TIM Lecture: Project Students Present on CEAs and Ecosystems‏

The next TIM lecture will take place on Feb 17. This lecture highlights the projects of MEng students on communications-enabled applications (CEAs) and vendor-neutral business ecosystems. Please join us for an opportunity to meet and talk to the students. Planned presentations:

• Daniel Cardenas, A practical CEA implementation: the ActivityBox event registration system
• Andrew Ceponkus, Opportunities for CEAs in the healthcare sector
• Ihab Khalil, Managing security within a vendor-neutral business ecosystem
• Patrick O'Halloran, How should assets be managed within a vendor neutral ecosystem?

Time and location of the lecture:

Wed, Feb 17, 2010
4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Carleton University
Room TBA

The event will also be broadcast over the web. See the event website for instructions. Please RSVP here.

Startups

The February issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "startups" and the authors include:

Lisa Torjman and Jon Worren from MaRS, an innovation hub for Canadian science and technology startups, discuss why Canada needs to invest in and nurture a culture of entrepreneurship in order to create successful startups.

Mekki MacAulay, principal at OSStrategy.org, highlights special considerations and pitfalls for open source startups and discusses how startups can use an open source strategy to gain competitive advantage.

Tony Bailetti, Director of Ontario's Talent First Network, describes nine companies located in Canada’s National Region and identifies how their founders benefit from the Lead to Win business ecosystem.

William Stewart, CEO of ESERI, describes one startup's experience in integrating open source software into a complete turn-key solution.

Harley Finkelstein, a serial entrepreneur, answers the question "Which is the better path to take, as a push or a pull startup?".

As always, we encourage readers to share articles of interest with their colleagues, and to provide their comments either online or directly to the authors.

The editorial theme for the upcoming March issue of the OSBR is Mobile and the guest editors will be Thomas Kunz and Francois Lefebvre. Submissions are due by February 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

Don't forget to visit the website every Friday to check out each week's column. The columnists for February include Christopher Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD, Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, Van Lindberg, author of Intellectual Property and Open Source, and Emma Jane Hogbin of HickTech.

FOCUS Series Talk on the Business Ecosystem

The MaRs Collaboration Centre in Toronto is hosting a free lecture entitled "Business Ecosystems: A new form of organizing knowledge workers worldwide." Registration details and a link to the powerpoint presentation can be found here.

A Practioners Guide to Ecosystem Development

The key messages and presentation slides from last night's lecture are now available. The audio of the presentation will be published with the September issue of the OSBR and I'll post a link once it is available.

One of the things I like about the TIM Lecture Series is the level of audience participation, both in person and via web conferencing. Mike provided many interesting insights from the Eclipse Foundation's experience and the audience built upon that by adding their own insights.

If you're new to the concept of ecosystems outside of the realm of ecology, the Wikipedia entries for business ecosystems and for James F. Moore provide a good starting point. Professor Bailetti from Carleton University provides further insights in his article Ecosystem Approach to the Commercialization of Technology Products and Services.

Probably the most interesting take-away from the lecture was that the Eclipse Foundation is breaking ground with a model where the keystone of the ecosystem is a non-profit, most of the complementors within the ecosystem are commercial interests, and the ecosystem as a whole is based on an open source model. Very little of the literature available today about business ecosystems discusses--or understands--how open source models operate.