Summer travel is over and I’m back on the airwaves with Amber.

About VenCorps

VenCorps is an online platform for discovering, funding, and growing startup companies. Our community is made up of entrepreneurs, investors and other members of the startup ecosystem. We’re going to change the way startups get found, funded and grow. We’re counting on the wisdom of our community to find and pick the startups we will give seed funding to. Then, we’ll tap the participation of our community to help those startups grow.

VenCorps is the brainchild of Sean Wise, one of Canada’s experts in raising venture capital. He’s trained over 3500 entrepreneurs, who collectively raised more $2.1B. He’s also the author of The Globe and Mail’s Wise Words column & book by the same name, and an industry advisor to CBC’s Dragon’s Den startup pitch show. Sean has been a great boss and mentor already, I’m looking forward to learning even more from him over the long term.

A Spencer Trask Company

VenCorps is owned by Spencer Trask, an investment company with a mandate to change the world. Let me just say: wow, it’s amazing to work with such a firm. Mr. Spencer Trask himself funded Thomas Edison’s lightbulb, The New York Times, General Electric, and the first credit rating service Moody’s. Since then we’ve funded the first human genome company, the first stem cell company, the first optical integrated circuit company, and the first AIDS vaccine research, and crowdsourcing innovators like Innocentive.

The fund for startups that the VenCorps community chooses is managed by the Spencer Trask Collaborative Venture Partners. We have an amazing team and investors. Expect to hear more about STCVP later.

The Cambrian House Transition

Very soon we will begin a special alpha preview where we start to rolling out invites to the 65,000 members of the Cambrian House crowdsourcing community. Cambrian House is a world leader in crowdsourcing ideas, so crowdsourcing companies was a natural evolution. The Cambrian House team will now be focused on building out the companies they crowdsourced like Gwabs and Mob4Hire.

I’ve spent a lot of time working with the Cambrian House team over the last few months, and I’m humbled at the trust they have placed in me to manage the community they worked so hard to grow.

What’s Next

In the short term, we will be rolling out alpha invites to the Cambrian House community. Next up will be invites to people that signed up for the private beta (hint, hint). Once we feel like things are going smoothly we will open the site up to everyone for a public beta.

We will also be headed to conferences like Mesh and Under the Radar to make announcements, demo the site, spread the word and tape elevator pitches for startups.

I will be blogging more about startups, entrepreneurship and venture capital here and later on a forthcoming public VenCorps blog.

And finally, thanks to my colleagues that knew what I’ve been up to for the last few months and were kind enough not to blow my cover. I like to be transparent, but I dislike talking about things too long before I have something to show.

If you have any questions or comments, let me know.

This is a bit different than the average Case Camp presentation because I’ll be talking about how my personal brand mixes with my personal life online. The trick will be to make it relevant for the business audience, and I’ve got a few ideas. I’ll also post my slides up here after the presentation. If anyone in attendance will be taping, please let me know and I’d love to post it here also.

This is probably going to be the easiest gig I’ve ever had. Evangelizing and building a community around a web application that people go ga-ga over is a dream for someone like me. People rave about ConceptShare, and they have good reason to. We have a great product that solves a real world problem, and a team of three guys made it happen. Scott Brooks has done an amazing job evangelizing up to today and will continue to do so along with me, but he’s also got a company to keep building!

This is going to be seriously fun. I’m going to get to work with designers of all sorts, creatives, artists, scientists, architects, engineers, worldwide advertising agencies and major league sports – to start. I could tell you how excited I am about this, but it’s hard to understand just how much without the backstory.

Four years ago, in my hometown of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island I was inspired by my super talented friends at silverorange to start my first web services shop. I looked up to them, and wanted to be like them. While I knew that they had the right idea by staying local and doing top notch global projects, I knew I would have to beat the pavement to make it happen for myself. When I moved to Vancouver and co-founded Raincity Studios their model of work and comradery was forefront in my mind. When I moved on from Raincity to join Flock, and from Flock to contract work for the last year, I learned what I wanted from my work was to be part of a small close knit team of people working on something amazing.

I visited ConceptShare HQ last week in Sudbury, and that’s exactly what I found. I’ve decided to move to Sudbury to join the team full time. There are also some other opportunites available to me with online video there, stay tuned for exciting news on that. And don’t worry – I plan to travel to Toronto regularly for commandN! I’ll be posting company news on the ConceptShare blog Thought Balloons too, so keep an eye out there for exciting announcements.

Tags: willpate, conceptshare, design, sudbury

“Obviously, we all want to sell, at least some of the equity. But Mark owns the whole thing and he’s a crazy kid. He doesn’t let us in on his ideas, and all he cares about are the users.”

Valleywag – ‘A crazy kid’

If you’re looking for reasons why Facebook is so successful right now, everything else is secondary. Mark is passionate about his users, to the point of having other people call him crazy. You need to fight for your community. He tells his partners to back off, and let him focus on his community. Mark, if you’re out there: you’re my kind of crazy.

Tags: facebook, markzuckerberg

Why did I delete my JPG Magazine account? Cofounders Derek Powazek and Heather Champ have been booted out because they didn’t want to lie.

In one evening, Paul removed issues 1-6 from the JPG website, removed Heather from the About page, and deleted the “Letter from the Editors” that had lived on the site since day one. Paul informed me that we were inventing a new story about how JPG came to be that was all about 8020. He told me not to speak of that walk in Buena Vista, my wife, or anything that came before 8020.

Here’s where the whole “not lying” thing comes in. I just could not agree to this new story. It didn’t, and still doesn’t, make any business sense to me. Good publishing companies embrace their founding editors and community, not erase them. Besides, we’d published six issues with participation from thousands of people. There’s no good reason to be anything but proud of that.

JPG Magazine has now lost its reputation, its much loved cofounders and people are starting to leave and be public about it. Think about that the next time you’re tempted to tell a lie to your community.

• Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. (AT&T, 2002)
• 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004).
• Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
• In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options. (ASP, 2002)
• Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006)
• Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
• Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
• 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007)
• Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. (Jupiter, 2006)

Will Pate, Community Ambassador, Flock/Rockstar
Out of all the evangelists out there, I’m likely to be the most jealous of Will Pate. Not because of his dashing good looks, (or so my wife tells me) or that he’s constantly surrounded by the ladies, or stylish garb, it’s because he makes it look so easy. I recently caught up with Will at the Community Next conference in Palo Alto and he described his role at Flock to be part community advocate, and part company evangelists. He helped to bring the requirements together, connect them, and build a better product. Today, Will can be found in Toronto, and he’s switched to a part time role at Flock, what’s next for Will? Greatness I’m sure.

If I make it look easy Jeremy, it’s only because being the community guy fits my personality so well. I’ve tried a lot of roles in the tech industry, and the “community guy” one just sings for me, personally and professionally.

As for what’s next for me, well I’ve got cool news coming on that very soon.

Market share is trust materialized.

This is something a lot of companies frankly are not prepared for. Earning and keeping people’s trust is not an easy job. You can’t do it with glossy marketing and a token Corporate Social Responsibility rep, it takes company-wide commitment to deserving people’s trust. Having a community manager or ambassador is just the start, they’re a membrane – not a magical antibody that creates a healthy organism.

Here are the best of the breed of the earliest Facebook applications. Only web-based apps are included here, no desktop apps. You will need to be logged into facebook to use all of these. Kudos to all the developers that made these apps!

Birthdays

Facebook Birthday Calendar Generator – Generate a birthday calendar of your Facebook friends and import it into Outlook, Google Calendar, iCal, etc.

Blogging

Facebook Photos plugin for WordPress – photos you upload to Facebook will be visible in a “Photos” tab in the WordPress blog post composition window.

Google Gadgets

Facebook Google Gadget – A little dashboard for your Facebook account that can sit on your Google personalized homepage, or your desktop if you have Google Desktop. Would be nice if it updated when you got new messages/pokes, etc

Hotness

Your Hottest Friend – Ratings of your friends plus a leader board. Oh boy, let the games begin.

Maps

Friend mapper – See a map of where your friends are from. You might be surpised at how far people live from their hometowns these days.

Photos

FBTF – Takes pictures you upload to Facebook and copies them to Flickr. Now, if only there was a way to do it the other way around…

Update: flickurbook allows you to copy sets of photos from Flickr to Facebook.

Product Recommendations

favrats – What are your friends watching, listening and reading? Not the prettiest, but fast and handy.

Politics

Your True Self – See how your friends map across the political spectrum. Very interesting to see how your network of friends skews toward a certain type of political thought.

If you want to find out more about how to get started developing applications for Facebook, check out Facebook Developers.

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