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!

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!

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!

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

This event and our sponsorship resonates for us and the work we do at Nexalogy. Anyone who’s spent a lot of time at conferences knows that the individual speakers are important, but it’s the relationships forged at an event AND the particular sessions that really glues the whole thing together. This matches really closely with our approach to social media intelligence. Although a particular blog post or Tweet is interesting – to truly understand it, you must have a good understanding of the relationships between posts (or tweets) and be able to put it in the larger context.

The conference itself was fantastic, and as always, Claude Malaison put together a fantastic roster of local and international speakers, including our friend (and founder of a sister company of ours), Jen Evans of Sequentia Environics.

Two weeks earlier, we were equally to have been invited speakers at the first Webcom Toronto. Hosted by Jane Dysart, the first Webcom in Toronto featured one of the best speaker’s lineups I’ve seen in years, including Don Tapscott, Shel Holtz, and Walton Smith, among others. Being the first edition, Webcom Toronto was a much smaller event than Webcom Montreal, but I predict nothing but growth for the future.

There were some great moments during the day, which as a whole exceeded expectations. Some highlights included presentations by Pierre-Loïc Assayag (from Traackr), and a wonderful keynote by KD Paine. The panel led by Mark Evans (from Sysomos), featuring Darren Barefoot, Brian Cugelman (from AlterSpark), and Ilya Grigorik (from Postrank) was particularly excellent, and really moved the whole day’s program in a very productive direction.

Claude’s presentation during his panel was pretty well received – thanks to everyone for the warm reception. I think video may be available soon, but for now, you can download Claude’s slide deck here: Nexalogy-TTMM-Deck (2.1Mb PDF).