In the last few months we’ve been approached by the media asking us to describe our experience incubating out of Shopify and to discuss the importance this form of mentorship has on a young company. Every time we have the discussion we seem to always touch the same points – clearly there are obvious takeaways. We’ve neatly summarized them below:
1) Office Space (duh.) – It’s nothing fancy Continue reading
Publishers are beginning to see the light – 3rd party ad networks just don’t cut it. There’s something about checking your AdSense account after a year of hard work publishing content, responding to comments, and growing your readership only to see a measly $43.29. For this reason a growing number of bloggers, forums, and e-news websites are turning back the clock and addressing advertising the way it should be dealt with – personally and with quality partners. Continue reading
It was a sad yet exciting day at Avitu because in the wee hours of Monday, Oct 4 we released the first functional edition of Avitu. The beta version enables anyone to create an account and immediately begin using Avitu as an ad management tool. The cummulation of over 5 months of brainstorming, discussion, testing, mentorship, and Street Fighter has brought us to this stage and you can bet your marbles we are stoked to keep things going!
At the current moment we are working out of an incubator at the University of Ottawa’s Tech Transfer Office called the ‘Start Up Garage’. The Tech Transfer Office and its staff have graciously offered us the space for the rest of the academic year – thank you very much (merci beaucoup l’universite d’Ottawa > you got to be careful with these guys). Continue reading
Have you ever wanted to perform a redirect with nginx but have the query string ripped out? I sure have!
I needed to make it so that if I go in my browser and go to http://www.mywebsite.com?foo=bar&fun=bus, I will be redirected to http://www.newurl.com, and not http://www.newurl.com?foo=bar&fun=bus. Here’s what I did within my nginx.conf file:
Could you imagine how utterly annoying it would be if advertisers employed the same tactics they did with online advertising to other ad-supported media? Picture yourself watching a T.V. show that deployed a pop-up ad every time the show entered a climax or reading your city’s metropolitan newspaper to see front page articles text wrapping half page ads. So why has online advertising gone to the dogs while television, radio, and print advertising is more highly regarded and has remained steadfast since its inception? 
While many of these popular media channels are heavily engaged in advertising, they do so tastefully. They understand the time of their readers, listeners, and viewers is a precious commodity and that the competition will gladly accept a disgruntled audience with open arms. Audience loyalty is what pays the bills. As a result, these channels have all developed a rather mirrored formula for success: select a target audience, produce material that relates to this audience, and stay afloat by selling space for advertisements that relate to this audience but will not annoy them to the point where they change the station or turn the page. Continue reading
Time to bring everyone up to speed on an eventful week at the Shopify incubator. First things first, with the release of Starcraft 2, Tobi has stopped coming to our office to challenge Matt at Street Fighter so work has increased ten fold! Second update, we would like to congratulate Shopify on finally putting up a sign over the front entrance…the photo below is what I was greeted with early Friday morning (I didn’t want to interrupt so I came in late).
Daniel shows publishers just how easy it is to set up their website with Avitu! Getting started as a publisher can be seen in three simple steps: 1) Add your website, 2) Create an ad slot, and 3) Review and accept your offers. We are trying to illustrate just how simple this process can be – if you can find anything easier we’ll buy you a market-fresh cookie.
This is Avitu’s first of many video blogs about our experiences at Shopify. Since Shopify got their new office in downtown Ottawa, they have played a big role within the Ottawa community, and have regularly hosted meetups such as Ruby Tuesday, Open Data Ottawa, and Fresh Founders Ottawa. As of July 26, 2010, Shopify gave Avitu the chance to work out of one of their offices as well as provide us guidance with design, programming, marketing and business. This is an amazing opportunity that we have come across and we want to share our experiences with you.
So we’re pretty excited about the cool new additions to the alpha this week. Dan’s been working really hard on getting the interactive calendar going while Matt introduced the ability to edit fields without jumping to another page. I supervised all of the development. Not.
Avitu 