On the same day in December that I recorded my interview with CBC’s Peter Mansbridge, I also had a chance to sit down with one of my favourite people from the Toronto technology scene, Karim Kanji, for a video interview about what happened around the tech world in 2011.
For those of you who don’t know Karim, he’s the co-founder of Third Ocean, a very cool Toronto-based marketing company, and basically just an awesome man about town in the Big Smoke’s tech community.
Karim and I have worked together on a number of projects in the past, and when he asked if I would join him for an episode of his XConnectTV show, of course I agreed.
It’s a bit of a long interview, but I think we have a pretty neat discussion about the big stories of 2011 and where the technology world is headed in 2012. A little less formal than Mansbridge, but the company was just as excellent. Check it out.
It’s no big secret that I’m getting married in a couple of months. If you know me, or follow me on Twitter, you’ve no doubt heard me talk about Future Mrs. Hartley and our escapades.
Well, in a little more than four months time, I’m going to make an honest woman out of Future Mrs. Hartley (FMH) after roughly 10 years of dating and three years of living together.
Now, this whole engagement thing is not a new development. In fact, it was August of 2010 when I popped the question — I’m going to save “The Proposal Story” for another post — so when we decided a couple of weeks ago to contact a photographer to take some engagement pictures we could use for our wedding invitations, it was clear we had waited until the last minute.
Most normal people get these kinds of photos taken shortly after the engagement. Instead, we waited about a year and a half. Which was especially dumb, because even though we got engaged on one of the hottest days of the summer in 2010, we decided to do our engagement shoot on the coldest day of 2012 so far. Because clearly, we’re not very bright.
As you can tell by the fact that it took us roughly 17 months to arrange for engagement photos and to start organizing wedding invitations, FMH and I are a pretty laid back couple. Other people might call this “laziness.” We prefer the term “chill.”
But let me tell you, having engagement photos taken is a weird experience. Essentially what happens is you and your better half go to a location, usually outside near daisies or ponies or something, and you spend a few hours walking around, holding each other in awkward poses and kissing. There’s a lot of kissing … way more than most couples that have been together for a decade tend to do in public.
For our shoot, we needed to take a bunch of photos for our invitations, but we also wanted to have a bit of fun with the shoot. So, borrowing a page from the Internet, we opted to pretend that a portion of the shoot was interrupted by a zombie attack.
When a CBC television producer called me in early December and asked me if I would be interested in appearing on the program Mansbridge One on One, naturally, I figured this was someone’s creative idea of a practical joke.
As it turns out, she was serious. Apparently, Peter Mansbridge is a big fan of technology, and wanted to do a tech show in the weeks leading up to the holiday shopping season.
So the CBC went out looking for a “technology expert” for Mr. Mansbridge to spend half an hour talking to, and after an exhaustive search, they wound up with your friendly neighbourhood tech reporter.
On Sunday night, I was just sitting down to catch the end of the NFC championship game between the New York Giants and the San Francisco 49ers, when I got an email from my editor on my BlackBerry.
It was a bombshell of an email.
Research In Motion Ltd., the company I spend more time covering than any other, was getting a new CEO, and the two men I have written about more than any other over the past four years — Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis — would be stepping down.
The ensuing 48 hours were a bit of a blur. I wrote stories for the Web, Twittered my ass off, wrote a column in the middle of the night, and the next morning, fueled by coffee and adrenaline, I interviewed the new CEO, Thorsten Heins.
Below are the links to my coverage of RIM’s leadership transition, including my full column that I wrote about the end of the “Mike and Jim Era” which I think I finished around 1:30 a.m. on Monday morning. Enjoy.
CLOCK STRIKES ZERO FOR RIM’S JIM BALSILLIE AND MIKE LAZARIDIS
By Matt Hartley
Financial Post
January 23, 2012
Published at 1:35 a.m. ET
In the end, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis simply ran out of time.
For the past two years, the co-chief executives of Research In Motion Ltd. maintained that the BlackBerry maker’s mounting difficulties were temporary. They remained steadfast that the embattled Waterloo, Ont.-based company was simply going through a rough patch; a necessary transition that would help re-establish the company as a leader in the smartphone market they helped create.
At first, investors were willing to believe them. After all, Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Lazaridis were responsible for taking a small startup from Southern Ontario building e-mail pagers and turning it into the firm behind the BlackBerry, a device which became an international icon, a prominent symbol of the corporate world and a staple in the halls of power in Ottawa and Washington.
But as the weeks turned into months, and the months turned into years, RIM’s loyal shareholders grew restless. With each product delay, each analyst downgrade and each fresh report of BlackBerry ceding market share to Apple Inc.’s iPhone or some new device running Google Inc.’s Android software, their patience grew thinner.
If you’re out there Mr. Luke, I’m sorry. I know you’re disappointed.
For those of you who didn’t know me in high school, it might shock you to learn that I was a lousy student. Especially in French class. No matter the teacher, no matter the year, my French was atrocious.
French is supposed to be a beautiful language, and I spoke it with all the grace of a tap dancing sumo wrestler. I’m sure that my teachers — including my dear grade nine teacher Mr. Luke — were appalled by the garbled Anglo-French half words I spewed forth.
So when a reporter from TFO — the French language educational public television network for Ontario — asked me if she could interview me for a story she was working on about the technology startup community in Toronto, of course I jumped at the opportunity.
It wasn’t until the lovely and kind Ms. Eugénie Emond arrived at the National Post offices for our little chat that I realized there might be a language barrier. She asked if I could do the interview in French, and rather than embarrass myself and every French teacher I’ve ever had, I felt it would be easier if I just did the interview in English.
So that’s why they shot me the way they did. They were leaving room for subtitles. Because I’m an idiot who didn’t pay attention in French class.
Check out Eugénie’s report above. It looks pretty great, even if I don’t understand most of what is going on. For the rest of you slackers who never learned to speak French, my part starts at 1:25.
Have you ever experienced one of those moments where you stop, pause and wonder: “How the Hell did I get here?”
Those were my exact thoughts this past Thursday afternoon as I sat in front of an audience of about 60 people — and several hundred more online — wondering how I could be such a dunce.
After all, it’s not every day one commits an epic verbal gaffe in front of one of Canada’s most famous authors.
Trust me, having Margaret Atwood correct your vocabulary in front of a room full of people is a humbling (if not hilarious) experience.
So how did I find myself sitting on stage beside one of Canada’s most distinguished international relations experts – Janice Gross Stein, the director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto — and a living literary legend?
Shatner Rules: Your Key to Understanding the Shatnerverse and the World at Large By William Shatner Penguin 208 pp; $25.50
Reviewed by Matt Hartley
There are two sides to William Shatner, and neither of them goes by the name of James Tiberius Kirk.
When one mentions the name “William Shatner,” the words “prolific author” aren’t usually the first that spring to mind. But with more than 30 books under his belt — at least as a co-author — Shatner would be justified in adding his status as a wordslinger to his impressively long résumé.
Although Shatner’s latest effort, Shatner Rules: Your Guide to Understanding the Shatnerverse and the World at Large, might seem a lighthearted tome on the surface, lurking beneath the Star Trek cracks and self-deprecating hairpiece jokes, this is a portrait of a man nearing the end of his days, taking stock of his life and wrestling with his two distinct personalities.
Indeed, coming just three years after the publication of his bestselling autobiography Up Till Now, Shatner Rules reads like a playful epilogue to that work, as though the actor was worried the last few years would go unrecounted, and needed to put pen to paper in order to ensure the Shatner legend is told intact.
On the one hand, there’s the private “Bill,” who enjoys horses, deep-fried turkeys and who once hitchhiked across the U.S. with a fellow McGill University student.
On the other, is the public “William Shatner;” the Price-line.com negotiator, the star of Comedy Central roasts, Olympic closing ceremonies and the man who played Denny Crane, Alexander the Great and Captain Kirk…
In a sure sign that the apocalypse is upon us, Canadians spent more time asking people to like their Facebook status than they spent talking about anything else on the world’s largest social networking site in 2011.
According to Facebook’s “Memology 2011? report, which was released early Wednesday morning, “Like My Status” or “LMS” was the most discussed item in the status updates of Canada’s 18 million Facebook users this year.
Generation Me, indeed.
It could be worse. Not only did “LMS” top Facebook’s Memology rankings in the United States, but much to the chagrin of English professors everywhere, “TBH” or “To be Honest” ranked No. 2.
Setting aside odd Facebook trends, Canadians devoted more Facebook status updates to the death and memory of the late NDP leader Jack Layton than they did anything else…
Google is just one of the many companies that has noticed the lowly display ad is making an online comeback.
One of the first forms of digital marketing was the lowly banner ad. Splashed across the top of every Geocities and Angelfire site, these primitive ancestors of the slick online advertising campaigns that now drive revenue at the most visited websites were often gaudy, noisy and annoying. But the banner ad is back. Big time.
Display-related advertising, of which banner ads are the most prevalent kind, accounted for 37% of all online ad revenue in the United States during the first half of 2011, which translates into US$5.5 billion.
The reason: The large and heavy user base of prime online real estate such as Facebook, Yahoo and YouTube don’t want to be immersed in gaudy advertising. Indeed, one of every three display ads appears on a social-media site. Facebook, boasting 750 million users, accounted for about 15% of total display advertising revenue in the U.S. in the third quarter, according to data from ComScore Inc…
TORONTO • Canada’s top privacy watchdog is warning online advertisers to be more up front about the way they are targeting Internet users and to come up with ways for Canadians to opt out of being tracked online.
Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, made the announcement during a speech in Toronto, where she unveiled a series of new guidelines for advertisers designed to restrict how marketers can track users, including children, on the Internet.
“The use of online behavioural advertising has exploded and we’re concerned that Canadians’ privacy rights aren’t always being respected,” Ms. Stoddart said in a statement.
“Many Canadians don’t know how they’re being tracked – and that’s no surprise because, in too many cases, they have to dig down to the bottom of a long and legalistic privacy policy to find out.”
The guidelines set out by Ms. Stoddart are similar to the tenets of proposed “Do Not Track” legislation in the United States. The legislation aims to curb the ways in which online advertising companies, including social networks and search engines, can glean information about Internet users based on their Web usage habits…
