So, here’s my story: Bell Sympatico DSL users have been experiencing major service disruptions in the Toronto area over the past few days. This affects me as well, living in Richmond Hill, always hitting a Toronto server and an IP address that had a reverse name as “basXX-torontoXX.dsl.bell.ca”.

I pick up the phone to call Bell and ask them “How much longer?” An extremely polite Dominique answers my call. “Sir, before we go any further, just in case we get disconnected, is there a number I can call you back?”

Uh, ah, I thought I was talking to Bell - the phone company. Why should I get disconnected?? Because the ‘net is not working for me?

So my question to the Rep was “Do you mind if I ask where are you located?”

“No sir, in Southern part of India”. Ahaa, just as Friedman’s stories from the book I’ve mentioned above.

After convincing the person at the other end (of the world) that my modem was actually powered on - I get a new challenge.
“Sir, how can you possibly experience connectivity problems related to the Toronto area when you are living in Richmond?”

Hmm - I get it. Now I have to convince him that I live in Richmond Hill, ON and not Richmond, BC.

Two days later Bell has not fixed the problem yet. I’m posting this through my BlackBerry. Lovely!

To Bell: in addition to all screen captures of modem types in use posted on that intra/extranet, you should make available a at least a Google Maps lookup tool, as well. :)

I’m starting to think that B2C has now changed its meaning to “Business to Community”. What’s your opinion?

* Same things don’t work over time - Chris Brogan
* Social media is a cultural revolution, not a commercial revolution - Collin Douma
* The “trust economy” emulates the human relationships on the web - Julien Smith

See some of the pictures I’ve taken and the whole podcamp flickr stream.

“Talking” Blackberry with PodCamp co-founder, Chris Brogan:

In the mean time, this one - PodCampToronto.com, just slipped through the fingers of a domain name broker, so I’m more than happy to put it back to work for this vibrant community. See y’all there on February 23.

Once your PayPal payment is approved, simply subscribe to your feed in iTunes and automatically receive all Premium podcasts that you have chosen to purchase individually - no monthly fees.

If you like the music we play on the regular podcast, you can enjoy it in a premium version, free of commercials and other talk. Pay only for episodes that you like to build your collection on. It costs less than a Tall Caramel Macchiato, but it’s premium quality!

iSPINIT.com Premium is a chapterized AAC/M4A enhanced podcast - artist/song info being displayed for each tune. All previous episodes are available as premium content.

Give it a spin @ http://iSPINIT.com/premium/

I have been evaluating and using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for couple of months now as a back-up hosting service for iSPINIT.com and I will definitely use this service for the upcoming iSPINIT.com Premium edition.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. That is applicable for large podcasting media files.

Let’s do the math first:

Libsyn’s highest package, Podcast Supreme, will set you back $30.00 per month for 800MB of space. Fair enough. This should cover the bandwidth costs as well.

Now this is what you would pay for Amazon S3:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

Using this calculator, you can get a price quote depending on you hosting needs. Let’s say you have about 1GB of data and 50GB (!!!) of files to ship out of the door every month: $10.36

Interested? This is what you need to get started with Amazon S3:

• an account with Amazon
• a neat Firefox plug-in - S3Fox (available on Mac and Windows)
• access to your domain DNS settings

Amazon S3 uses “buckets” as their terminology for “folders”. You can create your unique bucket - e.g. media.mydomain.com. After all, a domain name can be a folder name!

Next step: create a CNAME entry for media.mydomain.com to s3.amazonaws.com

Voila! Your cost effective hosting service is all set-up. The only thing left is uploading your data using the S3Fox plug-in in your browser. Firefox that is:

Enjoy paying only for what you use!

So, if you are an investor or an adviser, check out Renaissance Investments or Investissements Renaissance. There you go - you got my next step - getting some Google juice to flow.

• Creators - those who blog, publish web sites, upload videos, or participate in other content creation activities - 21 percent own Macs, while only 12 percent own Dell computers;
• Spectators - they read blogs, watch videos, and listen to podcasts - 55 percent own Macs;
• The majority of Inactives - they don’t participate online - 55 percent own Dells.

Social Participation on the Web:

Source: Forrester. Via: Macworld.

I had the privilege of sharing the “cool table” with Chris Penn, Mitch Joel and Julien Smith:

Some quick facts worth mentioning:

• YouTube usage growth in Canada between April 2006-2007: 616%! [Mitch Joel]
• FaceBook usage growth in Canada between April 2006-2007: 2424%! [Mitch Joel]
• If MySpace were a country, it would have been the 6th largest country on the planet! Want to buy a banner on the homepage? Be prepared to pay $1.000.000 per day! [Chris Penn]
• Canadians spend 48% of their leisure time online! Is that the whole winter?! [Mitch Joel]
• “Google couldn’t care less about your podcast!” [Julien Smith]

More:

• PAB2007 on Flickr
• PAB2007 on Technorati

• Lesson 1: “Pay attention to the economics and politics of your profession and figure out a way to gain leverage not just for yourself but also for your peers.”
• Lesson 2: “Your leisure is your future. Your parents and your professors thought you were wasting time with YouTube, Facebook, texting, mashups and GPS social networks. They were wrong. Thanks to all that time you spent thumbing messages and sending photos and videos around the Web, you know much more about what companies need to understand technologywise than the companies themselves do. You’ll walk into the office of your new employer with a better comprehension of what the company needs than all those suits running around on the top floor. In fact, most of those suits are spending their time and the company’s money trying to buy their way into businesses about which they don’t have a clue. Don’t be afraid to clue in the clueless and, failing that, don’t be afraid to start up your own business based on what you know and they don’t.”

• Lesson 3: “Innovation versus the cubicle. There’s probably no word that large bureaucratic companies like to bandy about more than “innovation.” You’ll hear innovation championed by the company president, highlighted in companywide memos and held up as the gold standard of corporate aspiration. Alas, you soon learn that, in the cubicle culture, innovation’s high goals can be recast by micro managers as tiny improvements in current product lines, as the creation of obstacles designed to trip up competing products or as patentable concepts meant only to cast a legal chill over the economic landscape. But innovation doesn’t have to live only within the confines of corporate edicts. […] Understand the difference between innovation in a straitjacket and intelligent invention.”

You should read the whole “Go to the Head of Your Class” article!

There are five themes re-shaping Marketing today:

• Integration: consumers are hard to find and harder to influence!
• Innovation: today’s buzz word is “video” - online video; “click to play” geo targeted video ads can be delivered depending on your location
• Inclusive: advertise all your assets, not only what you think is popular
• Interactivity: consumers like to get involved; how does it feel to have an extra 10,000 brand managers out there?
• Informed: make the most by measuring your data intelligence!

There you go, the five “I”s of today’s Marketing.

• 27.8% Poor Communications
• 17.9% Insufficient Resource Planning
• 13.2% Unrealistic Schedule
• 9.8% Poor Project Requirements
• 6.7% Lack of Stackeholder Buy-in/Support

Interesting! Via Baseline.

“We are making a responsible decision in recognizing the status of the record industry and the increasing impact of technology,” said Bobby Sniderman, the son of Sam Sniderman and present owner, in a news release. Via Toronto Star.

iSPINIT is a channeled music podcast that comes in several different flavours: (iSPINIT) Pop, (iSPINIT) Rock, (iSPINIT) Electronic and (iSPINIT) Jazz. You can subscribe to any one channel, depending on your taste, or get them all. Ella is hosting the rock and jazz shows, I get the pop and electronic/dance editions.
Since most of the music featured on the podcast comes from the Podsafe Music Network made sense for us to join the PodShow family.

Enjoy our hand picked “Naturally Famous Tunes”!