Today is an interesting day. We’ve announced on the bOK corporate blog that we are shutting down the service effective October 31st, 2008. First and foremost, thank you to all customers and supporters of the system. If you were a customer and you still had money on your account, please do email info@bOKnow.com in order to be reimbursed.

Amin, Sam, Pooya, and I have had a great time working on bOK. From the very beginning its been one of the most interesting experiences we’ve ever faced. We learned a lot in the process and I will have to put up another post in the future (or perhaps series of posts) telling the “inside” story of bOK

The good news is that we are all now working on Chide.it. We all believe that there is a big transition occurring in the industry today. We think that all desktop software will evolve into web software. This is a big opportunity, one that we can’t miss out on. We’re working actively to take part in this revolution and hope we’ll be able to serve you at Chide.it. Stay tuned for more updates as we progress. Many exciting things are happening and we can’t wait to share them with you all.

Best Regards,

Aydin.

Tonight I am doing an informal presentation for the IEEE Ottawa section at the Urban Well @ 7pm. The title of the presentation is “Untangling the Web”… Here are some of the things I’ll be talking about:

a) What is Web2.0 and what is Web3.0?

b) What are the most popular Web Services in use today?

c) How do these companies make money?

d) What are some of the more famous success stories (both in Canada and the US)?

e) How do you start a web-business in Ottawa?

The event is free to attend and you can find more information here:

http://ewh.ieee.org/r7/ottawa/gold/2008/Events.html

This Thursday night should be lots of fun. I’ve been invited to present as part of a round-table of local CEOs, VCs, and Angel investors  about what it takes to start a company without significant outside investment. It should be quite entertaining so if you’re free this Thursday night make sure to drop by.

This is one of the better attended events in town that happens once a year and usually has ~200 professionals in the local tech scene attending… here are the details of the event:

Ottawa’s technology clusters, OCRI Global Marketing and The Ottawa Network present the 3rd annual “Buddy Keep your Million” funding focused event.  In light of the almost non-existent VC money filtering into the city, the theme of this year’s event is based around how innovative people get their companies off the ground without the traditional financing options. The panel will be made up of experienced veterans and energetic start-up entrepreneurs.

Panel Participants:

• Moderator, Bruce Lazenby, Chair Ottawa Software Cluster
• Wael Aggan, TradeMerit Corp.
• Richard Charlebois, GrowthWorks Capital
• Rob Lane, Overlay.TV
• Scott Lake, Jaded Pixel
• Aydin Mirzaee, bOK Systems Corp. and Chide.it
• Karen Letain, CMI International
• Paul Slaby, Kaben Wireless Silicon Inc
• Kareem Sultan, RaceDV

Its that time again. Ottawa DemoCamp9 is on Monday at a new location. The big news is that Ottawa’s top blogger, Alec Saunders, will be our MC. Should be lots of fun.

For those of you that don’t know, DemoCamp is an amazing event where some of Ottawa’s Up and Coming Tech Stars present the latest products that they’ve been working on. Its alway impressive to see how much goes on in Ottawa. If you’ve never been to one of these events, this is the time to start! If you’re gonna be there, message me on Twitter (@aydin) or on Facebook…

Here are the details for the event:

Twitter is simply amazing… Rather than explain to you myself what it is exactly, I’ll embed this video that will tell you exactly what twitter is in plain english:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o]

I’m a big Facebook fan but in the last little while I have been wondering about what Facebook will look like in the future… Just thinking about the advantages of having Facebook (especially with all the new privacy features) for government agencies seems like a godsend. I mean, if you think about it, people “without any coercion” are documenting their every move online… If anyone wanted to track you, wouldn’t the best place be Facebook /Twitter ?

Ok, so, how unreasonable is it to assume that some of the following are possible in the future?

-no passport: why would you use a passport when you can add a “Passport Facebook Application” that will do the same thing? All you’d have to do when you get to the airport is show them your “virtual passport” on your Phone/PDA or perhaps give a secret access code to anyone who wants to check it out (possibly via bluetooth)?

-Facebook pages mandatory: Already, if you don’t want to fall behind in life, you need a facebook profile…. is it unreasonable to assume that one day everyone will be required to have a facebook page? Remember, as we go forward, privacy features will only get better (or so we hope)… so, its not all that unreasonable…

-verify with birth certificate: what if you had to verify your facebook page with your original birth certificate in order to prove your identity? Could your facebook page also act as your birth certificate? what if you were given login access credentials in the hospital when you were born?

-driver’s license: why show your driver’s license when you are standing in line for a 19+ bar/club when you can show your facebook page? yeah, yeah, you can show it when you get pulled over by a cop too…

big brother: Is it also unreasonable to assume that government agencies will be freely able to browse through all of this material online? I for one think that one is not so unreasonable at all…

Anywho… a lot of this stuff sounds ridiculous, I know. But, the world changes fast… I remember when I was first telling people about Facebook in Ottawa, Canada they would say: “why would I join? so people could stalk me?” and now look at where we are… people’s ideas and beliefs are changing.

Aydin.

Posted By: Aydin Mirzaee

3D Browsing is just sooo much fun. It sure beats boring old 2D browsing…. that’s why I really love www.SpaceTime.com. Basically, it is a new browser that you can download that will make your life a whole lot easier and more fun by turning all your web pages into 3D images… You’ve got to try this! Although, of course, it won’t completely replace FireFox for me, but its a start…

For the SpaceTime team, not sure how possible this is, but, can we get SpaceTime as a plugin for FireFox? Perhaps with a button that we can use to turn on and off 3D?  The reason I make this request is because I know you guys listen The last 3 requests I made actually ended up in the product which basically makes me think you guys rock!

Aydin.

Posted By: Aydin Mirzaee.

Everyone knows I love http://www.MeeMix.com. It is an absolutely amazing tool. You basically enter one artist/song you like, and it will continue to play songs that you like all day long. It works in Canada (unlike Pandora), which is awesome.

Recently they’ve added a whole bunch of cool social features where you can add friends that have similar music taste as you do. This is a very cool and addictive feature… I’ve made friends with a bunch of people on the website through these community additions. MeeMix even has Facebook & Twitter integration now… I for one can’t get enough of the music on the site… if you haven’t signed up, you are missing out

Aydin.

Posted By: Aydin Mirzaee

In one word, wow!

I’d love to see Facebook implement something like this for viewing its photo albums:

http://www.paulvanroekel.nl/picasa/highslidedemo/

Aydin.

That’s right… according to a TechCrunch Story, Facebook is adding its own instant messaging…

Is this brilliant? Yes. It will be a threat to all the other IM services out there.

What’s my concern?

Please let there be privacy options

Aydin.