I published an article today on StartupNorth about how Canada needs to realize the technology business is a race. I’m very concerned about Canada falling behind while other countries all over the world are racing ahead with technology innovation.

I love this song, I just can’t hear it enough times. A short, simple folksy tale of lost love and growing older. What more can you ask for? It should be no surprise that The Superfantastics come from east coast Canada’s music city, Halifax. Yet another great find from the CBC Radio 3 podcast, which I recommend all my music loving friends subscribe to.

I’ve taken a part time position with ZipLocal as Community Manager. This will fill out the other 1/2 of my work week, along with my ongoing work with Flock. That’s of course when I’m not working on commandN, or the other projects still baking until golden brown.

ZipLocal is a local search engine for Canadian metros. Folks from Toronto will recognize ZipLocal as being the company that formed with the merger of Zip411 and redToronto. I’m very excited to be working in the search space now, I’ve been watching the search engine industry very closely since shortly after Google showed up on the scene. To be working in local search, where there is still lots of innovation to be done, is all the more exciting.

I joined thanks to two fantastic ladies that I just had to work with. CEO Elaine Kunda was previously Managing Director at Toronto.com, and Director of Biz Dev Amy Rae was previously a principal at JLA Ventures. JLA is Canada’s premiere tech venture investment firm, the biggest shareholder in ZipLocal, and they also count my friends at b5media and former Raincity Studios clients MusicIP in their portfolio. On top of that, I get to work with the rad guys at Arktyp on the interface for the next version of ZipLocal. They’re the same dudes that kicked butt TWiT.tv for Leo Laporte and made the best looking magazine website, Macleans.ca. When Ambermac says you should work with people just for the opportunity to work with them alone, you don’t pass that up. And we’re even going to have the cats from Unspace recoding the entire thing in Ruby on Rails.

I’ll be doing a laundry list of activities, but thankfully for my sake that won’t actually include dirty socks. I’ll be helping get feedback from users to everyone in the company, managing relationships with city/neighborhood and subject matter reviewers and experts, giving the copy on our website a fresh and friendly voice, helping tell the story of the company to the outside world, monitoring and responding to ZipLocal mentions in social media, and integrating ZipLocal with the vibrant Canadian technology community.

So thanks to everyone at ZipLocal who have welcomed me so warmly, and to you my friends who support me in my ongoing quest to bring the awesomeness level up around this place. Hopefully soon finding a wicked patio with organic beer, great sushi with fresh unagi and the best dark chocolate in any city in Canada will be so much easier.

Tags: ziplocal, search

View the entire set of Pillow Fight Toronto Photos. Big props to Kevin and Lori from Newmindspace for organizing. I look forward to more of their events

technorati tags:toronto, newmindspace, pillowfight, flashmob, fun

1. Talk about it: write a blog post, put a video on YouTube, send a letter to the editor; whatever works for you. The point is that our collective audience is large and influential.
2. Send an email in support of Network Neutrality to your MP (search by postal code), cc Industry Minister Maxime Bernier (Minister.Industry@ic.gc.ca), Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Harper.S@parl.gc.ca), Leader of the Opposition Stephan Dion (Dion.S@parl.gc.ca) and Leader of the New Democratic Party Jack Layton (Layton.J@parl.gc.ca). If anyone wants to volunteer to write a standard letter, be my guest.
3. File a complaint with the CRTC

And before anyone calls me out on it, no - I haven’t had a chance to do all of these myself yet. I’m just sharing my first steps with you as I figure them out