Entries Tagged 'Personal' ↓

I just realized I haven’t talked much about what I’m up to lately. When we moved back to Montreal, I had what I thought was going to be a great job developing a new, should-have-been revolutionary web product… but that didn’t really work out very well (they didn’t share my vision of what the site could have and should have been and I didn’t think it was worth the investment to think small). Since then, I’ve been working really hard to get a new company off the ground. My great friend Claude moved back from Paris a few months before I came back to Montreal and he has been working like a maniac to establish Exvisu in Montreal. Almost immediately we talked about merging our forces, and after one aborted attempt last spring, in the fall I started devoting some time to it and based on my good experiences in the early going, this past winter I dove in head first.

At the moment, Exvisu is all about doing a very unique and advanced kind of research to help leaders with marketing, communications, and political opportunities (or problems). We have the ability to go out into existing but unstructured data sets and learn a great deal more about an issue than traditional approaches can provide. From there, we work very closely with our clients to develop appropriate web-based strategies to address the opportunity or problem. And, to round out the offering, if our clients lack the capacity to execute on the strategy themselves, we’ll work with them to do the job.

It’s a pretty broad offering, but we’re exceeding the goals we set for ourselves in January. We have several clients and partners we’re working with such as AGY Consulting, K3 Media, Gartner Lee Limited and several others I can’t really mention. As well, we’re working hard on a couple of different technology projects that will be the key to moving from a pure consultancy to a much more ambitious play down the road.

In his blog Fimoculous, Rex Sorgatz takes a look back at Wired 1.1, which came out 15 years ago this month.

I caught up with Wired at # 1.2, the Crypto Rebels issue, which I bought at a newsstand on Rideau Street in Ottawa. I was already familiar with both Mondo 2000 and the original bOING bOING zine, but that’s not to say that seeing the same kind of material in a clearly more mainstream magazine wasn’t pretty cool.

I wouldn’t say that Wired changed my life - as far back as 1.2 people who were involved in the culture Wired covered were (often rightly) critical of the magazine. But within a year I was in the world that Wired was all about - I had moved to Montreal and was working at CTHEORY, immersed in some of the earliest online publishing and (elsewhere) web community activity.

It’s kind of hard to believe it has been 15 years.

Today is the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, the deliberate killing of fourteen women at the École Polytechnique. So, at some point during the day, please take a moment and think about those victims and all victims of violence against women. This day has also become the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women.

Almost 20 years hence, the events of 1989 seem at once remote and vivid. I remember almost every detail of the hours after I heard about the massacre - what I was doing, where I was, what was going on in my life, etc. At the same time, I spent the morning very close to the site of the events (I was at HEC) and it was if nothing had happened, nothing special was being remembered today. I guess that’s how the passage of time works: but as I have said before, for a certain generation of Montrealers, today is etched in our memories forever.

I forgot to mention it last week, but at this month’s YULBlog First Wednesday there was a crew from montreal.tv doing a piece on the monthly event. Here’s the piece. I think it might have been the first time I have been recorded speaking French for a TV or radio piece! (Note to self: don’t back away from the mike in future).

Yet again I’m on the move. Not from Montreal! But I have returned to the consulting life, and I’m very excited - my services are on the market again. One of the great side-benefits so far: spending the afternoon with Nadia out and about in the city (rather than behind some desk).

around here but I haven’t had much time to blog about it. Last week I started a great new gig here in Montreal, and Friday night Nadia and I bought a place to live in when we get back. This is the place (ground floor):

We move in at the end of June, so between now and then, I’m borrowing a friend’s apartment on Av du Parc and commuting back to Ottawa on weekends. I miss Nadia and the dogs already!