I flew to Toronto this week. One flight out, two flights (hello, bizarre sculpture in Calgary airport!) on the way back. While checking in at a terminal, uh, in the terminal, I glanced at the seat selection screen. There were plenty of other seats from which to choose. The seat next to me was empty on all three flights.
Julie was down at Granville Island today. It was a gorgeous day, and that place is usually teaming with tourists in the summer months. She was surprised how uncrowded the island was. She easily found parking.
We recently used Hotwire to book a four-star hotel in downtown Seattle for Gnomedex. The conference occurs over a weekend in August, surely a popular time of year for tourists visiting the city. We’re paying US $99 a night.
I know these are all isolated anecdotes, but they confirm what I’ve been reading over the past few months: fewer people are traveling shorter distances. Here’s some empirical evidence. Between March, 2008 and March, 2009, the Canadian Tourism Council reports an 11.5% reduction in the number of trips to and within Canada. That probably represents the entire profit margin for a lot of hotels, travel agencies and related services.
As a matter of curiosity, I checked which countries were showing the greatest decline in trips to Canada. The percentages reflect how many fewer visitors came in March, 2009 compared to March, 2008:
United Kingdom - 24%
Japan - 24%
South Korea - 23%
Mexico - 21%
Of course, most foreign visitors to Canada are from the US, where travel is only off 5.9% between March, 2008 and 2009.
In any case, I guess it’s all good news for the consumer, and pretty bad news for anybody in the travel industry.
Today I flew to Toronto for a speaking gig. I had this awesomely spacious window seat in the exit row. I was looking out the window as we descended into a bank of what the pilot called ‘medium-low cloud’, and spotted this odd, multi-hued circle in the distance. I wondered if it was just a deformity in the window, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t:
It looks like a rainbow’s cousin (here’s another, very similar view). Does anybody know what it’s called?
I spent the past few days in Toronto, attending the Mesh conference for the first time. Yesterday I moderated a panel entitled, rather cheerily, “Using the Web for Good”. I had the pleasure of cross-examining Gavin, Duarte and Sarah (here are a couplephotos). Marc live-blogged, and Jeremy, uh, live-tweeted the discussion.
The conference was exceptionally well-run, both totally professional and very personable. The highlight for me was an informal keynote (live-bloggage) by Jessica Jackley, the co-founder of Kiva. She’s a good speaker, but her wisest choice was not to over-sell the story of Kiva. She doesn’t have to, because it sells itself so well. It was also a little brave to start off by quoting Jesus. During her talk, an ad hoc Mesh ‘team’ (an associated group of lenders) was formed on Kiva, and raised $250.
I was curious to check out Mesh in the context of comparing it to Northern Voice. In terms of structure and size, they’re actually quite similar. They’re even held in similar spaces. The MaRS building is a little institutional, and has a large, vaulted atrium, much like UBC’s Forest Sciences Centre. Mesh is simply business-oriented, while Northern Voice is not. There were a lot more business suits at Mesh than fleece jackets.
I had lunch in Kensington Market, and was immediately reminded of a TV show that I never watched when I was a kid, but, for some reason, I can clearly recall the opening credits:
UPDATE: A bunch of videos from Mesh 2009, including Jessica’s keynote, are available here. Click the Browse videos button at the bottom of the first embedded video to navigate through sundry videos to find what interests.
First, a heartfelt thank-you to all of the Northern Voice sponsors, from this year and the past four. Without you, the average conference ticket would be at least twice what it is today.
The conference needs just one more sponsor. From our esteemed sponsor wrangler:
We’re looking for our last NV headline sponsor to sponsor the NV party at the $3000 level. We are planning an upscale dinner party on the Thursday night (more details to be announced soon) and are looking for a sponsor to be the headline sponsor for this event. Your sponsorship would go towards subsidizing the cost of dinner tickets, so that it’s affordable for attendees. This party is always well attended and we’re sure it will sell out, just as the conference has.
Times are tough, but here’s a way for an organization to be a shining star in the country’s biggestsecond-biggestthird-biggest (I just checked, and Mathewtold me that Mesh had 450 people last year) social media conference.
I’m in Toronto for 24 hours. There was a magazine in my hotel room with an extensive write-up on the Toronto International Film Festival. There are so many great-looking films at the festival, I thought I’d link to a few:
I heard about Blindness about a year ago, and it sounded really promising. It’s adapted by Canadian screenwriting icon Don McKellar, and features a great cast:
Based on recently declassified information and the personal wartime experiences of journalist Mark Boal (who adapted his experiences with a bomb squad into a fact-based, yet fictional story), director Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker presents the ongoing conflict in the Middle East from the perspective of those who see the fighting firsthand — the soldiers. As an elite Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal team tactfully navigates the streets of present-day Iraq, they face the constant threat of death from incoming bombs and sharp-shooting snipers.
Oh, and hey, look, it’s Joshua Jackson. He’s kind of the new Jason Priestly, if you get my meaning.
Today saw the launch of Toronto’s first scramble intersection, at the corner of Yonge and Dundas. I think of these as Tokyo-style intersections, where traffic is stopped in all four directions and pedestrians can cross in any direction, including diagonally:
Flanked by the Eaton Centre and Yonge-Dundas Square, the intersection is used by about 100,000 pedestrians a day and is the site of Toronto’s first trial run for the scramble concept, meant to make crossing safer and more efficient for pedestrians and long used elsewhere, including some other cities in Canada.
While striding through the intersection diagonally yesterday, Glenn De Baeremaeker, the city’s works committee chairman, agreed that it felt a bit naughty: “You’re looking for an Elmer the Safety Elephant to be scolding you from the side. … It’s organized chaos.”
We currently don’t have cable. I’ve been putting the decision off to the fall, when I’d judge how much I was missing regularly watching the Canucks. At the moment, I’m thinking Shaw will go without our $50/month. It’s hard to be hopeful at the moment
He was inactive on draft day, but I was willing to give new Canucks GM Mike Gillis the benefit of the doubt. Then he turns around and offers a Mats Sundin an absurd amount of money–at least $3 million over market value (it feels to me like Sundin is done with the NHL). And before that he makes a cheap, ineffectual play for a restricted free agent.
In short, unless Mr. Gillis has some brilliant strategy that none of us can see (and that’s definitely a possibility), it’s going to be a rough year at GM Place.
That’s no big deal. The team has been quite good for nearly a decade, and you can’t go to the playoffs every year. The organization ought to embrace the idea that this is a rebuilding year. They should give as many young players as much playing time as possible, and try to trade some veteran assets while they’re still desirable. Roberto Luongo isn’t going to win a cup in this town in the next two years, and he could bring serious value in a trade.
The Canucks likely won’t make such changes in 2008, but assuming the team tanks, look for a fire sale on veterans at the trading deadline next spring. And I think that would be terrific. The current crop of players was good, but rarely great.
I’ve been reading, er, viewing Sam Javanrouh’s terrific photoblog forever. This might be the first video he’s posted. At least, it’s the first video I remember. The caption reads “Chess players at Dundas Square, Toronto. Shot on Canon 5D with 5 seconds intervals. Exposure of 1 second for each frame. Music from Philip Glass’s ‘The Photographer’”.
Rick Segal is a venture capitalist (we almost never write that out) in Toronto. He recently received a business plan in Microsoft Word format (a no-no in the first place, I’d imagine). The genius authors of the plan failed to ‘Accept All Changes’ in Word, thus enabling Rick to view a bunch of their comments in the document. A few gems:
Scratched out “Exchange sucks resources like a vampire in heat”, replaced with “Exchange is resource intensive under certain scenarios”
“Segal used work for Microsoft so skip the name dropping, save it for the afternoon meeting, they are clueless about Redmond.”
“When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them”
Make Chanukah jokes? That’s easier said than done. “Hey, uh, if we get our funding near the end of the year, maybe we could get it in eight parts?”
Here’s a simple rule to avoid this phenomenon in the future: PDF that mofo.
The Leafs goalie Vesa Toskala just let in what is possibly the longest shot in league history. In his defense, the thing was bouncing all over the place.
