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On Wednesday I competed with three great team members in the Telfer Business Model Competition. Up against 20+ really strong teams, we came out on top and won 1st place.

Our business BadServer.ca – which I like to describe as a dating site for restaurants and job seekers – is coming soon. We are moving on to compete in the Ottawa Wes Nicol Business Plan Competition this Sunday.

Jeramiah Hadwen, Dan Cardamore, JP Chartier, Scott Annan, Katrysha Gellis, me (Will Robertson), and Chris Jackson (Picture by Lisa Hoople)

Thanks to Professor Bruce Firestone for holding this competition; the judges Scott Annan, JP Chartier, and Dan Cardamore for seeing what we saw in the idea; and my great team Jeramiah Hadwen, Katrysha Gellis, and Chris Jackson for all their amazing work!

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At the end of last summer I quickly created a classifieds website for Telfer students to buy and sell their used textbooks. Students often sell their books back to the bookstore at criminally low prices. TelferBooks would offer an easy way for students to cut out the middleman, and sell books directly, student-to-student.

Check it out at http://TelferBooks.com and let me know what you think.

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Recently I was selected as one of 16 students at the Telfer School of Management to participate in the Entrepreneurial Culture Challenge. The school describes this event as:

“The Entrepreneurial Culture Challenge (ECC) is a one year competition through which Telfer School of Management students create and implement an action plan to develop the culture of success from Eugène Tassé. This culture of success or “entrepreneurial culture”, helped Eugène Tassé become one of the region’s most successful entrepreneurs.”

The competition includes four workshops with business experts, mentoring, and the refinement/use of an action plan to work toward your goals. Following the program, three finalists will be selected to make a presentation on their progress and goals for the chance to win $7,500.

As part of the application process I had to write a definition of what I think it means to “live with an Entrepreneurial Culture”:

To me, living with an Entrepreneurial Culture means three things. First, setting a goal and doing everything possible to work toward it. Second, facing situations of risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity head on, and taking actions to overcome those situations. And finally, doing something you believe in, something that makes you want to work, rather than feeling like you have to work.

Entrepreneurs identify the actions required to achieve their business goals. This same approach can be used to tackle life’s goals, anything that you strive to achieve can be viewed as an entrepreneurial pursuit.

This competition should be an excellent opportunity to develop a strategy for achieving my personal, academic, and professional goals, as well as work with some very interesting people!

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As the VP Marketing/Creative for the MISA Club at the Telfer School of Management, I managed the project of building a new website for MISA. After a lot of design revisions and scrapping various drafts throughout the summer, the new website is now live.

The design combines my own designs with fantastic graphics by Mark Dunkley, former VP Creative of MISA, and graphic work by Sian Davies. Since I was starting from scratch on the website, I took the opportunity to base the website on a CMS that will remain useful to MISA many years down the road. I chose WordPress for this because of the great plugins and rapid advancement of the platform. Another benefit to WordPress is the excellent iPhone apps that are available for site management on the go.

Right now the website is pretty bare, but I hope to be flushing out the many event pages soon. Have a look and let me know what you think in the comments! While you are at it, check out TelferBooks.com too (Blog post on that coming soon.)

MISA Homepage

Montreal Trip

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I just read on CrackBerry that RIM has acquired Torch Mobile, a company that develops a WebKit browser for mobile devices.

This browser, Iris, sounds interesting. Here is Torch Mobile’s description of it:

The Iris Browser is an advanced, high-performance and versatile application that is specifically designed to function in resource-constrained environments. It brings the full Web experience to mobile phones, set-top boxes, mobile Internet devices, portable media players, Ultra-Mobile PCs and other embedded devices – in a fast and user-friendly manner.

If RIM is planning to replace the current BlackBerry brower with this WebKit browser, it would be a major benefit to BlackBerry users. Apple, Google, and Nokia have all embraced WebKit as the backbone for the browser’s of their smartphone operating systems, and many mobile web applications have been optimized to work well with WebKit. This move would give BlackBerry users a much enhanced web browsing experience and open up many more websites and web apps to them. Hopefully this is RIM’s plan for Torch Mobile’s technology.

With RIM onboard with WebKit, this leaves Windows Mobile and the Zune pretty lonely with their Internet Explorer based built-in browsers.

Here is a video of Torch Mobile’s current version of the Iris browser for Windows Mobile:

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This weekend tr.im, very popular URL shortening service, decided it was time to shut down their service. This news comes as competing service Bit.ly is getting a lot of attention.

I believe that it is quite obvious that the business of shortening URLs does not come from the act of shortening, but from other services offered in conjunction with this feature. Bit.ly’s statistics on clicks are an incentive to use it, and even more indepth insight into clicks and other analytics data would be considered worth paying for to many marketers and publications spreading links to their content.

These URL shorteners pass a lot of traffic through their links, traffic that can be analyzed and turned into valuable data, data valuable enough to provide insight into what is popular on the web in near real-time. There are many rumours of Bit.ly planning to launch a news service featuring popular links to compete with the likes of Digg and Reddit.

URL shortening is a feature, not a business. It is what the company does with their URL shortening that will make it a business. Tr.im decided their battle against Bit.ly was too uphill, even though they had a significant userbase and a more logical domain name. They seem to think the aforementioned uses of the data are not enough to base a business on. So how will Bit.ly pull it off?

Bit.ly has deep pocketed backers that will fund the company while they attempt to find what works. I think they should attempt to use their data and service in as many ways as possible, and see what catches on. After following their Bit.ly Now Twitter account, I believe their data is useful enough to base a “popular news” service on. Will people pay for “pro” analytics features on their URLs? I bet they would, so why not try offering it.

This is my second post about URL shorteners, and more specifically, Bit.ly. Check out my first post on the topic: Bit.ly is going to be big. Stay tuned for more thoughts on this “business.”

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Or so TechCrunch seems to think. Reading TechCrunch for the past month I have noticed one thing, they have found a way to link to their story about Bit.ly Now almost everyday.

Bit.ly is definitely an interesting service. The company has raised $2 million to create a service that dead simple to duplicate – so they must have something up their sleeve!

The theory TechCrunch is pushing is that Bit.ly is going to create a news service to rival websites such as Digg, called Bit.ly Now. Currently they have a Twitter account called Bit.ly Now that tweets the most clicked Bit.ly link of the hour. I have been following this account for the last month and have actually found it useful. Although most of the links are irrelevant to me, I have found two things that I would have missed if it were not for Bit.ly Now.

I am very interested to see where Bit.ly goes with this concept. This month I am actually about to begin a project that will integrate with Bit.ly’s services through their API.

Stay tuned for much more on Bit.ly in the coming weeks.

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I won't be paying $1 for a rocket launcher! (Source: Engadget)

With the 3.0 iPhone and iPod touch software update, Apple added many new features for the user and new APIs for developers. In App Purchases, or Store Kit as Apple’s developer resources call it, allows apps to offer additional features or content to users for an additional fee.

These purchases could include new levels in a game, furniture in the Sims, or books in an e-book reader. There are many applications for this new functionality that may help developers fund their development efforts.

One thing that concerns me is the price points that Apple is going to enforce. I cannot find this documented anywhere, but I heard that the in app purchases are limited by Apple’s same price points on the App Store itself. This means that the lowest price a developer could charge is $0.99 (Canadian/US).

In today’s online world, microtransactions are becoming a big business. On the App Store, people already scoff at paying for apps, let alone paying a $1 for a feature in an app. In my opinion, if Apple really wanted to make a killing with in app purchases, they should lower the minimum price to $0.50, if not all the way down to $0.15. This way developers can actually sell very small content in a game. I know that I will not be willing to pay a whole $1 for a stereo in the Sims, while I could instead use that $1 to buy a new full-featured game.

Tapulous, the maker of the hit iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge, recently announced a partnership with Universal Music to sell individual songs within Tap Tap Revenge 2. They said they would sell these songs at $0.50, a price that makes sense considering the song will only be accessible within the game (does not transfer to iTunes).  Given Apple’s minimum price, Tapulous will not be able to sell them at this price, and I seriously doubt people will be willing to pay $1 for a song they can’t freely use. This means Tapulous will instead have to sell multiple songs at once, which makes these purchases much less of an impulse buy.

Apple is making a huge mistake with their minimum price for these purchases. Developers are going to have to really make these in app purchases worth it to convince me to purchase them. However, if apps had tiny upgrades for less than a dollar, I’m sure they could get quite a few nickels and dimes out of me. Just like the App Store itself, I think developers are unfortunately going to have to aim for volume sales of these purchases – something this minimum price will not help.

UPDATE: I found a podcast from Monday on this topic from Mobile Orchard. It is an interview with Urban Airship, a startup providing services for App Developers to outsource the infrastucture for push notifications and in app purchases. You can find listen to the podcast on Mobile Orchard’s page.

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You may have noticed that I now have a Google Ad running on the sidebar of the website. I realize that I am never going to actually make money off of the website, I am just running the ads for fun.

Every day at work I manage a big Google AdWords account promoting Invest In Canada. I spend a lot of time optimizing the campaigns, working on new keywords, targeting specific sites on the Google Content Network, and writing new ad copy.

Google AdSense
By running AdSense on my own website I get to see the flip side of the equation.

I wish there was an ad image quality filter.

So far I have been impressed with how AdSense works. Not in terms of how much money it is generating (none!), but how easy it is to started. After waiting just one day to get approved, I was able to have ads running on the site. Since my website is new and has very minimal content and traffic, the ads have not been the highest quality.

I find the typical Google text ads look very tacky on most websites. For now I have limited my ad spot to images. Unfortunately that did not improve things much. These bottom of the barrel ads that Google is serving up are not the most attractive works of art. I went through and blocked a few of the more ugly ads that came up. Hopefully as my website is around longer the advertisments will improve.

Going Forward
I want to continue to experiment with different ad solutions. Next I am going to look into Google AdSense for Feeds and may even put some of my domain names that are gathering dust to work with Google AdSense for Domains.

If anyone has some experience with this sort of things I would love to hear about it. Send me a note or feel free to comment below.

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Zip Car is not here in Ottawa yet, however back home in Toronto there is a Zip Car parked outside a Donut Shop not to far from where I lived. Ottawa has VRTUCAR, which actually has many cars very close to my house. I have yet to try out either company, but would definitely like to if I had enough of a need.

A post on VentureBeat regarding rumors of the company going public got me thinking about the company. Zip Car has taken a fairly old business model, car rentals, and made it interesting again. I like the decentralized approach, having cars accross the city definitely makes it appealing. Being able to walk to a car rental is very convenient.

A Deal for Students
The main barrier stopping me from using a service like this is their application fee and a monthly/yearly membership fee. I don’t think many students would find their need for this service frequent enough to warrant paying these fees. I did a little digging through Zip Car’s website and found they offer a deal for select universities, such as Ryerson. This deal eliminates any application fees and only costs $25 annually. This makes the service reasonable, even if you are only going to use it once a month or less. As a student, I find I only have the rare time when I wished I had a care for a brief period of time. If Zip Car was in Ottawa and offered this I would definitely be on board.

So if VRTUCAR is listening, they should definitely consider copying this program! I will the first one in line to sign up.

Zip Car iPhone App
At Apple’s WWDC keynote, Zip Car demoed their new iPhone app. The app looks like it takes car of everything required to find and reserve Zip Cars. You can even unlock the car or honk the horn. See for yourself below in this somewhat cheesy presentation:

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