Michal's blog

Wavemakers: Nancy Peterson

Wavemakers is an initiative I've kickstarted with Femme-O-Nomics’ founder Leah Eichler (@Femmeonomics) that profiles female innovators — women who are constantly blazing new trails, inspiring others and revolutionizing the status quo.

This week we profile Nancy Peterson, the founder and CEO of HomeStars.com, a site that provides user reviews of home contractors across Canada.

 

1. Describe your current state of mind
Really positive – I’ve conquered a lot of mini Mount Everest’s to get to where I’m at personally and professional and I feel like I’m still growing & climbing. Hopefully the air doesn’t get too thin up top!

2. If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be? 
Hmm – I think still human form and I’d love to be a tennis star as I love watching tennis (Agassi is my all time favorite).

3. What is your greatest indulgence?
Probably M&M peanuts and watching SNL.

4. What or who helped you the most to achieve your success 
My amazing parents and definitely my husband for allowing me to leave a secure profession and invest us heavily in HomeStars.

5. What is the best advice you’ve ever received
Ha – probably more like the many I didn’t listen to about the scalability issues of the business and how I needed to be in the U.S.. Like Steve Kaufer (CEO of Tripadvisor) who I was pitching to back when I started. I watched him drop my deck into the garbage bin as he walked me out.

 

(Pictured above from Left to Right: HomeStars’ Shannon Wong, Paola Romero Garate, Nancy Peterson & Jessica Sugar)

 

Wavemaker: Kira James

Wavemakers is an initiative I've kickstarted with Femme-O-Nomics’ founder Leah Eichler (@Femmeonomics) that profiles female innovators — women who are constantly blazing new trails, inspiring others and revolutionizing the status quo. 

This week we’re profiling Kira James, HR Business Partner at Kobo Inc. Follow Kira on Twitter @kirajames

1. Describe your current state of mind
(My) state of mind is currently future focused in every way, career, family, life. I’m in full plan mode at the moment. Appreciating where I am and determining where I want to be…lots to think about.

2. If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be?
I’d come back as a lavender bush, so fragrant, peaceful and lovely.

3. What is your greatest indulgence?
Without a doubt my greatest indulgence is taking long, hot showers. It is the only time in the entire day that I have to myself.

4. What or who helped you the most to achieve your success?
Having a childhood riddled with adversity taught me to be adaptable, communicate my needs, and that hard work, focus and determination will not guarantee success, but will certainly help you travel the path of success.

5. What is the best advice you’ve ever received
I’ve got a tie on best advice ever received. The first was from a former manager who said “if you do not have that slightly anxious, uncomfortable feeling when presented with a new assignment or role, it’s because you’re not being challenged.” The second was from my mother who said “don’t be too proud to ask for help when you need it.”

 

StarupCamp Waterloo - Rockn!!

What an absolutely awesome event. We had 19 start-ups introduce themselves at the start of the event in a round the room intro (I wish I'd taken a photo of our whiteboard with everyone's names). Over 85% of the audience were first time Camp attendees so they had no idea what the un-conference was all about. And, our youngest entrepreneur yet, Grade 11 student Brandon Ces, owner of CES Landscaping. What fun!

Given we had a great audience (see my last post), David Crow did a great job of telling folks how things work and Jim Parsons suggested we do the round the room introductions after which things sky-rocketed with buzz, networking, questions, presentations, and general good times.

Jesse, my co-instigator, wrote a post of the event including some great photo's, especially his last one with two entrepreneurs talking over an OLPC laptop.

Here are some of the start-ups that presented:
* Village Toolbox
* Wimax solution from Khosrow Modarressi of UoW
* FightTube.tv
* Student from the Velocity residence at UoW presenting 3 ideas for mobile apps - can you post your name please :)
* for the other 2 folks, please LMK who you are and I'll edit this post with your startups!

Dan Debow talked about his experience growing WorkBrain and his current start-up Rypple.com. He got lots of tough audience questions, including how you know when to stop trying - what a great question. Dan had told a great story about one of the first start-ups he tried to launch in the music space, think last.fm. He met much great resistance and so switched his focus back to Workbrain, to help them grow to 230 or so million in annual revenues. If you haven't tried Rypple.com yet, I highly recommend the service and have been contemplating using it to find out more about what you all thought about the event. Assuming I get the time to do that this week, I'll post some of the results :)

We had new sponsors this time around too: Sun Microsystems Start-up Essentials program. Launchpadlaw.com a legal service offered by Shibley Righton LLP. And so, we had lots of great food and beverage, Thanks!

StartupCamp Waterloo, tomorrow night

The upcoming Waterloo Startup camp is shaping up to be great, with a fantastic audience. This is a call out to those Startups and Entrepreneurs attending e-Week and the rich developer community in Waterloo to get yourselves signed up to present your business ideas!

Here is just a small sampling of the folks speaking and attending this event:

Dan Debow co-founder of a $350M company Workbrain and now on to a tres cool startup - come and hear what it's about his new Beta!
Jevon MacDonald aka Startupnorth.ca -- if you haven't been indexed or profiled on this site, get yourself up there and NOTICED! VCs and Angel investors pay attention to this list with keen interest.

Funders: broker Mike Middleton, advisor Gary Will, Will Pate with Cambrian House -- all of these guys can give you great reviews and talk to you about finding the cash you need to succeed

Entrepreneurs who have successfully raised angel rounds: Ali Asaria, Ilya Grigorik, Kevin Thomason-- these folks have direct and recent experience for raising money and creating successful businesses in the current climate in Canada.

Check out the other folks in attendance and get yourselves signed up to demo!

DemoCamp Guelph 7

There was a great crowd (wish I'd remembered my camera!), lots of new folks. Communitech did a quick chat on what that offered as services to entrepreneuers, they've been sponsoring the GuelphDemoCamps  since their inception. I hadn't realize that all of their services were free to the community.

I represented the Sun Startup Essentials program and was fun for me to sponsor a round of refreshments on their behalf and talk about their great new program for Startups. Feedback I'm getting in general is, finally :)!

The quality of the demo's were great and I was amazed at how much open source technologies are being applied in lots of different ways. Chris Long of Well.ca did a presentation on Solr and how they are using this search tool within the application to deliver highly relevant results to users. Solr also has the feature of word recognition on a partial or even incorrect basis. So if you type LaRosh vs LaRoche it will still recognize what you're after.

Christian Fobel did a demo of Arduino.cc - now this was a totally fun open source robotics gadget. I had never seen that before so I was blown away.

Brydon and Ali also tried something new they'd seen at another conference, a kids panel on technology. What a great idea to find out how kids are using the web and technology. Here were some of the highlights from the panel:
* no fear of internet because there are "too many educational things at school about it" and "Facebook has privacy settings - no one but my friends can see my pictures" and "no chat rooms cause they're lame"
* why not myspace? fb is what is used now, not go to website harder to understand
* where do yo go for research for school? "grandma, internet for book search, my parents then my sister, and the library to sit for hours"

Declan Whelan talked about test based development. Part of the agile concept of development and coding for the use case tests. And, John Rockefeller demonstrated GiantGoat.com a new web-based CMS they just launched.

Thanks Brydon and Ali for another great event. 

Firefox for peace

I sat with Erdal for dinner during the Firefox Plus Summit, he localizes Firefox into Kurdish. I was incredibly humbled and inspired by his story about how he started contributing to Firefox Kurdish. At the risk of embarrassing him, I hope I do not; I would like to share his inspirational story of contribution.

Erdal is a medical doctor and spent some time in Turkey during their “war” (the war of the Turkish army against the PKK Guerrilla) in the 90s involved in humanitarian help. He saw many horrific things during this time that stayed with him. After this experience, Erdal wanted to find ways to help. He learned the Kurdish and Turkish languages and because he was technically skilled and felt that would be valuable contribution; he started localizing open source software into Kurdish, with the belief that this would be a peaceful movement forward. After the 1980 coup in Turkey no one could dare to even speak Kurdish for fear of being imprisoned or persecuted.

Erdal found a Mayor of a town in Turkey who had supported the translation of children's books into multiple languages including Kurdish. They connected and the Mayor felt that localizing open source software would be a wonderful thing for his Kurdish constituency and the community at large so he offered his support to Erdal’s efforts. Erdal and a team of contributors (including journalists and others) translated Ubuntu and Firefox. Since offering his support, this Mayor has since been indicted on criminal charges of misappropriating state funds and his governing council has been dissolved. Erdal says, while this sounds terrible, if that mayor had been mayor in the earlier time and did similar things, he would not have been tried but probably faced more severe consequences e.g., death.

Erdal’s hope is that by localizing Firefox into Kurdish he is making a contribution to a peaceful togetherness. I believe he is and so, I am encouraged to support localizers in their efforts to bring accessibility to communities around the world. Thank you Erdal. I hope others take inspiration from this story in their work.

I appreciate that language can be a highly emotionally charged topic as it carries with it political, historical, cultural issues. I mean no offence to other languages or cultures by describing this story. My intent is to share one person’s story that I found personally inspirational.

Fennec for L10n

Following up from the Firefox Plus Summit here is the presentation that Christian Sejersen and I gave last week about localizing Fennec (the code name for Firefox for the mobile device).

I think the presentation went well. We had a packed room and got some good feedback and positive comments. Feedback centred around issues for which we are still working on the answers to, like fonts and testing. These will be challenging areas to address, and I'm sure we'll collectively find a solution that works :). Thanks very much to Philippe Dessante of the French team who has already localized Fennec and blogged his step by step how to (we posted a link in the presentation).

I was excited by the translate.org.za guys - Dwayne Bailey, Adel Zaim, and Friedel Wolff - reaction to the presentation. Dwayne immediately saw the potential to more easily localize and thus reach African communities. My understanding from Dwayne is that in Africa, communities will share a cell phone to access the internet, email, etc. And, because Fennec, at this stage anyway, requires a much lighter effort for translation it holds the potential for greater impact by getting to more African languages and thus communities. Awesome!

As always, please send me feedback. I hope the presentation provides some good information on where we're at currently towards localizing Fennec and how to start localizing it.

Congratulations to all our Localizers!

I just heard from Asa that we have now exceeded 20 million downloads in 1 week which is wonderfully incredible! Without your efforts we could not have achieved such overwhelming success.

It is an honour to work with all of you localizers, translators, testers and others who enable us to create so many great localizations for Firefox.  I congratulate you all on the extensive use of Firefox in all of your languages and locales!

Thank you also for participating and encouraging your users to help us go for a world record on Download Day for Firefox 3; we received over 8.000.000 downloads in 24 hours!

From what I hear in the channels many of you have or are about to have local celebration parties for Firefox 3. Please tell us about them either at www.spreadfirefox.com or leave me a comment with what you did and how it went :) I hope you ENJOY with your teams and users. You deserve wonderful celebrations :)!

Thank you and ...keep it open, keep it safe, use Firefox!

Yours sincerely,
Mic
L10n-driver

Firefox 3

Holy cows, I'm so excited :)
http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2008/06/11/coming-tuesday-june-17th-firefox-3/

and if you haven't already, check out:
www.spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord

wahoo

Brand new languages shipping in Firefox 3 Beta5

We are very happy to report that we will have five new languages will be released in our upcoming Beta of Firefox 3. These locales are Afrikaans, Indonesian, Mongolian, Norwegian nynorsk, and  Serbian. We would greatly appreciate your help in reviewing those versions when they are released in the next few days. You will be able to download them by either checking out Mozilla's all-beta download page or do a search for "Firefox Beta 5". If you find things that can be improved please file a bug or send me feedback in this post. Thanks and most especially thanks to the localizers responsible for these new builds.