The holidays are fast approaching, and with it, the hype surrounding the 2nd annual HoHoTO event in support of the Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank. Borne out of Twitter conversations from a small group of Torontonians who strive to make a difference, word (and tweet) quickly spread to create one of the most unique and fun-filled fundraisers to hit the streets of Toronto. This is social media at one of its most cathartic moments, sparking city-wide awareness and motivation.
In what is sure to be a memorable way to end the year off with a bang, Fused Network has stepped up to the plate once more, coming in as both reindeer and elves. In fact, Fused Network clients have contributed to roughly 80% of the fundraising! And why not?! After continued successes and an ever-growing client base, giving back to those in need does wonders for the morale. It is absolutely imperative we do more than our best to keep this cycle going – we receive, we give back, and the act of receiving comes back in the form of good vibes. Lather, rinse, repeat – with emphasis on repeat.
The Fused Network team will be hitting the Mod Club dance floors on the 16th in support of a most wonderful cause. Surface level engagements aside, it all boils down to the roots of this event; HoHoTO is about community, camaraderie, and generosity of spirit, all of which should be exercised daily. In a blog post aptly titled Blessed, David writes:
“We will go home feeling incredible knowing we, among many others, have helped foster such widespread generosity. As those feelings of elation start to settle, however, we must never forget that the needs of those who are less fortunate than us have no end. A daily effort on our parts must be observed to ensure that they too, get their daily bread.
When the music stops, the giving shouldn’t.”
Heartily noted – mind, body, soul. In a culture so very defined by excess, no one should have to wander the streets hungry.
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The Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank is the largest provider of emergency food relief in the Greater Toronta Area. There are several ways to donate to the Daily Bread; visit their donations page for more information. For HoHoTO event details and statistics, click here.
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If you find yourself in the city, come on out to the most happening Christmas party to ever hit Toronto! HoHoTO is the ultimate mixer; techies, creatives and good, fun-loving people gathering together for a wonderful cause… What could be better?! E-mail me directly at isshamarie[at]fusednetwork[dot]com for a chance at acquiring tickets.
On October 17, Fused Network participated in a Charity Challenge event hosted by Kontent Creative. Three teams of the mid-October Vancouver Innovation Camp jointly raised $5000 for the Vancouver Food Bank. After an astounding amount of success, I was asked to profile Fresh Choice Kitchens, one of the many prominent programs operating under the illustrious Vancouver Food Bank. Their goal? To fuse together the art of community with the lost art of creating affordable and soul-satisfying meals.
Their warmth struck me first, and I was immediately drawn to Diane and Shona’s energy. They welcomed me with the widest of smiles and the firmest of handshakes, their warm reception a striking (and most refreshing) contrast to yet another cold and rainy Vancouver afternoon. Formalities naturally evolved into friendly banter back and forth. They are such a delight to speak with from the very beginning.
Diane and Shona’s enthusiasm, passion, and infectious energy are a testament to the working environment behind the doors of Fresh Choice Kitchens. Its humble beginnings stem from the concept of community kitchens, combining the simple pleasures of communal gatherings with wholesome and nutritious food. The frequency of communal, sit-down dinners have significantly decreased with the onslaught of technology, the exponential growth of social networking systems, the odd working hours, and the many other innumerable factors that have infiltrated and therefore defined the “norm” of the 21st century. Good, nutritious, healthful meals are catalysts to long-lasting community ties. The sautéing, the chopping, and the overall process behind food preparation – these activities become vehicles for conversation, for banter, for witty repartee, for emotional unloading. What better way to return to the good old days of communal dinners than to partake in community kitchens?
In 1996, the Vancouver Community Kitchen Project was launched, catching the attention and support of Vancouver Coastal Health, BC Gas (now Terasen Gas), and the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society. By 1998, 25 community kitchens have been organized, self-directed and fully operational with help from the various workshops and [kitchen] equipment drives organized by those involved in the Vancouver Community Kitchen Project. The focus of the project eventually shifted to providing a resource centre for small groups and communities interested in starting various CKs all across Vancouver and eventually, the entire province. The Vancouver Community Kitchen Project changed their name to Fresh Choice Kitchens in 2008 to reflect this evolution. Diane Collis, Fresh Choice Kitchens manager, helps organize seasonal workshops, Level I courses on Food Safe, and equipment drives to help jumpstart any group looking into developing a CK program in their community. Shona Lam’s organizational and newfound social networking skills have helped brought awareness of this long-standing concept to the online demographic. The people at Kontent Creative, for instance, have worked closely with Fresh Choice Kitchens and the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society to raise funds for these projects through Innovation Camps. The amalgamation of the social media realm and this highly-evolved CK project made for a natural, super-charged pairing, one that will most certainly bloom with time, dedication, and perseverance.
The emphasis, really, is on the most basic of human needs. We need to be sated both physically and mentally. We need food to survive. Camaraderie and human companionship, abstract and intangible concepts, is food for our souls. Combine healthful, seasonal, nutritious (yet affordable!) food with human interaction and you have before you the recipe for success. Diane and Shona, in their warm reception, allowed me to glimpse but a minute fraction of what goes behind these open doors. I can hardly wait to participate in the cooking session that is to occur on the 10th of December. This post is merely a prelude to the fun that awaits my person over the next few weeks.
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For an in-depth article on the concept behind Community Kitchens, Diane Collis, manager of Fresh Choice Kitchens, has written a wonderful article for SPARC BC here.
For more information on Fresh Choice Kitchens, visit CommunityKitchens.ca
Fresh Choice Kitchens has also released a cookbook titled Many Hands, available in all Vancouver Capers Community Markets, or online. You can find more information on this wonderful cookbook here. The cookbook places emphasis on cooking as a community; the recipes in this book are tailored to accommodate communal cooking sessions and feeding large groups of people!
For information on how to donate to this wonderful project, click here.
It isn’t often that I single out an organization for something as harmless as harvesting email addresses & spamming with complete disregard, but this time I’m making an exception. I awoke to an email this morning from a small firm out of Toronto called NextTree. The company is operated by Jason Matheson (Founder of NextTree) and Christopher Hebert (Co-founder of NextTree), both of which have past experience at Netfirms as Marketing Director & Marketing Manager, respectively. After a few short moments I realized that not only had they spammed me (inadvertently, in attempt to contact one of our clients) but several other clients as well.
What made this particularly interesting is that the email address NextTree spammed one of my clients through was my own, completely unrelated to this particular site entirely & never having been associated with it. The greeting read ‘Dear David’, as though it were addressed to me but it referenced another website and client in the subject line entirely. Completely baffled by this, I immediately set out to figure out how NextTree would have confused myself and one of my clients. I dug through older whois records, left no stone unturned on google and still came up with not a single link associating my own completely unassociated email address with this particular client.
With still no luck in figuring out where they obtained the contact, I’m left wondering if Jason Matheston is possibly using old Netfirms whois database data to do the web web design related spamming. I did happen to take a few moments to call Jason but beyond stating that he couldn’t disclose where he obtained the contact details, he didn’t have much else to say. I suppose what’s truly disheartening about it all is how someone with previous experience at companies like Netfirms (as large as they are) and even including a positions titled ‘Marketing Director’ and ‘Marketing Manager’ really need to sink as low as spamming my clients. Boo, can’t you guys come up with something better?
Here’s a copy of the email that I received below, along with Jason Matheson’s contact details, he seems to be a massive fan of unsolicited email so I’m sure he wouldn’t mind receiving some from you, all of your friends and that persistent Nigerian prince who wants to adopt you as his red-headed stepchild.
Dear David,
Have you ever wondered why some websites perform better than others? (Spamvertising, maybe? Or Ci4l1s!)
Some websites were designed by NextTree!NextTree is a full-service web development company with a passion for spamming, creating highly usable, results driven websites. We’ll make your business look better and perform better than the competition. We’ll make your business shine.
Visit http://www.nexttree.ca/website/ to discover how we can help you launch a brand new website or put a fresh face on an old one. (Lipstick on a pig?) NextTree can you give your website a professional edge!
Sincerely,
The NextTree
Web Design Teamspammers.
($10 discount off your next design if you can guess which cereal box we got our website out of!)http://www.nexttree.ca/website/
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NextTree is a registered trademark of NextTree Inc.
2-112 Petra Way Whitby ON Canada.
We are 100% Canadian eh?!
Luckily they’re 100% Canadian, since spamming is illegal in the United States & CANSPAM is a $50,000 fine per unsolicited message. Luckily, our server infrastructure also resides in Chicago.
A few of Jason’s email addresses, say hi:
mathesonj@mtonic.net
jmatheson@room100.net
jasonmatheson@HOME.COM
After what seems like months of radio silence on the ol’ fused network blog I thought I would open up with both an extremely sensitive topic: Fused Network’s past, present and future. As with anything I write, I’m sincere in my statements that if this were a public firm with shares I would have as a leader been ousted long ago: If not for the marketing team screeching for my head (“Everything needs painted with rose-colored windows, pronto! The grass is green David, even if it’s covered in manure!”) or investors cutting us off at the next corner in an attempt to maximize profit instead of sticking to our guns and going for the throat with “quality, not quantity” and endeavoring to create one of the most socially conscious firms on the planet.
Luckily we’re 100% bootstrapped and flush with investments from people who actually matter to us: Our clients.
The past
During the past few years we’ve rather quickly scaled the wall in the web hosting world. By any comparison we’re still extremely small in the hosting ecosystem but we’re continuing to grow despite the often quoted concerns of a recession: What recession? Luckily we’ve had an exceptional group of people who we’ve worked with (again, our clientbase is fantastic) on a daily basis that have touted the Fused ‘horn’ despite some of our shortcomings: At points I’m sure they’ve had more faith than myself!
If we really considered all of the speedbumps we’ve endured this would be referred to as ‘offroading to success’ instead of the road to success. Nonetheless with perseverance and our noses to the grindstone we’ve successfully kept things in working order & for the most part flawless.
I was about to write that our past would be considered easier in comparison to what we’re up against as far as planning & development go and then I recalled the days when I ate with cardboard cutlery and ’soup’ and ’soup’ were the two choices to decide between for lunch & dinner. Okay, so the past was rather arduous if anything but the days ahead will be short of easy.
The present
We’re currently spending every waking moment on the hiring process. I recently made the move out to Vancouver largely to take advantage of the bigger ‘geek’ crowd and open-source friendly ecosystem out here. If the size of the ‘vanlug’ crowd is any reflection of the teeming applicant pool, we’ll do swell. I’m currently parsing through over 250+ applications for a recent support & system administrator position at Fused Network. Now’s the time for us to invest in infrastructure, backend and begin really working on client acquisition once we’ve filled up some more positions. At this point I’ve held off on advertising to allow us to continue to offer the same level of service without overloading our existing team.
Although it’s not the sole issue we face, finding applicants who fit the description of the type of people we want working at Fused Network is difficult. There’s a very rare breed of people that we’re willing to hire and sifting through the hundreds of resumes is probably the most difficult task I’ve ever been delegated. I’ve spent years building up this clientbase and even though I can be my own worst enemy at times, there’s a level of service I want to retain on a permanent basis. Luckily (if it can be defined as that) there’s a lot of highly qualified people out there looking for work and we’ve just got to find them.
The future
We’ll be opening a bunch of new points of ‘presence’ in the future that you can look forward to wielding, alongside a small content delivery network we’re slowly building. In 4th quarter 2009 we hope to open up additional infrastructure in Vancouver, Toronto and potentially a second location in Chicago. The intention is to migrate most of our Los Angeles equipment to Vancouver initially, with the latter points being opened shortly thereafter with new gear primarily for shared hosting & some virtualized offerings we’ll be adding to the mix.
Right now our goal is to add significant amounts of infrastructure in Canada: As much as we’re a global company, having the infrastructure within a quick flight will make expansion significantly easier. I’m the ‘hands-on’ type of guy when it comes to ensuring everything is perfect and often want to be on-site for even the smallest changes and construction. You would be surprised at how well I can micromanage a team, just ask Matt!
With the future comes a number of new projects & endeavors. Our areas that we’ll be concentrating on in short order are support, launching additional documentation and working on building additional ‘community’ measures. Once those basic facets of the foundation are out of the way we’ll begin working on new services, offerings and completing upgrades to our existing infrastructure.
We’ve got idle hardware awaiting some MySQL clustering functionality and within two months we should have some dedicated SSD machines online serving 100% MySQL only to open up some extremely delicious performance for databases. The days ahead are looking mighty fine from a technical standpoint.
Last but not least I want Fused Network to be one of the most socially conscious firms on the planet. Our ‘together’ program has been moving along swell but more backend needs put in place to truly make use of your referrals for the greater good. The intention at this point is to add the ability to ‘forward’ payments to a community group on Kiva so we can begin offering microloans to those out there that need it, of course the people the funds are delivered to will be decided by you that contribute with your referrals. Even better, we’ll be sponsoring some additional local charities, open source projects and food banks with more funds than ever. There’s tonnes of need and we’re going to do every little bit we can to continue ensuring it’s met with your help.
All-in-all, Fused Network is in a great position despite a couple of small bumps. There’s no one else I can thank more than each and every one of you as clients for continuing to support us, have faith in us and be there every step of the way. A big thank you from all of us at Fused for being there, we’ll continue to do the same for you.
Want some additional insight on the ongoings of Fused Network?
Follow @davidandgoliath on twitter (my personal account) and our @fusednetwork account otherwise you’ll miss out.
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