Located not far from Vancouver, with a live feed of the Olympic into our office (you nailed it CTV!), we’ve felt real comradery with team Canada this last week. Our team’s thighs much less muscular than bobsleighers or even female figure skaters, so why do we feel this kinship with Team Canada? It’s more than our passports (or most of them - we’re not all true north), it’s a bit of a love affair with an abnormal, competitive life.

10 Ways team Chaordix is just like team Canada:

1. Daily people tell you you’re insane and obsessed
2. You’re scored on a performance of minutes and seconds. No one asks if your product was having an off day.
3. You hope for fair judging. As if the market were a meritocracy!
4. You see people around town wearing your shirts
5. When camera’s turn on you are all driven, all dedicated, but humbly grateful too
6. Whoever picks your outfit on race day (VC pitch), you worry it makes you look like you’re trying to hard.
7. To make it to the finish line, you consider taking cash from people you’ve rallied against- competitors or uh…McDonalds
8. Some days you crash and consider quitting but you don’t. So do your team mates.
9. You care A LOT about gear and about what’s for lunch
10. When retired you’ll do one of two things - coach the next up and comers - or go “odd” maybe herding sheep on an island
11. (For bonus points - of course you go for those) You miss seeing your family more, but are profoundly motivated to make them proud.

GO CANADA GO!

We’re cheering for us.

Team Chaordix

TED has a new program this year called TEDx - local, independently organized TED style events. We’re big fans of TED, so jumped at the chance to sponsor our local version, TEDxYYC. It’s this Friday and you can watch the live stream of it, if interested.

Looking at the list of speakers, we got to talking about how TED and TED-style events are all about crowdsourcing ideas. Let me explain, with crowdsourcing projects, adding one more person doesn’t add incremental value, it adds it exponentially. With events like TED, the same thing happens. Instead of putting together a group of experts on one subject, the idea is to mash up all kinds of experts and listen to the resulting conversation.

Think of the possibilities. When looking to crowdsourcing to help solidify your brand, for example, looking to smart experts across a number of industries would yield a very different conversation than only asking current customers. When looking to crowdsourcing - or move to open - the local government, instead of asking local politicians, why not involve different people in the conversation. Local entrepreneurs, for example, might be a great resource for different perspectives.

Don’t get me wrong, going deep on one subject is important (hooray for dental conferences), but the opportunity to spark your imagination, or to see a problem from a completely different vantage is pretty magical. If we think of it as an online conference of great minds, what sort of crowdsourcing communities would you like to see?

Before heading home from Mobile World Congress I got to spend a day off in Barcelona over at Gaudi Park with my friend, Michelle Sklar. We got talking about how some cities seem to be more open to innovation and wondering whether Barcelona might offer some lessons to organizations looking to innovate.

First, travelling around Barcelona, we see touches of Gaudi all over. While his original work didn’t win immediate praise (his patron may have been his only fan for a while!), the city of Barcelona has really benefited from the mark Gaudi made on it. Barcelona allowed Gaudi’s almost Dr. Zeus-like buildings go up right next to highly traditional, old world architecture and that co-habitation of innovative next to conventional is something that really helps put Barcelona on the map. How do we enable this to happen inside corporations?

Even companies ready to embrace innovation are unlikely to make a wholesale switch from conservative to open overnight. One great approach is to pick one area of a company (e.g. R&D, product development, corporate responsibility, or marketing) and get a crowdsourcing initiative underway that compliments existing business but doesn’t disrupt anything that’s already profitable. For example, at Shell, they are in the business of producing and selling oil but they also have funded a project called Game Changer. According to Game Changer, the goal is to invite ideas in for increasing energy production, carbon management, energy conversion, storage and distribution and fuelling transporation. The more likely they are to say, “You know, that’s so far out there, it just might work.” The more likely they are to fund it. So they are continuing to focus on what is currently making them money, while also looking ahead to find new, sustainable ways of making money (and energy) in the future.

Gaudi’s presence in Barcelona is a reminder that what will help a company or a country stand out in the future will not be “what we’ve always done.” Finding the way to invite unexpected innovation into an organization is a vital way to lead.

Photo by: Carlos Lorenzo

Ok, so mobile is just one of the many moving parts at play in how Chaordix’s views future of crowdsourcing, but we share Google’s belief that over the next few years mobile will be bigger than desktop. I had the chance to attend Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and as always, had my crowdsourcing hat on the whole week. Here are two trends in mobile and my thoughts on how we might see them intersect with crowdsourcing:

Interconnectivity - the biggest word of the conference. Everything working together, to help mobile users minimize their efforts. The idea is to have all of your groups and social networks all aggregated to one place - so when I’m on my mobile and look someone up, I see all of their information in one place. On the flip side, I can pull information about one thing, from several different sources. Think of it as RSS for all of the different modes of communication and communities. How this helps crowdsourcing: If a crowdsourcer is juiced on an area, they have the opportunity to broaden their footprint, without a significant increase in time spent. For example, a developer can join several crowdsourcing sites and get information on projects he is interested in - all in one place.

Apps - At Mobile World Congress, one hall was dedicated entirely to apps. While there are still plenty of fun (possibly useless) apps, developers are focusing on apps that make lives easier. For example, apps aggregating real time data and spitting out practical info for people - like Traffic information. Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road and it’s 100% powered by users. How this helps crowdsourcing: Mass adoption. Crowdsourcing apps that people can use everyday and almost become invaluable (I’m heavily reliant on Yelp.com when travelling, for example) really help define what crowdsourcing is. While most people understand the idea of crowdsourcing through examples of American Idol and iStockPhoto, the more they use it on a daily basis, the more likely they are to embrace the value of it.

Figuring out how crowdsourcing fits in to trends in different industries is a good way to understand how we can continue innovating. It is hard work, but we’re excited about all of the ways we can enrich the user experience for people using the Chaordix platform.

Back in the olden days of Cambrian House, before “the cloud”, we, as with most startups, used hosting providers to host our sites.  This was typically costly, often requiring a long-term contract, and often took days to get a server provisioned.

Being a startup, money was always a concern, and having to sign long-term contracts was certainly not ideal for a startup that might not even make to a year.

Furthermore, what if your application takes off, and you need new hardware now!  (Yes, it happens.)

For us (and I’m sure thousands of other companies), the cloud was a godsend.  We primarily use Amazon EC2 and Rackspace CloudServers to host our Chaordix platform for our clients.  We host our demo sites in the cloud, allowing us to boot them up when we need to demo our technologies to prosective clients.  There’s no point in paying for running servers when they’re not doing anything.

We have developed our Chaordix platform to be quickly scalable, if needed.  With the cloud, we can spin up multiple new servers in a matter of minutes, reconfigure the platform to recognize a new database backend, for example, with all the other servers running apache behind Amazons load balancer.  Spiffy stuff!

photo by: kevindooley