Today on the Scroll: Condescending kiddie journalism couldn’t save the media business from itself — but maybe a dot-com unconference like DemoCamp can.
DemoCamp is an eight-times-a-year "unconference" where five web entrepreneurs have five minutes to show off their online schemes, followed later by five rapid-fire bigger-picture PowerPoint presentations from locals in the tech community.
The Toronto Board of Trade at First Canadian Place was the site of DemoCamp 17 on Monday night, an atmosphere that’s part bingo hall, part stock-trading floor. However, the free buffet of chicken nuggets, French fries and macaroni salad — not to mention the wardrobes and the postures of the attendees — gave it a feeling akin to a high-school cafeteria, albeit an almost-all-boys one. What began two years ago as a gathering of 30 people in the boardroom of photo site Bubbleshare now draws over 200 — including a few venture-capitalist vultures.
Not many other media gatherings in this town involve someone taking the podium to explain how angel investors have over $100 million to flow into projects. Rick Segal, the VC from JLA Ventures, extends his offer for a 30-minute “no harm/no foul” meeting, where he’ll listen to a pitch from anyone with half an idea. Segal did over 400 of them in 2007, and 75 in the last couple months alone — even though he describes many of the pitches as "lemonade stands on steroids." Decorum isn’t a priority but, at the very least, he advises that guys zip up their fly.
It’s a land of opportunity never found in journalism, which goes a long way to explain why the publisher and editor of short-lived CanWest kiddie tabloid Dose are now focused on their new recommendation startup site, GigPark.
Pema Hegan, originally from New Zealand, was recruited to edit Dose in 2005 even though his background was largely in advertising and marketing. Dose publisher, Noah Godfrey — son of CanWest board member Paul Godfrey — got Hagen to helm the editorial side of the initiative, which involved planting a pill-shaped box on what seemed like every other street corner in five Canadian cities. The effort to get younger readers to engage with dead trees reportedly burned $5 million in one year before CanWest acquiesced to the internet.
Clearly not losing their tabloid instincts, a press release touting the debut of GigPark explains that Godfrey and Hegan came up with the concept after seeking a good employment lawyer to review their CanWest termination packages.
“We came to an amicable agreement,” says Hegan. “I was extremely honoured to work with incredibly creative people. Dose was a really interesting brand at a really interesting time. We had a three-year growth plan that came together quickly, and ended abruptly. Perhaps it was just the newspaper industry moves too slow.”
But it acts fast when the smell of incinerating cash wafts into the boardroom. Creative cover art and other packaging stunts designed to make news look cool was a lost cause, although Dose.ca lives on as a recycled celebrity dirt portal.
GigPark has been the self-financed focus of the ex-Dose execs for the past year, operating in much more earnest terrain. Members make recommendations of their preferred offline service providers — with an emphasis on those in their own backyards. While around 1,300 people participated in its invitation-only beta stage, according to Hagen, they need more sign-ups for the idea to work. The inevitable Facebook applications have been introduced to extend the reach.
Taking the stage for their DemoCamp presentation — no PowerPoint allowed for these website demos — 29-year-old Hegan and 30-year-old Godfrey don’t quite resemble the over-assertive media mavericks Dose purported them to be. They’re more concerned with making friends who’ll get an account on the site and start feeding it, under the assumption that revenue will emerge when it scales wider. These bets were placed on the notion that traditional advertising is in its death throes.
And, if just to help articulate the ambition, the demo involves showing off a hypothetical GigPark account created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Does anyone really need another login name to remember? “We’re showing that social networks can be productive in a useful way,” says Hegan. “The thing that makes me happiest so far is to know that new mothers, or people building or renovating their houses, or putting on a wedding found exactly what they wanted because of recommendations on the site.” He’s confident that an accumulation of input will lead to features that businesses are willing to pay for.
“There are some similarities between being a journalist and being an entrepreneur,” explains Hegan. “Both are ideally focused on their audience, to create a connection with them. The entrepreneur can be a really strange breed, though — the willingness to sacrifice everything for that one shot at a crazy idea, knowing it can take two, three or four times to get it right, is a fairly unique trait.”
CanWest can also giveth and taketh away in record time. Hegan claims he can’t divulge what his salary and severance was from Dose, but he indisputably had the ultra-rare experience of coming out ahead due to a clueless corporation with a creative dossier to show for it. Now it’s a different kind of sink-or-swim story, even though they explained that GigPark isn’t being designed as a destination.
“We’ve seen this in the newspaper industry where a big company needs to pay attention to the upstarts, because that’s who’s going to take away their business, assuming it works out,” says Hegan. “There’s a need to create incentives to make people come up with new ideas, and find ways to keep them from leaving.”
The sentiment might apply to Toronto as a whole, although DemoCamp instigator David Crow — who worked for several failed startups before taking a job as an evangelist at Microsoft — is trying to rally the right people to take an interest in making the city a focal point for web-based innovation. “I’ve always wondered, where are the Toronto companies that spawn founders?” he wrote on a recent blog post, "Harnessing Hogtown’s Hominids for High Tech Hijinks and Hubs."
Crow points to how Silicon Valley developed thanks to the emergence of Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956, spawning over 50 years of “Fairchildren.”
“The first dot-com boom era in Toronto was entirely focused on marketing, advertising and creative dollars,” explains Crow. “It wasn’t about how do new companies to create wealth but, rather, how can I get work from other people?
“When the economy in those areas dipped in 2001, the entire industry crashed. And that’s why we have nothing on the level of Google or Yahoo! or MySpace or Facebook to show for it in Toronto. People here are just stuck on the idea that you work for a bank, or you work for a marketing firm, and that’s how you work.”
DemoCamp was created to help shatter that illusion. “Look, I’m working for Microsoft because they offered me a decent job,” says Crow, hastening to point out that he’s the only person there who brings a Mac to work each day. “It’s easy to evangelize my own efforts all day long, because I’m getting paid to do it, but there needs to be an incentive to do it even if I’m not. If you don’t have an opportunity to tell your story, then no one will listen, but that also means listening to what others have to say. I went to enough conferences over the years to learn that the speakers on the stage usually aren’t the biggest experts in the room.”
An unlikely influence for Crow is the aggressive music he grew up on, tossing out names like Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, Corrosion of Conformity and Suicidal Tendencies — although, presumably, Microsoft employees bathe more often. “These bands challenged the whole notion of what a value system can be,” says Crow. “And now people are always wondering how they can do more with less.”
Money still has the loudest voice in the room, though, and GigPark and the four other sites of uncertain worth who got their turn in the DemoCamp spotlight were hoping to find some — or at least hoping to not end up losing too much. Those slaving away to make it in any other creative discipline — especially those left stranded in the terminally hapless and backbiting world of professional journalism — could only be envious of the perspective honed by a group of coding geeks.
There is an emerging desire to make a broader impact, though, as reflected in plans for a spring sequel to last year’s TTC-baiting unconference, TransitCamp.
Come to think of it, why can’t the entire world be run like DemoCamp? David Crow won’t be too smug until his crew succeeds at making the Toronto techtown reality get a bit nearer to their vision. Then, maybe other media tribes can follow.
“There are two ways to accomplish anything,” says Crow. “I can succeed and others will follow, or others will succeed and pull me along for the ride with them. I’m willing to try both together, because that will double my chance of success.”
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