Terence Lo's Blog

SustainabilityCamp 08 - Tom Williams - Keynote

Terence Lo — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:16:47 +0000

On Sunday, November 16, I had the pleasure to attend and participate in the first ever Sustainability Camp. It was hosted inside the offices of the Centre for Social Innovation, a beautiful brick and beam building right in the heart of Chinatown. Inside an intimate board room, a small group of socially minded individuals gathered around to listen to Tom Williams (CEO of Givemeaning.com) deliver an engaging and thought provoking keynote.

The primary theme of his keynote was the idea of the power of plenty. As individuals, we have difficulty feeling the impact of our generosity. Businesses are able to measure their Return on investment (ROI) but for individuals, what’s the return on generosity? It’s only when we mobilize to work as a group, does the power of plenty become evident.

Elaborating further on this point, he mentions the importance of new media and it’s impact on the industry in bringing knowledge and awareness to everyone. He cites The Meatrix and the PETA campaigns targetting KFC which have been successful because of their emotional impact. We need to get out of the mindset that dollars and cents trump the importance of our earth. As a society we need to start caring get out of the I know it’s important, but it’s not important enough for me to get out of bed mindset.

So what needs to change? He proposes that the movement needs to distance itself from the perception that it is elitist and just a culturally refined taste. Specifically, it needs to move away from the unnecessary environmental arrogance in which everyone thinks that their cause is more important than others.

Furthermore, he believes that the next level of informatics, led by the Internet, will allow the movement to be more granular about the way food is sourced. As an example, he believes that eventually menus at restaurants will read like 30 page wine menus. This will empower and educate the consumer to make correct choices. While he praises the Internet for casting a wide net, he’s also quick to point out that the Internet is not without it’s limitations. The need to effect change in our local communities involves connecting with people. We need to look at our blocks and make changes at the ground level. Afterall, as Tom said, information without ability to act is dead.

For more coverage of SustainabilityCamp 08, please be sure to check out the event coverage page on the wiki.

Are Schools Killing Creativity?

Terence Lo — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 01:57:32 +0000

Sir Ken Robinson addresses the issue in his humorous, and thought provoking talk at TED.

In the talk, Ken makes 8 excellent points:

Kids entering the school system today will be retiring 65 years from now. Even as adults, we don’t know what the world will look like in five years yet we are teaching our kids to prepare them for that world.
Creativity is the process of creating original ideas of value. This happens through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of observing things.
Creativity is as important as literacy.
Don’t be afraid to be wrong. If you’re afraid to be wrong, you will not come up with anything original.
All kids are born artists, the challenge is to remain one.
Creativity is not something you grow into. It’s something we grow out of. Specifically we are EDUCATED out of it.
Public schooling was built to meet industrial growth needs. As such, science and maths are at the top of the ladder, while arts are at the bottom.
The current University system defines intelligence based on academic ability

Being Well-Rounded is Overrated

Terence Lo — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:51:20 +0000

In Seth Godin’s “The Dip”, he makes the argument that being well rounded is overrated. At first glance this sounds odd. At a young age, we’re conditioned to be good at everything.

At least I was.

Learn to run faster.
Study your times tables over and over.
Practice your piano to become the best.
Stop playing so many video games. You’ll never get a job doing that.

Basically it’s about diversifying our talents. But is this really a good thing? Do you really care if your optometrist sucks at bowling? Or that your web designer can’t make sense of a balance sheet?

Now don’t get me wrong. I certainly don’t fault my parents for all the opportunities they provided for me. In fact, I am very grateful that they sacrificed so much for their children. The thing is, while it’s good to have a variety of skills, you need to establish which skills are your strongest and make them shine. Be remarkable with those ones. It’s good to have skills in other areas (after all we’re human and we do have a variety of interests) there’s no reason why all of them have to be at the same top level.

Thank You For Not Automatically Opting Me In

Terence Lo — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:52:12 +0000

Up until recently a lot of the annual mutual fund reports I was getting were on an opt-out basis. Meaning, if I no longer wished to receive any of the clunky 50+ page annual reports, I’d need to contact the company directly and explicitly choose to opt-out. That’s why it was so refreshing today when I received a tiny mailer asking if I’d like to opt-in instead. No reply? Easy you’ll be automatically opting out.

The thing is, this is the way it should have always been. Aside from the obvious environmental benefit of wasting less paper, the company also saves money by not having to print a whole bunch of reports which would have mostly been skimmed (at best) and recycled anyway.

It’s a no brainer that when you given a choice of whether to receive an electronic version or physical version of mailings, you should, in most cases, choose the latter. Now if only we had some sort of solution to get rid of paper/physical coupons completely, now then that would be gravy.

Until then, sites like Save.ca will undoubtedly continue to entertain us with their Bathroom Tissue coupons.

Jumping Through Hoops to Achieve What?

Terence Lo — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:09:05 +0000

This morning I received a message from one of my Facebook groups alerting me that they’ll be deleting their group that they’ve had for a year and a half. Not a big deal right? What if this group used Facebook as their exclusive platform for alerting members of upcoming events and information sessions? What if there were over 100 people registered for this group?

To replace the soon to be deleted Facebook group, they proposed that everyone switch to another social networking platform. Isn’t this kind of inconvenient for well, everyone?

Not only will I have to go through the motions of registering with the new platform but what about the process of having to reconnect with members? Isn’t this a whole lot of work just for the convenience of the company?

I can’t help but feel this is really horrible customer service. Why should the customer have to go out of their way to continue their membership with the group. Didn’t they opt in once already? What if instead of forcing people to sign up for another social network, they included a one click email list subscription process. One click. Done. Keep your customers in the loop without forcing them to jump through a million hoops.

If something as simple as that was done, I would have subscribed. For me, the hassle of having to sign up the other social network definitely outweighs the benefits that I get out of the group. It’s too bad really.

DemoCampToronto18: This one time at the Supermarket…

Terence Lo — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 03:45:58 +0000

My colleague and I managed to get to the Supermarket around 5:30pm and noticed immediately that the venue was significantly smaller than the other TorCamp venues (like MaRS, Toronto Board of Trade). We found a couple of seats (it was still early) and managed to keep our seats for the entire evening. By the time the event was about to start, the Supermarket pretty much filled to capacity. So unless you were able to get a seat inside the room with the screen, you weren’t going to see much at all this evening.

The RGB from the projector was a bit off so there were moments that made viewing the screen difficult. There were also a lot of sound distractions coming from both people talking loudly and the sound of the wok from the open kitchen. That said, there were plenty of kick ass demos this evening that definitely delivered!

Roy Perira, Refresh Partners
Refresh Analytics: Social Networking Engagement Metrics

Launched in May/08, this app is a different way of doing analytics. It’s a REST based API that allows you to take social metrics data and put it on your website. By taking advantage of the Facebook API, they are able to provide and gather information about two main metrics: social influencers and virality (eg. how many new users does one new user bring to an application). With plenty of charts and detailed summaries of demographic info, I can see how this app would be very useful for marketers.

Chris Gurney
Blueprint Requirements Center

Based on eclipse, this app allows one to capture and elicit requirements through an easy to use interface. Chris first showed us how to enter a workflow and steps and inserting branching logic. He did a brief demo of the screen editor and showed us how they attach directly to processes. The ease of use of the application to create a visual story board and the ability to generate documentation and export out to other applications makes this seem like an ideal tool for business analysts.

Ali Asaria, Well.ca
Web -> Jabber Chat for your Site That’s better than Meebo and GTalk

By the time of this presentation, the RGB of the projector was finally balanced. Ali presented a tool that they’ve created over in their well.ca labs. We’re all familiar with instant messaging through web browsers but most of them aren’t that good. His solution is a chat system that is simple, reliable, doesn’t use AJAX and that can be embedded in a website. I think it’s something that my employer could use to integrate with our website, since we use jabber/iChat/Bonjour in the office.

Kosta Zabashta, Dr. Project, University of Toronto
Integrating IRC With Software Development Portals

For those not familiar with the Dr. Project it’s basically code that is forked from Trac. What his solution does is integrate IRC chats and logs with the Dr. Project system. Some of the key features he showed was the ability to query a Dr. Project Ticket with IRC and search IRC logs all within Dr. Project. I can see this being useful for those that use IRC in a lot of their day to day work.

Jesse Brown, Bitstrips
BITSTRIPS 1.2: why everyone should make comics

Debuted at SXSW 2008, this comic strip creation tool is the first strip creation tool that gives you a lot of creative freedom to make very unique cartoon characters. This definitely looked very cool and I will definitely be giving it a try.

Dave Coleman, SpreedNews
Spreed News: A Better Way of Reading your News on the Go

Spreed News solves the problem of information overload and two specific issues: Space and Time. By only displaying up to 5 words at a time and playing like a slideshow, this app allows you to gain more than just surface knowledge of articles. It actually allows you to read news in a much faster way. As you begin to read faster, you can change the speed of the text being output. Very cool.

Jevon MacDonald, Firestoker/StartupNorth
VC Rant

Jevon’s rant was about how startups will eventually save venture capital in Canada. He also emphasized the need for more good startups to be started through communities and for funders to connect with these great startups.

Conclusion

There were supposed to be 3 more ignite presentations but those never happened for whatever reason. Aside from some of the technical glitches that plagued some of the presentations, overall I had a good time. Best of all, I felt very inspired!

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FacebookCampToronto4: How to Market a Facebook Application

Terence Lo — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:34:25 +0000

On July 8, 2008 I attended my second Facebook Camp Toronto event. I had missed the first one because I didn’t know it existed and the 3rd one due to a prior commitment at work.

My friend and I arrived at the MaRS Centre about 15 minutes before the event and didn’t see the usual registration table set up nor did we see any sort of signage indicating that FacebookCampToronto4 was happening. After verifying that we had actually arrived on the correct date, we walked into the lower hall, found a couple of seats and sat down. I think the whole thing could have been a lot smoother as we weren’t the only ones who looked a little confused wandering into the hall. I guess when they say registration is at 6:00 pm, they mean it.

At 6:30 Colin Smillie took to the podium and did a quick introduction and provided some interesting statistics on the current state of Facebook:

as of Feb/08, 30000 applications had been approved by Facebook (up signficantly from just 5500 in Oct/07)

Impressive Canadian Growth - 8.4 million Canadians are on Facebook. In Sep/07 there was a major growth spurt. (start of university certainly played a significant part in that)

demographics: 44% male; 56% female

After the intro, he handed the microphone over to Facebook’s Rebecca Sawyer to discuss how to successfully market one’s applications effectively through Facebook’s ad system. For those not familiar with Facebook’s ads, they are placed in two key areas: a user’s new feed (integrated with organic stories) and in the left hand column which appears on all Facebook pages.

After a brief case study discussing the successful promotion of the Sumo Khan application through Facebook Ads, she immediately went into discussing the best practices for creating successful ads:

1. Harness social actions
This can be done by creating ads that have a social action that appears as the headline in the ad. For example “Your friend John Smith has added this application”. This is effective because we rely on what our friends do and can be easily influenced by them. When purchasing ads, you should definitely have ads that target social actions.

2. Target your exact audience
The Facebook ad platform allows one to target based on a variety of key filters (eg. country, location, state, age, gender, college, political views, movies, books, etc). Included in the platform is a targeting tool which provides metrics on what demographic installs your ads. This is useful as it allows you to fine tune your ads. In general, targeting ads to smaller, more specific groups of users should result in higher click-throughs.

3. Writing an Effective Ad
The ad writing platform looks really simple to use. It allows you to easily enter a title, body, and image for your ad with full preview capabilities so that you can see what it’ll look like as you create it. The key point that Rebecca made was your ad has to be catchy and properly branded regardless of whether it’s image based or text based.

4. Create Multiple Ads
The idea here is very simple and self explanatory. Creating multiple ads makes sense to see what works and what doesn’t.

5. Optimize
Included with the platform is an Insights tool which provides real time statistics on impressions, and clicks your advertisements are receiving. Again, the higher the click-through rate, the more successful your ads are.

Rebecca did an excellent QA and handled questions quite well. Aside from an inappropriate question being asked by a disgruntled heckler, most of the questions were on topic and useful for the community.

Andrew Cherwenka of Trapeze was up next. He talked a lot about the growing developer community and a bit about the soon to be released “new” profile page.

I stayed briefly for the Praized demo by Sebastien Provencher but due to a prior engagement I had to leave shortly after.

All in all it was an alright FacebookCampToronto. The lack of registration and signage at the beginning could have been improved, but overall from what I saw everything else went really well.

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Focusing on Goals: Lessons Learned From Softball

Terence Lo — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:56:53 +0000

This summer I’ve started playing some recreational softball on the weekends and on Wednesday nights. While I played some baseball when I was much younger, the differences between softball and baseball are definitely enough to make it seem like a completely foreign sport. Even after 5 practices and 2 games, I can say that there are some key life lessons that I’ve observed with respect to tackling this “new” sport:

1. Practice Makes Perfect

It’s easy to get overwhelmed and start comparing yourself with others on the team. There will be people on your team that have played years and years of softball so they are seasoned veterans. It’s pointless to compare yourself or try to match them skill for skill. You know why? Doing so will just lead to disappointment and bad feelings.

The important thing is self improvement. The goals that you set for yourself. Continuous improvement. Nothing is better than transitioning from an awkward hitter to someone who’s in the zone that can hit consistently. It’s not hard to identify those that are in the zone. They have that certain look in their eyes and they radiate confidence.

This is where practice makes perfect. Go find some friends and a big field and practice the fundamentals. Catching, throwing, and hitting. The more you practice the more better you will become. It’s very rewarding to see both you and your friends improve. You see more smiles on your friend’s faces and everyone seems to be having a better time.

2. Stay Relaxed and Radiate Positive Energy

Take a deep breath. Stay relaxed. Get those butterflies out of your stomach. Stay focused. It’s easy to become discouraged after striking out or bobbling a routine infield play. What you need to do in situations like this is brush it off and refocus. It benefits nobody when you start cursing or throwing bats and creating a scene. This creates negative energy that will stay with you the rest of your game or practice. Not to mention that it brings down everyone else on your team.

This also goes for when your teammates need your support. Suppose one of your teammates is having a rough day at the plate. Give them encouragement. Don’t yell or shake your head at them. This makes the person feel bad. Instead, say words of encouragement and give helpful tips in a constructive manner.

3. Each Pitch is an Opportunity

In the recreational softball league that I play in, we get 3 opportunities before we ’strike out’. Because we self-pitch, there is no notion of strikes or balls. Whatever your pitcher throws at you is what you get. This is why every pitch needs to be treated as an opportunity. While it’s tempting to ignore some pitches because they are out of the strike zone (I’ve seen players do this), it’s probably wiser to swing for everything. Be greedy. Be confident. You only get 3 pitches. The first 2 might have been slightly out of the strike zone, but is it worth it waiting for the 3rd pitch which could potentially be a wild curve ball?

4. Visualizing Success

This applies to any sport and any activity. The better you are at visualizing success, the more successful you will be. The day before the game - try to visualize the park you’ll be playing at and the successes you’ll have at the plate and at the field. Don’t visualize or focus on the negatives otherwise they will become realities. If you’ve been having trouble at the plate, visualize making solid contact with the ball.

5. Have Fun

Last but not least - don’t take everything too seriously - have fun. Winning is important to most people, but what is more important is the bonding and the journey to get there. At the end of the day if softball is more of a chore than a fun activity, you should consider some other sports. Go get ‘em tiger!

Google’s Shift in Focus From the Google Mashup Editor (GME)

Terence Lo — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:46:13 +0000

Recently, there’s been a lot of inquiries from the Google Mashup Editor (GME) community regarding the lack of updates and focus on rolling out feature requests and enhancements. This issue was recently addressed by one of the product managers at google on the Google Mashup Editor Group:

Paul McDonald wrote:

…We’ll continue to maintain GME and are always looking for feedback on
how to improve the development experience.

GME is actually one of the first applications built to run on Google
App Engine, a service we recently introduced to enable developers to
run their web applications on Google’s infrastructure. Many of our
engineers have focused their attention toward improving and enhancing
App Engine.

We’ve heard really good feedback about GME’s development model, the
ease of deployment and testing, and our templating tags. We are
working to incorporate that work into other developer products but
most of our focus has turned toward App Engine for the foreseeable
future.

While I can see this being a bit of a concern for designers and non-developers, those that like having the ability to work with a full Model/View/Controller model, the Google App Engine is a significant step up from the Google Mashup Editor. In the GME development model, any changes that the programmer wants to make needs to be done in javascript or modified with Yahoo Pipes. Being able to do data manipulation in the controller will result in easier debugging and deployment as well.

I haven’t done anything with App Engine yet but when I do, I intend to write more about my experiences.

Manic Coffee

Terence Lo — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 19:42:45 +0000

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit Manic Coffee, the Kensington Market area’s newest coffee house. My guest and I were drawn to this little coffee house after reading in the newspaper that they were offering the award-winning La Esmeralda Special coffee from Panama that day only for $15 a cup. Why such a high price you ask? The coffee trades at approximately $130/ lb, making it one of the most expensive coffees available.

After my guest and I finished our dinners, we headed over to the coffee shop. We walked inside and inquired with the Barrista about having a sample of this legendary coffee. Unfortunately, my guest and I underestimated the popularity of this drink. To obtain a tasting, we were supposed to request to be added to a list (something the newspaper failed to inform us about).

Slightly disappointed and in dire need of an after dinner beverage, we decided to stay at the coffee shop anyway. The owner of the establishment took excellent care of us, giving us each a tasting sampler of 3 different coffees in what he described as tasting sizes. Before each round of samplings, he brought the freshly grounded coffee over for us to smell and discuss. The first round of coffee came, and he told us to enjoy it without any sugar or cream. He told us to take a sip when it’s fresh and hot then take another sip when it cool and to taste the coffee for any differences. The differences were definitely noticeable. The other two rounds came, with each coffee being more complex and rich than the previous one. By the end of the third coffee, I was definitely over-caffeinated as the tasting sizes provided were more than generously sized.

If these ‘ordinary’ coffees tasted so amazing, the Esmeralda coffee must be clearly in its own league. Due to the scarcity of the beans, it looks like we’ll have to wait til 2008 for the next batch. When that time comes, we’ll definitely try to make sure we’re on the list.

Problems installing Mac OS X Leopard with ClearDock installed

Terence Lo — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 03:50:43 +0000

This past weekend I had the opportunity to install Leopard on my Mac Mini G4 at home. As I didn’t research any Leopard gotchas, I just popped the installation DVD into the drive and proceeded with the installation. After a little over an hour, the upgrade looked like it completed fine.

I excitedly clicked the reboot button in anticipation of trying out the new OS. Unfortunately, when the machine booted up again, I was presented with a blue screen. The mouse cursor was fully functional but no login screen was present. After much trial and error and research on the Internet, I realized that the culprit was ClearDock. The workaround to the ‘blue screen of death’ is available in the Apple Discussion Forums.

As I did not have many files on my Mac Mini, I simply backed up all my files on to my firewire drive and proceeded to do a fresh install of Leopard. Alternatively, one could boot into OS X in safe mode and uninstall ClearDock manually.

Other than this gotcha, I’ve been reasonably impressed with Leopard. So far, I really like the Spaces, tabbed browsing in Safari 3, and the much faster Spotlight. I’m not completely sold on the redesigned dock but I suspect it may grow on me in time.

Yahoo Pipes - Unable to merge feed descriptions?

Terence Lo — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:04:33 +0000

Given two RSS feeds with exactly the same list of title values, I’ve been playing around with Yahoo Pipes to try to figure out how to merge their summary values together with no luck.

     eg.

    feed 1:

        foo

	

    feed 2:

        foo

This is another value for title foo. desired output: foo

This is another value for title foo.

Has anyone figured out how to do this within Pipes? If not, I may write a trivial python script to do this.

Yahoo Pipes: Google Tech Talk

Terence Lo — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 15:13:07 +0000

This morning I stumbled across an interesting Google Tech Talk titled “Pipes: A Tool For Remixing the Web”.

Google Mashup Editor

Terence Lo — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:31:45 +0000

Since last friday I’ve been playing around with the Google Mashup Editor a bit. Although it’s still in Beta, and it has a few minor issues, it looks very promising. The guys on the Google Mashup Editor team have been extremely helpful (and quick) to respond to my questions. Because I learn the best when I’m doing things hands on, I took the opportunity to rapidly prototype two quick mashups:

Great Canadian Hot Deals Mashup (http://canadian-hot-deals.googlemashups.com)
- This was the first mashup that I ever made. It basically involves using Yahoo Pipes to aggregate and sort RSS feeds from various sources and then output them in the GME. I created this site because it allows anyone to quickly look at the latest deals without having to scan multiple sites or subscribe to multiple RSS feeds.
Upcoming Toronto Events (http://torontohappenings.googlemashups.com/)
- This was my first attempt at using geocoding some data to work with google maps. This is a mashup that involves Yahoo Pipes, RSS feeds, and Google Maps. The idea behind this mashup is to dynamically generate and map events to a zoomed in Toronto map

I’m currently playing around with the Gdata and how to make use of Flickr, Picasa and YouTube in a cool and fun way.

CBC: Test the Nation Auditions

Terence Lo — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 03:35:34 +0000

Recently I was notified that I’d been selected to audition for a spot on the CBC television series Test the Nation. The audition process involves meeting the producers and completing a short quiz. I guess the whole point of the audition process is for the producers to get an accurate assessment of who I am and how well I’d fit in on their game show. I’ve never been on a game show before so I can’t say for certain whether I’d fit in or not. If it’s someone like Sean Connery they’re after, I might not fit the bill.

Brand Yourself - an evening with Martin Buckland

Terence Lo — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 02:11:12 +0000

On October 18, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation at the Indoor Playground titled “Brand Yourself” with master resume writer Martin Buckland. His one hour and a half presentation was very inspiring. In the talk, he focused primarily on the fact that we are all experts at something and that we should focus very strongly on branding ourselves as experts to give ourselves a competitive edge in the market.

The most convincing and interesting thing that he shared was his top ways to make yourself stand out:

Know yourself - you need to know yourself really well first. This is a prerequisite for everything that follows.
Be prepared to flaunt your quirks and be able to admit that you’re not perfect.
Maximize your strengths through effective marketing to create a wow factor
Google yourself. You should google your name to see where you stand. Your rating will improve through SEO, blogging, and a web presence.
Seek Feedback from your peers
Engage in public speaking
Be a connector. Networking is absolutely critical for your career success. If you think big, the vision will come.
Keep on refining your brand. Brainstorming will help evolve it. Don’t be afraid of getting a business coach, personal coach or a confidante.
Effectively define your target audience.
Give back to your network and community by sharing - don’t just take.
Keep a brag book in which you log everything you do.
Be a confident communicator