This is getting very tiring. And needs fixing.

And then I browsed my way to the Grow Conference in Vancouver as I am planning a hacking event in Vancouver in August and to my surprise again: an all male line up for a start up, venture capital and growth conference in the tech space. Really? In 2011? Grow Conference: I love you. I attended your conference last year. But this: you need to fix. Now.

I am a do-er. I am going to give you a solution that I can point to because you are too lazy to do some work. And I am tired of pointing this out every time.

Yes, finding women you can include in your panels, mentorship programs, speakers line ups requires work. I am going to help you help my industry: I will be bringing you a We are Toronto Tech website very soon. NY is doing an awesome job at that with We are NY Tech and a spotlight in women in the industry as well. Take that Toronto. And we will be turning Toronto and Canada upside down to find you the women you need to include in your conferences and programs. In the meantime: you lot are connected to the world, get on your email and do some work please.

I don’t want to hear a peep coming from you unless you are calling me to talk to me about the changes you have implemented. Now go.

If Chanel were a product designer - Hugo Liu (Chief Scientist at Hunch).

“We completed years of research in the startup world and figured out the secret: charging for your product leads to profits.”

oh I am pretty sure that’s too simple and there’s got to be a “got you” there. I mean it can’t be that easy right?

[Photography by jaxxon]

1. Sit at the table
2. Make your partner a real partner
3. Don’t leave before you leave (keep your foot on the gas pedal)

Awesome. via Signal vs Noise

When he finishes his invention, it changes the way people look at the world. But his success changes him, for with it, he loses an important part of himself.

• I do this because I love to do it. or great local communities engaged with creative commons projects (openStreetMap.org).
• 13 Free web apps to simplify designer’s work life – including TinEye!
• BackType lands seed funding. Go BackType. Awesome to see a Ycombinator Canadian success story unfolding.
• My free software hero Benjamin Mako Hill
• A Slate take on Twitter: What the Heck Is Twitter?It’s not a Google killer, and it’s not a Facebook killer.
• There are 193,000 working photographers in the US.
• Leila’s music listening strategy. ipod? what ipod?
• I like Blaise’s free culture thinking – and essay!
• Via Benjamin Mako Hill: I believe that access to information is ethical issue. This is where I invoke Eben Moglen because he says it a lot better than I can. Moglen says:  The great moral question of the twenty-first century is: If all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information, can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone — if everyone can have everything, everywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything?

• What’s in your orange juice? Perhaps not the childhood oranges that you were once so fond of! What isn’t straightforward about orange juice? HAMILTON: It’s a heavily processed product. It’s heavily engineered as well. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn’t oxidize. Then it’s put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it’s ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time…

• Via Seth’s blog: The two elements of a great presenter: 1. Respect (from the audience) 2. Love (to the audience)

Photograph By Greg Ma.

A great Salon article by David Brin: Is the web evolving us?

Some of today’s most vaunted tech philosophers are embroiled in a ferocious argument. On one side are those who think the Internet will liberate humanity, in a virtuous cycle of e-volving creativity that may culminate in new and higher forms of citizenship. Meanwhile, their diametrically gloomy critics see a kind of devolution taking hold, as millions are sucked into spirals of distraction, shallowness and homogeneity, gradually surrendering what little claim we had to the term “civilization”.

Call it cyber-transcendentalists versus techno-grouches.

Via Evolving Excellence: A $170 million public company that manufactures high end hydraulic manifolds and values, profitable since it was started in 1970, six plants around the world employing roughly a thousand people. What’s unusual about that?  How about this:

• There is no organization chart
• There are no job titles or job descriptions
• No performance criteria
• No bonuses and no perks
• No regularly scheduled meetings
• No approval levels for capital or expense spending
• No goals
• No offices or high-walled cubicles
• If the peers accept the idea, then “management” is presumed to accept it – hence the need for very little management
• Every employee is simply expected to figure out where they fit

Kevin Meyer recounts his visit to American Apparel:

No fancy lobby with glitzy lighting and display cases, no plush waiting rooms.  An open entrance with a guard and a sign-in sheet.  For a $500 million company with over 5,000 employees.

But here’s my final and perhaps most important lesson: do what works.  It’s that simple.  Tools, even lean tools, are just tools.  Leadership requires people.