Victoria’s Tech Sector Branding
Apparently our tech sector needs a name. I think it’s a great idea.
Victoria ~ The Garden City
Vancouver Island ~ Paradise North?
Are we Island focused or Victoria focused?
What is technology bringing to us?
Talent, community, wealth, information, … , gadgets, research, the future?
Garden’s are a very powerful symbol of growth and sustainability.
A “Garden of Tech” will be built around a few trees which have:
- roots research & development (universities, government funded research)
- a trunk: large well-funded development shops (CGI, Sierra Systems, Quartech, IBM)
- branches: community groups (VDevs, VJUG, VIATec, SocialMediaClub, and many more)
- leaves (geeks, nerds, programmers, technology experts, people who contribute to the whole)
- fruit/seeds (startups)
- if they’re lucky they become seedlings (funded startups) and a new tree is added to the “Garden of Tech”. … Or the wind picks them up and they get planted in California. 
What other plants could we use to develop the analogy?
Is Victoria wild enough to swing for “Forrest of Tech”?
Add your thoughts here or at Dan Gunn’s original post!
reworked the slidedeck
I recommend full screen so the text is readable. I would love any and all critical feedback. Does it make sense?
Positions & Props: the Play with no Prototype
It’s time to go to the last all day session of the Market Entry Program. This is my homework, though I’ve failed to do it as suggested. I may have gotten into the program a little ahead of schedule. I definitely qualified by having no customers, but I also have no product. Thus I am mostly bringing my brain to market. However, maybe it has positioned me well for a different route.
Last week I got into my #1 competitor’s beta: Quora. This application is amazing and their name is way better than mine. I love that they share the same central idea in their product: No duplication of questions. There are some great strengths and obvious weaknesses to me, but I’ll save that post for later. Today I redo my go to market strategy for my non-existent prototype, which I can’t seem to start by myself. I keep saying I’m more of a fixer than a build-from-scratch guy, but maybe I should just get on with it. I’m definitely way behind these guys technically. I hope my story will catch their eye and we’ll talk about teaming up. Either way I’m sure we’ll talk eventually. Read more
Help me make it to round three!
May 10 is the deadline for my submission to qualify for round three of the New Ventures BC 2010 contest. I’m writing this post to detail my current draft plans and get feedback from you. Is it clear? Did I answer the questions? What else should I consider? I would love your harshest criticisms and any encouraging comments you can spare. Thanks for reading!!!
Dance Video #1
I mentioned before that I’m a nut, and also that I am doing tribute videos for my biggest musical heroes. The main goals of this marketing project are to:
1) get some attention from my friends and see if anyone else wants to watch a crazy person make a fool of himself
2) attempt to pierce public imagination and start a viral campaign to drive some traffic to my website
3) during Take 1 show my raw craziness and dedication to my role as wizard for peace (someone called me a propeller head once (I think they were right) (I should get a purple wizard hat with a propeller on top))
4) during Take 2 release do some market research to help identify: A) who my customer is and B) will they play this game with me?
I’m pretty sure it will take more than the first few videos to get much traction, but I’m happy with the results and want to give a big thank you to Daniel Hogg for filming and editing this round.
seminars and pitch update
Over the last two days I attended two seminars at the local technology park. One was on product positioning and marketing and the other was on intellectual property and business structure. Both were useful and it was good to get out and meet some local entrepreneurs. Thanks to Gowlings and VIATec for hosting!
Here is our current positioning statement:
The QuestionCollector is a sociopolitical game of debate, for Internet users who want to create peace with words instead of weapons. It provides a fun and neutral architecture for questioning everything. Unlike current social games the QuestionCollector is fun AND useful to your world.
Read on for the draft text of my media pitch and let me know what you think of it or my positioning statement.
the purple wizard dance
Today I advanced my marketing strategy by arranging to make my first video. On Sunday, weather permitting, I’ll be in downtown Victoria dancing with my friend filming me. It should be quite comical for people watching, because I’ll be the only one who can hear the music, via my headphones. Read more
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