Business Keynote – Scott Thompson

Day Two began with a discussion of the future of money with the President of PayPal, Scott Thompson. Formerly a CTO at Visa, Thompson sees the value in having tech businesses actually be run by people who have hands-on experience in technology. Thompson also stresses the importance of consumer and business partner feedback, saying “if you can measure something, you can improve it.” This seems to have paid off – PayPal serving 84 million consumers internationally in 190 countries!

Scott Thompson with Mike McDerment

Photo Credit: Mike McNulty, as uploaded to media.meshconference.com

Marketing/Communications Keynote – Arvind Rajan

{Disclosure: LinkedIn is an Edelman client}

Up next was Arvind Rajan from LinkedIn to talk about making lasting connections in the professional online space. Rajan gave mesh attendees a crash course in LinkedIn job hunting, saying that a filled-out profile, listing interests, and regular updating are the best ways to attract recruiters. Rajan also piqued the crowd’s interest when he said, “It’s fair to say that we’re looking at ways for users to leverage their LinkedIn network further online.” Looks like there’s much more to come from LinkedIn, especially with the opening of a Canadian office!

Top tweet: @erin_bury: Best quote of #mesh10 from @stuartma while interviewing LinkedIn’s @arajan: “I joined LinkedIn on Monday.”

Check out this video of Arvind Rajan speaking with mesh co-founder Stuart MacDonald

What Businesses Should Really Do with Facebook – Janice Diner

Janice Diner took the stage to talk about how businesses should be using Facebook to engage with their communities. Since Canadians spend an average of 429 minutes on Facebook per month, it’s important for brands to optimize their Facebook utilization. Diner suggests following Facebook’s guiding principles: make it social, keep it simple, optimize for speed and be sure to integrate.

Real-Time and How it Forces Marketers to be Real – David Carroll, Salima Valji and Leigh Himel

Next up was a great panel discussion about real-time marketing that included David Carroll, known for his viral smash hit “United Breaks Guitars” YouTube video. Over eight million views later, he believes that companies should implement a holistic and integrated marketing approach; an approach also mirrored by Valji and Himel. The key take away from the panel is that real-time is about authentic relationship building and transparency.

Photo: http://twitpic.com/1p73gg | Photo Credit: Rob Hyndman, as uploaded to twitpic.

More Excitement!

Speaking of David Carroll – he’s playing “United Breaks Guitars” and other songs from his latest album at Edelman’s mesh10 Wrap Party. For those who miss Dave’s performance tonight, he’ll be at the Duke of Westminster tomorrow night and Edelman Digital invites you to join us for a very sociable evening.

See you at meshMarketing and #mesh11!

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Edelman is a founding sponsor of mesh and proud supporter of Canada’s premier web 2.0 conference. Blog posts and Twitter updates are brought to you by @lauraroni and @melissaretty from Toronto’s @edelmandigital team. Edelman is the largest independently-owned communications firm in the world. For more information, check out Edelman.com

Stuart MacDonald kicked off the first day of #mesh10 with a huge thank you to all of the sponsors, volunteers, and fellow organizers – without you, this conference could not be possible! 

Media Keynote: Chris Thorpe

Chris Thorpe, Developer Advocate for the Open Platform at The Guardian, took the stage for the first keynote of the day. Thorpe described the “mutualization” of news as the guiding principle of the Guardian’s work in extending their open API to build businesses with the people who use their content.

Top Tweet: mesh Presenter @JayRosen_nyu provided context and tweeted- “#mesh10 The Guardian’s “mutualization of news” http://jr.ly/3t8f is explicated by @jaggeree: Means putting the “co” in, as in co-reporting.”

 
Chris Thorpe talking with Mathew Ingram

Photo Credit: Mike McNaulty, as uploaded to media.meshconference.com

Society Keynote: Joseph Menn

Next up was Joseph Menn, author of “Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet”, who entertained mesh attendees with his incredible stories of espionage and internet security. Even though some attendees thought Menn’s talk had “idea density too rich with awesomeness to extract nuggets”, here are our top three favourite Menn quotes:

“I don’t think I’ve met a top computer security guy yet that hasn’t done something bad as a teenager”
“…it’s not like the mob’s saying ‘We gotta open an online division’”
[On his own personal security] “In the unlikely event I get wacked, it’ll at least raise awareness”

Joseph Menn talking with Rob Hyndman

Photo Credit: Mike McNaulty, as uploaded to media.meshconference.com

The afternoon was packed with workshops and panel sessions that allowed attendees to ask questions and engage with our speakers. Here are some highlights:

 Special Session: TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin on “Our Digital Future”

 As TVO’s The Agenda continued their series on the future of digital, their session discussed one of the top themes of the day at mesh: the evolution of online privacy. @TheAgenda examined this issue looking at Facebook privacy questions and the growing concern amongst parents on how to monitor their children’s online activity.  Click here to watch past videos from the Our Digital Future series. The session aired tonight at 8 p.m. on TVO!

Privacy in the Age of Facebook with Dr. Ann Cavoukian, David Fraser and David Fewer

 This panel tackled the growing debate over Facebook privacy settings and featured Dr. Ann Cavoukian from the Office of the Commissioner of Privacy for Ontario (@embedprivacy). Key takeaways from the panel included the importance of opt-in versus an opt-out policy for privacy settings and that the power for change lies within the hands of the 500 million users of Facebook. 

Top Tweet: @michaelocc:  Worth re-posting: http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/ – will auto-audit your Facebook privacy sessions for you and highlight issues. #mesh10

Dr. Ann Cavoukian, David Fraser & David Fewer
Photo Credit: mesh Live iPhone App, as uploaded on media.meshconference.com

More Excitement: The mesh Prize

mesh had an exciting first today – Teehan + Lax announced the recipient of the first ever mesh Prize of $40,000 to Pixels to Products, who announced plans to conduct research and develop reports and a database about the size and scope of the Canadian digital community! Congratulations to Justin Kozuch, and we look forward to seeing your results at mesh11!

That’s it for day one! See you all tomorrow!! 

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Edelman is a founding sponsor of mesh and a proud supporter of Canada’s largest web 2.0 conference. Blog posts and Twitter updates are brought to you by @lauraroni and @melissaretty from Toronto’s @edelmandigital team. Edelman is the largest independently-owned communications firm in the world. For more information, check out Edelman.com

To encourage even more sharing, we’ve got two exciting announcements:

The first is a new and improved meshMedia community in which mesh attendees (and non-attendees) can create a profile where they can share information about themselves, as well as their photos and videos.

You can register for meshMedia here. meshMedia is powered by FileMobile.

The second part of the “sharing” news is a mesh conference iPhone application developed by Spreed that lets iPhone users share their photos and (for those of you with an iPhone 3GS), videos. After taking a photo and video, they can be uploaded via the iPhone app to your meshMedia profile.

Be it connecting with an audience, connecting via technology, connecting with like-minded others or connecting with a feeling, connecting is becoming the overarching theme of marketing in the 21st century.

Given this, who better than Arvind Rajan, VP International of LinkedIn, to be the keynote conversation of the marketing stream at mesh10? Arvind has been in the world of grassroots or connection marketing for many years, and through his role leading LinkedIn’s International efforts is – literally – at the hub of their growing ecosystem which makes personal and business connections possible.

A very engaging and knowledgeable speaker, Arvind will kick-off the marketing stream on Day Two of mesh10 on May 19th. Don’t miss it.

Tickets for mesh can be purchased here.

Sean is extremely well-respected within the start-up community and his blog, Startup Marketing Blog, has a large following.

Ellis just doesn’t talk the talk; he also walks the walk. His resume includes leading the marketing from launch to IPO at LogMeIn and Uproar. He also helped bring the popular Xobni service to market as its interim VP, Marketing.

Sean is now founder and principal at 12in6 Inc., which has helped startups such as Dropbox, Eventbrite and Lookout (Khosla Ventures) transition to high growth companies.

Sean is one of the four people doing workshops within the meshU management stream. If you’re a startup, and looking for insight and advice on how to go from zero to 60, you’ll definitely want to catch Sean’s workshop.

Here’s where you can purchase tickets to meshU.

Sean Ellis at Lean Startup Circle Meeting from David Binetti on Vimeo.

The Guardian’s Open Platform is based on an open API (i.e, application programming interface) similar to that provided by Google, Twitter, Facebook and other companies provide, which allows developers and programmers to use The Guardian’s content in a variety of ways, and build it into third-party services at no cost. The New York Times also has an open API, but it only provides access to a small part of the text in each story, whereas The Guardian’s provides the full text of every story.

In a blog post last year, British MP Tom Watson wrote:

I’m not bowled over much these days. But Guardian Open Platform is a chasmic leap into the future. It is a work of simplistic beauty that I’m sure will have a dramatic impact in the news market. The Guardian is already a market leader in the online space but Open Platform is revolutionary. It makes all of their major competitors look timid. Governments should be doing this. Governments will be doing it. The question is how long will it take us to catch up. (British MP Tom Watson)

Chris gave a presentation last year at the Future of Web Apps conference, which is embedded below, in which he talked about how The Guardian’s use of an open platform is “building the stacks of a mutualised newspaper.”

There’s also an interview with Chris here:

Interview with Chris Thorpe (The Guardian) from Publishr on Vimeo.

And so we’re looking for introductions to interesting people who think about these issues, and are now reaching out to people in our community who might have great ideas about moderators and panelists for such a panel, or thoughts about aspects of this topic that ought to be discussed. Perhaps you know of a neuroscientist who’s doing interesting research on how brain pathways are remapped under intensive internet usage. Or perhaps you know of someone who’s studying the way children learn when they have the web as a research tool.

Whatever your ideas are we’re interested! We’re looking for smart, dedicated and provocative big-thinkers and interesting perspectives on this larger topic to help us make the most out of this opportunity. We do have one request though – please help us to manage the inflow of suggestions by making serious suggestions only.

You can enter your suggestions here or below. Thanks for helping out!

Today, mesh ‘10 (which takes place on May 18/19) officially goes on sale. You can register here. The mesh gang has been meeting for months to talk about potential speakers and programming, and we’ll start to unveil more information in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we’re excited to announce two of our four keynotes.

Our media keynote is Chris Thorpe, the Developer Advocate for the Open Platform at The Guardian. His background as a research scientist and his early involvement in Open Access publishing makes him fascinated and passionate about what happens when data, content, platforms, identity and pretty much anything opens up.

Chris spends his time at The Guardian working on how to integrate its content, data and APIs with other people’s technology and businesses as part of the drive towards building the distribution and engagement channels of a mutualized newspaper.

Our society keynote is Joseph Menn, who just published his third book, “Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet”, a part true-life thriller and part expose that has become a bestseller.

A speaker at major security conferences, Menn will talk about the growing threat of cyber-criminals, and the involvement of organized gangs.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone in a few months. In the meantime, we’re having a mesh meet-up on Feb. 25 at The Pilot Tavern to get everyone together, as well as celebrate mesh co-founder Mathew Ingram’s new gig as a senior writer for GigaOm.

It’s a free event but we ask that you register so we can get a handle on the number of attendees.