of public sector actors but still held that it is “a horizontal world where partners and issues matter.” The presentation finished with an interesting discussion of which government departments have good branding: CMHC, SSHRC, Service Canada and Health Canada were pointed out, but in my opinion the social media receptiveness scale runs from Service Canada to Canada Science and Technology Museum to Canada Revenue Agency and Health Canada.

However, next to the keynote by Brian Solis, the presentation on crowdsourcing by Pierre Bisson and Jon Juane from Service Canada was my favourite presentation of the conference. The presentation explained the Service Canada Centres for Youth #sccy crowdsourced video contest and evaluated the key concerns and benefits of crowdsourcing for social marketing:

- Brand reputation

- Evaluation

- Crowd control

- Peaks & valleys

- Policies & guidelines

- Creating content

- Building the community

- Marketing and promotion

There was a lot of activity at our booth, which was next to Radian6‘s (Jon McGinley from Radian6 argued that social media represents revolutionary democratization), and the conference participants I spoke with were interested in the power of social media for gauging reactions, issues, actors and reputations related to public marketing campaigns a set of concerns related to social media that public sector actors will increasingly need to face and master.

Resources :

• Microsite for following the Marcom Forum
• Environics social media tool kit